2015 WRX Project Northstar – Winter Track Day

Sorry for the delay everyone, the shop has been very busy and I’m having to update this journal on my day off. A few things have happened and I’m going to post them in a slightly non-chronological order. You will notice in the images below the hood is wrapped, I will touch on this in my next update. This update will cover when we took the car to Toronto Motorsports Park in January just to see what it would be like in a safe controlled environment. As luck would have it the day was very cold and ended up coming down with freezing rain which made things interesting to say the least. For testing purposes we had swapped on the stock wheels/tires on the car as I had hoped the track would be clean enough to set a baseline time. The best time I was able to record was roughly a low 1:50’s in very poor conditions. Even with stock power levels I could not put the power down in the corners, it was just too slippery. I did compare acceleration between stock and Stage 1 OTS and the car was easily 5KM/h faster on the straight with the Stage 1 map. I also compared the 3 traction control settings and found that with the system fully off was the best by far. The traction control system in both modes was way too intrusive and unpredictable when it would come in. Overall it was a fun day sliding around the track in the car, the stock chassis is predictable and I can’t wait to test it out in the spring. What really surprised me is that even after driving to the track, running probably 30+ laps and then driving home I still had quite a bit of fuel left in the tank and ended up getting about 460Km to that full tank of gas. Direct Injection FTW!!! The brakes will be the weakest point on this car at the track, they are very spongy and don’t offer a lot of feedback or performance. 

I had been driving on Stage 1 since just after my first oil change and as in previous generations of Subaru’s found a pretty big difference. The first thing I noticed was that the car was smoother and easier to drive. At first when I got the car I thought I was just rusty from having driven a CVT for 2 years as a daily. This couldn’t be though since I get to drive customer cars on a daily basis. Turns out that the stock mapping has a weird rev hang which is likely there to make it easier for inexperienced Manual drivers. But for someone who shifts quickly and smoothly the rpms would be too high during clutch release and the car would jerk. This was gone immediately with the Stage 1 map and just this alone makes it totally worth it IMO for going stage 1. I actually had another person drive the car back to back to confirm what I felt to make sure it wasn’t a placebo effect. The pre-loaded OTS map was underboosting pretty significantly so I ended up running the HWG map to reach target. COBB implemented a very aggressive temperature compensation once below freezing, I think they need to get someone like OnPoint Dyno to do Cold weather OTS mapping for them . There’s a noticeable power difference in the 2000-4500RPM range, mainly an increase in torque that makes passing much easier. The new 2015 WRX ECU is much faster then older WRX and STi ECU’s, the refresh rate on the data is much higher which is awesome. Only downside is there’s no real-time mapping right now and full reflashes on the car take 3-5 minutes to do. Overall I would highly suggest getting a COBB on your 2015 WRX, it is a small bump in power and makes the car “normal” to drive.