05 Apr Clio 172/182 Engine Mods
This must be about the most asked question on the club Facebook group: How can I cheaply get gains in power from my clio 172/182?
The short answer to that question is “unless you have a fault that is causing it to lose power, you cant in terms of the peak figures”.
The standard map is too lean upto 5K rpm, so they are particuarly sluggish under that, so a remap to sort that is well worth doing for that reason (RS Tuner devices are a popular way to sort this) but despite loads of companies making false claims otherwise it wont increase the top end power figure significantly.
The cam timing on these cars is critical, and often set wrong by inexperienced backstreet garages or sloppy main dealer mechanics who dont care enough, so if your car feels particularly slow compared to other clios, its well worth getting that looked at by a reputable specialist like SJM / MWM / Diamond Motors / BTM as it may be out of alignment, in which case there is a cheap way to get back upto the power it should be by correcting this.
But if your clio is already healthy, then actually gaining power over what they are from the factory is not an easy thing to do to a big extent without spend a lot of money.
Decat / Exhaust / Induction Kit / Remap is not particularly expensive and does free up a few bhp, but beyond that you are heading towards spending 4 figures to get any meaningful gains.
If you have more money to spend, a decent set of uprated cams (which require a remap to suit) can add 10-15bhp realistically, but the only time they make financial sense really is if you are paying to have the belts changed anyway, as otherwise that’s an extra 400-500 pounds on top of the price of the cams themselves.
Turbo conversions are great, and these more than a lot of other N/A engines do respond well to the addition of a turbo charger. A realistic figure from a standard engine with a turbo conversion is around 230bhp, and cost for this will be around the 3-4K mark from a reputable supplier like www.ClioTurbo.co.uk
Throttle bodies and Cams combined if you want to see decent gains but still remain N/A on a standard internals engine can see around the 210bhp mark, but again the cost realistically will be in the 3-4K ballpark as it involves the fitting of aftermarket management as well as the labour intensive job of changing the cams.
Our advice? Spend the money on things like a suspension and steering joints refresh and uprated suspension first to sort the handling before you start throwing loads of money at trying to get more power, corners are what these cars do especially well and can be made to do even better for a more sensible budget than trying to improve their straight line pace.
