Build

The End of the 2015 Racing Season

The end of the season has come and gone, and I’m now prepping for winter projects. But before talking about that, I want to roll back to the last track trip of the season. As usual, I packed up and headed out to Milan Dragway for the last trip of the season.

I had known about a few friends who were also going, and we all met up for a trip we were all hopeful would be one of our best for each of us. I met up with Kiggly Racing and Warren from Antilag Racing.

A very long story short, the end of my season was a very hard and bad end to the season. Right off the bat, I blew up the intake manifold. This would normally end the day, but Erin from Kiggly Racing offered up the use of their garage which allowed Rick and I to re-weld the manifold and get the car back together. This left us with about 45 minutes before the end of the season to get up to the starting line. And it also lead to the second part of a very rough day.

The track prep wasn’t great. The track was getting colder as the sun was going down and getting in one run before the end of the season was all that was on my mind. I knew it wasn’t going to be a new personal best, but I wanted to end the season with another 8 second pass. Very quickly, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case because I ended up pedaling the throttle down the track, which is quite uncharacteristic of the car. After tripping the lights, I let off the gas and started to slow down. Unfortunately, when I was slowing down, the rear tires lost traction and the car became a huge handful. I kept it as straight as I was able to and tried to stay in my lane as best I could, but ended up tagging the wall with the front driver’s side of the car. As the front ricocheted off the wall, the back end of the car also tapped the wall. That took a lot of energy out of what I was doing and allowed me to finally get the car stopped.

I was fine, but the car wasn’t. I have a fair amount of repair to make over the winter. I’m starting now in order to get it under control. I hope I’m able to get the car updated and back out to the track at the beginning of the season.

First trip to the DSM Shootout? Read these tips!

So, you’ve heard all about The DSM Shootout, but have never been able to attended until now? Good for you! Go to The DSM Shootout. Learn more about The DSM Shootout here. If I could sum up The Shootout in one sentence, it would be this: The one time each year where the fastest and largest group of DSMs, EVOs and GTRs get together in what is one of the largest sport compact/import events that I know about.

Okay, more specifically, what is The Shootout? Well, it’s an entire weekend of checking out other people’s cars, hanging out, getting sunburn and racing. I’ve gone to this event since 1997 or 1998, it’s a little fuzzy, but it hasn’t changed very much since then, until this year. 2015 represents the largest number of changes I can recall happening to the Shootout. There are a number of new classes, more cars are now able to race, and more money is set to be paid out than ever before. The three days of racing, as opposed to a single day in the past, will certainly shake things up and allow for a lot more time at the track. This is good, except that DSMs aren’t exactly known for their legendary reliability, so we’ll see who makes it to Sunday! :-)

Friday consists of an open house at Buschur Racing in Wakeman, Ohio, which includes cars making dyno pulls all day. This happens until 5pm, and then Norwalk Raceway Park Summit Motorsports Park opens up at 6PM for a night of test and tune drag racing. There is also a qualifying pass for heads up classes Friday night at 9PM.

Saturday, SMP has Autocross starting at 9AM and Drag Racing test and tune starting at 3PM. Drag racing round 2 qualifying for happens at 7PM if you’re running a heads up class.

Sunday is the big day (for me, anyway.) Gates open at 9AM, final round of Qualifying is at 10AM, racing starts at 1:00PM. In years’ past, racing has typically wrapped up anywhere from 3-5:00PM, but it all depends on track conditions, car count, breakage and weather. So, racing ends when racing ends.

DSM Shootout Tips

If you’ve never been to The DSM Shootout, here are a few things to keep in mind. Even if you have been there before, you should probably read them anyway!.

