It's weird how things work out sometimes. For instance, you'd think that when you assemble some of the best tuners in the country for an all-out performance shootout-with all the variables that are entailed in such an undertaking-you would end up with a completely different set of results each year. That's what you would think, or least that's what I thought. But if you just look at the results from this year's and last year's Modified Tuner Shootout at Firebird Raceway in Arizona, you couldn't be faulted for doing a bit of a double take. Last year's Modified cover shot of the event showed the GST Subaru Impreza up front, the Full-Race supported Subaru STI just behind and a brand-new Nissan GT-R completing the picture. You'll see the same thing on this year's cover as well because the results ended up the same. The results are only a small part of what took place this April in Phoenix, though, and the real story is how we all ended up where we did.
For me, it was another podium runner-up finish in a Full-Race turbo-powered car, this time built, supplied and street-driven out from California by the great guys at YimiSport Tuning. YimiSport is a Subaru/Mitsubishi performance company based in Santa Clarita that offers services ranging from simply putting on the go-fast goodies all the way through to doing complete build and tunes of reliable street/track monsters. They were kind enough, through a little coaxing from Geoff Racier at Full-Race in Phoenix, to bring their new '08 silver Subaru STI down for a crack at the tuner competition.
We knew that as a full-weight street car on used rubber we would be at a disadvantage in some respects, but as it turned out, power would not be a problem. To make sure the car would run on track without reliability issues, we shook the Subie down at the Bondurant circuit a couple days before the shootout. Right from the get go, it was obvious that the Yimi guys had built a nice piece. Not a race car by any means, but certainly something that could potentially turn a decent lap or two.
We decided that for the shakedown run we would let the car loose a bit and run what we felt to be maximum boost that would allow the best possible power-producing induction without doing damage. It would be better to find any potential problems during the test as opposed to having something break during the actual competition. Despite an intermittent smoke cloud of burned oil that we traced to a relatively easy-to-fix oil pressure and seal issue, we had no problems with the car.
The first day of the competition was April 10, and YimiSport owner Paul Yim along with lead tuner Paul Leung decided to run the same boost during the dyno pull, which was the first element of the four-element shootout program. At 30 psi from the Full-Race rotated twin-scroll BorgWarner S300X83-75 turbo, the '08 STI put out a ground-pounding 550 whp! For a car intended to turn multiple laps on a race course and then be able to drive all the way back to California, that was an amazing number. And believe me, during our short test the day before, the car felt incredibly strong. It would later go on to turn an 11.5 at 124 mph on cold tires on the dragstrip at Firebird Raceway, and at the Bondurant circuit it reached 123 mph on the longest straight.
Just to put that into perspective, a Carrera GT on the same road course reaches 125 mph before the braking zone and an Enzo just touches 128 mph. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that the YimiSport Full-Race Subie is a million-dollar Ferrari or the world's best Porsche, all I'm saying is that in a straight line with 30 lbs of boost, it was bloody fast!
By Mike Speck
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