French Slick

The engineers at Renault we’re once keen to slap a turbo on every one of their models in the 1980s. This little Le Car though, must be one of the rarest blown hatches ever… it could even be a sole survivor!

- Jarkle

Renault were on a roll in the early ’80s, their hugely powerful (and it must be said, hugely unreliable) F1 cars really were doing a great job of promoting forced induction as the engine technology of the future. Of course, the company sought to capitalise on this turbo charging expertise, and many of their cars from the 1980s have gone on to be cult performance classics.

Even mundane models like the Phase 1 R5 got a dose of boost. Most famously the snorting, rear-wheel drive, Maxi turbo built to enable Renault to go Group B rallying. But also the more affordable front-wheel drive variants, badged through most of the model’s life as the Gordini Turbo. These cars were at the cutting edge of road-going turbo technology for a while, even if the engines being boosted had been used for decades already.

Nowadays any ’80s Renault is a rare sight in the UK, with rust and wear and tear accounting for the vast majority of cars before the turn of the century. This means that turbo charged variants of the 5 – like the Le Car 2 Turbo you see here – are now firmly in single figures. And the owner of this example, Adrian Fletcher, reckons his is the only one of its type left on the UK’s roads.

“I know of about six others, but they’re all off the road and really rotten,” says Adrian. “I’ve had this car for a while now, though I owned another when I was in my late twenties and swore I’d have another someday.”