  • Racers get an assigned pit space; While it’s outlined at some tracks and not others, it’s very common to have a pit space that’s roughly 20 feet wide by 40 feet long. The area behind someone else’s trailer is either their pit space or the pit road; The same goes for the area directly to the right of their trailer – it’s still their pit space. You arrived hours after the event started? You’re going to have to park out in the middle of nowhere; that’s how it works at every track everywhere. Don’t park behind someone’s trailer or directly next to it; it’s considered rude.
  • Pitting with your friends is cool, but if you want to pit with them, you should arrive to the track with them *or* have them save you a spot in order to all yourselves to find a spot together. Saving a single pit space for someone isn’t unheard of; that’s not a big deal. Encroach on others’ pit space because it’s next to your friend who happens to be pitting next to someone else is just rude. If you guys want to share a pit space, that’s fine, but don’t expect me to want to share my pit space with you, too.
  • Don’t walk in the middle of pit roads. I know it’s hot and you’re wandering, but you’re in a busy parking lot that’s also doubling as a return road and a road for racers to get to and from their pit space and the staging lanes. I know you’re a pedestrian and I don’t want to run you over, but I don’t have a horn, and you don’t seem to be hearing the car running an open exhaust slowly following behind you for the past 150 feet because you aren’t aware of your surroundings. Be considerate and move out of the way. If you think it’s hot out, you should try being buttoned up in an SFI-3-2A/15 fire suit inside of a race car with no HVAC. If that means nothing to you, go put on a snow suit on and go sit in your car without the A/C on in the 85 degree weather. It’s about the same thing. Another option would be to walk opposing traffic so that you can see the cars coming at you in order to be able to get out of the way when you see them coming toward you.
  • On the other side of this, drive slowly on the return roads and in the pits. If you’re a racer, this should be obvious. As I said before, you’re driving through a parking lot. This means 10 MPH or less is the only appropriate speed. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a race car, on a scooter, on a golf cart or your street car. You will get there, especially if the spectators/pedestrians are also aware of their surroundings.
  • Racers like to help other racers out, but don’t take advantage of the situation. I’ve had instances of people asking me for things: WD40, spark plugs, tools, brake/parts cleaner. I’d like to help people out, but in half the instances where I have, the other person has completely taken advantage of it. I once lent full can of brake cleaner out to a complete stranger at the DSM shootout as long as they brought it back. Not only did they not return it to me, but when I had a friend hunt them down, I found out they used the entire can on a broken transfer case that ended their day anyway and they just shrugged when he asked for it back, or some cash so that I could at least cover the cost of buying a new one. Seriously?! You couldn’t even throw me $5 and I’m the one who had the forethought to bring my own tools and supplies to the track. Cash or no supplies from now on; sorry. If you want to “borrow” a tool of mine, don’t be offended that I need your driver’s license. This helps me to ensure that I will get my stuff back in a prompt manner. I want to help you get to the next round, but not at my own hard expense.
  • If you’re partaking in after-racing stuff at hotels like hanging out, be mindful of other people. I know this is *THE SHOOTOUT*, but there are unwitting families who are visiting Cedar Point who happen to be staying at the same hotel you’re at. It already sucks for them having to shell out the ridiculously high rates for the only place they could find an available room, just like you. You know what’s worse? Having to deal with an asshole who feels like he needs to trash the hotel they’re staying at, while they’re there. Not sleeping because there are people jet skiing in the pool at the hotel, or because they’re doing burnouts on scooters outside your room. Sure, it’s funny to you. You and the people directly around you, but nobody else. You can have a good time and not be an asshole. I’ve seen it happen; I know it can be done.
  • Don’t drink and then go hotel-hopping. The local police have dealt with Shootout Weekend for about 20 years now; This weekend is no surprise to them. To help deal with the issue of outsiders trying to ruin their town for the weekend, on occasion they have been known to shut down 250 between the town of Milan and the town of Norwalk in order to set up sobriety checkpoints. Now sure, they are looking for people drinking and driving, but these checkpoints are also a very convenient way of crowd control to keep people from running around town all night. I don’t have first hand experience with this, but I have heard of people who knew of specific people who were arrested due to being intoxicated at these checkpoints. Also, waiting an hour or more at a sobriety checkpoint really kills part of an evening for you, so your best bet is to figure out where you want to be and plan on being there early. If you feel like you need to go to the other set of hotels, for example, then going earlier is probably better to avoid any sort of crowd control altogether.
  • If you do want to have a good time and have some shenanigans, I hear staying at the track is a great option. I haven’t personally done that, but setting up the track for camping leads to a self-contained event; rather than having people run around Norwalk and Milan and getting into trouble, they’re allowing you to have your shenanigans if you can confine yourself to the fenced area immediately surrounding the track. Responsible drinking isn’t a problem, and there’s not much better than waking up to the smell of race gas and the sound of race cars…
  • If The Shootout is your first time racing, There are many pages on the Internet with tips for what to do. Lapeer Dragway has a readme for beginners about how to drag race. Read it; it will give you an idea about what to expect.
  • Follow traffic laws. I know, it should be obvious, but it’s even more important in a place that has far more tourists in it than residents. Most people near Norwalk this weekend are either vacationing or going to a race, which means nobody is really familiar on the streets or knows what they’re doing. Be mindful of other people not knowing what’s going on. Also, read above about the local police – they know and are expecting you this weekend; they don’t need or want to put up with your crap, and handing you a ticket helps them with quotas.

