NITRON NEWS

<< back to News

Tune in to the BBC's Top Gear programme this Sunday evening to witness a rather unlikely recipient of a Nitron suspension kit! The concept of the feature is to take a regular family car and modify it to be quicker than a Mitsubishi EVO X around the Top Gear test track, but at a fraction of the cost of the £30k EVO.

The unveiling

Top Gear's car of choice then; the opinion dividing Renault Avantime! Despite having a number of neat features, the car was a sales flop, it sold just 435 units in the UK and was dropped after just 18 months. The vast majority were autos, but Top Gear found themselves a V6 manual (bought via Pistonheads.com) as the starting point. The car cost £5,200, leaving the team £9,800 to spend on modifications to try and beat the EVO's 1min 28.2sec lap time but with half the cost. The team would have '2 days' to complete the work.

AP Racing brake kit & Team Dynamics wheels The presenters bemused by the slower lap time

At the start of Day 1 the Stig lapped the completely standard Avantime in 1min 42.5sec, they had a massive 14.3 seconds to make up! After much deliberation the first thing to be upgraded was the brakes, £3,000 was spent on AP Racing 6-pot Pro 5000+ calipers clamping massive vented discs with track focused pads. But when it came to replacing the wheels they had a problem - the wheels would not fit over the new hardware! So a set of Team Dynamics wheels was bought for £600 (in fact these were specially machined the day before filming!). The Stig hit the track and recorded a new time of...1min 44.6sec!! A sensational 2.1 seconds SLOWER than the standard car! This they assumed was down to having fitted the wrong tyres, in reality it was more likely to be down to the bigger brake kit begin extremely heavy, so making the car slower everywhere except in the braking zones. The car started with road tyres in any case, so were equivalent to those fitted to the bigger wheels.

So to make better use of the increased stopping power James May was dispatched to a local tyre fitters to switch to some soft sticky ones, cost for 4 tyres; £600. With the fresh rubber the Stig was able to brake later and corner faster, and so the Avantime finally went quicker! At least quicker than the previous run, but still 0.2 seconds SLOWER than the standard car! So with better brakes, better wheels and better tyres, and £4,200 spent the Avantime was still no faster than in standard trim, the time 1min 42.7sec.

The Avantime's Nitron NTR Race 3-way adjustable suspension kit The Renault has its geometry checked at Nitron's Oxfordshire base Success! The presenters celebrate the Nitron's impact

With time fast running out on Day 1 it was time to see what a set of Nitrons could do for the car! Having not supplied any Renault Avantimes before Nitron had been lent the car for a few days some weeks previous to spec the damper kit. A few prototype parts were swiftly manufactured and some spare front struts sourced for donation of their bottom foot bracket assemblies, these were then welded to the Nitron body tubes. Nitron also did a quick geometry check using their Beissbarth laser alignment kit given that the car was being lowered by some considerable margin! Front toe settings were noted for quick adjustment on the day.

The Nitron kit was an NTR Race 3-way adjustable one, featuring bespoke top plates for added camber. The cost of the kit was stated to be £2,000. In addition to the Nitrons being fitted, the presenters and the crew from the Top Gear Technology Centre set about taking some weight out of the car. The luxury seats were replaced with racing seats and the enormous glass roof panel replaced with perspex. For completeness it would have been good to seen the benefit of these mods independently but with limited track time remaining all had to be done in one step. The Stig did his (or her...?!) thing and finally the Avantime had gone significantly faster! 4.5 SECONDS FASTER! The time: 1min 38.2sec. The Stig could now really attack the course with the sure-footedness afforded by the Nitron kit, body roll and understeer were cut dramatically, and the set up was still far from optimised, there was plenty more time to save by tuning the dampers had time allowed - as was done in the final step which saved a useful chunk of time.



Next the area of focus was the engine. The car was placed on a portable rolling road and the output measured, the figures were disappointing, only 157.4 hp and 161.7 lb-ft from the 3.0L V6, out of the factory the car should have been producing 207 hp. This was the end of Day 1. The car arrived for Day 2 (around 3 weeks later in fact) with a thoroughly serviced engine, there was a new air filter, new injectors, a new inlet manifold and a straight through exhaust (doesn't it sound great!). Again it was measured on the rolling road and this time produced a far healthier 206.0 hp and 196.4 lb-ft of torque. A few choice chassis modifications were present also, to stiffen the shell to give the firmer suspension a better platform to work from. The outcome on the track was a gain of 2 seconds, the time now down to 1min 36.2sec. Perhaps not the gain you might expect from 31% more power, but that's all the Stig could muster.

The fully modified Avantime in the Top Gear studio

Lastly the team turned their attention to aerodynamics. With the budget running out Richard 'Hamster' Hammond offered the use of a Super Aguri F1 rear wing that he had allegedly bought at an auction. With rear wing fitted the car went 0.8 seconds slower, because of course the extra drag far outweighed any benefit from the gain in rear downforce. The team then recalled how losing the front splitter on their Britcar BMW had such a detrimental effect on the car's handling, so a large wooden splitter was then jigsawed and installed. Unfortunately with the Stig ready to set a time the splitter caught fire under the engine, and that concluded the 2nd day at the track, the Avantime still a full 8 seconds off the EVO's time.

Not satisfied with being so slow still, the crew from the Top Gear Technology Centre tried one last time to extract every ounce of performance from the car, but alas the final recorded best lap time was 1min 35.4sec, 7.1 seconds quicker than standard, but still 7.2 from the EVO. A disappointing outcome in general, however the Nitron suspension (along with the lightening) did account for some 61% of the time gained! It does go to show how modifying your suspension is a wise place to start, especially as doing so can actually save wear on other components, for example tyres and brakes.

Watch the feature: