An evening with Renaultsport

We’ve got a facelifted Twingo Renaultsport 133 in for a road test at the moment, so Renault was kind enough to invite us to the Renaultsport track event just up the road at Bedford Autodrome on Friday evening. Man, it was a blast.

 

I went along with Sean. Sean does a lot of track days – as you might expect from someone who owns a bike-engined Caterham-alike – so I was expecting him to be quick. Quite how quick is something else, however, as you’ll be hearing more of very shortly…

Anyways, when it he wasn’t giving death to plastic-windowed Renaults of 2008 vintage, he tolerated sitting in the passenger seat while I bimbled around, attempting to remember which way the circuit went. Which was kind.

 

Although we took ‘our’ Twingo Rs, we didn’t actually get to drive it in anger since Renault went and nabbed it for a photoshoot – lucky for us, actually, as those pictures will be accompanying the ‘road test’ in the next couple of weeks. But I did grab a quick session in the other Twingo available, which came complete with an instructor.

I say instructor, but actually it was British GT driver Joe Osbourn – who like most hard working racing drivers supplements his income by sitting alongside talentless idiots like me at gigs like this. Amusingly, Sean had met him earlier in the week when his MK Indy R got temporarily banned from Oulton Park due to the amount of noise it was making.

Anyhoo. Aside from basically encouraging me to drive the Twingo as fast as possible – and then subsequently proving just how much faster it could go with him behind the wheel – he usefully observed that I wasn’t looking into the corners early enough. Since you tend to go where you look, this meant I wasn’t turning in early enough in some cases.

My excuse was concentrating on braking in a straight line – something you don’t really need to do with these Renaults, as it happens – especially given he had me braking a lot later than I had been of my own volition. Either way, an interesting development, since when I first started driving stuff round racing circuits the comments tended towards quite the opposite, meaning I was turning in too early (a natural trait that springs from road driving).

That’s probably enough waffle about me. So, just a final word to say that the Renaultsport track days remain as brilliant as ever – well organised, great atmosphere and a very high standard of cars and driving. If you’ve got a fast Renault and haven’t been on one you should rectify that situation immediately.

The end result was a weekend of perusing the classifieds for a cheap Clio Cup. Fortunately, I don’t think my current budget stretches quite far enough…

• Introducing the MK Indy R: what IS that exactly?
  
• Video: Bedford Autodrome track day
  
• First Drive Review: Renault Twingo (2012 onwards)
  
• First Drive Review: Renault Twingo Renaultsport 133 (2008-2012)
  
• Renaultsport track days