Street Build 94 TSi AWD - Keeping it Simple...

[Clinical]

My goal for this car has always been keeping it simple but respectable.

If there's one pet peeve of mine - it's all the people who think you need to dump 10k into a car to get past the 13's.
I go to the track and see evos/dsm's running GT35rs/HX40s/and other big turbos with built motors / built transmissions / race gas and still running 12's or high 11's.

I see people telling each other that they need to upgrade from their 14b/16g/20g/etc if they want to make 300hp+

I don't know why as time has gone on it seems setups that ran 10's and 11's back in the day are running 12's/13's/14's these days. Also the whole unreliable stigma b/s has really gotten bad because people are still buying these cars for cheap and expecting to throw parts at them and go fast and ignoring the fact that they are 20+ years old now and not thinking of the maintenance a 2-decade year old car needs.

Anyways, I got out of cars for awhile back in 2011 when I sold my 99 Firebird Formula LS1 6spd car that I threw a cam in and made 400whp~. Prior to that I had a 92 tsi awd with a fully stock 6bolt motor/head that I ran 12.7@107mph with on a 20g and 21.5psi on 91octane and a 92 laser rst awd that I bought already built with a FPGreen that I just fixed up a bit and ran 11.7@123mph on e85.

After 3 years I got the desire to have a car again, and a DSM at that since a DSM was my first car in 2007.

So I picked this up. 1994 Eagle Talon TSi AWD 5spd. I overpaid a bit honestly for it, paying $3500 considering it had a fairly decent bucket list of problems including terrible idle surge, needed a tune, fuel tank & sending unit issues, a ton of hack job fixes, terrible rear battery setup, lots of shit wiring from both age and poor decisions from a previous owner, boost leaks, and a improperly installed MLS headgasket (was not prepped properly) that was leaking. (Lots of these issues I did not recognize when I looked at it, it was -45 degrees when I picked it up and I couldn't stand to crawl all around it.. my fault). My main reason for buying it is that it was clean and my favorite 1gb color. Also that it had a rebuilt motor and trans (supposedly, unconfirmed but as clean as both were I believe it). The guy I bought it from did tell me about some of the issues - the main ones I did not know about were the headgasket, bad wiring, and the fuel tank studs all being trashed. Overall he was a decent guy, can't fault him I suppose cause I'm not sure how deep he ever got into this car since from what i know it was just a bit of a 2nd car to him.

Hauled it home, wasn't sure if it'd make it back on its own with all its issues. Picked it up New Years day. Was from Minneapolis (6 hours from me). Original goal was to just fix it up, do some appropriate mods and run 12's on the 16g and keep it reliable. Ended up doing better than I expected in the end.

After getting it home, immediately started doing maintenance and trying to sort out issues. Mainly fixing boost leaks, tried to brush up on my ecmlink skills from years ago and got the car tuned to the point it was decent to drive. Tried to find the idle surge issue but just could not figure it out. New sensors, boost leaks fixed, throttle body rebuilt, and still she surged.

got it cleaned up decent though

Around this time I also learned that a guy I know who is somewhat local whom I've bought parts for my old DSM's from actually used to own the car. He sold it in 2008 and had a pretty killer setup on it. Funny thing is, he sold it in 2008 with 144k miles on the shell. I bought it in 2014 with 147k on it - and from what I've learned it went through 2 or 3 motors in that time with the new owner blowing it up, rebuilding it with a ebay oil pump that seized and shredded the timing belt and bent valves, not sure what happened after that besides getting rebuilt again. Here's a picture of when he owned the car

My issue was i was on a time table to get it DD-able because I bought it January 1st and my University is 3 hour from home and I have limited tools/space to work on the car at my University, and the spring semester started sometime around January 16th or so. I managed to get the car pretty drivable and it made the trip up and managed to do okay as my DD for awhile. Though still overheating occasionally and constantly idle surging bad and the fuel tank issues.

Loaded up for my trip to my University.

Fast forward a month or so, still being an okay daily driver. I finally figured out the idle surge in late february. Turned out to be a stupid issue I overlooked. A previous owner had done the coolant bypass and just looped the lines and didn't block the coolant passages on the TB with anything. Bought a FIAV bypass plate and boom, no more surge!

Random decent picture from around that time

The car still needed a lot of little things but I sold one of my motorcycles and it freed up some cash, and I really wanted to run an external wastegate when I finally started to try to make power with the car as I've always found too many annoyances with internal gates. So for $125 I bought this tial F38 wastegate with springs and the weird dumptube + gaskets you see here off a member here.

Did some misc work/upgrades here and there- nothing worth going into detail over. Basically easy to do stuff when it wasn't -20 out.

