Reign Forester
“A SPECIALIST TUNED FORESTER S WOULD BE AN AWESOME LITTLER SLEEPER”
You mention lots of great cars in t his great magazine, but has anyone looked at the Subaru Forester S edition made around 2010/11. I own one I bought new and it’s a great, great SUV. It has t he same engine as the WRX of the day, and with a couple of minor mods, you soon get the same power as an STi. Modifications which, of course, I have done.
Once the turbo is up and boosting, it’s a seriously quick car. It was $ 50k new, but compared to some of today’s cars, it seems a great buy, and second hand they are reasonably priced. The only downsides are a small petrol tank and average f uel economy.
At t he lights, people t hink: Oh it’s just another Forester. Until I absolutely blow them away.
Subaru never made an STI wagon, but t his is probably as close as we will ever get.
Also do you know how many were sold in Austra lia. I have tried but can’t seem to f ind t his info. Ash Matthews, Email YEP, I remember these when they were new and the over-riding impression was that it was a great car in most respects. The bigger, 2.5-litre engine was actually a slightly detuned version of the WRX mill and gave the thing some real punch while the Forester body was still all about practicality (if not actual svelte looks).
Meantime, the price was a bit scary and the interior was made from those terrible plastics Subaru was persisting with back then.
The five-speed auto was deemed a bit off the pace for the time (when most of its competition had at least six gears) and the fuel consumption was seriously crook, but explainable when you looked at the pace the thing could generate. Ultimately, though, the handling was limited by the same factors that limit any other SUV; that jacked up stance equals a higher centre of gravity and that meant body roll at speed. You can’t beat physics!
Anyway, good to hear that you’re happy with yours, Ash. And I’m not surprised you’ve wicked up the engine to full STi spec, because with the right tune that’s a pretty straightforward process that shouldn’t shorten engine life to any noticeable degree. Combine that with Subaru’s reputation for building a tough engine, and you’re on a winner.
Second-hand, these are even better value, but
THE DRILL
It always staggers me when somebody’s car runs out of oil over a period of weeks or months and the engine seizes. Okay, the engine going bang isn’t the surprising bit, it’s the fact that anybody can be so ignorant as to let their engine run out of oil. Me? When I’m on a road trip (or an off-road trip recently) I always do a quick under-bonnet check every morning before hitting the key. Most recently, this showed up a coolant leak from a cracked radiator – I was able to limp 900km back to Alice Springs to fix it. Had I not checked, you can guarantee the rad would have let go big time somewhere in the middle of the Gibson Desert. if anybody out there is shopping for one, I’d want to know exactly what mods have been made and who made them before I shelled out the cash. Tuning is a great way to bump performance, but unless it’s been done properly, you could wind up with a grenade. But a Forester S that’s been tuned by a switched-on specialist like Brett Middleton at MRT would be an awesome little sleeper.
Just make sure any used Subaru you look at has a full service history, though, as these engines won’t tolerate skipped oil changes. The oilways are pretty small and a top-end ticking from the lifters is the first sign that all is not well. Unfortunately, by then, further damage has already been done, so a tickety-tick Subie is one to avoid.
Don’t call me Lefty
I’ve been look ing to buy a muscle car for a few years now. I was excited when Ford released the Mustang in late 2015. I liked its DOHC motor but I would have liked it more if it was a 6.2, bringing it up to par wit h its rivals the Camaro and Hellcat.
Buy when I flicked through Motor magazine and saw that the centre console was still left-hand-drive, I was disgusted. I could not believe it! How can Ford sell a hotch-potch, half-baked, half-converted car into a right-hand-drive market? It seems I’d have to ask my passenger to apply the park-brake and look through the centre console for my licence while I mind t he cups.
How disgusting is that? If Ford has left such an obvious thing as the centre console unconverted
–a first, no other car manufacturer has ever done that – then what else have they left unconverted? I’ve been a Ford man all my life. I’m looking away now. Which means I also looked at the new Camaro.
I was hoping that GM would build the factor y RHD Camaro and, look ing back, I could see that some General Motors product had a fair bit of f la ir and detailing.
Some of the Cadillacs were outstanding (the
`58 comes to mind) and if they were to build a RHD Camaro, I knew it would be perfect. But horror seems to be follow ing us around here in Oz.
Instead of a factor y RHD Camaro, something t hat would hold its va lue in years to come, we got a LHD Camaro converted to RHD by HSV. What a load of crap ! No wonder people are ask ing $700,000 for a Phase 3 Falcon… there is nothing to ta ke its place.
at the thought of losing our own home-grown car industry (one that served us pretty damn well, I would have thought) it’s also true that not all is lost.
Thing is, while I empathise, I can’t actually agree with some of your points of view. Let’s start with the Camaro RHD drive conversions HSV is doing in Melbourne. My own feeling is that it’s pretty harsh to be calling this process half-baked or that the end product amounts to an aftermarket converted car. See, these Camaros are being sold through Holden dealerships, so you better believe that GM head office in Detroit is satisfied that the quality and design of the conversion is just as good as the factory’s. For that reason, I don’t think the end result is a compromise in any way, nor do I believe that it will have any effect on the retained values of these cars. Certainly the end result carries the full GM factory warranty of any other brand-new GM product.
