Alpine's vision for the French hot hatch's future looks good - the past still ain't so bad, either.
has been received well, its combination of muscular good looks and innovative tech - plus the involvement of the team we used to call Renault Sport - promising a great deal. If anybody can make the small, electric car fun, it’s got to be the French. The powertrain might be drastically different now, but there’s simply too much heritage, too much goodwill, and too many brilliant cars for the segment to be hollowed out.
While the A290 previews a smaller model, something more Clio-sized , the Renault Sport magic touch made icons of almost everything it touched.for proof; it’s now off sale in the UK, the final one having never quite fulfilled its potential, and the original R.S. didn’t launch to a wonderful reception almost 20 years ago either. But in that sweet spot between about 2006 and 2016, the Renault Sport was the C-segment hot hatch benchmark.
It's hard to imagine the big-bottomed Megane being anything but fantastic, yet early 225s really weren’t at the races. Seemingly aware of a dropped ball, Renault Sport introduced the Trophy model just nine months after launch, followed by a Cup chassis option as well, both immediately hailed as steps in the right direction. Renault eventually made the Megane so good that it even worked well with a diesel engine.
Created to celebrate Fernando Alonso’s back-to-back F1 championships , the Renault Megane Renaultsport 230 F1 Team R26 tweaked the suspension over the Cup with new dampers, stiffer springs and anti-roll bars and changes to the bump stops; there was another 5hp, too. Most crucially, however, the R26 got the front limited-slip differential denied to all previous Meganes and a vital bit of equipment for the model’s future success.
More than a decade and a half later, finding a good R26 presents the same problems as seeking out one of the older heroes. They would have been less vulnerable to scrappage schemes as newer vehicles then, but cars that encourage hard driving inevitably fall by the wayside at a faster rate; related to which, cars that respond so well to modifying become harder to find in standard guise. It’s a bind we’ve all been stuck in trying to find Peugeots, Citroens and Renaults of a certain age.
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