RENAULT

5 Turbo 2

The RENAULT 5 Turbo 2 is one of the wildest road cars France ever built — a mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive monster hiding under the familiar silhouette of a humble supermini. Born from Renault's ambition to win the World Rally Championship, the original Renault 5 Turbo was unveiled at the 1980 Brussels Motor Show. Where the ordinary Renault 5 was front-engined and front-wheel drive, the Turbo relocated a turbocharged engine to the middle of the car, behind the seats, driving the rear wheels — a layout chosen purely to make a homologation rally weapon. The dramatic widened bodywork, with its enormous rear haunches feeding air to the mid-mounted engine, was developed by Bertone under design legend Marcello Gandini, building on in-house sketches by Marc Deschamps and Robert Opron, and finalised for production at Alpine in Dieppe. The first cars, now known as the "Turbo 1", used expensive aluminium roof and door panels and a lavish, body-coloured Bertone interior. They were effective but costly to build. The RENAULT 5 Turbo 2, introduced for 1983, was Renault's clever answer to that cost problem. Mechanically near-identical to the original, the RENAULT 5 Turbo 2 swapped the aluminium body panels for cheaper steel items and adopted a simpler, more production-based interior borrowed from the standard Renault 5. The result weighed marginally more but cost significantly less, allowing Renault to build the volume it needed while keeping the same intoxicating 1,397 cc turbocharged "Cléon" four producing around 160 bhp in road tune — enough for a sub-7-second 0–100 km/h sprint and a genuine 200 km/h top speed in a car the size of a hatchback. On the world stage the RENAULT 5 Turbo and its evolutions wrote a glorious rally chapter: Jean Ragnotti famously won the 1981 Monte Carlo Rally outright on the car's debut, and later "Tour de Corse" and Maxi Turbo versions kept the nameplate competitive deep into the Group B era. Production of the RENAULT 5 Turbo 2 continued until 1986, with 3,167 examples built. Today the RENAULT 5 Turbo 2 is a blue-chip collectible — a homologation special that combines outrageous looks, genuine rally pedigree and the raw, boosty thrill that defined 1980s motorsport.