CarBrandLogos archive · Renault · 1972

Renault5

The supermini that made small cars fashionable, then went mid-engined and won rallies.

Photo: Charlie from United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0

The story

A defining chapter in Renault history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Renault 5, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Michel Boue drew it in his own time, without a brief, and Renault's management liked the sketches enough to build the car more or less as he had imagined it. He died of cancer before it went on sale in 1972, and never saw what he had started.

R5 2 v sst

Design and engineering

What made the shape work was the way the bumpers were treated. Instead of chrome blades bolted to the ends, Boue wrapped the car in body-coloured plastic mouldings that ran up into the wings, so the front and rear read as part of the body rather than attachments to it. Underneath was familiar Renault 4 hardware, gearbox ahead of the engine, torsion bar suspension, but the effect was of something entirely new, and it turned a cheap hatchback into an object people chose rather than settled for.

R5 Turbo Pegomas-Tanneron 2005 · User Ericd on en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

Renault then worked the range hard. There were austere two-cylinder-cheap base models and the sporting Gordini and Alpine versions with more power and better brakes; in Britain the hot ones were badged Gordini because Chrysler owned the Alpine name, and in America the car was sold as Le Car. The extreme end was the Renault 5 Turbo of 1980, which kept only the silhouette: the engine moved behind the seats, the rear track grew grotesquely wide, and the car was built to take Renault rallying at the top level. Jean Ragnotti won the Monte Carlo Rally with one in 1981, on tarmac, against four-wheel-drive opposition that would soon make it obsolete everywhere else.

R5 Alpine 001 · 天然ガス · CC BY-SA 3.0

Legacy

A second generation, the Supercinq, arrived in 1984 on the platform of the Renault 9 and 11, with the engine turned across the car for better packaging and a body by Marcello Gandini that carefully preserved the original's face, since Renault had learned how much of the car's value sat in that shape. The GT Turbo version of it became the cheap fast hatchback of the late 1980s in France and Britain, admired for its pace and distrusted for its habit of overheating.

Chapter 5

Production continued to 1996, latterly alongside the Clio that had already replaced it, and the model's several million sales across two generations made it one of the handful of cars that defined the European supermini alongside the Fiat 127 and the Volkswagen Polo. Renault has been trading on Boue's proportions ever since, and returned to them directly in 2024 with the electric 5 E-Tech, which reproduces the original's stance and even the vent shapes in its rear pillars.

At a glance