Renault Sport Clio

Road test

To Cup or not to Cup? In other words, should you spec your Clio 200 with the ultra-stiff Cup chassis or this softer non-Cup set-up? Tricky one.

It's an important decision, especially because there's now a greater differentiation between Cup and non-Cup than on the old Clio 197. At the risk of sounding like one of those ‘If Johnny has two more apples than Jenny and Jenny has 30 per cent fewer bananas than Jimmy' GCSE questions, here's the maths. The standard 200's dampers are 15 per cent softer than those of the old non-Cup 197, whereas the 200 Cup's set-up is 15 per cent stiffer than the 197 Cup, making the non-Cup 200 a full 45 per cent softer than the Cup 200.

Forty-five per cent is a lot, and alters the 200's character like a cheeky handful of amyls. Though the Cup 200 isn't as brutally brittle as some hatches - we're looking at you, Civic Type R - it's still a rigid little bugger that headbutts every hole in the road. This is a far more pliant thing, absorbing divots and dents with smoothness, and imbuing the Clio with a bubblier character than the sterner-faced Cup. It feels, in fact, more like the original 197, which sat further to the malleable end of the hot hatch scale than the new 200.

The inevitable trade-off for this added bubbliness is a slight lack of precision on the limit. Where you can feather the angle of the Cup through a corner with a delicate prod of the throttle, the non-Cup is a marginally blunter tool, its slower ratio steering meaning you'll drive more with your palms than your fingertips. It still gives you the confidence to belt it to the limit, straight away, but it just won't give you quite the same level of surround sound feedback once you're there.

Speaking of sound, the softer chassis set-up actually seems to dulla little of the revvy rawness of the 200's engine. It's the same naturally aspirated 2.0-litre four-pot revving to the same 8,000rpm, but it sounds just a little more civilised, a little more muted. Maybe it's the deadening effect of the extra kit on board this test car, but the non-Cup feels a touch more urbane than the Cup.

Renault expects to sell slightly more non-Cups than Cups, and - if really, really pushed - it's the softer set-up I'd opt for if I had to drive my Clio every day on the kind of roads we get in the UK, trading in those last microns of feel for the benefit of not grimacing in anticipation of that next big pothole.

If you're torn between the two, here's the solution. Test them both, back to back. For a long, long time. Perhaps to the end of Scotland and back. Actually, why bring 'em back?*

*NB: Top Gear does not advocate car theft. Even for really good cars.

Sam Philip