My first adventure with a Clio V6 began with the Trophy race car on a press launch. It was a tight, fiddly track in northern France, and the great and good of motoring journalists attended – Chris Harris, Tiff Needell, Mark Walton. Big pros. Lots of driving talent.
And, um, me.
Inevitably, I spun the car. It was on cold slicks and was trying to get a big sideways shot for the camera. I got the shot, but what the camera didn’t capture was the vicious snapback oversteer that sent me in the opposite direction and into a gravel trap. I went so deep into the gravel that I couldn’t open the door. The car had to be towed out by a quad bike.
But then everyone spun the Clio Trophy that day, everyone that is except Tiff – the talented bugger. None of us were really good enough to cope with the high centre of gravity, lack of steering lock, and short wheelbase: the three ingredients that create a big fat dish of scary.
Later I went on the launch of the Clio V6 Phase 1 in the south of France. Inevitably there were accidents. Lots of them. Apparently one went off a ravine. No wonder the R&D team at RenaultSport started having discussions about an improved Phase 2 version then and there on the media launch.
I bought a Phase 2 Clio V6 and loved it. It was indeed a more fluent machine to steer thanks to heavily revised kinematics and improved rear geometry, but those essential spiky ingredients remained – albeit dimmed by the tweaks.
I spun it five times on a private evo track day, and once in the office car park at about 5 mph (although in my defence it was a bit icy). Oddly though, it was those spins that helped me suss out the Clio V6. It wasn’t the short wheelbase or high centre of gravity that made it tricky, it was not knowing when you would run out of steering lock.
With every spin I learned, and thereafter I never diced with anything greater than a ¼ of a turn of opposite lock. With that bit of muscle memory firmly rooted in place, I never spun again and I grew to love it.
As a driving experience, it required discipline and lots of time behind the wheel to learn how to get the best out of it. In an age of plug-and-play cars, that’s an increasingly rare and desirable attribute. You really did develop a relationship with it – and a rewarding one to boot.
What happened to the Clio? I sold it to buy a Porsche 996 GT2.
Honestly, that car had a reputation for being a widowmaker but it was a pussycat next to the Clio.
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