aftermarket tuning --> but not Fast and/or Furious

Do some junkyard suspension upgrades - stock suspension off of an Impreza RS, and some 15 or 16 inch factory subie wheels. (Or you can take mine off of my hands! )

A homemade cold-air intake and an 2.5 inch exhaust with a straight-through design muffler and glasspack resonator will add a few hp.

Do you subscribe to Grassroots Motorsports? If not, do, and you'll get tons of ideas, especially from their $2005 challenge.

What you want is one of those house sized Garrett turbochargers they put on transatlantic supertankers, bolt a supercharger onto it too just to combat the turbo lag! A couple of bottles of NOx in the boot and a billion ron fuel and you are good to go...

Seriously tho, have a look at getting it chipped this would improve the engines power output,dont go crazy and make sure the engine is in good working order and has been serviced regularly.

You could firm up the suspension springs and lower 15 - 30mm this would make the car a bit more sprightly, also new shocks would make a difference, the damping oil in 100k shocks will be pretty broken down, just replacing them with stock would make a noticable difference. Stiffer suspension bushings are pretty cheap and would help improve handling too. you could also beef up the anti roll bars front and rear. Remember handling is a tradeoff, all the above will reduce the cars ride quality.

Also fit bigger rims (no more than 17inch needed) and shod them with better wider tyres, tyres can make a huge improvement to handling and grip, especially the lower profile you get with bigger rims.

Doing all the above at once could prove to be expensive, Id go with matched new shocks and springs and an engine chip first.

Ross

Go here:

and then open up the "Normally Aspirated" forum and read, read, and read some more. Then look at the "Aftermarket Forced Induction" forum and you'll see what you can do to make real power from that engine. The latter may be a bit more complex than you were looking for.

Steve.