Westly Yacinthe isn’t looking for a fight when he says that the Toyota Supra’s 2JZ-GTE engine is superior in just about every way to Mazda’s 13B-REW rotary. [The 2JZ] is everything I want and need so that it is: , and, above all, reliable, he says.powerful and aggressive [You] can’t always put those three requirements in the same sentence as theThat doesn’t suggest that at least one rotary die-hard wouldn’t mind popping him within the chin for the sort of automotive sacrilege he’s seemingly committed, even though westly isn’t planning to cause trouble. Criticism he hasn’t escaped following swapping the imposing Supra engine into his 1993 RX-7-a transplant that is certainly every bit as complicated as it sounds and every bit as rewarding as you believe that it is. According to Yacinthe, had to be carefully modified in order not to disrupt Mazda’s thoughtful weight distribution, the engine conversion transcends a simplified box-full o’brackets and mounts, and hardware and instead requires a re-fabricated subframe and relocated steering system that. The engine was positioned low and rearward in an effort to secure the car’s 50/50 weight balance so that, inspite of the 1,038hp it appears, it still handles like Mazda wanted it to as such.
The quadruple-digit power figures start with one particular-turbo conversion dependant on a Borg Warner S475 that’s strapped to the inline-six by a custom exhaust manifold and feeds it through four-inch intercooler piping. , though making power is the easy part Considering that the six-cylinder 2JZ-GTE’s introduction in 1991, engine builders and tuners have pushed its limits, even eclipsing the 2,000hp mark. The RX-7’s rear differential all of that torque is transferredthrough despite the fact that, is an entirely different story. Along with a set of axles as well as a driveshaft before converting to a Ford Mustang Cobra layout, yacinthe annihilated three of these as it turns out. He isn’t the only one you never know how strong Ford’s 8.8-inch differential is, which made sourcing one an issue. Retrofitting it to the FD chassis is nowhere near as difficult as you’d expect that it is thanks to Samberg Performance Fabrication, who is an expert in the conversion. Samberg, whose primary collection of work concentrates on Chevrolet LSX engine swaps for the third-generation RX-7-an altogether different from of RX-7 blasphemy-was called upon for its bolt-up Cobra conversion kit which allows Mazda heretics like Yacinthe to take advantage of the tougher rear end and place a stop to driveline failures once and for all. To make certain that the Supra’s gearbox didn’t meet the same fate, he reached in the market toone thousand-plus-hp, he isn’t joking. I wanted something that I really could daily even, drift, drag and drive hard park, he says. To build a car which had been capable of whatever I felt like doing on virtually any day-car shows, track days and the occasional whooping of supercars’ asses on the highway. But this FD isn’t pretty much breaking off $200K pieces of Italian machinery. The Southeast Florida native and decades-old Japanese sports car fan admits that the mid-1990s is the place where his soft spot lies-a sentiment that led to the car’s almost ostentatious VeilSide tome. Pursuing what he calls an old-school JDM theme, Yacinthe hand-picked what he could from the VeilSide catalog, including its gauge cluster, steering wheel, now-discontinued Andrews Racing V wheels and also the company’s duly archetypal Combat II aero kit. All that’s stopping the VeilSide pattern from being complete are some seats of which he’s diligently on the hunt for.
Patience-that and what he calls a do-it-right-or-don’t-do-it-at-all attitude are both convictions that Yacinthe says tend to be more marked within himself now than they were before beginning the build merely a year and a half ago. Of learning how to wait, he says: I saved up for the parts that I wanted. With many of them being [rarer] than others, I needed to either wait for them to pop up or perform some serious sweet-speaking with someone who had [them]. But perhaps above all else, Yacinthe’s learned to deal with his detractors-those who, for reasons unknown, aren’t terribly happy going to a Toyota mill crammed to the front end of the Mazda. The toughest lesson I learned is the fact that people will generally have their own opinions-the vision which you put together doesn’t match the things they wanted anyone to do, he says. I lost faith in the rotary. I experienced three [of them] in half a year. I’m tired of justifying why I decided to go with the 2JZ to rotary heads. Can’t we all just get along?
