Clio 172 Turbo! thats not something you see every day, this one came in to us for an MOT, Track tyres and rectify a fault with the rear brakes to get it ready for a trackday at Bedford.

This customer wanted us to supply and fit one of our Pure Motorsport Gear Selector kits to his Clio 182.

These kits are a lovely mod for your trackday / race car, they give you a crisp definite gear change and because the actual gear stick is higher and slightly set back it has that race car feel about it.

Aarons Autos are a supplier of Pure Motorsport Products so check out our Pure Motorsport page for our products and prices.

A beautiful classic, the Sierra RS Cosworth, this one had the 24v conversion which has become a common mod for the old Ford.

It came to us with a severe oil leak from the rocker cover gaskets (common problem) the customer had supplied us with some upgraded gaskets to fit.

To get to the rocker cover gaskets on the Cosworth 24v engine you first have to remove the inlet manifold and a few ancillaries, once they are removed its just a matter of removing the rocker covers and old gaskets.

We cleaned the rocker covers and fitted the new gaskets following the specific instructions supplied with the upgraded gaskets, we had to slightly modify the old bolts and sleeves to help compress the new gaskets.

Refit the inlet manifold and ancillaries clean off all the excess oil that had been leaking previously then run the engine up and get the oil up to temperature and check for leaks.

No leaks, Awesome.

This little Yaris came into Aarons Autos with a nasty rattle coming from the engine and the customerwas almost ready to scrap the car after some of the quotes she had received to replace the stretched timing chain!

We gave the lady a quote she was happy with and placed the car on the ramp ready for strip down, once the timing chain cover was removed it was clear that the problem was indeed a stretched timing chain causing the rattle.

We checked the Vanos unit (Valve Timing Pulley) which was fine. Next we fitted the new timing chain kit, rebuilt the engine using all new gaskets and replaced the oil and filter, it was now time to start the engine and see how quiet it was in comparison to when it came in!

It purred like a kitten, and to say the customer was happy is an under statement.

This lovely Insignia VXR came into us with its owner complaining of a slightly slippy clutch, so after a simple road test to confirm the problem and a fair quote given to the customer we set about replacing the worn clutch.

The clutch replacement on this particular model of Insignia is not a straight forward job! first of all you need to remove the whole exhaust system,

and then the main sub frame before you can even even access the gearbox.

Not a problem at Aarons Autos though as our fully skilled technicians are trained to handle even the trickiest, time consuming and challenging jobs.

After removing the gearbox and clutch we checked the Dual Mass Flywheel for excessive play, but it was well within tolerance so we set about fitting the new clutch kit and hydraulic slave cylinder then rebuilding the car.

Once the car was finished and road tested it was time to hand it back to a very happy customer.

The week commencing our first race of the season at Donington Park I was getting myself and the car ready for its first outing since the winter rebuild when Dave decided to drop a bombshell on me “Im going to race”! for those of you that don’t know he has been in agony with his back for the last few months and had said he probably wouldn’t race this season.

This was great news even if I was a little concerned about his decision but it meant we would be racing as a team which is always more fun and more of a buzz.

This year we are racing with 750 Motor Club in there Roadsports series.

Race day comes and we arrive at Donington around 7.00am and manage to share a garage with Steve Hewson (Trackday Instructor) who was racing his mighty supercharged 106, we got ourselves setup and headed for signing on.

Qualifying soon came around and by this time the heavens had opened and it was wet, very wet! this was good for us because we had noticed from walking around the paddock that most of the cars we were racing against were a lot faster than our humble little Clio and they were mainly rear wheel drive.

Dave went out first and set a reasonable time (limited on laps as its only a 20 min qualifying and you have to do a minimum of three laps each) then i went out and was on average five seconds a lap slower but then i got a clear lap and beat Dave’s time which put us at P5 on the grid.

So Race time, Dave starts and gets a great start and grabs 4th place by the second corner but further back in the field there was a serious incident which collected several cars and meant ‘Safety Car’ after a couple of laps giving the marshals time to clear the wreckage the safety car headed in and we were racing again only to have the ‘Safety Car’ pulled out again after one lap!

The incident from the first lap had caused oil and coolent to be spilt all over Red Gate corner causing cars to spin and slide, after several laps the safety car came in and it was time to get racing again we had dropped back several places due to cars overtaking under yellow flags and not being seen by marshals but Dave was hot on there heels and trying to grab places back.

Pit stop time which in one hand was a complete mess up but in the other it was brilliant! as Dave was passing the pit wall i put my thumb up to tell him he was doing well but he took that as ‘its time to pit’ so on the next lap when I had the pit board out ready to show him he pulled into the pits! I was not ready for him so I leapt from the pit wall pulling my gloves on whilst running to the car and we managed to do a reasonable pit stop time of 1.24 and then it was my turn.

