Zubans LY RS200

About time I got on with this car again.

finally dealt with the manifold rubbing the arb, I had power flex inserts in all the mounts, kept trying to adjust the engine position to get the clearance but even if I did it never lasted and it was rubbing again. Found that the dogbone small end where there is no insert has split and no matter what I did it allowed the engine to tilt back, so the cure was a set of PMS competition mounts and once fitted and positioned the rubbing is gone at last!

so next I had the car corner weighted and the geometry checked.The car came in at 1121kg with fluids and half a tank of fuel and 1207kg with me in it. Not bad given there is still plenty of areas I can pull weight from it.

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Overall it just needed a bit of toe out on the front as it wasn’t as stable as I wanted under braking and its much better now.

by the way anyone looking to have their car setup for fast road/track/sprint use etc and you live in the north of Scotland, I cant recommend Stephen at Sports car services in Elgin enough, I'd just asked for the geometry to be checked and tweaked, but he had the scales ready which I was delighted with.

Balance overall wasn't bad at all and he suggested some minor changes to improve it, unfortunately I'm at the limits of adjustment with the current setup, so finished up with 2 degrees camber and 2mm toe out at the front and 1.7-1.9 degrees camber and 3mm toe in at the rear. We would have increased it to 2.5 degrees on the front but 2 was as much as we could get with the top mount. Will see how we get on with it as is I'm hoping to get it to a sprint track mid April for a few test laps. I had a little bit of imbalance under braking since rebuilding the front end, and thankfully this last step has gotten rid of it so I can stomp on them hard with confidence again.
 
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After having the car weighed its inspired me to have another round of weight saving, one thing that always bothered me was my seat mounts which were pretty heavy at 6.5kg per side, and I wanted to sit a little higher as I've never been truly happy with the height of the seat.

I checked round all the makers of direct to floor side mounts and either the height to the top hole wasn't listed, or they didn't answer my queries, or like the pure motorsport set was not even as high as the set I had. So with few options left I decided to make my own so knocked up a design, purchased some 5mm aluminium alloy 6080 plate and 6.3mm angle and gave it a go.

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First test fit

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Apologise with the state of my floor, its getting repainted and a foot plate put in soon once I've done some behind the dash stuff.

Pretty happy with the first go, once bolted up they are very sturdy and rigid, and come in around 5kg lighter per seat than the previous mounts at just over 1.5kg per seat. that saving along with my new seats which are 2kg lighter per seat than the old ones, saves me 14kg overall. I only have one seat fitted at the moment so the car is currently around 1097kg (wet with 50% fuel) and you certainly feel the difference.
 
In my head, I class everything I've done to the car up to now as phase 1 which is complete. The new seats and seat mounts are phase 2 beginning and i've got a few different things that I'm working on that may or may not come to fruition.

One of the things is to implement a 16x8 wheel and 225/45/r16 semi slick for track/sprint use, i ordered these rims back in February and they randomly turned up yesterday, managed a quick test fit at the front and its going to be touch and go as to whether they will fit under the arches, but thats all to work out. they are only going to be about 800 grams heavier than the current 16x7 wheel as i can drop the spacer. The photo's don't really show off the dish but they will certainly stand out when on the car.

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Et25 which will mean they stick out 5 more than the current 16x7 et40 with a 10mm spacer, but as these are 16x8 I’m expecting to have some issues with the arches, won’t know till I get some tyres on them
 
yeah i was referring to the change in et ending up; being 5mm over my current wheels, bad wording, it hopefully wont quite be 17.7mm as the shoulder of the tyre will come into play, but I wont know until I have tyres on if I have an issue and camber also plays its part
 
Et25 which will mean they stick out 5 more than the current 16x7 et40 with a 10mm spacer, but as these are 16x8 I’m expecting to have some issues with the arches, won’t know till I get some tyres on them
Good luck with that haha
 
have made some small progress since last update.

Weight is down to around 1080kg and working on taking some more out. The alloy seat mount has held up fine to all manner of driving situations and remains completely rigid which is good.

Gave the engine and gearbox an oil change with some expensive millers oil. The oil that came out also showed no sign of anything to worry about which is good. Chucked the old JR pod filter and replaced it with a new ramair proram filter with new silicon elbow etc, waiting on parts to relocate the battery and then will be making some cold air feed etc for that.

I've been looking into alternative alternator solutions to cut weight, but as a decent interim I've fitted a mk2 clio lightweight pulley connected to the standard alternator with a stretch belt. I hacked the alternator bracket in half as well saving another kilo, This setup underdrives the alternator, and allows the tensioner and aircon/idler to be removed saving over 3kg overall.

