Backmarker Appreciation No.1: Subaru Impreza Wagon (JTCC)
Image credit: SAN-EI, as published on AUTOSPORT web
Backmarker Appreciation is a series of articles dedicated to the best of the worst. Cars that never achieved success, but deserve to be remembered for other reasons. The especially unusual, endearingly terrible, or simply those run on a shoestring budget, these are the overlooked curiosities from the back of the grid.
When the All Japan Touring Car Championship (JTCC) switched from Group A to Super Touring in 1994, it would’ve been fair to expect the series would feature the usual variety of cars that were starring all over the world under those regulations. JTCC had previously enjoyed plenty of cars not seen in other parts of the world, but given Super Touring’s tighter restrictions it seemed unlikely this would continue.
This wasn’t the case however; a very strong variety of interesting Japanese market cars quickly appeared, which gave JTCC a unique identity among other Super Touring championships. Evidently this wasn’t enough though, as by the late 90s the organisers had tweaked the regs slightly to create an evolved form of Super Tourers: still generally the same style of cars, but with slightly more open restrictions on the dimensions of the cars, far more aggressive wings, and overall just a little bit more spectacle.
By some margin the most unusual car to race in this era of JTCC was a rear-wheel drive Subaru Impreza Wagon, debuted by Subaru aftermarket parts manufacturer SYMS Racing in the 1996 season. An independent effort, going racing with a car that the company sold parts for seemed like a natural fit. The estate bodystyle was great from a publicity perspective too, but as Volvo had discovered a couple of years earlier in the BTCC it came with some drawbacks.
The introduction of rear wings to the Super Touring regulations in 1995 had been one of the contributing factors behind Volvo abandoning its estate plan, as they wouldn’t have been able to fit a legal wing to the car. Obviously this would put them at a huge disadvantage, and this was an immediate problem that the Subaru team also ran into. While all their rivals benefitted from rear wings, the Impreza was forced to run with a small and ineffectual lip spoiler as featured on the road car.
Not that this mattered particularly, given the woeful reliability issues the team suffered in their first season. Running a single car for a near-full season campaign, out of the 12 races they entered they failed to even make the start in five of them. Of the seven they did start three were non-finishes, and the four the car managed to complete it was down the back of the field. These sorts of teething problems are far from unusual for a new car though, especially one developed independently.
Having sat out the 1997 season, SYMS returned with an updated version of their Impreza for the 1998 season. With the JTCC regulations having been loosened a little by this point, the team were now actually allowed to run a rear wing like their competitors. In theory this should have helped close the gap; however the opposition had moved on substantially since 1996 too. The rest of the field consisted of Toyota Chasers and Coronas, as all the other manufacturers had pulled out by this point. These cars took full advantage of the more open regulations, and were fairly serious bits of kit.
Former CART and JGTC driver Hideshi Matsuda was hired to drive for the opening round of the season at Fuji. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that while their reliability issues appeared to be solved, the Impreza simply had no pace whatsoever. Despite being a more than capable driver, Matsuda qualified dead last - by some margin - and proceeded to finish ninth and last of those still running, having also been lapped, in both races.
Argentine driver Sebastian Martino stepped in to drive for the second round at Twin Ring Motegi, but it was much the same story as the opening round. Qualified last, finished last, lapped. The team turned up to the third round at Sugo and once again qualified last, but the Impreza didn’t start either race. That proved to be the end of its short career, as SYMS quickly pulled the plug on the project. In the years since the team is believed to have kept hold of the car, though it hasn’t been seen publicly for a while.
The Impreza Wagon might have been the very definition of a backmarker, but there’s something to be said for the creativity of the team. It takes real guts to build a car that’s quite so left-field when most teams would play it safe, especially when you don’t have any manufacturer backing. Sure, they didn’t manage to turn it into a competitive car; but I’ll always have an enormous amount of admiration for teams that try something different like this, regardless of whether it works out or not. These are the sorts of cars that make motorsport history so colourful: the Impreza Wagon might not have succeeded on the track, but it carved out a place for itself in the history books in a different way.
Note: This is a rewritten and updated version of an article I published on DriveTribe back in 2018, which is unavailable due to that site’s restructuring.
