Megane RS225 Trophy - Track Build

[YannikS]

Hello everyone,

I've always wanted to make a build thread for my car but me being from a younger generation I guess I never had any affection with forums since things like Instagram and Facebook are kind of what I grew up with. I know that @Daan2d shares a build thread about his Twingo RS133 on here too so I felt inspired to share a bit about my car aswell.
I've owned my Trophy since 2018 and ever since first buying it I've always worked on the car really, slowly going from fast daily to clubsport and now, in it's awfully uncomfortable final form, it's a track- only car mainly build for the Nordschleife.
Incredibly lucky to live only roughly 1 hour away from the Nordschleife and only 1 hour from Spa-Francorchamps and Circuit Zolder it was pretty inevitable to build a tracktool eventually.
My very good friend @Daan2d has helped me A LOT building this car, I'd say that 75% of the car we've build together or side by side when he was working on his own cars. He's the reason I bought my Trophy after making me fall in love with the Renault Sport platform earlier.

This build thread won't be chronological anymore since I've had the car for way too long and most smaller bits (like Ph.2 taillights) will be left out since it seems irrelevant over the course of the entire build, but I'll try to post as many things as possible in a somewhat logical order dating back from 201x up to now. Over the years I've added a lot of modifications and even some self-build stuff to the car to make it absolutely perfect for my desires and wishes, this all of course on top of the maintenance a track-only car needs - I think that's kind of self-explanatory anyway.

I've added a couple of pictures of my car as it is now and a pretty complete speclist;

Megane 2 RS225 Trophy - Tracktool

Engine & Drivetrain
- Stock RS225 internals
- Remapped to 280hp & 400Nm by Fastchip
- Airtec intercooler
- Forge hard-pipe kit
- Forge recirculation valve
- Megane 3 RS TD04-15T turbo
- Megane 3 RS fuel rail
- GT-Performance 2.75'' downpipe w/ 200-cell cat
- 3'' KTEC exhaust
- Sandvichplate w/ sensors for oil pressure & oil temperature
- Refurbed gearbox w/ Quaife diff
- PMS Single-Mass-Flywheel
- R26R Clutch pack
- Powerflex engine & gearbox mounts
- Megane 3 RS Brembo's w/ redrilled ø340mm discs (5x108 PCD)


Suspension & Wheels
- KW Competition 2a w/ Custom Racetec springrates
- ø21mm R26 front ARB w/ purple Powerflex bushings
- Superpro adjustable droplinks
- Megane 3 RS rear axle converted to 5x108 PCD and Megane 2 RS ph.2 rear calipers
- Clio 3 RS hubs & wishbones w/ Clio 3 RS ABS Sensors
- Complete braided brake lines front & rear
- Speedline Turini 18x8J wheels
- Yokohama A052 tires

Interior & miscellaneous
- Stripped out interior: removed everything including airbags, isolation & tar mats
- Removed spare wheel booth & covered with carbon plate
- Track doorcards
- Partially stripped the loom
- Lightweight LiFePo4 battery
- ZPO Carbon shifter
- Sparco Grid Q w/ Sparco sidemounts and Jon Fossard low subframes
- Sparco 6-point harnass
- Raid oil- & turbopressure gauges + oil temperature gauges
- Alcantara steering wheel & armrest done by the legend himself, Snappy
- Duct3d brake cooling w/ R26R washer bottle
- Safety Devices rollbar
- R26R spoiler painted in Nimbus Grey

A decent but efficient speclist, a lot of these things have just been done bit by bit so the entire build just went on and improved over time. My idea is to post these mods bit by bit and cover it with some pictures, I've got over 1200+ pictures documenting pretty much everything I've done to the car.
The most important part about a build like this is sharing the passion and together with @Daan2d I'm doing just that, we've been to track together countless times and not a single time has been anything but absolute fun! This year we've both bought a Season Card for the Nordschleife and we're looking forward to many, many laps on the world's best racetrack!

Looking forward to sharing more and keeping this up to date.

 

[andybond]

Great first post!

Spa and Zolder are on my list of to-do tracks!

Thanks for taking time to post. Will be following

 

[Daan2d]

Hi mate. Fun to read this threat. Sometimes i forget how much time we spend building cars and tracking them.

Nice to see you took some time to post here

 

[Aldo]

Why do Turinis seem to suit every car!? Very smart

 

[Brigsy]

Looks great on the turinis

 

[YannikS]

@andybond Thank you. Circuit Zolder is definitely something I can recommend, it's a very fast paced track and relatively short, like most UK tracks. It's a proper brake and tire killer, I'd suggest you only book half a day if you somewhat love your car.
Spa is Spa, it's legendary status speaks for itself. Definitely a rollercoaster of an experience and it doesn't feel slow at all even though it's fairly wide and ''modern'' so to say.

