[Jordan Silveira]

Hey Future Toyota 86 Family,

Long time no chat but I'm back after a long absence in updating this thread. Naturally, I fully intend on catching everyone up on the changes made to BRZ3N since I last checked in. However, I figured that I would do something a little different this time though. Let's go in depth on my journey with Greddy's Individual Throttle Body (ITB) Kit.

First up, as you can imagine I made the somewhat ill advised and dumb decision to get my hands on the Greddy ITB kit for our cars . More about that in a second but here are some photos.







So with those out of the way, let me start by saying I've since parted ways with this kit. Why you may ask? Simply put, the entire kit seems half baked and unworthy of the effort to make it work. In other words, the juice was not worth the squeeze. Firstly, there are 3 known ITB kits for our cars. EMC, Greddy and SARD. EMC was the first to publicly display their kit with the unique utilization of the OEM throttle body as the critical adapter to make the ITB's themselves function. Psst... If this doesn't appear to be a precursor of "jerry-rigging" to get the project to work than I don't know what does

Anyway, since then both SARD and Greddy have released their own kits. I should add however that both kits by SARD and Greddy look to be identical (sans plenum). The catch here though is that both SARD and Greddy also went with the throttle body design that EMC first released. This makes me highly suspicious of the kits produced by SARD and Greddy. Ultimately, I'm led to believe that they are renditions of EMC's kit, albeit with a different plenum for differentiation sake. Moreover, EMC seems to be a tiny company and wouldn't have the pull that a Greddy (in the US) or SARD (in Japan) would have. As such, this probably proved to be a beneficial deal for EMC in the form of licensing out the design to Greddy and SARD. Meanwhile, both Greddy and SARD benefit from producing a one of a kind kit for our vehicles. The problem however, is that most have seen through the of this kit and not many have bought it due to the high price and little to no information about the kit because of what I'm going to get into next.

With that out the way, let's get to why the kit itself in my honest opinion is not worth wasting your time on. One word...TUNING! The install itself just requires removing your intake manifold and bolting on these ITB's. Then, begin tweaking with your OEM throttle body to to make it the main adapter for this kit. After that is where the headache starts. Now you must balance each ITB like you would a carburetor. Not a game ending job, but not fun and anyone who knows about balancing carburetors knows it's a job that typically needs repeating relatively often. Once that's done, put the plenum on and you're mostly good to go.

Aha, but most are probably wondering what about those velocity stacks? Well, good question and I'll get to those in a minute. You see, these kits were made to use their plenums and never even consider velocity stacks or "air trumpets". I'd be forced to ask then, why in the world would we want ITB's if we can't have the whole package? We want the pretty looks of the kit too right? Velocity stacks are the one way to truly achieve this goal. Simply put, shame on these manufacturers for the half baked plan of attack to achieve ITB's on the 86 platform.

Now, on to the velocity stacks and the tuning that I mentioned being the total nonstarter going into this kit. The problem with velocity stacks is that it means you must forgo your MAF/MAP sensors. As such, without these sensors it begs the question, how does your car know how to operate and run without critical information regarding air entering the engine? You see, every car needs three things to run...gas, air, and a spark! Without one of these three things, we have problems. Not that you don't have air, just that the car and particularly the ECU doesn't know what to do with the air now that it's calculators are missing. With that said, this means tuning becomes a much more intensive task that requires speed density tuning. In other words, you must have an incredibly skilled tuner who is now solely responsible for telling your car how to walk, or should I say run again. That means telling the car how to react at each moment. Things like weather, different slope grades, throttle response, fuel quality, etc. now must be accounted for. As you can imagine, with this much programming or tuning it's quite the job and headache for a tuner. Luckily, living in Southern California offers me a plethora of quality tuners that can tackle any job. While that's great and all, we can still agree velocity stacks are a headache on this car, meaning that it's significantly more expensive to get it working flawlessly. After all, that's whats most important.

Furthermore, now you can see why I said tuning was the biggest problem. Anyway, let's discuss the steps to get past this hurdle and truly have a one of a kind build that comes from rocking those sweet ITB's with velocity stacks. So, through my findings talking to respected tuners, all in all it would probably take about $10,000 to get it all up and running to an acceptable level. I say this because tuning isn't your usual just give the car to the tuner for a day and it's done. Were talking multiple days, and paying for hours on hours on a dyno. You're now talking about thousands just to get the car tuned. After all, the skill of the tuner is costly but dyno time proves to be just as costly. After that big hurdle, you will need to buy filters or come up with some creative way to protect those trumpets from pulling in harmful particulates into the engine. Also, if you're going in this deep with ITB's it means you should really try to extract every ounce of power you can get from adding this kit. As such, you might as well upgrade your entire fuel system such as your fuel injectors, fuel pump, etc. Which by the way, not only increases your cost but required tuning effort.

Finally, I'll leave you with the following...After speaking to a few tuners, I was told that the difference would be minimal at best. Now while throttle response would be damn near instantaneous with the right tuning, you'd also be taking from peak power to give to torque. You'd be taking away from the top of the power band, with what would equally be given to you in the low to mid range torque curve. All in all it leads me to ask, at what cost is it worth going this route? Is it really worth being that different in your build to spend $10,000? I mean just ask yourself, spend $10,000 for this ITB kit? Or, spend less to get a legitimate boost in power with forced induction. Anyway, that's just my two cents on the matter. It's like I always remind myself, very few things in this life are truly impossible to achieve. This ITB kit for example is by no means impossible to get working. I just think it's like being offered the shortcut to a destination and deciding you'd rather take the scenic route and walk instead of drive, just to add insult to injury. But hey, on the other hand it's also like having a totally bitchin' Wankel Rotary build. Only for the most dedicated and those not faint of heart.

In conclusion, that covers my journey and experiences with the ITB kits designed for our family of cars. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to drop me a line. I always look forward to interacting with those that spend the time reading through this build thread. Your time doesn't go unnoticed and I sincerely appreciate the interest and support. See you soon!