Cricket
I am sure you are wondering about the name. Well, this Fozzy or Schoolbus build was christened Cricket, probably because of the nature of crickets… noisemakers in the quiet of the night, known to take flight and unnaturally expansive hops as defense mechanisms and general do-goodery. Perfect and subtle. It is a 2006/7 Forester Cross Sport. This comes with your basic EJ20 power plant running a TD04L windmill to bolster the torque curve and give that hill climb confidence. It has the usual creature comforts such as the ability for passengers to stretch their legs while in sitting position, air conditioning, heated seats and your usual FHI reliability. These things are bullet proof. Almost.
Cricket
Stock setup
In home country
Tail ends
Stock setup
The transformation
Not Stock
This story starts off with a boy and a dream. A people carrier with sufficient space for a few grocery packages and work related cargo as well as rapid pace to surprise your regular boy racers in the concrete jungle. But as he is wont to do, said boy builds determination to cover greater distances in shorter time intervals, and thus the descent down into the rabbit hole that we call modding starts. First, a modest approach; what in these tuner circles are referenced as “just safety and reliability mods”. We witnessed tweaks to the following, not necessarily in that order:
Vented and cross-drilled DBA brake rotors mated to WRX 4-pot calipers for a bit more “stop”
A BC-R 3-way adjustable coilover set for a bit more corner entry speed. Just a lil-bit
Some adjustable lateral arms and sway bar end links
Full Mishimoto aluminium radiator and gearbox cooler kit. An engine oil cooler kit was thrown in just to “complete the package”. Reliability comes first you know.
A basic boost gauge to keep an eye on things. Screw that, a full set of gauges: oil temperature, oil pressure, AFRs, boost, coolant temperature, fuel pressure and one or two other important parameters that need an eye on. These came with the necessary bells and whistles to draw the driver’s attention in case anything went out of kilter.
GDB STI intercooler to replace the puny heater matrix that comes on these foresters purporting to be an intercooler.
A perrin intake. This also gets rid of the sound deadening and muffling from the stock airbox, so you start to hear a bit of that turbo whine and chatter.
Grimmspeed air-oil separator because you know why.
The Era of Change
Top Secret Mods
After months of running this “safe and reliable” setup, something snapped. I like to imagine that he was sitting in his thinking room, quiet and dimly lit, probably sipping on some well-aged whisky pondering about world domination when the idea came to him. What if, just what if, one could swap out all these stock parts from the Forester, slow parts that hold you back, slow parts that are enemies of progress, and give it an STI heart? Perhaps even take it a notch higher and up the ante, where the laggards at the base of Mount Fuji played it safe and conservative and held back the real potential of an EJ207? At that point, he put down the glass, switched on the LED overhead light and turned over the whiteboard to its clean side and jotted the following:
Buy GDB STI -> chop it up -> throw all the parts into the Fozzy -> be faster?
Getting faster
Schoolbus Upgrade
And so it went on: Parts list -
Full GDB STI drive train: EJ207 engine + Gearbox + R180 Diff + All electronics including DCCD controls
Blouch TD-05 16g Turbo (to be promptly replaced by a 2.5 dominator even before it was run in)
Perrin 3inch Intake pipe for the bigger inlet turbo. Stock cannot cut it
Tomei Expreme exhaust headers and up-pipe, full stainless steel
Grimspeed divorced down-pipe. Catless. 3inch bore. Full stainless steel
Invidia Catback. 3 inch bore. Full stainless steel.
Deatschwerks 300lph fuel pump
Deatschwerks 1000cc injectors
FPR?
AEM water-methanol injection kit
Endless 6-pot Big Boy Brake kit up front clamping on floating massive grooved and vented rotors. OEM brembo calipers and rotors rear end.
Custom braces: fender, front strut towers, rear strut towers
ProDrive Wheels + Sticky AD08 rubber all round
Refresh in Progress!
Putting it all together
A GDB STI impreza was sourced, chopped and shipped to KE. All this courtesy Kamal from Panesar Engineering. You can always trust him to deliver. The task of the swap at hand was given to Usama and Juggy over at Import Performance Parts (IPP). The stripping and teardown was the easy part, as always with any build. Then comes the task of putting everything back together. I think at this point, we had enough empirical evidence to dispel the “subarus are like legos” myth. While most of the parts actually bolted in with enough clearance for the Fozzy platform, we had a few quibbles here and there but nothing that could not be resolved. It was kinda like walking into a building called The Detail Plaza and being met by the concierge; “Hello to you! I am the Devil, but you can call me Dev. I will be at your service during your stay here.” Short summary for anyone planning an STI swap on a Fozzy:
Front cross member will bolt in directly but will affect the motor height
Rear lateral arms will bolt in but will affect track width
Grimmspeed divorced downpipe will not fit with the stock steering column linkage. Requires modification
Invidia catback will not fit properly with the 6speed box prop-shaft. You will need a resonator delete
GDB radiator will definitely not fit in the Fozzy frame without major adjustment. Better off with a stock Fozzy items
Battery will be better off relocated to the trunk or something
Clock Cluster will bolt in directly, shroud will need to be modified to fit
The tougher parts
Wrapping it up
Catback Exhaust work: resonator delete, because power. And also because crickets like to sing the song of their people in the night. If this music does not wake the dead, then it will certainly send them dancing. This was also a “function-over-form” modification as the resonator in the mid-pipe was touching the prop-shaft that transfers power from the STI 6 speed box to the R180 differential at the back. We needed a reduction in overall diameter and the resonator was sacrificed for this worthy cause.
Downpipe with divorced wastegate dump tube – “lobster-tail” bend welds. Artwork by @weld_hack_: one of the hidden gems of this city, bottled up talent. This quiet and unassuming character is Pindri. His work speaks for itself. Checkout his IG handle for more eye watering and deeply satisfying images of his metalwork.
The original grimmspeed downpipe was actually designed for a GDB STI impreza. That said, we found during its’ installation that it was not a lego piece that would simply join the next block. The divorced wastegate dump pipe was knocking on the steering column u-joint and impeding movement. Since Hagz has a passion for not crashing and dying due to inability to steer the car during driving, the stock pipe was bolted on and the car shipped off to Pindri to work his magic.
A long while later, pipe was done and heat wrapped by the lads over at IPP.
@weld_hack_ also delivered the custom braces
Absolutely stunning, to say the least.
The wiring work on this was quite interesting. It involved a harness merge, GDB STI wiring to run the motor works, fuse box & relays, DCCD, and Dash Gauge Cluster. OEM Fozzy wiring to run the body control, lights, HVAC, SRS Airbags, etc. Long and painstaking, especially due to the fact that the guys who handle the “half-cut” have zero regard for the end use. They generally mark a line down the middle and go at it with an uber-saw and in the process destroy many small bits and bobs that you may need.
A long while later, wiring done and provisions put in for gauges, water meth kit and sundry.
To be continued.