More Power & Track Time

As is normally the case with new found power, you get used to it. I often joke that this is what keeps me in a job, yet as I’m finding out it also keeps me poor too.

So it’s more power time, keen to shake the lame duck feeling we go for an EVO 9 Turbo, these are basically a slightly larger & more advanced design turbo than the std EVO 8 model & pretty much a straight bolt on.

After tuning so many large cam equipped cars in the US I’m getting the urge for a bit more lope in the idle. My partner in crime in the US, Beau ,is also partners in a Camshaft company called Revolver Cams & he has sent me their latest baby 270 cams to try. Now you have to remember that by US standards baby doesn’t really mean small to everyone else in the world.
For the mods we have at the moment this is probably over camed, but what the hell. We throw in a set of Adjustable cam pulleys so we can dial out some of the size of the cam if we have to.

While we’re at it we throw on a Turbo XS bar & plate intercooler & custom hard pipe kit to increase the throttle response. In truth to add some bling to the Engine bay as well.

Well back on the Dyno & we are now starting to get somewhere, we come out with 235kw at the wheels at 23 psi. We are able to dial in the Camshafts so there is no real difference in boost lag from the previous smaller turbo to now.

On the road the car it even more fun to drive, the throttle response is amazing compared to the last round of mods. Its time for my first track day in the car @ Wakefield Park raceway. The car performs faultlessly considering we beat the sh#t out of it all day. Shame the same cant be said of the driver, my driving skills need a bit of honing.

So Where to Next?

The car is going great, we’re driving the wheels off it & loving it. First problem though, with its new found grunt means getting to the corners faster, yet the cars suspension is std.. First port of call, ‘Coil Overs’. At Pulse Racing we have started using HSD products, so in goes a set of their mid level coil overs - the HR series. These are a fantastic bit of kit, adjustable strut tops, bottom leg adjustable & at a very reasonable price. We adjust the heights to our liking, about 2 inches lower than std, and the cars stance now looks the biz.

I must say when we first bolt these on & drive down the road - I am amazed! With the adjustment on soft for street driving the low speed harshness is so much less than the std shocks. Even the wife notices it from the passenger seat!


Enter the next problem, the handling now feel worse (what the?) No matter how much we adjust the shock valving up, down & around the cars handling feels considerably worse than std. We put in a call to our old mate Jim from Whiteline, he laughs at us, I should have remembered from all those testing sessions at Wakefield Park raceway with Jim when he would drum into us about the importance of roll centers. Bugger, completely forgot!

In a nut shell, in lowering the car we had upset the all important suspension geometry. Fortunately the good new is Whiteline make a Roll center adjuster kit for just this purpose. Done, send me one Jim, oh & better throw in some sway bars too I say.

So in go the roll center kit, front & rear sway bars & a good wheel alignment. The difference is night & day, what a car!!! On my way to work I pass a couple of round abouts & a couple of those chicane things (designed to slow you down? or possibly there to evaluate your latest suspension changes? who knows) & we can very easily travel through these a good 15ks faster now. Considering we were down 5-8ks on std with just the coil-overs, the difference is easily noticeable. The car sits flatter & just feels to stick. We gotta get this thing to the track!!

Now The Mods Begin

Now just to re-iterate the main purpose for this vehicle;

1. Obviously to have a truck load of fun with

2 To serve as a rolling ‘Test Bed’ for all types of parts & services Pulse Racing offer, so as we can confidently show our customers what’s possible to achieve with what mods.

The first port of call for almost any EVO is the exhaust. Now if you’ve ever driven a std EVO for any length of time you’ll have a fairly good idea what I’m on about. Basically it’s to drown out the so called ‘sewing machine’ noise that comes out of the things, to move the noise from the Engine bay to the rear of the car (where it should be). Its just a 4G63 thing, they’re noisy, it feels like your giving the engine a hard time every time you give it even the slightest bit. The fact that the std Exhaust is restrictive & replacing it can give you a power boost is just an added bonus, it’s the noise we’re after.

