Like my Daddy used to say, "You can't polish a turd."

and someone bought that POS

That is baffling as to why someone would do something that horrible.

I think its cool trhey could get it all to work. I think it put oput much more the 40 whp stock cmon. That part is just BS imo

I would've bought it for 15K. From the rad support it looks like the new*er front end, EASY $18K, and that'* with the rebuilt STI 2.2.

car was sold for 15k with the blown engine

Well... The idea was there, the person just lacked the research and common sense to pull it off. E for Effort, F for performance. I wonder why he/she didn't buy a piggyback underdrive for the harmonic balancer. Then he/she could use the original balancer as the drive pulley for the blower and have MUCH better results.

Pessimistically assuming 30% loss to the wheels (AWD like to sap lots of power), 56whp = 74hp at the crank.

A stock STi puts out 300hp. That'* a loss of 226hp

So essentially he lost a whole regular WRX Impreza'* worth (227hp) of horsepower in doing this...

I took a ride in a friends regular WRX with a intercooler pipe that blew apart. It ran, but was incapable of revving past 2100 rpm, and that took a while. The words MASSIVELY RICH spring to mind. I'll believe it was down to 50some HP. The scary part is that he drove it home 19 miles like that.

56whp? it'* about on par for the displacement, and tune on the car. Shops heard about him through that thread and tried to avoid giving him time as much as possible. IIRC he didn't have a MAF or something as well. I'm not sure how fuel is mapped on STI'* though..

The charge pipe was disconnected because he was showing off something in there.

It'* only a 2.2L, it'* got low compression for the OEM turbo, it'* fuel maps, and cams are turbo specific, the intake manifolds are designed for boost, and the exhaust has a HUGE restriction in the form of half a snail, still on it.