This is my car, one of 1505 built in 1987. My oldest sister bought it new (I steered her towards it) and I'd always wanted to see how well it would respond to modifications. She told me when the day came she was all done with it she'd let me know. Well, 16 years later it happened! I bought it off her in Sept of 2003 after I had just sold a '67 442 convert that I restored. I know, why would I get rid of a car like that for a car like this? Well I'm a little weird! And so are you if you're reading this! Hah! Driving home from her house in New Hampshire, zipping from 60 to just under 100 mph in seconds I found myself saying "God, I love this car." It's just a fun car to drive.
Anyway, I had planned to go to a "Muscle car drag day" at Lebanon Valley New York sponsored by a new Muscle car magazine called (what else?)"Hemming's Muscle Machines" and needed a car to take. I planned to take the 442 if I hadn't sold it or the Sunbird if I had. As luck would have it the 442 left and the GT came home.

I wanted to modify it before I went so it would turn a decent number and not embarrass me. I actually raced it when it was brand new and it went 16.1 and 15.94 at like 88 MPH at New England Dragway in Epping New Hampshire back in 1988. I figured to do the usual turbo car stuff - 160 degree thermostat, hollowed out Catalytic convertor, larger exhaust, K&N cone air filter, more boost and race gas. Since these cars came with no intercooler I was planning to install one of those too. Problem was I had 3 weeks till drag day to get this all done! Needless to say I spent a lot of late nights getting it done! Another problem was I was on completely uncharted territory since I'd never seen anyone do anything to these things except total them or blow the engines up. So could I tap into a "Sunbird underground" online or just do what I thought was right and maybe have it blow up in my face? Quite a challenge.
I started doing the mods I thought were logical all the while looking for someone online who had experience with these heaps. I didn't want to get too crazy because in all honesty everytime I looked at the engine I'd say "man it's gonna suck if I have to dig too deep into this thing!" Hey there's a lot of crap under that hood! One thing I always do with any automatic car I beat on is a performance shift kit and cooler for the transmission. I got the largest B&M cooler available and my transmission guy hooked me up with a Superior shift improver kit. The Superior kit is supposed to remedy common problems with whatever transmission you're working on not make it rip the tires loose when it shifts. Bummer. I do like that "hurts me when it shifts" feeling. Still, it had a little tug when it shifted all stock and now it was a little more firm so that showed progress.
Since the cooler was so big and there was so little room to install it I ended up putting it kind of angled in the left front corner under the front bumper cover. To make sure it got enough cool air flow I drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of the bumper cover with a hole saw so air would flow through to it. Look at the underside of the bumper cover above the intercooler pipe with the bracket welded to it.
I had no touble getting a big K&N cone filter from Summit and though it was a super tight fit I wedged it in front of the condensor behind the bumper. The 160 degree thermostat was a problem since there's none available for it. This is one of those goofy engines that has the T-stat inside the fill tube on the engine. It has a basket handle and you push it in place. Super easy to service but odd enough so you can't just find a 160 and stick it in. The best I could come up with was a 180 so I used that.
Eventually, I came upon a post online that read "Sunbird turbo - I have your speed answer". I figured it was some moron from ebay hawking an "electric supercharger" or some bullshit gizmo that was supposed to give me a nose bleed when I floored it right? So I ignored it and kept on looking while I killed myself nights to meet my date with destiny at Lebanon Valley Sept 23rd. Finally, I gave in and emailed the Guy and amazingly he was for real!
His name was Ned Southwick and he had a low 12 second turbo Sunbird of his own in Kentucky. I couldn't believe it! Here was my new God of Sunbird power! After we got a rappor going he told me the basics to "turn these things on" were a Map bleed, a boost controller a fuel pump and a good set of slicks!
The Map bleed was for bleeding off enough boost pressure so the MAP sensor never "saw" over the 7 - 9 lbs of boost the engine was supposed to have. I was actually familiar with that since I had been spending a lot of time on www.thedodgegarage.com to learn what I could about speed density fuel injection and what works on turbo Mopars. If too much boost was present in the MAP sensor hose it would activate the fuel cutoff and spoil all my fun.
The boost controller was for setting the boost pressure to where I wanted it and the fuel pump was to ensure no starvation under boost. The slicks, well I knew what those were for!
So I ordered the boost related items from Ned figuring it'd be so much simpler to buy the equipment ready to install instead of trying to concoct it myself. I had about a week left till race day and my car was just about set. I had fabricated a 3" head pipe with some mandrel U-bends and my trusty MIG welder. I wrapped it in heat wrap then moved on to the rest of the exhaust. I had a fake cat convertor from my old Typhoon that I installed. I took an old convertor and stripped the outer shells off it (the heat shields) and welded them to a piece of 2 1/2" pipe. So when you go for a sticker (we're emission tested here in Massachusetts) it would look like there was a catalytic convertor there. Sneaky huh? Then, I welded up a 2 1/2" pipe that went over the rear axle where it split into two separate 2 1/2" tailpipes and mufflers. None of this faux "sporty car dual tailpipes out of one muffler" for me!
The mufflers were Walker Dynomax Super Turbos. I bought the largest ones they made called the "Hemi Super Turbos" so restriction would be minimal and sound control was maximum.I figured that would be sufficient for a little 4 banger. When I started it up I was bummed out it was so quiet! Now, two years later it has a nice snarl to it since the mufflers have broken in. While I had the exhaust off I slipped in a GM fuel pump for an '89 Pontiac turbo V6 Trans Am like Ned was using.
All I had left to do was install the intercooler and Ned's parts when they arrived. So I started to install an intercooler I had lying around from a turbo Buick. After a little cutting of the front bumper cover and inner bumper support it actually fit pretty well. The necks were a bit too long so it hung a little lower under the car than I liked.

