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There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arms.
But there’s another, easier way of establishing whether someone is two spanners short of a tool box. Just ask them this simple question: “Are you wearing a Subaru rally jacket?” Because if they are, you will need to speak more slowly.
I’ll let you into a little secret. Each week, when Top Gear is on air, we prepare two scripts. One is a polysyllabic orgy of complex thoughts on the meaning of human happiness. And the other is full of words such as “tits” and “arse”. Choosing which one eventually gets used depends on how many audience members turn up in Subaru Imprezas.
No, really. If the audience is largely in tweed and Viyella, you can make them laugh with oblique references to Dickens and the iniquities of colonialism in 19th century Calcutta. If it’s a forest of Subaru baseball caps out there, we stick to genitals and spend the day skidding around the studio on banana skins.
Of course, there are intelligent Subaru drivers, but for the majority of them, there are only eight letters in the alphabet. WRX STIR and B.
I think the problem may be this. A Subaru Impreza is seen by the rallying fraternity as the golden-wheeled wonder boy. It was a Subaru that took Richard Burns to his world championship, and a Subaru with which Colin McRae became synonymous. Subarus are to rallying, then, what Ferrari is to Formula One.
And rallying, I’m afraid, is a sport for the terminally gormless. You stand there, on a frozen Welsh hillside, not knowing whether to drink the soup you’ve made or pour it into your wellingtons. And the evening is enlivened only when a pair of extremely noisy headlights whizz by, hurling a million bits of gravel into your face. The only good news about this is that your face is so chuffing cold you can’t feel the blood tricking out of all the open wounds.
What’s more, you do not know what sort of car the headlights were attached to. You do not know who was driving. And you do not know whether they were travelling faster than the previous set of headlights that spewed stones into your iced-up cheeks.
Rallying is the only sport on God’s earth where you watch the event live but do not know who’s won until long after you’ve got home and had a bath to remove all the mud that became stuck to you when you fell over in a Welsh wood at three in the morning.
The only possible reason for being there is to see someone called Stig Stigsson crash. Except you won’t, of course, because the rally is thousands of miles long and the chances of there being a prang right where you’re standing is remote. And even if you are lucky, you won’t actually see the impact because you’ll have been blinded by grit thrown into your eyes by Stig Magnesstig’s Citroën.
Of course, there is another way of going rallying, and that’s to take part. This is very simple. You buy a car that costs thousands of pounds. You then have that car tweaked and prepared, which costs even more. And then you drive it at incredibly high speed into a tree.
Show me someone who has a Subaru then and I’ll show you someone who thinks rallying is fun. And that means we’re almost certainly talking about a person who breathes through his mouth and has short legs, no forehead and one, possibly lacerated, eye.
Strangely, however, Subaru Imprezas have always been rather intelligent cars. They were so much more quiet and refined than alternatives from Ford and Mitsubishi. You got the impression that an Impreza would know how to hold a knife and fork. And whether to have its cheese before its pudding.
Whereas an Evo, you suspected, would goose your wife, eat with its mouth open and vomit into the sugar bowl during the coffee and mints. A Ford Escort Cosworth, meanwhile, would stab you just to get an electric ankle bracelet and an Asbo.
And now into the mix comes the new Subaru Impreza. I drove the WRX model recently and was terribly underwhelmed. It was too ugly, too soft, equipped like an Eskimo’s khazi and about as exciting as Tuesday. The car you see in the picture this morning, however, is what we’ve really all been waiting for. The STi version. The one with the flared wheelarches, four exhausts and almost 300 horsepowers.
First things first. The looks. And I’m sorry but I’m still not sold. The standard car looks like a lightly melted Rover 25. With its flared aches, this looks like a lightly melted Rover 25 with bingo wings.
Then there’s the interior. As is customary, the STi badge on the dash is pink and I’m afraid it really doesn’t go with the orange dials or the green indicator lights. It’s like a four-year-old has been let loose in there with a box of felt-tip pens.
Still, the vibrant colouring does at least take your mind off the fact that this is a £25,000 car that comes with fewer toys than an Ethiopian birthday boy. You know if a car maker is in trouble when, in its own brochure, it says the car is fitted as standard with locking wheel nuts and pneumatic bonnet struts. This is code for saying, “Sat nav’s extra.”
But of course the most important question is how the STi drives. And the answer is: provided you are the sort of person who can set the timer on a 1989 video recorder . . . it depends.
You see, down by your left elbow there’s a small panel featuring a number of buttons and acronyms that you won’t find in any other car. First of all, you choose what sort of throttle response you’d like. Then you choose from six settings how much power you’d like to go to the front wheels and how much to the back.
Or you can go for the auto setting, which unlocks the centre differential, sending most of the torque to the rear, or the Auto +, which sends it to the front. And now we get to the three-way vehicle dynamics control system, which turns the traction control system on, off or very off.
I have no doubt that on a track, when nothing is coming the other way and you can go beyond the limits, you will be able to spend many happy hours fiddling about, choosing exactly how you’d like to hit a tree. But you know what? On the road, even if you drive quite quickly, you can do whatever you like with any of these settings and it makes not a blind bit of difference.
I suspect the control panel is primarily designed as a talking point at Subaru owners’ club meetings. In the same way that the button that turns the traction control off in your car is something you mention to colleagues when giving them a lift. But you’d never actually use it.
Honestly? The only time I ever deactivate a car’s traction control is when I’m driving past a camera on Top Gear. On the road? Never. And so it goes with the STi. I pushed and prodded all the various buttons and, having realised they weren’t making much difference, put everything in auto and left them alone.
Strictly for fans In this mode, the STi is demonstrably better than the WRX. Harder, more taut and noticeably faster. There’s still understeer, in any setting, which was always a tiresome characteristic of the old car. But there is something new. The flat-four strum is gone. The new 2.5 litre engine just sounds boring and I must therefore recommend you opt for the Prodrive sports exhaust to liven it up a bit.
So even though Subarus are probably the most reliable cars made – they make Hondas look like South American dictatorships – the new STi doesn’t look or sound good, it isn’t equipped very well and it doesn’t excite like its bingo wings and four tailpipes suggest it will. Put simply, I did not enjoy driving it.
I think therefore you may have to be a bit dim to buy one. If you’re a Subaru fan with a full range of Subaru clothing in your wardrobe, you’ll probably love it.
_________________ Þórður '99 M5 SC // '89 M3 S85 // '04 Patrol GR  Alpina wrote: S85 er vondur mótor þó að hann sé kraftmikill...
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