Renaultsport was the quiet king of hot hatchbacks

Sure, there was the occasional miss here and there, but generally nobody else was able to touch Renault Sport for pure driver appeal.

So how did they do it? It was mostly down to clever expenditure of development budgets. Take the original Renault Sport Clio, for instance: while the engine was afforded the luxury of variable valve timing, the suspension was finely tuned to perfectly match the frenetic powertrain and the interior was upgraded with supportive seats and perfectly placed metal pedals for rev-matching, the rest of the base car was basically left untouched.

Outside, it looked just like a standard Clio to the untrained eye, and even in the cabin you would have been hard-pressed to spot any telltale signs of specialness, given that it featured the usual scratchy plastics and iffy leather. To keep costs down, the money had been spent exclusively on the components that mattered most to the driver, in an admirable expression of substance over style.

Of course, this excludes the likes of the bespoke-bodied Mégane R26.R and the Clio V6, but even then, such cars were almost always sold at a loss by the company, in order to preserve their relative attainability.

Even Renault's most extreme, composite-paneled creations never lost touch with the sense of invincibility that no class of performance car but the hot hatch can offer, and that was the Renault Sport genius. The cars they produced were practical and (for the most part) not unrealistically priced, but at the same time they were capable of causing serious headaches for the likes of Porsche and Lotus in the business of building a driver's car.