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Who doesn’t love a good fart joke? I know the French do. Well, at least I think they do, because there’s no way this wasn’t intentional (please ignore the fact that they speak French). It has come to my attention that one of the Renault Avantime’s engine choices, a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder motor, was codenamed the F4Rt. The goddamn car is powered by the fart motor, and that’s somehow not the weirdest thing it has going for it.
As it turns out, the F4Rt isn’t the only goofy engine code Renault employed in the early 2000s. A quick Wikipedia rabbit hole dive on the “Renault F-Type engine” page turns up another code: F4P. That’s right, the 1.8-liter FAP motor powered the Renault Laguna from 1998 to 2005. What a beautiful thing. On the other hand, the FART powered the Avantime, Vel Satis, Espace, Laguna, Scénic and Mégane from 2002 to 2017 when the motor was sadly discontinued.
I know, this is deeply unimportant information. Both the F4Rt and F4P are motors that are long out of production on cars we never got in the U.S., but c’mon. Fart and Fap? It felt like Christmas when I found this out. It works for Halloween, too.
In all likelihood, the French folks who worked at Renault in the late ‘90s and early 2000s probably had no idea they did this. I mean, why would they? They’re French. Still, I would just like to imagine they planted this little gift in the engine bays of a handful of their cars, knowing that one day a shithead like me would see it. I’m forever grateful that happened.