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What was your problem? I've got Thule racks. They were the only ones I could find that didn't involve drilling holes in the roof and permanent fitting. The dealer ordered mine, then when they arrived he fitted them with me watching to adjust the width correctly and show me how to do it the...

Mark's posting is relevant because it talks about guys trying to get lots of power out of a 1.9 litre Rover K-series engine, and that engine is similar in a lot of ways to the Clio Sport. Its about the same vintage in terms of when it was designed. Its a longish-stroke four-valve twin-cam four...

power to weight is a useful measure because it tells you what acceleration times the cars is capable of. Of course to get those best times you have to rev the engine out to the revs it produces its maximum power at in each gear. torque to weight isn't a very useful measure by itself but in...

Sticks up a little, but not a lot. If you put some weight on it it ends up flat. But you also probably end up with the leather crumpled in places. It would have been nice if they'd tried a bit harder to design it so you had a flat surface when the seat is folded. Instead of the boot opening...

If a high CR is always better, and its just a matter of mapping it "properly", why do Clio sports "only" run 11.2:1? Why don't they run 12 to one standard? 13? 14? 15? 16? And why do most cars run far lower CRs? The answer is that its not just a matter of mapping it "properly". For any given...

Renault's figures are for power at the flywheel. Chassis dynos measure power at the wheels. Any chassis dyno that quotes power and torque figures that are anywhere near Renault's figures is simply lying. Its inflating the numbers to stroke the egos of its customers. The dyno mine was done...

Well, yeah, right, who wouldn't believe the company selling them to be telling the truth. Oh and on a different subject I've got this waterfront land I'm sure you'd be interested in buying. You can come look at it. Just make sure its high tide.

12:1 pistons? Wouldn't be a bad idea if you were converting to LPG. It'd be a pretty expensive modification with a poor payoff in terms of increased power and torque for an ordinary road car. Its the sort of thing you'd include if you were going to build a rally car and you werre going to run...

You seem to be suggesting to use it hard soon. So why does Renault say lay off a new car for 1,000 kms/miles or so? The wisdom used to be that the faster you run a car in the faster it gets to maximum power and the faster it wears out. Which is OK for a race engine. And good for business for...

Will the gearbox take the increased torque?

Actually Stan its more complicated than that. Lots of turboed bike powered machines have gearboxes and drive chains (and diffs in the case of bike-powered cars) that shouldn't be holding up but do. Because they don't have enough weight to generate enough traction that you can open up the...

Poxy. As in having "the pox". Smallpox or cow pox or chicken pox or whatever other sort of pox that causes pocks and pustules in the skin.

What blows up gearboxes isn't power. Its torque. The JC5 is rated to handle up to 240 nm. Turboing increases torque as well as power. How much torque does your turbo engine produce?

As I've advised in another thread basic physics dictates certain relationships between various performance results and power or power to weight. The real world is more complicated than a physics equation, but you can estimate roughly how much extra power you've got from what performance figures...

F=ma a=F/m It is not power that accelerates you, it is force, in this case engine torque converted to tractive force by whichever of the car's tyres are driven. Ek=1/2.mv^2 Power doesn't accelerate you, it adds to your kinetic energy, and that goes up with the square of speed, so a constant...

The problem is "quick" can mean different things. You can mean "responsive", ie, torquey, that is you're cruising along and you put you foot on the throttle and you get immediate strong acceleration to pull out and quickly and safely pass the car in front of you. Big American V8s and diesels...

If you have a computer with a CD or DVD player in it you'll find if you look closely that it has a small hole that you can push the end of a paper clip into to force it to eject a disk. I expected to find one on the player in the Renault. But it doesn't seem to have one that I can see from...

They don't NCAP every variant of a model. The manufacturer may crash test a whole lot of cars during development but the NCAP people only do what they believe to be a representative sample based on whether there a variations in the crash structure and the safety equipment. I can't see from their...

Yes there was a roll on Top Gear. Hamster rolled a jet car at nearly 300 mph.

There are couple of reasons CDs get stuck. 1. the player got confused by you turning off the ignition while it was playing. The fix to this is usually just to cycle the player, to power it off and back on again. Like rebooting your PC. If there's nothing wrong with the CD but cycling the...

Sorry Edde, you know more about what you are talking about than anyone else in this thread, but you are wrong that aero drag is the only reason acceleration is lower in higher gears than in lower gears. Speed is acceleration times time. Acceleration is proportional to force applied. Power is...

A question, anyone.... why do you need an injector cover? why do injectors need to be covered?

You'all are mixing up two things. Or maybe even three. Some cars have projector-type low beams. If you look at the headlight from the front you see a lense rather than a reflector with a globe in the middle of it. Projector-type headlights cut glare. They have the side effect that the lense...

You can get slow punctures. You can get faulty valves that leak slowly. You can get porous mag wheel that leak air slowly - very unlikely in the cause of OEM wheels, but possible if you have cheap third-party wheels. You can get wheels that aren't seated properly, maybe there was a bit of paint...

Show or go? If you want show, fit 17s. Bigger wheels look good. People who don't actually know anything about the subject, ie, most people, think they're better. So if you want to impress most people, that's what to fit. If you want go, fit 15s, they're lighter. Lighter wheels do everything...

Look at the cross section of a wheel and you see there are lips on the outer edge of the rim that the beads of the tyre are inflated out against. And there's deep trough in the centre of the rim so that you can fit the tyre to the rim. The problem has always been with that way of making wheels...

There is always a price to pay for downforce. You can't get it for free. It costs you in terms of some drag. But have you seen in racing, especially US type high speed sedan car classes on superspeedways, where they say the car behind is getting sucked along by the car ahead. Cars aren't shaped...

Good point Baldylocks. You are exactly right in your conclusion. Given the choice of a V6-style spoiler sticking up at the trailing edge of the roof, or a mk 3 style diffuser, you'd choose the diffuser. Which may be why Renault did. Both the spoiler and the diffuser would generate downforce, but...

Yes, right, if you want to be technically correct, what a diffuser produces is "negative" lift. Ie, downforce. But there isn't any point in "positive" lift in a car, for the same reason there isn't any point in producing "negative" lift in a plane, so everyone just calls it "lift" and "l/d...

It is quite amazing how much loghter cars used to be before they had all the crash safety and air bags and air conditioning and electric everything. And how much more powerful engines with twin cams and four valves and fuel injection are than they used to be. The way to getting a fantastic power...