Prodrive P25 Driven! The $500,000 Subaru Rally Beast of Your Dreams

A little more than 30 years ago I was standing at a Subaru testing facility in Japan, pondering my first drive of the company’s all-new compact car, the Impreza. Designed to replace the Leone, the Impreza was a typically quirky little car from Japan’s most individualistic automaker, its flat-four engine slung out ahead of the front axle, a layout that allowed both front-wheel and all-wheel drive at low cost.

Body styles included two- and four-door sedans, and a distinctive five-door wagon. Engines for the Australian-market cars I sampled were 1.6-liter and 1.8-liter, both naturally aspirated and making 96 hp and 108 hp, respectively. Standard transmission was a five-speed manual, with a four-speed automatic available as an option.

A big improvement over the Leone, the Impreza was a decent, affordable compact car whose available all-wheel drive stood it apart from its Toyota, Nissan, and Honda rivals. But it wasn’t, I concluded, a car that would set an enthusiast’s pulse racing. Right about then, the Subaru PR person announced: “We have a little surprise for you.” And into view it came, blue and softly burbling, gold wheels glinting in the watery sunshine. The Impreza WRX.

One quick drive was all it took: This was a fun-to-drive Subaru; a 240-hp Subaru you wanted to hurl down a gravel road, sliding through the turns, spitting rocks from all four wheels; a Subaru for the enthusiast. Subaru had enjoyed some modest success in rallying with the tough little Leone. But the Impreza WRX was the first production model that sought to overtly link Subaru’s road cars with rallying—the WRX name, said company insiders, stood for World Rally eXperimental.

And now, three world driver’s championships, three world manufacturer’s championship, and 46 wins in World Rally Championship events later, I was about to drive a tribute to the most iconic of the five generations of WRX variants to hit the road since 1992—the 1998 Impreza 22B STi.

The Prodrive P25 is most assuredly a Subaru for the enthusiast. It still has a flat-four slung out ahead of the front axle, but this one pumps out a muscular 440 hp. Its all-wheel drive layout is familiar, but is now managed by a sophisticated, rally-tuned center differential. It looks like a 22B, but almost every panel is carbon fiber. Oh, and it costs about half a million bucks.

That’s a bunch of Benjamins. But the Prodrive P25 is no ordinary Subaru. In fact, it’s technically not a Subaru at all. The clue is in the name: Prodrive is the British-based motorsport company that ran Subaru’s world rally team in the 1990s and early 2000s, designing and engineering the Imprezas driven by rally superstars such as Colin McRae, Richard Burns, and Petter Solberg.

The P25 bit? That references the fact the iconic 22B, 400 of which were built, was launched by Subaru 25 years ago as the homologation basis for the Prodrive-developed Impreza WRC97 rally car.

Prodrive and Subaru ended their 18-year association when the Japanese automaker pulled out of the World Rally Championship at the end of 2008. But Prodrive still knows more about building the ultimate Impreza than anyone else on the planet. As the P25 shows.

The P25 is based on a lightweight Impreza WRX STi bodyshell, but 75 percent of the exterior panels are carbon fiber. Underneath is an adjustable suspension with improved geometry, lightweight linkages, and Bilstein shocks. Massive AP Racing disc brakes nestle behind Prodrive-designed 19-inch forged alloy wheels shod with Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires, 235/35 front and rear.

That big rear wing isn’t just for show: Prodrive R&D director Dave Lapworth, who engineered the winning Impreza rally cars driven by McRae, Burns, and Solberg, says it produces about 270 pounds of downforce at 100 mph.

The 2.5-liter turbocharged flat-four under the hood is based on the EJ25 engine used in the 2018 STi but is hand-built by Prodrive and features a host competition-spec upgrades such as forged pistons and steel rods, special camshafts, ported cylinder heads, a new turbocharger, new inlet and exhaust manifolds, and a baffled sump. Other improvements include a revised fuel system, motorsport-derived Bosch electronics, a high-capacity cooling pack, and an Akrapovic exhaust system with an active muffler bypass valve.

The engine makes its 440 hp at 6000 rpm and produces a hefty 457 lb-ft of torque from just 3000 rpm. It drives all four wheels through a Prodrive-built six-speed sequential automated manual transmission and an electronically controlled active center differential. Three different drive modes are available: Road, which has a softer throttle feel and dials back the available horsepower; Sport, which sharpens the throttle and corrals all 440 horses under the hood; and Sport Plus, which enables a rally-style anti-lag system and a launch control function.

The idea behind the P25 was to build a car that delivered WRC levels of performance yet could be driven on the road, says David Higgins, who won six Rally America and two American Rally Association championships driving for Subaru Rally Team USA. It’s time to find out how close the Prodrive team has come to hitting that target.

