If you could choose one Renault for your dream garage, what would it be? Guessing here, but a great number of us would probably pick one of the mad mid-engined hatchbacks.
Twin'Run previews new Twingo, with a twist
Renault isn’t blind to the fanbase for the
Renault 5 Turbo
the Clio V6
and last week in Monaco unveiled a new hatchback with a similarly mid-ship engine and a hint of the old Gallic barminess.
This Twin’Run concept heralds the intriguing new rear-engine, rear-drive Twingo city car due next year and turned out to be a properly set-up one-off rally car powered by a 320hp 3.5-litre V6 from the Megane Trophy race car.
PistonHeads was there to see it driven with suitable gusto around the street circuit, harassed by a nicely set-up 5 Turbo and a matt-green Clio V6. And to hammer home the significance of the 5, at the wheel was the French rally ace who made it famous in the early 80s, Jean Ragnotti.
No middle ground
We can’t get too excited by the Twin’Run until Renault does what it did with the R5 and the Clio and turn a rally/race special into a proper production car. It’s also been toned down stylistically so as not to stray too far from the city car it’ll eventually become.
Ragnotti in characteristic pose in the rally R5
Some nice touches though. The square LEDs up front are a nod to the night-stage driving lights of the R5 and there’s enough bulge in the rear arches to make it clear it’s a rear-driver. It’s basically done the trick in making us want a Renault 5 Turbo.
These were born out of rally homologation rules and were essentially a Renault 5 with a hole sliced into the rear floor and a 1.4-litre Gordini engine turbo’d to 160hp inserted in its place.
High 5
The authority in this country is an outfit called John Price Rallying in Hereford which has one of the slightly less exotic but no less desirable Turbo 2s for sale at a cool £27,500, giving you a clear idea of their continuing appeal.
When we rang them, John’s son Steve told us they had eight cars in the workshop. He explained their appeal on the road. “Exciting, exhilarating, not easy,” he said. “They’ve got massive turbo lag, nothing happens and all of a sudden a lot happens. On a wet greasy road it can be quite daunting. You’ve got to treat them with respect.”
The Twin'Run laps Monaco with its inspiration
Those popped fiberglass rear arches and their gopping great intakes and vents are hard to mistake for anything other than road-car born of maniac Group B rallying rules and will continue to enslave anyone whose car obsessions were first formed in the early 80s.
Clio, and then some
Of course Renault had to repeat it and did so from 2001 when it first started selling the 230hp Clio V6. The designer for this car, Axel Breun, was also in charge of the Twin’Run project, and he told us how the Clio came about.
He’s a softly spoken, well-mannered chap, but it wasn’t hard to imagine his cackle after first getting the go-ahead from marketing in the late 90s to build a one-off car in the vein of the 5 Turbo.
“At the very beginning we thought about a mid-engined Twingo,” he said. “We did a model of that too. Even with a V10…”
Mid-engined 5s in the classifieds for c. £30K
That insane plan was slapped down, but marketing were worried about the Clio looking a bit girly. He told us, “At the beginning the V6 was a promotion thing, to give the Clio 2 a more masculine image.”
From its race-car start, production followed and lasted until 2005.
Lost in translation
He wasn’t 100 per cent happy with final car. “They tried to sell it as GT car to go on a vacation, whereas I had DTM in my mind.” Something more hardcore basically, and looking at the spec of the Mk2 Clio V6, you understand his point: cruise control, automatic windscreen wipers, climate control…
Still though, it did have a 2.9-litre V6 behind the driver, good for a 0-60mph in 5.8 seconds and creating a car that was every bit as tricky on the limit as the R5 Turbo. “The first one was, let’s say, pretty difficult to drive,” he told us. The second one from 2003 increased the power to 255hp but also improved the suspension to quell some of that twitchiness.
Clio V6 looked the business, wayward or not
Breun’s styling trick was to avoid that wasp-waisted look of rally cars. Instead of two blistered wheel arches front and back he joined them with fiberglass extensions on the doors, keeping the intakes and the mental look.
He’s still a fan of the first car, and actually has one. He told us: “I love to drive it. You’re not the fastest but you can have a lot of fun if you know what you’re doing.”
Fancy a twirl?
At £10,500 this 2002 car in the classifieds looks tempting if you’re after an original V6, or here’s a facelift car from 2004 for £2,000 more.
At 3.7m long, the Twin’Run is the roughly the same length as the R5 and Clio, but apparently less of a handful than either of its mid-engined predecessors. Ragnotti preferred its power delivery to his old Maxi R5 Turbo. “It had excellent traction with a responsive engine delivering full power at all revs, rounder and with more torque than the R5 Turbo, making it particularly efficient and easy to drive. Unlike the R5, which required more technique,” he said. But then that’s the difference between a V6 and an 80s turbo. Or rather, TURBO.
Twin'Run uses Megane Trophy as a basis
The above ad for the facelift V6 ends with the line ‘No dreamers’. Sorry, no dreamers? These cars are ONLY for dreamers, those who dream about chasing down Lancias in the hills above Monaco in the early 80s, who dream about putting stonking great engines into superminis.
Renault fulfilled those dreams and could do it again with the Twingo. Fingers crossed that will happen, and meanwhile let’s salute two bona fide dream-garage cars both thoroughly deserving of the title: PH Heroes.
RENAULT 5 TURBO 2
Engine: 1,397cc four-cyl, turbo
Transmission: 5-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 160@6,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 163@3,250rpm
Weight: 970kg
On sale: 1982
Price new: £17,000
Price now: c. £25,000
RENAULT CLIO V6 (Phase 2)
Engine: 2,946cc V6
Transmission: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 255@7150rpm
Torque (lb ft): 221@4650rpm
0-62mph: 5.8sec
Top speed: 153mph
Weight: 1,400kg
On sale: 2003
Price new: £27,100
Price now: c. £12,500
RENAULT TWIN’RUN
Engine: 3,498cc V6
Transmission: 6-speed sequential, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 320@6,800rpm
Torque (lb ft): 379@4,850rpm
0-62mph: 4.5sec
Top speed: 155mph
Weight: 950kg
On sale: Don’t get your hopes up…