I had no idea what position we were in the race as we usually use radios to pass information from the pit to the driver (not allowed at Dono due to the airport) and we are a bit rusty with the old pit board, I decided that the only thing to do was drive fast and pass everything i could see, this worked well until the next ‘Safety Car’ which meant i was stuck behind a BMW Compact Cup Car that decided he didn’t want to catch up with the rest of the pack and just drive around at 30mph!!! FRUSTRATING, once the green flags were shown i had to wait till we got to the start finish line before i was allowed to overtake him. I managed to get past couple of other cars before the chequered flag but was past by two class A cars a BMW M3 and a very fast MR2 which i later found out were racing for first place.

As i came into the pits i still had no idea where we had finished so drove round the back of the paddock where Dave told me we had finished 12th overall and 7th in class! I felt gutted, but anyone who knows Dave knows he is a terrible liar, he finally told me we were 1st in class and 4th overall (3rd overall after the M3 got disqualified for overtaking under yellows) I started punching the steering wheel with joy, it was a far better result than we had expected but as we always say ‘Go for the win’

We would like to say a massive thank you to all our sponsors Sign Design Derby, M J Boyce Ltd, Wilkinson Coachbuilders, HB Group, Fast Away Services and Aarons Autos.

The RAC has reported an 82% increase in ‘pothole’ breakdowns with January and February 2015 marked as the worst months for suspension spring call-outs.

RAC patrols attended nearly 7,500 breakdowns in the first two months of the year compared to just over 4,000 suspension spring call-outs in 2014 and 2013 – the year that gave rise to so many potholes due to cold weather – nearly 5,600.

RAC Chief Engineer, David Bizley, said: “The sharp increase in suspension spring faults that we have seen across the country really does cast a cloud on the quality of our roads.”

With the replacement of suspension springs in an average vehicle costing up to £350, the RAC estimates that motorists are potentially facing a combined bill of more than £1 million each month – with the poor state of the UK’s roads to blame.

The problems caused by bad quality road surfaces are not confined to suspension springs either – shock absorbers can be affected, and tyres and wheels potentially damaged.

Estimates have placed the bill to repair the UK’s potholes at £12.16 billion and the repairs would take 13 years to complete.

Bizley added: “Experience tells us that these problems are normally worse in the first half of the year, so if numbers are still high come the summer we will know that local authorities are still struggling to get on top of the maintenance backlog.”

We would like to say a big thank you to all of our sponsors new and old for their continued support in 2015 of our race team Norfolk n Chance, without their kind donations this race team would be little more than a dream.

We will be racing in a new series this year which is the 750 Motor Clubs Roadsports series, again it consists of 7 gruelling 45 minute endurance races with a 20 minute qualifying sessions.

The first race will be at Donington Park on the 28th March, but unfortunately Aaron will be racing solo as Dave is still injured and unable to race (not a happy fellow) updates of the race will be posted on our Facebook page so that sponsors and friends can keep up to date with the action.

Please click on the Logos to find out more about our sponsors.

Last week we received a phone call from a customer regarding his Megane RS 265 Trophy saying that he had the usual tell tail signs of the lower swivel joint starting to fail, this is not an un-common thing for us as we see lots of Megane’s and Clio’s for this fault on a weekly basis.

This one was slightly different though, as the customer wanted to know about Ferry times?? after an interesting conversation with the customer we found out that he had been to his local Renault Dealer in Ireland who wanted to charge him nearly 1000 euros per side to replace the hubs!!

He also told us that he checked his on board crash camera after his Megane had been into the dealers to find to his horror that they had been racing his car up and down the dual carriege way and the mic on the camera picked them up saying “lets see how fast it goes”!!

So Friday morning comes and around 9.30 our customer arrives and we check over his car to find that it actually only needs one joint and not two like the dealers had told him! so we dropped him off in town to do a spot of shopping whilst we fitted a new swivel joint to his lovely RS265 Trophy, a couple of hours later we picked him up from town to collect his car and he was back on the road home to Ireland.

We are currently working on some very competitive ‘Service Packages‘ for the Renault Sport range which will include-

• Service and Cambelt Deals
• Service, Cambelt and Water Pump Deals
• Cambelt, Water Pump and Dephaser Pulley Deals
• Full Service Deals (inc plugs, pollen filter and gearbox oil)

The deals will be for-

• Clio Sport 172 / 182
• Clio RS 197 / 200
• Megane RS 225 / R26
• Megane RS 250 / 265

We will be updating the site over the next couple weeks with the Service Package prices along with prices for supplying and fitting Cooksport Lowering Springs and a range of Pure Motorsport products.

If there is anything you would like to add to our lists please feel free to email us or give us a call.