If you follow these tips, it should make The DSM Shootout experience better for you and the DSM community as a whole. It will also make the locals happier.

2014 DSM Shootout – What Went Wrong?

This is about the 2014 DSM Shootout. Or, more specifically, about how the car didn’t make it down to the 2014 DSM shootout. I know, it’s 7 months late, but what do you do? For starters, we rewind back to DSM shootout, 2013:

As you may have read in other posts on the site, I blew stuff up at the 2013 DSM Shootout. While this was fun and all (you should sense the sarcasm there,) I needed to get a new engine together. So, over the winter of 2013-2014, I went to work. The condition of the car was kind of a mess, but I was fortunate in that the engine failure only caused damage to the hard parts in the engine itself.

The head even fared relatively well. It was clear that there was piston contact on #4, the cylinder that lost the piston, but otherwise, the head was in relatively good shape. I did, however, find a few slightly bent valves and a number of cracked guides. The guides probably weren’t from the engine failure, at least, not those in #2, #3 cylinder in the head. Thankfully, none of them disintegrated and sent shards of guide bits into my turbo, but I wasn’t taking any chances – it was time to replace them all. While I had a new block out for machining, I went to work cleaning that up. I polished up the intake and exhaust ports, then replaced all the guides. And then replaced all the valves with stainless valves. In lieu of having a shop do all this work, I decided to do it myself. And yes, I even honed the valve guides. What a pain :-)

Next up was the waiting. Forever. Align hone the mains, bore and hone cylinders, balance the crank. SEVEN WEEKS. It should never take that long, I don’t care which shop you take it to – these are all simple operations that should only take a few hours each for an engine machine shop. This pretty much F’d the start of my season. After waiting almost two months, I finally got my block back and got to work. The crank? Great, if not a little snug on the thrust main and rod bearings. So, I ordered up a set of “race” bearings with extra clearance, and was mostly happy with those, except for that main thrust. The thrust bearing has .0025″ of taper in it, which is crazy for those. It ended up netting me <.00015″ of end play on the crank thrust. So, I spent a lot of time with very fine grit sandpaper on a sheet of glass to correct the taper. Afterward, .007″ of thrust clearance. Technically, this is on the large side, close to the factory limit, but this is a racecar, so whatever :-)

So, Head, Block, Rods, Pistons, bolt it all up and go. Sort of.

I took the car to the dyno to break in the engine and to check on some tuning changes that I made. And I ended up popping the head gasket on the dyno. This was due to hitting boost cut, I think. Hard to say, but the second to last pull I made it started pushing coolant. We made another pull, and it started pushing more coolant. That was it, it was done.

Tore into the car, trying to make it to the shootout. Just ran out of time and parts, really. I ended up working my butt off from Thursday through Saturday, and just gave in. There were other things going on, too – logistics, tires, fuel, all sorts of stuff. So, I called it, and went down and had fun hanging out with my friends at Summit Motorsports Park. I got to pit and cook food for two good friends, and it was something I don’t normally get to do so it was a lot of fun.

 

The 2013 DSM Shootout

My RWD Talon making a pass
Last August, as usual, I made my way to the DSM Shootout in Norwalk, Ohio. I participated in the Quick 16, and I think I even qualified, although, even with a 9.0-something pass, I was still like 11th or 12th or something. Why don’t I remember any of these details?

