Renault Megane RS 275 Trophy review, test drive

My brain is fuzzy after a night spent hunched over the keyboard. Yes, the two short, sharp coffee shots I’ve tossed down the hatch have helped, but I’m still drowsy. It also doesn’t help that the Megane looks a bit too familiar on the inside. I scratch my head – is it the lack of sleep? Then it hits me – it’s like the Fluence. The Megane, after all, is a Fluence without a boot. What’s nice is that it has a manual gearbox – trust the French to uphold tradition. Time to step on the gas.

 

The motor fires with a braapp, braaap – not bad for a 2.0 turbo four. Acceleration is also sufficiently full of character. There isn’t a dead zone or lag in the traditional sense, but things do suddenly get frantic after around 2,500rpm. You initially hear a loud sucking sound, and then you are flung back in the seat, as if from a trebuchet – WHOOSHH. A couple of seconds and you are further down the road than you expect, and this takes some amount of brain recalibration. With fast front-wheel-drive cars, there’s only so much you can expect, but this car has moved the goalposts.

 

Still, it’s not the power, but the handling of this front-wheel-drive chassis that sets the Megane RS 275 Trophy apart from other hot hatches. The small track we are on has a nice combination of slow and fast corners, and getting the RS up to speed here is seriously grin-inducing. The steering does shuffle around a bit when the boost comes in out of slow corners, but the levels of grip and composure from the body are so high, I’m simply baffled.