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

i'd like for you to transport yourself back to 1980 and picture the most outrageous over-the-top poster car it'd be expensive and low and wide it'd have an engine in the middle of manual transmission and rear-wheel drive it would be a limited production gandini box flared red economy car [Music] here in america we don't even think about french cars and it's for good reason we haven't had french cars here at all in an entire generation of people so i'm gonna 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 once upon a time renault made a front-drive sub-compact a size smaller than the golf and it called it the five in america it was sold somewhat embarrassingly as the renault lockhart and it was la slow hitting 60 miles an hour in 16.7 seconds in 1976 for the european market renault slapped in a hot motor to create the renault 5 alpine think of it as a gti version remembering that the gti hadn't been invented yet fast forward 31 years to 2007 and the volkswagen gti is still very much a thing vw wanted to show just how cool its engineers were so it did the most outrageous thing possible it took germany's best-selling car the golf and put its most powerful engine in it the twin turbo w12 from the bentley continental making 650 horsepower but instead of leaving the engine up front no no it shoved it up the back and made it drive their rear wheels vw presented its frankenstein creation to the world fully expecting us all to lose our minds kinda everyone did except for the french they're all eye roll but for once their cynicism was valid because renault did exactly that same thing all the way back in the 1970s but instead of building one cynical car for marketing purposes they put it into production and sold almost 5 000 of them to the public it was exactly the same recipe they took france's most popular car and shoved france's most powerful engine right up its butt taking a practical front-wheel drive car and ruining any semblance of practicality for the sole purpose of kicking the snot out of supercars now how pathetic does that make cars like today's golf r look here's a hint very [Music] like so many of history's most special cars the turbo was a homologation car sold to the public strictly so that the company could take it racing in other words it probably cost for an old billions to develop the thing during which not one single accountant was allowed in the room a ho contraire it had an interior that looked like a french art deco museum exhibit with the most outrageously cool seats dash and that steering wheel all of which were shared with absolutely no other car it had an aluminum roof doors and hatch and then fiberglass polyester hood bumpers and fenders and credit for these outrageous fender flares goes to none other than bertone's madman genius marcelo gandini the same guy who did the mura countach and stratos keep in mind renault only built this car because it had to it had to build 400 to take it racing but demand was so great that those were all sold out before the car went into production some 800 of them were produced in three years but that bespoke interior and the aluminium bits meant they cost a fortune to build somebody finally called in lay's account to stop the bleeding and they swapped in an off-the-shelf interior from the regular front drive 5 and they ditched the aluminium the result is the turbo 2 this car and renault sold another boatload of them including 200 evo models of which this particular car is one [Music] can we just get 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 is amazing it's also not actually all that difficult to do i hear people say all the time well it's so easy you just turn the engine around well if you turn the engine around the car would go backwards and even the french aren't that weird no it's even simpler than that you can just take the whole powertrain wholesale engine transmission suspension even lift it up put it in the back of the car and voila that's exactly how renault built this car many mid-engine cars have been built this way and today's lotus evora for example basically has a camry powertrain shoved up its derriere something very different here is that renault didn't use the typical transverse engine layout where the engine is sideways across the hood no no they use the longitudinal engine where the engine goes front to back much like audi does today where the engine is completely cantilevered in front of the front wheels think about what happens when the engine's at the back it's still in front of the wheels but that means it's in front of the rear wheels this is the supercar layout this is the lamborghini aventador and the bugatti veyron and every ferrari and speaking of ferraris this thing is ferrari fast then like now ferraris are among the fastest cars on the road and this was faster imagine magnum pi is 308 in the middle of some violent car chase and he gets passed by some nitwit in his tall french dorky hatchback that's the kind of television i would watch the turbo's engine was a teensy little 1.4 liter without even an overhead camshaft it had push rods for the love of god but add 12 pounds of boost and you can make anything fast especially if you cool the intake charge yes the turbo had one of the first intercoolers ever in a production car and the result was 160 horsepower it is 14 inches long it's the size of a jet ski motor it's so cute but that brutal power is only part of the story the r5 rode on the type of suspension used when chassis engineers mean it like when they're making a rally car double wishbones at all four corners along with four wheel disc brakes so when the road turned twisty the r5 turbo left ferraris for dead on the skid pad this car generated an outrageous 0.86 g humiliating a ferrari 308 gtb by about the same measure as a ferrari 308 gtb would humiliate a family sedan and i gotta say this is a lot better to drive than a 308 gtb it has a lot of lag a lot of lag but once it's finally under boost it's genuinely quick the engine sounds and responds a whole lot like an sti motor and the weird thing is there's no mechanical noise in this even though the engine is right here i mean there's no mechanical noise coming through this at all all you hear is exhaust sound and all of these amazing turbo noises which just makes it even more fun to drive around the lack this thing is a riot to drive but i just can't get past one other thing can you imagine if today's golf r out accelerated and then out handled a ferrari f8 and then was better balanced and more fun to drive to i mean this is absolutely insane stuff but it needs to be said this renault cost a fortune half of what the 308 did so if today's golf r were priced the same way 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 world's first car to feature a hatch cut all the way down to the bumper for easy loading except of course that in the turbo renault pre-loaded that cargo hold with an engine and whatever space is left tends to get very hot [Music] say magnifique but this whole thing is just so stupid and that's what i love about homologation cars these are out the type of cars that would have never ever been built ever except car companies have to for racing and anything needed on the race cars goes on the street cars and that's when stuff gets 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 okay according to the french government the renault r5 turbo 2 at a steady 56 miles an hour delivers 37 miles per gallon that means it can do 910 miles on one tank of gas that is 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 cabin with you this is why the french have a patent on being miserable the turbo needed that big tank to go racing and racing it did it did well in rally and was outrageously fast over the tarmac stages winning the monte carlo rally and several others the only big problem was its timing the turbo had the unfortunate luck of debuting at the same time as the audi quattro that all-wheel drive car changed the game for everyone forever and it meant that rear drive hatchbacks no matter how cool were just never gonna win rallies on the racetrack it was just another casualty of quattro but on the road the r5 turbo gave supercar performance with none of the pretense and think of the gall it took to make this thing 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 just builds on the next renault didn't do that they went full send and turned a le car into a supercar a supercar that by the way drives better than most supercars and had you known this at the beginning of the episode that gandini box flared poster car you were thinking of would have been this stoned toad looking legend now we have lag [Music] [Music] okay so you're gonna keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep actually i'm not some rich youtuber who's going to ask you to like and subscribe no i'm a professional journalist uh up up up up up up up up keep the furry up i'm a professional journalist who's going to 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 you like what you're seeing and isn't gonna show you more of it if you don't like what you're seeing well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to the award-winning magazine plus events and discounts on some really great stuff and after all of this if you still don't like any of it well then just leave a nasty comment below i have a thick skin i wouldn't be a professional automotive journalists if i didn't have a thick skin so come on say whatever you want just make me laugh please please i need help right and something something has to make me laugh in this world come on oh

