5, 4, 3, 2, 1...
Our pick of five rabid accelerators make up the most varied and exciting ways to buy your way to 60mph in just five thrilling seconds
By the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, all the cars you see here could have gone from stationary to 60mph. The Renault 5 Turbo 2 185, Porsche 964 Turbo 3.6, TVR 420 SEAC, Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato and Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1 are all specialists in their own field, yet none were rivals. And yet, in the Eighties, all had unique reasons for making a rapid getaway, be it incorporating Le Mans-racer tech to vanquish Italian rivals, bending racing rules to breaking point in order to win a championship, injecting sportiness back into a range of stately grand tourers, hiring Lotus in order to be taken seriously as a supercar player, or just winning rallies. Let’s drive them all, and relive that performance-car revolution. The Audi Quattro is often credited with inventing the Group B car, but that only told half the story. Four-wheel drive aside, it was a bit of a dinosaur, rooted in the Group 4 era. Most Group B front-runners followed the earlier Renault 5 Turbo’s lead – a space-efficient short-wheelbase hatchback monocoque as a basis, rear seats replaced with a frenetic turbocharged engine, steel panels swapped for lighter glassfibre and aluminium. The result combined wheel-at-each-corner agility with the huge torque increases enabled by turbocharging, and having pioneered it in Formula One, Renault was best-placed to exploit it. Would the Lancia Delta S4 or MG Metro 6R4 exist were it not for the 5 Turbo?
However, unlike the other cars here today, a 5 Turbo wouldn’t do a five-second 0-60 run in standard form, for reasons which complicate the buying process even today. The Renault Sport performance catalogue included rally-derived tuning options including the ‘Factory 185’ engine. Most 5 Turbos to emerge from Dieppe were built for homologation purposes, with the mere potential for truly high performance. The original owner of this one, however, ticked this option for clubman-rally levels of power. It amounts to an extra £20k in today’s market.
The 5 Turbo makes a remarkably convincing baby supercar despite being based on a hatchback. Like Gerard Welter’s Peugeot 205 a generation later, Michel Boué’s 5 design is a proportional masterpiece, the sloping rear tilting the visual weight of the car towards the centre. Renault marketed the three-door as a coupé, making it the perfect canvas for Bertone’s supercar artist Marcello Gandini to sketch flared arches, air-scoops and spoilers.
It’s a bit more down-to-earth inside, the Group 4-homologation Turbo 1’s bespoke Bertone interior, which still helps the earlier car command a 30-percent premium today, ditched in favour of parts-bin pragmatism in the Group B era. I fire the engine, wait for the temperature gauge to stabilise, slot the slick gearchange into first, raise the revs to 3000rpm to clear the turbo-lag, leap off the clutch and force the accelerator pedal deep into that gold carpet. Tiny 1397cc engine shrieking under load behind the seats, skull thrust back against the headrest, wafer-thin doors helping the five-second 0-60 sprint make itself felt with blood-letting intensity, followed by Gatling-gun overrun on throttle lift-off.
The sense of total commitment to the cause of speed doesn’t let up when you’re cruising. It doesn’t take long to realise that in order to get the best out of the Renault, you have to think almost solely in terms of rpm and turbo-boost. Allow the revs to fall below that magic 3000rpm barrier and you’re left with a 1.4-litre shopping car. Keep it on the boil, stabbing it towards its 6000rpm redline, and it feels genuinely capable of devouring a Ferrari 308.
But in order to pilot a 5 Turbo as quickly as rally ace Jean Ragnotti, you have to keep it on-boost through corners too. First, make sure it’s properly set-up – years of being undervalued compared with other homologation rivals like the Lancia Stratos mean many have been neglected and bodged, so make sure it’s sporting the right de Carbon dampers and non-aftermarket wheels. Thankfully doubling values over the last ten years – especially among French collectors – mean they’re usually better looked-after nowadays, albeit a rarer sight in British dealerships.
Having learnt my lesson bogging it down in third gear through a hairpin, I attack a series of snaking S-bends. Third works well for these, but my accelerator foot is paralysed with fear at half-travel. The bulbous tyres seem to generate plenty of grip, but move the accelerator up and down by millimetres and the car twitches and squeals mid-bend. With a 2340mm wheelbase and rear-wheel drive, it’d be near-impossible to rescue from a spin, but you could easily provoke it into one through lift-off oversteer or badly-judged boost increase.
