Stage fright

However good they look in photographs, it’s nothing compared to how they look in person. Curiously, you could peel away the numbers, the star cluster graphics and all the little decals and it would look just like a road car. The semi-slick Pirelli competition tyres might give the game away to some and the instant you peered inside the cabin, you’d know. But there is something deeply pleasing about how much like a showroom model it looks: a simple three-box shape, a single wing at the rear – large but not obscene – with wheels that perfectly fill their swollen arches. When car designers talk about stance, I tend to assume they are picturing a two-door Impreza WRC in tarmac spec with 18-inch wheels.

In a sense, rally cars from this era are more like MotoGP bikes than single-seater or Le Mans racing cars: strip them of their liveries and it would take a keen eye to recognise one from a car or motorcycle you might have at home. I suppose that makes them seem more relatable, more accessible than a Formula 1 car or a present day Le Mans Hypercar. Maybe we find it easier to imagine ourselves driving, or riding, rally cars and racing motorcycles because they don’t look quite so alien.

And maybe that’s why I prefer these late 1990s WRC cars to the current crop, which look more like off-road prototypes with their high wings and distended arches, and their endless aero flicks and spoilers, making them so unlike the sort of thing you might one day own.

But if you think these cars are going to be familiar or straightforward to drive because of how normal they look, you’ll be in for a shock. The first comes when you fire the flat-four into its moody, bassy idle and give the throttle pedal an exploratory blip. You expect a gentle rise in revs and a little more noise, but even the faintest hint of pressure on that pedal causes the engine to roar and the big exhaust to bark violently, shaking leaves from the trees as the needle in the rev counter leaps halfway around the dial. It is the first reminder that this is no normal road car, that it is every bit as uncompromising as any purpose-built racing car, and that you’re going to have to dig deep if you’re to operate this thing without being made to look and feel stupid.

Prodrive, which ran Subaru’s WRC programme so successfully between 1989 and 2008, developed new versions of these two-door Imprezas each year. They evolved gradually rather than standing still, the 1998 version introducing a trio of active differentials that put the power down more effectively and clawed more grip out of the mud, snow or tarmac, screwing the car into the surface so it could be fired along the road. A paddleshift transmission followed in 1999.

The 2000 car, the last of the line, which looked so like its predecessors, was actually very different beneath the skin. Optimised suspension geometry and designer Christian Loriaux’s obsessive attention to weight distribution meant it was a much faster machine. In fact, on its first test outing in Spain early in 2000, it went a second a kilometre quicker along the gravel test stage than its predecessor had done earlier in the day, equal to several minutes over the course of an entire rally.

This car’s roll cage looks spindly compared to thick latticework of scaffolding you find in the newest WRC machines. The seats don’t offer anything like the same side-impact protection either, while the banks of switches and toggles and the rudimentary communications equipment mounted directly ahead of the co-driver’s seat almost look like antiques. But the seating position is perfect, the Sparco chair and Sabelt harnesses holding you firmly in position while the suede-trimmed steering wheel presents itself eagerly at your chest.

This very car was used by Burns and Reid twice, once in 1999 on Rallye Sanremo and again a few months later in 2000 on the most famous WRC event of them all, Rallye Monte Carlo. The British pair won the third special stage that year, covering its 12 miles 1.5 seconds faster than local hero Gilles Panizzi in his Peugeot 206 WRC. They were second overall after day one, within striking distance of leader Mäkinen, and Burns was in a groove despite the treacherous patches of ice dotted along the otherwise dry tarmac roads. ‘The ice is a problem, but I’m getting good information and you can still go flat out if your ice note crew can tell you where to place the outside tyres,’ he said that evening.

Could he have gone on to win the rally? Perhaps, but the following morning, in bitterly cold conditions, his Subaru’s engine simply refused to fire up. He wasn’t alone. It dumped him and several others out of the rally for good.

Burns and Reid did at least prove that in the trickiest conditions on one of the most specialised events on the calendar, they had the raw speed between them and their Subaru to run with the best in the world. Appropriately, the following year, having finished third on Rally Great Britain to win their dust-up with McRae and Nicky Grist for that year’s drivers’ championship, Burns famously shouted to Reid through the intercom, ‘You’re the best in the world!’

The way this car’s engine responds to such fractional throttle inputs makes you realise just how compromised for comfort and usability road cars actually are. Quite rightly, of course, because this level of fury would drive you mad in no time at all. But so too do you begin to understand how drivers like Burns, McRae, Kankkunen, Solberg and those all-time greats who followed were able to drive the way they did. Skill, talent, bravery, commitment and all the rest of it, of course, but their cars were also designed by equally capable people to be driven that way. The machines and their creators deserve at least some of the credit.

The steering is just like the throttle – light and flighty, so you make whatever input you think necessary then feel this hyperactive, amplified response from below. There is no slack, no delay, no moment of deliberation as the doughy tyres and the rubber in the suspension and the compliance in the steering takes up the strain. Because there is none of that, just instantaneous response, only whipcrack alertness.

At some point during its later years as a privateer rally car, this example has had a H-pattern gearbox fitted in place of its original paddleshift item. It’s a dog ’box, so you don’t need to use the clutch pedal once you’re running, although I decide to because it’s kinder to the transmission. Even so, the gears bang in so hard and fast, always with a thunderous BANG that makes you jump, that you wonder how much time would be saved by fitting paddles anyway. The clutch pedal is reasonably weighty but the gearshift itself is light and easy.

The 2-litre, four-cylinder boxer turbo produces around 310bhp and 360lb ft, but the ferocity of the throttle response and the very short gear ratios make it feel like so much more. Initially the car charges along the road with the savagery of a modern Porsche 911 Turbo, but the gears are so tightly stacked that you’re grabbing the next one where the Porsche would continue to pull through a ratio. All the while the flat, aggressive blare from the engine and the rising whine from the gearbox flood the cockpit with a cacophony of tuneless, oppressive noises.

The ride is firm in asphalt trim, the brakes close to useless without no heat and the pedal rock hard; and any time you hesitate on the throttle, the whole car binds and grabs beneath you like it’s straining against a leash. It hates being driven that way, being forced to flow with traffic on the road or sit at low engine speeds. It wants so desperately to be thrashed, to be hammered the way only world-class rally drivers can. But even so, you begin to appreciate how these cars were able to find their way along a special stage quite so quickly. The power, the grip, the response, the immediacy in the steering, how quickly you can shift gears…you sense all of that, even on the public highway. It’s such an intense and physical machine to drive that you’re glad to hand it back, and you wonder what on earth it must have been like to spend days and many hundreds of kilometres in one.

I always love seeing photographs of these two-door Impreza WRCs, particularly with Burns and Reid on board. They wore similar helmets, silver with a thick orange stripe running front to back. In head-on shots, through the windscreen, you see one of those orange bands as a narrow rectangle, the other a fat square. You’re seeing one head looking straight ahead, focused unwaveringly on the road that meanders every which way into the distance, while the other points down, the eyes beneath the small peak trained intently on a book of pace notes, its contents delivered to the driver in a steady, precise stream of data.

Often I have wondered how two mere mortals could possibly guide a car along a rally stage at such electrifying speeds. Getting to appreciate, if only to some small degree, how outrageously capable their cars really are shines just a little bit of light onto that shadowy conundrum.

The Impreza will be auctioned this weekend by Bonhams at the Goodwood Members’ Meeting at 1pm on April 16, with a guide price of £430,000-£520,000

Photography by Bonhams and Barrie Downie