It goes without saying that we love a mid-engine hot hatch here at the good ship Jalopnik. We’re always on the lookout for the weird stuff that came from the factory with an engine where your cargo should be. Most of those oddballs came from France, because that country’s primary export is the base concept of weird. It excels at weird in a way no other country can. So there’s only one place the Renault Sport Clio V6 Trophy could ever have been from. This eye-searing green unit was recently imported to Hoboken, which is another of the world’s hubs for weird.
The Clio V6 was introduced to the world as a Trophy racing car from 1999, and was later developed into a street-legal death machine from 2001 to 2005. The racers had a lot of pieces that the street V6 Clios didn’t get, including a sequential Sadev gearbox, a full roll cage, lightweight magnesium wheels, and 285 horsepower instead of the 220-ish that street cars got. The Trophy cars don’t actually share all that much with the street cars, in fact.
These things were impressive rippers for the period, and still hold their own as a track machines today. You’d have to work a lot harder behind the wheel of one of these things, as the rear-biased weight distribution pushes into snap-oversteer city, but you’d be a lot more unique than if you just had another Miata.
This car is explicitly not street legal, and never has been, so if you buy it, you’ll be limited to “off road use” only. It’s a race car, so just keep that in mind before you plop down the $69,995 asking price. Of course, you could buy an early so-called phase 1 street-legal Clio V6 for a bit less than that (around $50,000) in the UK right now, but the import fees and paperwork to get it here might not be worth it. The Trophy is considerably more rare than the road-going version, however, as just 159 racers hit the track compared to around 3,000 units for the road.
Is it a bargain? Not exactly. But where else are you going to find a mid-engine French super hatch race car that doesn’t need to be imported? That’s what I thought.