1998 Ford Mondeo ST24 review from UK and Ireland

Rear anti-sway bar mount broke, needed replacing.

Water pump plastic impeller completely failed and caused over-heating.

General problems with over-heating caused problems for the inlet manifold runner control (IMRC).

Seat stitching is coming apart on the drivers seat.

Both rear door handles started sticking open.

The killer rust in places around the rear door, boot.

Bloody eats tyres!

The ST24 is a fantastic car for the money without a doubt.

Half leather interior, electrics all-round, air-con, CD player & changer with steering wheel stick control, sunroof, ABS, power-steering, TCS, spacious with nice little touches like the door handle lights and a powerful V6 engine!

There's not many cars that can come even close to matching all those great features.

The more common problems aren't impossible to fix either. The water pump has a plastic impeller as standard. Over time this degrades and can even come off completely as it did in my car which causes it to over heat. This can cause serious damage so get it looked at. I bought a metal impeller water pump from Autocraft for around £100 which has fixed that perfectly.

The V6 also suffers from a lot of under bonnet heat which can affect air induction kits and worse still cause your IMRC (Inlet Manifold Runner Control) to become faulty or totally break down which is around £130 for the electrical component. The symptoms usually consist of a lack of power at higher revs (3999rpm+) and increased engine noise. The IMRC is the small silver box that is underneath the plastic cover which reads "Duratec" on it. This unit also has a cable coming out of it and that is what opens the secondaries in the throttle body. This cable can fray so check that because they're not available from Ford I hear unless you purchase the complete box (IMRC).

I have removed the plastic cover from my V6 and the under bonnet sound proofing and this I believe has greatly helped the under bonnet temperatures. There is a lot more room for free flowing air over the upper inlets now and the IMRC box seems to be back to normal now.

The other annoying thing that's pretty common is the sticking rear door handles. I just lifted mine up and sprayed almost a third of a can of WD40 into the tiny cracks underneath the handles. I worked them back and fourth almost a hundred times each, but they still stuck. I gave up, but a couple of days later when I opened the rear passenger door the handle worked fine, so that's fixed for now.

This is the first Ford I've owned and I think it's great. My previous cars weren't this powerful, but the best I had was a Porsche tuned Seat Ibiza and it's hardly fair to compare a 1.5 litre to a 2.5l V6.The V6 can easily beat cars of a similar size like the Saab 95T, Jaguar S-types (3litre!),Honda Accords, Renault Laguna V6, Vectra V6 and ALL those crappy TDCi drivers as I've done it. I've had 141mph (on a test track for legal reasons) topend, but I had another 1500rpm left at least. This car will do 150mph for definite and that's fast in anyone's book.

Long live the Mondeo! Check out these sites for good advice, pics etc: Mondeo Enthusiasts Group, Allan's Mondeo ST24 and a wicked American site called the Contour Enthusiasts Group. (Contour is the Americans version of the Mondeo)