The flat-four fires up and settles into a fast, crackly idle that’s nothing like the throbby basso beat of a regular WRX STi. There’s a clutch pedal, but no shifter, just a massive single fixed paddle on the right-hand side of the steering wheel that you tug to shift up and push to shift down, working with the kinematics of the car. This setup is straight out of a WRC car: It’s designed to be easy to find when you have an armful of opposite lock on a gravel stage and need to grab another gear.

Foot on the clutch, tug the shifter. First gear. The by-wire clutch has zero feel. There’s no bite point, and the only way you know it has engaged is when the P25 starts to creep forward, the engine software slightly increasing the revs so you don’t stall. The good news is that from here on in, you only need to touch the clutch pedal again when bringing the car to a halt.

Out onto the tight, twisting, and bumpy tarmac, left foot hovering over the brake pedal. I try a couple of forceful squeezes to test the feel as I’d been warned the pedal required a determined shove to wake up the big AP Racing stoppers. The pedal is firm and hard, just as in the GT3 race cars I’ve driven, but respond precisely to the pressure applied. Good. That’s exactly how competition brakes should feel. My only gripe is that I’d like the pedal to be bigger, and more to the left, and the clutch pedal smaller, as it is in many GT3 race cars.

“When you open it up, it really comes alive,” Mark Higgins, older brother of David, a three-time British Rally Champion (rallying is clearly in the Higgins’ blood) and the man who hurled a modified WRC-spec Impreza around the daunting 37.7-mile Isle of Man TT course at an average speed of almost 129 mph, had said before I had slid behind the wheel of the P25. And when the tach readout on the digital dash flashes past the 3000 rpm mark, that’s exactly what happens. Especially in Sport mode.

Driven slowly, the P25 feels tight and edgy, all sharp vertical motions through the suspension and mechanical noise from the drivetrain, like a race car grumbling its way down pit lane. But, just like a race car, the harder you drive the P25, the smoother it gets.

Pace brings rhythm, and the grumbling becomes a conversation: “C’mon, let’s go a little deeper under brakes here. Get more aggressive on the turn-in. The rear end will start to rotate, but you can catch it with power. Feel it? Now short shift and use all that torque through the fast right-left. Yeah, great.” The Prodrive P25 encourages you to push and rewards quick and decisive inputs through the steering and pedals.

The suspension’s revised geometry and upgraded springs and shocks and roll bars play their part, of course, but the secret sauce in the P25 is the electronically controlled center differential. The front to rear torque split is nominally 50/50, but the clutches in the diff help instantly modulate the intensity of the torque distribution.

“The center diff does a massive job improving stability under heavy braking into a corner,” says R&D director Dave Lapworth. But that’s not all. Though the P25 visually echoes an earlier era of the WRC, the diff allows the car’s basic chassis setup to more closely mimic contemporary WRC machinery. “The whole diff strategy is based on our rally experience,” Lapworth says.

In simple terms, the P25 is set up to behave initially like a front wheel drive car on corner entry, responding aggressively to initial turn in. Once you’ve initiated the turn, however, the slightly softer rear suspension setup will create mild oversteer. The center diff then allows you to make the most of the weight transfer to the outside rear wheel and the cross-axle traction afforded by the rear limited slip diff when you go to power, punching the P25 hard out of a corner.

That meaty torque curve means you don’t have to walk a fine line between using peak revs and the digital instrument display dissolving into a screen-wide supernova of red as you kiss the 6500 rpm rev limiter. Like all WRC cars the P25 is a torque monster; you can use it to grunt out of corners. More important, it’s light, tipping the scales at less than 2500 pounds. “It only has 440 hp, but the low weight is a critical factor,” says Mark Higgins. “That’s what makes the car feel sharp.”

How sharp? Well, the Prodrive guys were targeting a 0-60mph acceleration time of 3.5 seconds using launch control and were pleasantly surprised when the P25 nailed it in just 2.8 seconds in early testing. Though speed limited to 150 mph the P25 has proven itself to be quicker than a Porsche 911 GT3 RS on the tight and rough tarmac tracks at the former GM proving ground at Millbrook, England, Higgins says.

The Prodrive P25 really does deliver on the premise of being a road car with the performance of a WRC car. But like all such highly focused track-oriented machinery – like the 911 GT3 RS and the McLaren Senna, for example—buying into the road car part of the proposition does require making some allowances. You can drive the P25 on the road. But would you want to?

In truth, road-tipping the P25 would be a tad tiresome, but it’s fine to drive out and back to your local track day, or for a before-breakfast blast along your favorite driver’s road. And for those joyous few hours, this sublime celebration of the ultimate Subaru will give you a taste of what Colin McRae, Richard Burns, and Petter Solberg experienced when they stormed a special stage in their WRC Imprezas.