RSS Share 11/02/2008
Renaults at the 'ring

By Dan Trent

Turn up at the Nürburgring car park and you’d be forgiven for thinking only German cars are permitted. From Golf GTI to Porsche GT3 – via every variety of BMW M3 – the locals are clearly fiercely patriotic when it comes to their car choices.

Which means rocking up in a French hot hatch – a bright yellow, stickered up one at that – turns more heads that you might expect. Of course, this isn’t any old car. The Mégane Renaultsport 230 F1 Team R26 (let’s just call it the R26 from now on…) is still the hot hatch by which all others are judged, a full year on from its UK launch.

So we know it’s good. But is it good enough to take on the world’s toughest race track? Well, the R26’s tweaked Cup chassis, its limited-slip differential and boosted 230hp motor mean it has all the right hardware. Only a lack of driver ability is going to stop the R26 putting in some blistering laps. The pressure is on me!

It’s not my first time here but, approaching the barrier with my freshly purchased ticket, my pulse is racing. It’s part excitement, part fear but having bonded with the R26 on the 300-mile hack from Calais I have every confidence in the car. I settle myself deep into the reassuring hug of the Recaro seats and prepare myself.

Accepted wisdom has it that for your first lap you start slowly, get a feel for the conditions and then gradually build up speed over subsequent laps. But as soon as I see that track ahead of me any fear evaporates and I’m hard on the power and letting the rev counter’s needle sink deep into the red. And the Mégane seems to relish it.

The beauty of the R26 is that the harder you push it the better it gets. Lesser cars feel fine on the road but quickly run out of answers on track. Not so the Mégane. It even sounds more serious, the air whooshing through the induction system as the turbo spools up and the R26’s special sports exhaust giving a much harder edge to the engine note. I’m only a few corners in but already I have the confidence to push harder than I ever usually would at this stage.

All Renaultsport Méganes have incredible front end grip but the R26 combines this with a more lively set up that just gets better the faster I go. I know from previous experience that with the ESP switched off it gets livelier still but it’s a long walk home so I leave it on. It doesn’t intrude though, letting the chassis work its magic and subtly stepping in only when it’s absolutely necessary.

By the time we get back to the car park the brakes are smouldering lightly and I’ve got huge grin on my face, hungry for more. A temporary closure after a crash gives me a chance to wander around the car park and check out the competition. There are at least three more R26s bearing plates from the UK, Germany and France. I also spot an Astra VXR and a Mazda 3 MPS. Now, the VXR currently holds the C-segment lap record here and Mazda had a crack at it last year in the MPS and came within a few seconds. I reckon the R26 has to be up there with these two and in with a shout of the 8min 36sec time set by the Astra…

I get chatting to a fellow Brit R26 driver and Renaultsport forum goer, here to give his car a proper test – he’s only had it a few weeks! His usual ’ring car is a Porsche 968 Clubsport but he’s keen to see how his new toy compares. We agree to follow each other for a lap or two when the track reopens.

We don’t get to do this until the following day, by which point the rain is bucketing down and the circuit is ice-rink slippery. A friend comes in from a lap shaking his head and saying “that’s it for me today…” and over coffees we hear numerous tales of slithers, spins and near misses from our fe