Two of our customers, Jason and Brian, wanted ten second Subarus and we got the
cars together and tuned within the last few days. Friday night we went to the track with the car owners. Both cars ran tens and it was great to deliver on the ultimate goal for two involved buildups the first time driving the cars. We’re careful in what we do and we know Subarus well, but it’s never a given that you tear a car apart, put it all back together and have it work that well the first time you run it. I’m extra proud of my guys and our work on these cars.
After telling Jason to go easy in 1st-3rd gears and then gas it in 4th so I can check the tune, he ignored me and ran a 10.5 on his first pass. LOL Luckily his tune wasn’t optimal, but it was safe and I tweaked it a little for his subsequent passes.
His Impreza has a cage so he got to run a few more passes and they were all in the tens. He ended up with a 10.30 at 135 mph at 21-24 psi. We intend to run more boost with his setup in the future, but 21-24 was plenty to meet the build goal so I left it there for the first time out. By 21-24 I mean the car ran about 21 psi in 1st/2nd gears, 22 in 3rd, 23 in 4th and 23-24 in 5th. He spun like mad in 1st gear on slicks so we’ll probably back off the boost level or launch control settings for first gear in the future.
This is the same Jason that has a 10 second 2006 STI we work on and tune so now he has a daily driver 10 second STI and a track 10 second Impreza. I expect the track car to go into the 9’s without much effort. He prepped the chassis and put the suspension, brakes and some other parts on the car before bringing it to us for the rest and he did a great job.
Brian had me drive his STI since I have more experience with higher HP cars and his STI is a real handfull now. I refused to run it at full boost on the street to test it after dyno tuning the car to 576 whp. Those who know how our dyno reads understand what that number means. For a street car, it’s nuts. I did try running full boost in 4th gear on his street tires at the track so we’d know whether he should drive the car like this on the road. I won’t be trying that again. Picture flooring a stockish STI on snow in 1st gear.
I went through 1st-3rd gears out of boost, then floored it in 4th gear and hit the brakes to avoid getting kicked out twice. That way I got to do a little logging and adjusting on the tune, but the track officials were onto me as you’d expect with four slicks on a Subaru.
I was told to run the car and if it was too fast without a cage I was getting thrown out. I knew I only had one chance so I made the tune safe and tried to run a smooth pass with easy shifting. My launch settings were too conservative and the car bogged. My boost settings were also too low in 1st-3rd gears since I didn’t get to test those, but it still got the job done.
Brian’s STI went 10.7 at 134 mph and has a lot more in it if we were given the opportunity to run more than one full pass, but that will have to wait until a cage is installed.
As I went down the return road I was stopped and told I was not to come back without a roll cage. The track officials were fair about it and I thank them for letting me go down the track once without a cage. One pass is better than none. 
I took a camera phone video of Jason’s 10.3 at 135 mph pass:
http://innovativetuningdl.com/video/JasV/Jason10.30At135.0-desktop.m4v
Jason’s two 10 second Subarus:
And here’s a few shots of Brian’s 04 STI show car:
