WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER ROAD
A half-million-pound Impreza might seem laughable, but with its WRC DNA the Prodrive P25 is no joke. Stephen Dobie struggles to contain it
PHOTOGRAPHY: DEAN SMITH
Petter Solberg, left, and David Lapworth. Solberg lifted the 2003 WRC title with an Impreza
HD widescreen driver display. Above: electronics and mapping are where progress has really been made since the ’90s
This is our kind of restomod. While the world goes gaga for million-pound-plus Porsche 911s with reimagined bodies, perhaps something with proven motor sport nous is how to convince folk like us that a retired icon warrants a comeback.
The Prodrive P25 is exactly that. Ostensibly it’s the old Subaru Impreza STI 22B road car, but modernised for the 2020s. Sounds too easy. And it is. Because in reality it’s something else entirely. With the team of people behind it, we ought not be too surprised. What you’re essentially looking at is a late 1990s WRC Impreza with fewer stickers and two decades of technological evolution sprinkled sympathetically through it.
Prodrive is now almost 40 years old and has campaigned cars in almost every sporting discipline, though its rallying success is perhaps it’s greatest calling card. “David Richards [Prodrive founder] had a feeling we should look at doing a car for the road as well as our usual competition development,” engineering lead David Lapworth says.
Lapworth also headed up the halcyon days of Subaru’s rally team. “The nostalgia comes from Colin McRae competing in cars like this. Those two things slowly came together, but the hardest part was developing a road car for the boss while also protecting our motor sport DNA. Everyone has a different view on where the happy medium is; we think we’ve met it, though maybe the car leans more towards the motor sport side. We normally work tightly to regulations and rulebooks. Deciding how far we want to take things is a new skill to learn.”