What can I say about a new hot hatch that you haven’t already heard? It’s built for speed, so what? You know that.
It looks bloody brilliant. But for this car you must be able to stand in the middle of a niteclub dance floor for half an hour without having an epileptic fit to agree.
It’s bloody expensive and a terribly bad idea to buy when you give it more than a moment’s thought. But your dad’s there to tell you that.
What I can tell you is that this car represents a number of things.
Firstly, it represents Renault’s almighty roar that it is now the leader of the hot hatch pack. 8 minutes and 8 seconds to get around the Nurburgring, a record for front wheel drive production cars, has seen to that. (Note: that’s quicker than a TTRS, BMW 1M, Ford RS and Golf & Scirocco R)
Next it represents the success and development that Renault has enjoyed on the motorsport scene and those benefits filtering through to one of its performance consumer cars.
And lastly, it represents one of the more comfortable hot hatches around. Dual airbags, Tom Tom traffic, antilock brakes, electronic stability control and traction control are all standard.
The new RS comes in a Sport, Cup and a mental-asylum-worthy 195kw Trophy version. The Trophy gets it’s extra power from some special tuning that makes the engine breathe better, but the chances of you ever experiencing it are not good ‘cos they’re only brining 30 of them into the country.
The good news is that a Sport or Cup will impress you just as much.
The drive is very comfortable and you would swear you were driving a well-made sedan. But when it needs to be (like on a back-country road in the Eastern Cape) it can corner like a gull in slipstream and accelerate away effortlessly. Check some footage below:
Living in the car is just as comfortable as driving it is. Leather-clad Recaro bucket seats cushion you nicely for the bumps, and the electric yellow seatbelt, although more tasteless than British cuisine, seems sort of at home when you consider what the outside looks like. Like a gentle reminder lest you forget what this car was built for.
Renault really wants you to drive this car, and I don’t mean down to the shops for a pack of smokes. Don’t be a pomce. They’ve fitted the RS Cup chassis, which is like having a high maintenance girlfriend. If you don’t take it out (to the track) at least once a month it’ll start bitching and moaning and withholding sex.
Anti-roll stiffness and dampers and a limited-slip diff offer brilliant handling and cornering abilities and power coming out of them.
As an F1 bonus? Bridgestone RE040 tyres.
Now let’s address what’s really on your mind: Renault’s questionable reliability and the expense of their parts.
Renault went to great lengths during the business session of the launch (annoying all of the journos who just wanted to race the bloody cars) to explain to us how this stigma is not true. They back everything with a 5 year/150 000km warranty and claim that their parts are a massive 17% cheaper than their competitors.
Enough to change your mind?
