Our favourite cars you can buy this month
SUBARU IMPREZA WRX STi S204
Year of manufacture 2006 Recorded mileage 106,000km Asking price €56,000 Vendor FS Automóveis, Prior Velho, Lisbon, Portugal; 00351 917 226 613; fsautomoveis.com WHEN IT WAS NEW Price £23,187 Max power 320bhp Max torque 318lb ft 0-60mph 4.5 secs Top speed 155mph Mpg 24
Prodrive’s wild, £552k, 440bhp, 25-off P25, a carbonfibre-bodied restomod built out of a 22B, has already sold out. But it brings up the age-old question about the Subaru Impreza: of all the myriad different versions, which is best? That depends on what ‘best’ means, but on a scale from Colin McRae to Baby Driver, if we were to slant more towards the nimble getaway-car antics of that 2017 satirical action film, I’d like to offer the S204 as peak Scooby. At €56,000, the example FS Automóveis has for sale is usefully cheaper than Prodrive’s P25, but on a par with other iconic variants such as the P1.
Being a second-generation ‘Hawkeye’ model, like the star of the film, the S204 benefits from 15 years of Impreza progress, including seven since the first S201. This limited-run series was created by the STi team as the ultimate fast-road Impreza, and arguably reached its zenith as the 2005-’06 S204.
Graduating from the WRX through the six-speed STi and lightweight Spec-C, the S204 had lavished upon it the most concentrated attention of Subaru’s performance department. Its 2-litre ‘four’ was hand-assembled and weight-balanced, the four-wheel-drive system was aided by the torque-balancing wizardry of the Driver’s Control Centre Differential (DCCD) system, and the suspension was thoroughly reworked. With the S203’s lower springs, revised dampers, thicker anti-roll bars and balljointed links, the S204 used novel ‘performance dampers’ on the front and rear strut-braces. Designed to absorb later
