Renault Sport Megane RS265 Cup

By Michal Kieca

Engine: 2.0 Litre F4R 16-valve turbocharged petrol
Power: 195kW @ 5500rpm | Torque: 360Nm @ 3000rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual

Fuel Consumption listed: 8.2 l/100km | Tested: 11.1 l/100km

Price (as tested): $42,640

Overall Rating:★★★★★

Plusses:Handling; steering; exhaust note; driving position; overall amusement value, hot hatch king.

Minuses:Interior feels somewhat cheap; confusing ergonomics; firm ride around town.

OVERVIEW

The supercar killer, the hottest hatch on the block, the hand grenade. All of these words can be levelled at the Megane RS265. You just know you've got a great front-driver in your hands when you when you can tighten its line through a sweeper with the throttle.

With its hunkered-forward lines, fat black guards-filling rims, brilliant sports seats and a raucous exhaust when under the whip, it's sure is a blast at the wheel. This is the hottest hot hatch, bar none.

VALUE AND FEATURES: ★★★★

The Megane RS is great value considering that you can demolish supercar owner egos as quickly as ripping up and down your favourite backroad all day long. Truth be told, this car will chase down any supercar in the twisties. And it’s not exactly barren when it comes to standard features.

The base Megane RS 265 is well equipped. Standard equipment includes auto headlights, LED daytime running lights and rear parking sensors. There's also dual-zone climate control, cruise control, rain-sensing automatic wipers, Bluetooth and audio streaming, multi-function steering wheel, CD/MP3 player, Arkamys 3D audio, aux-in and USB input, and electric heated foldable door mirrors among a longer list.

ON THE ROAD: ★★★★★

This thing goes like the clappers. Engage 'Sport', and every single car that’s not a supercar will disappear from your rearview mirror.

The fighter jet howl, rising in shrill outrage from 4000rpm, encourages full throttle hooliganism, the throttle and fat tail pipe in raucous harmony is absolutely amazing. Not since the sorely missed Integra Type R has a small car had so much ‘theatre’.

So what’s happening under the bonnet? In any language, 195kW and 360Nm of torque are hefty figures for medium front-drive hatch.

Renault claims a 6.0 seconds for the 0-100km/h dash and a speed-limited 255km/h top speed. Once once rolling, when cornering, or overtaking, and with things in full-song, it's a belter.

Load in the revs, and above 4000rpm the Renault simply scorches. It pulls like mad all the way to the redline, before softly bumping the rev-limiter. The engine just makes a jet-fighter like snarl and then seamlessly thrusts the car up to speed through any gear at any speed.

The sheer speed that you can carry through the twisty sections is beyond prodigious. It’s a point and shoot car; the Megane RS265 held its line with remarkable dedication, despite arriving at some wickedly tight bends with what I felt was way too much pace. The car just feels like it has infinite levels of grip, the nose always tucking in, the back always pivoting around you. The car takes the physics textbook and throws it out the window.

I can’t fault the Megane’s steering. It’s an electric power steering unit that’s been tested and tuned to perfection by the team at Renault Sport. The wheel feeds in high-definition detail of what the front wheels are doing, what the road surface is, straight to your hands. The wheel is well weighted and allows the driver to place the car anywhere they want on the road with pin-point accuracy.

With of the amount of power and torque pounding through the front wheels, I was expecting torque steer, but there was none, even on our course back roads. The RS just transfers the power seamlessly onto the road, there’s no tugging at the wheel, no tram-lining. Renault engineers have created a suspension geometry that stops all torque-steer, even when powering out of an apex under full throttle.

The ESP settings can also be changed, using that ridiculously hard to operate software. In ‘Sport’ the system allows more slide before intervening, allowing you to appreciate the balance of the chassis, allowing you to slide the tail at the same time as you tuck the nose deep into an apex, and then just fire out with the engine screaming.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room, what’s the ride like, hot hatches need to be fun and work in the urban environment too. The suspension is definitely on the firm side, but not to bad dealing with our imperfect roads, it’s about as stiff as I’d want it. It rounds out the big undulations really well, but it can get rather unsettled on smaller bumps.

The cabin is actually quite hushed at speed, with tyre roar being the biggest bugbear.

