It's easy to get a picture of Luke Kownacki and Luke Williams making pizza deliveries. With a pressing delivery deadline, their not-so-usual delivery cars boost their way off from a stoplight leaving whirlwinds spiralling in their wake. Pizzas, garlic bread and Coke bottles all sliding and rolling around inside the cabin... Believe us, if you think that pizza delivery cars are all just LPG-powered 1 litre Daihatsu Charades with some stickers - guess again!
Cajun Corolla
Meet Luke Kownacki. He's been doing pizza deliveries for a couple of years now. It's only a pay-the-rent night job though, as he works at Sebring Mufflers during the day. Not surprisingly, when you roll working in a hi-po aftermarket workshop together with doing heaps of kays in your own a car - this is what you get. A hot'n tasty boosted and Corolla!
Purchased as a $3000 "heap of shit", this 1986 TwinCam Corolla initially proved to be a great thrash car. After a bit of a serving, though, the motor soon started to vent a fair amount of oil. Luke then looked towards replacing it with either a 100kW red-rocker 4A-GE or the screamer 20-valve 4A-E - but a ride in a supercharged 'ZE Corolla soon changed that! As Luke K says, "it's the only way to go"...
Not long after that inspirational supacharged ride, he had picked himself up an imported AE101 Corolla Levin half-cut. He pulled out all the good stuff - engine, computer, loom and twin-pot 11½ inch front brakes - and dropped it into the local '86 body. Delivering up to 123kW at the flywheel in stock form, there wasn't much need to do much power pulling. The only breathing enhancements are a HKS Super PowerFlow air filter and a custom 4>2>1 exhaust manifold leading into a 2¼ inch mandrel system with a hi-flo cat and TRR 2½ inch straight-through muffler. That exhaust, incidentally gives zero backpressure, while removing the air filter caused a power
drop on a chassis dyno.
With a measured 95.5kW at the wheels (on 9 psi of stock boost) the Corolla is only slightly behind the other Luke's Excel in the traffic light tussle. Still, it has been timed at 14.7 seconds over the quarter - so it ain't no clapped out Handivan, that's for sure! Of course, this level of grunt does put considerable load through the Aussie-spec Corolla gearbox, however. Luke K's pan-fried two clutches and destroyed two gearboxes in the past nine months!
Beverages are kept nice an' warm on-route to a delivery thanks to Luke's cosy interior retrim. This sees an abundance of kitchen-grade stainless steel in addition to black and white leather trimming. The leather, we're told, took a few extra hours of pizza delivery to be able to afford. Autometer gauges for rpm, boost and oil pressure keep close tabs on engine behaviour.
With power-to-weight being the primary concern, the Rolla's fat level is kept as low as possible with just a 10-inch deep-pan Orion sub, a 4-channel 50W amp, Pioneer 6x9s and carbon-fibre 6½ -inch splits. The head unit is a Clarion CD stacker.
The Corolla's body has a nice taste. It's received a full bare-metal respray in white - with just a sprinkling of red pearl. No special herbs are added. Everything's been colour-coded, there's a single wiper conversion and also a bonnet vent to allow airflow through the stock 4A-GZE air-to-air intercooler. Seventeen inch Shooting Star rims capably fill out each lipped guard thanks to King Super Low springs. These rims are crusted in 205/40 Falken ZE502s - which, incidentally, looked a bit secondhand during our shoot! Looks like a bad case of tyre frying that will certainly come out of his pay...
All up, the Corolla is a project that's cost around $15,000, with Luke doing the majority of the work himself. But - as he says - it's the ideal car to do 700km of urban driving in every week. One of the only things left to do is look at upgrading the brakes; maybe he'll be able to swap the existing front discs to the drum'd rear and get a pair of whopper-stoppers to go onto the front. We'd bet that a pizza tray could make an excellent inner brake dust shield...
Hawaiian Hyundai
Just around the corner from Pizza Hut is a Domino's outlet where you can often find Luke William's with-the-works Excel parked out the front. It's quite likely it'll be left idling down after a very express delivery...
Luke W first started pizza deliveries back in '98. He started off the job with a KB Laser packed with dual 12-inch subs (that's not
pizza subs!). Unfortunately, this car got broken into - but that proved to be the perfect opportunity for him to step up into a brand new Hyundai Excel. Being a bit of a music freak, a serious stereo system soon made its way into the smells-like-new car, with a trio of 12s pushing some serious bass. A brace of 17-inch chrome alloys were also slapped on, wearing Falken GRB 205/40s. They're a pretty damn trick looking wheel aren't they?
Things were pretty full-on for the next two and a half years. A total of
140,000km were racked up and - under the demands of Luke W's style of express deliveries - the motor eventually dropped its bundle. Interestingly, an imported 1.5 litre DOHC Cyborg (non MIVEC) Mitsubishi motor slid almost directly into the old motor's void. Only minor engine mount mods were necessary. An aftermarket programmable computer - a MicroTech MT8 - was then wired in to get all the cylinders firing. A "bigger" set of injectors and a high-flow fuel system keep up with the PULP requirements.
The Mitsu engine was then upgraded to an extra-supreme with a MY99 WRX TD04 turbocharger hung off a custom Dom Rigoli exhaust manifold. The turbo is mounted very low in the engine bay, sucking air through a K&N pod on the compressor cover and blowing up to 11 psi into a custom front-mount air-to-air intercooler. A high quality intercooler was a requirement given the unaltered (and so relatively high) static compression ratio. A polished blow-off valve also makes its noise during gearshifts. The turbine relieves its gasses into a 2½ inch mandrel system with a meaty cat and single rear box.
Luke's plenty happy with his cookin' XL. It's a great custom installation that's made the car an absolute gas to drive on the street. Boost comes in quite early and it winds out to max power oh-so easy. Peak power, by the way, has been measured at 118kW at the wheels. Ordering an extra 6 psi boost (no extra cost) bumps this up to 135kW - but concerns about the stock rods prevent this from happening too often. Speaking about durability, the standard Mitsubishi gearbox let go about a month ago. The heavy-duty clutch (out of one of Dom Rigoli's mega-power Fiats) is lasting all right though - enough to perform a 14.5 sec (at 99mph) quarter mile just after we did the photo shoot.
With Luke's passion for thumping sound gear, the back of the Excel also saw a major refit late last year. Three 12-inch subs weren't enough, so
four MTX 15 inch family-sized dishes now zigzag their way across the rear luggage compartment. These are driven by ultra hi-current MTX amps. There's also a Kenwood deck and two pairs of Focal 5-inch splits. Other complimentary toppings include an AutoTechnica steering wheel, Autometer boost gauge plus white vinyl and paint to cover the standard base.
On the outside, there isn't anything - other than the 17s, tint and dumped suspension - that identifies this as a mega-meal Excel. But Luke likes it that way, "because it gets more races". It does the Domino Pizza name proud too, coz not much gets in front of this (anticipated) flat 14 second hauler.
At this stage, it's the Excel that holds a definite legs advantage over the Toyota. But Luke and Luke aren't exactly work and street rivals; far from it. The pair often cruise, attend shows and generally do car stuff together. Just quietly, though, we suspect that Luke K might have some new power plans afoot. This involves chucking out the blower (which, apparently, is getting a bit tired) and moving to a turbocharger. This should allow quick and easy boost changes to bring the car up alongside the Excel - and maybe pass it.
Let's just hope he doesn't jettison someone's dinner mid-drag in search of a better power-to-weight ratio!
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