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2 litres, turbocharged, direct injection, cool colours and a great interior… What’s not to love about Fords Focus ST250? Best of all, its ripe for tuning!
Take a look through the options below and see what we have to suit your current upgrade path.
Having owned our own Focus ST250 since launch date and with its PCM being the Bosch MEDG17 which we have a great many years experience with, we were one of the first companies to offer power upgrades for this awesome car and now have many calibration options available to suit almost any hardware configuration you may have.
For those of you with a standard vehicle, the MSD280 is the ideal calibration to choose. The engine really does come to life with with 465+NM of torque and 280PS, and for those of you with a few sensible bolt ons, 500+Nm and 300PS is just round the corner! Of course, should you wish to forge the engine internals and add a few extra bolt ons, we have achieved over 360PS on the standard injectors and can offer well over 400 with a supplemental fuel system. All on the original PCM..
Before you choose your power level, there are decisions to be made. You must first of all consider the two different approaches to tuning that we offer on this vehicle. The most cost effective (and more traditional) option is to send the calibration in via the OBD port and all you receive is the data.
The second, more expensive way is to utilise the amazing COBB Accessport. As if owning one of these amazing handsets wasn’t enough, it also unlocks many additional benefits, such as being able to display gauges and its data-logging facilities but also the ability to install and remove the tune yourself at home.
This is the traditional way of tuning that most people understand and have had done before. The tune is fully optimised utilising all the features of the vehicles factory ECU firmware and flashed in via OBD as normal. It is a “data only” tune and as such is certainly the most cost effective way to tune the vehicle. This option requires either ourselves or one of our installers have your vehicle in house. This option does NOT add any COBB Custom features such as map switching and flat foot shifting etc.
MSD 280 (465Nm / 280Ps)
This calibration works perfectly on a totally standard car and lifts the power restrictions from within the ECU, further enhancing the power output by 120Nm and 30Ps to 465Nm and 280Ps.
This is not just headline power either, flexibility and reliability are our speciality so the ECU’s incredible torque model is fully retained ensuring factory driveability with no hesitations, surges or hiccups in the power delivery. Naturally, as with all MSD power upgrades, all necessary safety limits and protection strategies are re-profiled and enhanced in order to allow the extra performance whilst retaining a strong, O.E Level of engine protection.
Please be aware that power figures don’t tell the whole story with these management systems, making extra power is easy, but many companies completely disable the torque control and most of the protection strategies in order to do so and this can cause driveability and longevity concerns with often massive boost levels required to make the power. Read our comprehensive “Safety” tab for more details.
Additional hardware needed:
Optional hardware upgrades:
Standard Calibration Features
Personalisations Available: (At time of programming)
Total cost installed to the car via OBD including an initial diagnostic session, labour and vat = £299.00
MSD 300 (500Nm / 300Ps)
This is as far as the standard turbo will allow you to go. Lifting the power up even further from our MSD 280 spec to new figures of 500+Nm and 300PS.This calibration needs some airflow upgrades and its final power output will be determined by the condition of your factory engine and turbocharger as this tune takes the factory turbochargers airflow capabilities to the limit. An intercooler is mandatory if you want to keep the 300Ps for more than a “Halo run” as we call them because the standard intercooler saturates very quickly and charge temps climb very high indeed, so whilst your boost gauge will indicate you have the boost, you wont have the density required to make the power.
This is not just headline power either, flexibility and reliability are our speciality so the ECU’s incredible torque model is fully retained ensuring factory driveability with no hesitations, surges or hiccups in the power delivery. Naturally, as with all MSD power upgrades, all necessary safety limits and protection strategies are re-profiled and enhanced in order to allow the extra performance whilst retaining a strong, O.E Level of engine protection.
Please be aware that power figures don’t tell the whole story with these management systems, making extra power is easy, but many companies completely disable the torque control and most of the protection strategies in order to do so and this can cause driveability and longevity concerns with often massive boost levels required to make the power. Read our comprehensive “Safety” tab for more details.
Additional hardware needed:
Optional hardware upgrades:
Standard Calibration Features
Personalisations Available: (At time of programming)
Total cost installed to the car via OBD including an initial diagnostic session, labour and vat = £349.00
A small selection of our best selling MK3 Focus ST tuning parts
(Click to see them on our webshop)
There are many ways to calibrate a modern vehicles ECU but the sad fact remains that a huge percentage of the tunes we see have had all the safety strategies and drive logic features removed from them. These MEDG17 PCM’s have exceptional engine control strategies built into them and these systems are a key reason that as standard, these vehicles drive so amazingly well. Smooth, linear and powerful to the rev limiter. And safe too… the protection strategies are incredibly complex and work alongside a very comprehensive torque model in order to deliver what the driver asks, but keep the engine in one piece should things go wrong.
To recalibrate an MEDG17 PCM properly, from scratch as we do, takes many hundreds of hours of development on our in house dyno. But the results are worthwhile.
Rest assured that when we calibrate a vehicles PCM we retain:
The above may look and read like common sense?
You are right… retaining everything above is desirable, but to do so requires an understanding of how these torque modelled systems work so that we can actually “recalibrate” the various sub-systems to work the way we want them to, whilst targeting higher airflow and power levels.
Sadly, because all of the above strategies will, by their very nature, fight our efforts to create extra airflow, many amateurs find ways to just disable the limits, often by “de-calibrating” the system so it will allow extra airflow.
We regularly see calibrations with various anticipation and prediction systems switched off, load limits flat-lined, air load limits totally disabled, fuel flow limits deleted, knock systems de-sensitised, the list goes on, its quite disappointing to see.
How would you know?
That’s a good question, and it depends just how badly they have de-calibrated the system.
Lets face a simple fact here… if you have a vehicle with a virtually standard engine and turbo that drove perfectly well before a re-calibration, extending its headroom above 250PS wont make it drive or perform worse during normal driving at least say, 100PS. Why would it? No reason at all. Same engine, same air path, same hardware. So it should drive the same, only faster at big throttle openings.
Now, if they have “only” removed all the safety limits (running more boost than a 3bar map sensor can see for example) then the vehicle will still drive perfectly well if the rest of the system has been recalibrated to properly request the torque the conversion makes. That kind of calibration will just have no safety limits in place should anything go wrong. Hopefully it wont, so all is well.(Whilst the cars components are new anyway)
However, if you start to disable the torque targeting system, or make a mess of recalibrating it then you end up with all manner of horrible drive-ability problems. Aggressive throttle, unpredictable or surging power delivery, an engine that doesn’t want to just cruise along at a set speed, an engine that only wants to deliver high power and doesn’t like to do things gently when needed, these are all very common when a confused ECU tries to deliver closed loop air loads with a broken load model.
Some are actually so bad that if you cool the air properly with an uprated intercooler they actually drive worse… We see that on the dyno where some tunes actually start to drive better or make a bit more power with the cooling fans turned off in our cell, the poor ECU has no clue what to do with the extra air density after an intercooler upgrade so it closes the throttle if you cool the air! Crazy!
And if that wasn’t bad enough, some of these de-calibrated strategies are of course firing out fault codes so we see some with all 300+ codes just deleted so the ECU cant report them. This in turn disables all the limp home strategies designed to take control and get you home in the event of component failure.
Sadly, this is the reality of modern tuning… Take care out there!
This OBD calibration can be purchased from Demon Performance Centre
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