For quite a while I've been wondering how the Clio V6 got approval for being produced in the first place as it seemed that the production costs must have been enormous. Just looking at the bodyshell, the costs of re-work to convert a standard front wheel drive front engined car to a rear wheel drive mid engined car are huge.
It's not as if that was done once to get a prototype right, or a small number of times to create a few race cars, but it was done 3000 times!
And then there are all the other components and sub-assemblies that are unique to the car.
When I started to look at my two cars, a Ph1 and a Ph2, the more I looked, the more amazed I became as it dawned on me that there is virtually nothing shared between them. The costs for re-design and tooling for the two phases of the road car must have been astronomical, and would only have been undertaken and implemented by organisations with a very short-term, cost-no-object, race car culture. And they had to shift production from Sweden to France!
And of course, as Duncan has recently mentioned, there is virtually nothing shared between the Trophy and either of the two road cars. There also seems to be precious little shared between the Vees and any of the standard production Clio range.
So in reality we have 3 almost entirely different cars, hand built by three different workforces in two different factories.
The recent article on the Clio V6 (Classic and Sports Car, Jan 2015) comments that (allegedly) Renault lost €70,000 for each £27,000 car made. So that means that each car cost €100,000 to build, in round numbers....all numbers in Euros from now on!
Also in round numbers, there were 3000 cars built, including the Trophy, the Ph1 and the Ph2 cars. That is €300,000,000 cost to build, with €90,000,000 revenue from sales and €210,000,000 LOSS for the entire Clio V6 venture.
This seems to be a massive amount of money for a car company to spend / lose over a 5 year period, until you put it into a Formula 1 perspective, and it was Renault deciding in 1998 to change what it was doing in F1 that gave birth to the Clio V6 concept.
Jean Francois Caubet, who manages Renault’s F1 engine programme, responded to a special Financial Times report on F1 costing recently. He revealed that Renault currently spend €120,000,000 a year on the engine programme, but recover €60,000,000 from sales of the engines, so 'only' incur a 'real' cost (loss) of €60,000,000 a year.
He went on to say that in the past, when they ran a full team, their total cost was around €280,000,000 a year, but they recovered €100,000,000 from TV rights and sponsorship, so incurred a cost of €180,000,000 a year.
When I first did the sums that suggested that Renault lost over 200 million euros on the Clio V6 programme, it just didn't make any sense that a car manufacturer would do that. But in the strange world of marketing and F1 spend, 5 years of the Clio V6 as a race car and 2 phases of road car costing little more than 1 year of running a full F1 team starts to make a bit of sense. I can begin to see the business case coming together in the late 1990s, but it seems inconceivable that such a car could ever be built again, even by a state owned company like Renault.
So next time you're driving your Vee, remember that it cost more than an Aston Martin Vantage to make. It was designed and developed by two organisations steeped in race car, including F1, experience, and each car was hand built in three different versions. It's not the top-of-the-pile hot hatch as described on 5th gear a few weeks ago, but something that has been so radically re-designed and developed that it stands apart from the normal categorisation of 'mere' production cars!
Mark
It's not as if that was done once to get a prototype right, or a small number of times to create a few race cars, but it was done 3000 times!
And then there are all the other components and sub-assemblies that are unique to the car.
When I started to look at my two cars, a Ph1 and a Ph2, the more I looked, the more amazed I became as it dawned on me that there is virtually nothing shared between them. The costs for re-design and tooling for the two phases of the road car must have been astronomical, and would only have been undertaken and implemented by organisations with a very short-term, cost-no-object, race car culture. And they had to shift production from Sweden to France!
And of course, as Duncan has recently mentioned, there is virtually nothing shared between the Trophy and either of the two road cars. There also seems to be precious little shared between the Vees and any of the standard production Clio range.
So in reality we have 3 almost entirely different cars, hand built by three different workforces in two different factories.
The recent article on the Clio V6 (Classic and Sports Car, Jan 2015) comments that (allegedly) Renault lost €70,000 for each £27,000 car made. So that means that each car cost €100,000 to build, in round numbers....all numbers in Euros from now on!
Also in round numbers, there were 3000 cars built, including the Trophy, the Ph1 and the Ph2 cars. That is €300,000,000 cost to build, with €90,000,000 revenue from sales and €210,000,000 LOSS for the entire Clio V6 venture.
This seems to be a massive amount of money for a car company to spend / lose over a 5 year period, until you put it into a Formula 1 perspective, and it was Renault deciding in 1998 to change what it was doing in F1 that gave birth to the Clio V6 concept.
Jean Francois Caubet, who manages Renault’s F1 engine programme, responded to a special Financial Times report on F1 costing recently. He revealed that Renault currently spend €120,000,000 a year on the engine programme, but recover €60,000,000 from sales of the engines, so 'only' incur a 'real' cost (loss) of €60,000,000 a year.
He went on to say that in the past, when they ran a full team, their total cost was around €280,000,000 a year, but they recovered €100,000,000 from TV rights and sponsorship, so incurred a cost of €180,000,000 a year.
When I first did the sums that suggested that Renault lost over 200 million euros on the Clio V6 programme, it just didn't make any sense that a car manufacturer would do that. But in the strange world of marketing and F1 spend, 5 years of the Clio V6 as a race car and 2 phases of road car costing little more than 1 year of running a full F1 team starts to make a bit of sense. I can begin to see the business case coming together in the late 1990s, but it seems inconceivable that such a car could ever be built again, even by a state owned company like Renault.
So next time you're driving your Vee, remember that it cost more than an Aston Martin Vantage to make. It was designed and developed by two organisations steeped in race car, including F1, experience, and each car was hand built in three different versions. It's not the top-of-the-pile hot hatch as described on 5th gear a few weeks ago, but something that has been so radically re-designed and developed that it stands apart from the normal categorisation of 'mere' production cars!
Mark
