In fact, some of you may have seen this car on YouTube with a Christmas tree on top of it. Today, P8 WRC is owned by the irritatingly stylish and linguistically sophisticated Max Girardo of Girardo & Co.
As for the car, well, it went on to have a life in Italy, where amongst its various pilots were none other than Ivan Capelli and Markku Alén. Amazingly, though, that was the last time the team would win the trophy.
This was still a championship-winning car, however, as Subaru won the manufacturers’ title in 1997, beating Ford by a significant margin. The end result is a surprisingly analogue rally car that requires plenty of involvement from the driver. What’s more, this was one of the last generation of WRC cars to have a manual, H-pattern gearbox. Although the original build sheet says ‘electro-hydraulically controlled differentials’, the reality was that this ran with a spool diff in the rear and the centre diff was often locked. However, unlike subsequent WRC Imprezas, this ’97 car doesn’t have complicated active differy. The engineers were also able to reposition the MacPherson strut suspension to enable increased travel for the Bilstein/Prodrive dampers. The two-door shell and accompanying CAD-penned integrated roll-cage increased torsional rigidity, while the total weight of the car is a governed 1230kg. David Lapworth and his team at Prodrive found more power and torque in the turbocharged 1994cc, flat-four engine and the spec sheets say that it is good for 310bhp at 5500rpm and 367lb ft at 4000rpm. So this car has the look, but mechanically it also has the moves. The overall stance is just fabulous aggressive yet also curiously friendly and approachable, in the way that early Evos looked but later ones didn’t.
The new rules allowed arches to be swollen, but they had to be smoothed-in with the bodywork rather than simply riveted on, giving the car an attractively cohesive appearance. Peter Stevens was responsible for the design and I think this two-door shape is the best looking of all the Imprezas. Prodrive embraced the possibilities of the new regs to launch this for the beginning of the season. The ingredients are the perfect blend of two eras of rallying as the cars shifted from Group A (such as the Mitsubishi Evo that Tommi Mäkinen was still using in ’97) to WRC regulations. ‘This’ is a 1997 Subaru Impreza S3 WRC 97 and I think it is probably peak Impreza. > The anatomy of a WRC car - history and tech from one of rallying's most competitive eras I’m not sure that it gets any better than this.
Plenty of power now and, as the momentum swings back the other way, there’s that upshift to fifth, keeping the slide going, accelerating through the bend, driver grinning, possibly even whooping. A fraction later a minimal amount of right-hand lock to get the car rotating, the unweighted rear swinging round to point the scooped snout into the open right-hander.įeel the front-right wheel brrrrrap over the rough kerb on the inside, a suspicion of left-hand lock to transition the drifting Subaru into the following left. Just as the lights on the dash indicate that fifth is on the cards there’s a swift press of the firm brake pedal, the whole car squirming slightly as the tall tread blocks of the gravel tyres deform against the tarmac. The flat-four is warbling angrily under the hard acceleration, filling the bare blue interior with its distinctive soundtrack.
Throw the lever at third, then fourth, each flyweight change accompanied by a heavy metal clunk as the fast-spinning dog ’box meshes.