Time to remove that wing & other tasks.

With a full Saturday to play around with the car and two out of three us around for the weekend, it was time to embark on some cosmetic and essential pieces of work. There were four tasks that required doing;

1). Undertake a compression test to check the general health of the cylinders and see if we have any problems with our pistons.
2). Sort out the alarm & immobiliser, 20 minutes to lock or unlock the car was getting pretty frustrating!
3). Replace the stupid looking useless wing mirrors which give little visibility with used ones bought off eBay for £2.50.

4). Remove that WING!!

First task was to get the immobiliser looked at, it was getting pretty frustrating whenever we needed to use the car and the battery section of the alarm fob had now completely come away from the circuit board. A quick trip down to our local Clifford specialist allowed us to order a new fob and find out a way of starting the car using the car's PIN code (very helpful if we ever lose the fob, run out of batteries etc). We also discovered the alarm & immobiliser is a pretty good one, which is reassuring if anyone tries to steal the track bitch. All this for around £30.

After getting the car home we set about doing the compression test, neither of us had done this before and all we had were instructions from the third owner on an email and an American Youtube video showing how to do the test on a Pontiac. We did have a brand new Compression tester and a brand new socket set. After spending a good 45 minutes (internet searches, Haynes manual and finally a call to our mate) trying to find out how to stop the fuel pump from sending petrol to the engine we were able to start removing the spark plugs.

By the way if you do want to unplug the fuel pump on a Renault 5 GT Turbo the connector is under the centre of the car towards the driver's side. :o)

Spark plugs were easily removed and after a lot of faffing around with the compression tester and its numerous connectors, we were ready to start the test. All you need to do is connect the tester to the spark plug socket and turn the car over five to six times, this would then tell you how much pressure was in the cylinder. Unfortunately it was not this simple. Could we get a reading on the gauge? No chance! After numerous connecting and unconnecting of the kit, checking the internet again and head scratching, we gave up. It was not to be, we believe the kit was faulty as no readings were given. Whether it was the kit or a case of bad workmen blaming their tools remains to be seen, but today we were not going to find out how our cylinders were performing.

Now time for the cosmetic stuff. Ever since we bought the car we said that the wing would be coming off. It looks absolutely ridiculous, makes the car stand out more than we'd like and probably weighs a few kg. We'd tried removing the wing before as had the previous owner, but after removing the bolts we found it was stuck on with some super strong adhesive. Putting chisels underneath it caused the wing to crack and pulling at it with all our strength proved useless.

This time we were going to require new tactics.

We set about it with a hack saw blade which seemed to be doing the trick but making a real mess of our paintwork, so after five minutes of sawing through the bonding we changed strategy and used a fresh Stanley knife blade, cutting the bond at a snails pace. After around 30 - 45 minutes of cutting away at the bonding we had a bit of movement, so I pulled on the wing whilst my mate got a screw driver underneath it and slowly the bond began to give way. The wing was off! To our surprise with not too much damage. The excess bonding was removed carefully with a blade and then light alcohol removed the rest. We then filled the holes left with some old bathroom grout I had lying around (nothing like a proper job). We'll aim to get some proper filler and paint in the near future, but this will prevent water getting in for the short term. We are really pleased with the results and think the car looks a lot better with the wing off, we have also saved a massive 7kg! Pictures shown below.

BEFORE

 

AFTER

 

VIEW FROM SIDE

All that was left now was to remove the pathetic vanity mirrors and replace with our £2.50 eBay bargains, an easy task. Admittedly they are the wrong colour and need a touch up, but they'll do until we get some paint. Finally the car has started to look normal.

So overall a relatively successful day, it was a shame the compression test did not produce any results. Something we'll have to try again another day with a new tester kit.

Trying to fix the smoky turbo

As mentioned previously, there are three of us that have gone into this project, one person with a lot of mechanical knowledge and will fix anything, a second with good general technical knowledge about cars and myself with little mechanical or technical knowledge. I know the basics but I am clueless when it comes to getting my hands dirty, I am hoping that I will soon start to learn.

If things were simple we'd all live near to one another, but we don't, and the best mechanic out of the three of us is 100s of miles away, things are never simple. As the car currently spends time at my house I get sent mechanical tasks via email by the person 100s of miles away. The first of these tasks is to try and work out how fried our turbo is and see what is causing it to smoke (intermittently).

My first task was to try and understand if oil is getting into the turbo itself and if it was how much. If there was a lot then we knew the turbo was pretty gone, if not a lot then more investigation maybe required.

Quite a simple test of;
1). Running the car for 5 minutes to warm it up
2). Disconnecting the intercooler pipe to see if any oil was in the housing

3). Disconnecting the air filter pipe to see if there was any sign of any oil

4). Finally, seeing if there was any play in the turbo shaft.

