If Dacia can do anything, why not a hot hatch?

With the Fiesta ST and i20 N long gone, there's a gap in the market - who better to fill it?

By Sam Sheehan / Tuesday, 7 October 2025 / Loading comments

I wasn’t planning on asking the vice president of Dacia’s brand and marketing about potential future performance models, but I’m very glad I did. At the reveal of the new Hipster concept in Paris, Frank Marotte and other execs seemed genuinely surprised by Dacia’s recent sales successes in Europe, attributing it partly to a demand for cheaper cars caused by the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. As Europeans grapple with rising bills, they’re swapping Volkswagens and Peugeots for Dacias. It’s understandable.

But it was when Marotte hinted at a desire to capitalise further on the market’s demand for more affordable models outside the usual Dacia remit, that the conversation turned pointedly to a topic close to most PHers’ hearts. Remember the Renault-badged Sandero RS (pictured) we never got in Europe but that topped the hot hatch segment in Brazil back in the 2010s? Could Europe’s struggles mean something like that becomes a reality here?

“Now that Dacia is an attractive brand, it’s something we need to study,” Marotte said to my surprise, when I mentioned the recently vacated area in the market for an affordable performance car that a Dacia ‘RS’ could fill. “There is an attractiveness to build on, a brand image to enhance, so we are looking into that. But anything we are doing has to protect the low cost of the base [cars].”

It gets even more heartening. Marotte pointed out that Dacia’s involvement in motorsport, which includes its Sandriders Dakar team and various one-make championships around the world that use the Sandero, means Dacia doesn’t need to lean on its sister brands, Renault and Alpine, to create something sporty. He suggested Dacia doesn’t even need to follow the same path as those firms towards full electrification, owing to the brand’s preoccupation with low-cost motoring.

“Dacia is working with motorsport rally engineers in innovative synthetic fuels…and the new Sandero Hybrid has a 155hp powertrain,” he explained, hinting both at the opportunity for an extended use of the internal combustion engine, and the performance hikes offered by the integration of hybrid technology. “I myself am a big fan of hot hatches. But we have [economies of] scale to protect, so we’d need to do it right.”

So it’s less about making a business case for the gap in the market - which is increasingly obvious - and more about protecting Dacia from falling into lower volume, unfavourable niches; like the one that would be perfectly filled by the wide-arched, Clio 200 wing-wearing hot Sandero I’d already begun building in my head. It was the old Sandero’s close technical relationship with the Mk2 Clio that enabled the Brazilian market to have a 2.0-litre-powered ‘Racing Sprit’ Dacia model - though, of course, nothing like that exists in Renault’s line-up today.

Accordingly, Marotte didn’t hesitate to shoot down my suggestion that Dacia could test the waters by creating a sporty trim level for the Sandero hybrid that would mimic the Alpine one that adorns Renault Clios and Rafales, maybe with a sportier suspension setup in the manner of Ford’s old Fiesta ST-Line. He said that wasn’t an option, so as not to “destroy any value” in Dacia’s sister brands. So how would Marotte’s enthusiasm for a hot hatch materialise? His answer didn’t half burst my bubble: “There are plenty of ways to do this with other brands”.

What seems most likely to reach roads first, it turns out, is not a full-blown Sandero or Spring RS, or an RS-Line trim, but rather Dacia-approved or co-developed aftermarket parts. Not exactly what a hot hatch-starved UK audience is crying out for, though it isn’t hard to imagine buyers taking up the option of adding sporty components created by another brand to their Dacias, big and small. For starters, 85 per cent of Dacia sales are already for higher trim models. As ever, even people on a budget want their low-cost cars to look good.

All this talk of Dacia approving aftermarket parts for its cars got me thinking about the Mk1 Vauxhall Zafira. When my parents traded in a then decade-old V8 Land Rover Disco for a barely-used Zafira in 2004 to save money on petrol, I tried convincing them that what the car absolutely needed was a host of Irmscher bits that were available to order via Vauxhall dealerships. I failed, of course - but the salient point is that not long after these parts were added to the brochure, a red-blooded GSi Turbo model came along. Just sayin’.