We hit H-Town to check out a street-slaying Bat born under a bad sign

Although I am far too sensible and realistic to subscribe to all that new-age destiny/fate/everything-happens-for-a-reason junk, I do see a fair amount of evidence in its favour. Should I one day decide to become a little more spiritual, I will be able to call on the many examples I’ve come across while on the job. Usually the stories start with: “The only reason I have this car is…”; or “I never thought I’d end up having a car featured in NZPC, but then…”

Robert ‘Bob’ Sullivan is one of those guys. Bob has always been into cars, and has owned a mint and heavily modified Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III for many years. The Evo had always been his main focus, but he also had a raft of cool daily drivers, including a nice white S7 FD3S Mazda RX-7. Then one fateful day around a year ago, everything changed. Coming through a roundabout, Bob looked to his left to see another driver barrelling towards him. Unfortunately, said driver was paying less attention than Bob had hoped, and a split second later Bob was the owner of a complete write-off. Luckily, the insurance company helped him out, and, after the pay out, gave Bob the option to buy the wreck back at a very good price. Once an appropriate donor shell was bought from a mate, fresh with a lick of Mazda Pacific Blue paint, a C-West bumper and S8 RX-7 lights, the wrecked chassis was put on a truck and transported from the wrecking yard to Bob’s workshop. It was then that the decision was made to go all out and build a very cool daily driver.

Before bolting the motor into the engine bay of the donor shell, Bob stripped it down and got to work building a far tougher yet still streetable twin-rotor 13B motor. Bob is a real do-it-yourself kind of guy with a good grasp of anything mechanical. So instead of putting his trust in someone else to build his motor, he decided to do it himself. “I could have paid someone to do it, but I like to build all my cars myself, motors included,” Bob confesses. “I wanted to know exactly what was in my engine, and if something did go wrong, I should be the only one to blame.”

First off, the factory apex seals were replaced with 3mm steel items, which are far more resistant to failing under extreme loads, as are the RX-8 replacement springs that retain them. While the motor was in pieces, Bob also took to the housings and etched out a new set of ports. “I’d never ported a rotor before,” he says, “but I spent a few weeks doing heaps of research, then got into it once I felt like I knew what I was doing.” He quite obviously did, as the motor now runs beautifully, with a subtly pulsing, crisp idle, thanks to the freshly enlarged ports.

The extend port is a perfect choice for a street car like Bob’s, as it is about as big as you can go without drastically altering the basic shape of the port itself, like a bridge or monster port for example. Bob’s ports are still roughly the same shape as they were originally, but are now twice as big. This means the car is still very reliable, and retains characteristics similar to a standard motor in terms of driveability — albeit with the greater power and torque created by an increased flow of air and fuel.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, Bob needed a lot more pieces to get any good power potential, and the most important of those pieces is the huge Garrett TO4Z turbocharger. Although currently boosting only 12psi to break in the new engine Mazda setup, the turbocharger still flows huge amounts of air, cramming it through 3-inch piping, a large custom front-mounted intercooler, up past a pair of HKS blow-off valves and into the bored-out factory throttle body and intake plenum.

Fuel makes its way into the combustion chambers first via 850cc primary injectors, then through a set of massive 1600cc secondary injectors, both of which are fed by a pair of high-flowing external pumps and a surge tank in the boot. It is probably fair to say that this car isn’t doing New Zealand’s clean green image much good…