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... because I saw one of these with my own two eyes, at the UCF car meet last night.

500 Super Mario Bros. bonus points to whoever can guess what it is!

is it a Renault.JPG?

Renault Sport Spider. The windshield was an option over the standard wind deflector, except in Britain where the deflector was illegal for a road car. IIRC from about 1996. It may have been built at the former Matra plant.

Dammit, I was gonna say you weren't allowed to play Steve

Guy is a private importer. He brought this car and a JDM FD RX7 over, and he says they're both 100% legal, and he says this is the only Spider in the country.

I was in Spain for a week back in high school and I never saw one of these!

I got to sit in it, and it is THE most pure of a sports car I've ever sat in, even more than the Elise IMO. The Elise is plenty Spartan, but this car felt more driver-oriented to me. Once I got situated in the seat, it felt perfect, even for me at 6'3".

It was supposed to be sold for a one-make race series. I don't remember if that ended up happening or not. I love those things. I think it was a little heavier than the contemporary Elise (maybe lighter than the current one), but had something like 220 HP. Renault Sport is like Renault's M division. They also built a minivan with their F1 car engine in it (or more like, their F1 car with a minivan body) around that time. Now that I think of it, the Spider might have been built in the old Alpine plant and the Espace F1 at Matra... Dammit, something was built at Matra and something else was built at Alpine. I don't know. Anyway, Alpines were sweet cars too.

The 'car' I'm working on will be even more driver oriented, but not as Spartan as I want to be able to drive it across country. An easy 600 miles per tankful will assure I'll have to piss three times for every gas up. Maybe I'll rig up a hose with a hole in the floor.