Here’s Where it Gets Fun

It’s because I popped the motor. When something like that happens, you tend to hold on, clench up and hope for the best. It happened on the top end of the track; I was going somewhere north of 140MPH, but this is a guess because I have no speedometer and I don’t think I have a log fro that pass, either. A lot of other things were going through my mind. At one point I thought to myself “I should really pick up that time slip”, but that never actually happened, either. More important stuff going on, you know?

A Breakdown of What Happened

The motor that was in the Talon from 2003 through 2012 was doing great, but there were a few things that were causing issues for me.

A bucket of Hard Block

A bucket of Hard Block, ready to go into the motor!

A JMFab 4g63 Torque plate

I picked this up from JMFab.

Kiggly Racing provided a Girdle to keep my main caps from moving around. A necessity.

Kiggly Racing provided a Girdle to keep my main caps from moving around. A necessity.

My stroker Wiseco HD pistons mounted to my original Pauter rods

My stroker Wiseco HD pistons mounted to my original Pauter rods.

My block, filled with Hard Block and ready to rock.

My block, filled with Hard Block and ready to rock.

The Short Block, freshened up and ready to go

The Short Block, freshened up and ready to go

  • The main thrust cap had actually walked around (from all the power!) and as soon as I pulled it to check bearings after three seasons of running it, it would no longer seat squarely back in the block because metal from the block fused to the cap and vice-versa, causing pitting on both. This was causing abnormal thrust wear, and that caused me to have to replace the thrust main quite often. I knew it wasn’t right, but ended up going to two DSM Shootouts like this and ran okay at both of them.
  • The JE pistons in the motor were the cat’s ass back in 2003, when I originally assembled the motor. Unfortunately, they also had really bad valve reliefs in them, which actually netted this motor *less* piston to valve clearance than a stock block. Thanks, 2003 JE :-\ This meant that I wasn’t able to really make many cam changes, because all the hot cams nowadays would have smashed my valves right into those pistons. This also needed to be fixed.

Because of these things, I got to work. About 8 weeks before the Shootout, I ordered up a set of Wiseco stroker pistons from ExtremePSI. The plan was to use those, a new block, my existing factory G64B stroker crank and my existing Pauter rods. Machine work done, crank polished, clearances checked. everything put together. All good. Right.

Well, mostly good anyway. This new motor didn’t go together well. It was setback after setback from the beginning.

  • The machine shop sat on it for a while because one of them had questions about how to align hone the block and didn’t bother to ask the guy I dropped it off to; I’m lucky enough that the machine shop I use is local and generally does very nice work, but they had to send the block out to one of their sister shops for the line hone, which caused this delay.
  • I decided to partially fill this block; this meant I had to make a few round trips to the machine shop to get the block hot tanked and then bring it back home, fill it with Hard Blok, and then bring it back out to the machine shop. This caused a delay, but not a big deal
  • I had a bit of rewiring to do. I did some while waiting for the machine work. It’s amazing how colors of wire pop back into your head years after you’ve put a harness together (for example, light green is the color of +12V to my gauges. I’m sure you wanted to know that!)
  • I needed random parts and supplies. Nothing huge here, but delays nonetheless. I was able to teach the old guy behind the counter at the local parts store what plastigage was used for. That was interesting…

I pushed through it with the help from a list of amazing friends who helped me out so much. Jeremy, Warren, Matt, Jay and Mark – thank you all for getting my shit together with me.I wouldn’t have made it to the shootout without all of your help.

Some More Wrenches

The plan was to leave Friday after work-ish to make the trek down to Norwalk, Ohio. Around 3:30pm, though, Mark, Matt, Jay and myself were all wrenching on the car, trying to get it buttoned up. While putting the timing belt on, I broke the timing belt tensioner. Now, this was completely my own fault, but Matt jumped in and we started calling all local and only-merely-somewhat local parts stores to see if anyone had a replacement in stock. A dealer in Kalamazoo (about 2 hours away) had one on the shelf, but that was a little outside the realm of possibility. I had kind of given up, but Matt pressed on and found a parts store Waterford, about 45 minutes away, that had one on the shelf. Jay took one for the team and hopped in his car to go pick it up. Before 6:00PM, the timing belt was on the car. At that point, everything else was wrapped up, fluids were in and it was ready to fire.

