I really wanted a blue one – Subaru’s World Rally Blue is most famously associated with their World Rally Championship (WRC) Team (well, duh). So when I began looking at the used market, I at first ignored the WRX I ended up buying. Silver was, I thought, a bit boring. I found a blue one on autoTRADER.ca and went to take a look.
Pre-purchase mechanical inspections are a good idea when buying used. More important than that? Trusting your gut. I wouldn’t buy a car from anyone I wouldn’t let hold my kid, and the bleary-eyed surfer dude who showed me around his medium-condition Subaru – broken side-mirror, tear in the seat bolster, scratches on the rear – was a few gears short of a five-speed. Pass.
 2002 Subaru WRX SportWagon. Click image to enlarge |
The guy driving the silver car, on the other hand, was a bit of a perfectionist. He was fussy, and the tiniest bit difficult to deal with when negotiating. Perfect.
And so, she was mine, and it was time to begin the tinkering. It’s fine to buy your cars off-the-rack and keep them in factory trim, but I’ve always had the modification bug, ever since I figured out that more boost = more fun. For the Subaru, I’d set aside funds for some professional automotive tailoring, and off the car went to Subaru experts Rocket Rally, in Squamish, BC. These guys both build privateer rally specials and are in charge of Subaru Canada’s rally team, and they know their stuff.
Pat Richard, expert tuner and a phenomenally talented driver to boot, fiddled with my car’s programming as it sat on a four-wheel dyno machine, hooked up to fans, cords and monitors like a patient in intensive care. He would do so on a further two occasions as I added things to the car.
The result? An extra 60 hp and a totally different driving experience, practically free of turbo-lag. Beefed up sway bars and end-links were also fitted, as was a freer-flowing exhaust that kept the factory muffler for a bit more stealth, and I put in a rear-mounted strut brace with quick-release linkage so that cargo-hauling wasn’t compromised.
  2002 Subaru WRX SportWagon. Click image to enlarge |
While many more tweaks would be added over the years, this was probably the best bang-for-buck upgrade the car ever received. It cornered flat, scooted off the line with aplomb, and still had a reasonably comfortable ride. I took it to track days, we hurtled along mile after mile of gravel in a late-afternoon sunshine in the hunt for hot springs North of Pemberton, we loaded it up with gear and drove 7,000 km on a side-road-centred round-trip to Los Angeles without spending more than ten minutes on the I-5.
As I’d hoped, my wife fell in love with the thing too. She dubbed it “Roary,” for the sound of the offbeat rumble that unequal headers give a flat-four engine: wub-wub-wub-wub-wubwubwubrrrrrrMMMMMMM!
And so, Roary became a sort of Swiss Army Knife for the road, hauling paddle-boards and bikes, crammed full of thrift-shop find furniture, covered in mud from fording a mucky creek bed. I kept adding stuff.
 2002 Subaru WRX SportWagon. Click image to enlarge |
As she now sits, my – our – WRX is running the turbocharger off an Australian-market STi and making somewhere around 330 hp, which it does in a furious surge, air whooshing through the large-bore intake like the sound of Zeus trying to finish the last of a White Spot milkshake. It’s lowered on adjustable Koni struts paired with progressive springs that provide only a mild drop, and I’ve gone through the rest of the chassis adding braces, polyurethane bushings and other suspension tweaks. I bought a set of BBS wheels from a 2004 STi (these are the only year that will fit as the WRX has a different bolt-pattern than its more powerful cousin) and painted them myself. They look okay – from about fifteen feet away.
