Sure, it was a coincidence, but the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Less than 30 seconds after Erik Winebrenner performed the burnout of the century with his IS300, a New York City fire truck turned the corner at the dark end of the block. Meeting the truck head-on were two long streaks of frizzled black rubber on dove gray pavement, thick white tire smoke floating lazily in the air, and harsh echoing flares from something that sounds like a turbocharged bit of hell. The guilty party, however, was long gone.
That's what 470 hp at the wheels can do for you. It gives you the power to lay patch and the getaway speed to burn out another day. But it's not the powerband that makes Erik's Lexus IS300 so special, it's how he got it there. Beneath the calm surface of the engine bay lurks the bottom end of a twin turbo Supra JZ engine, complete with a six-speed transmission. "I knew the stock transmission wouldn't be able to handle this much power," says Erik. "That's why we went with the Supra bottom end and a six speed." In the quiet Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, the legendary 2JZ block (taken from a `98 Supra) resonates like Mothra on a bad hair day. We're halfway through the photo session and Erik's doing doughnuts on a deserted street corner. Manhattan sits like an attentive audience beyond the Hudson River and the haze. As far as the locals know, it's just a loud car, but if they got the chance to sit down and talk with Erik, they'd find out that it's much, much more.
Erik's mod hobby began with Jeeps. He started in high school, lifting and doing whatever else Jeep guys do, which probably consisted of eating lots of fatty foods and daydreaming about Daisy Dukes. (Mmm...fatty Daisy Dukes.) But when Erik graduated from college, he looked for something with "more class," as he describes it, and the IS300 fit the bill. "I love the lines of the car," he says. And he has kept those lines intact. There's a lean Carson Tuned aero kit, some custom Lexus badges, and a few Japanese-spec Toyota touches, such as the antenna. Otherwise, Erik has reserved his attention for performance.
"I started out with simple n/a mods," Erik explains. "Air filter, intake, and things like that." But then he met Muhammad Choudury of Swift Racing Technologies, and his life (and bank account) changed forever. "I just started going to the shop after work. I even worked there-for no money. But I hung out there and worked on cars. I learned a lot." It was only a matter of time before an SRT Stage 3.5 turbo kit-also known on the street as Badass Mother f'er-replaced the n/a mods.
The kit starts and ends with a macho Turbonetics T04 blower with a tangential divided turbo housing. Swift Racing matched the turbo with a system that includes the company's own 3-inch downpipe, exhaust, and open wastegate. There's a Spearco front-mount intercooler, a Walbro fuel pump, a Blitz blow-off valve, and RC Engineering 550cc injectors. The results were good enough to overload the stock transmission, which Erik says can hold up to around 350 hp-and here's the guy gutting another 120 hp out of the machine.
The answer was a Supra six-speed transplant. In one fell swoop Erik converted his mild-mannered IS300 into a quick-shifting super sedan. Inside the cabin, the swapped-in stick looks like a stock unit. And if you think I'm only saying that to have swapped-in stick and unit in the same sentence, well, maybe you're right. To help Erik click the gears like a pro, SRT installed a Fidanza lightweight flywheel to speed up the revs, an RPS six-puck clutch with hub and pressure plate to swallow the gear changes, a beefed-up custom driveshaft to transfer the power to the rear wheels, and a short-shift kit specially built by B&M for SRT. Add up those letters and you get Cha-ching.