6/3/00: I purchased my silver car from Sound Performance in Bloomingdale, Illinois. It was a alpine silver automatic twin turbo targa, with 90k miles. Since my black car was being worked on by them at the time, Gary gave me a great deal on the supra. At the time of purchase, I installed the Phillips HID Conversion Kit, Tanabe G Power Medallion exhaust, RMM downpipe, magic hose, and a K&N drop-in air filter. The car came with stock wheels with Michellin Pilot SX tires. Here is a picture of the car while it was stock. Right out of the box, it was very strong, much more so than my black car when it was stock, I'm not sure why certain cars are stronger than others, but this was definitely the most powerful stock turbo supra i've ever owned. This car came with the 98 suspension and felt real smooth, more so than my 93.
6/14/00: I ran my silver car for the first time at Great Lakes Dragway for NOPI Drag Wars. Running straight 93 octane, the car went 12.8@111 best, with the street tires, and some moderate traction problems. Despite not being really fast, I made it to the finals of the 12 second class, and took home a $100 check, WOOT! I could definitely tell that timing was being pulled on this car, time for some race gas!
6/24/00: Ran the car again at the track, after installing 17" Konig Villans and Nitto NT555R drag radials, this time I put some race gas in the car, and it went 12.1@117 all day long. Car felt much stronger with race gas, I think with high boost BPU cars, race gas makes a tremendous difference in terms of timing. I think the stock intercooler was heatsoaking the car pretty badly, after a couple runs, the trap speed would just tail off.
7/8/00: Installed the APEXi FMIC kit, retaining the stock upper intercooler piping. We took the car to Byron Dragway in Rockford IL, and the car went 11.8@122, with Sunoco GT104 race gas. The intercooler definitely helped alot, made the car look far more aggressive, but also helped in terms of the top end, not really any more lag either, I think the apexi intercooler being a smaller design but also really efficient was a big plus.
10/22/00: Took the car to NOPI Drag Wars again, and the car ran consistent low 12s/high 11s the entire day. It ended up in the finals of both the Quick 8 and the 12 second class, but it lost both times to single turbo supras :( Car was real strong, and very consistent, I was actually pretty happy with it for BPU, however at this point, I was starting to notice that the turbos were beginning to go, you could hear check valve honks and the car just felt weaker, time for a single conversion!
Winter 2000/2001: We decided to take alot of the parts off of the black car because I was redoing the setup, so the silver car got RPS Turbo Kit with Greddy Type C Hi-Flow Wastegate, HKS VPC/GCC, GForce computer, PHR Stage II turbo, 760cc injectors and the rest of the SP Fuel System with dual 300zx fuel pumps, Flex-a-lite Electric Fan Dual Kit, Blitz 3" Intake, HKS EVC EZ, HKS Turbo Timer type 1, SP transmission with Hughes 3800 stall converter, APEXi boost and EGT gauges in Lo-tek Dual Pillar Pod... Install on this changeover took several months, and wasn't real fun, there were alot of little issues that kept popping up, but after awhile we got all of these sorted out, and the car felt VERY strong with that PHR Stage II. I still really like that turbo, even though it wasn't real big, didn't have huge top end, but it spooled REALLY fast.
April 10, 2001: Car got full stereo system with Kenwood KDC-912DVD in-dash DVD Player, Butler TD-1500 Tubedriver Amplifier, Zapco AG1000 Sub Amplifier, Eclipse 8052 5 1/4" components, 2 Eclipse 8810.4 Aluminium subwoofers, 1.5F Lightning cap. Also added Blitz rear, Blitz side skirts, 17" Blitz Type 03 wheels, and converted the car to Quicksilver. Here is a pic of the car (with the 18" SE37s) The stereo was really nice, alot of the components were out of my old legend system, but they seemed to work much better in the supra, imaging and soundstage were graet, the only issue is that the 300zx fuel pumps were REALLY loud and that kinda sucked. Even with the RPS header, the tanabe g power medallion kept things really quiet.
