10 Years Of ClioSport

With several of the founding members based in the South East, the first ClioSport meet was held on the seafront at Southend-on-Sea on Saturday 27th January 2001, at 8pm.

Most of the vehicles attending on a very cold evening were Clio 16v's and the recently released 172's.


...

Donny South Show - North Weald - August 17th/18th 2002
Article written by Nick Read - 2002 Cliosport Events Manager

Donny South! The very first Donny show that wasn't actually in Doncaster (not Donnington as some people think!) and also the first with a Cliosport stand, which in all honesty was streets ahead of the other clubs' meagre offerings - we had the best and most complete club stand there.

The organisation of the show was all a bit of a rush, Kev M was full of ideas to do the show, so thanks to him for getting the ball rolling and doing the initial enquiries. Then he passed it on to me and Jas to sort out - our first time at organising a show stand but definitely not the last. With a few weeks to go we had our final line-up of members who wanted to show their Clios and after a bit of wangling with the organisers sorting out support cars, one-day passengers, the possibility of a 12m x 3m show tent etc, we finally got ourselves booked in. Big thanks to John (night.icon) for sorting out the two massive gazebos that we put together to make the Cliosport tent, this really made our area stand out.
...

During the past 10 years, the ClioSport website has gone through many changes. Below is a brief overview of the various changes that have happened, and a look back at how things used to look for those of you not old enough to remember!

2000

On September 17th 2000, an online group called ClioSport172 was set up on the website www.egroups.com (which around the same time merged into Yahoo! Groups). The description of this group was "A Group of Clio 172 owners swapping knowledge + arguments etc!!". The groups system was very basic but allowed simple discussions and a section for photos to be posted.

The RenaultSport Clio 172 had recently been launched by Renault, and a number of people started to use the group to discuss their opinions after taking ownership or awaiting delivery of their new 172's. One such member was Jason Thomas (Jas), who had taken delivery of his 172 a week earlier, after previously owning a Clio 16v.

Jas quickly started to become a regular poster, and began arranging meets in his local area (Essex), in collaboration with users of the Clio 16v egroup. In October 2000, Jas announced to the egroup that he was setting up a website for everyone at www.cliosport.net, which also had a discussion forum. ClioSport was born!


...