A Guide To Renault’s Mad Mid-Engined Hot Hatches

By mid-December, we sort of assume all the big new car reveals for the year are done because everyone’s more preoccupied with copious amounts of mince pies and wine. Last week, though, Renault pulled a full Steve Jobs-style “One more thing,” and showed us the Renault 5 Turbo 3E.

Cool, we thought. A neat concept car based on the lovely new 5 in ode to a classic rally homologation special. But no, this thing’s actually bound for production, in all its rear-wheel drive, carbon-bodied, 500bhp-plus glory.

Renault’s confirmed that power will come from a pair of rear-wheel mounted electric motors, meaning it’s technically… rear-engined, we guess? If engine position is even a concept that neatly transfers to the world of EVs. As you’ll likely know, though, this isn’t the first time Renault’s taken one of its hatchbacks and put the thing that powers it in the quote-unquote wrong place. Join us for a glance at Renault’s wonderful back catalogue of mid-engined hot hatchery.

Renault 5 Turbo

Renault’s entire flirtation with hatches that put the hot bit behind the driver can be traced, indirectly at least, to the Lancia Stratos. It was this glorious Italian wedge that made other manufacturers realise that a mid-engined layout made sense for rallying.

Renault, though, decided that its mid-engined rally contender should bear at least a passing resemblance to one of its road cars, and it went with the little 5 hatchback. The unassuming car was hacked up, with the 1.4-litre turbocharged four-cylinder from the 5 Alpine Turbo dropped in where the back seats used to be.

It was massively widened and featured huge intakes on the flared rear arches to let the engine breathe. This was all before the Audi Quattro turned up and rewrote the rallying rulebook, so the 5 Turbo was solely rear-wheel drive.

Best of all, though, rally homologation requirements meant Renault had to build some road cars too. Debuting in road-going form in 1980, the first 1800 or so were Turbo 1s, built to fulfil those requirements. They’re the most sought-after, partly thanks to the truly insane interior designed by Marcello Gandini.

The engine made 158bhp, which doesn’t sound much, but consider that this was a short-wheelbase, mid-engined car with squiffy weight distribution, no driver aids and a very laggy, ’80s spec turbocharger and it starts to sound like plenty. 62mph happened in 6.9 seconds, and the top speed, for the brave, was somewhere north of 125mph.

Once the homologation requirements were complete, Renault made a further 3167 Turbo 2s, presumably just for merdes et rires. Performance was basically identical, but they had a toned-down interior more reminiscent of the regular front-wheel drive 5's.

Oh, and as for the rally version, it eventually evolved into a Group B ‘Maxi’ version, kicking out a wholly terrifying 350bhp. It remained rear-wheel drive, so could never really compete for global glory, but was a bit of a demon in asphalt rallies.

Renault Clio V6

An apocryphal story goes that Volkswagen, in the lead up to the 1998 Paris Motor Show, was working overtime to get its Lupo ‘3-Litre’ ready – that is, capable of 3l/100km of fuel consumption – because it had heard that Renault was working on its own ‘3-Litre’ version of the second-generation Clio.

Well, it was, but not in the way VW thought. Renault’s ‘3-Litre’ Clio was, in fact, a widebody Clio with its back seats ripped out and replaced with the 3.0-litre V6 from the Laguna saloon, with power once again sent solely to the back.

It was just a concept in 1998, but the following year, it had been made a reality for a one-make race series, and by 2001, the Clio V6 sat in Renault showrooms next to Espaces and Meganes. Developed by British motorsport outfit Tom Walkinshaw Racing, which also built it, somewhat unexpectedly, at a facility it co-owned with Volvo in Sweden which was producing the handsome Volvo C70 coupe at the time.

These ‘Phase 1’ Clio V6s had 227bhp, would hit 62mph in 6.2 seconds, and max out at 146mph. It also had a reputation for being a bit… twitchy at the limit. Around 1500 were made before production wrapped up in 2002, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t because when the Clio got a ‘Phase 2’ facelift in 2003, the V6 came back. Still TWR-developed, but now built in France, it had more power – 252bhp, more than any other hot hatch on sale at the time – making for 62mph in 5.9 seconds and a 153mph top speed.

It also had various tweaks, including a longer wheelbase and totally reworked suspension geometry, to try and tidy up the handling. This did help, to the extent that it possibly could in a rear-wheel drive Renault Clio with a ruddy great V6 sitting in the middle.

With a third-gen Clio on the horizon, production wrapped up in 2005 after around 1300 Phase 2s had been made, and that really was that in terms of mid-engined Renault hatches. Well, for road cars, anyway…

Renault Megane Trophy

Even after Clio V6 production wound up, Renault couldn’t resist stuffing an inappropriately massive engine into the middle of a hatchback body. Between 2005 and 2013, it ran the Eurocup Megane Trophy, a one-make race series featuring a silhouette racer clothed in bodies vaguely resembling the Megane family hatch – first the big-bummed second-gen, then the swoopy Mk3.

These wild-looking racers borrowed a V6 engine from a long-time partner of Renault’s – the 3.5-litre VQ35 from the Nissan 350Z.

After that, Renault still ploughed on with hatches with unusually positioned engines with the rear-engined, third-gen Twingo. There was never a version of that which could even be described as ‘tepid’, though, let alone ‘hot’, despite being previewed by the mega-cool (and fully functional) TwinRun concept, which borrowed the engine and layout from those Megane Trophy racers.

No, it’s taken until now, and a revival of the car that spawned the first of its mid-engined experiments, for Renault to return to its obsession with supercars disguised as hatches. The 5 Turbo 3E may use electric motors in place of a turbo four or a meaty V6, but in a car market that’s increasingly wary of silly, niche passion projects like this, we’re beyond happy that it exists.