THE INTERIOR: ★★★

The thing is that the RS feels expensive in terms of the bits that you can’t actually see, the oily and bouncy ones, yet it seems cheap when it comes to those parts that you can actually see. The Piano black and chrome trim pieces fail to lift the ambiance in this cut-price interior; evidence of bean counting here… The seats and driving position are spot-on though, the stuff that drivers care about.

The switches and controls in the cabin feel quite decent, as do the tactile surfaces. The interior also manages to feel rather solid, unlike the RS250, there were no squeaks nor rattles coming from anywhere, the car was as solid as a drum, imparting refinement not expected in such a rorty machine.

The front seats are brilliant - grippy, with a superbly shaped back and base; they're as good as you'll find fitted standard in a road car. They offer plenty of adjustment, which is no doubt aided by an easily adjustable multi-function steering wheel.  The bulky six-speed shifter falls comfortably to hand, and the pedals also placed just right even for heel and toe downshifts, it's easy to get comfortably set for press-on driving, no matter your size or shape.

One issue that I had was with some of the controls in the cabin that were placed in their typical awkward Gallic way. Case in point, in order to get the most out of the engine, the throttle mapping needs to be put into ‘Extreme’ mode. Sounds fun right, not so easy though. It took no less than 5 minutes of randomly pushing buttons behind the steering wheel in an attempt to engage this mode for the car. Not all of the electrics are useless, the RS monitor mounted nicely in the dashboard provides al the information that a seasoned petrol head needs from turbo boost to on board telemetry. So, the ergonomics aren’t great, as you’d expect with a French car. It would be one if everything was perfect, we’ll leave that to the Germans.

The rear seats seem reasonably well shaped, they’re set low, and provide enough headroom for even tall adults. The same praise can’t be heaped on the overall feel of the cabin in the back, it’s claustrophobic, feeling rather like a submarine in the back with only tiny windows on each side.

The boot appears to be quite good. It's deep and wide thanks to the low floor and space-saver spare, and offers a pretty reasonable 344 litres. Shame that the loading lip is just so high and the opening of the boot so small, a side effect from making the Megane’s chassis as rigid as possible.

SAFETY: ★★★★★

The Megane comes with the full arsenal of passive and active safety features, nothing is really lacking. ABS, brake-force distribution and brake assist, Brembo front brakes, three mode ESP (normal/sport/off). A limited slip differential, anti-slip control, and front seatbelt pretensioners are all standard. The car achieved a 5 star rating on EuroNCAP.

VERDICT:

The story goes that the French Gendarmerie Nationale called for tenders for new "rapid intervention vehicles" to replace its fleet of Subaru WRXs. Renault obliged, boosting both the horsepower and torque of the Megane RS 250 to win the tender. And as a side-affect they have created arguably one of the best front-wheel drive cars ever made.

It looks brilliant, it's well priced, and it has the muscle to match its athletic lines and razor-sharp dynamics. A cracker in every way, leaving you grinning ear to ear during every drive. 

All images/media © Renault Australia Press Office

The Concept Story: Karen Russell's VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE

It’s a rare pleasure when, at the same time, two out of ten books on various “best-seller” lists are collections of short stories--which was indeed the case for a few weeks last month when George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove claimed that coveted place.  Although the two collections share some characteristics that partially explain their popularity—fantasy, satire, social criticism, whimsy, witty intelligence—in my opinion, George Saunders’ collection is more “inspired” and imaginatively unpredictable than the stories of Karen Russell.

In several of these stories, it looks like Karen Russell is up to her old tricks. Well, actually new tricks, since she was only 25 when her first book St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves came out six years ago.  Her first novel Swamplandiawas a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, unfortunately and inexplicably, the year that the judges decided not to award a prize for fiction. In my blog on the St Lucy’s collection, I suggested that it was a youthful book in many ways. My old guy reaction to the stories was that they were fun to read as childlike fantasies that illuminated some of childhood’s strangeness, but that they lacked the depth that real exploration of these experiences require.

Although I enjoyed reading Russell’s stories in both her collections, I sometimes felt it was, if you will forgive me, a cheap thrill—a kind of Ray Bradbury, T.C. Boyle, Stephen King kind of thrill  (apologies to all Bradbury/Boyle/King fans), whose stories I enjoy reading, but who cleverly stay on the surface.  In my opinion, Russell is a fine writer who knows her away around a sentence, an image, a metaphor with what one reviewer has called “pixie” charm—apologies to Tinkerbell—but I still fail to see any depth in her work.  Yeah, yeah, I know—everything doesn’t have to have depth!

