First car I ever owned was a USDM Subaru Outback. It was the first car I ever raced, modified, totaled, rebuilt, slept out of during a brief homeless stint, and truly fell in love with cars with. I’d been saving up to STI swap it when I blew the engine and eventually had to sell it since I didn’t have the time, space, or funds to fix it and needed something immediately for a daily. It’s been the only car I ever regretted getting rid of. Fast forward to now, and in a much more stable place in life, I saw this on cars and bids. The Volkswagen I’d been dailying left a lot to be desired in terms of performance aftermarket, traction, difficulty to work on the car, and decided screw it, this is everything I’ve wanted in a daily and I have an unreasonable connection to these cars due to owning one during the hardest moments of my life. Turbo, all wheel drive, wagon, JDM, mostly unmodified, and only 67,000miles. I won the auction, flew to the east coast that weekend, to meet a stranger in a city I’d never been to, to buy a right hand drive car I’d never seen in person, and drove it the 1200 miles home before my shift the next Monday. So far that’s the best road trip of my life. On my way home just on the outskirts of Chicago, another city I’d never been to, I just happened to drive by a car show and decided to enter and won the best import car award (it helps that I was the only import amongst a sea of classic Mopars, Fords, and GMs.) got the car home with no issues and have been absolutely loving it ever since. The only mods it came with were a project lambda 91 tune and a retro HKS boost controller, everything else is stock. No dyno sheet, but best estimate is about 310-320hp on the butt dyno. I’ve completely redone the entire stereo system with new alpine speakers, tweeters, amp, subwoofers, and headunit. I did the wiring and built the box myself to fit as seamlessly into the trunk as possible, and so I knew how to fix it if something breaks or malfunctions. I threw some new wheels and tires on, sourced by martini works, and am now working on researching a big brake set up to make sure there’s nothing different with the JDM performance legacies than the USDM ones and what garage engineering I may need to do to make that happen. Other future plans are to swap the four speed auto to an STI 6MT, new turbo back exhaust (though I may need to fabricate it myself,) and new intake. I love how many looks this car gets when people hear the turbos spooling up and blowing off, watching their faces when they realize it’s an imported right hand drive, and the shock on their faces when they realized it absolutely RIPS.
