Well I doubt the 16g will get you anywhere close to his CRX. Those thing are light as hell (and just as scary when they go fast). If you are trying to match his numbers, you're probably better off with a bigger turbo and a few supporting mods over a ton of mods and squeezing every bit of life out of the 16g. That being said, I'm sure there's varying schools of thought. I've got a T3 04 on my rig (similar to a 20g) and I figure I'll get 400 @ the crank after a tune this Friday on the dyno at English. That being said, if I'm seeing even 350 of that at the wheels, I wouldn't be able to touch a 325hp CRX. power to weight is just too far off.
Here's my suggestion. If you want to shut him up, then don't let him bait you. You've got a very rare car with all wheel drive. Tell him to sit on that. Besides, it sounds like he put no small amount of work into his rig, so give him props and let it go.
As for you, go read my build thread. The absolute one takeaway you should have is this: make a plan and don't cut corners. Start with a budget, scope out the work, find a place to do the work, then start putting together parts lists, pricing, etc... Before I even started on my rig I had a budget and a spreadsheet showing what I knew was already on the car, what needed to get done, and lists of parts and vendors. That's before I started any work.
My car came to me for free after the PO spent 8 years tossing good money after bad trying to get the car built up. He had no plan aside from "go fast". It came to me with a bunch of neat parts , zero tuning, and an obvious lack of direction. Big turbo with a stock intercooler. Big injectors with no engine management. Chewed up transmission with the wrong gear oil. Hacks like the radiator fan was always on (a racing mod he was told) and the clutch switch was disabled (something to do with the launch control that never worked). It bucked and knocked and eventually died. But I knew this going in and made a plan.
His mistake was to do things cheap, one at a time. He chose performance over maintenance and it left him unsatisfied.
If you want to drop $10k on a galant, you can do what he did and just buy a finished project for that much. Or you can do what I did and build it up yourself for half that and not have to own someone else's issues (and they all have issues).
Good luck!
