Welcome to 1995. “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan is blasting out of seemingly every last speaker known to man. The James Bond flick GoldenEye came out and put Bond in a Beemer and set in motion many a nights with friends playing N64 while scarfing pizza during my teenage years. And somewhere in France, somebody within Renault took one look at the Espace people-mover and decided that it was high time that a minivan-looking thing was mated with a Formula One car. Because what could possibly go wrong with this idea, right?
A carbon-fiber F1-style chassis was crammed under a carbon fiber-reinforced Espace body, and the powertrain, a 3.5L, 40-valve Renault RS5 V-10 like the engine used in the 1993 Williams-Renault car, was mounted mid-ship to a six-speed semi-automatic. Performance? Mighty. 0-62 MPH in 2.8 seconds, 0-200 KMH in 6.9 seconds, and a top speed of 194 miles per hour. It could go 0-270 KMH-0 in 1,969 feet, thanks in part to the carbon-ceramic brakes. Forget that red Caravan that nukes the front tires off, this is the minvan that will utterly decimate your feelings. You don’t have enough car to test your luck, unless your name is Jensen Button or Lewis Hamilton.
It looks like F1 driver Alain Prost is driving.