Well it all started when i was a senior in high school. the girl i was dating that time (who later became my wife); her father owned a car lot. so i told him what i was looking for a black or dark blue GTP with under 60,000. well off to the auction he went with my request in mind. what he came back with was no where near my request. a 2001 GT RED...****... It was something he knew he could sell so he bought it. at first i thought **** this and then i sat down in it and it only had 11,256 miles on it. this was in 2003. he threw some dealer tags on it and let me take it before i decided to buy it. after beating on it some i was sold; it was a hell of a lot faster then my 93 lumina euro 3.1. I thought i had the fastest car on earth.
I drove it stock for about 6 months and then bought a SLP cold air intake and a DHP 1.0 PCM. boy oh boy was it super fast now! that lasted through my freshman and sophomore year of college and i had enough. it was now slow as balls. (my roommate had a GTP). so i started looking and after working my ass off that summer building houses i ordered a HD diff upgrade from Morad. I ordered a cartuning turbo kit, transgo shift kit and miscellaneous other parts from 3800performance. I ordered it in june and after 2 months of *****ing i finally got it in august 5 days before i had to make a 450 mile drive back to school on the other end of nebraska. here we go. started throwing the kit on and doing the transmission mods. got it all back together in 2 days. while doing the diff upgrade we pushed the driverside axle out if the trans and could not figure out why it felt so springy when putting the new diff and output shaft in. after a quick call to morad (this was back in the day when ed still used his personal cell phone) about the issue he said he would have someone call that could help. i hung up the phone and about 10 minutes later got a call from Tim King explaining that we had probably pushed the drivers cv shaft out (was indeed the issue). those guys are some great guys.
got the car back together and off i went to school. after about 3 miles of driving i could tell something was rubbing. turns out it was the down pipe hitting the brake master cylinder. so after about 100 miles i pulled over (do a check engine light) to do some surgery on the side of the road. pulled the throttlebody and the brake master cylinder and got out my BFH and beat on the down pipe about 1/4 inch so it would clear the master cylinder. bolted everything back up, reset the computer via the battery method and went back to driving. about 2 months later i finally received my DHPpowertuner. tuned off the STFT's and LTFT's for a long time and got it running much better.
i forgot to mention i did put the car on the dyno before i left for school and it made a whopping 248 horsepower on 9 psi. after getting the pig rich tune straight it made around 280-290 i believe and that is how it lived for basically the next 3 years during the remainder of my college career. with the occasional splash of race gas i would turn the boost up to 13psi and get about 340 horse out of it. the best pass it ever made in that configuration was a 12.7 i believe.
post college i called morad once again for a L32 short block, a set of stock L36 heads, and L26 intake. went to zzp and ordered an st5 cam, double roller, crow cams 130# springs, rear powerlog and other assorted stuff i cant remember anymore. went to treadstone performance and bought a TR10 intercooler and assorted stainless steel piping and a Tial 50 BOV. A buddy of mine at the time had just bought a tig welder so he wanted to practice so i helped him out and let him weld up all my intercooler piping. I cleaned up the heads and assembled the top of the motor. i also ordered a TEP trans and precision billet converter at this time. when i got it all together and tuned (now with HPtuners) it ran an 11.57.
next time i had it on the dyno i killed 3rd gear making dyno pulls so i rodded it around in second for a while and parked it for 2 years with less then 1000 miles and about 30 track passes on the new setup. and that brings us to today.
i suppose ill try to find some pictures from throughout the years and post them at some point. also somewhere in there it got GXP brakes, GXP seats, and several different stereos. embarrassed a lot of camaros and mustangs and wrx's among other things over the years.
Originally Posted by Bio248
