FBM long overdue review

[pmccut]

Back in March '13 I had driven a friends BRZ almost daily and was looking into FI kits for a car I did not yet own. I knew I couldn't own a stock power BRZ. At the time I was mostly driving my Stg2 '12 WRX and '11 M3. Anything less than 300bhp just wouldn't cut it.

My research led me to @FullBlown. I talked to LJ about getting the base or premium kit, as I was leaning towards the premium, and he basically talked me into the base kit for the power levels I thought I wanted. The kit took a few weeks to come in. Once I had the kit at home, I went in search of a BRZ and found one 800 miles away in stock in Oregon. I picked her up sometime in May. Yes, I bought the kits months before the car

The tuning proved to be much more difficult than I expected. I went through ~70 revisions with @Visconti, and had a local tuner (WORKS) attempt to tune the car for multiple days, without any success. LJ did some remote dyno tuning and we got the car in a drivable state, but certainly not smooth or fun - as we just kept running into issues (hoses popping) and running out of dyno time. After 3 months I gave up and shipped the car to Minnesota to have LJ tune it, along with an engine build, radiator, oil cooler, t-shirt, etc.

LJ has pro-actively reached out to me many times to see how the car is running. That's crazy stuff, no one else does this. He's always been very responsive and helpful. I can't stress this enough.

Example: I've had an issue with the oil cooler leaking from the fittings - and right away he's going to send me new fittings. Good guy LJ.

Conclusion: You're always going to run into some issues when heavily modifying a car, so it's important to pick a company that really stands behind their product. There's only one turbo kit to pick (FBM) if you want the best customer service.