CAR OF THE YEAR - 5 STAR

Yep, Renault's retro-chic new supermini with an optional wicker baguette holder Scoops the grand prix...

- PAUL HORRELL

IT took a surprising amount of sniffing around until I managed to find a dusty old Renault 5 and wedge our shiny green machine alongside for a family photo. And this was the south of France where the climate is kind to old bangers, even ones that ended production three decades ago. Only a very few years ago it would have been easy. Most villages had a one-man band garage with a petrol pump and dark messy service bay, its walls covered with rusting enamel signs: Cibié, Kléber, Yacco. Round the back you’d glimpse semi-abandoned Renaults and Peugeots, the more senior of them with the telltale yellow headlights. That, in my mind’s eye, was to have been our ideal photo location. If Renault’s hype machine wants us to recall the original 5, very well, we’d do it with an elegantly shabby example, scrapyard dog in the background yanking ominously at its chain.

France held out much longer than Britain against the march of the shiny glass palace corporate franchised car dealerships, but now it’s gone that way too. So your village garagiste, his lifespan doubtless curtailed by decades of drawing at a Gitane while pumping leaded four star, is now as hard to find as your original RS.