Driving Sports

It has been a long spring for us here at Subiesport; hence a few projects have fallen a bit by the wayside. With three major events on the horizon, the rally season in full swing and an unexpected engine failure (see the next issue of Subiesport for details); the Miata vs. Impreza build battle has taken a bit of a back seat. To be honest, my project has taken a bit of a back seat since after all, I am building mine.

While Ryan has the luxury of paying someone to paint his Miata, rebuild his heads and install his turbo kit; I am doing all my own work from the body, to the engine build to the reassembly, in my garage. This isn’t to say that I haven’t had help along the way. But the lion’s share of the work is on me. Not that I mind at all, I just want to make that clear. I am building mine. Got that?

For starters the 1.8-liter engine has had it. The car still ran fine and made ok power, but it is clear that the little mill is done. The overflow tank was constantly full after any driving at all, although the coolant temp never went past half way. The catch can was filling with blow-by and there was a fair amount of oil smoke when I pushed the loud pedal.

Also, a fair amount of opportunity led me to replace the little 1.8. Now, I did have a good cross-section of engines to choose from and seemingly all at once. I had an EJ20G in pieces that I could use, complete with rebuilt heads with Delta Camshaft reground cams. I also had an EJ257, again in bits that would need a rebuild. Then an EJ255 fell in my lap along with a set of CP forged pistons. Since the 255 block only had a broken piston and was still in great shape, I decided to drop the CPs into the EJ255 and mount my EJ20G heads on top.

This combo should make for some great power once the engine and ECU get sorted. I might even opt to bolt on a larger turbo since Mr. Miata seems to need all the juice that a GT2860RS can provide. The difference being I have 2.5-liters, he has 1.6. So while I have the exhaust energy to keep a much larger snail spooled, Ryan will be enjoying the wonders of turbo-lag-induced snap-oversteer.

For now, the stock fenders are going back on since doing the HTAutos 22B kit right will take some doing that I currently don’t have. After lugging around in the Zero To Hero car, which is now bone stock and very Zero, I am craving boost and I don’t want to wait to install the widebody at the moment.

I have also gone about sorting a few other issues with my front endlinks and also swapped our old Konigs for a set of STI BBS wheels and tires in gold.

As of this writing, my garage is a complete disaster, and the car has yet to fire back up. A few more issues need to be worked out before I can begin to build steam in the boilers again. In the meantime, I have been doing a huge amount of kart racing in preparation for our little track battle, whenever it is we get the time to actually drive our cars.

For more updates, or past installments on the Dreadnought, check out Subiesport magazine at www.subieport.com.