Renault takes Twizy to the extreme

Renault has turned its quirky Twizy city-EV into a high-performance, Formula One-mimicking super-EV with a power-to-weight ratio to match the cracking Megane RS 265 hot hatch.

Revealed at the French car-maker’s Valladolid plant in Spain overnight, the wild Twizy Renault Sport F1 concept is designed to show that technology from the brand’s F1 racers can filter down to its production cars.

To that effect, the one-off Twizy wears an F1-inspired bodykit and is fitted with a Renault F1-sourced Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) that turns it into a seriously high-performance commuter.

Weighing 30kg in total, the KERS comprises an electric motor, lithium-ion battery and control unit, integrated into the standard Twizy’s original electric motor.

All of this replaces the production Twizy’s rear seat, making the F1 concept a single-seater, and the energy recovered during braking is stored in the battery for later use.

Because the Twizy’s braking force is nothing like that of a Renault F1 car, the system has been modified to also draw power from the car’s main electric motor, ensuring that KERS assistance is always on hand.

The concept features ‘Recover’ and ‘Boost’ modes (selectable via a steering wheel inspired by the Formula Renault 3.5 race car), with the latter allowing a top speed of 110km/h – up from 85km/h in the standard Twizy -- at a maximum of 10,000rpm.

Renault says that when fully charged, the system offers an extra 60kW – increasing the standard Twizy’s total output by more than five times, from 13kW to 72kW -- for a maximum of 13 seconds.

With a kerb weight of just 564kg, which is 91kg more than the regular Twizy (473kg) but still less than Renault’s F1 car (650kg), the result is a weight-to-power ratio of 1hp per 5.8kg, or 5.8:1.

That’s at least four times better than the standard Twizy (25:1) and almost as good as the Megane RS 265 (5.2:1), although the 750hp Renault F1 car is still king at just 0.86:1.

Logically, Renault Sport engineers were employed to tune the rear-wheel drive Twizy chassis to handle the extra performance, and the range of dynamic upgrades includes F1 wheels.

Of course there are also F1-style front and rear wings, side pods, a rear diffuser, F1-mimicking rain light and a black and yellow paint scheme that recalls previous F1 liveries from Renault.

Renault says the Twizy F1 will make its public premiere at the World Series by Renault race meeting at Aragon in Spain over April 27-28, before gracing the Barcelona motor show.

“We always said we wanted to create F1-derived technology that was road relevant,” said Renault Sport F1 President and Managing Director, Jean-Michel Jalinier.

“Hopefully, this Twizy will make a few people smile while also making a serious point. KERS is a very complex system and integrating it into another electric vehicle was a very serious endeavour, but they managed to make it work, delivering a huge boost of power safely and efficiently.

“I’m not sure we’ll be seeing many of these on our roads, but it does show that the same principles we see on the race-track can be filtered down to the road-legal range – this is just the evil elder brother!”

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