The Renault R5 Turbo is smoking hot | Revelations with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 01

I would like you to transport yourself to 1980 and imagine the most outrageous and exaggerated car. It would be expensive, low and wide. It would have a mid-engine, manual transmission and rear-wheel drive. It would be a limited production flared red economy car with a Gandini box. Here in America we don't even think about French cars and it's for good reason that we haven't had French cars here in a whole generation of people, so I'm going to have to talk about this hot hatch in hot hatch terms that we all understand. Even those of us here in America, so let's talk about this car in terms of the Volkswagen Golf and its performance variants, the GTI and the Golf R, Renault once made.

A front-wheel drive subcompact one size smaller than the Golf and called the Five in America, it was sold somewhat embarrassingly as the Renault Lockhart and was slow, reaching 60 miles per hour in 16.7 seconds in 1976 for the European market. Renault put a hot engine in it to create the Renault 5 Alpine. Think of it as a GTI version. Remember the GTI hadn't been invented yet. Fast forward 31 years to 2007 and the Volkswagen GTI is still something VW wanted to show off. Great, their engineers were so they did the most outrageous thing possible: they took Germany's best-selling car, the Golf, and put their most powerful engine in it, the bi

turbo

w12 from the Bentley Continental, which generates 650 horsepower, but instead of leave the engine in front, no, no. he pushed it back and made it move its rear wheels.

VW introduced its Frankenstein creation to the world hoping we would all lose our minds. Everyone did it except the French. Everyone rolled their eyes, but for once their cynicism was valid because Renault did exactly the same thing in the 1970s, but instead of building a cynical car for marketing purposes, they put it into production and sold almost 5,000 units per year. public. It was exactly the same recipe they took for France's most popular car. and shoved France's most powerful engine up its ass, took a practical front-wheel drive car and ruined any semblance of practicality for the sole purpose of kicking the snot out of supercars.

Now how pathetic that makes cars like today's golf r look, here's a clue. Like many of the most special cars in history, the

turbo

was a homologated car sold to the public strictly so the company could take it to races; In other words, it probably cost billions to develop something during which not a single accountant was allowed. In the room, however, it had an interior that looked like a French art deco museum exhibit with the most outrageously cool seats and that steering wheel, all of which was not shared with any other car, had an aluminum roof, doors and hatch and then fiberglass polyester hood bumpers and fenders and the credit for these outrageous fenders goes to none other than Bertone's mad genius Marcelo Gandini, the same guy who made the mura countach and the stratos.

Keep in mind that Renault only built this car because they had to, they had to build 400. They wanted to take it racing, but demand was so great that they all sold out before the car went into production. About 800 of them were produced in three years, but that bespoke interior and aluminum parts meant they cost a fortune to build. Someone finally called Lay's. It counts to stop the bleeding and they changed a normal front wheel drive ready-made interior 5 and ditched the aluminum. The result is the turbo 2 in this car and Renault sold another batch of them, including 200 evo models of which this one in particular. car is one, can we go back to the obvious here for a second, there is an engine in the back of this economy car where the back seats used to be and that's amazing, it's actually not that hard to do either, I hear people say all the time, well it's so easy, you just crank the engine, if you crank the engine the car will go backwards and even the French are not that weird, no it's even simpler than that, you can take the whole drivetrain, the transmission wholesale engine. suspension, even lift it up, put it in the back of the car and that's it, that's exactly how Renault built this car.

