LuxuryCarMagazine En Luxury Car Review and News
To many, STI means nothing. To a few, it’s the damned neighbour’s kid’s loud car and to him, and fewer still, it’s a story about racing in some of the most gruelling of conditions, going fast and building legends.
Subaru Corporation, previously known as Fuji Heavy Industries, founded the company in 1988 in order to handle the companies burgeoning motorsports aspirations, in particular rallying. Success came early on thanks in large part to Subaru’s association with the legendary British motorsports company called Prodrive. Within 10 short year, Subaru and their prepared cars (WRX, then Impreza 555 and finally, the STI) had garnered a huge of podium finishes and three consecutive Constructor’s Championship in the World Rally Championship.
In 1998, in order to celebrate and commemorate the three championships and the company’s 40th anniversary, Subaru commissioned the now the mythical 22B STI. Officially, just shy of 450 of these 276-horsepower (on paper and as per the gentleman’s agreement but far more in the real world) were built and sold in a number of markets worldwide. To give you an idea how rare and desirable this wide-bodied Impreza is, one sold at auction in May of 2016 for a whopping $120k.
There are very few places in the world where one can actually see a 22B and one of them is Subaru Mitaka. This is the largest Subaru dealer in Japan responsible 11.1% of all Subarus sold in Tokyo. That’s 1 in 10 new Subies sold in Tokyo are purchased at this dealer. Subaru Canada brought us to Japan to drive the new Crosstrek but while we were in the neighbourhood, we were given a tour of the shop where many a Levorg, STI, WRX and one insanely pristine 1st generation Legacy RS turbo sedan was being worked on. The showroom is fairly typical complete with branded swag. A 1-43 scale model of sonic-yellow bug-eye WRX sedan was displayed and was coming home with me but sadly, they’d run out of stock. At that point, I though my day was ruined.
Now, however impressive that might be, it’s what’s upstairs that’ll get the Subaru fan-boy in you fizzing. It is here where one of the prototype 22B resides in permanence. It is parked alongside Colin McRae’s 1998 Sanremo WRC car and one of Petter Solberg’s WRC STIs. Normally, these cars are cordoned off however for we visiting Canadians, the 22B and McRae’s car were unlocked. Yes, I got to sit in car #000 of 400, set up my driving position, depress the clutch and move the very heavy shifter. From there, I slithered on over to Colin’s car and proceeded to do the same things, plus yank slightly on the handbrake lever. O glorious day.
Although we know only STI as a pumped up version of the WRX sedan, STI has branded a number of other products over the years including the Forester and the Legacy. STI continues to cultivate in-house after-market parts for the cars including strut bars, aero and much more. There are 50 engineers hard at work developing components to improve steering, stability, and refinement, if you can believe that.
We will shortly be able to sample some of their latest work with the coming of the BRZ tS and WRX STI Type RA. I for one am very much looking forward to it.
