THE STRIP
Scratch what I just said about the sports seats. The set-back pedal box forces a splay-legged driving position which, after a couple of hours at the wheel, feels like a DVT in the making as too much of your weight is pressed onto the side bolsters. Bring back the old Recaros. Likewise the switches for the cruise control are weirdly scattered between wheel and centre console. Arriving at Heathcote to a damp strip with standing water, it’s clear we’re not going to get too close to Renault’s claim of 100km/h in 5.8 seconds. That time was set with a dualclutch version with launch control, so even in perfect conditions, we’d probably call a 6.2-second time a good ’un in the manual car.
Switch the car into Race mode and the rev counter vanishes, being replaced instead by an unhelpful digital bar. With only a knife-edge margin between manic axle tramp and flaccid off-boost bogging, the RS280 isn’t an easy vehicle to launch swiftly off the line when it’s greasy underfoot. After a handful of runs, our best effort is 6.5 seconds, with 400m vanishing in 14.5 sec at 162.9km/h.
The 100-0km/h braking test saw the pedal bend slightly onto the actuator; an issue we’d had with some other vehicles subjected to full-power decelerations. This manifested in the vehicle limping, thinking it was being left-foot braked. Pulling the pedal back up forcibly effected a fix, the issue not repeated with normal brake pedal use.