Subiesport Magazine

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RE070s are NOT Snow Tires

 So here it is just after the first official day of winter and the Pacific Northwest is seeing the biggest snow storm in over 50 years. With over a foot of snow on the ground, us Nor’Westers are in a bit of a jam. Usually, snow here is limited to a few inches in the morning followed directly by rain which has most of the snow melted just in time for the afternoon commute home. Not this time. Portland, Ore., has been buried under snow for about a week now. With one weather system passed and the roads cleared, I thought it would be high-time to take Project Dreadnought down to Surgeline Tuning (www.surgelinetuning.com) for some badly-needed upgrades before the snow hit. Sadly, a patch of ice had other plans for me.

Waiting for 2010? Don't hold your breath!

Few cars have been as anxiously awaited in the past decade or so than that of the WRX. And with its recent redesign, few cars have created such polarizing opinions and backlash. Since posting our review of the 2009 WRX in which we hailed it as the fix needed to inject a little lifeblood back into Subaru’s staple pocket rocket, a rather large number of you have logged-in to weigh your opinions. Some of you have accepted the car with open arms. Some of you are still on the fence and then there are those who are “waiting for 2010.” For those in the waiting column here is a hint: exhale.

2009 WRX, What a Sport Compact Should Be

Fixed. If you needed one word to sum up the changes made to the 2009 WRX, that would be it. Subaru of America has done a fantastic job of distilling the needs and wants of the US-buyer and convincing their Japanese counterparts that America wants a real performance car and not a more “mature,” economical performance car, whatever that is. The 2009 WRX: proof that if you cry loud and hard enough, someone just might listen and give you what you want. You wanted more power? Done. You wanted more aggressive looks? You got it. You wanted better handling and better tires? Your wish is a command. At least the internet is good for something.

GTLive, Hot Girls, Hot Cars, Hot Pavement

Miller Motorsport Park, Salt Lake City, UT - Hot. That is the word for GTLive; hot girls, hot action and hot cars, literally. Overheating seems to be the word on the tip of most teams’ lips as the ambient soars towards 100 degrees with the track temp about 20 degrees higher.

Most of the top Subaru Time Attack teams are here including Richard Garcia and the DynoComp STI, Crawford Performance and their “Skunkworks” 2008 STI with Tarzan Yamada at the helm, and even the dynamic duo GC-based cars of TopSpeed and GST Motorsports.

2008 WRX Update, Better Handling

After driving our new 2008 project car, Nemo, around for about a week now, one thing has become glaringly clear: This car needs suspension upgrades. And not needs in the sense of, I need to because I am a driving junky, it needs it because it flat needs it.

During hard cornering on a freeway on-ramp round-about, we were able to get the car to rock back and forth, while under cornering load by getting our trunk monkey to bounce around in the rear seat. Even tracking straight down the road, the car would undulate over bumps. While this is very comfortable for highway driving, it is no good for any sort of performance situation. Why Subaru decided to tune the suspension for Miss Daisy and not Mr. Solberg is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps they thought that the hot hatch market was getting older, perhaps they thought that we really all wanted a vague and “floaty” suspension, or perhaps they just got a killer deal on springs from Buick. There is help though.

Driving the 2008 WRX and 2008 STI on course

Today we put another issue in the can, well more or less in the can. As I write this MediaSpigot Publisher, Ryan Douthit, is slaving over the “technical aspects” of formatting the files that will become the next issue of Subiesport.

While he does that, I am reflecting on my recent driving experiences, most notably a bone-stock 2008 WRX and a very-modified 2008 STI. While the two are very similar in behavior, one is more akin to Bud light, easy to drink and keep in your stomach, even after you drink a whole sixer; while the other is more like Barley Wine, much harder to stomach, especially after you have had a few.

Now I am not saying that one is more enjoyable than the other, but it shows where tuning can get out of hand. Or rather, how a performance-driving setting can bring out the less-than-stellar qualities in a car.

Subiesport 2008 WRX Project Car

With a new model-year comes a new addition to the Subiesport project fleet. We had our fun with our GD-chassis 2.5RS, and since that car is going back to stock, we needed some fresh blood in our fleet. To that end, we have decided that we need to play around with one of the third-gen Imprezas, in turbocharged form this time. The basic premise of this car is to see what we can do within the frame work of a stock turbo and stock engine.

To see where we starting from, we took the car to Pacific Import Auto in Tacoma, Wash., to get a baseline on their all-wheel-drive, Mustang dynamometer.

Dyno Tuning Preparation

You’ve read every forum and visited every on-line store and in the process spent your rent money, the college fund, and your future retirement on bolt-on Subaru goodies. The point of all this madness is to produce a more powerful platform for whatever your personal performance niche might be: drag racing, autocross, track days, or simply bragging rights. However, with few exceptions, your new parts will produce little power and, in the worst of cases, might actually damage the car without proper tuning.