For anyone wondering, no I haven’t sold the pig, gave up on blogging or died I’ve just had some matters that demanded attention be placed there first. Anyway, with those finally squared away to my satisfaction attention has returned once more to working on the blue pig.

Second place trophy from the Subaru shootout last month. Lost to a buddy running flex fuel with 50whp more than me. Not too bad for my fist time at the strip in a car not built to drag race.

As is so often the case when you’re playing stupid games and win a stupid prize the only answer to you problems is to throw money at them.

Walked out to my car, looked at the rear rotor and thought, “nice, the pad smear is getting worn off”. Then I look closer and see this:

Often times you’ll hear or read in car and car part reviews how much of a problem heat soak can be for turbo cars, expecially modern ones with small turbos, double expecially if the car has a top mounted intercooler!

After a ton of work organizing the event over the last several months, it was nice to finally have it.

Through a series of strange decisions yesterday night I ended up doing a brake pad swap in the parking lot during a car meet I regularly attend. Why, is probably the first question you might ask and there are a lot of reasons. Dollar tacos are a big one, but also supporting the community via education and promoting a…

I set up and event to get a bunch of local Subarus together to do an autoX event that a local club puts on. This is the second year I’ve done this and this year 9 people signed up.

Who doesn’t love pictures of cars doing cool things!

At Gingerman Raceway bright and early for today’s hpde on the reverse course. Weather looks like it’s going to hold so it should be a great day!

After the requisite wrangling of suppliers and a lovely vacation, I’ve finally gotten my replacement wheels and tires installed! (previous rant about this here)

Here in Illinois in an effort to reduce distracted driving they have banned the use of cell phones while driving, but have they gone far enough?

On my drive to work this morning I spotted the tell tale goober eye headlight arrangement that could only be a Juke coming up behind me. Naturally to limit my ocular suffering I let them go around, but when they did I spotted the weirdest thing on the car’s back side. It appeared as though all of the badging had been…

I discussed in previous posts that I believed that this car was intentionally held back handling wise from the factory in order to provide an easier to control and safer experience. It has been a long term goal of mine to fix that and there have been a few iterations of modification and research required to get there.

Completed the most feared task of auto maintenance known to man for a boxer engine over the weekend. That’s right I changed my spark plugs. Yes you have to remove the air box, the battery and have a good variety of extensions (short ones!), but no it is not that big of a deal.

Had an excellent Easter holiday visiting family in Atlanta. Was able to bum a ride on a Ducati Monster 696 and go bomb around some excellent twisty back roads there. 300awhp makes for a fun daily driver, but 78 one wheel HP (well prolly less because that’s a crank rating and also Italian) is a whole other experience.

shootout!

Reading Matt Brown’s post and Future Next gen S2000's comment on it I’ve had an epiphany!

I was just driving around like normal yesterday and then it happened, the car is ruined...

With most of my parts in hand it was time to begin figuring out how exactly they are going to fit on the car. I didn’t (entirely) go ordering parts blindly, I had made templates out of cardboard to make sure that the core would fit and a user on NASIOC had confirmed that the sandwich plate I was using would fit with…