Gears of War

Welcome back faithful followers, and I hope our American friends had a great Thanksgiving holiday with their loved ones. What's new on our end? Jura aka George is the proud first-time father of a beautiful baby girl, Katerina. Mom and baby are both doing great and George is suffering from a melted heart haha.

Butch was in the hospital too for a quick upgrade. Porter is the official team mascot, but now we've got another "dog" on the team, his name is Hewland...

Don't worry buddy, we could never replace you!

Rallye Střela Kralovice 2010

The boys were back in the Six-Star saddle two weeks ago for another cup championship event, this time southwest of Prague for Rallye Střela Kralovice 2010. Official navigating duties were once again the responsibility of our great friend David Klvač. Anyhow, there was another race in between this one and Rallye České Středohoří, but an injector failure at the start of the first stage forced a very premature retirement and a disappointing DNF.

In addition to a fresh set of 660cc injectors and an updated MoTeC tune, George decided the gravel-spec D2 suspension was too soft and bouncy for long stretches of tarmac. We were definitely losing some time in the sharper corners waiting for the chassis to settle and track properly. After being re-tuned for the new injectors, the car went off to a rally chassis specialist and the car was limitedly dialed-in on these beauties...

However awesome those new dampers are, the "problem" is that they entirely change the handling dynamics of the car. It's not at all that the D2 gravel coilovers were bad, it's simply that they are valved for loose traction surfaces and allow for more vertical travel than tarmac units. The new dampers control chassis travel so precisely that it was like a completely new car. I guess I could equate it to years in the kitchen with a dull knife than getting a very sharp one all of a sudden.

The new suspension certainly took some getting used to, and a couple of the stages were run at night. Awesome indeed, but admittedly tough to manage on an unknown suspension and weather conditions that made the roads slicker than average. The combination of cooler temperatures and light rain resulted in sort of a "damned if you do, damed if you don't" tire situation, so the boys slipped a bit to 11th overall and 7th in class.

Here are the overall rally maps and the individual stage routes:

And now, on to the GOOD stuff!

And of course we have some decent action footage at 3:37 and 4:44...

Rallye České Středohoří 2010

After our respectable finish in the previous rally, Jura (George) had his mind set on entering as many events as possible. I did pretty well as a navigator, but on account of trans-Atlantic location constraints, Jura needed a new co-driver for Rallye České Středohoří 2010. He called our buddy Dave Klvac, another adrenalin junkie and accomplished tattoo artist, and off the boys went to Litomerice, a small town in the northwest corner of the Czech Republic near Germany.

I was unfortunately not in attendance, but the guys got plenty of on-board footage and some photographers took some great shots of them in action. There were nine stages in this rally, and Stages 3, 6 and 9 Tetrised (yes I just used it as a verb, deal with it) their way through an old army base, bummed I missed those! They finished even better this time around, 7th overall and 6th in class.

Another nice slide at 2:19 and some great in-car footage from 6:10...

Rallye Železné Hory 2010

It's been a while, hope everybody had a great weekend! So for however much I like cars, tuning and racing, I've never actually competed beyond the keyboard, and that's always bothered me. Talking about which size turbo is best-suited for a daily driven street car and sliding sideways around a downhill hairpin turn at 30mph are two entirely different creatures. This past August I definitively set-out to change that and see what rallying is all about.

If you've been following this blog at all, you likely know by now that the focus is on our '97 Impreza rally car build in the Czech Republic (CZ). But why don't you do that here in the US, you ask. Well, for one, it's expensive here, a lot more so than in CZ. Also, it's much easier to enter an organized event over there than it is here, certainly for better or for worse. Sure, that means that a lot more inexperienced drivers make up the field, but it also gives one plenty of chances to get experience.

Off we went to Chrudim, a small town located near Pardubice in north-central CZ. Rallye Železné Hory 2010 was scheduled for Saturday, August 14 with recce runs done on Friday. Also scheduled for Friday night and Saturday morning was a brutal storm, and it rained sideways all night in between brilliant lightning strikes and earth-trembling thunder. Between this saturation and the anxiety of competition, sleep was nowhere to be found.

The rally consisted of eight stages, two different tracts run twice each and then the same tracts run in reverse twice each. Jura was behind the wheel and I was strapped in as navigator. Mind you, this was our first rally, and better still, I was reading our stage notes back to him in Czech. I speak fluently, but my reading and writing isn't quite as strong. Nevermind, no time for second-guessing now. I synced my stopwatch with the event clock and off we went.

Our assigned number was 20 in class A4, so that simply means we left the service area 20th and really has no bearing on overall position since a rally works on staggered starting times. Each stage is blocked off to regular traffic, but transit between is on open public roads and all laws apply, especially with the local boys in blue eager to write tickets. We passed more than a few guys that had been busted trying to make up time for issues during the stages.

