Highlights

Two-litre 16V engine
Time-warp interior
Excellent handling
Extensive service history
A textbook hot hatch

Overview
Many a dark winter’s evening can be spent in the pub discussing — or arguing about — the best era for hot hatches.

Everyone has their preference, with each decade gaining its stalwart defenders and harsh critics in almost equal measure.

And now that the mid-noughties were twenty years ago, we can look back on them while wearing a wistful, nostalgic expression.
Perhaps this really was the sweet spot.

Mechanical reliability had reached a more than acceptable level, small engines were now capable of putting out performance only previously achievable by enormous displacements.

And most cars had stopped dissolving as soon as you whispered the word ‘salt’.
And into these sunlit uplands of motoring Nirvana stepped the Renaultsport version of the Clio, first as a 172, then as the 182 Cup we see here.

It features a fabulous 16-valve, two-litre engine, and in this ...