The basic problem I have with Russell is that she writes concept stories—stories that start with an idea and stick with it—e.g. the idea of kicking a habit vis-à-vis vampires and lemon juice; the idea of feminist liberation, vis-à-vis Japanese girls rebelling against producing silk from their own bodies.

Ron Rash (whose new collection Nothing Gold Can StayI will talk about in a week or two) expressed my reservations about the “concept” story quite well in a short piece in The Wall Street Journal, 3/8/13.  Rash said that like most fiction writers, he is often asked where he gets his ideas, to which he answers, “I have no idea,” adding that if ideas were gettable, like in a secluded cave somewhere, he would not go get them, for “an "idea," especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.”

Rash says the best example is the difference between Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and A Fable.  Faulkner once said that The Sound and the Fury began as a single image—“a child in a tree watching adults at a wake.” The Fable, however, began and ended with an idea—if Christ returned to earth he would be crucified again—an idea that Faulkner outlined chapter by chapter and followed scrupulously.  Whereas The Sound and the Fury is a dynamic, living book one of Faulkner’s best, a Fable is “tedious, lifeless, imprisoned within its idea.”

  

The fact that Russell’s stories are concept stories springing from some “idea” is suggested by Fiona Wilson’s review in The Times of London, who says she wishes she could have been there at the moment when a story like the title story was conceived.  In fact, Karen Russell has talked a bit about when this story was conceived.  She says she was in a lemon grove with her siblings and saw a very tan, elderly man sucking on a lemon and said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if lemons were just like vampire methadone and that man is a vampire with a tan.” 

Even though none of her siblings thought the “what if” idea was funny, Russell says there was something about the premise: “The ‘what if’ was set up in such a way that it felt like: here was the place where I could explore some questions.  A diorama where I could explore the question that seems almost too huge to confront in realist fiction.”  Well, I am not sure what “huge” question Russell had in mind, unless it was addiction as a social problem.  If so, it seems to me that the cleverness of the story undercuts any serious such intention.  And furthermore I am not sure I would be interested in a story that existed solely for such a serious intention.

Joy Williams, one of my favorite short story writers, also suggests the concept nature of Russell’s stories by opening her New York Times review with the notion that if you gave Karen Russell an assignment to write a story about an ex-president who is reincarnated as a horse and put her in a room with a couple of pencils and one arm tired behind her back, she would come up with “The Barn at the End of Our Term.”  The result is a comic romp, but little else, about Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19^th president of the United States who exists in a sort of limbo state after death as a horse longing for his wife Lucy, who maybe has been transmuted into a winsome sheep. Other ex-presidents are featured, such as Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and James Garfield.

In my discussion of Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, I suggested that Russell raises the suspicion that many of her early stories were written as class assignments. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except writing to an assignment is sort of like teaching to the test, isn’t it?  It could lead to a narrow sort of focus aimed to please. Now, I am not sure it is MFA-assignment-fulfillment that drives Russell’s stories, but something more linked to her creative procedure of conceiving a concept and following it relentlessly.

A less funny, even somewhat tedious, concept story is “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Tailgating in the Antarctic,” about--in big sports fan fashion--the Food Chain Games that pits the Team Krill against the Team Whale. As you might guess, in spite of devoted tailgating fans, the Krills have never won a game, always being sucked up into the maw of devouring whales, each year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 being eaten.  It is a simple, conceptually comic, trope meant to be a satire on big time sports, but it is just a self-indulgently romp.

As you might expect, the two stories for which reviews have the most respect are the stories that seem to carry the most significant social satire/social message weight:

“The New Veterans,” which focuses on a massage therapist who treats a veteran of the Iraq War suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.  She discovers that if she massages a tattoo on his back that depicts a roadside bomb that killed one of his friends, the tattoo becomes animated and that she can manipulate images on it, for example moving the sun from one spot to another, indeed, even managing to change history seemingly frozen on the veteran’s back.

