Words by Alex Kierstein Photos by  Josh Mackey & Mike Bowen

With the departure of every storied name in Toyota performance, the Scion tC is left carrying the banner (and baggage) into the 21st century. That is a lot of psychic weight to carry on stock spring perches, so to speak. The tC has shown potential in various forms, but it still hasn’t lived up to the Toyota pedigree.  Pine all you want for Toyota to dredge up the legendary “GT-Four” designation from the past and build a tarmac-clawing, boost-huffing monster, but it won’t happen. Luckily, Scion is happy to point you in the direction of the sizeable aftermarket performance market, allowing the tC to quite easily become a blank canvass for any wild combination of vinyl, camber, and nitrous you could imagine in your wildest tuner magazine fever dreams.

When the time came for Giovanni Rogano’s Scion to go under the knife, the easy and predictable way wasn’t going to cut it. His design brief called for a car that not only stunned visually, but also dynamically. That meant some concessions to drivability: no ridiculous camber, microscopic ride height, or enormous rim size. That didn’t mean that Giovanni’s Scion was your average grocery-getter; Giovanni grew up in Italy, where style and old-school craftsmanship were the name of the game. As he put it, Giovanni wanted to “make sure that [he] had a car that no one else had, that [his] ideas were unique and stood out from the rest of the crowd.” From the beginning, he knew the Scion would be the perfect starting point for his vision. He also knew he wanted the major visual theme to be “black and gold,” and he wanted those performance bits to actually perform.

The visual transformation took place by utilizing a range of tasty bits. A full carbon fiber lip kit hunkers the car down to the pavement. Up front, APR canards at the corners form a squared-up jawline for an aggressive front-mount Dezod intercooler setup. The carbon fiber doesn’t end at the sills:  a Seibon hood, VIS trunk, B-pillars, engine covers, and even the fuel door are composed of the woven stuff. The deep black paint is set off by the gold accents provided by the ADVAN RG-IIs at 18inches all around, wrapped in Yokohama S.Drive 205/40/18 rubber. Further accents are provided by the VRD yellow fog lights, which keep the gold theme down low on the car and tastefully subtle. Further lighting mods include angel-eye headlights with smoked eyelids and smoked taillights out back. Combined with a dark window tint, the tC is both sinister and purposeful.

That stance comes courtesy of TRD struts and H&R Race springs all around, pulling the body kit lower to the ground while providing useful dampening and rebound characteristics. Since Giovanni wants to hit the corners as hard as he hits the show scene, the tC also sports Hotchkis front and rear sway bars, Hotchkis adjustable camber links, and a TRD strut bar spanning the front strut towers. The total package trades a mild stance for real-world drivability, but well-matched to Giovanni’s goals for the car.

Clearly, the Scion has a lot going for it in the looks and handling departments, but Giovanni didn’t neglect the 2AZ-FE engine. With plenty of displacement to work with from the motor’s 2.4 liters, the Dezod-spec’d T3/T4 hybrid turbo kit gets lots of help putting down some serious horsepower out of the box. With the addition of the intercooler as well as an AEM cold air intake system, the motor makes over 250 horses – nearly 100 more than the stock 2AZ.  An AEM fuel injector controller keeps the juice flowing properly to the big 550cc injectors, and an Ingalls engine torque dampener helps channel the power to the wheels and control driveline lash. An Agency Power straight-pipe exhaust system and a Mishimoto radiator round out the package.

The bottom line is that this Scion is clean enough to perform open-heart surgery on, and is enough of a performer to bring even a flat-lined patient back from the dead. By combining the Old World craftsmanship with cutting-edge performance components, it achieves Giovanni’s vision of creating a tC that proves that a super-clean and balanced car can stand out in a sea of extreme wheel fitment clones.

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