Hello!

long time lurker, finally starting a build thread. Nothing ground breaking, mostly stuff I?ve learned from this forum and my own errors. I?ve had this car for a decade now, it?s primarily a street car but I?ve done everything from road trips, to track days, to back roads and mountain runs in it.


I originally purchased this car in 2016 for $2000. It was bone stock and I was 22 and broke. So naturally I decided it?d be a great idea to immediately delete the AC and power steering (not even the right way), slam it on cheap coil overs, and cut the wheel studs so the eBay spacers would fit?


The car mostly stayed like this for a while, other cars came and went and I moved around a bit. Fast forward to 2020 and I was able to tear into it a bit more and landed on refreshing the stock engine and put a turbo on it. I started by fixing a couple of my previous mistakes with a full rack depower, ARP wheel studs and wheel bearings while I was there along with braided brake lines and a set of Rota Grids. The VMAXXs remained.





the turbo setup is something I pieced together. It?s a 1.8 Kraken TD04 base kit I got in about 2018, I think he only ended up making a handful of these. At the time, it was very budget oriented and an OEM turbo kept the cost down. It snowballed a bit from there though. I rounded it out with a ms3pnp, skunk2 manifold and throttle body, fab9 intercooler, 640cc flow forces with a DW200, a supermiata 4 puck (overkill), and a Greddy type S from my srt4 days. Below is as it sat in 2020.




I drove it for a while trying to learn to tune it. Somewhere around this time I added R Theory side skirt extensions, some interior bits, redid the coolant reroute hose about ten times, and numerous other things I?ve since forgotten about.





in 2023 I signed up for my first track day so I found someone to actually tune it on a dyno. It makes 220WHP. I was chasing a ?safe? tune vs a peak power number. I ended up doing two track days that year and the car performed well, although heat management was an issue.





since about 2023 the upgrades have been gradual. Carbing towhooks, I replaced the Vmaxx coilovers with fortune auto 500s, my wife surprised me with the Work wheels I had wanted for a long time, I added r theory hood vents (cutting my hood hurt my soul), redid the reroute hose again, added the OEM cruise control, redid the gauges in the center to have functional vents again. Probably forgetting a few things.









In 2025 I got to cross tail of the dragon off the bucket list in this car. The ten hour drive each way was more like 15 with a group of modified cars.







pretty much current up to this point. Tried to show the highlights but can only include so much in one post. Lots of future plans for it, nothing imminent.


Missed seeing it cross over 100k by one mile!

Most recently I created a 2P Work Meister S1 center cap.

 

Quite the introduction, welcome. Those are Meister S1's, right? I do love those wheels and have definitely considered them for my own car, but I can't justify the price. Not to mention they'd probably look out of place with the rattle can paint job.

Is the engine unopened? Any issues running that breather off the valve cover on track (assuming you did)?

 

They are Meister S1's. 15x8 +15 with 205/50r15 Falken Azenis RT615's. I had to do a decent pull to get the tire to fit with that low of an offset. The engine is unopened, I know I'm probably on borrowed time at this point, but I haven't had any issues with the VC breather (yet at least).