Posted Thursday, January 14, 2021 at 9:46pm

Looking Back At The First USDM Subaru WRX

The Subaru Impreza WRX and it’s big-winged brother, the WRX STI, have quite an extensive history. The current models, both of which you can buy new in 2021, draw on four decades’ experience on the world’s rally stages, where Subaru developed, tested, and fine-tuned its symmetrical all-wheel-drive system that, to this day, causes car-enthusiastic youths to foam at the mouth at the first sight of a snowy parking lot.
But the WRX’s story in the United States and Canada is a far shorter one. While rally drivers like Colin McRae were busy cementing Subaru’s legacy at the wheel of Subaru’s Legacy and Impreza WRC cars through the 1990s, North Americans were not given the same taste of turbocharged flat-four fury as the rest of the world: no turbocharged Subaru models were sold here, despite them having already become the stuff of legend in other markets like Japan and Europe.