SUBARU IMPREZA

OUR PICK 1999 Subaru Impreza RB5 £15,000

Ignore anything non-turbo or diesel, right? Then you’ll find ‘Impreza’ is a catch-all term for a basket of ruthlessly effective 4WD stage-hands. By the way, some of those latter WRXs aren’t officially Imprezas, but who’s counting? Across the four generations you get to pick from a broad spectrum of characters and images. Fly under the radar with a silver wagon, or go the full McRaeBurns: blue saloon slash gold wheels slash wide arches.

The first generation of mid-Nineties Impreza Turbo might be 25 years old but still has a distinctive magic. It starts life softish but later iterations get harder and grippier. They all share wonderfully balanced and playful cornering and surprisingly talkative steering. The ride on most of them is easier than you’d expect, too – certainly by today’s comparisons.

And yet however lovely the chassis, what defines the Impreza is the flat-four. Its cheery blather and any-revs swoop always wipe a smile across your face. It began with little more than 200bhp, but that soon climbed, especially for the various WRXs and STIs. They went towards 300, and that was enough – beyond that, turbo-lag grew comical.

The Impreza is a totem of the turn-ofthe-century rally scene, when massive manufacturer involvement and huge crowds fertilised the development of the cars, and the rules circled that development back into the showroom. For me, it’s the MkI two-doors: the 22B if you can find it (though the set-up was brutal) or the one with all the Prodrive fairy dust: the epic, life-affirming P1. Later on, Cosworth did a version, too, the CS400, but that kinda overshot the runway.

So the Impreza evolved with a blizzard of variants and sub-species – space here absolutely does not permit. If you’re valuing a car based on originality, be prepared to do endless homework on what its spec should be, followed by diligent verification that it does indeed tick all its boxes.