Tag: renault

Renault Turbo

Renault turbo header

Put on those rose-tinted glasses and think back to the glory days of turbocharged Renault cars competing on the track and tearing it up on the roads. The company was the first to win in Formula One using a turbocharged engine, fittingly, at the French Grand Prix at Dijon in 1979. Jean-Pierre Jambouille brought the […]

Renault Safrane Biturbo: the ultimate 1990s French supersaloon

In the early 1990s, Renault wanted to rattle the cages of the rival German manufacturers, who ruled when it came to both speed and power. The only way to do this was to go extreme, and they did, with this, the Safrane Biturbo. At the time, the BMW 540i and Audi 100 S4 were ruling […]

Avantime

Very few people can claim to have owned a road-legal spaceship. As it happens, I’m one of them. Okay, okay, it wasn’t really a spaceship, though it definitely had an otherworldly air to its appearance. And it did produce occasional ‘aren’t you Han Solo (I liked that one)/Chewbacca (no comment)/Buck Rogers?’ comments from a motley […]

Renault Clio Williams: a hot hatch hero

Sorry Subaru, Renault rocked the blue-paint-and-gold-wheels look first. Like the Impreza, the Clio Williams’ colour scheme was inspired by racing, specifically Alain Prost’s 1993 championship-winning Williams-Renault FW15C. Instantly iconic, it was the icing on the gâteau for one of history’s greatest hot hatches. Twenty-five years later, a blue and gold Clio has been disgorged from […]

Super Cinqs: the small Renaults 5s of the 70s and 80s

It’s 1976. ABBA, Elton John and Queen are riding high in the charts, the Queen opens Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, and when kids weren’t riding their Raleigh Choppers up and down the streets of Britain, they were glued to the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (the rest of us had George and Mildred and The New Avengers). […]

Renault Turbo 2: Pop Goes Classic.

  For those of us that were contemplating our O Levels in the mid 80s, the news that a 1984 Renault 5 can be auctioned as a classic car can bring on a nauseating rush of existential angst. I guess, along with the coppers, that when the cars at the NEC Classic Motor Show sale […]