So,are you reading this to hear of the misery part?
Well with all the 'why only 230bhp' threads and everyone screaming for 350bhp, I thought that I'd put in my two-penneth to try and save someone the misery - I've not had anything I wasn't expecting on the money front!
This is all my take and am happy to be corrected - you can reply with how you plan to extract 600bhp and blow all of us away - it's just what I've worked out with the development of the rally car over the last three years.
So, firstly, why is the standard car only 230/255bhp - and often short of that? IMHO, the potential for warranty claims means that manufacturers always err on the cautious side. Renault are not a specialist manufacturer and customers have a habit of using and abusing cars for 100,000 miles or more with minimal maintainance. Said customers also get pissed when their car is landed at the side of the road with engine or transmission failure. Consequently, while Renault engineers clearly had the knowledge of how to make the engine make more power, the bean counters put the brake on turning out 100bhp per litre.
I think in essence the reason for the safety net was to protect the transmission which has proved to be the weakest link. The car has massive traction and knowing how unsympathetic clumsy drivers can be, meant that the last thing the warranty dept needed was clutches, shafts and diffs exploding under 300bhp launches.
To cope with more power and give a safety margin, components would need to be uprated and that's an expense that you can't recoup on a niche product like the vee. By way of explaining, compare the rear hub from the Trophy with the one on your roadgoing car....
So, you've bought your 230/255 and understand that you might need to replace bits more often, and you promise to be kind to the transmission. Now you decide to spend your pocket money on upping the power to the 300+bhp that Mr Regie always should have given us.
The initial stages are simple and cheap - first, get the engine in perfect shape with one of Scotty's services! Second, fit a better air filter and a freeflow exhaust - NOT the same as a noisy one! Finally, a 'chip' by any of the firms on this forum.
Realistically, I think this is as far as you can go with off-the-shelf stuff.
Beyond this, tuning naturally aspirated engines is horribly expensive but the V6 is more so, as any of the methods WILL breach the transmission. [smilie=icon_eek.gif]
The big bottleneck with the vee initially is air intake as the single plenum strangles the car. The single throttle body only flows so much air so resolution is either the twin-plenum Trophy setup or multiple throttle bodies on a custom manifold. Around 300 bhp, the Trophy injectors are wide open at full throttle so, t/b's are the only answer much past that.
Past 300bhp, air starts to become a problem, and not just what the engine can draw. The lack of breathing space around the engine bay both limits and disrupts the amount of air that can be sucked in. More so if you intend to leave the standard engine covers on.
Another problem is heat management - we have a bulkhead so no covers, holes in the rear window, side window vents, fans in the air ducts and still can't lose the heat. Engines don't like that sort of environment and it's unlikely that we crawl through traffic like a road car.
Similarly, going bigger capacity is, by all accounts, likely to run you into overheating problems, particularly as you near 3.5-litre, when the water jacket is dangerously thin.
And so to engine management - again, not quite as straight forward as bolting on either. As well as the engineering and cost involved, the management of this much fuel and air not something that a 'remap' of the Renault ECU could take advantage of. Not in a million years...
Enter Motec - or some of the other serious competition. The first myth to explode is that fitting Motec is something that you can just throw at the car - it can allow you to make the best of an engine, but it also can lose you heaps of power or, in my case, cause other management related problems. Fitting Motec is only part of a large commitment to testing, adjusting, checking and more testing. We have had three separate sets of specialists working on the car, all have made improvements but none have so far got it perfect.
Secondly, I don't believe that there is a wealth of knowledge about the V6 that can be transferred to someone going the Motec route. A Group N Evo or Subaru maybe, but all the big power V6 cars have quite different specifications - mine, Mike's Turbo, Tim's NOS car and Mike Sellars' old car on multi throttle bodies with cable rather than fly-by-wire throttle. This means MoTeC is an individual route, not a bolt on. There may be baselines to work from, but no one has a map for your car, it needs to be developed.
If you asked me now, I'd say the simplest way for bigger power would be to go for a Trophy engine along with the Magnetti Marelli ECU. The standard transmission might just live with the 275bhp that you'll get reliably - our engines have been 100%, quite astonishing really.
If you simply have to get 300bhp or more, we are realistically talking of spending £20K+ once you can make it all live together. Surely not I hear you cry. Ask any of the serious car owners and they'll confess! Much more expensive than when we 'talked up the spec'!
If you can find one, you'll need the Sadev sequential 'box, shafts, hubs etc from the Trophy. An engine with the management system and on top of that, budget for at least £5K to get MoTeC or similar bought, fitted, mapped and debugged.
So, good luck with all that, the one thing with these cars is that they do bring out the madness in all of us.....
