The last two-seat Renault I drove before this one was the Spider, which some of you may remember as a short-lived sports car from the mid 1990s. The Spider was designed from the start to be a road/race vehicle, and as such it had a mid-mounted Clio Williams engine, composite body panels on an aluminium monocoque structure, no roof and an optional windscreen. Apart from the badge and the number of seats, absolutely nothing about the Spider had any relevance whatever to the Wind roadster.The Wind (and I'm not going to follow tradition by making clever remarks about its name, so you'll have to supply your own) is a dumpy little coupé-convertible whose most interesting feature is the fact that its roof can be folded into or unfolded from a compartment in the rear in just eleven seconds, or about half the normal time for this sort of thing. That's not because the mechanism is outstandingly clever, but because the roof itself is a one-piece affair which simply rotates around its rear-mounted hinges in either direction, looking not unlike a slow-moving fly-swatter as it does so.There are a couple of points to mention about this. Firstly, the roof has to be released before you ask for it to be removed, or secured once it has been replaced, using a rotary handle. The handle has been arranged to be very convenient for use with the right hand in a left-hand drive car, but it requires a difficult arm action if you're using your left hand in a right-hand drive car. For UK customers the handle really needs to be re-mounted by 90 degrees, though Renault may not consider this worth the expense.Secondly, the roof is not fail-safe, though a warning buzzer goes off if you start fiddling with the handle while the car is moving. Clearly, nobody other than a congenital idiot would attempt to do this in any case, but in the interests of research CARkeys handed the car to a congenital idiot - one whose name happens to be an anagram of my own - to see what would happen.It didn't go well. During a motorway cruise, our tester toyed with the handle and carelessly allowed the roof to rise up by half an inch or so. A gust of wind got under the roof, as anyone with any sense could have predicted, and flipped it over in about one thirtieth of the normal time, causing significant damage to the pieces of sloping plastic bodywork behind the rear screen. Let this be a lesson to us all.After such an incident it may seem churlish to be critical of the Wind, but the fact is that I don't think it's much of a car. Road and wind noise levels (even with the roof up) are astonishingly high. The interior seems dull and cheap, more so than that of a low-spec Clio, and although it's moderately good fun to drive quickly it's not significantly better than a basic Clio in that respect either.At lower speeds it's just dull, giving none of the pleasure of driving for driving's sake than, for example, Mazda achieved two decades ago with the MX-5. That car showed that a sports car does not have to be quick so long as every major control behaves the way it should, and even the most prosaic manoeuvre (such as reversing into a parking space) is achieved with such grace that you want to do it again as soon as possible.That is not the case here. The Wind offers no driving enjoyment at all, and unless you love its looks - in which case fair play to you, but I don't understand what you see in it - or are desperate for open-topped motoring, I can't imagine why you would want to own one. Yet it comes from a company which clearly knows how to build enjoyable cars on a budget. So here's a suggestion. If you want a low-priced, low-powered Renault that provides bags of fun from the moment you step inside to the moment you get back out again, don't buy a Wind: buy a Twingo GT instead. Engine 1149cc, 4 cylinders Power 100bhp Transmission 5 speed manual Fuel/CO2 44.8mpg / 145g/km Details correct at publication date
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