This article was contributed by close friend and customer whom we did the MME together as a team.

Trackdays Trackdays and more trackdays. It is getting a bit boring. So one day a few of us sat down over coffee and thought. Hmm…why don’t we do it properly for once? And hence, we decided to do this:

The Petrona Merdeka Millennium Endurance Race. It is an 12 hours FIA approved race with competitors coming from all over the world. There are international touring car drivers, Ex F1 drivers, Rally drivers and then you have us J

The team is made up of:

Team Manager: Joel Cheong from Driven

Chief Mechanc: Eric from Avantgarde

Logistic Manager: Ken from X-Factory

Drivers: Dean Ong, PK Yong, TY Yak

Few good friends whom without them is not possible at all: Weijie, Weitun, Crew from X Factory, Crew from Avantgarde Mechanic

Sponsors: Leading Edge (Hong Kong), Tint Auto (Lumar), Driven Singapore

The Preparation

We started the preparation 4 months before the race. It was a hell lot of work to do. What I am presenting now does not do any justice to the amount of work put in by everyone. Nevertheless, here you go:

Taking the engine out

The 1JZ in the foreground is Joel’s engine that went into his Drift Spec Cressida, whose passion lasted for all of 5 mins. hahaha

Reworking all the wirings again with some fancy warning lights

Beautiful interior huh? Transparent Arcylic lights up beautiful at night

Rollcage and External Fuel Surge Tank. The entire car was also seam welded to make sure the brutal drivers don’t break it.

Now that everything is put together. Its is time to go racing!

Can you all listen to me for once???

Our umberlla Girls, I wished. Oh well….

And these are the people we share the track with!!! They can be quite intimidating in the dark and to make it worse I am a bit blind at night.

Anyway, before race start, everyone gets to walkaround the pit and here we gather our first smiling picture of the day. It has been really tiring and the race has not even started

Race started. 3 teams to a pit. We shared the same pit with ST Power Singapore and a Malaysian Workshop. We learnt quite a bit from our neighbours who are seasoned MME competitors. Let’s look at it this way; ST power could swap an engine on their competing EVO in less than 2 hours. 

How did it go?

Joel thought I might have stage fright, so he made Dean the first driver to start the race. I am 2^nd and PK is 3^rd. Our aim is to finished the race for exposure and experience sake. Next year we will come back for the trophy.

So Dean went out, came back and doing allright. I took over after from Dean, I was really excited. My first time…..Anyway, when I took over, the water bottle fell off, I am going to die of dehydration!!! The ear piece fell right out of ear and now I cant talk to anyone!!! What if my tires fell off and I didn’t know??? The Proton Team Monster Lotus lapped me again and again and screamed passed me like I am standing still. Nevertheless, I lasted an hour, no one knew I am going back to pits caused there was no communication but I went back anyway, I need a Coke. Surprisingly, when I am back, they were waiting for me already!!!! YEAH!!!

PK took over went out and oh well…no comments

Dean took over again on the 4^th hour and drove for 35mins when it starts to happen. It drizzled. Dean continue to drive and came back almost at the end of the hour and told us the car felt weird. Anyway, I didn’t care, I jumped in and all hype up to go out and kick some ass. Helmet on, harness strapped and FUCK! Weird??? Dean said car is weird??? Car is fucked!!!! It doesn’t really want to move!!! Rev rev, gears on, clutch off, it still doesn’t move. Eric! Joel! Help!!! Everyone gathered and suddenly I felt like the astronaut in Apollo 13. Everyone has his or her own idea, that great! The fixed Apollo 13 and it came back, so I must have a chance to go on driving.  Drive shalf looks ok and there is fluid in the clutch pump. Look here look there, no clue L

Then someone was brave enough to make this conclusion without fear that a few grown man will cry. “The Gearbox is fucked” and oh no….we do not have a spare….

No spare!!! We have 3 trackcars in Avantgarde and we didn’t bring spare??? How can this happen to me??? I was so desperate that I thought, “there are so many EG in the carpark, can we steal one???”

We lasted 4 hours!!! That’s all!!! After months of preparation??? That sucks. I still had 8 hours to go. So me and Joel decided to do a pit walkaround and observed how other team does it. That pissed my wife off because I was away for 2 hours and she was walking all over the place looking for me. She thought I must have gone hidding because I was sad.