Surprisingly I managed to pull the task off and a stubborn air filter was the only mild complication. The only downside to the work was that there was no visible signs of oil in either of the places we were expecting and only a little play in the turbo shaft. This left us a little confused as we had believed the test would have proven positive with regards to the oil.

Doing this work also allowed us to find the serial number of the turbo to try and see what we had under the bonnet. To our disappointment we found only a standard T2. I wonder what happened to the KTR230 that was originally on it?

As we've now discovered the turbo is pretty standard and the rest of the engine has apparently been upgraded, (larger intercooler, uprated carb) we've now taken the plunge and bought a T28 with the hope that this will stop the smoking, but if not will give us a better turbo to build our track bitch.

The turbo is a newly reconditioned T28 Garrett which has had little/no use (apparently). We've paid £250 for it off eBay, so taken a little gamble. Fingers crossed it'll be goodun.

The first run out

Immediately after picking up the tax disk, myself and one of the co-owners felt compelled to take a drive out in 'The Baron' (sometime between picking the car up and it being MOT'd we managed to name the car The Baron, due to its dodgy wear wing addenda).

We didn't go too far or anywhere too exciting just some local roads in the area which include nice spaced stretches of dual carriageway split up with roundabouts, followed by a trip underneath two tunnels beneath the airport, for aural pleasure.

Initial thoughts on the car are; it has a quite a bit of turbo lag (currently running original spec T2 Turbo) it is slow to react, but when it does, it seems pretty quick. We've not timed it yet or had much to compare it to, but it does seem fast.

The brakes are superb, excellent feel, progressive and do a good job of stopping, having had a big brake conversion in the past this seems to have been very beneficial. Good brakes is always desirable on track, it will be interesting to see how they hold up lap after lap.

Handling I am still not sure on, the rear suspension has been completely 'slammed' and I wouldn't feel very safe on high speed corners on a race track, it is definately something for us to sort out.

Fun - the car is a lot of fun, very loud exhaust, dump valve (perhaps a little chavvy), light weight and not much to the build of the car all contribute to this. Myself and one of the other owners had a very entertaining evening out. Both of us are pretty pleased with our new purchase.

 Considering how much we've paid, the car represents tremendous value for money. We're hoping for many future enjoyable track days this year.

The MOT

After recovering the car back from Wolverhampton, it was then booked in for an MOT the following weekend. We thought it was worth putting in to see what was wrong with it rather than trying to second guess what could be wrong with it and trying to fix it. So early one Saturday morning the neighbours were awoken from their slumber as the Renault 5 was started on the driveway. It is pretty loud even when idling so my wife was glad to see the back of me when I had warmed the car up and headed off to the testing station.

All three of us were pretty pessimistic about its ability to pass. We thought the emissions would be way off due to it being smoky, especially when cold, suspension looked dubious (it still does) and the fact that it was a 22 year old car.

Upon pickup we were shocked to find out, it had only gone and passed, with only three advisory points.

1). Blue smoke upon acceleration (which we knew about), it still sailed through emissions.
2). One slightly warn rear brake pad (singular), again we can cope with that.
3). The windscreen wiper arm was working its way lose out of the bodywork, again something we had noticed.

This now meant all we had to do was wait for the insurance cover note to come through and we could then tax it and we'd have a 12 months tax and 12 months MOT track bitch within our initial £1,500 budget.


As mentioned on a previous post, tax on a Renault 5 GT Turbo is only £125 for 12 months, so this means more money to play with and less to the tax man.

A trip to the Midlands - our first viewing.

After two or three weeks of hunting on the internet, we'd booked our first viewing and set off to Wolverhampton. Upon arrival we were greeted by the owner, he appeared very genuine and showed us around the car pointing out all the things that needed doing to it, e.g. smoky turbo, potential suspension tweaks and removal of that ridiculous wing. After a brief test drive, checks on the engine and a lot of checking for rust we thought the car was a possibility.

Checking the documents showed the car was out of MOT, it has run out the prior week unknown to the owner. Our hopes of returning with a car that day had been dashed.

After weighing up the pros and cons we thought the car was worth an offer, it had been for sale for three weeks and already been dropped in price once, with no MOT or tax we offered £1,150 and as the owner was looking to get rid of it sooner rather than later he accepted.

We'd bought our track bitch.

Attempts were made to recover the car that day, but these fell through and the car was recovered the following weekend.

Now all we needed to do was try and get it through its MOT! Who knows what we had bought, how much of a gamble had we made?

On the hunt for our car.

The hunt for our track bitch started in late January, scouring eBay, Pistonheads and specialist forums. It can be quite a time consuming task, especially trying to get agreement on which cars we should consider over email. Sometimes you need to move fast to get the right car, but agreement needs to be made before hand. Also, contacting speculative owners proved to be painful, with many unanswered emails, texts and forum DMs proving to be very frustrating. They say selling a car is fraught with time wasters! 

