Hatchback Subaru Impreza Sti
Boy, didn’t the purists howl. Their beloved sedan Impreza had warped like some B-Grade monster into a hatchback. The first pictures on the internet had many people foaming at the mouth, but as the Porsche Cayenne has unfortunately proven, car companies feel better about making money than pleasing the fan base, and so we’ve got a hatchback Impreza.
Now I’ve already driven the standard hatch and the WRX and found them to be quite good cars. The emphasis is on convenience and comfort rather than outright sportiness, which will probably result in more sales to a wider customer base, but what about the STi?
This is the hard core, do or die, ultimate rally machine. The eternal competitor to the Mitsubishi EVO. More virtual blood has been spilt in electronic games over these cars than any others. You’re either on the Mitsi side or the Subie side, and now Subaru has gone and thrown might what be an exceptionally large spanner in the works.
The new STi is nothing like the last. Yes it has a 221kW 2.5 litre turbocharged engine, full time four wheel drive and an adjustable centre differential, but after that virtually everything is different, and to step from the previous STi to the current is like switching from a jet boat ride to a canoe.
Well, that’s maybe too extreme, but it does illustrate the difference between the two cars. The new Impreza STi is much easier to drive than the old, and it doesn’t insist on turning the contents of your stomach into a bubbling spa pool every time you hit a bump.
But what most people don’t realise is that there’s such a thing as suspension that is too stiff. Talk to any racing team worth their salt, and they will tell you they stiffen the suspension as much as possible and then wind it back towards the soft side.
Hard suspension means the wheels won’t travel faithfully over bumps in the road, and your car begins to skip across ridges and imperfections in the road, which is exactly what the old STi did. The new one is softer, with more wheel travel, and as a result the tyres stick to the road much better.
On a track, the new STi is slower than the old – as many magazines have proven, but out in the real world you need to stick to tarmac that sometimes resembles the surface of the moon and that’s where the new STi shines. I’d advise against fooling too much with the adjustable differential, which would be useful if you spent half your life on gravel, as when you lock it fully up all you get is lots of tyre scrub at the front.
Better to let the automatic setting sort everything out – for one thing it reacts about three zillion times quicker than you can. So there you have it, a car that’s softer, but not necessarily worse than the car it replaces. Ardent fans of the STi lifeline will not like this car – it’s softer than the old, but in many ways and in the real world it’s more capable than ever before.
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