Renault Sport is teasing us with news of a new, focused performance car built with one-make competition in mind. Called the Renault Sport Trophy, we will get to see this machine for the first time at the Moscow International Automobile Salon (MIAS), running from late August into early September.
The aim is for the RS Trophy to join the World Series by Renault in 2015, and the barest bones of its tech-spec make for drool-inducing reading. It will be built by Dallara - the Italian chassis engineering company that has an enviable history in Formulas 3 and 1 - and will feature a carbon fibre monocoque powered by a Nismo-derived engine kicking out in excess of 500hp. This will be mated to a Sadev seven-speed sequential transmission, while Michelin will develop specific rubber for the Trophy - and it should weigh around 1,100kg all in.
The RS Trophy is designed to be used in a single-model championship and has been developed with 'pure performance' in mind apparently. It is also said to be solely for competition use, which presumably rules out any chance of a limited production, cripplingly expensive road-going version (boo!). It will undergo extensive development testing between now and 2015.
Anything else?
It's a bit different from the last bespoke Renault Sport creation, the Spider of the late '90s. That car was also designed with one-make racing in mind, but a road version was built that used the same 150hp F7R engine as found in the exceptional Clio Williams, in this case mounted in an aluminium chassis with plastic composite bodywork. The Spider tipped the scales at just 930kg and around 1,800 were built in three years from 1996 to 1999.