After 10 days or so of looking in adverts a couple of cars had caught or attention. One, an already developed track bitch, including cage, race seats and sensible modifications, it was a out of tax and MOT but for the bargain price of £1,000 it was worth a gamble. 

The second was a pretty ugly looking example which had quite a lot of money spent on the engine and suspension, but was suffering from fuel line problems and a few bits of rust.

Both cars were worth a look, but to our disappointment the first was sold before we could get to see it and the second had more problems and the owner had then decided to fix it and keep it. Our quest to find our track bitch continued.

It was another 10 days before we were able to find anything worth viewing, anything good seemed to be in Kent, Essex, Plymouth or Scotland. Anything crap and falling apart seemed to be local. Or it had a ‘DIMMA kit’! Finally, we came across a red G reg GT Turbo in Wolverhampton with slightly dubious rear wing.

As it was only 1h 15 m drive away and we were all free, we booked a viewing.

Choosing the car

As we’ve owned around 10 or 11 RenaultSport cars between us (from 5 GT Turbos, 21 Turbos, Clio 16v, Clio 172 Mk1, Clio 182 and Megane R26 to name but a few) we thought it would be daft not to continue in this tradition and hunt out a Renaultsport track bitch. Initially we started looking at 172 Clios, as there are many to be had around the £1,500 budget. But slowly our search started to focus on one Renault in particular. 

The Renault 5 GT Turbo.

Why pick this car? They’re 22 years old, most have been abused, they rust and eat head gaskets, turbos and anything else they can get their teeth into. There were four quite big reasons why we chose a 5GT Turbo.

One, my mate and one of the co-buyers has owned three or four in his life and knows the cars inside out, he can fix almost anything on them (inc. welding) this would mean very limited labour costs for maintaining the car, whilst not a mechanic by trade, he is pretty handy on a car he knows a lot about.

Two, they are very light (around 850kg when new) and can be easily modified, plus if you buy the right one, someone will have done the modifications for you. Most Renault 5 GT Turbos have been modified so if we wait we could get something quite ‘nasty’. With that power to weight ratio, you could have a car that could embarrass serious hardware on-track.

Three, as they are over 20 years old, you can insure them on a classic car insurance policy, even with all modifications declared it is possible to get insurance for less than £300 fully comp.

Four, car tax, as the car is pre 2001 and has an engine size ‘Not over 1,549cc’ the road fund license for 12 months is only £125, by comparison a 172 Clio costs around £205 to tax for the year. I’d rather £80 in our pocket than the tax man.

For us there really was no option. Our track bitch of choice was going to be a Renault 5 GT Turbo. Ideally with sensible modifications, but the main goal was to get a solid shell, free from rust and a car that could be driven away.

How the track bitch project was born.

Track days can be expensive business, especially if you embark on more than one a year. This expense can get worse if the car you track is your daily driver and you are not able to maintain the car yourself. Take the following costs incurred last year just on two track days:-

Renaultsport Track day - Oulton Park

• Track day fee - £185
• Insurance - £150
• Petrol - £65
• Helmet hire - £10
• Tuition - £15

General open pit track day – Cadwell Park

• Track day fee - £195
• Insurance - £135
• Petrol - £65
• Helmet hire - £10

After these two track days and 20,000 road mile I also needed four new Michelin Pilot Sport 3 tyres. Admittedly I would’ve needed new tyres anyway within the next 5000 miles, but the cost was incurred quicker and straight after the track day. Total cost £780.

So for two track days total cost in the space of one month was £1,610.

It was turning out track days were costing a good chunk of money. Plus this was only in a Renaultsport Megane R26.

A month later one of my best friends tracked his modified Subaru Impreza, also reducing the life on his tyres, brakes and all other components. Four tyres for him are a similar cost £700 - £800. However other components are a lot higher due to the specification that is currently on the car e.g brake discs £850. Speaking with my mate he expressed similar thoughts to me on track days, great fun but pretty expensive. 

Debates can be had on whether you bother with insurance, as this would reduce costs, but with cars costing around £12,000 neither of us would want to risk having a big off and paying a visit to Mr Armco, in addition to this there are other people on tracks to consider and as there is no third party liability it only takes one clown to ruin your day, as experienced in front of me at Cadwell with an M5 driving down the side of a Skyline. Not having track insurance on our cars is not an option.

All this got me thinking and after reading about other track and Renault enthusiasts Danny Royston & Joe Simpson’s conversations on twitter one evening the seed was sown.

What I needed was a track bitch, a car that can be bought for less than £1,500, does not require insurance on track, has cheaper parts, cheaper tyres, brakes and maybe even co owned with like minded friends.

As it was the middle of winter and with nothing much to look forward to in January or February, I sent a speculative email to four friends all of which have done track days before and all of which understand the spiraling costs of running a car on-track. 

Over the course of the weekend and after multiple emails we’d agreed that three of us would club together and throw £500 in each to purchase a track bitch.