Video: Meet Porschubishi... A Porsche 911 With A Dirty Little Secret

This is one of our favorite swaps ever. Why? Because Porsche owners have the reputation as the snobbiest of the snobby and dropping a Japanese import engine into the almighty 911 is unadulterated blasphemy in their eyes. The perpetrator of this desecration is our friend of Boba Fett welding helmet fame, Eric Plebani.

How did this come to pass? “After successfully campaigning my 4G63-powered Starion in the heyday of import drag racing,” says Plebani. “I decided on building a fast fun reliable and unique road going car. I always wanted a wide body Porsche 911 from the ‘80s era. I wanted it to look genuine and authentic with a dirty little secret.”

Plebani had retained the stout Mitsubishi 4G63 engine from his drag racing days and started the search for the 911. He found a rough but running 1980 edition and says it took about two years from start to finish to develop the adapters and make the swap work. Another big hurdle was combining the wiring harnesses from the two principals. Cutting up a perfectly good German-engineered car to fit a Japanese four banger is thinking outside of the box… considering you’re also swapping from air cooled to water cooled is further outside the box… front engine to rear engine is thinking outside one’s mind.

The Porschubishi has gone through its engineering evolution since its initial firing in 2000 and has gotten better with age. It still retains its wide fendered, authentic German looks but is matted to the high revving, bulletproof 4G63 engine. Power is funneled through the unbreakable four-speed Porsche 930 gearbox.

The 911 packs a wallop generating 10.80 at 125 mph quarter mile timeslips… but goes through the traps in second gear! It also has some impressive times in SlipStream’s 1,600-foot roll race, a scenario it is more suited to master.

The car generates 538 ponies at the wheels at 30 psi of boost and weights 2,600 pounds with Plebani in it. The Nitrous Express system is set up as a spool shot and shuts off at 17 psi. “Because of the gearing in the big, strong 930 gearbox it’s important to get the powerband going as soon as we can for racing launch acceleration. The box also eats up a good deal of power but it’s worth not servicing it often like I had to with the failures on the 915 five-speed gearboxes I used earlier in the car’s development. The car is also at the limits of the fuel system.”

The Porschubishi is one of those on going projects and Plebani says the next round of mods for future SlipStream racing events is more fuel and more boost. He will be adding two Bosch 044 fuel pumps and swapping out the RC Engineering 1,000cc injectors for some 1,300s and adding 10 more psi to the mix.

1980 Porsche 911 SC 4G63 “Porschubishi”