I recently spent a day in the Clio at a wet grip track facility with car control guru John Lyon. This revealed that simple excess speed produced good old boring understeer whereas a quick stab of throttle and/or a flick of the wheel gets the back coming round as fast as, well, a very fast thing I suppose ΂- which is altogether much more interesting. It can certainly be caught, but you need to get it right first time ΂- and you'd better be quick. If your name is John Lyon you can leave the tail hanging there, elegantly held on the throttle for lap after lap. My own attempts had all the grace of a cow in a bog and I was happy to achieve half a lap or so. In reality doing this is a bit of a party trick and I was actually very pleased to discover that any slides could be caught and sorted fairly comfortably. Good fun and good experience, particularly with a car like this.

The Clio also spent some time at Superchips' Buckingham base recently to see if its V6 will respond to chipping. The day ended in an honourable draw with the Clio refusing to reveal all the secrets of its little French brain but with the Superchips boffins feeling they had learned enough to win the return bout scheduled for a few weeks' time.

Best of all, an initial rolling road run showed that the V6 is putting out 222lb ft of torque and as near as dammit 230bhp ΂- exactly what it says on the tin. Which is nice.