Hi and welcome to my project thread,
I'm sure I had one before but I couldn't find it, so here the new one
I ended up owning this phase 1 Renault Sport Clio 172 by acedent really. I was always a Ford man at heart, (still am deep down.) I took it in part ex as an non runner. I traced the fault to the engine bay wiring loom and I was going to shift it on right up untill the point I took it on roadtest.
What can I say. I so wanted to hate this stupid pile a Renult crap that had been a pain in my arse for the last couple of days. Sadly It took 3miles for me to decide it was staying :drive:
The first thing that drew me into the car was just how lively the engine was. It pulled so hard and just felt like it wanted so much more than all the abuse you could chuck at it. The steering was so tight and sharp, and as for the handling, it was just increadable. How it gets round corners at the speeds it does still baffles me today.
This is what it looked like when I brought it.
So the Clio was staying. I decided to use it as a track car as i wanted to get into track days. My theroy was that if I binned it, it didn't really matter as it would be cheap to fix or replace (turth be told now, Id be gutted if something happend to it!) So the track prepping begun.
The first thing to do was to fit the bucket seats from my old Focus RS powered Transit Connect Van, Strip out the interior and fit a better steering wheel.
I then did my first track day at castle combe. I could fault the car. It punched so much higher than it weight, holding off Civic Type R's, Scoobys, Evos, VXR's
The only real issue I had on the trackday was getting the heat out of the brakes. They overheaded a coule of times, so i removed my foglights and made some home made brake coolers
As the standard wheels were fitted with Toyo R888's for track use, I treated it to a set of Team Dynamics Pro Race 1.2's
Just before the next track day, I fitted some Vibra Technics engine mounts (full kit) and binned the aircon. Both very affective mods in my opinion.
Here she is on track at silverstone. Thats my mum in the passanger seats and the brake discs are just starting to glow :twisted: :twisted:
I then took it off the road for a bit and carried out a full check over and fitted some gaz coilovers, comp brake top mounts, heat wrappped the exhasut mainfold, fitted a trackday exhaust and some camber bolts. I then did a soaking wet track day at beadford autodrome.
All was going well with the Clio untill one nice going down to lakeside cruse. On the way down we found a brand new R35 Skyline to play with, Not that there was much playing, Them things are rapid. After a couple of 3figure speeds passed the him, and then him past me, then me passed him (fair play to the guy. He seemed to really enjoy a little tear up) the Clio started to feel down on power. I couldn''t put my finger one exsactly what it was. It just didnt feel itself.
When we got to lakeside I checked all the levels witch were all fine and set off home. Sadly on the way home it started to knock
After 140,000 miles the engine had finally taken all the abuse it could and had spun a big end shell.
The damage
I wasnt't gunna let this be the end of my awesome little track car. As a matter of fact, this was a perfect excuse to put some plans I had into action.
Im now half way through rebuilding the engine, fully forged, low comp ready for a supercharger. The figure im going for it anywhere between 300bhp-350bhp. No more No less. Im also going to be fully rebuilding the gearbox and fitting some 4 pot brakes.
I wanted to upgrate the brakes on the clio without moving to bigger wheels (size 15inch) and I didn't want to use wheel spacers either. I found a cheap set of 406 Coupe Brembo 4 pot calipers and I came up with this..........
Normal brakes, Forgive the rust, the car has been sitting in the garden for 8months now.
Note how far out the standard disc offset is
I needed to move the caliper more inboard so's not to need wheel spacers. I decided to run a different offset disc to move it all in. These are Ford disc's im guessing due to the 4x108 holes in them but they were easily re drilled to 4x100
Note how much more these discs are tucked in by
Once I knew where the disc was in refrerance to the caliper mounting bolts I was able to fab up some new mounting brackets in the correct thickness to alow everything to run inline. I used stainless steel witch was proberly overkill but its what I had laying about.
Once I was happy with the bracket I'd made, I gave it a quick paint. Im not one for shiney bits everywhere.
Annoyingly the caliper needed to sit right over the top of the bracket mounting bolts so I had to shave away some of the caliper but luckly is wasn't that much so didn't affect the strenght of the mounting.
And there we are done! I use the Team Dynamics everyday and the standard wheels of track use and both if with about 5mm of clearance.