I figured if it worked I could always take it out again and have some better necks welded on. I had some aluminum intercooler pipes from turbo Volvos and SAAB's I scrounged from the junyard. Though they were smaller than I wanted (2") they'd probably be OK since the turbo outlet was only 2" too.
I knew things were going too smooth so I was bound to hit a snag - and I did.
I saw some anti freeze leaking at the corner of my radiator. Crap! I took it out to have my radiator guy repair it but the core was too far gone so I needed to replace it or recore it. Typically I'd have him put the largest core in that would fit and he said he could indeed recore it as a 4 core. The problem was he wouldn't have the core until after Wednesday! Double crap!! So I ended up buying the heaviest duty replacement they made for it and he ordered the larger core to put in my old one when it arrived. Did I mention I'm made of money? Ha ha.
So I had my radiator all I needed was the boost increasing stuff to come.
It showed up Monday and I threw it all on that night. I drove it to work Tuesday morning and guess what? 5 lbs of boost! WTF?! I emailed Ned and he said to check the hoses, intercooler connections, etc. I did but no dice. The only good news was it felt just as fast on 5 lbs as it did on 7-9. But I wanted more, more, more!! Plus, I had one more day till race day.
Ned said to try adjusting the rod on the wastgate as my spring may have been weak. Good thing I had the foresight to cut and thread the rod while I had the radiator out. Amazingly that did it! Where before it was quick now it was genuinely fast. At stock boost levels you'd floor it and it would zip forwards but now it would rip the tire loose while you were rolling! Cool.
I played with the MAP bleed on my ride home to get it to where the fuel wouldn't be cutting out and got it right. I was now ready for the big day at Lebanon Valley!
The 2 1/2 hour drive to Lebanon Valley was uneventful and I arrived early enough to have ample time to put on my drag radials, unload and cool it off. There was no race gas available that early so my first passes would be on Sunoco Ultra pump gas.
Finally the moment arrived - I was about to make my first pass in this car in 16 years!
Cleaned the tires off, cleared the engine out a couple of times and staged. I wanted to leave with as much boost as possible so I loaded the convertor and brought it to 5 lbs of boost. The way this car launches is odd. It comes out fairly soft for about 5 feet and then a rush of power hits and the tires fight for traction. My first run was hampered by hitting the fuel cutout at the end of first gear. Hopefully the run would be decent anyway. Amazingly it was! I ran 14.87 at 90.93 MPH! Wow! That was a second faster than in the old days! Pretty good. Plus, the run wasn't ideal so it had to do better than that. I cooled it off for a little bit and then got back in the lanes and tried it again. I had been running the fan to keep it cool and when I went to start it the battery sounded low. Uh oh. That wasn't too cool. So I had to watch out before I killed the battery.

