Welcome to my garage.
Over the last few weeks I have been tearing my car down to the bare bones. And when I say bare bones, I mean there is an empty chassis in my garage. You might be asking yourself “why?” Well I am here to tell you.
Not too long ago I fell asleep behind the wheel after spending days on end helping a friend of mine rebuild his whole engine with a very unforgiving timeline. We had not much more than three weeks to take his engine out, tear it down to the block, reassemble it before tossing it back into the car. The original plan was to replace some cooked piston rings, and connecting rod bearings. Once we had the block opened up and popped the piston out of cylinder four, we knew we had our work set out for us.
Once we got past the pieces of piston in his block we proceeded to ponder for a few days before fully committing to building the bottom end, or short block. The following days were filled with researching parts, discussing options with his tuner, and purchasing some goodies for the inside of his engine. With the new parts in hand we got back to work. Building an engine worthy of 1000+ on the bottom end, ignoring the head because it was in great condition. Closing in on the deadline, we had the engine back in the car along with all of the parts that came out of it. Some new shiny engine mounts, bushings here and there, as well as some electronic solenoids and controllers. Two days from our deadline we had the car back in one piece and ready for first crank. All new fluids, and no hesitation on the startup of the freshly mapped 2.3L we had high hopes.
Just as the coolant started to come up to temp cylinder four’s ignition coil began to smoke. After tracing some wires and touching a couple leads to some copper, we looked past our noses and saw that one of the grounds for the engine wiring harness was not very well a ground at all. As the night came to a close and the morning came to an open, we decided to call it for the day.
On the way back to his house I began to dose off and fought as best I could, but the previous four days had gotten to me. Collectively we had no more than an hour of sleep in the last 96 hours and our bodies weren’t too happy about that. One thing leads to the next and I open my eyes while were cruising at a cool sixty while on the side of the road. Thanks to a few bumps and curbs that jerked me awake I was able to pull us back on the road before any serious damage happened to either of us, but I wasn’t able to entirely save the car.
The brand new oil pan that came with the oil control system from Mountune I had just installed weeks before had cracked wide open. Not enough for oil to dump out, but enough for oil to leak out. I was able to complete the rest of the drive wide awake and in one piece. After returning home and inspecting the underside of the car more I came to find that the subframe was no longer in any state that could be considered subframe at all. The lower control arm on the front passenger side was beat up, as well as the steering rack who had seen better days apparently.
Now you are probably wondering a few things. Yes I could have replaced a few parts with new ones, gotten an alignment or two and called it a day. I could have had someone do it for me and called it a day. I could have gotten some sleep in those four days. I could have done a lot of things but this opened my eyes and my opportunities to build this car the way I have been itching to for the past few years.
After some extensive research I have devised a very detailed plan of attack for this build. This plan includes converting to the AWD system from the RS, building the engine from top to bottom paired with big boost, big fuel, and bigger compression. The car will also get a full six point cage within sfi specs, twin buckets and twin six point harnesses. I will either make or have made a custom wiring harness to pair with a stand alone ecu, and display.
