RACE RETRO SPECIAL
Iconic Auctions’ Race Retro sale this Saturday will see a wide array of performance icons up for grabs, including this pair of rarefied rally rivals, which we’ve been putting through their paces
It’s almost impossible to talk about one without mentioning the other. Launched just two months apart in 1992, the Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution were adversaries from the get-go. but the world didn’t truly take note until their intense rivalry spilled out from the showroom floor and on to the world rally stages.
Following a period of dominance led by the Lancia Delta Integrale and then the Toyota Celica, it was Colin McRae’s Impreza and Tommi Mäkinen’s various ‘Evos’ that came to define the latter half of the Group Aera.
Team Subaru took the world rallying manufacturers’ championship laurels consecutively between 1995 and 1997, with McRae crowned drivers’ champion in 1995. Mitsubishi finally wrestled the manufacturers’ title from Subaru in 1998 with Mäkinen crowned drivers’ champ for four straight years between 1996 and 1999. As a pairing, the Japanese marques were untouchable.
To get a flavour of each car’s competitive nature, Iconic Auctioneers invited us to evaluate the pair featured here, which have been consigned in its Race Retro sale at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire this weekend.
Features editor Chris Hope got the keys to an Impreza P1 while staff writer Jesse Billington got behind the wheel of a special Zero Fighter edition of the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI.
Let battle commence!
BEST OF BRITISH
The P1 is a special machine – even within the impressive canon of first-generation Imprezas – but especially so for British enthusiasts.
Alert to the growing number of highly-tuned Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) cars arriving on our shores, Prodrive’s head honcho, Dave Richards, saw an opportunity. He wanted to offer a rebuttal that not only replicated as closely as possible the performance of the all-conquering competition cars that his company had engineered in partnership with Subaru, but also, unlike that swathe of grey imports, for it to be designed in Britain specifically for British roads.
The Impreza P1 was released in May 2000 – the same year that the first-generation Impreza would bow out. Prodrive had initially intended to limit its run of P1s to 500 units but such was the demand that the actual figure was doubled to 1000. Each P1 was based on the two-door bodyshell – making the P1 the first official ‘coupé’ Impreza to be sold in the UK – with an aggressive aero kit designed by Peter Stevens and all finished in the now iconic Sonic Blue.
The Impreza was already pretty awe-inspiring in standard form so the P1 wasn’t about homologating any further improvements – rather it served as a celebration