So back in the burnout box I cleaned the tires off again, staged and launched it kinda like before. A little tire spin but no fuel cut this time. It ran 14.54 at 91.48! Another tenth. Nice.
I was only running 13-14 lbs of boost so I bumped it up a turn on the wastegate actuator. Race gas was now available so I got a couple of gallons. Back at the line I staged and tried to launch a little harder than I had been. It spun a bit but I was rewarded with a 14.61 at 90.51 mph! Hmmm, maybe that was all it had? Another pass and a 14.35 popped up. Whoa, starting to get more interesting.

I cooled it off a little, readjusted my tire pressures, adjusted the wastegate actuator as far as it would go and went back up to see if I could blow this thing up. The guy who handed out the time slips had been taking notice of my times and was commenting on how well it was running. This run felt really good with no tire spin and a strong, flawless pull all the way. The time slip guy was talking to another guy there and looking at my slip then at my car smiling. They walked over and said "Man, this thing really flies huh?" "You just went 14.1!" No way! Wow! 14.17 at 94.83! Unbelieveable. A 108,000 mile, 4 cyl heap with a little bit of tuning and money. Unreal. I was shocked. God, I love this car!

Further attempts to go faster that day were unsuccessful as I ran a couple more 14.3's and that was the end of the show. All in all it was a very fun day. I weighed it at the track and it was 3005 lbs with me in it. About where I figured it would be. It was making 210 horsepower on that 14.17 pass which was pretty good for 122 cubic inches. Best 60' time was 2.04 which is what a typical big block muscle car pulls on street tires (at least all the ones I've owned) so that was great. It also got 24 miles per gallon on that trip which was awesome compared to all the big cube muscle cars I was used to racing. Nice.

So that was my first 3 weeks with the car. It was a lot of fun despite the grueling hours spent getting ready for Lebanon Valley. Now I had to go looking for some other stuff to make it even more fun!
I found some old posts on J-body.org about different rims and tires that would fit without rubbing. I settled on 16" Z-24 rims from the 1998 - 2000 years and scored a set with 205/55-R16 Goodyears on them. That was a $440 ebay find that made a big difference in handling. I got a factory strut tower brace on ebay too for $16 bucks and that made the steering even more responsive though I didn't believe it really would. I needed to change the struts and shocks so I went with KYB GR2's and since I was in there I upgraded to the 1992 and up larger front brakes. Though some people on the J-body.org would practically burn your house down for doing it I decided to cut one coil off the coil springs front and rear. You do your car your way and I'll do mine my way. :)
I stumbled on some posts about different turbos that people had tried on their Sunbirds. It looked to me like the T-25 off the Maclaren Grand Prix was the easiest to swap on since all the rest required moving the radiator forwards and making adaptors for the exhaust manifold flange. So I scoured ebay and eventually found a GP turbo that I won for $107 bucks. I took it apart and, since I'd never disassembled one before and it was so oil caked inside, I broke a few things. Unfortunately, one of them was the main shaft that the compressor wheel was part of. Beautiful. Ever want to throw something in the trash and go have a good cry?
Hoping to salvage this thing I found an exploded view of a T-25 online and started making phone calls to rebuilders for the parts I'd need. I settled on Limit Engineering who was well known in Buick turbo circles for their expertise on Garretts. They sold me a rebuild kit (that had the pieces I had broken for the thrust plate) for $75 bucks and a new shaft and wheel for $150. Ouch. That's more than I paid for the turbo.
Amazingly, I got it together and back on but it immediately started leaking oil all over the ground and burning so much through the exhaust I couldn't see the back of the car. Oh wonderful. I was bummed out that it had gone so badly and also because New England Dragway closed in 2 weeks and I wanted to see what it ran.
I had thought the center cartridge was worn out where the shaft exhaust side sealing ring went and now I was more sure of it. So I called LImit again and they said to send the center to them to look at. In the meantime I really wanted to go racing so I took the center cartridge of a spare T-25 and put the new shaft and wheel in it along with the GP housings.
I should mention now that the only differences I see between the Sunbird T-25 and the GP turbo (I still don't know if it's a T-25 or a T-28) are the compressor wheel (it's 1/4" taller) and the housings (they're 1/4" wider). So I assembled a T-25 center cartridge with the GP compressor wheel and housings. Why not right?

