There’s plenty to see from Renault and Alpine at Goodwood this year. The 4 E-Tech officially opens for order at FOS, the 5 Turbo 3E will be there to gawp at, and both the small standard EVs will run up the hill. Alpine has that funky little rally car to show off, plus the stunning A110 R Ultime, and the Alpenglow HY6. And the A390 makes its dynamic debut as well. For so long the brand has felt in the doldrums; the A110 was doing its best soldiering on, but it was the sole Alpine for many years. The Renaulution wasn’t such a daft idea after all...
That has to be good news. Nobody else, after all, could make a 5 and a 4 again apart from Renault, and it’s great to see the experience gained from cars like the Zoe can be put into - let’s be honest here - more desirable applications. At last, it feels like things are moving in the right direction.
Which probably only serves to bring more attention to the back catalogue. Small, fast Renaults are great again, so naturally we think back to what has come before. Seeing an A290 Rallye haring up a tarmac stage, it’s hard not to reminisce about 5s and F2-spec Clios doing just the same. Or, to be frank, many roadgoing ones as well. There was little better for a tight and twisty mountain road than a hot Renault.
Not that this one will have seen any such action since 2005. We’ve all seen our fair share of track-prepped Clios over the years; maybe we’ve owned one or two as well. They’ll likely have some K-Tec bits, a new exhaust because the originals rot, perhaps even a turbo 2.0-litre from a Megane. The cars were so good to drive, so cheap, with so many aftermarket bits available, that it was kind of rude not to modify.
Yet here we have one exactly as it left the factory 20 years ago. And that’s not with just a K&N added, or ‘standard except for…’ - this is a bone stock Clio 182. Bet it’s been a while since any of us have seen one of those. Furthermore, it’s a one-lady-owner from new car, having covered just 34k since ‘05. It had a cambelt last year, and the recent MOTs are okay.
Perhaps our one lady owner was a rally driver, and those 30-odd thousand miles have been redlining every single gear. But it certainly looks like it’s been treated very gently, with nice wheels and paint. The picture under the bonnet could have come straight from an early-'00s catalogue. The famously cheap, scratchy interior still has all its buttons intact; even the big ol’ bolsters look great.
As fast and French survivors go, this looks like one of the good 'uns. It really hasn’t been used very much in the past few years (it only went through 30,000 miles in 2019), so might require a bit of TLC to bring back to its best for regular use. But it’s hardly like good Renaultsport Clios are going to become any less desirable now; the ad suggests this £12k example ‘is surely yet to have its day as an investment car’, which does seem a tad optimistic. That being said, look what happened to 5 Turbos. And we can all remember when a great Clio 182 was £5,000…
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