“Proving Up,” whose concept is that the Homestead Act of the 1870s in Nebraska had one perverse requirement so typical of politicians out of touch with everyday human reality—in order to be granted claim to a homestead, every house had to have at least one glass window, even though the “houses” were more like animal burrows underground.  Since the poor farmers cannot all afford glass windows, they pass around one single window before the arrival of the Inspector who determines if they are allowed to keep their farm. In the story, the task is given to an 11-year old boy, and the result is a nightmarish journey that comes to a horrific ending

Other concept stories include:

“Reeling for the Empire,” It’s one thing to work in a silk factory, but quite another to do so as a magically transformed silkworm, your body spinning out the silk in a nineteenth-century Japanese extreme version of a sweatshop.

“The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” the subject of which is school bullying, here embodied in a boy who feels guilt for his participation in the tormenting of a kid with epilepsy who disappears and comes back as a scarecrow.

In “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979” an Australian boy finds a hollow tree in which seagulls have deposited lost objects, some of them from the future.

An interesting critical difference of opinion about which Russell stories are most successful and thus whether Russell’s success as a short story writer depends on a poetic fantastical style or on concept-driven socially significant plots can be seen in the contrasting comments made by brilliant short story writer Joy Williams and influential critic/reviewer Michiko Kakutani in bookended New York Times reviews.

Williams says, “A grim, stupendous, unfavorable magic is at work in these stories.  They are not chicly ironic or satiric and certainly not existentially or ethically curious.”  She says, however, that “The New Veterans”(a social/realist/critical favorite) is sentimental, that its fundamental situation is so familiar that its “intention becomes obvious and must be laboriously realized.”   Williams argues that the story is not energized by the” unerringly knowing and mischievous planchette that unequivocally belongs” to Karen Russell.

Michiko Kakutani, the star reviewer for The New York Times, on the other hand, says that “The New Veterans” is the “emotional centerpiece” of the collection, a story that perhaps begins as a takeoff of Ray Bradbury’s famous “Illustrated Man” and “quickly evolves into a complex, deeply affecting exploration of the ways memories can crystallize or redeem the past, and the ways the process of storytelling itself can remake history.”

Perhaps the best mediation between these two perspectives is provided by M. John Harrison in The Guardian, who says that as long as Russell’s stories are “fragile tissues of word, image, and emotions,” they have unbelievable strength, but when she pushes these images into a narrative, they get weak: “The two styles of communication interfere with one another, then the plot prances off with the bit between its teeth, shedding subtleties as it goes.” 

And perhaps here we have the basic critical question about the stories of Karen Russell:  Is she the protégé of Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme, or is she a child of The Twilight Zone and Stephen King? 

Toyota GT86

Review by Michal Kieca

A Victory in Engineering Finesse, Finally the Affordable Fun Machine is Here!

One day after lapping Toyota’s superb GT-86 through the perilous Winton Raceway in Victoria, Australia, the adrenaline of the day is still a vivid memory. Never has a car left me as thrilled, or utterly delighted as the 86. Or left me grinning so much from ear to ear.

Toyota in recent years has matured and understands the fundamental qualities of a good car. Even better, it has the in-house talent to do so at a price that would excite even Cyprus with their financial woes. My ardent enthusiasm for the 86 mirrors the fieriness of the vehicle itself. The Porsche Cayman was the benchmark for that car’s development, and it shows: not just in the similarity of the driving position, but in the general character of the car. The Toyota’s agility, chassis balance, responses and the eagerness of the naturally aspirated boxer engine, all mirror the German. The steering is delightful, organic and beautifully weighted with such pinpoint accuracy and purity that will have others lost in the dark. 

The chassis simply brushes off bumps and the bravely neutral handling allows the car to be utterly adjustable allowing you to “Ken Block” corners at will. Yet the car feels planted and stable, with your body becoming an extension of the machine. Working in harmony with the dynamics is the willing Subaru boxer, keen revving and beautifully matched to the gearbox. Sure, the 86 could do with a bit more power, but that would be to fundamentally understand the essence of the car. It would upset the balance, the poise, the brilliance… No other car in my mind, not even the MX-5 offers the same degree of accessibility, or is as exploitable, or natural in every facet of its being. Yes, I’m in love - and believe it or not, with a Toyota! Amazing...

All Images/Photos © Toyota Australia Press Office 2013