The saga of DriveTribe’s Ford Mondeo ST200 restoration has finally reached a happy conclusion, as the car has come out of the garage and gone straight onto a runway.
Host Mike Ferny took the Mondeo to Kendrew Barracks, one of the UK’s longest runways, to see just how close he can get it to its 144 mph (231 km/h) claimed top speed when it was new.
First introduced in 1999, the Ford Mondeo ST200 featured a 2.5-liter 24V Duratec V6 that made 202 hp (205 PS/151 kW) at 6500 rpm and 173 lb-ft (235 Nm) of torque at 5,500 rpm. Not bad for the rare performance version of one of the most common and most liked cars on U.K. roads in its day.
Read Also: James May Unpimps His Ford Mondeo ST200 The Way He Only Knows How
The channel has been tracking the restoration of this Mondeo ST200 since December 2020 when it was explained that this is one of the very few cars that all three former hosts of Top Gear, namely Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, like.
It was, therefore, the aim of this restoration not to really change anything, but rather to return this car to its former glory and to get it into such good condition that Ferny would think twice about even taking it out in the rain.
Indeed, the car appears to have been restored to an extremely high standard, but there’s only so much restoration can do. Even though it’s on one of the longest runways in the U.K., Ferny still struggles to get the car up to its stated top speed.
In his first attempt, he can only get it up 116 mph (186 km/h). A second run from farther back, whose results I won’t spoil, gets him going faster, but not quite as high as he might have hoped. That speed is encouraging, though, indicating that with more space, the car might have been able to go even faster still. And who knows, it might have been able to go all the way up to 144 mph (231 km/h).