You're given a certain amount of time to reach the beginning of each stage, and if you don't make it to the timing checkpoint in the allotted time, you are assessed a penalty relative to the delay. It sure keeps you on your toes if you have any mechanical work to do on the car in the service area. We calmly drove over to stage one, accelerating gently to bring the engine to temperature and braking gently to warm up the race compound pads.

Stages 1 and 3 don't look too tricky by the map, but longer straightaways with full-throttle turns means very carefully scrubbing off a lot of speed into any more substantial turns. We made the decision to start the day on rain tires, especially because Stages 2 and 4 wound through a shaded forest where the sun didn't reach the damp, moss-covered road. I think it's fair to say that it didn't impact our time significantly, and it turned out to be a wise choice (more later).

Our good ol' buddy Jan Kvasnicka in his EVO IX was paddocked next to us in the service area. There is no doubt that he is a faster driver than George, but he is also more reckless (you always have to push the envelope to get faster). He felt confident enough to switch back to dry slicks for Stages 3 and 4. Well, we passed him holding the "OK" sign on the side of the road, and shortly thereafter we saw his EVO face-planted in a ditch after a blind, sweeping right. Damn.

Thankfully Kvasa and his co-driver Dave (the guy that made our twin-scroll headers) weren't badly injured, but the car was a different story. They nose-dived into that rut on the inside of the turn and a large rock tore the bottom of the motor open, so needless to say it's totaled. No pics, because it's bad juju to show-off someone's misfortune, especially our good friend's. So, he was done for the day, but true-blue, he stayed to cheer us on!

After a midday service and lunch break, it was time for Stages 6, 7, 8 and 9, which if you recall are the earlier stages driven in reverse. So yes, we saw all the turns before, but any mud, gravel and debris that was sprayed onto the outside of turns in the earlier stages was now directly in the apex of those same turns in reverse on these later stages, yikes! We were extra cautious, especially after Kvasa's wreck.

Fortunately, we finished in one piece, and respectably at that. We knew going in that we were not going to win, so our goal was to get our feet wet, not crash and most importantly, have fun! Is the fastest way through every turn with the e-brake? Definitely not, but the fans loved us, and we loved driving for them. Even with all of our showboating, we managed to finish 9th overall and 7th in class.

A nice slide at 1:41...not so much at 7:33 haha!

2011 Impreza STI Spec C Nürburgring Challenge

BY DAVID GLUCKMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO

June 2010

The Nürburgring. You may have heard of it. It’s a popular place of late, with industry test periods filling the schedule Tuesdays through Thursdays—providing ample fodder for spy-photo junkies—and sanctioned racing on weekends. And then there are the secretive private sessions, out of which come that trendiest of bragging rights, the manufacturer-generated, unofficial Nordschleife lap record. This is the story of one of those records.

First things first, here’s what you want to know: Subaru got an STI sedan to lap the ’Ring—helmed by rallying legend and four-time-in-a-row WRC title holder Tommi Mäkinen—in 7 minutes and 55 seconds. That’s quicker than the quickest production sedan to date, Porsche’s Panamera Turbo, which clocked a (still-unofficial) 7:56 lap, which in turn is quicker than the CTS-V, which posted a 7:59.32.

Not So Fast, But It’s Fast

The stickler is that the Subaru in question wasn’t a production car, it was, in the words of the company, a 2011 Impreza WRX STI prototype. The car is basically the bastard child of two JDM-only models with some extra bespoke aero bits thrown in for slipperiness and high-speed stability.

The car starts with the suspension from the improved-for-2011 WRX STI—it’s 5 mm lower than the 2010 model, with 1-mm-thicker front and rear anti-roll bars, higher-rate springs all around, stiffer rear-subframe bushings, and new front-suspension pillow-ball bushings. The engine is the Japanese-market STI Spec C’s, a 2.0-liter turbocharged boxer-four that’s been given the larger turbo from the R205, another Japanese special-edition STI model. It’s now putting out a claimed 320 hp, which makes the time that much more impressive when compared to the Panamera’s 500 turbocharged ponies (although the Porsche is surely carrying around a few hundred extra pounds). The R205 also donates six-piston front brakes and a front strut-tower brace; it features a flexible center portion that allows vertical motion but maintains lateral stiffness. Weight is saved through the use of an aluminum hood from the Spec C, unique aluminum front fenders, the Spec C’s smaller battery, and the deletion of the radio as in the R205 and Spec C. Extra aero parts specific to this car include a full undertray, a front-lip extension tacked onto the R205’s lower spoiler, and a Gurney flap added—taped, really—to the rear at Mäkinen’s request. (The car was getting a bit out of shape without it in the high-speed sections.) A full roll cage and race buckets fitted with a five-point harness for the driver and a four-point for the passenger make things safe.

