CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFoaVAjtt68

And you get it!

Oh gawd the steering is TERRIBLE. Worm and ball is just no match for rack and pinion in anyway. Still turns in nicely but holy gently caress is it loose as goose poo poo. And this is a GOOD and well maintained worm and ball steering. When I first owned this car in 1990, it's steering was a mile ahead of anything else but progress has truly marched. That and .... yeah 35 year old car. Rack conversion for sure.

Brakes. Need to be bled. Stops decently even by today's standards but there's really not much weight to stop.

A WRX is not a big car by any stretch. But fuuuuck the RX7 in the garage is stupidly tiny - a good 30 cms shorter beight-wise than anything that has been in this garage. The reality is as well, there's not much forward of the radiatior so you have a 30 cm odd air gap between it and hte front bumper. The WRX you cant see how a repackage could shorten it, the RX7 could have been compressed by 45cms, no sweat.

Interior. Soooo 80's it hurts and a mess right now.

Still rides quite well even for today's standards.

Now... yes it does have the rasp and pulse of a ported motor. 13B "street" port, which means the inlet ports are cleaned up and slightly enlaged to give more intake opening time - like adding more duration on a ICE motor. So on say a cam, this is basically giving 1-2 degrees more duration and a slight lift in profile. You have not changed the cam's timing. In theory with also some mild exhaust cleanup porting, that will give us about 170Kw with a good EFI and mid join exhaust. With 1000kgs, that's enough to start with. Right now it's severly choked with a Nikki carby and a stock exhaust header which are just ridiculously bad.

Now of course the prinicples of exhaust extractors are the same as in any motor, but a fairly big gain can be made by different header lengths. In the case of a rotary, you want the headers to join after the diff if at all possible - also makes it easier to shut them up. In our case, we'll join them at mid-car. The muffler is 25(!) years old but when I got it, I got the top of the line stainless steel street / race edition so it has lasted and still works as intended.

Biggest suprise - the speedo works properly. About 20 years ago I.... umm..... basically drove the thing overnight between Sydney and Melbourne by the coast road (about 1000kms).... after I got past Bega and there was zero traffic and I may or may not have been doing very high speeds for 5 hours. At some point I may or may not have wrapped the speedo on the peg for 20 minutes. And it may or may not have had some issues ever since due to the car being redlined in fifth gear for so long.

I completely deny any knowledge of such youthful shenanigans of course.

I also may or may not need to find a quiet bit of tarmac and do some Italian tyre compound softening.