Renault R5

The trend of Retro modding has really taken off over the past few years. It was only last week that we got you a story on the Gemballa Marsien, designed by Alan Derosier. Well, Alan has now worked his magic on yet another icon. This car is one of the most celebrated Class B rally cars of not just the ’80s, but of all time. The Renault R5 Turbo. Renault themselves are yet to give us a successor to the Turbo 2 from the 80s. However, until that happens, Alan has co-founded his company, Legende Automobiles to give us the unofficial successor to that 80s rally icon. Feast your eyes on the R5 Turbo 3.

There are moments when a carmaker’s ambitions go way beyond its financial or technological powers. But in pursuing said ambitions, only a select few companies managed to overcome any difficulties and deliver amazing car.

Take Renault, for example. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, the French firm simply couldn’t afford to fully develop a rally race car from the ground up. So it had to work with what it had, in this case the humble Renault 5, which through massive modding gave the raucous Renault R5 Turbo.

You gotta love it when manufacturers bring race-proven performance to the street. Back in the ‘80s, that’s exactly what Renault did with the R5 Turbo2, a boxy giant-slayer that looks the part of a sideways dirt-slinger all the way down to the hugely flared rear fenders.

This thing is just dripping with old-school-cool, which means it fits right in at Jay Leno’s Garage. Originally, the mighty mite used to be (as Jay puts it) “just a front-wheel drive, front-engined, econobox.” Now, however, it’s so much more. For starters, the engine is in now behind the seats, and now features a turbocharged 1.4-liter four-cylinder producing just under 200 horsepower, all of which flows through a five-speed manual transmission. The suspension was also completely reworked, and of course, don’t forget that glorious new body work. The product of racing homologation, just 200 were produced with the same aluminum roof as the example seen here.

This thing is a straight-up rally superstar for the road. Check it out in length in this 27-minute, 44-second video, which includes a look at all the technical details, and a stint on the streets of Southern California.

Every automaker in the world has that handful of models that get lost in the halls of history, be it for this reason or anther. For Renault, a case can be made that the Renault R5 Turbo 2 falls in this category. Not a lot of people remember the R5 Turbo and the reason for that is really simple. Production only lasted four years and only 3,576 units were made. True story: it was even sold in the U.S. for a time under the name “Le Car.” And yet, 30 years after production ended in Belgium, at least one of them has lived to see the roads of today. That model is owned by one Christophe Guerin, a gentleman from France who counts a 1984 R5 Turbo 2 as one of his most prized possessions.

This episode of Petrolicious tells the story of Guerin and his beloved R5 Turbo 2 to go with countless memories of being fortunate enough to have spent most of life a stone’s throw away from the iconic LeMans race track. As you can imagine, Guerin never ran out of stories to tell, which makes the six-and-a-half minute episode of Petrolicious seem to short. But in that time, we get a chance to hear from someone who not only got to spend a lot of his life on one of the most iconic race tracks in the world, but who also found a life-long love and appreciation for a car that’s largely been forgotten as the decades have piled up.

This is our chance to get to know Guerin and more importantly, get introduced to the Renault R5 Turbo 2, a street-spec car that was born out of Renault’s desire to beat the Lancia Stratos rally cars that dominated the rally scene back in the 80’s.

The Renault R5 Turbo (also known as the 5 Turbo) was a high-performance hatchback automobile produced in the early 1980s. The car was designed for rallying, but was also sold in road-going guise. Around 250 units of the Turbo II were imported to the US market, and around a dozen of them are still in circulation.

The R5 Turbo was powered by a mid-mounted 1397 cc Cléon turbocharged engine placed behind the driver in mid-body in a modified Renault 5 chassis. The engine developed a total of 158 HP. The car made the 0 to 60 mph sprint in 6,7 seconds and can hit a top speed of 126 mph.

The Turbo II version was introduced using stock Renault 5 parts replacing many of light alloy components in the original 5 Turbo version.

Specifications after the jump.