STANDARD DEVIATION

Ostentatiousness is all very well. We’ve got a lot of time for people who paint their project cars bright purple, or engineer the exhausts to lick out 2ft flames, or fabricate one-off bodykits to morph the factory lines into something entirely new – blame the fact that we grew up modding in the Nineties and early-Noughties.

But this sort of approach isn’t for everyone, and it takes all sorts to make a world. For some, particularly in recent years, the key has been to modify cars in such a considered and light-touch manner that the uninitiated would never even suspect that anything had happened; following the OEM-plus route can refine and perfect the factory treatment while making everything a little bit better.

This technique speaks softly (in conceptual terms, at least) while carrying the proverbial big stick: it doesn’t shout about what’s been done, because it doesn’t need to. And when you’re starting with a car so overtly ostentatious as a Mk3 Focus RS in the first place, the OEM-plus route is