I’ve actually been through the HSV factory that does the conversions (which started with the RAM Truck product a couple of years ago). Frankly, it was very impressive. Any welding is done with proper jigs for correct alignment and wherever possible, HSV was using parts from the RAM’s original suppliers in the US. A great example was the steering box which needed to be a mirror-image of the LHD unit. Instead of finding a cheap supplier somewhere, HSV contacted the OE supplier of the LHD RAM steering box in the States and contracted it to build a RHD version of the same component. So quality was never going to suffer. In fact, you could argue that the reassembled (by HSV) trucks were actually of better build quality than the ones that arrived in containers as LHD Rams.
The Camaro involves a lot more disassembly for the conversion, so it’s not a simple process (which is why the Camaro costs more than the Mustang which is available ex-factory in RHD). But it’s important to remember that conversions are much better engineered these days. Another example is the work being done by Crossover Conversions (also in Melbourne) which is converting Dodge Challengers, Vipers, late Ford F-trucks and others with very impressive results. Fundamentally, I wouldn’t have a problem with any of these cars in terms of their integrity, design or build quality. And let’s face it, if the only way to get your hands on a new Camaro is to have somebody like HSV convert it, is that so bad?
I’d also argue with your statement that the centre console in the new Mustang is the only time a car-maker has taken the easy way out when switching from left to right-hand-drive. I’ve driven plenty of cars where the park-brake lever has been on the wrong side of the console, and most of those have also been factory right-hand-drive models. And what about indicator switches on the left-hand-side of the steering column? Or ignition switches on the `wrong’ side?
Hell, I drove a US-made, factory-RHD SUV once that still had the LHD `driver’s’ foot rest in the passenger’s footwell!
“THE HIGHWAY PATROL CAR NAILED THE CELICA AT SOME INSANE VELOCITY”
My experience has also been that these things that might annoy you greatly in the first place, don’t produce such wrinkles in your psyche a few weeks down the track. So do me a favour, Peter: Go down to your nearest Camaro and Mustang dealer and drive an example of each with an open mind. I reckon if you’re honest about it, those lovely big V8s and rear-drive platforms will soon be making a bigger impression than which side the console is hinged on. My pick? Thanks to the price advantage and the retro looks, my money is on a five-litre Mustang with a manual gearbox. Probably that techy looking silver colour. Although the metallic blue is very tempting, too…
She’s a-mine
Just wanted to let you k now I bought the Triumph Dolomite Sprint featured in your October 2016 article and t hat it’s on t he road to recover y. It now has a newly restored subframe, front suspension, and the engine and gearbox are now back in the car. The bra ke calipers and tandem master cylinder have a lso been rebuilt.
The welding on the suspension towers is old welding from an attempt to strengt hen t he car for ra lly ing. I have ground t he welds down a bit but they are st ill untidy. Have to live wit h t hat I t hink. Still a long way to go but getting t here.
HEY DON, nice to see that the leads we publish are actually working to bring old cars and new owners together. Yours wouldn’t be the first car to have a few home-made modifications made in the name of rallying or racing but provided the mods haven’t reduced the car’s structural rigidity, then maybe living with a slightly untidy set of strut towers aint so bad.
I’ve never had much to do with Dolomites but I do confess to being a big fan of their styling. That Michelotti styling has aged remarkably well and I put the Dollie in the same basket as the BMW 2002, the Alfa Giulia, Mazda 1500 and the Volvo 144, that had simple but elegant glasshouse that stamped them as classic three-box designs.
My most vivid memory of a Dolomite was many, many years ago on a fairly empty road between a big town and the little town where I worked as a young dogs-body on a newspaper. One of my jobs was to drive the paste-up pages from my town to the printing shop in the big town. For this, I was issued the company Sigma wagon, a 2.6-litre, five-speed manual with no documented top speed (it would just keep winding out). This particular day, I got into a proper road race with a 1600cc Celica and a Dolomite Sprint (like I said, this was a l-o-n-g time ago). I had the top end, the Triumph had the jump out of corners and the Celica simply had a driver with huge bollocks. Which was no help when the highway patrol car came over the brow and nailed the Celica at some insane velocity. Me and the Dolomite slunk off in the distance, watching our mirrors and sweating. And no, you couldn’t do it now.
The Dolomite engine story is interesting. Saab was working on a new four-cylinder engine in the 1960s, but had run out of development money. So, it agreed to hand over the work to Triumph to finish the development and build the engine, providing Saab with 50,000 units. And before anybody out there poo-poos the engine, remember it was good enough to be the basis of one of the first production turbo cars (the Saab 99 Turbo) as well as one of the first modern multi-valve engines in the 16-valve Dollie Sprint.
Meantime, is anybody else spannering up their dream car at the moment? We’re looking for Reader’s Resto feature fodder, so get in touch and send a few photos. Don, let us know when your Sprint is up and running and we’ll tackle a feature on it, too.