Listen To This 700bhp Renault Clio Hillclimb Car’s Bonkers Anti-Lag

When some people go to sleep at night, they count sheep to send them off. Others listen to white noise or lie awake with nothing but their own thoughts haunting them. Ok, that’s us sometimes, but we like to occasionally counter that by falling asleep by queuing up anti-lag videos on YouTube.

If you’re like us with that, well we’ve found perhaps the best we’ve ever heard – and it’s coming from a Renault Clio.

Well, a Renault Clio in looks, anyway. Really this is a spaceframe chassis wearing the bodywork of a French supermini but actually hiding away some pretty bonkers mechanical gubbins.

Its engine is a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-pot FR4T Renault unit as originally found in the Megane RS. ‘F4RT’ it does (sorry), with some pretty extensive work pushing its power figure right up to ‘over’ 700hp. We don’t have exact details on what has been done to the engine to make that figure, but based on just how hard its anti-lag system is audibly working, we presume a gigantic snail of a turbo has been affixed to it.

Unlike the Renaults this car borrows from though, it’s running an all-wheel drive system. Probably a good thing, given that much boost-heavy horsepower going through the front wheels would be quite something to get a handle on.

That’s all in a car weighing just 1120kg, and we’d wager a bet it’s adding a significant chunk to that figure at speed in downforce given the huge rear wing affixed to the back, as well as its extreme bodykit.

Although YouTube channel HillClimb Monsters has only recently shared the video, the footage comes from the 2024 Ilirska-Bistrica HillClimb in Slovenia. Presumably, since then, the ‘Clio’ will have had some further work done to it. Hopefully, we’ll see more footage of it and driver Matej Grudnik’s expert work throughout 2025.