A car enthusiast from the USA wanted a highly capable Subaru WRX STI conversion to satisfy both his daily driving and rally racing needs, so he stuffed the sedan with a naturally aspirated V8 from Ferrari.
According to Sam Albert, the F136 is under 4.5 liters large and lacks forced induction, so making it street-legal was a much easier task than it could be otherwise. In its factory form, the mill hits the crank with 460 PS (454 hp / 338 kW) and 485 Nm (358 pound-feet) of torque. Once swapped in, the dyno showed that the engine was underperforming somewhat, but it looked like something that would be easy to correct.
As you can hear for yourself, the engine sounds downright amazing. It does come with a number of drawbacks – or tradeoffs, if you will. For one, it puts even more weight on the front axle, straining the stock suspension. For another, it makes cornering trickier due to the added weight, a circumstance made worse by the fact that the WRX STI suffers from considerable understeer as is. Finally, due to the housing requirements, the new engine resides even higher up the bay than the old one, resulting in a lifted center of gravity at the front end. Once again, you can probably work around it, but it is definitely something to keep in mind.
Albert is personally very optimistic about the build, pointing out the much smoother torque curve of the Ferrari F136 and its rally implications. For our part, we would be very interested to see the car in action when it is ready.
And what about you? Would you approve of such a swap?
