Not atypically for a British driving fan, I think the hot hatch is the best type of car you can buy.

For getting your dynamic kicks on our narrow B-roads, riddled as they are with crater-sized potholes, you want something that's highly manoeuvrable, practical, affordable and still exciting to drive. And in my opinion, those wearing the coveted Renault Sport badge are the undisputed champions of the game, especially when it comes to delivering on that last criterion.

Ignoring the ill-fated and slightly peculiar Sport Spider of 1995, the first model to leave Dieppe with a Renault Sport (later Renaultsport) badge glued to the bootlid was the Clio 2.0 16v of 1999. With an affordable price, a brilliant chassis and a 168bhp four-pot that was able to "spin the wheels in third on most surfaces" in the wet, as our testers found at the time, the spiciest Clio was met with instant praise and named by many the best-driving hot hatch since the Peugeot 205 GTi.

This all but set the trend for the performance brand going forward: the Renault Sport Clio turned out to be the first in a glorious generation of fast hatches to emerge from Dieppe over the following 20 years. These included the likes of the Clio Trophy, Clio 200 Cup, Mégane R26.R and Mégane Trophy-R, as well as the truly crazy Clio V6.

Sure, there was the occasional miss here and there, but generally nobody else was able to touch Renault Sport for pure driver appeal.

So how did they do it? It was mostly down to clever expenditure of development budgets. Take the original Renault Sport Clio, for instance: while the engine was afforded the luxury of variable valve timing, the suspension was finely tuned to perfectly match the frenetic powertrain and the interior was upgraded with supportive seats and perfectly placed metal pedals for rev-matching, the rest of the base car was basically left untouched.

Outside, it looked just like a standard Clio to the untrained eye, and even in the cabin you would have been hard-pressed to spot any telltale signs of specialness, given that it featured the usual scratchy plastics and iffy leather. To keep costs down, the money had been spent exclusively on the components that mattered most to the driver, in an admirable expression of substance over style.

Of course, this excludes the likes of the bespoke-bodied Mégane R26.R and the Clio V6, but even then, such cars were almost always sold at a loss by the company, in order to preserve their relative attainability.

Even Renault's most extreme, composite-paneled creations never lost touch with the sense of invincibility that no class of performance car but the hot hatch can offer, and that was the Renault Sport genius. The cars they produced were practical and (for the most part) not unrealistically priced, but at the same time they were capable of causing serious headaches for the likes of Porsche and Lotus in the business of building a driver's car.