No surprise, then, that Renault's proposed roadster for the Noughties is a tamer affair. It's front-drive, built on the Nissan Micra floorpan, uses a 2-litre, 136bhp engine and has a boot, a stereo, proper ventilation and even a roof. In fact, on paper the only thing that isn't sensible about the Wind is its name.

It's no mere concept, either; this is very much a working prototype, built to test the water and help determine what Renault Sport should build next. If the Wind is the chosen one, it will find itself up against roadsters like the MX-5 and MG TF. But as we've come to expect from a car maker that had sufficient sense of humour to bring us the Avantime, it will do so with a twist of imagination that goes beyond a daft name.

For starters, there are its looks. Imagine the offspring of a coupling between a BMW Z4 and Ford Streetka and you get the picture. It has chunky, rounded haunches, wide tracks, a long bonnet and flanks that combine curves and straight edges. Sitting on beautiful 19in alloys, it looks much longer than a Clio, though it's only 58mm to the good in length.

The Wind has been designed to be a car for drivers to have fun in, though when Renault says fun, it means sitting in an eye-catching car that allows you and more than one other person to have the cobwebs blown away in a relatively comfy, unthreatening sort of a way. The paddle-shift gearbox is a good example of this. It uses rally-derived hydraulics to initiate changes, but instead of using the potential shift speed of 30 milliseconds, it has been slowed to 200m/s. 'We wanted something that was smooth rather than frantic,' explains Denis Falck, who was in charge of building the Wind. The 2-litre 136bhp engine was chosen for a similar reason. In a car weighing around 1100kg it should give 0-60mph in around 8.5sec.

Even six-foot-plus occupants won't feel too much wind buffeting. At 70mph the only reason you have to raise your voice to hold a conversation is because of the rather monotonous drone from the engine. According to Falck, his department had only eight months to build the car, so tuning the exhaust was low on the list of priorities.

The sound aside, Renault's engineers have managed to create a car that fulfils its interpretation of fun. With no manual clutch, you change gears by pulling on steering column-mounted paddles. The 'box shifts with a reassuring clunk and some healthy gear-whine, betraying its competition roots. To set off you simply select first gear, build the revs to 2500 and the clutch engages automatically, albeit with rather a lot of slip.

The driving position is excellent. The carbonfibre-framed, leather-covered seats look uncomfortable but are surprisingly supportive and sit you low in the car. The pedals and steering wheel adjust electrically, and there's even an occasional third seat that slots in behind the front pair.

The analogue speedometer has an LED ring for a rev-counter, and in the bottom right of the dial there's a single digital figure to tell you which of the six gears you're in. There's also a digital screen that displays information from a single circular controller for the ventilation and sound systems. It's uncluttered and functional.

The prototype's leaden steering is the biggest disappointment. According to Falck it's another area that his department has yet to really work on. It makes it difficult to assess how nimble the Wind really is, but weight distribution is 60/40 biased to the front, so expect healthy amounts of understeer. The brakes, too, are like an on/off switch. 'They're not ideal,' admits Falck. 'We've had to use 12-piston callipers because they are the only ones we could get to fill the wheels.'

And that's the big problem Renault will have with the Wind if it builds it. This is a machine that has been conceived and orchestrated by the design department with the engineers acquiescing to their every requirement. It means that in its current guise, too much emphasis has been put on what the car looks like rather than how it goes. If the Wind makes it to production, and Renault says there's a good chance it will, the company will doubtless address that.

At the moment, it's as though the Sport Spider still looms large in the corporate memory, prompting Renault to race in the opposite direction towards the practical rather than purposefully sporting. If it could just engineer a meeting between the older car and the Wind, it might be onto something.