It’s not really a surprise, it has been begging for death since I bought it, but I have finally parted ways with the Clio. I have had 2 years of pain with this car, and although I lost loads of money, I was quite glad to see the back of it to be honest. This is the second 197 I’ve owned, and the first one was unproblematic during the time I owned it. This one, less so.
When I bought this one, it had a load of problems, which weren’t apparent until it was too late, and I massively overpaid for it – £4,500 iirc. The guy was probably pissing himself as I drove off. I am not talented when it comes to buying cars.
The first problem it had was that it would blast coolant up the windscreen at high RPM. I had hoped this was something easy like a thermostat housing, but it was in fact a cracked head gasket. I took it to the garage to get this fixed, which took quite a while. They took the head off, said it looked like it had been bodged on a driveway, so they got the head skimmed and the valve seats recut, new head gasket, new dephaser and cambelt, and it was back on the road.
This was okay for a while, I did 2 track days in it without incident. It was driving reasonably well, I was getting more familiar with it, and I think I was doing pretty well. We took it to Cadwell Park twice, which really suits a hot hatch in my opinion. Quite a technical track, lots of corners, not too many straights (unlike Bedford, which is very much an M3 kind of track).
I put a decat manifold on it, because it had a bit of a flat spot. This didn’t really fix it. The best thing I did to improve it was to put a MotoCNC MAP sensor bracket onto it, which I think did improve the “kangarooing” in first gear, and generally made it feel slightly better. Renault did a pretty poor job of attaching the MAP sensor. It is just held in by a couple of rubber O-rings, which don’t seal particularly well, or hold it in place very well.
I did a few odds and ends, drop links, bushes, rear discs, etc. Just typical tired car rehab stuff.
The third track day I did in this car was quite an eventful one! Very early in the day I threw a rod and absolutely obliterated the block. There was a roughly 40mm window blasted in the back of the block. I was chasing my dad in his Suzuki Swift Sport (ZC32S), and was absolutely hammering the car around “Charlie’s” – a fast double right hand corner. I was really on a mission to catch up to him – thinking “how dare he, in his stupid little 1600 clown car”. I was right on the redline in 3rd gear, for a few seconds, and what I think happened is that all of the oil pulled to the left and starved the right hand side of the engine of oil. In the space of maybe two seconds the engine went from “sounds okay” to “oof, that sounds a bit grindy, metal on metal” to “pop”, and rained a load of shrapnel and oil on the track behind me.
I managed to coast it onto the grass to the left of the back straight. Red flag. They had to pick the car up because it was leaking. Much laughter upon my arrival back in the paddock. Dad was nice enough to take turns with me driving the Swift, which actually is quite fun, because when you’re out in the car on your own, and you make a decent save or see someone doing something ridiculous, you have nobody to share it with. He spun the car on some “tree sap”, which was funny. A guy we had befriended in the paddock was right behind us and visibly agreed. Cue many excuses.
I got the car recovered back home and started thinking options. I rang up my usual garage and said, sounds like there’s 3 options, can you price them up. Those options being straight replacement with a salvage F4R, Megane swap, or obviously K-Swap (which I really wanted to do, a K20 in this chassis would be hot hatch perfection). All of these were really expensive. Straight F4R swap was going to be £3,500 and a K-Swap was looking like something in the region of £10,000. I can’t afford any of that. Over to eBay.
I found a salvage engine for £1,000. It had done 96,000 miles or so. I ordered it, got it shipped to dad’s (he had a carport and I am living in a flat). Me, my dad and my father-in-law spent the next few months of Saturdays swapping it out. It was actually quite a fun experience. We definitely learned a lot.
The first thing we learned was that (at least on this car) you’re not going to have a good time trying to get the engine out, leaving the gearbox behind. In the 197 you have very little clearance between the cambelt end of the engine and the chassis leg. Maybe an inch or so. The clutch pack is significantly taller than that. We tried for a long time to try and wiggle the engine out but we just made a mess to be honest. This was all to avoid removing the driveshafts and draining the gearbox oil, which in retrospect would have been way way easier. We did eventually get it out, but decided we’d have a much better time putting it back in as a unit, and we did.
Before we started I had said we would take pictures of everything, organise the bolts nicely, label all the plugs, etc. We did not do that. We ended up with one tub filled with all the bolts, clips, sensors, etc. The process of disassembling it actually went relatively smoothly!
We had a nightmare of a time trying to get the gearbox onto the other engine. The splines looked okay. I made an improvised clutch alignment tool with a screwdriver, some duck tape, and some sockets, so I was fairly sure it was correct, but it just would not drop in. Eventually I tried swapping it for the clutch from my broken engine, and literally within 5 minutes we had the gearbox attached.