It worked! What a difference in power too! When I turned up the boost on the original turbo it would rip the tires loose while you were rolling. With the GP turbo it would spin them like crazy! Plus, the mid range pull was much greater. It was starting to feel like a big-block! Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to go the one night I was ready to go to the track it rained. Bummer. And that was the end of the season.
So I spent the winter doing more stuff in the quest for crazy power. I removed the intercooler and had new necks welded on.

You can see the difference in the above pics. The stock configuration on the left, modified on the right. Here's a pic of the modified version out of the car.
The original necks were 2 3/8" and 2 1/4" . Since I was running 2 1/2" pipes into and out of the I/C I had a pair of 2 1/2" necks welded on. The guy who welded them on screwed it up though. Since the original necks were squared off in the area where I cut them off the new, round necks had a gap around the edge. Since it's tough to fill in big gaps when you're welding aluminum he wanted to use a filler plate. I told him the one thing I didn't want was for him to slide a plate in there with a hole bored in it since it would kill the airflow especially on the outlet side. If he could use round rod or aluminum strips on the outside that would be fine. Of course he put a plate on the inside. :( Well at least he did it for free.
So with that re-installed and plumbed I added a MSD ignition coil to replace the high-mile stock one. I indexed the spark plugs and also went to a colder set of plugs. I had been running the stock AC R42XLS but now was going to try a Champion RN9YC which was about one heat range colder than stock. Since the boost was higher I figured a colder plug would help ward off detonation. I read that air bags in the rear coils would help fight weight transfer. The idea is on a front driver you want to keep the front tires planted for traction because as it leans back the front tires have more chance to spin. So I stuck a set of Air Lift bags in there.
I had been reading whatever I could find about these engines and had made a few Internet friends with varying experiences. I was laying plans for the future figuring to rebuild the engine and tranny someday. I bought a spare engine and transmission from a local junkyard but when I got it home I discovered it had thrown #3 rod through the block! Amazingly, they gave me another complete eng/trans for a $50 removal fee. Somewhere along the way I was informed there were new engines on ebay for cheap money. I did a little investigating and sure enough I scored two new blocks with fitted pistons for $75 bucks each! Since they were in Ohio there was a $140 trucking fee but that was still a deal. I pay 10% over cost for parts at a GM dealer my friend works at and new turbo pistons are $91 each my cost! So I bought two new blocks and stashed them for "someday" too.

So since I had time on my hands over the winter I decided to have my extra head ported and flowed. My friend the head porter noticed right away that even though the intake valve was 1.690" the throat below it was only 1.400". So my machinist ran a cutter down the throat to open it up to 1.500". I couldn't come up with any larger valves so I was stuck with the stock 1.69" intake and 1.44" exhaust. The valves were back-cut to help flow a little and a 3 angle valve job was done.
There was also a protrusion in the # 1 intake port that looked like a boss for a holding fixture that I ground out.

Here's a comparison of the flow, stock vs ported:

STOCK
Intake ports-
.100" lift= 25.3 CFM at 10 " water (42.30 at 28")
.200" 56.3 CFM at 10" (94.13 at 28")
.300" 80.3 CFM at 10" (134.26 at 28")
.400" 93.1 CFM at 10" (155.66 at 28")
.450" 98.1 CFM at 10" (164.02 at 28")
.500" 99.5 CFM at 10" (166.36 at 28")
.500" with stock manifold and throttle body
85.2 CFM at 10" (142.45 at 28") 58.5 CFM at 10" (97.87 at 28")

