Renault 5 GT Turbo Review

Overall Rating

For the time, awesome performance coupled with supple ride and good traffic manners. Economical and very reliable when new. One of the best cars of the 1980's.

None when new, but most cars now are just worn out clunkers. Most butchered with cheap mods. Need sympathetic and skilled restoration.

I was lucky with the Renault 5 GT Turbo. It was a company car and I happened to work within a couple of miles of Wimbledon, which meant Radbourne Racing was the local Renault dealer. The deal was "no discount, but I get all the Radbourne "engine mods" and so the little red bomb was born.

I managed to get it without the garish "turbo" sticker down the side, and the only exterior clues to the changes were a tiny aluminium "Radbourne Racing" plate on the tailgate and the giveaway of the rather obvious tailpipe of the French exhaust system.

Apart from the engine mods, Radbourne had insisted on installing strut braces "cos without them, you're gonna flex the inner wings", worth it if only because the big polished aluminium tubes looked really cool when you opened the bonnet. They did have a real effect on handling though, transforming the not-too-solid little R5 into a very rigid platform that let the suspension work perfectly.

In the days before re-chipping, the engine was modified in the classic fashion: flowed cylinder head, internally modified turbo and intercooler, carb and filter mods and the exhaust. An ultra-low back-pressure system that was, simply, just bloody noisy. I did get a look under the car after about a year and found out why. No silencer. Just an expansion box at the tail with the turbo doing the work of reducing the noise.

The result was a car that gave about 145 genuine horsepower, a truly astonishing torque curve, yet was more docile than a 1.2 Renault 5 in traffic. To put it in context, it's only in the last couple of years that drivable road cars have reached 100+ bhp/litre and the little Renault did it with pushrods and a single downdraught carb. We eventually found a further 10bhp by installing a water-cooled star section aluminium duct with a tiny radiator and electric pump in place of the big rubber tube that fed the carb.

With a weight of around 730 kilos, performance was astonishing but the car was still totally driveable and turned in a regular 35mpg. We never actually took performance figures, but the R5 was decisively faster than the contemporary M3 BMW (we tried it) and on the motorway, with the turbo gauge just coming off the stop, offered instant and serious acceleration at 90. It was one of those delightful engines that "bootstrap" - open the throttle maybe a third at 40 or so and as the speed climbs, the power climbs and it just keeps on going up into three figures. Never did find out just how fast it would go, I wasn't dumb enough even then, but I can say that at 135 the car was still accelerating strongly.

I still admire the Renault suspension. With such simple parts, they achieved a mixture of supple ride, great road holding and real controllability. I'm not sure if it's true of an unbraced example, but this was the only front-wheel drive car I've known that performed a controllable 4-wheel drift. Folk say my new R32 will do it, but who's that crazy?
The car was totally reliable - no warranty claims - until just before it left me at 40,000 when the fan sensors failed. But by then, I was beginning to hear a hint of bearing noise from the turbo, suggesting that performance was going to come at the expense of longevity.

Would I recommend one now? Not if you want a cheap car. To really appreciate how good these are, you'll need to lavish money, time and skill on it to bring it back to top condition and probably to reverse some horrible bodges done over the years. If you are buying, really only look at the last cars, on an "E" or "F" plate. Renault made two very important changes, a water-cooled turbo and sodium-cooled exhaust valves to combat reliability issues and I wouldn't touch, let alone tune, an engine without them.
But if you are looking and find an "E" reg red one that's got aluminium bits under the bonnet and where the spare wheel should be, it could just be. Also, if there's a pair of Ray-Bans in the door pocket, they're mine. Well it was the 1980's.