Posted Sunday, January 25, 2026 at 9:45pm
From the April 2001 issue of Car and Driver.
We’d been driving around in the new Subaru Impreza WRX inventing errands on a Saturday just so we could push the gas pedal and watch the tach needle motor past 3000 rpm.
Layered atop the characteristic growl of the Subaru flat-four engine was the whine of a single Mitsubishi-supplied turbo cramming air into the little 2.0-liter four-cylinder at twice the pressure of the atmosphere. It sounds like the constant-pitch whine of straight-cut racing-transmission gears. It’s the sound fans of small performance cars have been waiting for—us included. The great unwashed out there will think the WRX is some mutation of a Neon or a modern-day Dodge Shadow, but who cares? We finally have that turbo.
Depending on your perspective, the Impreza WRX is either the new version of what was known as the Impreza Turbo in markets lucky enough to have received it, or an Impreza 2.5RS with the turbo power to match its pit-bull looks.
