The Blue Bomber

Where did it all start? Read on...

In December 2000, I did my first real autox event. My buddy, Randy, finally convinced me to start autox'ing. So, I asked if Alan wanted to come along and watch me make a fool of myself. We woke up at the ass-crack of dawn and made the 120-mile drive down to Monterey for a NASA autox event. Alan and I got hooked and have been autox'ing as much as we possibly could ever since.

You fellow autox'ers know that a Solo 2 rookie should work on the driving skills before messing around w/ the car... Alan's case was an exception, though. He started autox'ing sometime in Spring '01 and Randy (already a regular fast guy in our region) rode with Alan to offer tips. This is classic...

Coming out of a turn onto a critical straightaway...

Randy: "Floor it!..... FLOOR IT!!!"

Alan: "It IS floored!!!!!!"

At another autox event, Alan, George, and I took turns in each others' Corollas; my decently-handling AE92 GT-S, Alan's carbed lightweight AE92 sedan, and George's torquey AE102. Alan's advice was to leave the 3-spd slushbox in "low" and keep the gas floored. I gave him a quizzical look and passed it off as him poking fun at his motor. In the end, though, I did keep it floored about 95% of the entire course and was absolutely astonished that I was a good second slower than Alan's fastest scratch time. Yikes! This car would be great for drivers to learn how to keep as much momentum as possible.

Needless to say, his tired 4A-F (which had made numerous trips up and down California and Oregon) was on its last legs. Brand new, they put out, what, 100 hp? We figured his was making, oh.... how much can a hamster leg press??? =) Halfway through the '01 autox season, the carb started acting funny and it barely passed the SMOG test. What did that mean? GZE time!!!!! A race shop wanted to charge $2000 just for the engine swap. This didn't include an engine rebuild. Now, none of us had (even now!) insane amounts of extra cash laying around, so this option wasn't too appealing. With George "Mr. Electrical Engineer" Hong (of www.corollaperformance.com fame) helping us out, I figured we could successfully complete this project.

My own thoughts were, "Hmmm... Building up and swapping in an engine that makes twice the power of the original engine in a car that wasn't supposed to have it? Bring it on, baby!"

Thus, began the blue sedan's new lease on life in August of 2001. As the project's completion drew closer and closer by January '02, we christened her The Blue Bomber. Alan took the time to do a comprehensive writeup of a majority of the process, so the rest of the pages are in his words. In some instances, you'll see gray text that I added. Enough talk. On to the writeup!..