I mean, just look at it. Look. At. It. Regardez-vous la folle voiture Renault and tell me you don’t fall in love with it immediately. Those arches! That engine bay! Those fat BF Goodrich tires and the (appropriately French-style) yellow auxiliary headlights up front. What kind of person would commission and drive such a machine, some sort of daredevil French stunt driver?
Well, in a word: oui.
This is Charles Andre’s 1982 Renault R5 Le Car, and it looks like it’s been swigging from the magic potion gourd that Asterix carries—the one that lets Goscinny and Uderzo’s pint-size hero pummel entire Roman legions one-handed. It looks inspired by the Renault R5 Turbo, one of the nuttiest performance cars to come out of France, but is even loonier. Those flares are half again as wide as you’d get on an R5T, and instead of the 160 hp of the original’s turbocharged four-cylinder, this one has a screaming Honda 2.0L mounted amidships.
The audacity of the build is only part of the charm here, as this Renault is the former daily driver of Andre’s father. Jean Jacques Andre is no longer with us, having died just shy of his ninetieth birthday in 2021. Born in Algeria, he lived an incredibly full life, spelunking on archaeological digs in the south of France as a teenager, then working in the wheat fields and sawmills of western Canada.
Jean Jacques was both artist and adventurer, and he transmuted those interests into a career building museum exhibits. His best known work is found at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, BC, but he also created displays in museums from Hong Kong to Las Vegas.
Charles inherited his father’s drive and creativity, but in different arenas. Not bound for the scholarly life, he took up martial arts at an early age, and had an active childhood riding horses and minibikes and mountaineering with his father. “I was going to be the next Chuck Norris,” he jokes. Theatre school followed, with a specialty in stage combat, and he soon was racking up credits in everything from The X-Files to Jumanji.
The Andre family owned several Renaults over the years, the Le Car being the sort of everyday practical transport to appeal to a Francophile. In its day, this car wasn’t really an enthusiast’s choice, just cleverly packaged and thrifty fare. The Renault 5 debuted in the early 1970s, and while it never had as much personality nor captured the public’s attention like the Citroën 2CV (few cars do), it became an unlikely European icon. On this side of the Atlantic, it was basically a Honda Civic in a beret.
While it became France’s best-selling car, even the fuel crises of the 1970s didn’t lure many Americans into Renault showrooms. The Volkswagen Rabbit and the Honda Civic surged in sales, but even the R5’s rebranding as Le Car didn’t really move the needle much. You really had to want something French if you bought one.
After a Ford Cortina GT and a Honda CRX, Charles inherited his dad’s Le Car, though plans for its current form didn’t hatch until much later. First, he’d spend time ice racing and then competing in the Knox Mountain hill climb held in Kelowna, muscling a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am to just over the two-minute mark, about what a modern Lamborghini will do.
Knox Mountain doesn’t quite have the prestige of hill climbs like those at Pikes Peak or Mount Washington, but it is a knife fight of a course. Built to handle winter drainage, basically every corner of the 2.2-mile tarmac course is off camber, and the posted speed limit is under twenty miles an hour. Competitors will run five times that fast at peak speed.
The fabricator behind Andre’s build is in such high demand that he prefers to stay behind the scenes. With his input, the R5 project goal moved from a relatively standard engine swap to a full Renault 5 Turbo-style build, the car caged for safety and stiffness and fitted with a K20 from a Honda Civic.
The bodywork incorporates the flares from a Porsche 944, but pretty much everything else is custom-made. There’s a fuel cell up front, a one-off exhaust manifold, plenty of bracing to give the R5 shell rigidity. The factory front and rear bumpers really give a sense of how much this car has been bulked up over stock, as the latter barely ends where the rear tire tread begins.
Naturally aspirated power and more grip than a factory R5 Turbo gives this homebrew hot hatchback more predictable behavior than its infamously looney-tunes ancestor. An actual R5T comes on boost with a thump that can catch the unwary off guard. This machine experiences the changeover of Honda’s VTEC system but with far less fuss. It’s certainly nothing a seasoned stunt driver can’t handle.
At this year’s running of the Knox Mountain hill climb, Andre’s Honda-powered Renault didn’t quite unseat his previous personal best in his V-8-powered Trans Am. Wet weather had meant nearly no shakedown time between completing the build and tackling the course, so there’s a little work yet to be done.
Properly seasoned and set up for next year’s attempt, there’s plenty of speed left to be unlocked. And, at the same time, this car is a son’s tribute to his father, a street-legal hillclimb special built out of a French daily driver.
This hot hatchback, the kind of unhinged and deranged mid-engined thing to shame even Renaultsport’s wildest flights of fancy, remains a story familiar to many an automotive enthusiast. This Renault Le Car is still, at heart, the car Jean Jacques Andre commuted in, his life’s work spent creating exhibits that made history come alive for museum visitors. His son Charles has done the same: turned the past into the present. A widebody, mid-engined present, capable of storming a hillclimb with rev-happy fury. You just know Jean Jacques would have loved it at first sight.
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