Renault may have just sold a majority stake in its F1 team to businessman Gerard Lopez, but the French marque showed that it will not be completely abandoning its racing heritage when it announced the revival of its historic ‘in-house tuner’ brand Gordini. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gordini was to Renault as AMG is to Mercedes or M-Division is to BMW today – it prepared the firm’s racing and rally cars and built special high-performance versions of its road cars.
The brand can trace its origins back to the pre-war era, when Amédée Gordini, a Franco-Italian tuner nicknamed ‘Le Sorcier,’ prepared Fiat-engined sports cars. Gordini was born in 1899, just a year after Louis Renault debuted his first car, and following World War II, he was instrumental in the revival of French motor racing. After enjoying great success in the late 1940s, he entered the new Formula 1 World Championship in 1950 with a Simca-engined car. Ferrari was the dominant force in the early years of F1, but Gordini’s cars did score a clutch of race victories, driven by the likes of Jean Behra, Robert Manzon and Maurice Trintignant. Gordini cars also raced in Formula 2, where up-and-coming young drivers took on the established stars of the Grand Prix world.
At the end of the 1950s, Gordini joined Renault as a consultant engineer and disbanded his F1 team. At Renault, he developed the Dauphine rally car and the famous Gordini version of the Renault 8, which proved to be a popular road-going sports saloon as well as a very successful race and rally car. It finished first, third, fourth and fifth on the 1964 Tour de Corsica rally and in 1966 was used to launch the ‘Gordini Cup’ one-make race series, the forerunner of today’s Clio Cup and Mégane Trophy championships. Gordini also prepared Renault’s Le Mans 24 Hours entries at this time. In 1968, the Gordini operation was merged into Renault, and its workshops were moved to a factory in Viry-Chatillon, which remains the headquarters of Renault’s sporting arm to this day, building engines for the F1 team.
In Gordini’s 20-odd years working for Renault, almost 200,000 Gordini Renaults were produced. The aforementioned Renault 8 variant is probably the most well-known, but there were also Gordini versions of the Renault 12 family car and Renault 5 hatchback, all featuring the brand’s distinctive colour scheme of blue with white ‘racing stripes.’ The Gordini 12 boasted an all-aluminium 1.6-litre engine, Weber carburettors and a top speed of over 180km/h, while the Gordini 5, which predated VW’s Mk I Golf GTI, was arguably the first-ever hot hatch, debuting in 1976. It featured a 93hp, 1.4-litre turbocharged engine and a five-speed manual gearbox. Now, 30 years after Amédée Gordini’s death, the brand has been revived by Renault for a series of special-edition Renaultsport models, beginning with the Gordini Twingo, which was unveiled at Renault’s Champs-Elysees showroom in late November and went on sale earlier this year. A Gordini Clio is also expected before long.
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