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This article was first published in May 2000.
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The succession of tight S-bends sinuously stretches towards the sea, a driver's delight writ in the curling shape of black bitumen. I heel-and-toe the short-shift leather knob back to second, the notchy box confirming the gear's selection. Then into the first left hander, smoothly feeding in torque and lock, the steering and throttle both delightfully subtle and sensitive.
The g-forces start to build but I keep on applying power, the turbo whistling as the engine's enormous peak torque is transferred to the road through the four clawing Potenzas. The subtle steering feedback is telling me that the fronts are j-u-s-t starting to lose their grip and I feather the throttle a little; the rear then moves into gentle oversteer. With the car yawing along the coastal tightrope, it's time again for some more power - especially since the first corner's exit is now looming.
There's a slight hump in the stretch of road between the bends - to call it a 'straight' would be to give it a length that doesn't exist. The car goes light and squirmy over the rise but I keep the right pedal nailed; now the sideways forces have been replaced with straightforward, gut-wrenching acceleration. Eyes slightly widened, we are shoved back into our seats as the simply phenomenal force surges us forward. Over the rise the tyres scrabble for grip, wheelspin of the front-right and then - a fraction of a second later - the rears. In other cars of this power you'd have backed off long ago, oversteer threatening a spin or understeer beckoning a plough off the road. But even in extremis, the STi is utterly reassuring, settled, composed and stable. A dab on the brakes and then it's time to re-live the ecstasy around the next corner... then the next.
The Great Ocean Road is tamed - almost quelled - by the staggering competence of this simply incredible car.
The Subaru Impreza WRX is a cliché. The four wheel drive turbo Subaru - developed originally with world rallying in mind - has become every boy's surreptitious drawing in school textbooks, the car lusted after by many whose cultural cousins place HSV Commodores on a pedestal. But what is the reality? After all, the darling of the motoring media (when will we see the first Ferrari/WRX comparo?) has a truth that's frequently at odds with the hype. How often do you read of the broken gearboxes and clutches and engines that have been experienced by many a Rex owner? Er, never. How often are phenomenal 0-100 figures quoted in hushed tones of reverence - the fact that such times can only be achieved by 6000 rpm clutch-shattering dumps conveniently ignored? And what are we to make of the limited-edition STi being flogged off by Subaru at a price a stunning 169 per cent more than the very humble Impreza LX with which it shares so much of its design?
Is the WRX just a media creation, in the way that not so many years ago some Commodores - modified in simple ways by a race driver - were written about as if they were world-beaters? No one would dare say now that an HDT Commodore kicked contemporary BMW arse.... Is the WRX just a cover photo opportunity to sell magazines, or is it a genuinely superb car, capable in the real world - and on real roads - of handing out performance lessons?
AutoSpeed decided to find out, in the best of the Aust-delivered Rexes and on some of the best roads in Australia.
Follow the coast from south of Geelong along the tight and twisty Great Ocean Road, continue along the free-flowing Highway 1 to Portland, then turn inland. North-west to Hamilton, through the stunning scenery and great driver's road in the Grampians National Park, then head north-east to Ararat and onto Bendigo. From there south to Melbourne, spending a day punting the little Subaru around the conurbation.
From corners marked at 25 km/h, to open sweepers able to be taken stretched out in fourth, from potholed urban roads skewered by tramtracks, to narrow secondaries normally the natural habitat of trucks. A toy car for toyboys, or a serious performance machine?
Three days, a white STi four-door, and a beckoning road. This was gonna be interesting....
Meet Rex
We meet in a carpark. AutoSpeed Publisher Brendan Taylor passes me the keys: this is yours now, he says. I look at the key to the fastest four-door car sold in Australia. It's nothing like a Skyline GT-R key - that one has a beautifully cast metal shape embossed with those three evocative letters. It's not the electronic rectangle of many Mercedes Benz models; nope, it's just the pedestrian plastic and steel key used in all Subarus. Strangely disappointed, Dep Ed Michael Knowling and I get into the tight and comfortable STi seats; they wrap themselves around you like a long-lost grandmother - that's more like it. In front of me is a leather airbag-equipped Momo wheel, behind that are just basic instruments - speed, rpm, fuel and temp. No boost gauge, no oil temp, no torque split - nothing like that. If the gauges weren't white-faced and didn't have an STi emblem, that key could be entrance to a Impreza GX.
