Forbidden Fruit: Mégane Renaultsport 265
The hottest hatch you can’t buy in America is even better than you think it is.
It’s been more than 25 years since you could buy a Renault in the United States. At the time, the sporting honor of the company was upheld by the relatively mild “Cup” variant of its AMC-built Alliance subcompact and the Sports Renault/Spec Racer, which relied on the Alliance for its drivetrain. Since leaving America, however, Renault has produced a series of extremely well-received hot hatches, one of which even had a V6 engine mounted behind the driver in a sort of tribute to the original mid-engine Renault 5 Turbo.
The U.K. auto press has continually rated the speedier versions of Renault’s Mégane and Clio as equal to, or better than, its German and Japanese competition. In particular, the current Mégane Renaultsport 265 has been repeatedly hailed as the fastest and most satisfying-to-drive hot hatch on the planet. To determine the truth of this assertion, we borrowed a right-hand-drive RS 265 and drove it from Singapore to Sepang. Once there, we ran it around the Formula 1 course, right in the middle of a one-make race for Honda Fits.
Our initial impressions of the vehicle in the parking garage of Singapore’s Changi Airport were entirely favorable. The Mégane is low and wide, with a gaping grille and furious-looking slanted headlights. Compared to, say, the Focus ST, which looks slightly CUV-ish from some angles, the Renaultsport might as well be a Gallardo. Best of all, it’s a three-door, not a five-door. Not to minimize the importance of child-seat loading and rear-passenger comfort, but the kind of people who buy these cars usually value style over practicality; and this bright yellow hatchback has style to spare. It doesn’t look like a hopped-up version of a family car at all. It looks like a sporting vehicle in its own right. That’s awesome.
Opening the long door and settling into the moderately-bolstered driver’s seat reveals another pleasant surprise: Finally, someone’s built a modern compact car that doesn’t try to put the driver eye-to-eye with pickup trucks. The “hip point” of the Mégane is halfway between that of a GTI and a Scion FR-S. Ahead of us, there’s a red-stitched steering wheel, a long-throw shifter, and a simple but attractive set of controls and displays. The dashboard is wide and doesn’t stretch too far into the distance. Again, we aren’t looking at the typical compact-car form.
On the move, any lingering thoughts we had about the tall-car competition disappeared. The Mégane’s boosted 2-liter is strong and responsive, with a genuine willingness to rev and a relative lack of torque steer. It’s as fast as any of the turbo hatches we can buy here and more charming in the power delivery than all of them. The shift action is about what you’d expect from a transverse drivetrain and cable mechanism, but it’s predictable enough. If you want BMW gear changes, you’ll have to buy a BMW.
The drive from Singapore to Sepang is more than 200 miles and alternately plagued by typhoon weather and buzzing crowds of darting scooters, carrying thousands of workers into the port city each day for work and then return en masse back to their respective homes. The Renaultsport’s high tail makes rear visibility a little suspect, but we manage not to inconvenience the scooterists while occasionally blasting into the triple digits. Every so often, there’s a massive jam ahead for customs checkpoints or crashed trucks, but the big Brembos up front are reliable at any speed. The brakes alone are a good enough reason to prefer the Mégane to the rest of the segment. Who else puts Porsche-style brakes on a front-wheel-drive hatchback?
Although the RS 265 isn’t a particularly luxurious freeway commuter, it rides well, offers Bluetooth connectivity and a decent stereo, and has enough go (and stop) to handle any traffic situation. Even if you never tracked it, you’d still probably prefer it to anything else you could buy for the same amount of money.
But what a shame that would be, because on a racetrack, the Mégane is simply head, shoulders, and maybe half a torso ahead of the competition. Sepang’s an extremely long racetrack with some very wide-radius turns. It’s designed for Formula 1 cars, and we suspect it would also be a very nice place for Corvettes and Vipers. Hot hatches typically don’t fare well on tracks like this, and the 110-degree ambient heat promises misery for turbocharged cars as well.
But the Mégane doesn’t notice any of that. It’s as strong on the fifth lap as it is on the first—and we cannot emphasize enough how rare that is for transverse turbocharged cars. There’s prodigious grip in every turn, even in the daunting section from Turn 5 through Turn 8 where it’s expected that you’ll stay on the throttle despite the elevation changes, camber changes, and deceptively tight right-hander near the end. It’s exceptionally sensitive to deliberate adjustments of the tail via lift-throttle in midcorner. It’s possible to come out of turns a little sideways. All that claptrap you read about the French hatches being “throttle-steerable”? Turns out it’s true.
We’re sharing the track with a Honda Jazz (Fit here in the U.S.) owners group and their single-make race. The Mégane behaves like a shark among minnows, passing groups of three and four Fits contesting their positions with a whoosh and a growl. The brakes are a revelation in this category of car; again, nothing else you can buy stops as well, particularly after hard use on a racetrack. The difference is monumental.
Our 30-minute racing segment seems to pass in a tenth of that time, and we’re sorry to return the Renault to the pits. It’s difficult to describe its on-track superiority to its rivals without descending into hyperbole or panegyric. The truth is simply this: It’s a league above cars like the Focus ST, Mazdaspeed3, or GTI, and on an American road course, it would be running with hardware like the Mustang V6 Performance Package and BMW 328i. Running ahead of them, we might add.
This was a bittersweet experience. Yes, the RS 265 is gorgeous, rapid, and huge fun to drive. But if you want to see for yourself, you’ll need to start by buying a relatively expensive plane ticket—and there are no plans whatsoever to bring this car or its successors to the United States. Perhaps the best thing for us to do is to openly plead with Carlos Ghosn, the big cheese at Nissan and Renault, to consider doing American enthusiasts a huge favor. Bring the RS 265 in as a Nissan. Call it a 200SX. Call it a Sentra. Call it a Hardbody King Cab if you have to! Just bring it, okay?
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