Love hate 197

[woot woot]

Hi all,
I thought I would just provide a condensed highlight real of my owner ship of 197 i have owned since 2018.
Cutting this down really makes it seem like a lot of money has gone in a short time and the car looks the same for the most part still hahah.
I live in Victoria Australia and have a thread on OZrenault sport but its a pain to copy it, as the photos get lost when copying the content.

When i purchased it, the car was mostly stock besides an Akrapovic exhaust and green cotton panel filter.

I also did the usual power flex upper torque arm bush as the mount was stuffed and fell out

I got the MAP sensor bracket also

I also wanted to keep the car looking fairly OEM but got a Maxton rear boot lip thingy

I also updated the stereo to a Sony headunit with the Connect 2 harness, man that was a pain in the arse to figure out why the steering wheel controls would not work properly. You have to open the connect 2 box and change the last DIM switch to enable Sony and Kenwood stereos to work with the harness


Will dig up more photos soon also.
Thanks for reading so far, and my apologies for the short nature as i try to get this up to current day

 

[massiveCoRbyn]

Are there many 197s in Oz? I do miss mine. Wasn't perfect, but they are a lot of fun.

 

[woot woot]

Are there many 197s in Oz? I do miss mine. Wasn't perfect, but they are a lot of fun.

Honestly not a huge amount. We didn't get the options you guys got in terms of Full fat, cup and Lux. We only got the regular non cup 197 which i have with climate control and 40 cup editions with the recaros and cup suspension.
They are not common here and the services and parts are a bit poo to say the least, but there is some good knowledge here but you have to know where to look. Parts are usually cheaper to source from UK even with postage as the company that runs the parts here for Renault want your first born for OEM

 

[woot woot]

Again apologies for the brokenness of the posts as I try to get this up to speed with scattered photos.
I ended up getting Bilstein B14s for a birthday present from my wife and went about installing them and hit the dreaded front shock removal. truth be told that did not go well and i decided i needed to pay someone to do that for me.

A little while after getting the front installed i noticed that the rear was quite firm and not the same as the front in terms of bump absorption. The rear was already set at the max height as I live on some terrible roads and need the clearance.
I took out the rear shocks and check the travel against the bump stop. Even on the hightest setting the shock was pretty much riding on the bump stop. so some measurement later i took about 1.5cm off it

The ride now seemed to match the front over bumps better now. They are actually hard to cut through hence the crooked cut haha