The Story of Grandpa’s Toy
In 2018, this Legacy was no longer being driven on the street and was just sitting around gathering dust. It had 100,000 easy miles on it. So, (Grandpa) having built numerous muscle cars over the years got together with a number of his racing buddies and associates and made the decision to build something different and memorable. Our team enlisted the best technical people we knew who were available on the West Coast, none of the folks except FW Motorsports and M-45 Automotive had ever built a Subaru. However, each member was very curious, experienced and knowledgeable about how to build a legitimate race car!
Each of our team had to have an extensive resume and experience in engine and chassis development in Race Cars (not street cars). Our team’s resume’s comes primarily from many successful years at the highest levels of Drag and Road Racing and because their wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t certainly allowed us to eliminate many potential mistakes that many enthusiasts make in their pursuit of their special car!
As we all know the heads, cams and turbos are where the power resides in any engine. The engines durability and capacity to survive our tinkering as you will note, was designed and calibrated to flow more air with less boost than 99% of the current Subaru hi-performance platforms you will observe. Our goal was to generate competitive horsepower and torque while minimizing the enormous heat loads that generally comes with horsepower. We feel that oil temps maximizing around a high 200 to 220 degrees was an acceptable goal for a racing engine. We also were attempting to generate high horsepower with minimum boost, which we also accomplished.
Of course, for the specs on the short block you can look at the list of parts that are found on adjacent upgrades category to see that this platform is very robust and capable of almost anything we can throw at this engine.
Getting back to the heads, cams and Turbo. The final designs were the work of RMI on the heads, Demi Elgin designed and built the custom cams and Comp. Turbo built the special Turbo. The RMI Heads started life as CNC’d versions of IAG’s Stage 4 heads, which are considered to be the best CNC’d heads in the USA for the Subaru Platform. RMI has very unique experience in improving on what the manufacture feels is their best commercially available product. RMI is known for the work they have done for most of the Porsche race teams and many, many top drag racing teams over their many years. RMI is a porting and engine design specialist extraordinaire. As an example of RMI’s program is that his equipment and computer software is some of his own development and creativity. For example: RMI has a very unique flow bench that is custom designed and uses a car engine to operate the bench and his bench is so accurate that he designs the heads to increase the flow in .050 of valve lift up to .550 of valve lift. Using this process, he increased the flow rate over the entire powerband on average 18% more than the comparable IAG heads. RMI then provides this data to Demi Elgin who is known in the Cam industry as “Mr. Cam” and is the person who taught the majority of Cam manufacturers in the USA and abroad how to create and develop their camshafts.
In our case, the cams were developed to work in concert with the RMI heads and the Turbo. Unfortunately, we needed some special Supertech shims to adjust these cams and they are not available until the end of 2023 and would not be available until sometime in 2024. So, we have temporarily installed a set of Crower Stage 3 Cams, which will not perform at the level projected, but would allow us to come to this timeline with a much stronger running engine at 20 lbs boost. The Comp Turbo, was designed specifically for this engine configuration and really needs the Elgin cams to produce what we feel will be the optimum performance level. All of our top end has been WPC and Cryo treated for longevity and performance. The maintenance and upkeep of this vehicle is extremely important and has been performed by Paul and his competent crew at FW Motorsports in Rocklin California. The car is tuned by Travis Barnes, owner of Snail Racing and one of the best tuners on the West coast. After tuning the car in early Oct. 2023 and installing the Haltech ECU he stated that he has tuned 1000’s of Subarus and never had a Subaru that could produce 560 whp and 515 ft lbs of torque with just 20 lbs of boost. He did state that if we ran what highly modified Subarus run at 45 to 50 lbs of boost. The car should make in excess of 850whp and probably 775 ft.lbs of torque!
However, Travis is a fabulous time attack racer who stated that because of the light weight 560whp should be the perfect amount of power for any road course and will limit wheel spin when coming out of the corners. The rest of the car has been completely refined as the running gear and parts are easy to replace.
