Never Unleashed
by David Finlay (29 Jan 01)

 
Mount a tall, heavy engine between the rear wheels of a short car and you introduce four elements of instability which clever suspension design may compensate for but will never fully eradicate.

With that happy thought in mind, welcome to the Renault Clio V6. The merest glance in its direction is enough to confirm that this is no ordinary Clio. For a start it is awfully wide, which it has to be to accommodate the huge wheels (7x17" at the front, 8.5x17" at the rear) and tyres. Up at the sharp end is a mean-looking spoiler, down each flank are meaty sills and butch air intakes, while the tail boasts an almost diffuser-like rear apron from which sprout two serious-looking exhaust tailpipes.

Kind of noticeable, in fact. Climb aboard and things are somewhat different. You might expect this to look like a racing car inside, but in fact virtually everything is pretty much standard high-performance Renault. Apart from the rear seats, because there are no rear seats. There is no room for any; unlike all other Clios the engine sits in the middle of the car, not at the front. This opens up far less front luggage space than you might expect, and if you open the tailgate you'll find a small compartment which looks as if it would just about carry ten Coke cans in five stacks of two. Altogether this is not what you might call the mini-MPV version of the Clio.

You didn't want to know about luggage space, did you? Okay. That engine is essentially the 24-valve, 3-litre V6 from the Laguna, but thanks to work on the induction and exhaust systems, plus new pistons which bump up the compression ratio, it produces 230bhp as opposed to the 210 of the Laguna version. That power reaches the road via a close-ratio six-speed gearbox.

Straight-line performance is rather jolly, as you might expect, with 0-62mph possible in 6.4 seconds, to the accompaniment of a thoroughly pleasing bellow from the sports exhaust. Purposeful brakes mean that you can wipe off speed very quickly too.

How's The Handling, Though?

But we're skirting the issue here. As mentioned above, the laws of physics suggest that the Clio V6 should be a bit of an animal. The question is whether Renault's chassis people have managed to tame the car and make it as controllable round corners as it is exciting in straight lines.

To a certain extent, they have. With so much potential weight transfer across the rear, two things had to be done - limit that transfer as much as possible, and increase the capacity to deal with the transfer that is left.

The second point is dealt with by those large Michelin Pilot Sport tyres, which provide lots of grip. The first is answered in three ways - lowering the car (it's a remarkable 66mm nearer the ground than a standard Clio), widening it (171mm!) and doing a careful job with the suspension settings. In the unlikely event that I ever get a job in chassis development, a plaque with the words "soft but well-damped" will be mounted on every wall of the office. It works every time, and it certainly works with the Clio, which is compliant without being uncontrolled.

So why does all this work only "to a certain extent"? Well, in the test-track session at the official UK press launch, Renault was notably coy about allowing anyone to drive the car too vigorously. We could go hard in a straight line, but always under the guidance of professional racers, who had been well primed to say things like "Isn't it stable under heavy braking?" - which it was, and damn well should have been.

There was also much talk of high grip levels and low centre of gravity as these same professionals drove us round corners at very moderate speeds, which we were not allowed to exceed when we got behind the wheel ourselves. The only time the cars went at all quickly while changing direction was in the hands of a different set of professionals - in my case Oliver Gavin. In this session the car certainly went rapidly enough, and showed no sign of leaping backwards into the undergrowth, but again you would hope this would be the case with Oliver Gavin driving.

A Door Clanged Shut

I asked if it would be possible to tackle the same twisty course myself. "No," came the reply from Renault, without further embellishment.

A later, very short road course through Surrey demonstrated only that the engine note, so spectacular when the car is being pushed hard, is a little intrusive when cruising along motorways; that there is quite a lot of drivetrain shunt (at least in the example I drove) which makes smooth gear-changing difficult; and that the car's substantial width demands extra attention when you are overtaking parked buses in busy villages. How it behaves when being driven quickly I don't know, because there was no opportunity to find out.

Am I wrong in suspecting that Renault is nervous about this car because it can easily become uncontrollable? Certainly, other press reports have suggested that there is a serious stability problem. Perhaps the journalists who have written along these lines were just being clumsy - and clumsiness is certainly the sort of thing a car of this design will punish severely. Or perhaps the Clio V6 is a deeply flawed machine.

None of this is likely to affect the car's sales, which are already exceeding its planned production. The basic bits are made by Renault but are then transported to the Tom Walkinshaw Racing factory in Sweden for modification and assembly. Twelve cars a day are produced by this method, and of course most of them are left-hand drive. Maximum capacity for the £25,995 right-hookers is 400 per year, and Renault UK has already received orders for 500, so even if you put your name on the list right now you won't be able to take delivery until well into 2002.

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