Amédée Gordini began tuning cars and competing in races during the 1930s. His results attracted the attention of Simca, the French assembler of Fiat vehicles, which hired him to run its motorsport programme and develop performance road cars. The Gordini-Simca association continued through the Second World War.
In 1946 Gordini introduced the first cars to carry his own name: Fiat-engined single-seaters raced by himself and José Scaron that achieved several victories in their first season. The company opened a workshop on the Boulevard Victor in Paris and began entering both sports car and Grand Prix races. The partnership with Simca began to break down in 1951 due to political conflicts, leaving Gordini to pursue his Formula One programme independently.
Gordini competed in Formula One from 1950 through 1956, with a brief return in 1957 with a new eight-cylinder engine. The team operated on severely constrained finances, which earned Gordini considerable admiration for the pace he extracted from his cars relative to their resources, but also meant consistent reliability problems that prevented the team from converting performance into championship points. A major success was achieved in Formula Two during the same period, providing some compensation for the lean Formula One results.
After the Formula One programme ended, Gordini redirected his operation toward engine tuning work for Renault. Gordini-prepared Renault cars entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans between 1962 and 1969. He also tuned engines for Alpine, a rival French sports car manufacturer that shared its association with Renault.
The first commercially significant collaboration with Renault was the Dauphine Gordini of 1957, a modified version of the Renault Dauphine that became a sales success. Gordini-tuned Renaults also won various rally events during the 1950s and 1960s.
At the end of 1968 Amédée Gordini retired and sold a 70% majority stake in his company to Renault. The operation was relocated to Viry-Chatillon in 1969 and became a performance division of Renault. In 1976 it was merged with Alpine to form the Renault Sport division. The Gordini name became wholly owned by Renault in 1977.
Under Renault ownership the Gordini name was applied to performance variants of mainstream models, most associated with the characteristic colour scheme of bleu de France bodywork with white stripes. Key models included the Renault 8 Gordini (1964–1970), the Renault 12 Gordini (1970–1974), the Renault 17 Gordini (1974–1978), and the Renault 5 Gordini (sold in the UK market 1979–1985 and elsewhere as the Renault 5 Alpine).
In November 2009 Renault announced the revival of the Gordini name for an exclusive hot-hatch line, drawing a parallel with Fiat's contemporary revival of its Abarth performance brand. Models to carry the revived badge included the Renault Twingo Gordini, Twingo Gordini RS, Clio Gordini RS, and Wind Gordini, all introduced from 2010.
Gordini's Formula One career was brief and rarely victorious, but the name became synonymous in France with the idea of imaginative, resource-constrained performance engineering. The Renault 8 Gordini in particular developed an enduring cult following in French motorsport. The Gordini badge remains in use within Renault Sport Technologies as a signal of enhanced performance, and the bleu de France with white stripes colour scheme is instantly recognised by European motorsport enthusiasts as the Gordini signature.