FANTASY ISLAND
IT’S NOT MUCH MORE THAN A LEDGE. ONE OF THE Renault’s Toyos skims the very edge of the tarmac as we squeeze past a recent rockfall, and a couple of small stones bounce once then vanish into the abyss, probably landing in the river below about a week later. Sixty-four years ago, the first Tour de Corse would have come along here, and the idea of driving this road at high speed in a Renault Dauphine (a car once described by Time magazine as ‘the worst piece of French engineering since the Maginot Line’ and undoubtedly equipped with nothing we’d recognise today as brakes) is enough to give you an incurable case of vertigo…
The Mégane R26.R, thankfully, has fantastic brakes, and as I proclaimed it ‘a tarmac rally car that you can buy from a showroom’ when we drove it at eCoty 2008 (evo 125), there seemed no better place to escape to in it than Corsica, the home of the ultimate tarmac rally. It is a doubly appropriate destination for the R26.R because that Dauphine clinging to the vertiginous mountainside won that first race in 1956, and Renaults would win ten subsequent Tours before Lancia began to dominate.
A little further down the precipitous road, we find a small outcrop to park on. The scenery onto which I open my door is as breathtaking as the drop and the surprisingly chilly air. We’ve only been here a couple of hours yesterday. The Renault’s bucket seats also tenderise buttocks past the point of numbness after a couple of hours and, worse still, there’s no radio in the R26.R, so photographer Andy Morgan and I had to actually talk to each other.