I realized the car heating up was getting much worse and found the fans were no longer kicking on at all. Culprit was very piss poor wiring by a previous owner that had broken. Pulled the rad and re-wired the fans and actually tried to wire it in a way that might actually last.

Then decided to look into my fuel issue. Found it dribbled a bit from the FPR return and then that all but two of the pump studs in the tank were broken and the seal was blown out. I temporarily used some RTV that has started to fail again now too, and actually in the next two weeks from posting this journal I'll finally be pulling the tank to re-stud it. Otherwise now it has just been an issue when filling up the car to full. Otherwise the main issues I fixed back in early March

By now I had done enough work on the car with small mods, and lots of fixes/maintenance that I decided to have a little fun. I BARELY had ever gone WOT with it with all of its issues before. I played with it for a bit at the 12psi (no MBC, running low as I could on the internal gate) on 91 octane. Then I threw E85 in the car. Boost liked to spike around 15-18psi. Car ran decent maybe in the 250-300whp range

Found a local guy with a stock 2g manifold with a 38mm wastegate flange welded to it. Not pretty but it works for $50. Selling my 2g mani for $50 so pretty much can consider it a free mod!

 

[Clinical]

When my Spring break rolled around, rather than going on a vacation or just relaxing I spent the entire week working on the car. Re-doing more wiring, all new brakes, lots of new gaskets/seals to fix various leaks the car had, and swapping the 2g mani and tial wastegate on.

Some general cleaning and final touches and got the car together on its new setup with lots more maintenance done.

Then the night before I was due to drive back to my school, I started having weird alternator issues and when I woke up in the morning I had a pool of coolant on the ground. The drain plug in my radiator started leaking. It wasn't too fast. I drove to Advance auto the next morning to have them test my alternator. Came up with a stuck diode, figured screw it I didn't have time to mess with it and as long as it'd charge enough to get me the 3 hours back up north I'd be okay. Drove it back home, and it was just a massive stream of coolant out of the plug.
This was the day before my classes started again and I needed to drive back up that day, so I was pretty frustrated that day. Yanked the radiator back out, drained all my fresh coolant out again. Found the drain plug culprit, JBwelded the crap out of the entire section of radiator down there. Threw it back in and made the trip without issue.

along the way back up I stopped to see a friend halfway between and picked up a good stock trans from him for $150. Mine shifted fine but for the price I couldn't beat having an extra for a backup.

Then the next day my alternator decided to completely shit on me

Drove it with a bad alternator for a few days until I could get around to ordering one and picking it up and installing it. Just left it on the battery charger every night.

I also decided now finally I'd actually beat on the car a bit, threw another set of springs in the wastegate to run 20psi. Tuned it very conservative with low timing (14 degrees) and 10.8-11.4 a/f ratio. Still ran decent this way.

Then one morning driving to school it just died waiting at a red light. Wouldn't start, occasionally would pop. Pulled out my laptop and it was throwing a code for the CAS. So she ended up on a flatbed, first and only time it has been on one from breaking.

Figure I needed to source a new CAS, ended up finding this - just junk wiring.

So the next day was one of the first decent days of the year weather-wise. So did some re-wiring on the CAS that was honestly pretty ghetto since I didn't have a good plug to swap and the pins that hold the wire in broke, so I just used a wire that was much bigger than the stock wires so that it was so fat it held it self in there just from how big it was - a temporary solution until I could get a new plug. Also fixed some electrical issues on my roommate's bike

After all this, the car started being pretty decent to me besides pushing coolant from a bad headgasket, previous owner had installed a MLS without doing any of the necessary prep work. All the DDing was catching up to it and it was getting worse.
Did have my cut off ac-bracket and bolts take a vacation while on the highway at 55mph. Drove the car home with a clunking driver side axle and ordered new OEM mitsu carrier bracket bolts and since I no longer have an AC bracket I just used the tried and true washer spacer method.

Then against my better judgement, went to the dragstrip that is about 10 minutes from my house up there. Originally was just going to watch my buddy race his DSM which ended up running 10.5@136mph. but of course I couldnt resist running my car. I was taking it VERY easy since this was the weekend before finals week and I needed the car to get me 3 hours back home for summer break. No super hard launching or hard shifting. Just babying it.
It surprised the hell out of me with a 114mph trap. Ran 12.6@114mph overall. Much quicker than I thought it was with only 20psi on the 16g and still low timing.

 

[Clinical]

Made it back home May 9th. My goal was to finally tear into the car to do the headgasket, fresh timing, fix more wiring, and some other maintenance to have it ready for the track May 23rd. I wasn't going to work on it til the next weekend, but luckily Sunday night on May 11th I got bit by a boredom bug and went out to the garage at midnight. An hour later she sat like this.

