The Renault 5 GT Turbo is still a hero | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Which is why in idle moments and from time to time I wonder what it would be like to meet up again. Now we’re both in our mid 50s rather than late teens would the conversation come so easily as it once did, would we still laugh like drains at stupid stuff, or would we be staring at our shoes within five minutes, desperate to engineer a way out of the situation? I have genuinely no idea, but on the basis that you tend only to regret the things you don’t do, I’d take the risk.

Why this now? Because back then there was another in my life, who also vanished at around the same time and I’ve not encountered since. But unlike my former girlfriend, this one is here right now, waiting patiently for me outside the building in which I am writing this. It is a Renault 5 GT Turbo.

I sold it because I got a job testing cars at Autocar and even I could see the only thing I absolutely did not need was a car of my own. I’d love to say I missed it terribly but it’s not true: if every car I had owned up until that time can be likened to a chocolate bar of one description or another, Autocar gave me keys to the entire bloody factory and I never looked back. I forgot it completely.

Until, that is, a day quite recently when I discovered that Renault keeps one on its historic press fleet, along with all sorts of other wonders from an original Alpine A110 to a RenaultSport Spyder. If I couldn’t engineer a reunion with the person of my affections back then, at least I could with the object.

Besides I was genuinely interested to see what it was like because to my then uneducated mind, it was the most exciting hot hatch produced up to that point. I’d already had a Golf GTI and a Peugeot 205 GTI (I know how lucky I was to be able to drive such cars in my teens and early 20s, but I worked in the City at the time and had come into some money) and the little Renault was quicker than either and funnier still. But even then its shoddy build quality annoyed me, only because I always feared it was about to break on me, which unless you count locking itself with the keys inside, it never actually did.

So what does my now rather more jaundiced middle-aged perspective make of it? Well, if I thought it was badly built back then, it’s nothing compared to how it feels today. Some of the interior materials are either shockingly or hilariously bad and sometimes both. There’s an almost wilful shoddiness to the way it is put together which I clocked in the 1980s. What I don’t recall from back then is thinking much about what might happen if I crashed it. Now I think about it all the time.

What is interesting to me is that I actually owned a 205 GTI for around seven years and only sold it a few months ago, and I rarely dwelled upon the likely consequences of flying off the road in it. I expect one would be very little worse than the other, but the perception is dramatically different. The Renault seems to be made out of crisp packets by comparison.

More bad news. It’s not quick any more. Not remotely in fact. Back then I put up with the fact I needed a choke to start it from cold, sometimes it wouldn’t start at all from hot and that I’d need to wade through a whole load of turbo lag before I could get to the good bit. But that was because when it did get going, it felt like ground to air missile. It doesn’t any more: it’s mildly amusing once on boost, but not much more.

Only its handling is as I remember it. In fact it might be even better. Back then it was certainly noteworthy that it weighed just 820kg, because the Peugeot was nearer 900kg, but today it seems barely believable. It’s lighter than a Lotus Elise for goodness sake. And it really does still roller skate around, offering amazing grip, stupendous agility, completely benign manners and probably the best steering of any front-wheel-drive car I’ve driven.

Which is why I’m so glad we met up. We’re both looking our age but the laughter returned as long and loud as it ever was when we were young. And if that’s the last time we’re together, that’s fine too, for I know we parted on good terms, and in any inherently finite relationship, that’s the most for which you can really hope.