Japanese Performance 127 preview

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7/1/11

12:46 PM

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HAWKEYE IMPREZA GETS HARDCORE WRC MAKEOVER

THE

ULTIMATE WARRIOR

SATS COSWORTH BUILDS

EUROPE’S BEST DRIFT CAR FOR BDC DOMINATION

803BHP COSWORTH 2JZ-GTE

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track ATTACK!

THE UK’S TOP CIRCUITS UNVEILED NÜRBURGRING-TUNED NISSAN S14.5 JP’S GUIDE TO TRACK PREPPING YOUR CAR BEHIND THE SCENES WITH BTCC’S HONDA RACING

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SUBARU IMPREZA BUYING GUIDE, NISSAN VS PORSCHE GRUDGEMATCH, JP’S ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO GEARBOXES, DRIVING TIPS FROM THE PROS

EXTREME SCION

WE GO STATESIDE TO GET THE LOWDOWN ON AMERICA’S TOP TIME ATTACK CAR - AND IT’S FWD!

£4.35 No.127

AUGUST ’11 www.chpltd.com

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BY ENLISTING THE HELP OF NORTHERN IRISH DRIFT CHAMPION MARK LUNEY, AND MOTORSPORT LEGENDS COSWORTH, SATS MOTORSPORT HAS RAISED THE BAR FOR EUROPEAN DRIFTING...

AND ITS STUNNING SUPRA IS THE PROOF

Sherwood Words: Dan y Fl Pics:

‘N

ever judge a book by its cover’.

That’s the saying anyway. But often, when people are heard spouting the old adage, they’re referring to something that has a lot more potential than its outward appearance would suggest. Take rat-look cars for example, where underneath their purposely rusted and decaying exteriors, are often reliable and well-maintained motors and chassis.

However, as anyone who has ever bought a car where the opposite is true can testify, whereby the shiny, polished paintwork is hiding a multitude of sins and problems, it can be a harsh lesson to learn.

Chris Arthur, who runs his family’s driver

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training school by day, and is the man behind the SATS Motorsport drift team at weekends, is a man who fell for the pomp and polish of a certain well-known Japanese demo car and almost ended up with a good looking, but highly uncompetitive, drift car on his hands.

However, with a little help from his friends and Northampton’s finest engine builders behind him, Chris has turned the tables on his dodgy decision and now has one of the UK’s top sideways-sliding steeds.

‘I bought the Supra back in the summer of 2008,’ recalls the 27-year-old Northern Irish modifier when we meet him and the car at Donington Park race circuit the day

before the first round of the 2011 British Drift Championship. ‘It was originally built as a demo car for top Japanese tuning house BN Sports. I’d actually tried to buy the same car a few years before, but had narrowly missed out on it to a guy who lives down in Southern Ireland.’

At the time, Chris had settled on acquiring another car from the BN stable – a full-on Nissan PS13 show car, which had been built to go on the BN Sports stand at the coveted Tokyo Auto Salon.

‘I just stored it in my garage, I didn’t even drive it much really, it was just too nice to drift or race,’ laughs Chris. ‘My younger brother Iain is more into driving the cars

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HONDA RACING IS CURRENTLY

THE FRONT-RUNNER IN THE ULTRA COMPETITIVE BRITISH TOURING CAR CHAMPIONSHIP.

WE JOIN THE TEAM TRACKSIDE

TO FIND OUT HOW THE SEASON’S SHAPING UP Words & pics: Simon Cooke

TEAM

WORK 62

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W

ith the greatest number of entrants for years, racing doesn’t come much more competitive than the 2011 British Touring Car Championship.

Featuring a raft of the best drivers on four wheels, all ready and willing to trade paint with their rivals for that exclusive taste of victory, it makes for an exhilarating series to say the least. The varied mix of cars, such as Audi A4s, Ford Focuses, Seat Leons, Chevrolet Cruzes, BMW 3-series, Vauxhall Astras and a Proton Gen2 – not forgetting the Japanese branded teams running Toyota Avensises and Honda Civics – mean BTCC cars are probably the closest racing cars to what we drive on the roads every day – albeit in a much more hardcore state of tune.