From that point it seemed to go quite quickly, we were just doing the inverse of what we’d already done, so there weren’t any huge surprises. I did crack an ear off the alternator trying to lever it into place. Also, one of the shock absorber bolts was absolutely welded into the upright. We spent a while fighting that and trying to drill it out. In the end I got another upright and shock off Facebook marketplace and cobbled together a new “leg” from the best bits of both, avoiding this immovably seized M12 bolt.
We got everything back in, bolted together, etc. It was time to start it. We cranked it over for a while… nothing. I assumed maybe the fuel system was dry and needed a little while to prime, but nothing. We kept trying for a while. Still nothing. Changed the plugs and coil packs, still nothing. A fault code reader would have saved us a full day wasted pissing around with this, because right at 5pm as the sun was going down and we were getting ready to go home for the day, I found a little sensor on the ground. As it turns out, it was the crank position sensor. I had actually looked at it that morning, picked it up, and assumed I had already put one in the engine and this was spare, and chucked it in the box of bolts. I also saw the harness for this dangling in the engine bay, but assumed it was for the radiator fan or air con or something non-essential, and ignored it for the time being. I plugged this in, put it into the bell housing, single 10mm bolt, and the car started immediately, on the button. I (rightly) received a fair bit of mockery for this.
From here it was a pretty easy case of throw the face back on, and get it MOT’d. There was a fairly major incident wherein I crushed two of my fingers between the spokes of a front wheel and the calliper. That’s quite a lot of rotating mass, with the wheel, brake and driveshaft, and it certainly felt like it when it stopped immediately on my fingers. Dad did his best Colin McRae impression getting me to the hospital. You might’ve noticed if you have a 197, there is maybe 2mm clearance between the spokes and the brakes, and too many spokes! If you must rotate the wheels, do it by the tyres, make sure your fingers are well clear of the wheels or you will have a bad couple of weeks. The nurses in A&E were nice though, I think they felt sorry for me. They gave me gas and air which was definitely a silver lining. This incident slowed us down a bit because I had to take a lot of painkillers and antibiotics for a while.
Nothing major on the MOT. Needed a new rad support (which aren’t in production any more… thanks Renault). I had one made by my garage (it’s a standard Clio 3 support with the tabs in slightly different locations), and got it painted and cavity waxed.
It was back on the road! It actually felt much better than the old engine, which I think was very leaky and sad. I drove it on the road a bit, and then I took it to Blyton Park. Blyton is a really cool track. I enjoyed it a lot. It’s not a super power-dependent track, it’s quite small. It is also a good track to test your new engine, because it’s mostly 3rd and 4th gear, so I felt like I wasn’t putting too much stress on the car. The car got through this without incident. This was also the first time I had ever tried “semi-slicks” – in this case the Nankang Sportnex AR-1. These tyres are absolutely transformative. Up to this point I had always used Goodyear Eagle F1s, which are a really good all rounder considering they are really a summer UHP tyre – they do well in the wet, they handle abuse quite well, and they aren’t too brash on the road. The way I would describe going from Eagles to AR-1s is like the first time I went from rubbish £60/corner eco tyres to Eagles. I scared myself a few times, because you can absolutely barrel into a corner at ridiculous speeds, brake terrifyingly late, and the car will just stop. I don’t think I managed to lock up the front wheels/trigger the ABS at all on the AR-1s. I had a lot of fun on them. I went out for a session towards the end of the day without dad, and when I got back in, the front brakes were smoking, which is a first for me! The car developed a clunk, which it turned out was the front driver’s side calliper working loose. Bit scary, but easy fix.
The car made it home from this trip. Driving home on the AR-1s was an experience… they were at quite low pressure, so I was pushing my luck a bit trying to keep a bit of temperature in them. They also have really rigid sidewalls so the ride quality on the road is atrocious. Luckily it was dry that day.
The car shortly after started leaking oil at quite a considerable rate… I would drive maybe 20 miles and lose a couple hundred millilitres. My suspicion was that I had dented the sump while being a bit heavy-handed trying to get the engine in place, and abusing it had popped the RTV. I parked it up for a couple of months and went back to the (touch wood) reliable old Mazda6 diesel I keep around. My in-laws were moving house, so I thought I ought to get the Clio back on the road, and maybe sell it, or maybe go full track car with it. I took it back to the garage and they told me that basically every seal on the engine was failing, both mains, oil in the bores, oil from the rocker cover.
So I scrapped it. I got pennies for it. If I had the space, I probably would have either broken it myself, or tried to rebuild the engine, but as I mentioned, I’m in a flat at the mo, so I abandoned.
To my detriment I have always had a soft spot for Clios. My first car was a 1.2 16V Clio Mk.2, which was quite fun, I passed my test in it. I also had another 197, which was pretty good, had a map and a silly cone filter on it and made loads of induction noise. This car has certainly been an adventure, but I’d like the next one to be a bit less needy. Where to next? Probably Japan… or maybe… Sweden? 😈 Anywhere but France.
My current shortlist is:
Mazda MX-5 (NA, NB or NC), Toyota MR-2 (Mk. III) or Volvo 940