Pete Boccarossa has a test for every car he owns. When he closes the door and walks away, he turns around and looks at it. "If you spin around, take a look, that's your car," he says. "I don't have not one car in here that I won't do that with." The one that failed was a new Corvette. He figures saying so will piss off a lot of people. "I bought that car brand new, bought it, walked away, looked at it, said, no, I'm never going to look at that again," he said. "It's got a Camaro rear end, it's got a McLaren side, it's got a Ferrari front," he says. Great car, he'll give it that, best car for the money. He got rid of it anyway.
The Clios he still turns around for. He first saw a Clio V6 Trophy in a video game his kids had. He thought it was really cool and started digging. Renault had thrown a V6 in the back of its little front-drive Clio and turned it into a rear-drive car.
Renault had done this once before. In 1980 it stuffed a turbo four behind the seats of the Renault 5 and went rallying with it. Pete calls the R5 Turbo the Clio's predecessor. He has a couple of those too. The Clio beats them at everything, he says, comfort included. The R5, as he puts it, is "like a friggin oven on wheels." The idea came back around as a Clio concept at the 1998 Paris show. People liked it enough that Renault handed the whole thing to Tom Walkinshaw Racing to build. If you're reading this maybe you, like me, just discovered what TWR stands for. TWR gutted everything behind the front seats. The Laguna, Renault's everyday family car, donated its 3.0 V6. It went in sideways where the back seat used to be. A six-speed hangs off the end of it, turning the rear wheels. "It's literally just two tires, seat and motor," Pete says. The fenders swelled out over a much wider track. The motor rides high, right behind your head, on a short wheelbase. TWR tuned in a pile of understeer to keep the back end where it belonged.
The race car came first. The one-make Clio V6 Trophy series opened at Jarama in 1999, Renault's hundredth year. The cars had 281 hp and a sequential six-speed. That summer it ran as a support race at Le Mans. Over the years it got to Monaco and the Nürburgring too. By Pete's account the front of the field had some real hot shoes. Anthony Beltoise and Philippe Siffert, both sons of F1 drivers, raced one. So did Bernd Mayländer, who went on to drive the F1 safety car. The rest were gentlemen drivers who bought the cars and crashed them, plenty of them for good. The road cars followed in 2001 and they had a reputation. The weight transfer is great right up until it isn't. Then you're in the woods somewhere, or making your own drive-through. TWR went under in 2002. Renault Sport took the car home to the old Alpine works in Dieppe. The Phase 2 built there got a longer wheelbase and a stiffer rear end. Pete says it doesn't have "that last minute, oh my God, it's going to go into the woods thing."
There are three of them at Bocca Motors now, his shop in Bethel, Connecticut. He figures there might be ten in the country. "We cornered the market on French Clios," he says. The first was a Phase 2. He found it on a Japanese auction site with 4,000 km on it. Delivered with everything, it came to about 35 grand. A couple of months later another came out of Italy. "I figured you can't just have one," he said. Then a Trophy turned up, already in the States and racing. The motor blew the day they got it. They rebuilt it top to bottom, and now it puts 375 to the wheels. One of the road cars, a 2001, just turned 25 and is finally getting plates.
On Father's Day about ten years ago, Pete was riding his motorcycle home from breakfast. A car turned left across him and hit him head on. He broke 28 bones and, by his count, died twice, once in the medevac helicopter. He had 175 motorcycles at one point, 75 of them crammed into his garage at home. Still on crutches, he had to climb over ten of them to get to the bathroom. "I'm done," he said. He'd owned five he never rode, not once. "That's almost like sacrilege," he says. He sent 50 to Mecum and gave a lot more to museums, Barber among them. He kept the 20 or so he really loved.
Then he started driving the cars. Most days now it's four different ones, swapped between his garage at home and the shop four miles away. "I go to my gym and people think I have 500 cars because I bring a different car every day," he says. He bolts slicks on the Clios and runs laps of the parking lot out back. Pete calls it the Bocca Motors Proving Ground. "It's almost like playing go karts, but you get to sit down in a real car," he says. A few years ago 50 or 60 grand bought one, and Pete figures 80 to 120 now. To him they're hard assets, like a stock portfolio, except he gets to drive them. "You can watch all those go up and down sideways and get nervous," he says, "or you can jump in your Clio, turn on the stereo and then rip it to 7000 RPMs through these backroads when the sun's just going down."
