Subiesport Magazine

2008 Olympus Rally Wrap-up

April 19-20 2008, Pomeroy, Wash.

We’re only three events into the 2008 Rally America series, with six events yet to run, but I’ll go out on a limb and predict that this is the year Ken Block and co-driver Alessandro Gelsomino win the Rally America national championship. After two years in the shadow of teammates Travis Pastrana and co-driver Christian Edstrom, Block and Gelsomino have won two of the first three events in dominating fashion.

“I’m definitely going to try for the championship. This year, we’ve got a plan,” remarked Block at the Olympus podium ceremony.

Whatever that plan is, it’s working very nicely. Block won 7 of the 16 Olympus stages outright and finished second on 4 more. On the 5 remaining stages, a quirk in the Rally America championship rules created a tie with up to 17 other competitors.

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.