The Dauphine was of course one of the pioneering small, economic continental cars that steered the world away from two ton gas guzzlers at the end of the fifties.

It was a cute, compact issue designed inhouse by Renault with assists from carrozeria Ghia.

You can see the moddish elements of the three box design, whose Euro motifs where decidedly other than the American chrome clad giants that were being designed at the time, and with whome the Dauphine would attempt to do battle.

Check out this interesting ad for the little Frenchie from North America — its interesting to see how, as far back as fifty years ago, urban utility and fuel economy were becoming a marketing element. America might have been booming, but they also wanted to keep an early eye on the pennies.

We’re not sure how successful the car proved to be in the states, but it would have cut an alternative dash on the streets of Manhattan, as it would do today.

These little cars, with their rear mounted engine and rear ‘swing axle’ would have been a quirky little handler too — a lot more fun to chuck around than your average Buick at the time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve noted elsewhere how we missed out on the automotive opportunity of a lifetime when we neglected to purchase a neglected Alpine 310 from a local country lane.

The burn of the memory of a missed opportunity is especially piquant when you stumble across pictures like this: possibly the nicest example we’ve ever seen.

We’re falling in love all over again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Feel my pain. For around three years now, I’ve been driving past a Renault Alpine 310, a later V6 GT model at that, rotting (or whatever it is that is the equivalent of rotting for fibreglass) on the wrong side of a skip, just off a country lane that I pass almost every day.

Now I am one of the legions out there who would truly, madly, deeply love to own and drive a modern classic like this — but for whom the practicalities of family life rule out the purchase of temperamental French two seaters made from fibreglass.

The design of the later versions from the great Robert Opron, who was responsible for the latter restylings of the DS, as well as Citroen’s sexiest creations the SM, CX and GS — and went on to pen the marmite-ish Fuego, too. You can see that rakish, front-heavy attitude in the 310 — signature of a very Gallic futurism that you don’t see very much these days…

I’d been meaning for at least twelve of these last thirty six months, to pluck up the courage to walk up to the doorway of the property where the Alpine is parked and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

This morning, being on the brink of making the leap and striding manfully to make an epoch making decision in my motoring life, the Alpine had disappeared — gone, I can only presume, to some lucky individual able to dedicate the time and commitment to bringing this beauty back to life.

And what a life it would be. These latter models, with a 2.9 litre V6 engine that made around 200 BHP, must have been a blast. Not ever having driven one we can only wonder at the handling, but with a hefty steel tube chassis and clothed in strong but lightweight fibreglass they must have flown.

But more than the potential performance of these things it was the unique styling that attracted me – and no doubt the striking resemblance they had (in my mind at least) to Captain Scarlet’s patrol vehicle.

In 1966, 3-litre normally aspirated engine regulations were introduced to F1 with a 1.5-litre equivalency formula for anyone wanting to run a turbo instead. Nobody did. Until, that is, a decade later.

The British Grand Prix of 1977 saw two highly significant debuts. One was Gilles Villeneuve in a McLaren, and the second was the 1.5-litre V6 turbo Renault with Jean-Pierre Jabouille at the wheel.
At first, nobody took the Renault too seriously. It blew up a lot and because brewing up could be more or less be relied upon, it earned itself a nickname of ‘The Teapot.’ Or, some said, ‘Teapot 2’ because the original Teapot had been a Ligier with a particularly tall and distinctive airbox.

By the time a couple of seasons had gone by, the Renault was being taken very seriously indeed. Jabouille scored the first turbocharged win by an F1 car, fittingly enough in the French GP at Dijon in ‘79. But even that race was better known for its epic tussle for second place between Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari and Rene Arnoux aboard the second Renault turbo.

Arnoux was using the better top speed of the Renault and Villeneuve the better drivability of the naturally-aspirated flat-12 Ferrari. They banged wheel repeatedly and went off everywhere until Villeneuve crossed the line ahead.