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Seeing as i've done the timing belt myself, its always been on my mind to get the car to a dyno to make sure i've done it right and its not down on power, with the weight of the car significantly less than when i started it could mask a loss of power. So I took it through to MB garage services and motorsport near Aberdeen, a lot of sprint cars from the area use them as well as some SLS competitors etc so seemed a good shout,

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Good news is as suspected the engine is healthy with just the usual flatspot around 3krpm made worse by the removal of the first cat, hopefully having it mapped eventually will get rid of that but its not really a problem. Performance was strong given the spec and the dyno operator got out of the car and basically congratulated me on how well it did, specifically commenting on how normally he'd have backed off the throttle as power started to taper off, but my car was still increasing in power as it hit the limiter. Surprising given its still on the standard cams.

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So all in pretty happy and i've got my baseline for future engine mods.
 
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Been looking back over the graph's and its crazy how bad the AFR get's after 2500rpm until it clears up around 3000-3500rpm, its not a problem on circuit as you are never really in this area, but it does make you look a bit of a fool pulling out a junction sometimes.. but its all good I had a target in mind of 200bhp per ton for phase 2, and thought I was still a long way from that but turns out I was a lot closer than I thought.

The engine is currently mapped to the RStuner stage 1 map from Henk, I did ask him if he would do a map that gave a few hundred more rpm on the limit but he wont do it unless the engine has internal upgrades, which I understand from a business point of view. It does look like the power is just tailing off as it gets to 7500rpm, so possibly not a big deal just need to pay a bit more attention to when its time to shift.

The most likely route for me next is to go for the ecumaster aftermarket ecu as the garage that ran the dyno are experienced tuning those, and then cam's, but that's a big investment so will be a long way off.
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Next thing to do is MOT is due early July so I'm going to leave it alone till then, once its passed the cooling system is the next target for some tweaking.
 
Not much going on at the moment as i've been waiting to get through the MOT, put it in on monday and it failed on a corroded brake pipe, the long one that runs across the rear beam. It looked fine apart from where the pipe sat in the clips where the paint had stripped and the pipe had swollen up in one of them clips.

Not a big deal to change about 20 minutes work all in and was £41 for a new pipe, but worth a check as the MOT tester told me its a common area for the pipes to go on both the Clio's and Megane.

Other than that apart from some minor things like number plate lights, and some uneven wear on the rear discs it passed later on in the week, no issues with the latest changes to the seat mounts and also only have the drivers seat installed. My car doesnt do a lot of miles, but the miles it does are hard and it always impresses me how tough these cars are when looked after.

One of the changes I have a made recently is not running the rear diffuser and wing, I'm not finding any issues a result, its certainly not going to be an issue when I'm at the sprint track, but it saves about 10kg of weight. I revisited some of the old CFD I did, and whilst I could show the diffuser and wing was working, the sims I ran without them showed that the numbers were not huge between with and without. I remember the conclusion I came to at the time was that whilst they do have an effect, the volume of the diffuser isn't enough to give a large effect, especially on a 200 which has less diffuser volume than the 197.

The other thing I did was free up and soften up the suspension adjustments, the car is almost 200kg lighter than stock now, so having softened up the suspension quite a lot compared to where it started with the full interior, I've found myself picking up speed in almost every circumstance since doing it.

Little bit of a break in terms of mods for the next while, my other car is a 4.2tdi v8 q7, and its needing some attention, but once its sorted as I said planning on looking at the cooling system.

Would be interested to know from those who have replaced the oem heater matrix with a a lightweight heater for the screen what they used and how they have found it.
 
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Was setting up my camera's as something to do in the middle of some upgrades for the Q7, and getting my wife's new workplace ready, and recorded an acceleration vid of the Clio on a nice flat bit of private road I have access to, the camera's built in mic cant handle the noise.

I need an independent audio recorder for in car and engine sound if anyone has some recommendations please let me know.

 
Thankfully I can now turn my attention away from the family car the Q7, fresh MOT and near 400BHP of twin turbo diesel V8 goodness put to bed for the next while. Focus is back on the Clio.


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The 16 x 8 inch wheels are now on, ET25, no spacers and fits fine, fronts only, the rears are 16 x 7 et40 with a 10mm spacer, 225/45 front tyres and 205/50 rears are now fitted.
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Regarding the sound issues with the car being too loud to record, I got a tascam dr-05 field recorder and can now record fine as it has enough settings to be able to adjust.
 
The clio is off the road whilst the brake calipers are sent off to be rebuilt, so i'm cracking on with some other jobs, one of which may be of interest to others.

I had originally intended to use an arduino to get canbus info and display it on a small display, but when thinking about it recently I had a few thoughts.

I have the RStuner odbii usb interface which can read all the data i need and log it. However having a laptop in the car during runs is not ideal, so I came up with this.IMG_3214.jpg

Rasperry Pi 4 running windows 11, laptops a power source only for testing it will be wired into the car directly once in place, running the RStuner software in x86 emulation mode and it works, have done dozens of hours of testing connected to the unit, still to do a decent amount of live data logging with it as i'm waiting on the brakes coming back.

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The idea is to have a small touch screen in the dash where the old hvac control's were as i'm also removing them and going to a small t7design heater. It will be switched and weigh about half a kg and just turn it on when i want to datalog or do diagnostics.
 
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