OUR CARS
FEATURED THIS WEEK
FIRST REPORT
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To find out how much closer to GTI
territory Renault Sport has moved its
Mégane hot hatch and whether the
cheapest one may also be the sweetest
ALPINA B 4 S AUDI E-TRON BMW i3 DS 7 CROSSBACK MG ZS RENAULT MEGANE RS
64 AUTOCAR.CO.UK 2 1 AUGUST 2019
Entry-level Mégane hot hatch begins its six-month test with a lot to prove
RENAULT MEGANE RS
money out of them, its recent product
portfolio might look somewhat
different from the way it does now.
Renault Sport is the firm that
gave us some of the most memorable
and brilliant fast front-drivers ofthe noughties era, which also just
happened to be the decade when I
was coming up the ladder as a road
tester. Ask me to put together a list
of t he 10 b e s t hot h at c hba c k s I ’ v e
driven to date and I reckon as many
a s fou r of t he m w ou ld b e c a r s m a de
- or, at least, heavily modified – by
Renault Sport in Dieppe. From the
Clio 182 Trophy to the 200 Cup, and
the Mégane R26R to the 265 RB8,
t h i s f i r m’s out put pr e t t y a c c u r at e l y
defines what you could call ‘my
era’ in car enthusiasm. I think of
those cars now with much the same
r e v e r e nc e t h at blok e s 10 y e a r s my
senior lavish on the Peugeot 205 GTi
and Mk2 Volkswagen Golf GTI – as,
I d a r e s ay, do ple nt y of my p e e r s.
Which makes me a good candidate
to run the latest arrival on Autocar’s
long-term test f leet, I suppose – a
Flame Red Renault Mégane RS 280 –although I won’t be running it alone.
And perhaps younger road testers
Ricky Lane and Simon Davis, who
m ay not h av e my h i g h e x p e c t at ion s
of, or personal preference for, Renault
Sport products, will be fairer judges
of this car than I will be. The coming
months should tell.
It’s the recent ‘strategic
development’ of Renault Sport’s cars
in general, and the nature and story
of t he l at e s t Mé ga ne R S i n pa r t ic u l a r,
that has brought us to this point, with
some interesting questions to ponder
over extended use and mileage.
At the beginning of the current
decade, Renault’s management took
a conscious decision to change tack
with its factory-tuned RS products,
you may remember. Eyeing jealously
both the profit margin and the sales
volume enjoyed by rival Volkswagenwith its GTI lines, it decided to
modernise and to slightly reposition
its hot hatchbacks in order to make
them more appealing as daily-driven,
technologically sophisticated,
pseudo-premium-branded cars.
W he n it l au nc he d t he l a s t C l io R S i n
2012, complete with dual-clutch-only
transmission and downsized turbo
engine, Renault Sport clearly hoped
to retain the diehard enthusiast
following that the old line of
A
nyone looking to measure
the gulf that can exist
between critical acclaim
and commercial success
in the business world would do very
well to ask a car maker. Few have
been showered in more of the former
than Renault – for its hot hatchbacks,
at le a s t , a nd for a s lon g a s t h i s t e s t e r
has been in the reviewing business.
And yet if that same company had
proved only equally good at making
great hot hatchbacks as making