Evo vs. Impreza Hypermeet - Tsukuba Circuit Japan

Varis

Your Humble Reporter In The Hyperbattle
You always want to start a good story with a bang. But not, in this case, with a spray of metal, oil, and water as well. But that was how my 48-hour journey to the big Evo vs. Subaru battle at Tsukuba Circuit in Japan really started this year. That big bang was my engine finally giving up the ghost after 3 hard years of circuit racing and time trials. My turbocharged and intercooled 2.0-liter JDM Subaru Legacy GT was being prepped for entry into the time trial section of the big annual event, and had just started being run on the dyno. Around the 400hp mark the standard 2-liter turbocharged motor let go in a rather spectacular manner.

Technical Factory Hirano

To backtrack a bit, my Japanese-spec Subaru Legacy has been prepped for racing for the last few years by AVO turboworld in Japan. It is an Australian turbocharger maker and tuning company run by the Wilson clan, namely Ross Wilson. He moved to Japan seven years ago, and started up the AVO tuning shop in Tokyo about six years ago. We met up one day. I expressed an interest in participating in a time attack in Japan. So that is how I ended up in Japan's biggest time attack event last year.

It Is A Bit Addictive, Racing.It is also a bit hard on cars, especially if they were never really built for it in the first place. So while in the quest for a bit more juice, 48 hours before the big event, three conrods, one shortblock, and eight valves gave up the ghost. They went down fighting! However, that did leave me in a bit of a lurch. Team AVO really swung into action at that point. Despite having their own race car to finish up for the race, they spent the next 48 hours removing my engine and sourcing a new short block. An STi shortblock, in fact. That certainly was going to help when developing power.

Pit In Chiba

Sounds simple up to that point, except for one small problem. Usually one or more heads are taken out with the rest of the engine when it goes like this. So after pulling the remains of the motor out of the car, off came the heads. The good news came much later-one of the heads was in perfect condition. The other had some damage, how much was the question now. Well, all eight valves were damaged-when you have to blow something, might as well do it right! The problem was that there were no dealerships open for some reason, something about being 3 in the morning, blah blah blah. So we did some research and found out that the STI and the Legacy heads use the same lightweight valves, so the next task was to pull the head apart, inspect the valve seats for damage, pull apart the STI head for the valves, overhaul both heads, repair one valve seat, and reassemble everything. Piece of cake.

Some time around 3 a.m. on Saturday the engine was in, the car started up, and everybody was looking just a bit dodgy. Smelling a lot worse than dodgy at that point as well. Just about enough time for one hour of sleep, then it was time to drive the cars to the track and do some test runs. This is one of the reasons I did not elect to drive this year, instead handing over the keys of the newly resurrected blue beast to Maejiima Shuji, a good friend and professional touring car driver in Japan. He was actually attending the event to drive the AVO race car, and he further volunteered to drive my car, as well, as it was in a different part of the event.

Prodrive Japan

After watching him drive on Saturday, I was incredibly glad to have him on board. Shuji is amazingly consistent, and even better, knows how to bring a car home without damage even when people are going off around him. This proved to be incredibly useful as more than a few cars either blew up or crashed out. At one point two Evo's augured in to each other immediately in front of him, yet he managed to extract himself from that without a scratch!

At the end of the day, he brought it home with a 1.06.7 lap, roughly 5 seconds faster than last year, and good for 2nd place in the '04-up Legacy category, a second behind the Super Autobacs Legacy, which had about 20 grand more invested in it and 50 hours of time on the track pre-race sorting out suspension systems. Talking to our driver, if we get a much more race-oriented suspension than the HKS Performas, he figures we can beat them, and everybody else, next year.