Project Ford Fiesta ST – Improving the Shifting with mountune
Although the Fiesta ST has fairly decent stock shift feel, which is quite positive for a cable shifter FWD car, we still thought the longish throws could be shortened for a more performance oriented shift feel. Traditionally we have never been fans of short shifters that the aftermarket is full off. Your typical short shifter shortens the throws too much destroying shift feel as well as sometimes overstressing syncros, to the point of damaging them.
With this in mind we were somewhat reluctant to install mountune's short shifter developed for the Fiesta ST. If you haven't heard of the name mountune, it's because in this country tuning of Ford's FWD offerings has not been the popular thing to do. Not so in Europe where compact Fords have been a mainstay of the enthusiast market for 3 generations. In Europe the name mountune is closely associated with Ford Performance and with the new Fiesta and Focus ST mountune will become a mainstay for Ford performance in North America.
With close factory ties, you can bet the mountune stuff will be well engineered, so with this in mind we felt a lot better about adding mountune's short shifter to our car.
To install the mountune short shifter, we had to get to the shift linkage. We had to remove the shroud that covers the engine and part of the transmission so we can get to the intake pipe. Since the shift linkage sits under the intake pipe it and the airbox had to be removed.
Next we removed the stock factory airbox.
With the intake airbox and intake pipe out of the way you can now access the area where the shift linkage cables bolt to the extension of the shift shaft that exits out of the top of the transaxle.
This huge metal eyelet sits on the end of the shift cable and clips over a pin that sticks out of the shift shaft extension. Through this the cable pulls on the shift shaft to shift the transmission. All the parts of the linkage need to be sturdy and rigid to preserve shift feel. The first step is to pull the eyelet off of the pin and move the shift cable aside.
