Someone say Focus ST??
Legendary cars mate... They handle well and put the power down very well up to a certain power level. A simple £600 remap gets you up from 225bhp to 265bhp and loads more torque. out of the box the focus st boosts to 0.6 bar, the turbo max is 1.3 bar.. most remaps whack it up to 1.2 bar to be safe which has a huge impact on the torque and speed of the car.
I went for a new exhaust / intercooler / induction kit etc. with mine to get it where it is but a remap gives you 3/4 of the performance for bugger all money.
With regards to the Megane, its much more a track car... the ford is a lot comfier than most hot hatches and rolls a lot until you uprate the suspension on them. If tracking and handling is what you want then i too test drove all the hot hatches at the time and prefered the renault.
The focus is cheap / mods are cheap / cheap to insure... a great car for people on a budget who cant afford the running costs of a scoob. Wet weather lets them down if you start modding though as you cant get the power down above 260-270bhp very easily unless you are easy on the power.
The one in the pistonheads link has code red on it which means it will have had a turbo conversion to a slightly bigger more laggy turbo but one that boosts up to 1.4 bar. good side to this is loads of top end power. down side is you loose a lot of the low down grunt as the full power is only mapped from gear 3 upwards. Using the standard turbo the boost can be mapped to all gears. Code Red were formerly wolf concept - a shop front for Wolf Racing in germany. They went bust and started again as Code Red. Both run by a chap called Garry based in his small unit over in Stockport.