what to do

200.0 would be a good start on a nice head unit if it needs an upgrade. I think that there to are to many options to list as far as performance goes. I'm sure others who have done a swap will chime in soon. Very nice looking car by the way. Esp. for it's age. What was the price on it?

Might look at replacing that corner light so you don't get pulled over.

Anyway...bud, there's a reason people don't just put a turbo on the stock engine. It's gotta be on this forum about a thousand times by now and yet people ask about it every other day.

The stock pistons are weak (cast). Yeah, you can put a turbo on a stock engine, hell it might even last awhile. But there's two fundamental problems with this approach:

#1. You can only run about 10 psi max (even that is really pushing it) which will give you maybe 30-40 hp over the stock engine

#2. One little hiccup and the engine runs lean and bye bye pistons!

Nice thing about the turbo engines is that it's really easy to make good power with plenty of room to grow later. I threw mine together for about $1200 including plenty of go-fast goodies that I didn't necessarily "need." I'm running a close to stock boost level (stock is 15, I'm running 17), stock T3, stock fuel system. I guesstimate the car at 250 hp and 300+ ft-lbs, and it's still dead nuts reliable.

I was gonna find out what it could actually run last week, but the track event I was gonna go to got rained out, and with the closest track being an hour and a half away, it's harder to coordinate stuff.

Oh, the automatic to manual tranny swap is more about parts gathering and labor than cost. I don't believe the price of everything you need is much, you just need a small pile of little bits, and some time to crawl up under your dash to install some fun stuff like the quadrant and clutch pedal...blech. There's probably FAQ's all over for the swap.

Its cheaper to do the 2.3 turbo engine swap then it is to get the 2.3 N/A ready for turboing.

ex: You need forged pistons, better valves to take the heat, different head to keep the CR down, E6, and the turbo itself

The manual trans swap cost all depends if you do it or someone else does it for you (way cheaper if you do it)

Check stingers site for the how to on swapping to a T-5 and what parts are needed (cross member, drive shaft, etc)