Renaultsport Twingo 133 review

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Renault Twingo 1.6 Renaultsport 133 Road Test

Test date 05 November 2008 Price as tested £12,960

For Fabulous chassis agility, steroidal appearance, surprisingly practical

Against Roller skate ride, very noisy at speed, driving position

The world is in difficult times, so it’s no bad thing to be reminded that the low-cost, low-carbon future that is imposing itself upon us it not without upsides.

Cars will surely become smaller and lighter, but far from this precluding the provision of fun in what we drive, it seems likely that we’ll end up enjoying ourselves rather more.

If it turns out that this Renaultsport Twingo 133 is in the vanguard of a new breed of small performance cars (along with the likes of the Fiat 500 Abarth), you’ll not hear us complaining.

Bloated kerb weights mean much of the magic conjured by, say, Peugeot’s 205 GTi is a dim and distant memory when you drive today’s hot hatches. But Renault is convinced that the Twingo is the car to bring it back, and given that it’s the progeny of the same minds that created the Clio 197 and Megane R26R, two of our favourite sporting cars of any description, there’s no questioning its pedigree.

What seems more open to doubt is whether even the shining talents of Renaultsport can create a convincing makeover of a car which is based on the underpinnings of the Mk2 Clio.

As there was no hot version of the original Twingo that first went on sale in 1992 (but never in the UK), it would be tempting to regard the 133 as a car without an ancestry.

In fact, in its size and temperament it is a much closer successor to the original 1985 Renault 5 GT Turbo than its technical descendant, the Renaultsport Clio 197. The GT Turbo had a mere 115bhp at first, but weighing in at 850kg, it didn’t need much power to make almost all other hot hatches of the era look distinctly puny.

The GT Turbo itself was the natural offspring of the 1982 Renault 5 Gordini Turbo, which in turn was begat by the 1976 Renault 5 Gordini.