Doubt the car was ever run on e85 before, and running on it cleaned out the fuel system and gunked up my injectors. Fuel filter is a strainer made for fuels like e85 so it was easy to clean and throw back in.
Injectors were terrible, a buddy has a flowbench and cleans them for a side business and did mine for a good price which included all new seals. Said he didn't know how my car even ran or drove decent with the shape they were in. Perfect shape now.

Only spent about an hour on it that night. Then the next few days I was pretty swamped and didn't get to touch it. Finally after about 3 days I had time to work on it and finished pulling the head.

New OEM headgasket on, ARPs torqued down

Getting it more buttoned back together with the new timing hardware and timing belt, and also picked up a Mishimoto radiator with mishimotor slim fans for $50 from a buddy to replace my beat up jbweld trashy stock radiator.

re-sprayed my fmic for the stealth look

Ended up breaking a couple of wires from my o2 sensor a ways back due to more shoddy wiring that pulled apart. I needed to salvage a pin, and I couldn't find the right connector pin at ANY store. I realized my CAS uses the same pins. So I got a new CAS plug from a local since mine already had one bad wire that was ghetto rigged. I ripped apart the old junk CAS plug and took a pin from it and used it with my o2 sensor. Then a buddy stopped by and offered to wire my new CAS plug on for me, so while he did that I went to finish getting my tension set on my timing belt. He accidentally wired a couple of the wires backwards on the CAS plug and it wouldn't fire up after it had already ran once before. I just cut it all and re-wired it again soldering and shrinking it and using new wire loom so its done as "right" as possible.

Due to lots of hiccups and waiting for parts to arrive, my deadline got pushed very close to make it to the track to the point I didn't think I'd get to go.
Then finally it was ready to drive the day before the track. So I took it out for a fill-up and started dialing in the tune on 20psi. It was getting late and I didn't want to throw the MBC yet so figured I'd do that before the track the next day

Then on the way home from tuning my alternator started having issues and popped my alternator fuse. Despite being basically a new alternator albeit reman'd - it still had an old rusty stud that was not making a decent connection. The stud spun freely in the alternator. Also before, the alternator never seemed to charge very well per my stock boost gauge set to show voltage. Also if I turned up my radio past volume level 35 it'd cut out. I got lucky that day that Advance Auto had the alternator in stock at a store an hour away and had it delivered to their store by 2pm. The track event that day started at 11pm and went until 3am. It was 2 hours away so I just wanted to leave around 8:30pm.

Got the new alternator in and installed. Then I still needed to get my MBC on as I really wanted to run a 11.9 and didn't think only 20psi on the 16g would get me there. I got the lines and got the MBC on around 6pm and went out to start raising the boost only to find that the MBC that I had on my shelf since 2009 was having a massive boost leak.
I was pretty frustrated and just resolved to run 12's and drove it the 2 hours up to the track anyway.

The night was pretty terrible all around. Around 500+ cars, busiest I've ever seen one of the midnight events. Then after being in the staging lanes for an hour and waiting for two cleanups, the whole area lost power for about an hour and a half then right after it came back on a car drove past the end of the track into the gravel and it took them 30 minutes to get him out. The event was full of ricers, stock cars, big dumb trucks, and other 16-20 second junk that made the wait miserable. My first run I ran 12.1@115mph hitting the rev limiter in 3rd. Second run after another extremely long wait I ran 12.4@114mph missing 3rd. I was frustrated since I ran 114mph before on a more conservative tune and with more issues. Then at 3:15am I saw the lanes were short as people were leaving and they hadn't closed them yet. So i went back for one more and got my 11.9@116mph. Traction was a bi*** as the track was absolute crap that night and my 205 wal-mart tires were junk for traction. However with the 11.9 slip I was very happy considering I did it with still low-ish (17 degrees of timing max through WOT) and only 20psi on the 16g.

Video of my passes will be linked at the end of my post


Since then the car hasn't changed much. It has been fairly reliable and I've still been DDing it despite finally buying a 96 civic ex coupe 5spd in good shape from a friend for $1500 to DD.
The car has seen a little street action and then last weekend I took it to a unprepped old school 1/8th mile track which can barely be called a track. The track is barely wider than a single lane at a regular dragstrip. They have pretty much no rules besides wearing a helmet. The track itself is the only paved part of the whole place. Everything else is dirt/grass. It's out in the boonies - stereotypical iowa area. I didn't think I'd have fun but it was an absolute blast. Everyone was there for fun. There are no staging lights, timers, etc. Just a flagger and a guy on a stand at the end to declare the winner.
I ran 5 times, one against a modded WRX, one against a built nova (no video, messed up the gopro), one against a 40's chevy/ford im not familiar with, and two against my buddy's 79 volare which is built and has ran 11.5 on motor but hasnt been sprayed yet. The final run we grudge raced for a pizza and I beat him.

