Hello colleagues!
I have a Murena 2.2. I really like this car. Murena is the first sports car that I saw and touched in my childhood. Many many years passed, I saw an offer for sale of exactly the same car and could not resist, and bought it.
An unpleasant situation happened to me. My right leg does not want to work normally. I do not want to part with Murena.
I have an idea - to put an automatic gearbox on the Murena, and possibly replace the engine.
Please give me advice on which gearbox can be installed on the car, from what brand, model... I will be very interested in advice and discussion.
Hello Ditrich and other members,
I must admit I have never read this particular posting concerning Matra-conversions, which was started in January 2004 mainly as I'm not in favour of conversions using other major units, by amateurs. Now the term amateurs may offend some here, but anyone who is not an engineer working at a factory with access to all the design, development and testing facilities to properly engineer and have the changes made properly, is by definition, an amateur. When these conversions are done, they are only ever made to fit and be connected up physically, with no real attempt at all the other things that are necessary. If you have to ask what are these things, then that already shows you don't understand what is really necessary, and proves my point.
As a trained engineer myself, I would not attempt a major conversion on any car, let alone something like the Murena, or to even think I knew better than the whole of a company such as Matra, that I could make a better car than they produced by substituting a major component like a V6 engine in place of the original 4-cylinder ones. And I could easily name several things that have not been done on various converted cars, but I am not going to go into that here.
However, there are many minor things you can do possibly to improve the original car such as the higher 5th gear I developed, or fitting a float level sensor to the header tank, for early warning of a loss of coolant long before it would become a serious problem.
Now in Ditrich's case here, he would like to fit an automatic in place of the manual. The obvious choice would be the automatic that was fitted to the Citroën CX that our original Murena 2.2 manual gearbox came from. Therefore that should be the first one to compare in detail, to see if it might be possible. Since the CX transaxle and housing had to be modified in the design to adapt it from the CX to the Murena, I would suspect the Citroën automatic will need various changes too. And that is without even considering how the different gear ratios might be unsuitable for the car.
However, there is another thing in this posting that I have now read that I hadn't seen before and that is the statement that 'I wish that the Murena had better brakes.' I am sorry but I have to disagree strongly with this, and since I have had my Murena from new and know what they are like, or should be like, I have to say that if anyone thinks the Murena needs better brakes, then the brakes on that car are not up to the original standard, no question about it! It is, or should be, possible to lock all four wheels in an emergency stop from speed, as I know all too well from having had just that situation in mine once when it was less than a year old. A motor cyclist thought he could pull out in front of me from a side road and accelerated away, without stopping to judge or realising how quickly I was travelling and I had to stand on the brakes the hardest I've ever done otherwise I would have hit him. With the front wheels locked and therefore a loss of steering, I had to ease off the brakes after that initial lock up to get the wheels rolling again and my steering back, so I could steer to one side of him, and ended up with the front alongside him rather than hitting him. There were four long black lines on the road behind after the smoke had cleared!! But the real point here is that the maximum obtained from the brakes was higher than the tyres could cope with and they were some of the best tyres (Pirelli) available at that time. So the limit of braking was not the brakes but the tyre grip to the road. Only with more grip could the braking been better. You cannot improve on four locked wheels in terms of braking effort (except by having anti-lock braking of course to prevent locking) but all anti-lock does is the same as me easing off the brakes slightly before pushing down again, in what is known as cadence braking which was used before anti-lock systems were developed.
So if anyone who has a Murena out there that cannot lock all four wheels under the heaviest braking, then it is below standard and needs fixing. Since that time I have fitted EBC greenstuff pads all round and fitted the cross drilled front discs that Simon Auto now has and they certainly improve the brakes slightly in light normal use, but they still can't do any better than locking the wheels at maximum effort, as it is the tyre grip that provides the ultimate limit.
Anti-lock braking might be a help for those that can't do cadence braking, but anti-lock brakes were expensive and not common at the time the Murena was designed in the late seventies, or at the low price it was sold. The Lotus Esprit which was over twice the price, didn't have them, and if I remember correctly it wasn't until the 1990 X180R racing version that they first fitted the Esprit with anti-lock brakes.
Another fact is that all the magazines and some of the best road testers that drove the Murena stated that the Murena brakes were superb especially for a mid-engined car and that the front were difficult to lock in normal braking, even in the wet. Compare that to the reputation of the Lancia Beta Monte Carlo. I need say no more.
Roy
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