What happens when you merge two iconic rally marques? Apparently rallycross domination. Meet the Porscharu of Leon Drake, which melds a Porsche 914 chassis with Subaru EJ20 power. It’s won the past two SCCA National RallyCross Championships, with Leon behind the wheel in 2022, and Jason Fuller last year.
“Mid-engine works well because you have more weight toward your drive wheels–you got more traction,” explains Leon. “Most rear-wheel drives don’t have good traction. And the weight is very low–at about 1850 pounds. Most of the time you’re turning, and turning is when weight fights you.”
Leon didn’t arrive at the magic formula for the Porscharu overnight. In fact, the idea of the car wasn’t even his–he just refined it. Leon bought the Porsche 914 from a fellow SCCA club member, Gary Horneck. It came as a gutted rolling chassis, with a Renegade engine cradle and a Subaru EJ25 drivetrain.
“He had planned to do a project,” Leon explains. “Gary got cancer and he wasn’t going to be able to finish it–he has since passed away. The car at the time was still kind of the way he had gotten it. Somebody had built it like a street rod–and it was horrible. It had huge fender flares. The front air dam was done out of steel, and it wasn’t done well. They figured if they put enough Bondo down where you welded, you didn’t need to grind your welds.”
Right after Leon bought it, he went to work converting it over to a rallycross car. He cut off the fender flares and replaced them with ones he had for a Jeep. Its appearance, though, wasn’t the only thing causing issues for Leon. He quickly found that out when he did his first rallycross with Porscharu in 2019.
“The Renegade cradle wasn’t strong enough for off-road use,” Leon says. “I broke it in half the third or fourth race in, and I had to reinforce it. The first two years the car didn’t finish a lot of races. Things broke. Axles kept coming undone–I had to engineer my own axles. I originally had the radiator in back and I packed it so full of mud I moved [the radiator] up front. It had a 2.5–I went through three of them–and now I’ve got a 2.0. These are the kind of things that had to get reworked.”
Yes, with the smaller 2.0-liter engine the Porscharu makes about 130 horsepower, estimates Leon, but he quickly adds, “How much can you get down to the dirt?” To make that engine live, he took two…
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