Many mid-engined cars have been built this way and today's Lotus Evora, for example, basically has a Camry powertrain stuffed up its rear, something very different. Here's why Renault didn't use the typical transverse engine layout where the engine is on its side through the hood. No no, they use the longitudinal engine where the engine goes from front to back, like Audi does today, where the engine is completely cantilevered in front of the front wheels think about what happens when the engine is in the back still it is in front of the wheels but that means it is in front of the rear wheels this is the design of the supercar this is the lamborghini aventador and the bugatti veyron and all the ferraris and speaking of ferraris this is fast ferrari then as now ferraris are among the faster cars on the road and this was faster imagine magnum pi is 308 in the middle of a violent car chase and he gets overtaken by some jerk in his tall dumb french hatchback that's the guy On TV I saw that the engine turbo was a tiny 1.4 liter without even an overhead cam, it had pushrods for goodness sake, but add 12 pounds of boost and you can do anything fast, especially if you cool the intake charge, yeah, the turbo. had one of the first intercoolers on a production car and the result was 160 horsepower, it's 14 inches long, it's the size of a jet ski engine, it's so cute, but that brutal power is only part of the story the r5 was riding in, the type of suspension is used when chassis engineers mean it, like when they are building a rally car with double wishbones on all four corners along with disc brakes on all four wheels, so when the road got twisty the r5 turbo left the ferrari dead on the skidpad this car generated an outrageous 0.86 g humiliating a ferrari 308 gtb about the same extent a ferrari 308 gtb would humiliate a a family sedan and i must say it is much better to drive than a 308 gtb, it has a lot of lag, a lot of lag, but once you finally get it under boost it is really fast, the engine sounds and responds like a sti engine and the strange thing is that there's no mechanical noise coming out of this even though the motor is right here, I mean, there's no mechanical noise coming out of this at all that you hear.

It's the sound of the exhaust and all these amazing turbo noises that makes it even more fun to drive around the gap. This thing is crazy to drive, but I can't get over anything else. Can you imagine if today's golf came out revved and then drove a ferrari f8 and then it was better balanced and more fun to drive. I mean, this is crazy, but it has to be said that this Renault cost a fortune, half of what the 308 cost, if today's Golf R was the same price. It would cost 125,000, which would be an especially large sum of money if it looked like a supercar, but the Renault 5 was practical, it was the first car in the world to have a hatch cut all the way to the bumper for easy loading, except of course on the Renault. turbo, the cargo hold with an engine is pre-loaded and the space left tends to get very hot, let's say magnifique, but this is all so stupid and that's what I love about homologated cars, these are the kind of cars. that would never ever have been built except car companies have to make it for racing and everything needed in racing cars goes into street cars and that's when things get really weird.

Here's a good one, the engine may only be 1.4 liters, but the fuel tank is 93 liters, that is 24.6 US gallons, according to the French government, the

renault

r5 turbo 2 at a constant speed of 56 miles per hour delivers 37 miles per gallon, which means you can go 910 miles on a tank of gas from Paris to Budapest or from New York to Alabama. Tucky, think about this 16 and a half hours in a car the size of a shoe. with an engine in the cockpit with you that's why the French have a patent for being miserable the turbo needed that big tank to run and in the races it did, it did well in the rallies and was outrageously fast on the asphalt stages, winning the monte carlo rally and several others, the only big problem was its timing, the turbo was unlucky enough to debut at the same time as the audi quattro that all-wheel drive car changed the game for everyone forever and it meant that rear-wheel drive hatchbacks, no matter how cool they were, were never going to win rallies on the track, it was just another victim of the quattro, but on the road the R5 turbo offered supercar performance without any of the pretense. and think about the nerve it takes to do this as an enthusiast.

I love that Volkswagen makes a golf and then they make a gti and then they make a golf r which is the ultimate gti but one is just based on the next

renault

. To do that, they went all out and turned a Le car into a supercar, a supercar that, by the way, drives better than most supercars and, if you had known this at the beginning of the episode, the poster-shaped car of Gandini box set you were thinking of would have been this legend that looks like a drugged toad now we're running late okay so you'll keep the ferrari framed the whole time right yeah I'm actually not a rich youtuber who's going to ask you that you like and subscribe, no, I'm a professional journalist, uh. up up up up up up up keep the furry up I'm a professional journalist who will ask you to like and subscribe and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know what you like you are watching and I won't show you anymore if you don't like what you're seeing join the club and by this I mean the hagerty drivers club which gives you access to the award winning magazine and events. and discounts on some really cool stuff and after all this, if you still don't like anything then just leave a nasty comment below.

I have tough skin. I wouldn't be a professional automotive journalist if I didn't have a thick skin, so come on, say what you want, just make me laugh, please, please, I need help, right? And something has to make me laugh in this world, come on, oh.