@Daan2d sometimes it's easy to forget how much cars we've repaired, driven or fiddled with over the last 4 years while also building our own, kind of crazy really... not to mention how much things have broken on our own cars!

@Aldo @Brigsy Thank you, I absolutely love these wheels. They look very motorsport-y and are also fairly light for a wheel not being super expensive. Without the car being low they kind of looked like 17's, but with the right ride height and these Yoko A052's on they look super beefy, I love it. I lost most of my centercaps by now though, still haven't found any new ones.

ps. does anyone know if there is a way to keep the foto's in posts small, just like when I'm not logged into my account? I kind of prefer it over the big foto size in posts.

 

[andybond]

Thumbnails are what you want for your photos. I think you are wrong mind and actually want full versions





Upload the image , then press insert --> Thumbnail

 

[Brigsy]

Loads of centre caps on ebay. SPEEDLINE CORSE ALLOY WHEEL SILVER CENTRE CAP (1) with Plastic Back 60mm | eBay

Mrs has turinis on her 225. Et60 from memory, what et are yours?

 

[YannikS]

Loads of centre caps on ebay. SPEEDLINE CORSE ALLOY WHEEL SILVER CENTRE CAP (1) with Plastic Back 60mm | eBay

Mrs has turinis on her 225. Et60 from memory, what et are yours?

Oh great, thanks! Will order a set of those, they look right. I think mine are a bit lower than ET60, I think something like ET55 but honestly I'm not sure, might be ET60 too. With the Megane 3 RS rear axle on they just fit on the rear, on the front there is room for a spacer (which I'm running).

 

[YannikS]

Megane 3 RS Brembo conversion

Shortly after buying the car in 2018 this was probably the first mod I've done bar changing the taillights to phase 2 ones. The calipers I bought from @Daan2d who, before selling them to me, had bought them from some German guy himself. The calipers were a painted half red, half banana-that-isn't-ripe-yet-yellow, I guess the guy never took them off when giving them a lick of paint.

I'm very lucky to work in a firm that does a lot of mechanical work for electrical engine drives and pumps so I've always got access to a sandblasting cabin which made quick work of the old paint and left a perfect finish (thanks to fine glas-grid) to get them powdercoated. Widened the pass-through for the brake lines a bit so the braided brake lines fit on the calipers and then got them powdercoated. I went for a funky RAL6027 color in a satin-gloss finish which would later become the kind of main accent colour of the car.
Refurbed the calipers with new seals, bleed nipples and pistons. @Daan2d then applied a very nice Renault-Sport sticker (too much basic Brembo stickers going around already) and then gave them a nice coat of Gtechniq C5 Wheel Armour, which kind of did it's job for 1-2 years but I never bothered to re-coat them. They're fresh from a far but most brake dirt has embedded itself in the powdercoat by now.

I was lucky enough to still be able to buy a proper conversion kit, I can't remember the name of the guy that made them but they are proper aluminium brackets that fit perfectly just like the hub rings. Came with longer 10.9 grade allen-key bolts too... overal a very nice kit. Over the years I've seen some extremely cheap made kits with 2 individual brackets or even simple washers to make the caliper fit over the ø340mm disks. I can't wrap my head around people fiddling cheap stuff around their brakes but oh well.
The ø340 Brembo HC discs were redrilled by a local machine shop, easy enough since I handed them over a CNC-drawing which had the exact coordinates on them.
Topped everything off with Motul RBF660 and a set of braided brake lines.

I'm pretty sure this was the first mod I ever did on the car (according to my foto album anyway) and to this day it's one best mods one can do to this car. Brake feel is better, there's a lot more bite in the bigger pads/discs combo and most pads are cheaper too since this caliper platform is shared by many other cars around the world.

Added some pictures in chronological order down below since I can't format them properly in the post and it bugs my OCD.

 

[DaveL485]

Spa and Zolder are on my list of to-do tracks!

Spa is phenomenal but you need a lot of power to make it really zing, its SO long.

 

[YannikS]

Safety Devices Roll- & Harnessbar

I bought this Safety Devices (at least I think so) roll- & harnessbar from a friend local to me way back. The cage was initially mounted in his R25 and still in UK spec, meaning there was only one diagonal bar going to the passenger side, which obviously would be the driver side for you guys over there.
I didn't really like that it wasn't a proper cross rollbar so I stripped the old, black paint of it and got it blasted at a place somewhere nearby because the bloody thing wouldn't fit in our own sandblasting machine. This actually revealed quite some bad welding spots that were kind of hidden under a layer of putty, primer and paint, so other than also getting the crossbar welded in I also got all welds re-done.
After having that done I sent the cage over the the powdercoater together with the Megane 3 RS calipers so the guy did all of it together for a fair price, again in the same funky RAL6027 colour.

