What it takes to be the quickest Subaru

Atty. Jerome G. Neri
The Scrutineer

FOR some time now, we have been developing a drag race car. The platform we chose was a 1999 Subaru WRX STI. In the Philippines, a big chunk of the drag racing community use the Honda platform, then followed by the Mitsubishi crowd. Subaru is not even on the radar of the drag racers in the Philippines. It is said that it is difficult to make the Subaru quick and reliable. The reason we chose the Subaru STI is because Subaru is the only local dealer that sells a high-performance car that has affordable aftermarket parts, well-developed EJ series engines that have won numerous World Rally titles, and a patented symmetrical all-wheel-drive system that is second to none. The symmetrical all-wheel-drive system is important for traction as the race venue in the Visayas, mainly the Old Bacolod Airport, has a slippery surface.

Unlike in the capital, Manila, where the drag racers there have huge budgets and spend millions on their race cars, we wanted to build a drag race car with a budget of P1 million, including the cost of the car itself. This is quite a challenging feat. With such a budget, we are also aware that we cannot compete with the elite racers in Manila who have spent over 10 million on their race cars. Our goal is simple. Make a low 11 second, which should be enough to compete at the top in the Visayas.

During the first leg of Bacolod’s Karera 2015 held last February, we brought our race car still fitted with basically a stock engine for a shakedown and a few test runs. It posted an elapsed time of 12.1 seconds.

The shakedown runs were important as we found problems with our drivetrain. The axles of a 1999 Subaru STI would break when launched hard. However, we also had the newer 2008 STI that had no problems with hard launches, and in fact, the 2008 STI we brought was overall champion posting an elapsed time of 12.1 seconds. Now we knew that an upgraded axle is needed for our race car, one as big and durable as that of the modern STIs.

After upgrading the axles we also installed our race engine, which was completely built in Cebu at Group B Automotive and Tuning. All machine shop work was done at Edmel/Rurex machine shop. We chose Edmel/Rurex as this machine shop has the most modern equipment, which is at the top of current international industry standards. Gone are the days of having to purchase short blocks abroad – the precision we get from Edmel/Rurex is just as good or even better.

Right out of the bat, our race engine produced 490-wheel horsepower, a great number for a baseline run without any tuning yet. After fine tuning, we ended up at 540-wheel horsepower with only 21 psi of boost. There is still a lot of horsepower left in the engine as the turbo we are using is more than capable of boosting 30 psi, but we decided to stop at 540 wheel horsepower as the car is still in its development phase. The engine seems capable of going upwards of 600 wheel horsepower, but that will be the next step in the development of this race car.

We brought the race car to the second leg of Bacolod’s Karera 2015, held last May 9 and its performance exceeded our expectations. Right out of the box, it ran an elapsed time of 11.7 seconds at 120 mph on a very hot summer day. The only problem we had was traction. The launch was good with a 1.7 seconds 60 feet time, but the tires would spin too much in second and third gears. We tried different tire pressures and even put new tires.

These helped a lot that we dropped our elapsed time to 11.2 seconds at 123 mph. We had the quickest car in the race and was top qualifier and won the Class A category in the hands of veteran race driver Jess Garcia.

More important than the win was that our race car is the first Subaru STI in the country to do 11 second passes and our 11.2 second pass is the quickest made by a Subaru in the Philippines. I am confident that this car is very capable of doing 10s once we sort out the traction problems.

For the next race, increasing the horsepower will have to be put on hold as sorting out traction is more important. Power is useless if it cannot be transferred to the ground.