Autoblog

It was the early 1990s when Subaru went into the Porsche business. It wasn't nearly the pseudo-Porsche the Nissan NX 2000 was, but it could have been the result of a tryst between a 944 and an erstwhile 911. The SVX looked like a space capsule, and it teamed the brand's famed (even then) AWD prowess with a newly-developed flat-six. The price was high, squaring the SVX off against such awesome rivals as Supras and 300ZX Turbos, not to mention ponycars, which promptly blew the doors off Fuji's left-turn from the XT.

flatsix92, also known as Rob, dropped a few pix of his '92 SVX into the Flickr pool, and we took the bait. Of course, the car's not stock. It's hard to have a Subie coupe and not mess with it. The transmissions in these cars are apparently a weak link, but Rob's car had it's cog-swapper replaced before he got the car. He did fit a shift kit to the autobox, though, and while he was under there, he tossed on a Stebro stainless exhaust and custom wound springs. There's other tweaks, and that's one of the beautiful things about these cars, the enthusiast base is large and very supportive. The SVX was absurdly expensive for a Subaru in those pre-Impreza STi days, and in light of their short-lived transmissions, you can likely find these cars cheap. What we want to know is where does a college student (studying industrial design – good, minoring in video editing – run – that's what my degree's in, and look where it got me) pull together the scratch for books, tuition, a formerly 30-large coupe full of stuff to fix, upgrades for said coupe, and oh yeah, food?

Two more pix after the jump, along with instructions on how to get your car featured as a reader ride.

Alright... so you've openly lusted after the performance envelopes of road-bound rally cars like the Subaru WRX STi and Mitsubishi EVO IX MR, but you can't get around their frump four-door roots, or their look-at-me aerodynamic addenda. So what's keeping the two firms from building a lighter, more lithesome coupe?  Mitsubishi has little excuse, as it already has the rumptastic (if overweight) Eclipse in its fold, a car that was once upon a time known for its turbocharged hooliganism.

Subaru, however, doesn't have the same luck-- the last time it did a two-door coupe, the interestingly-styled SVX, it was an overweight, slow-selling cruiser, not a true performance car. So while enthusiasts have waited around for some time for the boys and gals at Fuji Heavy to pack their winning mechanicals in something smaller and sexier, it's taken the WRC wizards at Prodrive to deliver.

Seen here is the P2, a car that's been hinted about for some time, and Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear is the first scribe we know of to drive it... as well as suffer its ill-effects.

Based on Subaru's diminutive R1 supermini, but packing the drivetrain from the WRX STi with a bigger turbo, and the attractively 'New Edge with chunk' styled P2 puts 345 brake horsepower worth of smack down. The net-net? 0-60 mph in 3.8 seconds, and a top speed of 174 mph.

Better still, Clarkson figures, is the handling. The engineers at Prodrive have not only figured out some sort of indescribably complex anti-lag system for the turbocharger, they've gone and developed a driver-adjustable active center differential. While the latter trinket doesn't sound terribly different from a bog-standard STi's piece, the Subaru's is essentially a mechanical system, while the P2's is supervised and informed by all manner of sensors, including yaw, throttle position, and so on. The end result is a coupe that can be neatly tailored for the demands of the road and the driver-- safe as houses understeer, or tail-out antics. It all works so well that it makes Clarkson sick-- literally.

Sadly, according to JC, ProDrive has no plans to put the P2 into production. 

[Source: TopGear via YouTube]