Exhaust ports-
.100" lift= 20.2 CFM at 10" (33.79 at 28")
.200" =42 CFM at 10" (70.26 at 28")
.300" 53.1 CFM at 10" (88.83 at 28")
.400 61.6 CFM at 10" (103.05 at 28")
.450" 64.8 CFM at 10" (108.41 at 28")
.500" 67.4 CFM at 10" (112.76 at 28")
.500" with stock exh manifold- 58.5 CFM at 10" (97.87 at 28")

PORTED
Intake-
.100" 32.2 CFM at 10" (53.87 at 28")
.200" 59.6 CFM at 10" (99.71 at 28")
.300" 84.5 CFM at 10" (141.36 at 28")
.400" 101.3 CFM at 10" ( 169.47 at 28")
.450" 104.8 CFM at 10" (175.33 at 28")
.500" 108.2 CFM at 10" ( 181.01 at 28")
.500" with modified intake manifold for
larger throttle body 102.3 CFM at 10"
(171.14 at 28")

Exhaust-
.100" 25.5 CFM at 10" (42.66 at 28")
.200" 46.6 CFM at 10" (77.96 at 28")
.300" 57.3 CFM at 10" (95.86 at 28")
.400" 65.8 CFM at 10" (110.08 at 28")
.450" 72.1 CFM at 10" (120. 62 at 28")
.500" 75.3 CFM at 10" (125.97 at 28")
Did not reflow with ported exh manifold

So instead of flowing like total crap it now just flowed poorly! Well, it had to help.

So spring had finally come and I arranged to go to the track on a Friday night. It was supposed to be a nice night, I had a friend of mine along as my cameraman and I was hoping to come home as the new local king of the turbo 4 bangers. I went to the pits to prepare my trusty steed and swap on my drag racing paraphernelia. My Drag radials went on, rear tires were set to 40 psi, my air bags were inflated and my trunk was emptied. I planned to do a great big burnout and really launch this sucker but I quickly realized I still didn't know how to launch this rig. It just doesn't come out well. I build up boost, get off the brakes and floor it but it still takes a second or two before it pulls hard and roasts the tires. Turbo lag? Seems to me turbo lag is a lot more pronounced than that. But I digress...

So I launch it as hard as I usually do and it takes off great. No screaming tires, not even a chirp just "whoosh" and away I go. Pulls great all the way down, no hiccups or anything. A good, clean, strong run. Get my time slip and Holy #&@! 13.61 at 97.22! Wow! And that was the first pass imagine what's next! 60' time on that pass was 1.94! Wow! Incredible.
Unfortunately, that stood as the best pass of the night though it was also the slowest MPH-wise. I did a couple of 13.7's, a couple of 13.8's and a 13.9 all at 98 or higher. Best mph was just shy of 99 MPH. Another happy day at the drags! But the long spiral into "why did I go so far with this thing?" was about to begin.
Leaving the track I noticed my fuel pressure gauge was way higher than normal- 78 lbs. "Hmmmm, what's up with that?" I thought maybe the gauge was screwed up. I tapped it a couple of times but no change. It ran fine so I kept going. What was I going to do anyway? I mentioned it to my cameraman but he didn't know what to do about it he just didn't want to walk home. All was well until I saw the fuel pressure falling off. I figured either the problem repaired itself or the fuel pump fuse blew. Guess what? It was door number two. Damn!
Naturally, it happened on the darkest part of the ride home, no street lights and of course I had no flashlight. So I had to swap the fuse by the light of cars passing by. I swapped in the 20 amp Heater/AC and made it home with no further problems. I was waiting for the wiring harness fire that luckily never came. When I shut it off and tried to re-start it in my driveway it wouldn't turn over - it was hydro-locked from all the gas in the cylinders. Yikes!

Pulling the plugs verified it was definitely hydro-locked from fuel, now I had to figure out why. It was either a leaking injector or the regulator was bad. Since all the cylinders were loaded with fuel my guess was the regulator. Pulling the regulator required pulling the P/S pump, the accessory bracket, the fuel rail and a bunch of extremely stubborn bolts.

