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Written by Travis Geny
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For most enthusiasts, the stock car is not good enough. From the moment we took possession of our new 2007 Legacy GT, we knew it would not remain stock. To start with, it wasn’t fast enough, the tires weren’t aggressive enough and the brakes were not so great. We also knew that the suspension would need some attention as well.
But really, what are the most immediate aspects of your car’s performance when you are storming onto the freeway for the morning commute? Power and acceleration.
To that end, we decided to upgrade as much as we could, all at once. Sure, you can do a little here and a little there: Add an intake, then an exhaust, and maybe some engine management; but really, the best way to get the most bang for the buck is to do it all in one go. Here is our reasoning.
Many parts require a complete retune like intakes for instance. Add an intercooler? You need a tune. And should you want to add a turbo, that would be another tune altogether. Then there is the labor to install these parts.
Perhaps you can install an intake on your own, but as the hardware gets more hard core, so do the installs. Installing turbos, intercoolers and injectors can be very intimidating if you are less-than-mechanically inclined.
When it comes to tuning, this can mean paying for tuning and dyno time for each successive modification. This all adds up to lots of money in labor and tuning. In many cases, modifications that would be rather expensive to install by themselves, can be combined into a single install.
To install the turbo on the Legacy, the intercooler has to come off. If you want headers and an uppipe, you have to remove the turbo. It makes more sense to uninstall it all and reinstall everything at once, making labor costs much more economical.
For tuning, the same logic applies. Why not tune everything at once instead of one part at a time? Using this logic, we did a one-day, no-holds-barred install on our Legacy GT project car.
This gangbuster install took place during a downpour at Subiefest2. TDC tuning from New Hampshire made the trek to Portland, Ore., to install all of our go-fast bits.
To pump up the performance of our bruiser cruiser, we turned to the local boys at Perrin Performance, who offered up their catalog of high-flow turbo plumbing. TDC also added their own addition to the mix, a Blauch-built 18G made specifically for TDC. This turbo features an 18G wheel stuffed into the Legacy’s VF40 compressor housing, which is driven by the stock turbine. TDC did not want to upgrade injectors at this point. Said TDC bigwig Jon Drenas, “With a fuel pump and top mount, you can make a decent amount of power without changing the injectors. We did not know which engine management we were going to have until the last minute. This is a deciding factor on how hard one can push the car.” For 2007, the Legacy and STI use top feed injectors, and they are totally different than anything ever offered before. Still, these new-style injectors can be modified.
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