New Megane Renault Sport: details and photos

The latest generation Megane has been given the Renault Sport touch. Under the hood is a 250 horsepower twin-scroll turbocharged 2.0 litre inline-4 motor that puts out 340Nm of torque at 3,000rpm, with 80% of that available from as low as 1,900rpm. That puts it well over the power figures that the Mk6 Golf GTI manages to make.

The engine is mated to a 6-speed manual transmission, and provides for a 0 to 100km/h acceleration time of about 6.1 seconds. The 2.0 litre turbo engine is claimed to be 25% new compared to the Megane F1 Team R26 engine. It has new intake ports, reinforced pistons and conrods, new air-air and water-oil intercoolers, sodium-cooled valves, and new piston ring carriers.

The Megane RS is one of the few C-segment hot hatches that actually gives the buyer the option of two chassis configurations – the Sport chassis which is more of an everyday hot hatch kinda thing, and the Cup chassis which is more track-focused, perhaps like the Civic Type R. The Cup option even has an optional mechanical LSD provided by GKN Driveline, which is seen as something that’s getting abit rare lately with cheaper performance cars. The pure LSD is slowly being replaced by e-LSDs.

There’s also a cool tool called the Renault Sport Monitor, which is basically an on-board telemetry system. It provides various readings (controllable via the steering wheel) such as turbo boost pressure, oil temp, brake status, real-time engine performance data, a G-meter, a stopwatch with memory functions and various counter features such as 0 to 100km/h acceleration times and 400m times.

Look after the jump for a full gallery and video of the car.

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