Wanted: test driver who weighs no more than 50kg

Fancy driving the startling blue cigar? Better start a very strict diet...

Renault is on a roll. The R5 continues to sweep up the biggest industry gongs with its more industrious R4 sibling just around the corner. Both are proudly on display this week on its Retromobile stand in Paris, tucked beside an even more extroverted EV, the Filante Record 2025. Talk about surprises; a throwback to a century-old speed record hero feels like a curveball even with the French form’s recent form so strong.

‘The Filante heralds the solutions of future production vehicles’ according to the bumf. This is the usual concept car fare, only here the car is functional and will – in due course – go chasing (as yet unconfirmed) efficiency records. Let’s hope they involve more than a monotonous mooch around a proving ground bowl.

The glint in the eye of its design chief, Sandeep Bhambra, as I try (in vain) to extract where those records will be set and by whom suggests both answers are worth waiting for. He doesn’t flatly deny it when I drop the word ‘Bonneville’ into conversation, at the very least.

“We have a few drivers in mind and we have a very strict weight limit for them, too. We want somebody that isn’t more than 50 kilos.” For reference, most of the F1 grid is around 70kg and only five-foot-two Yuki Tsunoda gets close to such a strict figure at 54kg…

It’s further proof of how stringent the Filante’s targets are. Aero figures are only one thing, and its drag coefficient target of between 0.2 and 0.25 isn’t immediately spectacular when a Mercedes EQS claims the former. More pertinent is lowering its surface area and slicing weight comfortably below the 1,000kg mark. Tricky when the powertrain comprises 600 kilos of that, somewhat calling to mind the ‘jet engine with a cockpit’ vibes of former Land Speed Record heroes.

The Filante project was led by the design department, says Sandeep, with the suits rubber-stamping it soon after. “We started in January last year. We created a few sketches and went to our CEO Luca de Meo with this idea of making a car that pays homage to the 40 CV a hundred years after its records. One that goes and breaks a few records of its own.

“We got everybody on board quite quickly; the centenary will only happen once in this century, right? So this was the right time and everyone was excited by it. Luca really likes the teams to push and come up with new ideas. It's a nice ecosystem where information and ideas travel both ways.”

While the design team planted the seed, they knew that aesthetics alone couldn’t have free reign. “We worked very quickly with advanced engineering teams to figure out what our constraints would be. We couldn't sketch freely when we want to set efficiency records; we have a certain window in which we have to land the car in terms of weight, tyre resistance and aerodynamics. These were critical for us throughout the design process.”

It's arguably the weight aspect that should excite PHers most; when even the coolest EVs weigh 2.2 tons, it’s clear there’s a long road ahead in slimming them down. Hopefully one that can be shortened by projects like this.

Its steering column is made of light, 3D-printed alloy and looks exquisite, while the flashes of silver in the cockpit are more than a fantastical nod to space travel. Even if that’s the first thing Sandeep references. “The seat is inspired by modern space flights, which is a frame with a very little structure and a very technical fabric. The silver fabric that you see here provides just the right amount of comfort for doing records, but no more. The correct support while being extremely light.”

Tyres are next, and Renault has worked with Michelin on tall, narrow rubber with 40 per cent less resistance than current production equivalents. Ligier is its partner on the car’s shape, its expertise in high-performance composites yielding carbon that’s under 1.5mm thick. Which is half what Renault usually uses on its concept cars. And vital for tucking under the tonne mark.

The Filante is yet to be put in a physical wind tunnel, but lots of work has been done in CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to carve its profile. This isn’t the final design, either. The head- and taillights link the show car to the 1925 hero it celebrates but scupper the aero profile. Expect them to be edited or even lost when it comes to plonking the car on whichever surface it’ll trouble the record books with.

Success might fast-track some of the car’s fastidious lightweighting into production, while also achieving a somewhat more pragmatic goal: encouraging us mere mortal, 50kg-plus drivers to buy an EV of our own by glamourising the cause. At its core is the same 87kWh battery as a Scenic E-Tech, only sliced into a different shape to fit the slimline cigar body –which is as long as an S-Class.

“It’s always good to take what we already have in our company and make it better,” says Sandeep. “We can learn and apply what we discover to production. And all good teams train; here we are training our team at multiple levels. About aerodynamics and architecture and making them more efficient. To develop steer-by-wire technology. The goal of this car is to test and apply new things for future production cars.”

Should it make the replacement or evolution of the R5 even better, then Renault really will be on a roll…