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 (don’t look at the electronics haha).

Getting your hands on a Renault Twingo is fairly simple especially in Europe; they’re 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 isn’t 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 don’t think the turbo revs up much beyond 0.75 bar on stock

However if you unlock the D4FT’s 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, they’re just slightly bulkier.

I bought them from Winparts (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 it’ll work as well for yours as it did for mine (pending update). Edit: Tuner wants me to come over in person and I haven’t done so yet.

After you did this, the first next step will be to replace the intercooler with something that can actually keep up. I haven’t done this myself, I might first try to remove my left front fog light to force extra air into it. Edit: I did this and it helps a little! but it’s not magic and the air will still get too warm if you keep pushing it.

Another thing that needs replacing to keep up with the new injectors is the Fuel Pump. A good option for this is the Walbro 255ltr, but note you’ll find clones of this on aliexpress and alike which are NOT as resilient (I tried one and it ended up breaking after a few months of use)

Some further notes and things you could try:

  • The engine seems fairly resilient to high pressures, I’ve managed to push 2+ bars into it without it breaking (NO GUARANTEES FOR YOUR ENGINE THESE ARE VERY HIGH PRESSURES)
  • To get these high pressures, you’ll need replace the dumpvalve, as it dumps at ~1.5 bar by default.
  • Some people noted you can also null the dumpvalve (remove it and blank off the pipework), which I’ve done due to my pipework breaking while trying to replace it, but that is really bad for the turbo, as it causes ‘compressor surge’ when you let go of the throttle. In my case the turbo started spitting some oil due to this; It still works, but it’s not a mod I’d recommend.

Also good find: in this forum post they’re talking about Protoxide and Catcams offering a whole lot of aftermarket parts for this engine, including forged rods (Catcams) and heads (Protoxide), and note that to go above 200hp you’ll need to swap those out, or stuff will bend. I haven’t tried any of those, but for anyone else tinkering with this car and the D4FT engine it may be worth checking out: Twingoforum link

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