A Quick Look at Stephan Verdier's 2011 Rallycross Subaru STi

A Quick Look at Stephan Verdier's 2011 Rallycross Subaru STi

By Mike Kojima

We spend a lot of time at Costa Gialamas's shop GTI Tech Innovations.  Costa is Dai Yoshihara's Time Attack crew chief, Matt Powers Crew Chief and is also Stephan Verdier's Crew Chief.  Costa is also one of the fabricators that MotoIQ uses on our various projects including some fab work on refitting the Dog II.

We have been around while Costa has been hard at work building Stephan Verdier's Rallycross Subaru STi over the past few months and we thought that it would be cool to share some of the build details with you.  Look for a full feature on this car later.

Stephan has been known for his Formula D antics drifting this STi for the last two years.  What people don't know about Stephan is that he is an accomplished road racer and rally driver as well.  Stephan is sitting out this Formula D season to participate in the new to the USA sport of Rallycross.  Rallycross is sort of like Supercross for cars.  You might have seen this on the X Games, in fact you might have see Stephan do pretty well at the X Games.

Like Rhys Millen and Tanner Foust, Stephan is going to focus on Rallycross this year hoping it becomes the next big thing in Motorsports.  We hope it does as well!

Like a drift car, the world of Ralllycross is a rough and tumble motorsport with a lot of anticipated contact.  Costa built this bash bar to protect the intercooler and heat exchangers from damage.  Like a drift car it's designed to be easily removable and repairable in the event of a crash.  The car should be able to shrug off some significant impacts.  The tubular front subframe also gives more tire cornering clearance and is lighter than the stock stamped front frame rails, core support and fender aprons.

The Crawford Performance EJ25 motor is probably bored, sleeved and stroked to 2.7 liters or so.  Sorry I didn't get the specifics but the engine probably puts out around 550 whp.  I think the turbocharger is going to be a Garrett GT35.

A sturdy thick aluminum skidplate protects the engine's sump from Yumps.  There are skidplates protecting most of the car's bottom.  Most of the drivetrain including the axles are protected.  The skidplates also protect from rocks thrown up from spinning tires which can cause significant damage to the car's bottom as well.

Costa stripped the car down to a bare unibody, had the unibody acid dipped to remove paint and sound deadening, completed the major fabrication and finally had the entire unibody powdercoated white.  It looks pretty amazing.  Check out the gold kapton tape preventing heat transfer to the car's interior.  Kapton is an aerospace heat reflecting material used primarily on spacecraft and race cars!