Subaru Impreza 2.5RS - Best Inexpensive Brake Upgrade When I bought my 2000 Subaru Impreza 2.5RS, I immediately wanted to see what kind of brake upgrades I could do. Since I was building a rally car, I needed to fit 15" wheels to use rally tires since 16" rally tires are very expensive and hard to get. This made big brake kits not an option. Another choice would have been the JDM 4-piston front calipers and the JDM 2-piston rear calipers, also known as the 4-pot and 2-pot brakes. These will fit certain rally specific wheels like Methods, but six Method wheels, a JDM 4-pot, and 2-pot...
Fitting Subaru WRX Brakes with 15" Wheels Typically you want to be able to fit 15" wheels when building a rally car. 16" rally tires are very expensive and hard to get. The option that most people choose are the JDM 4-piston front calipers and the JDM 2-piston rear calipers, also known as the 4-pot and 2-pot brakes. These will fit certain rally specific wheels like Methods. Six Method wheels will run you about $1000 and a set of JDM 4-pot and 2-pot brakes will be around $500. We haven't even bought pads and rotors yet! If you are more budget oriented like me, then you probably...
5 Amazon Cyber Monday Tool Deals The holiday deals just keep on coming! Here are five more that I found for Cyber Monday. All of the tools listed are from high quality brands with many good reviews. If I don't already have them, you can bet that they're in my shopping cart. Remember, the Black Friday deals that I shared a few days ago are still available as well! Actually, most of these deals last until the end of the week, but that's if they don't run out of stock! And without further ado, here are my top 5 picks for this year's Cyber Monday why...
5 Amazon Black Friday Tool Deals The holiday season is finally upon us. That also means that there are a lot of good deals going on, but if you are like me, you probably don't want to be a part of holiday shopping crowd. All I want to do is relax, enjoy the holiday weekend, and eat a lot. Luckily, it's the 21st century and we can do all of our shopping online, while still finding the great deals we are looking for. I've been spending some time on Amazon trying to hunt down some nice tools for the garage, and I think I found some...
5 Reasons Why You Should Rally a Subaru Subaru parts are readily available In North America, finding parts for a Subaru is simple. Plenty of parts are interchangeable across various Subaru models. Most autoparts stores will probably have what you need if you are in a rush to get something fixed. Even if you need to get an OEM part from the dealer, lead times are quick. Subarus have a massive aftermarket as well, especially for rally components, so you do not need to fabricate most parts yourself to turn a Subaru into a race car. For other makes, picking suspension for a rally car can be difficult,...
From Junker to Rally Car - Part 4 - Clutch and Transmission This was definitely the highest priority repair I needed to make on the car. My first question was: "Which clutch and flywheel should I get?". I did not need a crazy, unsprung, ceramic clutch for the car because I will not be adding too much power to the car. I was lucky to find a guy on the RS25 forums who was selling his used ACT Streetlite Flywheel and Exedy Stage 1 Organic Clutch. He said it was only used for 5k-10k miles, so I took his word for it and bought it. I think he was only asking $300...
From Junker to Rally Car - Part 3 - Suspension Reinforcement Moving along to the suspension from part 2, the next task on the list was replacing all of the suspension bushings. Because this is a race car, I chose to get polyurethane bushings of course. I bought a kit from Prothane. Some of the bushings were for a GD WRX, so I ended up not using those. I also bought the bushings for the lateral links from Whiteline. Here's what I used for this modification: Front Sway Bar Bushings Rear Sway Bar Bushings I upgraded to a 17mm rear sway bar at the time of this modification so I got...
Empire State Performance Rally 2017 Empire State Performance Rally (ESPR) took the cake again as one of the most difficult rallies to finish in North America. With 24 cars starting the event, only 10 of them finished. For the last two years, the common complaint was how rough the stages were, but this year, they could not use the same excuse. The organizers of the event spent many hours working on the stages to level out the big holes and rocks that were causing problems before. This allowed for a faster, safer, and more enjoyable rally. So why didn't many of the competitors finish? Most...
From Junker to Rally Car - Part 2 - Rust After buying the car in Part 1, I was eager to get started on the car. I wanted to fix all of the problems right away, and I was determined to make it just like new. I started to do a lot of disassembly from the back of the car since that seemed to be where most of the problems were. Time to pull off the rear bumper cover... Ughh, that's no good. At least the STI exhaust tip is looking pretty! That was several pounds of rust coming from that bumper. Whatever, weight reduction. I noticed that the inside...
From Junker to Rally Car - Part 1 My rally car has come a long way since I bought it in October 2015. In this post, we will take a walk down memory lane to see how far we've come. This picture was from the original Craigslist post. A 2000 Subaru Impreza 2.5RS 5 speed manual. It was in Hartford, CT, which is about 5 hours away from me. It had about 200K miles on it at the time, with a few issues: Bad clutch Air in brake lines Handbrake did not work EVAP codes Rusted quarter panels Huge dent in rear right door No seats? First,...