I'd planned to upgrade my next motor to larger injectors and had bought a set of Mopar 52 lb/hr injectors (they're incredibly cheap - $150 for 4!)so I figured why not put it all in now with this motor and work out the bugs? Sounded logical to me. It wasn't quite that easy though. You can't just put in big injectors and expect a stock engine to idle and run as usual. You either get a chip modified for big injectors (try buying one for a turbo Sunbird I dare you!), or resort to tricks to make it run as lean as usual down low but then rich again when you floor it so molten steel and aluminum don't run out your tailpipes. Ah, that requires a device called a FMU - Fuel Management Unit. It's basically an adjustable fuel pressure regulator that you can alter the rate of fuel pressure under boost from 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, etc as your engine requires. Slick. A little research (that term comes up a lot on here huh?) and I found the Cartech unit was the one everyone copies or likes. Cartech had changed it's name to Bell (Corky Bell, remember that name) so I picked up a Bell FMU off ebay for $179 bucks. Wonderful, it was all coming together.
By the way the old regulator had caused the problem. By design the diaphragm was pinched between the halves of the cannister. Mine had actually come un-pinched in one spot. Either from age or from 17 lbs of boost. Other guys online had said when they crossed 55 lbs of fuel pressure their regulators had croaked too. I had around 52 lbs of fuel at 17 lbs of boost so that may have been the problem. Take heed turbo Sunbird owners!
So I felt good I found the problem.

I had to modify the fuel rail to accomodate a different regulator. The stock one had a female coupler and a bubble fitting that screwed into the regulator. That was oddball even by European car standards. There was no way that would work with anything of American manufacture so I had to get creative.
I unbent the stock return line so the routing was more like what I wanted. Then, I had my local radiator shop cut off the bubble end and solder on a piece of 5/16" steel line. On the end of that they soldered on a 1/4" pipe thread brass coupler so I could adapt anything I felt like using.

That did it!
I picked up a used Paxton FPR off ebay for $40 bucks. It was meant for a supercharged 5.0 so it was boost referenced.

So I plumbed all that stuff in and that just left one more thing to do. The stock throttle body is tiny on these things - 43MM. Doing the math in Corky Bell's "Turbocharger" book you'll find that the stock TB becomes a restriction to flow at 210 horespower. When I went 14.17 I made 208 hp, at 13.61 I was making 235 hp. It was time for an upgrade.
Ned was using a 60 mm TB off a Mustang but he had to weld a pad on the intake manifold to get it on. Even though I was doing some nutty stuff to my car I still had no desire to pull the engine apart so anything I did would have to be "bolt on". So I did some more hunting.
To make 300 horsepower you'd need a 60MM throttle body (according to Corky's formula) so I set my sights on that. I had a spare turbo intake I was planning to modify but that would be down the road a ways. For the time being I needed a down and dirty way to get a larger one on my engine.
I read about a 54 MM TB from the V6 Fiero that was a pretty easy swap. I ran into a guy on the 2.0 turbo website another guy on J-body.org had started (www.lt3engine.tk)and he told me he had done it, it wasnt too tough and it made 25 hp on his chassis dyno. Cool! That was the one for me. So I scoured ebay for a deal and finally scored an NOS one for $71 bucks. I compared it to my original and discovered it was far from what I'd call "easy" but it wasn't out of my capabilities.

Stock Sunbird turbo 43MM on left, Fiero V6 54MM on right.
Basically, you had to modify the IAC bypass canal in the new TB, cut and weld a piece of the throttle bell crank in a new position, modify the vacuum ports, remove and plug the TB hot water channels, reroute a couple of vacum passages and open the hole in the turbo intake manifold. Wow. "After all that it better be worth it" I thought.
Unfortunately I'd never find out.
I did all my mods and actually got it running though it ran crappy. I messed with the fuel pressure, up , down, up, down. Rate of gain up, down, up, down, etc. I eventually got it to run pretty good off idle, driveability was as nice as usual. Problem was as soon as you got to 5 lbs of boost it fell on it's face! bogging down, just generally falling all over itself like it was fuel starving. My EGT showed it was rich (low temps), my air/fuel gauge showed it going lean as you stayed in the "bad zone" and my gut told me it was leaning out. So I fattened up the curve more and more and more and got nowhere. So I leaned it out more and more and more and got nowhere. I thought since it had such a killer fuel system maybe that measly turbo TA fuel pump couldn't keep up so I had to go bigger. The best pump I knew of was the Walbro 340 which has a 255 LPH capacity at 60 psi. So I got one of those and swapped that in. That wasn't it. I was so pissed off I unhooked the vacuum line to the FMU to basically deactivate it. If it was too rich that should stop it. Incredibly that was it! I couldn't believe it. All that wasted time. The instructions had included a tiny, plastic vacuum line restricter that said "in some rare cases you may need this..." well I guess this was a rare case.