Anyway, we made an interesting observation: There should be no screaming and shouting amongst the team when your competing car comes into pitlane. Everyone should know what to do, do what is needed and signal to the rest of the team when it is done. Since when you see F1 Team like Ferrari screaming to each other when Kimi comes into pitlane. I am surprise that this happen in big team like Team Honda and Team Proton during MME.

What Went Wrong?

 Dean broke the LSD L We changed everything during preparation but not the LSD. We overlooked it. Here are some pics.

This article was contributed by a close friend and customer, hope it would make for an interesting read.

Having driven a roadcar on track for the last 10 years, it is time to get more serious. How about an EG Civic? Handles well, goes well and stop well. It has proven itself time and time again on track. So I decided to buy this:

Unfortunately I have been driving turbo on track and having anything lesser than 200bhp will be weird. How do I fix the problem? Give Joel from Driven a call. There is nothing he cannot fix J

What did he do to fix the problem? B16 high comp? B18C? B20? H22? Noooo, he did this:

Using HASPORT mount kit, some wiring effort and thinking through. The K20 from a JDM DC5 Type R was kitting into the EG. To top it up, there was a set of Crower cams, Euro R intake manifold and Hondata. It was making 210BHP on a 900kg shell and running on really cool DMS 50mm suspension. Now it is time to take it to track!!!

My first track outing in the EGK20.

Going up the tow truck.

Paying for toll

The car clocked 2.39s in its first outing. Damn it! Joel could do 2.36. I need to do something about it.

Maybe the car does better in the straightline. Let’s take it drag racing!!!
Let’s whack on some Hoosier drag slicks and see how it goes?

How did it go? High 12s in the quarter and a burnt bearing.

I have a problem, it cannot go round the track fast enough and it doesn’t even go straight fast enough and now I have to rebuild it L

Avantgarde, the guys who maintain my car in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia will sort it out.

Let’s take the engine apart

They port the K20 head

Before and After

Custom Made Extractors, arent they beautiful?

Wilwood Calipers from Driven. Who else knows their Wilwood better?

While we are at it, let’s give it a new coat of paint.

She is beautiful. We now have a set of Cusco 4 point cage.

The Boys in Avantgarde

We are ready. Time to hit the tracks again.

So how did the EGK20 do now? There you go J

2:32.99 around Sepang on the best lap. It would do consistent 2.34s around Sepang. The fastest I ever gone before this was on a 330BHP S15. The EGK20 is only doing about 233BHP now.

How fast is that? Let’s put it in perspective with this timesheet as a reference. Faster than a Porsche GT3RS, Exige S, Many other Evo and STI

Well, the car is sold now. I feel that I am not going anywhere with it. It is neither here nor that. It is not fast enough as a trackcar and it does not belong to the roadcar league. Time to start my next project.

here is the first EG K20A conversion done in Singapore, probably in Asia when it was done way back in 2004.

this car was converted over a span of 2 months, just working on it over the weekends as i have a proper day job during the weekdays.  it was truely a satisfying experience when we managed to fire the car up.  the car is really really quick over the previous B16A motor it had in there.

 Here is a short video clip of the car racing in the Kallang carpark race series during 2005 when it was 1 of the sponsored car by Team Idemitsu.

 the car has since been sold on to another friend.. please see what he has to say about the car here, and all the other additional mods that he did to it HERE.

We have recently just acquired a FD2 civic type R to do some testing.  this will be an ongoing project car, with very sensible modifications that will make it comfortable enough for street driving and quick enough for track.

Here is a short video clip we made after we got the car for about 4 days?!

hope you enjoyed it.

Sometimes, we really wish that we can have a lot of time on our hands so that we can build a car to a spec we really love.

 From the chassis, to the exterior, to the engine, suspension components, etc.. 

This fine example of an EG6 was found strictly for that purpose.  The body was straight, with no major accidents.  Engine was in bad shape (so that we can squeeze the ex owner for a good price).  Interior was non-existent (so we can squeeze EVEN more for a cheap price).  Well, the list goes on… but since we are going to rebuild it anyhow, it didn’t matter how bad the car was.

OK OK, i guess the car is not in that bad shape.