Taken for a Ride

A month after Subaru set its time, and just days after the Nürburgring 24-hour race, we were invited to meet with Mäkinen and the STI team to have a look at the car and for to experience what a record-setting lap feels like. And we did, for the most part. There was a narrow window early on a Tuesday morning, which only allowed track time for two flying laps. The first was interrupted by a truck that snuck onto the track—no joke, watch the video—which reminded me why you should always pack an extra pair of boxers, and the second was a flying, full-speed blitz, at least until the end when Mäkinen realized we were running out of fuel.

But the ride was no less of a thrill. Flying over German hill and dale, all of which looks the same—Armco, very green trees, graffiti—but every twist and kink of which is unique, learning the intricacies of the ‘Ring, let alone getting comfortable hurtling through at eye-popping speeds, is no small feat. Muscles ached from attempting to keep planted in the seat, eyes hurt from scanning the graffiti-plastered pavement, and we weren’t even driving. Afterward, when we asked how much time Mäkinen had on the track before the record run, one of the Subaru guys laughed. “We asked him to learn the circuit on PlayStation, but he never did it.” The Finn’s response: “I wanted to, but it was the Japanese version.” A certain Herr Schmidt, a German member of the STI development team who is very familiar with the ‘Ring, took Mäkinen out the first time he was at the track and showed him around. He told me that a normal person needs about 50 laps to improve their time. Mäkinen did so in maybe five. “He ran unbelievably quickly.”

Mäkinen says that, as a rally driver, he’s developed good “road memory” and didn’t need to run the track too many times. He said he viewed it like any rally stage, except without any pace notes, and shrugged it off by saying the hardest part for him was adjusting to the car’s right-hand-drive setup.

Why Bring a Prototype to the ‘Ring?

Subaru brought this prototype to the Nürburgring because that’s what it has done with past models. The automaker first lapped a non-STI WRX prototype in 1992, posting a time of 8:28.93. It then returned in 1996 with a prototype of the version III WRX STI, and turned in an 8:10.75. The heavier second-gen WRX STI, which bowed for 2000, posted a lap that “did not meet our expectations” (Needless to say, we didn’t learn that car’s time.) A 2002 STI prototype picked up the baton, setting a lap time of 8:06.59. Most recently, a 2004 prototype got down in the 7s with a 7:59.41. Subaru contends that time spent on ‘Ring times is a very helpful R&D exercise for the development team, providing an opportunity to try out new parts that can and sometimes are applied to future models. (We don’t expect to see a full undertray on an STI any time soon, however.) With this year’s car, STI project boss Hiroshi Mori aimed to create “the fastest WRX STI ever,” but he was quick to mention that fast doesn’t necessarily come from maximum speed and engine output.

Indeed, the ‘Ring offers a little bit of everything, and—more than any other track—it offers a simulation of real-world roads. Altitude varies by about 1000 feet, and there are loads of blind corners. Pictures don’t do the elevation changes justice; the deceleration from a few of the more drastic uphill portions had us wondering if the harness would hold. Blind corners appear and disappear, but luckily we didn’t have enough time to process them, or the thought that there might perhaps be another utility truck just past the apex.

You’re probably wondering, like we were, what any of this has to do with reality. Well, besides this particular car’s tenuous R&D connection, vanquishing the Panamera Turbo was a point of pride among the Subaru delegation. However, if Porsche wanted to build something analogous to this amalgamated STI, a ‘Ring-specific Panamera Turbo, we have no doubt that the Stuttgart boys would have their mark back in a heartbeat. What the Subie’s time really proves, though, is that the STI continues to be enhanced, iteratively. Plus, the PR machine loves to be fed.

The latest prototype is easily “the fastest WRX STI ever,” at least among those built by Subaru. You just can’t buy one, which is kind of a bummer. Our ride in the prototype does, however, have us a little more excited to experience the 2011 hatchback and sedan, which we’ll get to drive soon enough.

Impreza 555, Impreza WRC '97 and Prodrive Impreza Group N

Good Afternoon Folks! What we have here is an outstanding review and comparison of two legendary Imprezas and the latest offering from Prodrive that's as close to a factory-backed WRC car as we can get since the departure of SWRT. This fantastic video is courtesy of the folks at Autocar UK.

1997 Impreza GT Project: New paint!

While we received quite a bit of positive feedback for the initial matte black paint scheme, Jura has never been known for his patience or complacency. He emailed me out of the blue (pun intended) to show me his latest inspiration for the car. This new livery is in classic Subaru style!