When excitedly anticipating rolling 15-year-import-windows a few years ago,i French automaker Renault popped up more than once. This is notable because I’d never even driven one. And until last week, I still hadn’t.
But since at least 2010, when a Clio V6 stopped my world from spinning on the streets of Barcelona, I’ve had a nearly bottomless soft spot for these piquant little playthings, these Frenchiest of hot hatches. So while cruising Autotrader recently, and in my current low-grade crisis phase of wanting more-more-moreii before I inevitably imminently expire, I brushed past the usual German and Italian suspects and found my way to the mere dozen French cars for sale in the entirety of the country.
Having withdrawn from the North American market in 1987 – thirteen years after Citroën and four years before Peugeot – Renaults have only barely been sold here new in my lifetime. But thanks to the aforementioned rolling import-window, they’re now relatively straightforward to bring over. Models of the last couple decades are mostly pretty solid, simple to work on for competent mechanics, and parts are readily available within a couple of business days from overseas. So as long as you already have a small fleet and this is just adding to the mix, there’s never been a better time to Frenchify your my life.iii
While the Megane R26.R is still the culturaliv high-watermark in my books, at CAD$100,000 for a decent one, it’s not where I’d want to start. Thankfully, a young Brit named Elliot in Calgary had a few sporting Clios for sale, so I went down from Edmonton to take a closer look. Could these little Gallic hot hatches live up to the hype?
Starting with the 2007 LHD Clio R27 197 F1 Team Edition in Liquid Yellow. Although the catless X-pipe exhaust sounded appealing on paper, in reality it droned enough during our 10-minute test loop that I quickly dismissed it, even though the 197 design really is much more cohesive and dynamic in-person than in photos. Next was the 2010 RHD Clio RS 200 Lucetia RS in Alien Green,v which I didn’t push as hard for the simple fact that my brain was momentarily scrambled by driving manual on the “wrong” side, but the relative maturity of the vehicle immediately impressed. Where the 197 was crashy, deafening, and a bit over-modified, the 200 was civilised, perky, and oh-so-fresh feeling. Did it really have 103`000 km on the clock? I could hardly tell, so for the bargain basement price of CAD $18`000, a deal was struck. The Green Bean was coming home.
A week in, I’m fairly smitten! I don’t think I’ve ever driven, much less owned, a vehicle that was more care-free and just plain fun. It sips gas,vi makes it through 83% of the 6-speed gearbox at city speeds,vii has a delightfully fruity exhaust note, can fit in any traffic or parking gap, and since it’s from 2010, doesn’t suffer from auto-stop-start. The colour, sound, and size and just mmmouah! cooked to perfection. Speaking of size, did you know that the average weight of new cars today is 4`400 lbs?viii Blame impact regulations, but this just makes this 2`700 lbs featherweight feel even more otherwordly than it already does. Alien indeed.
And at just 1% of the capital outlay for a Python Green 997.2 GT3 RS these days,ix which is essentially the high-end German boring version of this exact same car, from this exact same era, and in this exact same colour, I now have a veritable fizz can of joie de vivre that I can chuck around with abandon. With Akrapovic exhaust, KW coilovers, and gearing shorter than a sewing machine, this 200hp pop rocket keeps me busy and brimming at every turn. The challenge of driving RHD manual only adds to the engagement and appeal.
It’s French. It’s now. It’s the RS 200… want a ride?
[photo credits: mostly Evo]
- That was 7 years ago… how time flies. ↩
- More toys, more partying, more-more-more… ↩
- Some people, like Sam Kriss for example, are currently “Chinamaxxing,” which I totally get. China has magic dragon energy, especially compared to feckless Britain. To quote Sam from his recent piece “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life” :
We’re here because we yearn for the wise governance of Chairman Xi and the Communist Party of China. We’re fleeing the British Century of Humiliation. We’re Chinamaxxing. We’re here to become Chinese: to dissolve in the belly of the greatest country in the world.
