Exhaust and Gear Linkage

The standard exhaust on the Cup had seen better days, the rubber hangers were fairly knackered, and the back box was rotten. Still it was 6 years old!

The replacement is a fairly default choice, a K-Tec Stealth with a silenced decat. Plan with this was that it was quickly available, cheap, not too noisy and fairly well designed. Downside is its not the lightest exhaust out there!

We got the Clio up on the lift and set about stripping the old exhaust and brakets off. It all came off easily bar one captive nut securing the rear box hanger which was no longer captive when we came to undo it, 30 second inconvenience. The downpipe to cat flexible mountings were as much fun as they always are!

With the exhaust off we also took the opportunity to fit a modified front end gear linkage setup. This is a direct fit to the standard cage. The standard cage is knackered in this car though so I'm after another at the moment. New linkage is very good though - its got another few hundred grams of weight on the top of it which helps with shift feel and the pivot point is relocated slightly reducing shift length when compared to standard.

The K-Tec setup was then offered upto the car. It all fitted pretty well. I tweaked the positions of a couple of heat shields to ensure decent clearance, although with new mounts all round the amount of play in the system should be fairly minimal. The downpipe to cat pipe flexible joint was a complete bastard as always - this is about the worst bit of design on the 172, bar perhaps the aux belt on the air-con equiped cars, there is literaly only just enough room to get your hands up there and then only if you've figured out which hand goes at which end and what bits of gear linkage and heat shield you have to bend around to get access - its never any less of a PITA either! Once the front end of the exhaust was bolted up I loosely bolted/hung the rest of it and lined it up properly. Once done the whole thing fitted pretty much spot on with minimal play. The silcenced decat does a decent job of quitening it down although its still pretty rorty at WOT, part throttle cruise and low speed is pretty much as per standard though which is nice. Unlike the original it no longer knocks and bangs over speed bumps either!

New gearlinkage feels very positive, nice snicky change which is something very much missing from the standard linkage. The throw is still fairly long but this is no bad thing as there needs to be a bit of throw to allow the synchros time to work.

Engine work starts tomorrow!