Why Renaultsport Has Dropped The Ball

It’s like some kind of Rip Van Winkle-esque nightmare story. You wake up one day and fire your smartphone up, logging in to the day’s car news over a couple of Weetabix. Everything is normal… you think.

Because what’s really happening, you realise as you spit your breakfast all over the cat, is that a dynasty has fallen. In many ways it’s the dynasty; the one you grew up with, the one you remember lusting after when you started learning to drive and the one that you could actually afford to buy into.

This is the Renaultsport story. Renault’s highly improbable sporting wing has kicked just about every other small hot hatch family into the weeds over the years; at least for consistency. Sure, Peugeot had the 205 GTi and Volkswagen had the first- and second-gen Golf GTi, but that was more or less it from both of them.

Renaultsport has brought us a line of Clios so nut-numbingly awesome that looking back it’s hard to believe it was real. Among the Clio greats are the Williams, the 172 Cup, the 182 Trophy, the 197 F1 Team R27 and the run-out special 200 Raider model – a guaranteed future classic.

Why is it a classic? Simply because the car that replaces it is a colossal dropped ball. Sure, the paddle-shift arrangement is neat and the R.S. Drive button gives you an excuse to drive like your Grandma while pretending you’re still cool, but the excitement - the challenge - is gone.

It used to be that a hot Clio would put a smile on your face that was proportionate to how much work you put into driving it. Your dinner tastes better when you know you’ve earned it, and so it was with previous Renaultsport fun-boxes. Driving them was a statement that you didn’t care about luxuries or user-friendliness. It was a statement that the most important thing to you was driving pleasure – and we liked that.

But in the search for higher sales figures Renault has abandoned ship. The Clio Renaultsport 200 Turbo is decent to drive, has lots of kit, looks nice from most angles and won’t bite you in the ass. But it’s no longer a hot hatch figurehead. It’s perfect for the mediocre middle-ground buyer; someone who buys for style and technology more than for thrills. The last bastion of old-school driving enjoyment has fallen, and we should mourn it.

But hey, once you’re done with that there’s always the classifieds. You can pick up a tidy French legend for peanuts these days…