CAR OF THE YEAR - 5 STAR

Yep, Renault's retro-chic new supermini with an optional wicker baguette holder Scoops the grand prix...

- PAUL HORRELL

IT took a surprising amount of sniffing around until I managed to find a dusty old Renault 5 and wedge our shiny green machine alongside for a family photo. And this was the south of France where the climate is kind to old bangers, even ones that ended production three decades ago. Only a very few years ago it would have been easy. Most villages had a one-man band garage with a petrol pump and dark messy service bay, its walls covered with rusting enamel signs: Cibié, Kléber, Yacco. Round the back you’d glimpse semi-abandoned Renaults and Peugeots, the more senior of them with the telltale yellow headlights. That, in my mind’s eye, was to have been our ideal photo location. If Renault’s hype machine wants us to recall the original 5, very well, we’d do it with an elegantly shabby example, scrapyard dog in the background yanking ominously at its chain.

France held out much longer than Britain against the march of the shiny glass palace corporate franchised car dealerships, but now it’s gone that way too. So your village garagiste, his lifespan doubtless curtailed by decades of drawing at a Gitane while pumping leaded four star, is now as hard to find as your original RS.

The new RS is bigger and fancier and electric. Well of course the R5 has changed. France has changed. Just along from its garage, each village would have a bar tabac and a boulangerie. Last summer I cycled across France. I expected to stop every couple of hours at one of those for a grand creme and a bun pain aux raisins in the morning and religieuse in the afternoon thanks very much. In the end I nearly always went hungry and suffered persistently high levels of blood in my caffeine stream. Those pivots of village life have disappeared. Maybe it was the pandemic that did for them but I guess general social change and urbanisation has been the bigger driver, leaving the rural communities as little more than over conserved tourist attractions.