Enter TXS Exhaust pic

So on went a Turbo dump back ‘Turbo XS’ 3inch stainless system with a Cannon Muffler (bring the noise as they say). From a pleasure to drive stand point the car was much more fun to drive now. Although personally I’ve always been a fan of slightly noisy car, they’ve gotta know your coming sort of thing.

While we were there we threw in a Walbro 550 HP fuel pump, the car really didn’t need it at this stage as we weren’t using all the fuel flow of the std pump it just seemed like cheap insurance considering future mods & the fact that we are planning on beating down on this car pretty hard in the future .

So back on the Dyno she goes, turns out it hasn’t lost its lame duck status yet, only manages 205 Kw. Although in truth this doesn’t tell the whole story. The car is now so much more fun to drive, the torque is up almost 15%, boost is on earlier & the sewing machine noise is gone.

All in all considering it made 140 Kw std (before tune) we still have an improvement of 65 Kw, so I know I should be happy. It’s just, I’m as they say a ‘power Junkie’ & it takes more than this to float my boat. It doesn’t help driving 300 Kw customer cars daily either.

IN MY HOT LITTLE HANDS

No sooner was the car home & the laptop was out. Those who know me will know that I cant leave anything std for long. I remember riding home my brand spanking new Honda Fireblade to a whole host of parts waiting to be installed. Yes I’m that bad, Im even straight barred from working on my wifes car (of course it NEEDS a Turbo luv, look at them hills). So onto the Dyno it goes, only to find that my lovely one owner/never thrashed car is a bit of a nugget. You know one of those Friday cars, it run low power in std & no matter how hard I tried I cant push it beyond 185Kw when similar cars still with std exhaust get close to 200 – bugger! Anyway off to the Drags we go for some baseline testing, managed a 12.8 @ 101 mph, not all bad so im slightly happy again.

THE SEARCH BEGINS

Which model & why??

As with any car search, budget plays a huge role - I didn't want to blow it all and not have enough left to mod it all now did I. I originally looked at EVO 7's as this was my preferred shape as it looks slightly more modern than the 6's, and if I wanted all it needed was cosmetic changes and it could look like a 9. Black or Blue were to be the colours of choice, so this tended to narrow my options slightly. I looked over a stack of 7's ( almost all with 40K on the clock - go figure eh), yet most seemed poorly modified or heavily thrashed out. Even though i was planning to mod just about every inch of the car i still felt the need to source a good example.

Then I found it! A one owner Black Aus spec EVO 8, slightly more costly than a 7, yet completely untouched, 40000Ks, log books and still under factory warranty. I had no chance of bargaining for this one, surely he could see I wanted it BAD!

The deal was done!

WHY AN EVO...........

Number 2 reason:

After landing back in OZ I was inundated with people in need of a good Tuner. So as it was, Pulse Racing was born. One Customer in those early days was a rather unassuming Lady by the name of Angela, now Angela isn’t your every day housewife, no her ride of choice is a sweet black EVO 6.5 TME with large Trust Turbo kit & all the fruit. With a bit of Pulse Racing magic we got this thing to 315 Kw at the wheels, it was while road testing this crazy machine the deal was sealed, man is it a fun car. The speed, the sounds, I had to have one!

WHY AN EVO...........

After tuning the badest Subaru’s for years, why an EVO?

Good question, there were really 2 real reasons:
After a 6 month stint Tuning in the US at SRM tuning (a predominately EVO shop in North California), I was astonished at the sheer amount of grunt we were able to push from the EVO’s with little or no Engine work. The fact that, at the request of more than one Mad American, we pushed these things to 30 Psi of boost on std donks, says their something of a special engine. I mean I’ve met some crazy Australians, but Americans beat us hands down for the number of guys ready to push their car to breaking point. Not to mention that the EVO gearbox & diff can handle a huge amount of punishment too! (Can you hears the sighs of the WRX owners). Yet the fun got even bigger when we built the engines, strokers, big Garrett turbo kits (fun, fun)..... This was number 1.