BATTLE BASTARD
OLD-SCHOOL STREETERS THAT ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE QUARTER-MILE DON’T GET ANY TOUGHER THAN BEN MANAGH’S HOME-BUILT 1.5JZ-POWERED KE36 WAGON
There are two types of people in this world: those who look at cars as nothing more than a means of transport, and the rest of us, who are down at the local testing office banging on the door the second that we’re old enough to hold a licence. That little piece of plastic means more than just being able to sit in the driver’s seat without your parents telling you to piss off; it’s the physical embodiment of unlimited freedom. Once you have one in your wallet and a car of your own, there is no place you can’t get to, at any time you feel
like going there. Those cars become a critical instrument of your social life; friends are made through the late-night car-park hangs and ill-planned roadies to god-knows-where just because you can, and the longer you hold on to them, the greater the chance you’ll find yourself wanting to use them for more than just street menacing!
For Rotorua local Ben Managh, this 1979 Toyota Corolla (KE36), which he bought at the tender age of 16, was his ticket to that unrestricted freedom.
“As a young fella, having a street car was always the key. My mates and I used to go over to Tauranga and Hamilton and hang out with car mates as were growing up. Having a car that you could drive on the street was quite important to us; all we did was hang out in our cars,” he says.
Originally powered by the formidable, albeit gutless, Toyota 4K, an unexpected conversation between Ben and a stranger at one of those aforementioned car hangouts got the ball rolling towards where the car sits today. That stranger approached Ben and said that he had the perfect motor for the car, offering up a 1.8-litre dualoverhead-cam twin-spark turbo power plant known as the ‘3T-GTE’ for a price that was too good to refuse. Ben shook hands to seal the deal in little time and proceeded to “valve bounce the 4K all over town until it finally blew up” to clear space in the engine bay.
With a fresh heart fitted — one that cranked out a ton more power at the wheel — many a back road was terrorized in the name of breaking it in; the kind of stuff that any young gun gets up to. Around the same time, however, new laws came into place whereby cars could be seized when caught, and Ben tells us that really put him off the silly stuff. Which is where drag racing came into the mix: somewhere to go, be a hoon, and not get into trouble for your efforts.
Clocking up more than his fair share of quarter-mile passes, managing a PB of mid 13 seconds, Ben started getting itchy for more power than the 3T was offering. He saw two ways to obtain those gains: spend moonbeams on the old heart to go not that much faster, or swap it out for a newer incarnation that would actually offer the grunt in stock form that he desired. It was an easy decision, with the 3T, the only engine to be by choice instead of being blown up, replaced with its much bigger cousin: a 1JZ-GTE.
This was at a time when the JZ hype had yet to hit and putting together a potent package meant cracking open the vault to empty your savings, and then some. A humble Ben admits that, even back then, prior to him having the more important priorities that he has today, when he was able to blow every pay cheque on cars, it was a damn expensive task. That’s why he opted to start out with the package in stock form, running into the 11s before discovering a few teething issues, which were to be expected when pumping far more power through the car than it was designed for.
The rear end was determined to tear itself to bits once Hoosiers went on, which is why you’ll find a shortened Hilux 4.1:1-ratio LSD with two-link, added leaf springs, and stiff shocks back there
To reduce the loss of grip off the line, Ben switched to a set of Hoosiers, which, he tells us, made a massive difference but meant that the rear end wanted to tear itself out of the chassis and needed a rejig to handle all the new-found grip. In went a two-link to tie the shortened Hilux limited-slip diff (LSD) together, and an extra leaf was added to each corner with stiffer shocks. For the same reason, a sixpoint cage would eventuate, as, over time, the entire chassis began to twist under the hardships of repeated launches.
While Ben could have gone a lot more hundie on the suspension set-up, he makes the point that, for him, it was always going to be a trade-off between drag racing and staying street legal, especially as he didn’t want it to drive like rubbish as soon as he approached a corner: “Drag cars handle terrible on the road; you make them soft in the front for the weight transfer. I wanted the best of both worlds and couldn’t commit to either/or.”
It was probably for the best, as Ben would soon discover; while more goodies such as a BorgWarner huffer and a Link G3 would find their way into the car, a particularly enthusiastic burnout at a local event saw the 1JZ give up the ghost. That meant an extended stint in the garage while Ben hopped the ditch, came back, and started a family. With a few more years under his belt and a shift in spending priorities, drag racing wasn’t quite as important as it used to be, although streetability was still critical, and Ben found more fun in going hammer and tongs around the circuit.
After the previous 1JZ-GTE went bang, Ben chucked in a 2JZ-GE block crammed with a mishmash of pistons and rods, bolted a home-ported head atop, and hung the BorgWarner S300 huffer off the side for a cool 380kW at the rears Fresh 98 octane is cranked through 1000cc injectors supplied by a Bosch 044 primary and Carter lift pump package that includes a surge tank