Following a wonderful day at the TurboRenault national day 2017 at Blyton Park I knew something was still awry with my R26, there was a grinding noise coming from the car during left hand bends, and I was struggling to get 5th and 6th gears whilst on track. So I took it back to Mark Black at Midland Renault Services for him to diagnose.
Picked it up and he'd found another couple of things wrong with the car which he replaced. First of all he found the largest bearing set in the gearbox was on its way out which was causing the noise I heard on the video

Next he found that the nylon bushing in the gearshift assembly was also worn and allowed some movement in the shift:
Whilst Mark had all of the gearbox apart he also fitted a new short shift mechanism to the gearbox to further improve the shift quality.
With that work done, I collected the car and everything seemed great again!!! So I drove the car home with a smile on my face!!

Unfortunately though, the closer I got home the more I started to get more

. The old problem of not wanting to engage 5th or 6th gear had returned..
I was feeling pretty p1ssed off I would again have to take my car back to Mark to figure out what was wrong but before I started with that game again, I thought I would give the gearshift mechanism a once over myself to see if I could see anything obvious??
Nothing was looking crazily wrong, but after a little poke with my finger I found this floating around:

Knowing that this was made of Nylon, I figured it was designed to be some sort of bushing I started to dig a little deeper and pulled the centre console out and got access to the bottom of the gearshift. Didn't take me too long to spot this:
I found that the nylon part I fished out was part of this locator which stops the side to side movement of the gearshift lever:

So now I found what's broken, how to fix it?? Order a new part from Renault? Yes I probably could, but id have to find the part number first so I opted for the old bodget & scarper method :dz:

Put it all back together in the car this evening... and low and behold, it's again a new car!!!! Fecking delighted with myself!!