The engine cranks and starts, an unexpectedly loud metallic threshing coming from under the alloy bonnet whenever I blip the throttle. Michael and I exchange glances - mmmm, didn't realise that we were gonna be driving a Suzuki Hatch for three days. Moving the short-shifter into first is a tactile and precise motion, and then we're rolling through the carpark. The engine is warm and I floor the pedal in first. At low rpm nothing happens, then three grand arrives and momentum builds. Four thousand rpm and the push becomes more urgent, five thousand and the car is charging, six thousand and it's pretty sweet, seven thousand and - oh my God - this engine is so threshy, so unpleasant, so metallically horrible that we expect valves and valve springs and gudgeon pins and rods to erupt from under the bonnet. How bad is the sound at the 7900 rpm redline, we wonder?
And, while the push had been good, it'd never become a shove between the shoulder blades, never the urgent crescendo of accelerative violence that we'd been expecting. As we feel our way out onto the M1 to Geelong, we discuss the presence of the small air/air intercooler, positioned directly above the turbo exhaust housing. The words 'heat soak' are mentioned repeatedly....
The steering is quick - so quick in fact that you need to be careful that involuntary inputs don't occur over bumps. I position my seat one notch closer to the wheel with my elbows bent more than usual - without this, the required millimetre-by-millimetre inputs are hard to apportion. On the freeway there's only the slightest trace of tramlining; the car is stable and user-friendly. The kilometres whip by, road streaming past the intercooler scoop bulging from the bonnet in front of us. After 10 or 15 minutes of air being force-fed through it at 100 km/h, we figure the 'cooler core will be at ambient temp. Back to third and boot it.
Yeeee-haaaa! This is more like it!
The acceleration is akin to a giant hand sweeping us forward - at four thousand revs the VF28 turbo is on its full 15.5 psi boost and the rush turns into utter exhilaration. This time I hold it to the redline, changing up at a smidgin under eight grand. The engine noise is still appalling, and in fact the rate of forward progress seems to fall away above seven thousand revs anyway. From now on, we generally shift at 7000 rpm (we later find that the peak power of 206kW is achieved at 6500 rpm), a strategy which also puts the engine revs back into the area of mountainous torque. But one thing has been demonstrated without any doubt: when the intercooler is cold, by God the power is there!
We fill up with Optimax at Geelong - good fuel might be hard to come by over the next three days. The line of breakers at Bells Beach is a wonderful sight, then it's back onto the road to Torquay - time for lunch. Michael's driven the car for the last 50-odd kilometres - what do you think so far? he asks. I pause: it's obviously based on a cheap Japanese car with all of the body flex, poor interior trim and clangy-shutting doors that goes with that. But the steering is good, the seats wonderful and the engine extraordinarily strong. But only with a cold intercooler, Michael agrees. Well, yes....
The ride is a bit more contentious. It is hard - bloody hard. Wheels crash through potholes, coins and phones bouncing around the cabin. And at speed it doesn't smooth out in the way many cars achieve - it just stays hard. The saving factor is the seats - you're held clamped in place, becoming part of the car architecture rather than just sitting on padding. The seats are extraordinarily comfortable, softening what would otherwise be a totally unacceptable ride. And the handling?
The only cornering we have a chance to do so far is around roundabouts. And there we are stunned at the amount of power understeer that is present. Go into the roundabout, get hard onto the power at the apex, and then watch the front skitter across the road. Sure, there's a lot of power, but driven like this it all seems to be going through the front wheels.... We are surprised and a little shocked - what'd it be like around town in the wet, we wonder? We've experienced other very stiffly sprung constant four wheel drive turbo Subarus, and none of 'em has particularly liked the ultra-hard spring and damper rates. Maybe the STi bent towards extravagance and overstatement is present in more than just the rear wing design? That's the very same device that we've already seen constantly fluttering in the slipstream, and one that later proves to have the strangest of dirt deposition patterns on its supposedly aerodynamic surfaces...
The jury's out on the handling; in the mean time we'll be wary on the throttle in really tight stuff. Wouldn't wanna understeer off the road, would we?