Do I need to do the bit where I condescendingly run through the phenomenon? You’re a smart audience. You know what Chinamaxxing means. It’s not just a social media trend, or a few gimmicky behaviours. Anyone can stop drinking cold water to prevent a dangerous excess of yin. Anyone can hum Jin Sheng Yuan to themselves and prattle on about how stirring and beautiful they find the Chinese equivalent of Barry Manilow. We all love biangbiang noodles and rou jia mo.
Chinamaxxing is more than that: a kind of national dysphoria. The Chinamaxxer feels themselves to be, in some ineffable way, inwardly Chinese, even though they have no Chinese ancestry, can’t read the characters, and barely even know anything about the culture. Overhearing Chinese tourists on public transport, the Chinamaxxer will immediately assume that they can understand what’s being said, even though they can’t.
In a Chinese restaurant, they’re desperate for the waitress to recognise them as being fundamentally different from all the other laowai wandering in to eat sweet and sour pork. Look how deftly I use my chopsticks. Hear me overpronounce the tones in hong shao rou. The Chinamaxxer feels a deep sense of personal pride when China wins a clutch of Olympic golds or successfully mediates in an international dispute. That’s me, that’s my people. I belong to the country where they just built a thousand glowing gigacities from scratch, not the one where MPs keep trying to strip Parliament of its copper wire at night.
- The automotive era of 2008-2012 is irrevocably etched itself into my then-under-developed-forebrain as “peak car” – a blindingly self-important framing which assumes that the design climax began when my cohort finished undergrad, only for the denoument to begin with auto-stop-start. As of yet, I have zero interest in further bidding up the “poster cars” of that all-too-recent era, though this reluctance is apparently not shared by those of my peer group who’ve been at least as successful as me at the cost of being even more of left-brained spreadsheet autists, as evidenced by the (imo grossly unwarranted) trebling of 430 Scud and 997.2 GT3 RS prices in just the past year.
Not sure what kinda clout they’re chasing but they can have it. I can only assume that it’s a regional thing? To me it’s Chongqing-coded, to quote Kriss again (emphasis added):
At night all the glassy [Chongqing] skyscrapers light up with images, blossoms and snowfalls and enormous flashing Chinese characters; the whole city turns into a vast crystal druse, glowing virtual over the humid alleys. They’ve got a real live UFO that flies over the city, and for fifty yuan you can get a ride on its tractor beam.
But Sarah’s beautiful fourteen-year-old boyfriend has texted her with bad news. Apparently, Chongqing is chopped, it’s unc, it’s Reddit, it’s washed, it’s a meme city, it’s for Westerners who soy out over a few cheap LEDs. And now Sarah is second-guessing everything. This Second World War air raid shelter that’s been turned into a cavernous hotpot restaurant—is it cringe? This Buddhist temple on a high cliff face, facing the jagged pandaemonium of the city as it stretches infinitely away into the haze—is it Millennial-coded? This glass-bottomed walkway, a thousand feet above the churning Yangtze—has it been memed out?
- Apparently Honda owns the “Clio” trademark in Japan, so the Clio there is known as “Lucetia.” But whatever, I’m still calling it a Clio even though it’s JDM, or more likely its new nickname, “Green Bean.” ↩
- With gas at CAD $2.00 / L for the good stuff (93 octane from Shell or 94 octane from Chevron), fuel efficiency feels good, even if I don’t actually put enough miles on any of my non-electric vehicles to fill them up more than once a month. ↩
- This is how a manual should be, not a 500hp 992.2 GT3 that with “8% shorter gearing” that still hits 116 KPH in 2nd, which is a certainly part of the reason why my Guards Red Weissach-spec car is now off to the next owner and I couldn’t be happier to see it go. It also wasn’t worth to me what the market valued it at, not by a factor of about 50%, so bon voyage. ↩
- Up from 3`200 lbs in the 1980s. ↩
- In this market, a Python Green 997.2 GT3 RS would retail for ~USD $1.3 mn (~CAD $1.8 mn) right now. Crazy but true. ↩