1985 Renault 25 V6 Turbo from UK and Ireland - Comments

Turbo water supply hose split

Valve spring broken

Big end bearings worn excessively.

Extremely potent engine, but watch out for faulty electrics - particularly coolant temp sensor circuit!

I had a 1985 Renault 25 V6 Turbo. I chipped it and increased the boost giving me a nice 260bhp in 1988. Was cruising down the M1 one night - got caught doing 145mph. Amazingly my inept words to the 12 arresting officers that had chased me for 20 minutes without my knowing was "I didn't realize I was going that fast officer!". Ended up with a healthy ban for a while - unfortunately it resulted in me having to sell the car.

I loved Kenneth Kendel's voice from the onboard computer - but I remember one night on the motorway (doing a much more respectable 70mph) when the stereo was cut out and Ken's tones shouting "BRAKES not working..." - scared the pants off me. I lightly checked the brakes - which seemed to work - pulled off onto the hard shoulder, walked around the car, checked the rear, the pads and disks, everything. In total confusion I went back inside the car - pressed the "status" button and received the reply "all systems working fine" - evidently there was some sort of static short that created the erroneous message.

The worst thing was the computer was tied directly off the speedo - and the speedo had a problem where all of a sudden, it would go to zero. You had to find a stretch of road where it was possible to reverse the car 10 feet or so, and the speedo would activate again. Unfortunately, if you didn't do this, you had no idea what fuel you had left - the fuel gauge had a tendancy to zero out if it went under 2 gallons left or so. I guess Renault believed if you could afford their car, you could afford to keep the fuel level above 2 gallons!!!

It was one of my favourite cars I ever owned. Lots of speed, lots of gadgets, lots of leather - but you had to have the manual transmission. You could smoke anyone back in the late 80's with it - and people would literally be shocked at this behemoth accelerating away from them.

Peugeot and Renault probably made the best affordable cars in the 80's. Wonder what happened?!!!

I have a 1988 phase 1 car and it is awesome (when it runs right)!

Problems: splitting fuel hoses, low speed servo fault, bad earths resulting in electrical faults, seized ac pump, heat from engine has stripped the paint off the bonnet.

Plus points:

Massive specification, massive speed, load carrying area is huge, and towing capacity is excellent.

Recommendations

if you manage to find one of these extremely rare cars, order a complete set of fuel hoses and replace them, then clean all the earth points and run a new earth up to the heater.