Spider

THE MID-NINETIES WITNESSED A renaissance for the two-seater sports car. Just as today we’re going through a purple patch for hot hatches, two decades ago you were spoiled for choice if you were in the market for something low, lithe and exciting. Certainly more exciting than the hot hatches of the day (Mk3 Golf GTI, anyone?). While hot hatches had never been so bad, in terms of sports cars we had never had it so good.

TVR was in full flow with the Griffith and Chimaera, Mazda’s MX-5 could do no wrong, BMW and Mercedes-benz were fully behind the roadster resurgence, and so too Porsche with the Boxster. And then there were the small British sports car specialists. Caterham had taken the plunge to branch out from building Sevens by developing the 21, which sadly wasn’t the hit its sweeping lines suggested it could be. Evante offered to relieve you of your credit rating with its classic-elan-style ragtop, and Ginetta went old-school by fitting a Rover V8 in the G33. Arguably the best of the lot was Lotus’s sublime Elise, a car that is still in production today and will be until 2020, when the first all-new Elise in 24 years will be revealed.

There’s one other name to add to the mid-’90s sports car roll-call: the Renault Sport Spider. We revisited the Spider back in issue 183 but, for anyone who may have missed that, a quick recap. Revealed at the Geneva show in 1995 and launched the following year, the Spider has an aluminium box-section chassis, a glassfibre body and the 2-litre 16-valver from the Clio Williams, making 148bhp and 136lb ft of torque in a car weighing 930kg. The 96 Spiders sold in the UK were fitted with a conventional windscreen as opposed to the wind deflector fitted to the show car and examples sold in other markets. In all, Renault sold 1685, a figure dwarfed by the 10,619 Series 1 Elises Lotus sold. That must have smarted in Paris.

Of course, selling only a sixth of the number of a contemporary rival gives the Sport Spider genuine cult status 20 years on. I mean, when was the last time you saw one? You’d remember if you did, too, because, while it’s as low as you’d guess, it’s much wider than you might imagine, with big, curvy hips exaggerated by the body’s flat-top design. The wheels are tucked in to the bodywork and – compared with most of its rivals at the time – the Spider looked the least lithe of roadsters, its wide and heavy-set chassis giving inflated proportions. The overly tall rollhoop didn’t help, either, but the Sport Spider also had a motorsport remit to answer and this was the best way of meeting it.

Drive an S1 Elise today and you can still get a sense of the wonderment that the road-testers of the day experienced. The Spider doesn’t hit those highs. The Clio engine doesn’t engage, the gearshift makes an Elise’s feel quick-witted and precise, and the unassisted steering doesn’t deliver any of the benefits such a system should. It just feels a little flat; more show car than drivers’ car. Like a number of its contemporary rivals in that ’90s glut, kerbside appeal never quite translated into driver appeal. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.