First launched in 2010, the Renault Megane RS 250 proved to be very successful for Renault and its no wonder why when you set eyes on one. But beneath the svelt lines and flowing curves is a very well designed chassis supported by a capable power plant in the 2.0 F4R motor. This combination has earned the Megane RS 250 the reputation of a giant killer laying waste to the lap times of what are on paper much faster cars.
Whilst the RS 250 is more than capable of finding its way around the track in a quick clip it does feel a little under powered lower down in stock form. Thankfully Renault have provided a suitable platform for extracting more power which is easily accessed with tuning which will lift the stock figures by over 10%. Post tune it really does feel that the Megane should have always come with 10% more power, something which Renault eventually delivered when they brought out the RS 275 in 2014.
So an extra 10% is nice for the occasional trackday, but more power is really needed to unleash its full potential. At Race Spec Tuning we’re always up for some investigative modding and when a low km RS 250 came up in Canberra it was quickly acquired. Before we could get started we attended to the basics calling in RenoTech for a 60k service and belts.
After the initial round of tuning we found that whilst we found more power, we were unable to extract much improvement in torque. The only physical difference with a stock car was the “hotdog” a previous owner had installed. Once the hotdog was removed we found another 40Nm of torque and the planets were once again in alignment. With the hotdog removed and stage 1 tune installed the Megane was now doing 163kw/330nm.
Thanks to the generous support of Koya Works a new Koya downpipe and Flex joint were installed. This allowed for the upgrade to stage 2 and increasing the power to 182kw/384Nm which is basically the limit of both the current turbo and the injectors. Easily fixed though with a Hybrid turbo upgrade and 630cc injectors 🙂
End result is 198kw/418nm at the wheels and a huge smile every time the fun pedal is pressed. The hybrid turbo delivers boost right across the rev range at a very efficient level keeping temps down and allowing the maximum to be extracted from the car. Having now covered 1000s of km its still a real pleasure to drive and recently completed a trip across the Snowy Mountains and back which can only be described as sublime on full boost at 6000rpm still pulling hard…