They are of different worlds, of different generations, of different social strata. One was common, the other high-fallutin’; one was delightfully simple, the other deviously complicated. The AE86 lived its life briefly and brightly, Japan’s tightly-structured four-years-per-generation rule all but ensuring that the Corolla GT-S would be replaced before it got hoary and old; the Honda S2000, home of the F20C engine now seen between the Toyota’s strut towers, lived for an entire decade and seems to have barely been missed since it went away.
Conceived relatively near each other yet born decades apart, both were, and remain, highly respected for their abilities, even today. Few knowledgeable folks in the scene have a bad word to say about either. Yet their spheres of influence seem not to have intersected.
Until now, anyway.
It took someone coming in fresh to put it all together. Enter Al Duyungan, who had spent the past few years playing with VW Jettas and was immersed in the Euro scene. Time for a change, thought Al: “I was pretty much done with the Euro scene. I did all that was there to be done to my VW and I wanted to start fresh.” Aaah, but where?
It started with the car, a clean ’86 Corolla GT-S, undamaged and “98 percent rust free,” according to Al. So what? So Al lives in Chicago, a town where your own breath would rust, given half a chance. Snow, salt, and Japanese carmakers’ improving-but-not-perfect grasp of treating their metal for wintertime American roads meant that, in Chicago, a solid hachiroku was as rare as an un-bribable local politician. A friend saw it posted on a semi-private message board and turned Al on to it. Days later, he went to see it, checkbook in pocket.
What he found was shocking. Engine? Gone. No steering wheel, mismatched rims, and a gutted interior save for the rattlecan insulation sprayed all over. It had been something of a local drift-scene hero whose owner had fallen on hard times. And Al still shelled out $3800 (!) for it. Sounds like a lot for a 20 year-old Corolla missing an engine... but for the plan that Al was quickly formulating in his head, it would be perfect.
Just one of the many perks when you upgrade to a S2K motor, you get to run the factory gau
That plan revolved around Honda’s F20C engine. “I wanted to go a different route,” he explains. “I always wanted an S2000, but didn’t have the cash at the time. But I’d just bought this car that had no heart in it. What better engine to drop in a perfectly-balanced AE86 than an F20C, one of the best engines ever created, and something that wouldn’t throw off the car’s balance. Plus, I wanted to ditch the Toyota engine because I just wasn’t going to receive a lot of power with that 4AG.”
For some, this mixing of marquees would be heresy, but from Al’s point of view, it was actually simpler. “It would cost an arm and a leg to get that engine to where I would want it; in the end to me it just wasn’t worth it. With the F20C you get more bang for your buck.” Ah yes, that old hot rodding trope, swapping in an entirely different, newer, more powerful engine rather than sinking money into the old one (see sidebar).
“If you do your homework, any swap is achievable,” “You know what they say...measure twice and cut once. You do that and you’re ...
And it is a thing of beauty. All-aluminum construction, 11.7:1 compression, 51-degree valve angle, heat-treated and surface-carburized forged alloy crank and connecting rods, forged aluminum pistons with short skirts, the engine’s five main bearings incorporated into a single girdle for strength, an 8300rpm peak and a 9000rpm redline are among the specs. More impressive: a naturally-aspirated 120hp per liter, or converted to English measure, nearly two horsepower per cubic inch. Two hundred and forty horses from two naturally-aspirated liters. By comparison, a 2006 Subaru WRX needed a turbo to get 230hp out of 2.5L; this isn’t meant to slight the Rex, but to point out just what a remarkable piece of engineering Honda’s F20 is. What’s more, the S2000 is a 2700+-pound car, capable of low-5-second 0-60s and 14-second-flat quarter-mile times. That same driveline, minus about 700 pounds, would be absolutely ballistic. Sourcing a clean 38,000-mile 2001-vintage S2000 from a wreck gave all of the engine and transmission pieces necessary to make the swap.
Just one of the many perks when you upgrade to a S2K motor, you get to run the factory gau
Making the thing physically fit wasn’t that big a deal. New engine and tranny mounts, plus a couple of moved and re-shaped crossmembers, allowed everything to clear and nestle down beneath the hood. Accommodating the Honda’s six-speed was a little tougher: some metalwork was required on the firewall and trans tunnel. “If you do your homework, any swap is achievable,” Al tells us (and all of the potentially-inspired reading this now). “You know what they say... measure twice and cut once. You do that and you’re golden. You just gotta be patient with it.”
And there were the usual mechanical hiccups; weird things that you had to hunt down and kill in order to make everything right. “We had a couple of electrical issues. The car would start and idle fine, but when we started driving it, it would die after like five minutes. Or, it would short out every time we started it up. Fuses were being blown and replaced left and right.” Some quality time tracing the source of the short meant that it was dispatched in short order. “One other weird thing— the engine would die if the fuel wasn’t topped off; we remedied that by making a custom fuel sump, and changing the fuel pump. After that, all was good.”