1995 Swift Formula Renault
Over the past winter, I've completely rebuilt a 95 Formula Renault. I thought I would share some photos of the build.
My dad and I have been racing for as log as I can remember. We raced latemodels, Legend cars, snowmobiles, etc.
About 6 years ago, we learned of a brand new road course that had opened up within an hour of our place ( Calabogie Motorspots Park). We normally had to drive 3-10 hours to oval race. We bought a Legend car with an R1 engine and ran it for the past few years in our local Formula Libre evening series. Other than safety rules, it’s a run what you brung class, with everything from Stohrs, Radicals, Formula Mazdas, Renaults,FFs, Formula Vees, Legend cars and everything in between. It’s a great evening series with beer and food afterwards, and great guys (and gals). I enjoy fabricating and building cars, so over the last few years, we modified the Legend car quite a bit. I built a Turbocharged ZX10R motor for it, had 10” tires all around, swaybars etc. We had the car beating most of the Formula Mazdas and FFs.
At the end of last season we had the opportunity to bring our Legend out to Area 27 in BC and test it for a few days. At the end of our trip, someone offered to buy the car from us. We agreed on a price and sold it. But now we were out of a car. We found out a local racer had this 95 Formula Renault. We actually raced against it once in our Libre series but he blew it up. He had it rebuilt, but had not raced it again as he moved on to faster cars.
We bought it with the intention of tearing it down, fixing a few small things and racing it this year. When we tore it down, we found a bunch of issues with the car. This is my first “open wheel” car, so I’ve learnt lots along the way. We are frugal, and we got the car for less than we sold the Legend for, so its definetly a budget build. Lots of late nights and many beverages consumed its nearly done.
The car came with a 2.0L Renault Motor and a 5 speed LD200. My understanding was that back in ’95 you would buy a package from Renault Sport and build the rest of the car around that. I believe the package consisted of the Motor, bellhousing, gearbox, wheels, brakes, dash,electronics, steering rack and maybe a few other pieces. The motor was freshly rebuilt, so it mainly was left alone aside from a few issues that I found.
I found a pair of JFR200 boxes on Apex for a steal, and decided to convert the car over to the sequential. This meant all new suspension mounts, and many other small modifications.
I also wanted to make the car a little safer. The fiberglass body provided very little protection from intrusion, so I added protection plates all around the chassis.
The lower rear subframe sections were bent from a previous crash, as was the plate that connected the spars with the bellhousing. I made a new plate and tried to straighten out the chassis as bestI could. It is within an 1/8” of being square, but there is some “twang” in the chassis still.
We did get the car out last weekend for a test day, and unfortunately only got a fewlaps in before noticing that the tensioner pulley for the water pump belt had failed. The car seemed pretty smooth, and I’m pretty happy with the outcome so far. The pedals need some adjustments to make things comfortable, and a shorter throw shift lever is in order too.
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Originally Posted by Jnovak