A few turns of the crank and the beast awoke! We got it up to temp, checked for major leaks and looked to make sure everything was good. For the most part, it was. For the most part. One thing that cropped up was an intense ticking from the top end of the motor, which made no sense. It sounded like a bad lifter, or worse, a wrist pin. At the time, it was late at night; around 9:00pm, so we just threw the car in the trailer and called it a night. After that, we hung out and played Cards Against Humanity, which is just about the best card ever made, ever.

Saturday rolled around and I spent the morning getting the trailer loaded. Matt had driven his extremely clean and fast 1998 street GSX up from Tennessee and tuned it on the way up. Unfortunately, he was having what ended up being a coil issue that he was trying to diagnose. So, while he did that, I decided to see what was up with that top end tick. I fired the car up inside the trailer, and then started poking around. At first I wasn’t hopeful, but it ended up being a very large exhaust leak. Between the header and the head. It took me five hours to fix! I replaced the gasket once to still have the issue happen. So, I took it back apart thinking something major was up with the head. It was a simple oversight – upon putting the exhaust gasket back on the car, I ended up missing that a washer was still sitting on one of the studs in the head. So, it was tweaking the header enough to cause a large leak. I ended up pulling the header something like 5 or 6 times. Two of them were due to my fatigue – I couldn’t help but drop bolts down the header while trying to re-install the turbo. And no, you can’t snake a magnet around my header enough to get bolts out of it. I know; I’ve tried. Fatigue like that sucks. Finally together, we closed up the trailer and headed down to Norwalk on Saturday afternoon. It was a quiet trip down; I think everyone was beat by then.

Race Day!

Sunday we showed up at the track somewhere around 8:30AM. It was a good feeling to see Summit Motorsports Park. Unpacked the trailer, checked everything on the car, fueled up and were ready to go right about the time the first qualifying pass of the day came. It came time to make the first pass. I did a massive burnout, but it was actually to try to break the motor in more than anything. And yeah, it’s fun, too :-)
I ticked off a 9.0-something, around 147-148MPH? Or something like that; I can’t remember. Back to the pits for a cool down.

In the pits, I wanted to check compression. After all, this was a brand new motor, and the first thing I did to it was a burnout and a pass. I also talked with Kevin Kwiatkowski about my car breaking up in high RPM; Kevin gave me a few things to check, ignition related, and offered up his coil on plug ignition for me to use off his car (he was done for the day; his transmission broke.) which was great to try out. So, back to the car to get things swapped around and check things out.

I pulled plugs, pulled out the compression tester, and went to town. Cylinder 1 was not yet up on compression – it was somewhere in the 160 range. Cylinders 2,3 and 4 were all in the 175-185 range, which is better, but they should actually be a little higher than that. During doing all this, I ended up having to put the motor at TDC for some reason. While spinning the motor over to TDC, I felt more resistance than is ever normal while rotating the crank. At the time, I didn’t think that much of it. In hindsight, I should have packed it in and gone home with a slightly messed up, but fixable motor. Nope, another pass!

This time, the burnout was fine. At the line, the car was sluggish to get onto the converter. I left without being on the 2-step because it was taking forever. Then, about 1000′ out, the car started breaking up. This was similar to what was happening the previous pass. About 100 feet after that, though, at 100% throttle, I lost all power. It was my rod making it’s way out the side of my block. White smoke rolling out from under the car and behind me. Now it was time to focus on slowing down. When I initially hit the brakes, the car started to slow, then wanted to wander due to having oil sprayed all over… everything under the car. I remembered I had a parachute and pulled it; I didn’t feel it at all. I’m thinking I was already braking hard enough that it didn’t really provide much. I rolled around to the turnaround where the car coasted to a stop.

Hi, Rod!

The aftermath :-\

The aftermath :-\


After taking off my helmet and unbuckling myself from the car, I hopped out and popped the hood. This was my first foray into making large pieces of metal into smaller, useless pieces of metal, but I had a feeling I already knew what happened. Sure enough, I had a pool of oil in the catch pan and chunks of both cast iron and aluminum floating around in it, too. Then began the walk of shame… back to my pit area, 3/4 of a mile away. I held my head high; kept my fire suit on, and was thankful that Mark had commandeered John’s quad to help tow the Talon back. I hopped on the back, we found Christyn, and the three of us made our way back to the Talon, and towed it back to the trailer.

