I am sort of feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment as I burnt all my cash and there are still things I want to sort on the car :)  The paint due to carelessness, neglect and the usual stone chip goodness on these cars is nowhere near where I want it to be.  Its a 3 stage pearl job I am pretty sure which I am not at all comfortable with attempting myself.  The doors and rear clam might need a wholesale respray as I dont know how easy it is to touch up a pearl finish.  Front clam is good and the roof and engine cover I can probably brush touch myself (some scratches in the clear on the CF areas).  Got the tune to sort out, also it needs a good clean overall, engine compartment etc
 
There was another one that became available at last minute which I probably should have bought instead, cup 240 so missing the CF goodness, but paint and panel was 9/10 as it had only 13000km on it (about third what this vehicle has).  Didn't have a few of the additionals that this car had that I wanted (upgraded radiator, sump, two piece floating rotors, w2a intercooler) but from my previous experience its 10x more fun fitting shiny new components then fixing neglected paintwork.
 
Owner of that car was away for the long weekend so it wasn't available for purchase whilst I was in Sydney though.

Congrats on the purchase!
 
Seems strange that you would need to fiddle with the factory ECU to get it to run right?

-Totenkopf-
Good question, I think it may be the SC setup (or could be the DBW) that is already giving me the ****s.  Its a large blower, too large for the engine really and the inlet tract is long.  Most fitment of these blowers mount direct on the manifold and dont have an IC.  These have an IC and associated pipework etc and the TB is mounted pre supercharger.  At the moment when you lift off the throttle and depress the clutch to change gears revs don't drop for quite a period, I dunno, at a guess, probably a second or so before revs start to decrease.  This is epicly annoying, makes it sound like you don't get off the throttle between gears and is likely working the synchros harder then is necessary.  Its either the DBW being gay, or, it could also be due to the large pressurized inlet tract that must allow air to flow somewhere (into the engine, ecus still seeing manifold pressure so keeps feeding it fuel, revs are sustained until air is consumed from the inlet tract).
 
Annoying as hell, biggest gripe with this car.

From my experience, it is the DBW. Cait's Impreza does the exact same thing and it also ****s me off. The DBW seems lazy on coming off the throttle when you shift up gears and even looks like a throttle blip if you clutch in quickly enough. Then you spend an eternity waiting for the revs to come back down to the appropriate clutch release point.
 
It's not a side affect from having the throttle pre-supercharger or having a long intake path, look at the AW11 SC setups, that's how it comes from the factory and they do not suffer from this issue. The throttle pre-supercharger prevents any run on from the supercharger by cutting off the air flow to the supercharger and sends the intake into vacuum near instantly.

cogs
Ahh, drive-by-wire, didn't catch that bit!  I presume this is still controlled by the factory ECU, in which case it's optimised for reducing emissions at the expense of, well, everything that makes driving fun?
 
If it's an E1280S there's a drive by wire board available, or is the actuator motor just too slow?  Rob, any thoughts?

It's not an e1280s, it's a special version of either the e420c ECU or the Select ECU, I can't remember which.
When Adaptronic was dealing with the SSC Lotus cars, I think it was after my time in the company, or close to that time, so I can't remember the specifics. They either replaced the DBW with a cable throttle, or let the factory ECU continue to control the DBW.
 
EDIT: I just saw your post on the Adaptronic forum, so we'll wait and see what Andy says very soon.

With the original SSC setup they kept the factory ECU for DBW & also dash control, with the new solution (based on adaptronic select ecu I think) the ecu now controls the DBW & the dash.

Fit itbs in between sc and head? Lol

Think I've more or less sorted the problem, appears it may have been a firmware issue, installed some newer firmware and things are looking positive.  Only done about 5km of testing though so will confirm once Ive completed a more comprehensive test :)