A blue-and-gold echo of rallying’s wildest years, built to turn gravel, boost and bravery into something you could somehow drive home.
By 1998, Subaru had achieved the sort of motorsport success that normally produces a commemorative watch, a jacket and perhaps a tasteful plaque. Subaru instead built a swollen-arched, two-door Impreza with a 2.2-litre turbo boxer engine and the visual subtlety of a rally car arriving sideways through your hedge. The 22B STI celebrated the company’s 40th anniversary and three consecutive World Rally Championship manufacturers’ titles. It became something more dangerous: a cult object.
Its shape was the first clue. Conceived as a road-going echo of the 1997 Impreza World Rally Car, the 22B wore widened blistered arches, an adjustable rear wing and Sonic Blue Mica paint over gold 17-inch BBS forged wheels. It looked less as though it had been styled and more as though someone had parked a WRC car overnight and discovered registration plates had grown on it. There were cleaner sports cars in 1998. There were also cleaner chainsaws.
Under the bonnet sat a 2,212 cc horizontally opposed four-cylinder, enlarged from the familiar two-litre unit and turbocharged through an air-to-air intercooler. Official output was 280 PS at 6,000 rpm, with 363 Nm at 3,200 rpm. Japan’s makers were still observing their famous 280 PS gentlemen’s agreement, a wonderfully civilised arrangement in which everybody promised restraint while apparently keeping their fingers crossed behind the dyno room door.
A five-speed manual sent power through permanent four-wheel drive. Bilstein inverted dampers, Eibach springs, wider tracks, 235/40 ZR17 Pirelli P Zeros and a very quick 13:1 steering rack sharpened the chassis, while kerb weight was just 1,270 kg. The point was never merely straight-line speed. It was how modest-looking numbers were attached to an unusually serious chassis.
The engine had the impatient character of old-school turbocharging. Below boost, proceedings were brisk. Once the turbo woke up, the horizon became considerably more interested. Yet the chassis was ready for it. Wide tyres, fast steering and four driven wheels let the 22B attack poor surfaces with the confidence of something that had clearly spent its childhood watching Colin McRae ignore perfectly serviceable roads.
McRae is impossible to separate from the mythology. Subaru’s blue-and-gold Imprezas, prepared by Prodrive, became defining competition cars of the 1990s, while McRae’s spectacular driving transformed Subaru from a maker of worthy all-wheel-drive machinery into a name teenagers pinned to bedroom walls. Richard Burns and other Subaru heroes deepened that legend, but the 22B captured the precise moment when rallying, road cars and popular culture all spoke the same noisy language.
Only 400 were officially offered in Japan, with export and prototype cars bringing the commonly cited total to 424. Demand was immediate. Today surviving examples can command six-figure sums, remarkable for a machine whose dashboard began life in an Impreza and therefore contains plastics developed with approximately the same emotional ambition as a microwave.
That plainness is part of the charm. The cabin does not pretend you have purchased jewellery. It gives you supportive seats, straightforward instruments, three pedals and a gear lever, then leaves the expensive theatre outside where the wheelarches live. Modern performance cars often work terribly hard to make ordinary speeds feel dramatic. The 22B does the opposite: serious speed feels like the natural consequence of being awake.
Its most important feature may actually be its proportions. The widened body and compact 2,520 mm wheelbase give the 22B a stance no later Impreza quite reproduced. It is short, broad and visually concentrated, almost as if the whole WRC era had been compressed between two axles. More than a rare GC8, it became the moment the road-going Impreza stopped imitating Subaru’s rally programme and turned into its physical memory.
The 22B is what happens when a championship trophy is given number plates. That is its Signature Line: the shape, engineering, scarcity and reputation all exist because Subaru had spent the previous years proving itself on gravel, snow and tarmac.
The irony is that many 22Bs now live in climate-controlled collections, polished carefully and driven sparingly, which is rather like preserving muddy rally boots in a glass cabinet. Their value makes the caution understandable. Their character makes it slightly tragic.
Ultimately, the 1998 Subaru Impreza 22B STI represents the point at which rally success escaped the special stage and became a road car with remarkably little dilution. It was crude in places, sophisticated where it mattered and gloriously uninterested in luxury. Plenty of cars are faster now. Very few make you want to find a wet forest road quite so badly.