It was an experience.

Fuel system changes

I’m working on quite a few fuel system changes. Here’s a short teaser for you: a pair of system 1 filters, picked up from Summit Racing last week.

20140305-225608.jpg

These are simply the cherry on top though. I will be posting shortly about the other items in the new fuel system :-)

A Fresh Look

I know I need to get my but in gear and update this site more often!

Because of that, I’ve just spent the last few free hours of my life going through everything on the server, throwing old stuff away, and updating the layout and the look of everything on the site. There’s still a little bit of work to do still, but I wanted to present this new stuff to you. I’ve also moved servers to something kind of ridiculously overpowered and on a real internet connection, so hopefully everyone will experience improved performance from that.

Anyway, here’s to 2014, and to getting this site updated more often. I have a ton of things to show you!

2011 DSM Shootout – Getting Ready (Part 1)

The mad race to the shootout is finally over, so I have some time to write up a recap of the events that happened in the weeks and days beforehand…

Just as a random note – I started writing this back on 08/27/11, and have kind of forgotten about it. Wow :-o

Kiggly Racing HLA Regulator

My Kiggly Racing HLA Regulator

Anyway, The road to the shootout was long and very much delayed. Many many times. It started around April of 2011 as a conscious decision to freshen up the motor. The engine in the car has originally put together back in 2004 when I started on the road to making the car RWD. It basically sat for four years after being initially put together. I also made the decision to freshen the motor because the car had three seasons, countless passes and a bunch of dyno time on it. Compression was down a little bit to around ~140-150 per cylinder, where it would normally be around 180-190 in any given cylinder. I also had a few other new items to install – one of them being a Kiggly Racing HLA regulator:

Additionally, it was just kind of time – So, I started pulling things apart.

Pauter rods and JE Pistons during the teardown

My Pauter rods connected to my JE Pistons

With the help of Jeremy and Warren, I spent a few hours tearing the car down. With a few capable guys, the car went from running to completely apart in about 3.5 hours. Not bad. I certainly can’t complain. If I didn’t have lock-tite and/or safety wire on everything, it would have gone even faster. After getting it all torn down, everything looked surprisingly good. I was happy with almost all of it. One of the more interesting things that I found was the strange amount of oxidation on some of the parts. All in all, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was pretty strange nonetheless.

JE Pistons with oxidation

JE Piston Oxidation

Additionally, there was also some oxidation (rust) on most of the cylinder walls. Again, this isn’t a big deal because the car ran for three seasons like this, so not a huge deal. The main bearings looked decent, the rod bearings looked even better, even though both of them had wear. Not unexpected.

The original plan was to pull it all apart, hone the block, replace the rings and bearings, and then start putting it back together. The reality, though, was that I ended up being done for the day. Crap.

The original rings that I purchased were the wrong rings. JE apparently updated their piston design for the 4G63 at some point in the past 8 year (Imagine that!) and I didn’t realize this until after I had files the top ring on the pistons. The second ring, however, was much thinner than it needed to be. So, I had to order another set of (correct) rings, which took about a week to get here. I also found some issues with the head that I wanted to get fixed.

The head that I was using was a completely stock head, aside from the Springs and Cams. What I found when I pulled the engine apart was pretty interesting. Between Cylinders 3 and 4, there are a few things: a head stud hole and a coolant passage. In addition to that, there was also an additional unwanted passage between 3 and 4 that ran underneath the seal ring on the head gasket. This was certainly not supposed to be there. To fix this issue, the head would have to be replaced.

4g63 Crankshaft

My Crankshaft, sitting snugly in it’s block

These issues put me weeks behind. I had to source a head (I actually ended up sourcing like 5 heads, but that’s a different story) get machine work done to it and order new rings. The short block actually went together pretty well – pretty uneventful really. The crank and new bearings plastigauged out to spec without a problem, and everything went back into the Talon. By June, I had the block back in the car and waiting for the head.

Unfortunately, it took another 6 weeks to get a head I was happy with. I took a new head to a local machine shop. The shop itself did a decent job on a deck to the head, and did a valve job on the head, too. By now, though, it was the beginning of August! I had to hustle to get it all together and ready to run. The weekend before the shootout, the head was finally ready to go – I bolted it on, finished up the rest of the unfinished business on the car, and fired it up.

