Tuning the Renault Twingo GT 2010 D4FT engine
The Renault Twingo may not be the first car that comes to mind when you think about souped up engines and fun times, but rather surprisingly, Renault seems to overbuild their engines quite a bit, and they often seem to be the most resilient part of the car (donât look at the electronics haha).
Getting your hands on a Renault Twingo is fairly simple especially in Europe; theyâre one of the most commonly sold cheap cars that are out there. Their light weight and small engines and total size make them the perfect city car, but could they be more than that?
Meet: The D4FT
Also known as the Renault TCe (Turbo Control efficiency) engine. A savage marriage between a tiny 1.2L 4 cylinder short stroke engine, and a beefy intercooled turbo that happily delivers 1.5+ bar to the engine if you tickle its settings a little.
By default, the D4F engine only gives you a meager 75HP, tuned for efficiency long engine mileage, its light size still means you can get the Twingo from 0 to 100km/h in a respectable 10 seconds. You can, if you really want, add a turbo to this, as it does have the pressure sensors required to deal with it, but note that the D4FT has more oil, stronger piston rods, and makes it much easier to actually tune the engine as the turbo and intercooler are already installed.
By default, the D4FT gives you 100HP, which isnât that much of an increase, but it does definitely make a difference, with the car easily making it to 100km/h in about 7-8 seconds. Especially the torque is a nice difference that you can feel there. I donât think the turbo revs up much beyond 0.75 bar on stock
However if you unlock the D4FTâs turbo settings, and make the turbo valve close to spin it to max, something magical happens. 1-1.5 bar is well within reach of this turbo, the main issue actually being the intercooler not keeping up, air can get 60C+, meaning the turbo valve will open a little again to allow the turbo to cool down a little. But even despite that, it is an insane kick, the torque almost doubles, and you can easily get 130-150HP with this mod alone.
There is another easy mod you can do after that, which is replacing the injectors with bigger ones. In most engines this would require drilling out the injector holes, but not with the D4FT!
The Renault Clio 172 2.0L RS injectors fit flawlessly into the sockets without needing to change much at all, the threading is the same, theyâre just slightly bulkier.
I bought them from here: https://www.winparts.nl/motordelen-toebehoren/injectoren-verstuivers/c1187/injector-iwp042-magneti-marelli/p563503.html (dutch website)
The exact type is: Magneti Marelli IWP042
This will much increase the available engine power, as more burned gasoline equals more power! Do note that to make full use of this you need to do a retuning with a professional dyno. I might be able to share my own profile, but no guarantee that itâll work as well for yours as it did for mine (pending update).
After you did this, the first next step will be to replace the intercooler with something that can actually keep up. I havenât done this myself, I might first try to remove my left front fog light to force extra air into it.