Well with all the 'why only 230bhp' threads and everyone screaming for 350bhp, I thought that I'd put in my two-penneth to try and save someone the misery - I've not had anything I wasn't expecting on the money front!
This is all my take and am happy to be corrected - you can reply with how you plan to extract 600bhp and blow all of us away - it's just what I've worked out with the development of the rally car over the last three years.
So, firstly, why is the standard car only 230/255bhp - and often short of that? IMHO, the potential for warranty claims means that manufacturers always err on the cautious side. Renault are not a specialist manufacturer and customers have a habit of using and abusing cars for 100,000 miles or more with minimal maintainance. Said customers also get pissed when their car is landed at the side of the road with engine or transmission failure. Consequently, while Renault engineers clearly had the knowledge of how to make the engine make more power, the bean counters put the brake on turning out 100bhp per litre.
I think in essence the reason for the safety net was to protect the transmission which has proved to be the weakest link. The car has massive traction and knowing how unsympathetic clumsy drivers can be, meant that the last thing the warranty dept needed was clutches, shafts and diffs exploding under 300bhp launches.
To cope with more power and give a safety margin, components would need to be uprated and that's an expense that you can't recoup on a niche product like the vee. By way of explaining, compare the rear hub from the Trophy with the one on your roadgoing car....

So, you've bought your 230/255 and understand that you might need to replace bits more often, and you promise to be kind to the transmission. Now you decide to spend your pocket money on upping the power to the 300+bhp that Mr Regie always should have given us.
The initial stages are simple and cheap - first, get the engine in perfect shape with one of Scotty's services! Second, fit a better air filter and a freeflow exhaust - NOT the same as a noisy one! Finally, a 'chip' by any of the firms on this forum.
Realistically, I think this is as far as you can go with off-the-shelf stuff.
Beyond this, tuning naturally aspirated engines is horribly expensive but the V6 is more so, as any of the methods WILL breach the transmission. [smilie=icon_eek.gif]
The big bottleneck with the vee initially is air intake as the single plenum strangles the car. The single throttle body only flows so much air so resolution is either the twin-plenum Trophy setup or multiple throttle bodies on a custom manifold. Around 300 bhp, the Trophy injectors are wide open at full throttle so, t/b's are the only answer much past that.
Past 300bhp, air starts to become a problem, and not just what the engine can draw. The lack of breathing space around the engine bay both limits and disrupts the amount of air that can be sucked in. More so if you intend to leave the standard engine covers on.
Another problem is heat management - we have a bulkhead so no covers, holes in the rear window, side window vents, fans in the air ducts and still can't lose the heat. Engines don't like that sort of environment and it's unlikely that we crawl through traffic like a road car.
Similarly, going bigger capacity is, by all accounts, likely to run you into overheating problems, particularly as you near 3.5-litre, when the water jacket is dangerously thin.
And so to engine management - again, not quite as straight forward as bolting on either. As well as the engineering and cost involved, the management of this much fuel and air not something that a 'remap' of the Renault ECU could take advantage of. Not in a million years...
Enter Motec - or some of the other serious competition. The first myth to explode is that fitting Motec is something that you can just throw at the car - it can allow you to make the best of an engine, but it also can lose you heaps of power or, in my case, cause other management related problems. Fitting Motec is only part of a large commitment to testing, adjusting, checking and more testing. We have had three separate sets of specialists working on the car, all have made improvements but none have so far got it perfect.
Secondly, I don't believe that there is a wealth of knowledge about the V6 that can be transferred to someone going the Motec route. A Group N Evo or Subaru maybe, but all the big power V6 cars have quite different specifications - mine, Mike's Turbo, Tim's NOS car and Mike Sellars' old car on multi throttle bodies with cable rather than fly-by-wire throttle. This means MoTeC is an individual route, not a bolt on. There may be baselines to work from, but no one has a map for your car, it needs to be developed.
If you asked me now, I'd say the simplest way for bigger power would be to go for a Trophy engine along with the Magnetti Marelli ECU. The standard transmission might just live with the 275bhp that you'll get reliably - our engines have been 100%, quite astonishing really.
If you simply have to get 300bhp or more, we are realistically talking of spending £20K+ once you can make it all live together. Surely not I hear you cry. Ask any of the serious car owners and they'll confess! Much more expensive than when we 'talked up the spec'!
If you can find one, you'll need the Sadev sequential 'box, shafts, hubs etc from the Trophy. An engine with the management system and on top of that, budget for at least £5K to get MoTeC or similar bought, fitted, mapped and debugged.
So, good luck with all that, the one thing with these cars is that they do bring out the madness in all of us.....