Fitting this was fairly easy, luckily @Daan2d already fitted this exact cage to the R25 it came of before so we knew we had to take out the (then stock) seats and center console together with the rear seats. The rear harness bar was even easier, just had to cut out some trim to re-fit that back into place. Back then I still had a clubsport idea in mind so I wanted to keep the rear floormats and interior trim in place. Finished the floor off with a KTEC boot mat which I was really lucky to find 2nd hand somewhere on German eBay, I swear these things never pop up for sale over here.

Obviously, this modification wouldn't last long before it bothered me how weird a rollbar looked without seats to match, so the search for proper seats started from here...
The roll- & harnessbar are still in the car these days and luckily I've never had to experience it's safety-properties on track but obviously this is better to have than not to, even though in the future I'd like to fit a fully welded cage to my car since I feel like I've reached a certain speed where it just makes way more sense and is a lot safer than just a rollbar.

Added some pictures in chronological order down below since I can't format them properly in the post and it bugs my OCD.

 

[RS_Rowe]

That welding is shocking, more so if it's actually from SD

 

[DaveL485]

That welding is shocking, more so if it's actually from SD

Yeah thats not great is it! Good job it was spotted.

 

[YannikS]

That welding is shocking, more so if it's actually from SD

Yes I was shocked too! Pretty weird that it's been like this from factory, but honestly this thing could've been 3rd hand by now so I guess I'll never really find out where it got this bad. Like I said I'm also not sure if it really is a SD rollcage but it comes closest to it, it might be an older model really... don't forget that even 2008 is already 15 years ago!

Yeah thats not great is it! Good job it was spotted.

Yeah I'm glad I spotted it and got it all rewelded before powdercoating it. Like I said, I hope I don't ever need it's features but if it be so, it should work proper at least...

 

[YannikS]

a bit of a summary of parts & bits that I found in my photo folder, thought I might aswell put some of them in one post before making seperate ones. Keep in mind, we're still 2 years away from the car in it's current state, seeing how the car used to be with a full interior and as a Clubsport-idea really puts into perspective how much things I stripped from it in the end. Definitely can never go back to stock ever again!

Sparco REV bucket seats & Accessoires
Just like everything else for the Megane I bought these bucket seats 2nd hand, back then I bought them from a guy who outgrew them... little did I know I would too a couple of years later, when I bought these seats I was easily 15kg lighter than I am today!
With the seats I bought a new pair of Sparco sidemounts and all necessities to mount a 6-point harness. Short time later I found a guy in the UK who sold me his 2nd hand Jon Fossard low & long subframes, this was before brexit so getting them over here was actually quite easy back then and not very expensive. A lucky find really as these never really come up. By far the best subframes for the Megane 2 RS in my opinion, they get you really low and centralize your seating position so you're dead center in front of the steering wheel.
Installed the subframes, sidemounts, seats and harnasses and they fit really nicely with the center console too. Back then I also had sliders mounted but they starting squeeking after a week or so so I got rid of them again and just went for fixed seats.
As of today I actually swapped the Sparco REV's out for a single Sparco Grid QRT which is a bit wider and the leg-supports are higher, the REV's are seriously small.


Retrimmed interior parts by Snappy
As a sidenote I also had my steering wheel, shift-gaitor & knob center console and armrest retrimmed in alcantara with matching accent stitching which I fitted not that much later. One of the only things that are still left in my car today actually bar the shifter which I later replaced with a ZPO shifter. The quality Snappy delivers is second to none... still holds up insanely well today, 2-3 years later, even the wheel looks barely used today.


Megane 3 RS Fuel Rail
Parellel to getting everything ready to mount the seats I got hands on a Megane 3 RS fuel rail, an idea which @Daan2d also used back when he had his Megane 2 RS. The rail is basically plug 'n play, you just have to tie-wrap one of the holes to the exisiting hole on the engine head since the rail is offset a little. Since you can use one of the existing bolts/holes and the other one is tiewrapped the thing doesn't move a bit and I've ran this for years without problems.
The Mk3 is stainless steel as opposed to the Mk2 rail being plastic and the fuel-entry is in the center instead of to the left on the Mk2 rail. Whether this actually matters or not I don't know but it's a cool peace of mind item.
Had to make a bung on the lathe real to close off original rising-rate-fuel-pressure-thingy on the Mk3 rail.

Thanks for reading again... I think I might summarize one more post with some little bits and then I'll make the step to the car as it is today, with 197 hubs and wishbones, Mk3 rear axle with 5x108 PCD conversion, KW Competition suspension, etc. Probably a lot more interesting to a lot of people in it's current state.

As per usual, some pictures below.

 

[andybond]

197 hubs and wishbones,

Interesting! Will be following for sure

 

[Daan2d]

This thread needs to be updated