April 21, 2001: Ran the car at Byron Dragway, with nitto drag radials on the blitz 03 wheels. Ran 11.43@125 with 20 psi boost, and 11.05@129 mph with 26 psi boost. Car seemed to get out of the hole really well, didn't have any wheelspin at all with the nittos, which is certainly something I found was a rarity... this car was probably as good a daily driver as I could have wanted, enough turbo to run low 130 mph trap speeds with about 2 bar of boost, however, a EGT gauge mishap destroyed the turbo and it had to be rebuilt :( Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, on to bigger and better things!
May 16, 2001: Switched turbos to the SP63, and added B&M Transmission cooler and HKS Twin Power Ignition, ran the car at Byron dragway and ran 10.56@134 with 28 psi boost. Switched wheels to 18" SE37A Volk Racing. The SP63 spooled slightly slower than the PHR Stage II but made significantly more power, it was a very nice turbo, and I really liked it, one of the biggest drawbacks of that stage II (possibly) was that it was a wet turbo so it made it a little more difficult to get everything squared away once I switched to the dry SP63, but I couldn't complain too much. The SP63 is a very good turbo, mine was a P trim with 0.70 exhaust A/R, and it worked wonderfully. We put the car on the dyno and it made 601 rwhp with the SP63, not too shabby for an automatic.
June 22, 2001: Switched turbos again to T66 Q Trim 0.81. This turbo felt much laggier than the SP63 when i first put it on, I think that was mainly because the Hughes converter wasn't really capable of spooling to big enough rpm to get it out of the hole well, while it was rated at 3500 rpm, it only seemed to flash to about 3500, and that was fine for the PHR Stage II and SP63, but the T66 required a bigger stall. The T66 certainly had MUCH more kick up top...
August 8, 2001: Changed color of car to Ferarri 360 Modena light metallic blue. Added NOS kit 5348 jetted for 65 shot, switched converter to Precision Industries single disk 4000 stall. While the PI converter was rated for 4000 stall, it flashed to about 4200, and was really nice. I really like this converter, with the new converter, it felt like I had about as much lag as the SP63, with far more power. I was getting to the point where I was pulling on big street bikes at 28 psi without too much trouble. The nitrous was a add-on that I added to eliminate lag since I thought I had alot of it, but with the new converter, i felt myself not really needing it. I only used it for launching sometimes to take strain off of the converter, and sometimes on top end runs, but it really wasn't too necessary unless I was racing modified bikes or something.
August 15, 2001: Put the car on the dyno with the T66. First 28 psi dyno pass yielded a fairly dissapointing 608 rwhp, but after some tuning I managed to get 661 rwhp out of the car with the converter locked and no spray, and 714 rwhp with the nitrous.
Winter 2001/2002: Switched alternator back to stock from PHR. I was having some charging issues with the PHR alternator that we couldn't figure out, so we switched back to stock, however that was kinda an issue because of the big current draw we were getting from the big fuel pumps, HIDs, stereo, electric fans, etc... oh well, it charged :)
May 11, 2002: Ran car at Byron Dragway with T66 and 315 BFG drag radials on 17x11 CCWs, car ran 10.14@137 with 32 psi boost, running straight C16.
May 23, 2002: Added Gforce full upgrade and put the car back on the dyno, after a couple hours of tuning, I got 680 rwhp at 32 psi, and 716 at 36 psi (I think i'm approaching the limit of the stock cams) without the nitrous, and 812 rwhp with the spray. I was pretty happy with these numbers and the car was really strong and seemed well tuned, it was running great. A/F ratios on the dyno with pure C16 @ 680 rwhp were around 11.3-11.4:1, I figure with a little more load on the street and a little less octane, they would be in the 11.6-11.7 range, @ 36 psi boost they were 13.0:1, leaning out alot
June 18, 2002: Switched wheels to 17" Volk Racing GTP with 315/35/17 Nitto Drag Radials. Making 600+ rwhp at street boost settings, the 18" S03 pole positions just weren't cutting it :( I needed to roll the fenders and file down sharp points for the nittos not to rub, but they handled great, good ride quality, and looked sharp, easier to clean too :)
July 6, 2002: Added 4" intake, PCV breather, bottle heater, blanket, nitrous pressure gauge, and some other accessory stuff, the 4" intake did make a big difference in both sound and in power.