REPORTING FOR DUTY

OUTBACK HEADS TO COTY AS AN ALL-PURPOSE LOGISTICS VEHICLE

LAST MONTH, I signed off hoping that I’d get the chance to take the Outback further off the beaten track and boy, I wasn’t disappointed! You see, the next issue is the Wheels Car of the Year edition. This year, the team headed down to the Australian Automotive Research Centre, located near Anglesea on Victoria’s Surf Coast. The AARC is a phenomenal venue, set in a spectacular setting.

It is a fair hike from Melbourne, though, and with 20 cars, six judges and a stack of content to be made, COTY is quite the operation, requiring plenty of additional personal and support vehicles. And so, my supremely practical Outback was commandeered by photographer Alastair Brook for the duration.

“I had the choice of a Ford Ranger Raptor and the Outback,” says AB. “They both had the room and dirtroad capability I was after, but for me the Subaru was the pick, because I’d rather do tracking shots out of the back of a wagon than a ute!”

Wise beyond his years, this lad.

With ‘my’ car pressed into COTY service, I stuck my hand up to help out as well and why not? Five days with the latest and greatest vehicles on the Aussie market, pushed to their limits on a stack of different surfaces by some of the best minds in the biz? It’s any inquisitively minded car lover’s dream.

Not that my brief was particularly glamorous. Most of my time at COTY was spent driving cars for transport stages or photography, lugging gear and helping to feed and water the editorial masses.

I also chauffeured Alastair around whenever necessary and spent some time in a silver Outback Touring that was part of the COTY testing.

The real bonus of all this was that I got to put the Outback through its paces on dirt roads. Given that I really enjoy hustling the Subaru on tarmac, doing the same on the gravel was even better. And when I did get the back end out too far, the ESP intervened and corrected me without fuss.

I even got to try a couple of full panic stops on the gravel. You can check out the actual COTY data on this next month, but for mine, on an unsealed surface, the Outback pulled up straight and as quickly as you’d like from a family car.

While this was fun, I’m a mere novice on the rough stuff, so I lobbed the keys to 4x4 Australia Editor Matt Raudonikis for his feedback. Matt took the Outback for a burn on both the AARC’s 9km ‘second-class surface’ and on a twisty ribbon of hotmix, then reported back in.