“Irresponsible!” bellowed the Puritans. “Nothing to worry about, just a couple of young lions clawing each other…” reckoned laconic ’78 world champ Mario Andretti.

Running more boost in qualifying, the Renaults were always at the front of the grid and when they started to develop reliability too, the writing was on the wall. The opposition realised that turbos were the only way to go and it effectively spelled the end of the road for the legendary Ford Cosworth DFV (below).

It wasn’t Renault, though, who claimed the first world championship success for a turbocharged car. That honour fell to Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham team with its four cylinder BMW turbo, which snatched the championship from under Alain Prost nose at the very last race of 1983 in South Africa.

Turbos dominated F1 for the next five years with Niki Lauda and Alain Prost claiming a hat-trick of titles for McLaren with a TAG-Porsche V6 between 1984–6. Prost won that ’86 title in dramatic fashion when Nigel Mansell suffered a dramatic tyre blowout just 18 laps short of winning the title with his Williams-Honda in Adelaide.
Nelson Piquet made amends the following season for Williams-Honda before Ayrton Senna took the first of his three world titles in a McLaren-Honda in ‘88.

By the mid eighties turbo engine development saw stratospheric horsepower figures derived from the 1.5-litre motors – as much as 1500bhp in qualifying trim, where every gearshift sounded like a detonating grenade and produced a dark haze behind each car. Costs were spiralling out of control and for ’89 the FIA banned turbos and introduced a new engine class for 3.5-litre normally aspirated power units.

Today’s F1 engines are 2.4-litre V8s but the governing body is busy drafting regulations for a new small capacity turbo formula to be introduced in 2013 along with more powerful regenerative systems.

The thinking behind it is threefold; being seen to be green, capping spending as much as possible and having more direct relevance to the motor industry.

Cosworth Group’s chief executive Tim Routsis has been part of the ongoing discussions and says: “The big difference this time will be the amount of fuel we can pour into the engine over a race. In terms of efficiency, the differences have to be marked. We are looking at using somewhere between 35 and 50% less fuel than we are using today for a car that’s got to do fundamentally the same sort of lap time and distance, so it’s a big change.”
There’s concern about a couple of things: preventing a financial arms race and, in terms of fan appeal, making sure the turbos still sound good.

“As regards the spending, one route is to constrain areas where we know you can spend a great deal of money for very little gain and just keep the development focused on areas which are relevant to the future,” Routsis says. “The other is to look at the amount of resource that each engine manufacturer deploys on the job. It’s very much work in progress but everyone is committed to finding an answer.

“As for the sound, a turbocharged engine will always be a little quieter than a naturally aspirated one running open pipes. But I’ve never seen a really good racing engine that sounded bad. I think we’re going to find the old story that if it goes fast, it’ll sound great. There are things we can do as well. Playing around with firing order does actually make a remarkable difference but if we are going to have less cylinders the amount that you can actually play with that is reduced. But I don’t think they’ll sound bad. They’re still going to be pretty high-revving by any normal standards.”

So there you have it. Coming soon, to a circuit near you – Turbos 2!

Strange western symbolism in this Civic campaign from Japan…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This ad for the tenth anniversary Datsun Z-car screams sells old-fashioned , mustached sex…

Click here to view the embedded video.

And this will make you look at the Ford Sierra anew…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dig the Top-Gun pastiche and beyond-the-limit driving in this South African Golf campaign

Click here to view the embedded video.

The payoff here is the beautiful Bill Withers excerpt

Click here to view the embedded video.

And straight to the point with a bit of irony here, just like Not the Nine O’Clock News

Click here to view the embedded video.

Got to thinking the other day that most of the time on British roads it’s pointless having a ridiculously fast car.

Having hundreds of frisky ponies under the bonnet certainly gets you places with panache, resonance, and a certain sort of drama, but there’s always a little bit of frustration when you get behind the wheel of a truly fast car. Sure on a country lane you might drop that R26R into second, and enjoy twenty seconds of dramatic bump, point, squirt and shimmy: but sooner or later there’ll be the good citizen in the Micra, stoically sticking to the indicated speed limits to spoil your fun.