Here, let us ”showcase” what we have done this far.

we needed to put the car on a diet… so first thing to go was the sunroof.

here, we purchased a nice piece of the roof without the sunroof.

please enjoy my EG6 cabrio, limited edition 

and another one here, with the top, on its way down

whole interior was stripped and all the sound deadening material removed.  this took us a good 2-3 weekends.

yes yes, we are wimps, and we need fans.

yanking out all the unwanted wires, like the ABS, VSC, TRC, DSG, SST, we don’t want all of that!  (don’t you agree this EG6 is way cool???)

after all the sound deadening material and waterproof sealant were scrapped off, it was time for master craftsman Mr Lye from Lye Designs to do some stitch welding to stiffen things up a little.  we would like to put in a nice roll cage in there…. but.. we will see, how to get around our annual inspection.

REALLY NICE AND CLEAN RIGHT?

fat ass at work, trying to talk the engine into walking itself out of the engine bay

and very importantly… how long we took to get to this point?

just have a look at these…

After 4 months of driving around with the 4E-FTE engine… we decided that we need to “improve” again on what was already very good. And since there is no replacement for displacement (or so they say), we put in a 5E engine instead, paired with a TD04L from the Subaru WRX. That way, we will have a good mix of low end torque from the increased cc and good high end power with the bigger turbo.

Since I was at it, might as well put in a set of Wiseco forged pistons for added reliability. These should be able to sustain some high boost and resist to some hard engine knocks without breaking apart. In actual fact, it was supposed to be a budget build, and no expensive items like forged pistons were planned for. UNTIL, the machine shop broke my stock 4E pistons while pressing out the wrist pins! @$#%$# HOW DID THEY EVEN DO THAT?!?

While rummaging through my store, we also managed to pull out some Mitsubishi front mount VR-4 intercooler and some blitz intercooler piping that suits the Starlet body just fine. We had to custom make a couple of charge pipes, but that is easy enough with help from our friend Sam who is a superb TIG welder with stainless steel materials.

Custom metal head gasket was also ordered and installed at the same time. The standard head gasket was some sort of graphite sort which does not look at all impervious to high boost at all! The new Multi Layer Steel (MLS) one definitely looks like it will stand up to the task

MLS head gasket for my inline 6 starlet

HAHAHA, GOT YOU! That was for the 2JZ!

Here is the actual one.

Engine was also refreshed with all new ACL bearings for the mains and conrods with specs that were just a little bit looser than stock. We hope to be able to make some power with high boost on this turbo.

On the engine management side of things, we added in a piggyback unichip to control both the ignition and fuelling. It got rid of the speed limiter in the JDM ECU, and gave control to the much needed extra fuel on the higher end of the rev range. Granted we had forged pistons in there, but we sure didn’t want to have to drop out the engine again and have to find out we melted one of them!

After everything was done and put together, surprisingly, there was virtually no lag in this turbo at all. We are able to get full boost by 3000rpm and the car is a blast to drive. I guess, 800kg is a great advantage when it comes to short distance sprints. Perfect for everyday city driving use, and good fuel economy.

I was in the market for a cheap car… and I mean CHEAPPPPPPP!  Like a car below S$10,000 so that I can afford to buy it without having to take any loan.  at first, I thought it amounted to a mammoth task, what with the tax structure of cars in Singapore, and also the prices of used/new cars.

Well, low and behold, I actually came across an example of a relatively cheap car, with the characteristics that I was looking for.  It was

1.      CHEAP! $10K for a car that has 4 years of life left.

2.      in a straight enough condition

3.      minimum corrosion

4.      Toyota brand – for maximum reliability

5.      Sport (Small) / Lightweight / Kompact   (like my friend’s SLK)

6.      cheap on fuel.

There was a problem though… albeit a small one.  The car will not MOVE!  Don’t ever try to beat a red light with the standard Carburetted 1 litre engine in there, before you can even get it up to speed, the red light camera would have already captured you.

So, the search begun… for a healthy dose of power enhancement.  What started out as a cheap roundaround vehicle… is starting to take shape as my next project.  A prime example of a starlet GT turbo was found

4E-FTE engine

Hi/Lo boost button

Rear disc brakes

So, after the conversion, we had 140hp from a stock engine…but.. after a while, we got sick of the power again and had to improve on that….  Click here for more updates