Video of that event will also be posted at the end.

The next midnight event at the track I ran my 11 second pass at is next Friday night. Wednesday night I finally threw on a MBC donated to me by my buddy and raised her up to 25psi. I'm honestly blown away, did not expect the difference with only a 5psi increase on the 16g. Got A/F's dialed in to around 12.0 through WOT so still a bit rich but safe. Timing still only around 17 degrees so could stand to probably see 18-20 in some areas to make peak torque.

My goal is to just back up my 11 second pass and maybe get an 11.7 or 11.8. Considering how much of an issue traction was at 20psi I know that'll be even more of a problem in 1st gear now on 25psi as it has definitely picked up probably at least 30-40hp.

So we will see how it goes. So far I've put around 7000 miles on the car. It has been reliable the past month since getting it back together and making the 11 second pass and I abuse it fairly frequently. The only issue has been keeping the car cool in the hot and humid weather lately since the mishimoto slims struggle to keep up. I might throw my stock fans on the mishimoto rad.

After this track event I'm going to be taking the car apart a bit to replace the e-brake cables and re-stud the fuel tank. I also am considering upgrading to ecmlink v3 which require me to re-tune from scratch. Also looking for a new set of stock wheels preferably 16" 2g GST wheels to order a set of BFGforce Sport Comp2 225 radials to put on to help with traction.

As of the moment, I have around $4200-4500 invested in the car including purchase price. I've made back a lot of my money from selling my old parts. I'm very happy with the car. It's leaps ahead of where it was when I got it when I barely trusted it to drive off the trailer and drive 3 miles home from where we unloaded it - to the point now I might make the 12 hour trip to the shootout in August.

Time will tell.

Current mod list:
Stock 6 bolt bottom end, head has brian crower 272 cams, crower springs & retainers, arp headstuds
Stock Transmission. 2g MAF. DSMLink V2. FIC 950cc injectors. Walbro 255lph fuel pump rewired. 10+ year old HKS FPR. Braided 6an fuel lines from pump to rail. Full 3" custom exhaust with a Magnaflow 3" muffler. DNP Downpipe. STM Intake. Dodge mod 1g BOV. SSAC FMIC with custom piping. ACT2600 6puck unsprung clutch. Plain evo 3 16g turbo. Tial F38 Wastegate. Stock o2 housing. BPR7ES NGK Plugs and NGK Wires. TEIN Springs & KYB GR-2 Shocks.
Running on E85.

here are some pictures of the car as it basically is now:

Track day last weekend, all my buddy's with their "street cars" on trailers

Lined up with my buddy's volare which has ran 11.5 on motor. Beat him twice, second time he wanted revenge and we raced for pizza and I got him again.

Videos:

Clip of the car idling back in March


My passes on May 3rd with the bad headgasket and babying the car (ignore video, wasnt 22psi only 20, went off dsmlink boostest which was wrong.)



My passes on May 23rd where I ran my 11.9 second pass on 20psi.


The 1/8th mile Fun event I went to last weekend:

 

[Clinical]

So I finally scored a set of wheels, and tires too!

Buddy cut me a deal on his 2gb GSX wheels with BFG Drag Radials on them. Now I should get enough traction tomorrow night to break something!

Car looks a lot better too now.

 

[Clinical]

best of 11.6@112mph with blowing apart my intercooler piping in 4th. Then my only other run I got in apparently their timers were off so who knows what it actually ran. Optimstically I'd like to think maybe 11.4@120mph.

 

[Clinical]

Well last week I decided I needed to burn through my full tank of e85 I still had, so I went on a nice long cruise through the country and made a few stops to take some pictures. Wish I had a better camera, my phone is all I have so it leaves a lot to be desired.

She's not mint but she isn't bad for a 20 year old 11 second daily driver!

Then with the car getting close to empty, I went ahead and pulled the tank out since it has needed re-studded since I bought the car. Will be nice to finally be able to fill it to full without it shooting out from the sending unit and then leaking when i take corners for the first 50 miles or so on a fresh tank. Also tackled the tank with some degreaser and simple green to clean it up from 20 years of grime. Pic is before cleaning it at all.

the faithful little 16g still is perfect, pretty much no shaft play

 

[GRAVEDIGGER]

Lookin' good in the new pics man! Nice numbers at the track too, that's for sure.