Next up: The Dyno!

Sold! 1991 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD

More images can be found here.

For Sale: 1991 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD – white exterior with black Mitsubishi interior. I’ve decided to sell this car. I actually really like it, but I’m not going to do what I wanted to do with this car so I’m going to sell it and start other projects. It’s almost entirely stock. It has just under 150,000 miles on the chassis, just over 8,000 miles on an engine rebuild.

I don’t know the entire history of the car, but I do know it was purchased new in Tennessee and spent most of it’s life in Tennessee, until the end of 2006. That’s when it came up to Michigan to live next to the RWD in the garage. I drove it just a little bit before it developed a rod knock, so in 2007 I pulled the engine and replaced it with a fresh rebuild. The crank is uncut and the engine has .020″ over 95+ pistons on 1G rods. I also ended up replacing a wheel bearing, front driver’s axle, front brakes, alternator, clutch, pressure plate, OEM throw out bearing and probably a few other things that I can’t remember. I have not done any performance mods to the car, and was pretty much stock when I got it. The car itself is in pretty decent shape, especially considering that it’s 20 years old.

Exterior-wise, the body is in relatively good shape and only has a few dings as you’d expect on a car from 1991 – the worst one is on the hood next to the turbo bulge and can be seen in the pictures. The paint is a little dull and could certainly at the very least use a professional buffing, but is okay and certainly not falling off the car or anything. The other outside body panels are decent – all the plastic is there and in the right spots and the bumpers are not cracked or scraped up badly or anything like that. the car currently has a set of Konig Tuner wheels, which unfortunately have a terrible finish on them, but are physically in good shape. The tires are Khumo Ecsta somethingorothers Z-rated tires, which have around 15,000 miles on them if I had to guess – tread is good but they’re getting to be pretty old at this point. I also have the original white swirlie wheels along with a sketchy set of tires that will go with the car. All the windows have aftermarket tint on them, which was probably done back in the ’90s – the side and rear quarter windows are okay, but the back window is bubbling.

The interior is in okay shape – I don’ know who did what or when, but when I got the car, it already had many of it’s interior components replaced. Someone replaced the headliner and neglected to put the sun visors back in the car, so they’re missing. The seats have been replaced with the seats pictured, which are Mitsubishi seats (not Eagle seats.) The car originally had the stock beige light gray leather interior, and if you’ve ever owned one, you know that the driver’s seat never lasted very long. The stock radio didn’t work when I got it, so the car has a simple replacement CD/MP3 Player and I’ve also replaced a few of the blown stock speakers with other stock speakers.

The car has working A/C. It’s awesome.

The car needs exhaust work – it’s not super loud, but there’s definitely an exhaust leak of some sort going on. I haven’t looked into it. I think the original 14b is still on the car. Every once in a while there will be a whiff of oil when you’re stopped at a stop light, so I think that may go at any time. I have another used 14b I will include with the car that seems to be in good shape; it has normal shaft play – nothing excessive. Additionally, the transmission does not shift very well. At this point, I really think that it’s time for a rebuild on this. To help clarify this a little bit, the shifting is pretty notchy when the car is cold, but once warm the shifting is better. At times, a 5 to 4 downshift will not want to happen and will crunch a little bit. The 1-2 shift is certainly the weakest of the bunch, but will generally not crunch unless you’re trying to shift it at high RPM or you’ve done something funky with the clutch pedal. I’ve gone through and adjusted the master cylinder and the flywheel has not been cut (it’s newer than the car – the one that came with the car had hairline fractures in it when I went to replace the motor.) so I’m pretty sure the issue is with the blocker rings.

Overall, this car is decent enough to drive around on a daily basis, but if you wanted it to be nice, you could spend as much time as you wanted and have a great project car. I’m looking at getting a classic, so that’s why I’m selling this. Price is $2500/obo. If you have any questions, want any other information, or need additional pictures of anything then please Contact me.

[Updated 04/03/11 to add more information about the transmission and correct information about the original interior color. The original interior was Gray, not Beige.]