The road flows onto Lorne, then Apollo Bay. And it's along this stretch of challenging, invigorating bitumen that we come to grips with the STi's handling. Yes, if you enter slowly and then tromp the loud pedal it will understeer far further than you expect. But if instead you enter faster and are more subtle with the torque applications - if you take a high-speed flowing approach rather than point-and-squirt - then the handling comes together in a simply awesome way. Yes there is still understeer, but it is of the subtle, telegraphed warning type, rather than the plough or power-understeer characterised by many constant four wheel drive cars. The throttle-off transition to oversteer is an easy foot movement away; and if the degree of oversteer achieved in this manner is a fraction less than we'd like, we're happy to demur on this to STi engineers - perhaps four-up on a wet road any more rear roll stiffness becomes a handful. Juggling tyre pressures and alignment angles could be used to subtlely change these characteristics - factory pressures are already a dramatically uneven 33 psi front and 27 psi rear.
The steering, the throttle progression (yes, even with just that single turbo and sole throttle body), and the suspension control come together in a holistic package completely at one with the road. The brakes? No, unfortunately they're obviously from another package all together! A long pedal travel, lack of initial bite and a full-ABS level of retardation that's nothing special add up to a less than impressive set of stoppers. This is a car with Porsche Turbo performance - but with tarted-up Impreza brakes. Pissy little twin-pot front calipers on modest discs are nowhere near the level of sophistication required in a road rocket like this. And, while in our drive the brakes don't show fade or increased pedal travel, we are deliberately modest in our use of them.
Warnambool is our stop for the night. Once accommodation is organised we hit Maccas for dinner then go on a quick night drive tour of the town. It's cold outside and dew is forming - the temp's about 10 degrees C. The throttle response is fantastic, the WOT performance stunning. With what we know of the strength of Subaru clutches and gearboxes there's no way we're gonna run multiple performance times - 'specially when a test by another mag of this very car just a few weeks ago gave a 5.3 second 0-100 and 13.5 quarter mile. But what's a real-world 0-100 time - one where you pop the clutch in the manner you might if you're the owner, instead of someone who doesn't pay the bills for the stuffed mechanical bits? We launch two-up at three grand and 100 km/h comes up an astonishing 5.7 seconds later. And that's a time you could do (cold) day after day, not a figure unobtainable without a loan car.... Even better was our rolling 60-90 km/h run of just 1.6 seconds - faster than any other road car we've ever measured!
Even with the rattles inside the front doors, the crappy sound system speakers, the tacky grab handles and the generic Impreza/Forester dash, this is one helluva car. After all, that straightline performance is superior to a $325,000 Ferrari F355 Berlinetta F1 3.5, to name just one ultimate performance car. But that night our conversation keeps turning to reliability. We know of one early WRX that has had ten gearboxes, at least a couple of two-door STi's that have had engine rebuilds after catastrophes have occurred - and we've experienced first-hand Subaru's hard-nosed attitude to repairing cars under warranty. So what
does the warranty say? We fish it out of the glovebox to read: no motorsport of any kind, no non-Subaru service, no aftermarket accessories, no non-Subaru parts (including oil!), no driver abuse. Hmmm, later in the trip we hear that Subaru personnel regularly attend club level motorsport events jotting down rego numbers of competing WRXs, and that "warranty cases are looked upon on an individual basis". Hmmmm.
And what of the gearbox and clutch? The gearbox (improved on this model, as apparently it has been on every model...) is notchy. Sometimes reverse cannot be engaged before first gear is selected, and when the car is rolling slowly forward, first is always baulky. In fact in these respects it all feels a bit like the fragile 'box in a Liberty RS! But on the positive side, snap changes don't cause crunching, and the light clutch feels progressive and has only the merest smidgin of that oh-shit warning judder.
Heading Inland
A good road extends west towards Portland. The conditions are clear, the temp still cool and an appropriate cruising speed about 140. We're zipping along, experimenting with changing back to either fourth or third for best overtaking. We settle on third, short-shifting to fourth during the passing manoeuvre and letting the immensity of the 353Nm midrange punch the car past the traffic. We're about to do the same to a white VT SS - dawdling along at 100 - then we see the twin rear aerials and hold back, keeping station with the Commodore for several kilometres. Suddenly, red and blue flashing lights come on in the front and rear windscreens and a siren starts. The unmarked police car pulls to the side of the road, does a U-turn and disappears in pursuit of a motorcycle that was travelling the other way. We go back to 140.
