If your personal target is slightly less hardcore, you’ll find the Mégane incredibly easy to live with. It rides with real comfort on rough roads and you rarely feel the need to apologise to passengers as you might in a Focus RS. Also, neither Focus nor Leon Cupra R can hold a candle to it when it comes to interior ambience. Alfa’s sumptuous 147 GTA might offer more flair, but it does so without the ergonomics of the Renault, or quite its feeling of quality.
The Mégane’s interior blends different textures and colours particularly well and, in the 225, the combination of red-lit instrumentation and dark tones only emphasises this. The optional leather seats are especially superb.
The alloy pedals are a nice touch but the spacing feels a little strange, with a big gap between clutch and brake and a little one between accelerator and brake that makes fleet footwork tricky for those with big shoes. It would be nice if the classy, smoked titanium material on the door-pulls made a subtle appearance on the dash, but even without it the Mégane 225 manages to appear sporting yet mature.
A well-integrated sat-nav system is available and the optional upgraded sound system is clear and effective.
Turning to price, considering the amount of performance on offer, £19,500 (£20,000 for the five-door version) doesn’t seem expensive. It’s cleaner than you might expect, too: CO2 emissions of 209g/km result in a tax liability of 27 per cent (£176 per month for those in the higher income tax bracket). Renault claims a combined consumption figure of 32.1mpg; we managed a respectable average of 26.4mpg.