Similarly, when you can’t get track time and you’re blessed with the helm of an F430 Scuderia, the only thing to do is to get up in the early hours and hope that even the nation’s finest are still tucked up in their cosy beds. Lurking in the back of your mind then, is the sure and certain knowledge that the law never truly sleeps.

It was in the light of these self-evident truths that the workability of cars like my battered and bog standard twelve year old Civic were cast in a renewed, glowing light. You can chuck the thing at bends and it will skitter and chatter with enthusiasm. You can lob it over humps in country lanes; you can fling into impromptu three-pointers without worrying about the blackberry bushes scratching the paintwork; you can ferry bikes, football kit and all the other flotsam of a daily life into its ample guts without the concern of decreasing your return on investment.

Long live that old banger. But save me a speedy ride for the days of early morning devilment.

You’re a family man. You’re used to chugging around in a variety of wagons. Your automotive lot is transporting the nippers around betwitxt football training, school and ballet classes. You fantasise every now and then about the joys of irresponsibility as encoded in a mad little motor.

And every now and then, behind the wheel of the Meriva, you mind-drive a Renault 5 Turbo like this:

.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stare into the crystal ball. The motoring industry tugs us in two directions. On the one hand it fuses the heights of driving passion, design discernment and technological exactitude to produce the most dizzying hypercars of which we could ever have dreamed.

On the other meanwhile, that same passion and techno-savvy explores new ways of powering, driving and being on the road.

Somewhere in the middle lay the worse of marketing-led product launches and misguided nods to trend. Meet our heroes and villains of the next 12 months.

[Show as slideshow]

There were seismic changes to Formula 1 in 2009.

Bickering over the sport’s financial arrangements and governance led to FOTA (the Formula One Teams Association) announcing a breakaway championship at the British GP at Silverstone in June, then back-tracking once it became evident that Max Mosley’s reign as FISA/FIA president was truly over and that he would not stand for re-election in October’s election.

Despite the FOTA U-turn the fact is that in the last 12 months Formula 1 has witnessed the withdrawal of manufacturer entries from Honda, BMW and Toyota. And, at the time of writing, Renault is considering bids for its Enstone-based operation that was taken over from Benetton at the start of the decade.

Whether the desertions are purely the result of a catastrophic economic situation for the motor industry or more deeply entrenched dissatisfaction over the sport’s governance, is a moot point. Mosley certainly believed that Formula 1 was unviable in the current climate if it basically amounted to a spending contest.

Max argued that manufacturers have always used F1 for their own promotional purposes while it suited, but always follow their own agendas. To safeguard the sport, he said, it needed to be viable for commercially-funded private entrants. Events of the past few months seem to have vindicated his assessment. We have returned to a position of multiple private entrant ‘purist’ racing teams, plus Ferrari and Mercedes.

Back in the seventies, eighties and early nineties, that was basically the sport’s composition. Largely British private teams such as Lotus, Tyrrell, Brabham, McLaren and then Williams dominated with off-the-shelf Cosworth engines. Opposition came from Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Matra, then came Renault, BMW, TAG-Porsche and Honda as the turbo era dawned.

As Bernie Ecclestone’s vision developed Formula 1 into a world class global sport with unsurpassed reach – the Olympics and the soccer World Cup generate bigger audiences but only once every four years – it became an irresistible promotional platform for the world’s motor manufacturers. Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Ferrari, Honda, Toyota, Renault were all there at the same time – unprecedented for the sport.

For some, participation was enough to increase brand awareness but, for others, winning was essential. And they couldn’t all win. Team staffing levels approached four figures and budgets went through the roof. Collectively, the manufacturers were spending a billion dollars a year on engine development alone. Mosley, a man who witnessed the off-the-shelf Cosworth era first hand with his March company, thought it was both bonkers and unsustainable.

Suddenly the independents, including top class outfits like Williams, were struggling to be viable businesses without major manufacturer backing. And, whereas Max and Bernie had been able to control the privateers, often by divide and rule tactics, the presence of heavily backed corporate players threatened to take the sport out of their control. Politics started to dominate sport.