We’ve come to Thruxton circuit in Hampshire to spend the day with the BTCC drivers Matt Neal and Gordon Sheddon of Honda Racing. The team runs a pair of BTCCspec Honda Civic Type Rs and currently leads the manufacturers’ championship, and also the drivers’ championship – thanks to Matt. Thruxton is the fastest circuit in the series, and with three races on the same day, the team is on a steep learning curve – especially as this season the Civics are running with new 2.0-litre turbocharged engines – its first ever taste of forced induction.

‘It’s a standard 2.0-litre Type R engine, which then goes to Neil Brown Engineering for the turbo conversion. It’s the same turbo that is used on all the cars in the series, and is designed and supplied by Owen Developments,’ explains Team Principal Steve Neal, when we meet him in the team’s busy pitlane garage. ‘We only got our new turbo engines a few weeks before the season started, so we didn’t have much time for testing,’ Steve points out. ‘Since we’ve had the engines, though, the first meetings have really been extended test sessions – the mapping by Neil Brown has been critical – and the cars have got better and better and we’ve improved the handling characteristics of the car, too.

We’ve taken a lot of time to tune the aerodynamics as well, and are creating a good level of usable downforce.’

Series regulations place severe restrictions on the teams for testing during the season, and simulations are simply not the same as the real thing.

‘We’ve made some substantial changes to the weight distribution since last year’s cars, and also changed the whole drivetrain and gearbox,’ continues Steve. ‘It’s still an Xtrac six-speed sequential, but it’s stronger, because we thought we’d be running higher boost and more power. We are treating this year as a development period for next year’s NGTC regs, and it’s turning out to be even better than we ever expected.’

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Front-wheel-drive - Enthusiasts may argue that it’s the weak relation, but putting power to the ‘wrong’ wheels hasn’t held Chris and the team back. The car picked up first place in its first seven events, smashing records and embarrassing conventional high performance machinery in the process

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Just

Frontin’ WORLD MOTORSPORTS FACED AN UPHILL CHALLENGE TRANSFORMING THIS FRONT-WHEEL-DRIVE HATCHBACK INTO A TIME ATTACK WEAPON – BUT WITH AN EVER-EXPANDING TROPHY CABINET, WHO SAYS YOU NEED POWER GOING TO THE BACK WHEELS? JP HEADED TO THE TRACK TO WITNESS THE METAMORPHOSIS OF A MONSTER

Words: Alex Grant Pics: Fly

T

ime Attack is one of the most brutal and fiercely competitive motorsports on the planet. It’s a series dominated by the most extreme performance cars, and when you’re flat out against the clock, every second, and every component, counts.

With grip and horsepower proven to be the biggest success factors, behind driver ability, it’s hardly surprising that it’s also a series dominated by rear and four-wheel-drive cars. The usual performance car layouts have always done the best job of translating epic power figures into on-track pace, so you’d have to be bonkers to bring a front-wheel-drive car to the grid, surely?

Chris Rado doesn’t think so. As the owner and founder of Californian Scion specialists WORLD Motorsports, he’s a bit of a front-wheel-drive advocate and the brains behind an audacious Scion tC drag car – a car that tore up Pomona drag strip in less than seven seconds, reaching an unbelievable 197mph in the process. And with credentials like these, it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two when it comes to building seriously quick Scions.

The problem is, of course, that, while front-wheel-drive is a layout which works perfectly well on normal road cars, and even in some crazy horsepower straight-line racers – with a little bit of clever engineering, anyway – massive power figures through the ‘wrong’ wheels, generally doesn’t tend to work quite so well on a circuit. For example, dive into a corner and give a little throttle and the front tyres will soon have way too much to handle, and you’ll more than likely end up understeering off at the first corner in a cloud of acrid tyre smoke. The BTCC is one of the only race series which predominantly use front-wheel-drive

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