So that did it. Now I could tune it till it ran great and knocked off 12's at the track. It still was too rich as I was driving it to and from work but I did what I could. I was petrified of going too lean.
I finally got back to the track and did my pre-race preparation. My first pass was a dissapointing 14.08 at 95 or so. Funny how your perspective changes. A year prior and I would have kissed the tires for a 14.0 now I was pissed off. Next pass was a slightly better 14.00. EGT's were around 800 degrees which is terribly rich. I still had 17 lbs of boost and figured if I increased the boost it would lean it out in a more fun way than taking away fuel. So I maxed out my wastegate actuator and managed to get 20 lbs of boost holding the brakes in the pits. This would have to help right?
And then a funny thing happened when I went to back out of the pits - it wouldn't go backwards! Uh oh! It would go forwards but not back. I actually thought about running it once more while I still had forward gears but reasoned this was a friendly hint from God to call it a day while I could still get home.
I was thinking back to my dealership days and didn't the 125's have a low-reverse clutch? So, if you lose reverse doesn't that mean low gear is next? I know that was true on the 200 trannys but I couldn't remember on the 125's though I thought they were functionally the same inside.
Well, better to go home while you could still go.
So that was that. My season was pretty much done.

I had a spare tranny rebuilt for the day I blew mine up or I swapped in a fresh engine. Whichever came first. It had a limited slip unit from Pontiac Jeff's company (Engineered Performance), a 3:42 final drive he sold me, a combination of Superior and Trans-Go shift improvement kits and a loosened up stock torque convertor. For a few minutes I contemplated swapping in the new trans with the old engine to salvage the season but decided against it for a number of reasons. First off, I never swapped out one of these front drivers and it didn't look like it would be a picnic. It looked a hell of a lot easier to do the motor and trans in one piece. Secondly, this engine was burning oil now, had a 108,000 miles and had to be an explosion waiting to happen. So I decided to just do the wise thing and build a new engine and swap them in together.

I uncrated one of my ebay turbo blocks and started to gather the pieces for it. I had three good rods from the junkyard engine with the hole in the block so my machinist got me a rebuilt one for $38 bucks to round out my set. The stock rod bolts are junk so I stepped up to ARP super duper rod bolts.
My internet buddy Stefan over in London had sent me a GM finned, aluminum oil pan and oil cooler adaptor (they definitely got the best stuff for these engines over in Europe!) so I was going to use those. He also sold me a tube header intended for some member of my engine's family from a Euro turbo kit that was flanged for a T-3.
Oh boy! Now we were talking!

I found a machined crank with bearings on ebay for $76 bucks so I picked that up to add to the mix.

I'd been searching out camshafts but all the aftermarket ones were in Europe and they weren't intended for a turbo engine though the manuafacturers thought they would probably work OK. I didn't want to take the gamble with a $300 camshaft so I bought a Melling replacement cam kit for the 2.0 turbo. According to the catalog their cam had .443 lift, 214 degrees duration at .050" lift and 112 lobe centers. Pretty stout for a stock cam so why not? Remember this saying, "don't believe everything you read and only half of what you see."

Since the stock head bolts were crappy one-time use types and were supposed to be spongy I decided to go with a he-man set of head studs. Problem is the bolt holes are metric and no one I found offered a metric head stud that would work. Stupid Euro engine! So I bit the bullet and went with ARP 1/2" head studs and had the block tapped.