As some of you may have gathered from my postings...i recently got rid of the FTO reluctantly to make way for a Mazda 3 mps. It took so long to finally arrive at a new car choice but in the end, the in gear shove of the mps got me addicted and it handles decent with a nice interior.
So why did i get rid of the FTO i hear you say! Well, i broke 3 chassis weld points in crucial areas (mostly around the driver side chassis beam
). How ? I don't know...i did drive the car pretty hard and it was running coilovers i guess but still... oh and it received a lot of touge treatment in the RNP which isn't the smoothest of roads.So i first bought the car in 2006 at the start of october...was kind of a b'day present to myself heh. I thought i had found a fantastic deal and i still think i did...$15,400 from an importer/dealer (Version one), it was a facelifted 1997 in scotia white, manual, had the light up kick plates from factory, genuine optioned GPvR wing, a hks pod on it and only 56,xxx kms on the clock. The interior was neat-0 save for a cig burn or two and the paint outside was damn impressive for a then 9yo car.
Couple of days after i picked her up...
First few things i did were clean her up and waxed her
Removed the dodgy cd player it came with and installed a panasonic mp3 head unit, along with 6x9 jaycar kevlar rears and 6.5" jaycar kevlar fronts. Which gave awesome sound btw...a lot of ppl thought it was running a sub and that i had really expensive branded speakers installed...
Curious to see the engine condition, i whacked her on a dyno shortly after. Got a good laugh out of this! Admittedly, i had a dodgy heatshield that was restricting air flow to the pod but yeah... it was pretty much stock at this point
I also tried out my gtech timer gadget thing for giggles and got this
On the same night, my mate's bugeye wrx got 6.14. Accurate-ish i thought.
A happy drive with a couple of mates...
The stocker wheels were in pretty sad condition so i decided to do something about it...all the silver factory paint were coming off and it was cracked/ugly etc...
7 hours, sanding, priming, spraypainting and topcoat later. Comes out like this.
Then i got the windows tinted
Then i started playing with the engine and handling...the reason why i bought a japanese car
UAS intake pipe, hks pod, homemade heatshield, tein jap spec HA coilovers, and an earthing and volt stabilising kit in that photo. With the addition of a high flow metal cat and axle-back system...i took it back to the dyno and got this
4th gear run...the 3rd gear run netted 110.5kw atw. As some of you may know, a manual fto in 4th gear hits the jap ecu 180km/h speed cut before the engine cut at 8200rpm so hence why the 3rd gear run was slightly higher.
Shortly after, Aza013 organised an FTO dyno day. I went and got this. The graph shows 4th gear runs and a 3rd gear run in green.
Then i bought some magnecor leads during the RPW GB and also got some Denso iridium plugs, popped them in and gave her some fresh Mobil1 engine oil and nulon performance engine treatment...down to IS for another dyno lol. Came up with this, i was very surprised.
I was pretty happy at that point but sometime later...watching best motoring dvd's with my mate, they showed a Honda with ecu tuning and without comparison and that spurred me to get off my arse and do some sort of a piggyback. I eventually opted for an Apexi SAF-C II as i wanted a smooth power curve and the Apexi will increase my top end due to the factory afr ratio at the top being too rich. The car was in need of a service, costing a few kws...but anyways, jumped up to this.
I had also removed 20-30kg from the car bringing it down to 1140-1150kg depending on whether i took the rear seats out or not (so easy to do! Just leave the two bolts off and it takes 2 minutes). Boy was the car fun to drive weighing at 1140kg with 116kw atw and a damn smooth power/torque curve. 0-100 went by pretty quick and rolling acceleration was good too, with my mates wrx not being able to pull away at all.
Then 2 weeks later or so, the chassis weld spots broke on me
. Right on my birthday, what a nice surprise!Well there goes the FTO... i asked several mechanics on whether it was viable in fixing it but both said just get something else. Damn, i loved the FTO...i still miss the crazy n/a engine response and linear power delivery at times. The handling with the coilovers and slight camber was pretty sweet too, allowing me to better a lightly tuned wrx with sti shock/spring combo in touge (and a bunch of other cars). Did pretty well in traffic light grand prix too haha.
My plan was to eventually get power to low 120kw atw but sparing as much low end as possible for driveability too, i was looking forward to the challenge...
So there it is, my happy 1 year journey with the fto. In 1 year, i raised the odo to 78,xxx kms...goes to show how much i loved driving it. I gotta say...an fto modded with attention to acceleration, balance/response, handling and stopping makes for one pretty decent weapon! And the bonus is, if you have a few connections, some DIY skills, bargain hunting eye and a solid plan for the car, it's not even expensive at all to do. I did all of this whilst studying full time at uni. Income was simply from a measly casual job.
Oh almost forgot the last pic of the engine bay, check out how homemade dodgy it looks
Well thanks for joining me on my journey, and take it easy you lucky fto drivers!
