This hot little French car is a lifetime's obsession

There's no need for a Ferrari — a Renault R8 Gordini is more than enough

Brendan McAleer

Sep 13, 2021 • September 17, 2021 • 5 minute read • Join the conversation

Standing at his workbench in his home garage, Paul Silva deftly cuts and bends flat steel into a handmade interior panelling clip. Scarcely a metre away is a car he fell in love with when he was just six years old, watching cars slalom through the parking lot of a church in Portugal.

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“I never wanted a Ferrari,” Silva says, “I never even thought about them. Too far out of reach to consider, I suppose. For me, it was always the Gordinis.”

Talk about Paul with pretty much any member of Vancouver’s close-knit classic car community, and two things come up: a fierce little blue French car, and an innate mechanical ability. Silva is not a mechanic by trade – before retirement, he was an electrical contractor, like his father. But he began wrenching on cars before he could drive, and has been behind the wheel and under the hood of feisty Renaults since he turned sixteen.

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Silva is the person to call if you need some advice setting up the carburettors on your Alfa-Romeo or Ferrari. He has a knack for the black-magic art of setting and jetting a carb, honed by a lifetime spent squeezing power out of the tiny engines of a series of somewhat unlikely performance sedans.

This 1970 Renault R8 Gordini was originally a Vancouver car. French cars were a relatively common sight on the west coast in the 1970s and 1980s, and though Citroëns were the most commonly known, plenty of Peugeots and Renaults also roamed about.

A Renault Gordini, on the other hand, was uncommon even then. Available as a special order from one of three import specialists in the lower mainland, Gordinis were the hottest French cars you could buy at the time, the equivalent to Abarth for Fiat. Indeed, Amédée Gordini, who founded the company, was Italian-born. He moved to Paris in the 1920s, and had a successful career racing in Grands Prix and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

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Gordini’s nickname was “le sorcier de la mécanique,” and it was an apt sobriquet. In the post-war period, his company was approached by Renault, seeking to bring race-bred performance to a limited-edition of street cars. Eventually Gordini would be folded into Renault Sport in the late 1970s, though the Gordini badge would again be revived for some Europe-only hot hatchback specials in the modern era.

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The Silva family arrived in B.C. in 1970. When Paul was fifteen, he found a little Austin A40 a few blocks away from the family home in non-running condition. The price was just $20, so he convinced his father to let him buy it, and pushed it home.

“It needed a head-gasket, brakes, the clutch needed doing,” Silva ticks off an imaginary list.

He got the car running, and later got his driver’s license. A couple of months after that, he found a Renault R8 for sale in West Van. The car needed mechanical and cosmetic sorting, including a clutch replacement, but youthful enthusiasm didn’t care about the flaws. The car resembled the Gordinis that had fascinated Silva as a boy, and he had to have it. It would be the first of many.

“I’ve had ten or twelve Renault R8s over the years,” Silva says. “When I was in high school, we had a long driveway and I would cram in seven or eight cars; I was also into Fiat 124 Spiders. My parents didn’t mind.”

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Today, Silva has just three Renault R8s. One is a non-running ex-circuit-racer he brought down from the interior. Another is a fender-flared racing machine that he campaigned himself at hillclimbs like Knox Mountain. The third is the 1970 R8 that was his first Gordini, purchased in 1989.

Silva shuts up his garage, tucking tools away into the Craftsman toolbox his father bought him when he turned sixteen. He rolls open the door, fires up the R8, and backs out into the narrow alley way. The little rear-mounted 1296cc engine fizzes away as it warms up, the suspension surprisingly compliant over the bumps.

To give you an idea of how potent and rugged this little French shoebox is, at the 2019 running of the Monte-Carlo Historics rally, a Renault R8 Gordini came first overall. More well-recognized machines like Porsche 911s, Mini Coopers, and even Jaguar E-Types were all roundly thumped by a rear-engined car with the side profile of a fedora.

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It’s not the power. While Silva has fine-tuned the twin Weber carburettors feeding the R8’s sub-1.3L engine, the car still only makes about 100 hp at the wheels. But the gearing is very short and the curb weight is a little over 800 kg, thanks to a spartan interior with plenty of exposed metal. Driver and passenger clip their seatbelts into a single centrally-mounted ring – you pull each other side to side as the g-forces build.

However, in the best French tradition, the R8’s seats are hugely soft and comfortable. Visibility is excellent, and it’s surprisingly roomy for such a small machine.

Silva drives the car like it is an extension of himself. “It’s like a good pair of shoes,” he says, winding up the R8’s snarly four-cylinder. The engine isn’t harsh, but as the revs approach 8,000 rpm, it sounds like you’re being pursued by a cloud of angry hornets.

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Over the past two decades, Silva has put something like 150,000 kms on this car. He regularly participates in classic car rallies, and he is not precious about the car. The flat front of the R8 is flecked with bugs and rock chips pockmark the windshield.

A restoration is in the works for this one, tidying it up after years of frequent all-weather use. That restoration will not be to preserve and show the car, but instead to extend its lifespan, and continue its use.

Paul Silva’s Renault R8 Gordini is not so much the realization of a childhood dream as it is a lifetime’s constant companion. It’s the first thing anyone who knows him thinks of when they hear his name. Off it zips down some curving road, a beacon of French racing blue against a backdrop of mountains, the Sport Lisboa e Benfica football pennant swaying from the rearview mirror. Not some fantasy Ferrari. Far more special than one.