The Death Eaters, Chapter 3: Renault R5 Turbo and Clio V6

Sam Smith
15 July 2021
Share Andrew TrahanWelcome to a series we call The Death Eaters. With the help of the Lane Motor Museum and Kentucky’s wonderful NCM Motorsports Park, Hagerty is exploring the stories and real-world behavior of legendary cars with infamous handling. The stuff of lore, both common and obscure, from turbo Porsches to Reliant three-wheelers. This is the third in a series; the first, on the Tatra T87, can be found here, and the second, on a Reliant, is here. Enjoy! —Ed.

If you take one thing from this story, make it this: The French are bonkers.

For the latest installment in Hagerty’s Death Eaters, we’re looking at two Gallic landmarks: The 1983–1986 Renault R5 Turbo 2, and the 2001–2003 Renault Clio V6. Each was an expensive and limited-production car, and neither was officially sold here. Thanks to the kind folks at Nashville’s Lane Motor Museum and Kentucky’s NCM Motorsports Park, however, we were able to borrow a little seat time. At NCM, we ran a series of skidpad handling tests designed to illuminate two potent machines long known for making folks brown their pants.

Both of these cars are mid-engine hatchbacks. They look like mutant hot rods because they are, front-drive econoboxes gone mad, bodywork inflated to hold all the crazy. The took Renault’s front-drive, front-engine, 50-hp 5, a model sold in America as Le Car, and gave it a turbocharged, intercooled, 1.4-liter driving the rear wheels via years of lag and 160 hp. The fat box flares were styled by Marcello Gandini, he of the Lamborghini Miura. They held redesigned suspension and beefier brakes. The whole project existed as homologation project for FIA Group B rally work, where it performed respectably until the arrival of the world-beating Audi Quattro.

The Clio V6 was essentially the same idea. In the late 1990s, Renault wanted to nudge sales of its 100-hp Clio supermini, so the company drummed up a one-make racing series and built a mid-engine, V-6-powered Clio to fill it. The roadgoing version of that car—French pourquoi pas? logic incarnate—was developed and built by Renault Formula 1 partner Tom Walkinshaw Racing. The stretched and widened Clio that resulted was clearly hammered out by a race team, complete with 42-foot turning circle, a 2.2-cubic-foot trunk, 227 hp, and a mere 12 months of R&D. Unlike the R5, the Clio was a porker—660 pounds over its base sibling—and widely derided as a Jekyll-Hyde mess. Two years into production, Renault yanked the car back in-house, addressing many of the model’s problems with a face-lift and engineering rework called Clio V6 Phase 2.

In the right hands, each of these little nutjobs could outrun period supercars. They were also known for leaving the road sudden as a heart attack. When the R5 Turbo was new, Road & Track politely allowed as how the car required “delicacy,” its throttle “very much a part of the handling equation.” At the Clio’s launch, Automobile said the Phase I offered “chilling lift-throttle oversteer, wilting brakes, and a nasty case of straight-line instability.” Evo called that car one of the scariest-handling machines of all time and advised buying one only if you didn’t intend to drive it.

Myths and truths can take on a life of their own. Most cars don’t live up to period hype after the fact, but then, these aren’t most cars. For better or worse, machines this nuts don’t come along often. Strap in.

***
Andrew Trahan

1985 Renault R5 Turbo 2
A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.

I owned a Le Car once. It was a fun little dork, bought half as a joke, shortly after I took a job at Road & Track in 2012. The car was dirt cheap and somehow felt even cheaper, but it also exuded a kind of egalitarian goofishness. The R5 carries the feeling. A Turbo 2 is ten inches shorter than a Mazda Miata but a few inches longer in wheelbase. The upright doors and narrow cabin make the driver’s seat feel like sitting in a 50-gallon drum, as if you could simply stand up and walk around, wearing the car like a full-body hat.

I didn’t really fit my Le Car, and I didn’t fit the Turbo 2. Probably because I’m not four feet tall and French. The thin wheel is fixed close to the dash at awkward forward tilt, inches from a 150-mph speedometer. The hard-plastic switchgear seems like an afterthought, but the rest of the car is quiet and rattle-free. Even the shift linkage feels bulletproof. Ride quality is remarkable—a French-car trademark—and the suspension marries long travel with relatively cushy damping and big grip.
Andrew TrahanEvery great once in a while in this strange and delightful job, you expect to find a wheeled object creepy and instead come away wanting to take it home forever. If the R5 were an organ, it would be the heart of a hummingbird. If it were a child, it would be one of those five-year-olds who runs laps of the living room at max q and tries to light your couch on fire. If cars have souls, this one holds nothing but what the Irish call “fook.” Driving it near the limit makes you glad to be alive, and also very tired, and when you climb out, you’re out of breath and, well, I was for a moment very happy about everything in life and just wanted to lie down.

Surprises are a perk of this job. Cars this mad are supposed to be… mad, you know? Treated sedately, the R5 suggests carts and karts—golf, shifter, shopping. Nothing serious. At 75 mph, it will track hands-off straight. The steering is so quick and light at speed that you catch slides with little wrist dabs, not entirely unsurprised. Then you figure it out. The tub seems to flit and caster from just above the pavement, growling lightly from behind and muttering the odd forced-induction zhoosh. Below 4000 rpm, matting the throttle means around three seconds of waiting through turbo lag. Higher rpm reduces lag roughly by half. The torque hit on boost is not huge by modern standards, but the car rarely feels less than manic. It just sort of rubber-bands its way down the road, snarfing up pavement in lungy little chomps.
Andrew TrahanThe sum makes you obsess over space. The R5 grows in size as you learn its habits, always physically tiny but also perpetually tracing a path that widens in proportion to your own input slop. You eventually come to obsess over the seemingly impossible elimination of that slop, loathing every microscopic screw-up, because the penalty is sliding front tires or simply just those taillights sashaying too much when all you really want is forward motion. The center console holds a boost gauge, far below the dash. This location makes any information on that gauge south of useless. The only place you really want to know the R5’s boost is in a corner, and if you are looking at the center stack in an R5, that means you are not looking at the road, and that means that you are probably about to die.