The WRX badge has long been a touchstone for petrolheads. When Subaru unleashed the second-generation Impreza WRX on an unsuspecting public back in 2001, it redefined almost overnight what a performance car should look like. Sure there’d been things like the Sierra Cosworth and Escort RS2000 with their duck-bill rear spoilers, but there’d never been anything that mixed five doors and a big boot with anything like the Impreza’s level of cartoonishly aggressive styling. With it’s huge bonnet scoop and lairy rear spoiler, it looked like the sort of thing your dad’s Cavalier would look like if your adolescent self had access to a body shop, and Subaru knew that this made up a huge part of it’s appeal.
Sadly, things changed. As customer demand for more airbags, greater economy and more technological bells and whistles, Subaru found it difficult to marry the demands of a modern family hatchback with the hell-for-leather insanity now demanded by WRX buyers. The saner, fatter third-generation Impreza was never going to hold up against it’s predecessor, and with the fat required on modern hatchbacks now even higher, Subaru have made a bold decision when it came to the fourth: The Impreza WRX is no more, with the Impreza free to challenge the Ford Focus and Vauxhall Astra in the family hatchback market, and the freshly-minted WRX able to take up the mantle of iconic, full-fat, balls-out performance car.
So, how does it shape up? The answer is, very nicely indeed. The outsized hood scoop is back, as is the huge rear spoiler, albeit one that looks like it has a little more science behind it than the big square box of old. The rest of the car is a quality affair too – in fact, take off the trademark Subaru cartoonishness and it could almost pass in profile for a BMW M3, which I think is one of most aggressively beautiful cars on the market. The inside follows the same philosophy – sparser and less sophisticated than it’s rivals, the WRX cockpit is classic Subaru, with big chunky buttons for all the essential controls and nothing else. So what if you can’t have your texts read out or change your radio station with a hand gesture? If that’s what you’re looking for, why have you bought a WRX?
WRX buyers have always been willing to trade ticks in the options column for better numbers under performance, and the WRX STi definitely comes with a tasty stat sheet. It’ll take just 4.8 seconds to get you to sixty from a standing start, and the 305bhp engine will, with a whisper of tailwind, take you up to a hundred and sixty. It also has traditional Subaru four-wheel-drive, a suitably raucous soundtrack and, Subaru’s marketing blurb assures me, the same mix of solid base and tongue-waggling hoonability (not their words) that they could never have delivered in a car built on compromise.
With that level of performance and a price structure that sees a base model setting you back £28,995, Subaru are rightly pitching the STi a notch or two above entry-level performance fare like the Focus ST and Astra VXR. In fact, it’s chief rival is the ST’s bigger brother, the much-vaunted Focus RS, which promises bigger numbers but won’t begin delivering on orders for another few months, and that might well turn out to be key – thirty grand might be a little much for an impulse purchase the choice between a car now and a similar car in six months time is likely to lead plenty of buyers to a Subaru forecourt instead of a Ford brochure.
Outside of the STi badge, the WRX promises to retain traditional Subaru indestructibility and, for a performance car, low service costs. It also comes with gold wheels, Subaru blue paint and, if you’re bothered by such frivolities, four doors, a sizeable boot and dual-zone climate control. For the numbers it puts up, it looks like a steal, but the worry for discerning buyers will be whether Ford manage to translate the genius they’ve managed with the Focus ST into the more hardcore RS, leaving Subaru early adopters wondering if they’re driving around in the silver medal car.
Does the new, unshackled WRX match up to it’s esteemed bloodline? On paper, yes, and it certainly looks the part. As for how well that translates into real-world performance, I’m hoping the good people at Subaru UK will let me take an STI for a proper spin later this month.