Holding 130-140 highlights one problem. The STi lacks cruise control, and at this speed the low, low gearing (33 km/h per 1000 rpm in fifth) means that the engine's smack-bang on peak torque. The smallest twitch of the right foot results in the big turbo suddenly winding up into action - instantly you're travelling 10 km/h faster than you were a moment before. It's the sort of surging throttle that you get from a wastegate-delay type of boost control system - excellent for corner exit grunt; not so good for constant speed cruise.
Advanced turbo cars get around this problem by using electronic throttle control; Michael and I discuss the technology of the STi and suddenly realise how simple a car it is. No twin turbos - let alone sequential twins; no variable camshaft control; no variable intake system; not even a coil-on-plug ignition system any more. And the EJ20 flat four dates back at least a decade - this one might be called the EJ207 (versus EJ205 of the current standard WRX), but an EJ20 it is. And what about the four-wheel drive system? No active four-wheel drive torque split, let alone a Torsen LSD middle diff - there's just a simple viscous coupling. No Automatic Stability Control, no active rear diff...
Portland comes and goes, then we're passing across wheat and sheep farmlands exhibiting the deep scars of gully erosion. The rivers have their headwaters in the Grampians, the mountains protruding abruptly upwards from these plains. The road into the Grampians National Park enters at the south, a well-surfaced - albeit narrow - road that curves and dips its way through the mountains. There are few advisory speed signs, the bitumen more sweeping blind corners that tight and twisties. To despatch these kilometres you need a car with precision and poise, one where you can place the left or right wheels within an inch or two of your chosen location; one with a muscular mid-range allowing you to farewell hills with a twitch of the foot.
In these more open corners the STi is magnificent. I have never driven a car that combines the nimbleness inherent in a small car with such precision of steering and immense power. Never does the car even start to do anything untoward, never does its nose vary a touch from the chosen line without that fact communicating itself through the steering, never does a change of direction when swinging through S-bends unsettle the body. If you knew that the road was clear of hikers, this stretch could be taken at a safe and practicable 160; at 130-140 it is just a sheer, relaxing joy.
We stop midway through the park for photography. Michael drives the car around a corner towards me while I use a 300mm telephoto to compress the marvellous waves of rolling hills into the same pic as the STi. We run the sequence a few times, then I hear voices. Tumbling down the hillside onto the road beside me is a group of hikers - 13-14 year old boys, accompanied a few minutes later by their teacher. Are you from Wheels?, they ask. Michael signals with the horn that he's about to roar into view, and I await with interest the comments of the kids. Aw wicked! It's a WRX. It's an STi! Awww, fantastic. There's a scrabbling for cameras; their clicks become more frequent as I dump the clutch just before the exit to the dirt carpark...
We arrive in Bendigo not too late to do a dusk town tour. Michael's interested to see a few cars that he wants to drive; the wealth of rural Victoria means that there're as many good cars in this country town as in South Australia's capital... He's seen a Subaru SVX, Saab Turbo - and even a Lamborghini! The latter's not on his list of Subaru Liberty RS replacements, but the other two are potentials. And what better car to take to a Subaru dealer when trying to cadge a test drive than a Rex STi? We're at the Subaru dealer bright and early the next day - too early in fact. So we go look at the Saab - no good, low pressure turbo - then head back to Subaru. The guys are as helpful as, letting Michael drive the SVX, happily talking WRXs, and even showing us their rally import Type R Rex out the back. Nice to meet genuine enthusiasts in a dealership...
Then it's back down the road to Melbourne, stopping at the hamlet of Malmsbury for lunch and more photography. We're running early so when we reach Melbourne we do some more chasing for Michael's Replacement Car Program. In the city the STi's not much fun. The turbo really only starts to do something above 3000 rpm, and while the low gearing helps hide this bottom-end torque inadequacy, there are certainly times when a quick lane change in fourth is ineffective - the power's not immediately there, and by the time you change back a gear or two, the slot's disappeared.
Even after three days of acclimatisation, the ride comfort is still poor; on really bad roads the jarring is simply uncomfortable. In city conditions you can still enjoy the precise steering, still relish the power (although always well down after idling at lights for a few minutes - even in these 20 degree C conditions), but the giant-killer handling and performance are not on display. And in their absence, the generic Impreza budget items take on more significance...
Retrospect
Does the STi live up to the hype? Yes it does. Here is a car with phenomenal cornering and performance capabilities, a tractable, liveable package put together by people who obviously love to drive. And if at times the car feels a little like an aftermarket package, that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the only things that we can think to add are some really big brakes.
As a performance car, it's already just so damn good.