On the plus side, interest grew and competition became closer than ever. In 2009 we enjoyed entire grids covered by little more than one second — unthinkable just a decade ago.

On paper, all the factors that made F1 so attractive to the manufacturers still remain, albeit that as things stand you can’t go out and beat six or seven of your major rivals. The interesting time will come when the economy turns. We will see how many return. The regulatory path followed by new FIA president Jean Todt will also be influential, along with his success or failure in implementing a planned glide path of reduced expenditure aimed at reaching early nineties levels. Many have serious doubts about the viability of such a target.

The immediate future gives rise to some mouth-watering match-ups on track. None is quite so compelling as the prospect of Britain’s back-to-back champions, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button, lining up as team mates in identical McLarens.

Button’s talks with McLaren were initially viewed as expedient for both parties – McLaren was surely turning the screw on Kimi Raikkonen’s negotiating team and Button was trying to eke out a bigger pay day from Brawn and Mercedes. Nobody quite believed it when the deal went through.

Some suspect that Button, with the pressure finally off, took temporary leave of his senses. To head into a McLaren environment where Lewis has been king for three years and take him on – is a big ask. Fernando Alonso couldn’t do it when Lewis was a rookie never mind a world champion.

While it’s fair to say that many don’t rate Jenson’s chances too highly, it’s not as simple as all that. Button started ’09 with an undoubted car advantage due to Brawn’s double diffuser and long development lead time. By the end of the season the team had been caught and arguably overtaken. McLaren initially didn’t cope with the new aero regulations but once it solved its problems became a potent force.

Jean Todt’ puckish of genius when running the Scuderia will be applied to the FIA

Next year with refuelling banned, it will become vitally important to look after your tyres, the rears particularly, over a race distance. That may play right into the hands of Button’s super-smooth style which is likely to take less out of the rubber that Hamilton’s more flamboyant oversteer-pronounced technique. On the other side of the coin, the change in handling characteristics over a race distance is more likely to favour the more adaptable driver, which is likely to be Hamilton. It will be fascinating to see how it pans out, not to mention whether or not McLaren can keep a lid on the potential tensions of two star drivers again – something it patently failed to do with Senna/Prost and Alonso/Hamilton.

The other great plus is that the future of the British Grand Prix seems assured after Bernie Ecclestone signed a recent 17-year deal with Silverstone following the collapse of Donington’s ambitious plan – another victim of the economic situation.

With potential EU competition issues clouding F1 rights ownership issues at the start of the decade, it was no surprise that F1’s new super-venues: Sepang, Shanghai, Istanbul, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and, next year, South Korea, were all outside Europe. Now though, with those issues apparently resolved by the FIA divesting itself of the commercial rights, we’ve had Valencia and the new deal for Silverstone. That at least, is a blessing. While the new locations are spectacular – witness Yas Marina in particular – they must always be balanced with F1’s traditional core events.

Renault announced yesterday that their ‘little blue bombshells’ with two white stripes are coming back. The French blue, white stripes and front panel inset with four round headlights all contributed to a sporting identity that is an important part of Renault’s sporting heritage and one that predates both the ‘Renaultsport’ moniker and the ‘Alpine’ label that came before.

According to the wires Twingo Gordini will be unveiled on 25 November at L’Atelier Renault on the Champs Elysées in Paris as part of the ‘Christmas in Blue’ exhibition – and will be launched officially in spring 2010. Clio Gordini is due later in the summer.

Check out the video below for a look at the Renault 8 Gordini – Amédée Gordini’s most successful creation. The car finished 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th in the 1964 Tour of Corsica rally and became an instant classic all over France. In 1966, the 1300cc version of the R8 Gordini heralded the Gordini Cup one-make race series, the blueprint for all single-make motorsport championships.

The little boxy sportser was quirkily cool and quintessentially gallic – watch this space for more on the reinvention of the brand.