Friends bad luck with megane 225!

Just thought I'd share a bad luck story with you all, sometimes as a GTI-R owner I ask myself why didn't I just buy a normal car as I'm scratching my head under my bonnet but my friends bad luck with a Renault megane sport has made me realise anyone can have bad luck with any car.

He purchased the car for £3500 from a garage, it had 60 odd thousand on the clock.
After a few thousand miles the clutch and dual mass flywheel needed to be replaced, that cost him over £1000 but I suppose a clutch can be considered general maintenance.

The day he got it back from having the clutch and flywheel done, he was giving it some down a road and saw the stop light flash when going round a bend, he thought nothing of it but when he pulled up at the next set of lights the bottom end was knocking!
Had it checked out and practically the entire engine internals were ruined. Crank was gone, one piston had been hitting valve and it was just a total mess, even the turbo was toast.

He got an engine with 43k on (apparently) it cost about £800-900 and he had to send his old engine back to them on an exchange basis. He had all that fitted with new timing belt etc and oil pump to be on the safe side.

Then somebody stole his front bumper wile he was at home playing on the Xbox at night. He bought a second hand bumper for £160 the had it painted but the guy sprayed it the wrong colour so that was a fath about to get it right.

Then when he finally got it back and all seemed well, he was on the same road as his bottom end went just facing the other way, he pulled up at a set of lights and the car nearly stalled so he blipped the throttle slightly and it was just knocking it's tits off!! he hadn't even been driving it hard.

How can one person have such bad luck lol, I know shit happens but damn!! He's only done a few thousand miles on this new engine but because it's been off the road from the bumper getting stolen the 3 month warranty has run out.

The only thing he can do is get onto the people that fit the oil pump to see if the fault lies there or there's the place he got the engine from, I think they were called ren-spares but I'm not sure.
They had the engine advertised for sale with 43k on, he bought it with next day delivery for £150 because he needed it ASAP for work, the engine took the piss to come and after several phone calls they told him that the engine he had bought was still in a car but the insurance company hadn't released it to them yet, something along those lines. Anyway he got it in the end after about 2 weeks! And they refunded the delivery cost.

Here's where it gets really suspicious, they still have the exact same advert up for an engine now, same millage same description everything, just £200 more, as if to recover the postage cost they had to refund my friend. So it leaves the question, what the hell did they actually sell my friend? because I doubt it's the millage etc in the description

Always a tough one when buying second hand engines... and its french

I think the car now stands him at over £7K and he's got nothing to show for it.
It's strange because the engine did actually sound and run pretty good but the truth is you never know when an engine is ready to let go.

The moral of the story.. He should of bought a Gtir off bob like I told him too

Sounds like he has some shit luck with it and tbh i wouldnt say he has a leg to stand on if the warranty time period has gone .... i feel for him 7k in is a pretty deep hole to be in and left with the dilema if he doesnt fix it its worth fook all ...or sell it for little money as is ....

Man poor guy, he's had some bad luck. Sounds like something dodgy is going on with that engine though.

Hardy172cup wrote:I think the car now stands him in at over 7k

The moral of the story.. He should of bought a Gtir off bob like I told him too

Any old high performance car is a gamble tbh, all you can really do is cut down the risks by getting whatever car from a trusted person but as you well know Bill even then things can go very wrong, not through anyones fault as such but just through sheer bad luck.

Prime example was my TVR (which i still own)
Bought it for 10 biguns, 40 mile trip home never made it and toasted the engine through a snapped keyway on oil/water/power steering drive sprocket, by the time i noticed it i had already covered around 2 miles of driving with 0 oil pressure then big man wealding large hammer was banging inside engine blockj........result one totally trashed 4.2ajp V8........renew engine cost 7k......total spend was around 18k with other little bits
Not the guys fault i bought car from (he couldn't have known anything like that would happen) just sheer bad luck that i was hit with the big shit stick on way home.

Outcome......car only has done 600 miles in around 4 years on new engine so longest run in period of all time i reckon lol
Upside.........whilst cars been sitting in my garage & gathering dust looking prim and pretty over the years they have actually rocketed in value as people either crash them & kill themselves or the demons under the bonnet mysteriously start a massive fire and you burn to death
Either way its good because if i sold mine now with the very genuine 39k from new mileage and New but old engine i would actually get most or all of my money back on her.
Way i see it is you have lost nothing unless you sell it so don't sell and youll feel better about yourself lol

I think it is just pure bad luck as said. There is no way the people that sold him the engine could of known it was going to fail, it was fine for 2-3k miles with no sign of anything a miss.

The company that fitted it couldn't of done anything wrong, if the oil pump has failed then I think that has a 6 month warranty for the work they have done. But the way he described it dosent sound like the pump to me, it sounds like something has let go in the bottom end. He said prior to the bottom end letting go he pulled off and there was a slight misfire or or stutter half a mile before it went but it seemed fine after with no noises or lights on the dash. The fact that the revs dropped to point of nearly stalling then it started to knock badly after that makes me think something has physically let go, not oil starvation

The thing is if he had bought the Gtir in question from you, I'm sure you ended up selling it for £1800! He would of saved money because he's been through a few crappy cars before the megane and he could of had all the issues he's had happen to the Gtir and it would probably be cheaper to fix every time lol.
I know things will change soon but at the moment there's plenty of cheap parts floating about from cars being broken. Plus the Gtir would go up in value even if it needed repairs but the Megan is only going down lol

I feel bad for the guy because it's all happened in a short space of time, right when him and his missis have just had another baby