You’re perpetually on a knife-edge in a 5 Turbo. If you can master it, you’d probably make for a half-decent rally driver.
Oulton Park, April 26, 1986. It’s the first round of the BARC Production Sports Car Championship. Privateer competitors in ex-le Mans Porsche 935s and Ferrari 512 BBS look forward to another year trouncing plucky tuners in British sports cars. And that includes what looks like Chris Schirle’s bright yellow TVR 390SE from the previous season, now wearing a massive rear spoiler. That’ll give the Morgans and Marcoses some bother, so long as its V8 doesn’t blow up again. The supercar pilots didn’t smirk for long. Steve Cole’s TVR 420 Special Equipment Aramid Composite was up to third place in the space of as many laps. One lap later, it snapped at the rear bumper of the leading Porsche. By the time the TVR’S differential gave up on the 18th lap, it had been making convincing lunges for the lead. By the end of the season, it had won nine races and made the podium at another five. Fellow competitors got angry, claiming TVR was contesting a privateer championship with a works team. Grounds for a ban were quickly found – not enough examples of the TVR 420 SEAC had been manufactured with Kevlar bodies to homologate them for racing. Schirle’s ‘works-supported’ team withdrew and TVR went on to create the Tuscan Challenge in riposte. Luckily, our car today is one of the few Kevlar SEACS. The reason for the production deficit was because it was a difficult material to work with on a road car, the flat planes of bodywork often rippling and bowing in the middle. Neither the Kevlar nor the equally awkward rose-jointed suspension of the early cars amount to a premium for today’s buyer, a reflection of the way they continue to frustrate the ownership experience. But it all contributed to a 300bhp car with a kerb weight of 1170kg – and with a huge rear downforce-wing, flush-glazed nose and steeplyraked windscreen, it was slippery for a roadster. For a few brief months before Porsche unleashed the 197mph 959, the 420 SEAC’S five-second 0-60 time and 165mph-plus genuinely vied with the Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari 288 GTO in the world’s fastest production car stakes. Yet there was no exotic engineering under the bonnet, just raw Solihull muscle. It all adds up to a remarkably cheap supercar - as the wedges continue to be overlooked in favour of curvier Nineties cars, TVR’S mightiest Eighties offering still struggles to break the £20k mark.
Yet it doesn’t feel cheap, the traditional long-legged TVR interior boasting swathes of leather and high-quality wood. And the savagery of the V8’s race-informed bore and stroke, coupled with a body sculpted by aerodynamic science and chemical engineering, means it is genuinely comparable to those Italian supercars.
Violent is the word that springs to mind. It’s a visceral, howling, angry car that bucks under its own hard acceleration and writhes into corners, the smooth wheelrim racing through my fingers. I can see the tiny speedometer in my peripheral vision, and its needle is flicking wildly as though it’s actually a gauge measuring throttle pedal angle, so linear is the SEAC’S torque delivery, unfettered by excess weight or drag.
‘A howling, angry car that bucks under its own hard acceleration and writhes into corners’
But ultimately, it’ll scare you sensible. I find myself entering bends at 80mph – a speed that seems slow compared to how absurdly easy it makes three-figure velocity on straights – and a sudden gale of understeer howls through the front undercarriage. It’s a combination of simple physics – the car’s lightness merely emphasises the engine’s mass in the nose – and 245/40 VR17 Pirelli P-zeros plus that massive downforce wing excessively aid rear grip. It’s necessary though – engineer Schirle once removed it from the racer in search of ever more speed on track, and Cole returned to the pits a lap later declaring it ‘undriveable’.
So before long, you’re forcing yourself to think like a racer in order to avoid doing anything unwittingly dangerous. Accelerate only on straights or once a clean corner exit is visible. Brake in straight lines and remember there’s no ABS to help keep you out of the scenery. Keep gearchanges measured and deliberate on the hefty, long-throw gearbox. It’s rewarding once you get it right, but it’s a nervous, intimidating driving experience from a very serious supercar – one that should perhaps be regarded more as Britain’s GTO rather than some overgrown kit car.