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 1,061,603

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, Renault R5, hot hatch, Cammisa, Jason, Camissa, Spotlight, Turbo 2, homologation, rally, Group B, smoke, fume, fumer, cigarette, LeCar, Le Car, GTI-650, W12 GTI, Wörthersee, car history, classic car show, rally car, car review, renault 5 turbo, renault 5, renault 5 turbo 2, r5 turbo, renault r5 turbo, renault 5 turbo rally

Id: nEahqyc_Jgc

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mayster101]

Production quality is phenomenal here. Jason did a great job at Issimi and It seems like he is taking full advantage of the Hagerty budget

[u/DdCno1]

Renault did this again a couple of decades later with the successor of the R5, the Clio, but this time, they used a V6, turning it into the legendary Clio V6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8aFpBTvz-I

[u/peaseabee]

Always enjoy Cammisa stuff.

Sometimes tries too hard to be clever/cute for my tastes, but that's personal preference.

Looking forward to more!

[u/agod2486]

This replaces the Icons show (I think?) Cammisa used to do with ISSIMI. Hagerty is releasing new videos every day and Jason has the Thursday slot, so we can expect more from him, which is awesome news!

[u/turboevoluzione]

The engine was indeed turned 180°, as the original R5 used a longitudinal MF layout. The gearbox was taken from an R30, which had a overhanging longitudinal engine (like the larger Audi's).

[u/JaremaJarema]

Guess I’m in the dark here. What is this segment from? It’s so well done. Would love to see more.

[u/YouAreMentalM8]

This video was just amazing.

[u/RodRAEG]

First time I learned about this car was playing Rallisport Challenge on XBox. Been a fan ever since.

[u/Novicept2]

Jason Camissa is such a good presenter