Mike Kojima posted on October 19, 2009 17:17
A few months and one grueling 17 hour stint of airports and plane flights later we arrived in Australia. One of the first things we noticed after getting off the plane was the huge amounts of tuned WRXs driving around the streets of Sydney. You would see one every few minutes. The WRX has got to be the Honda Civic of the continent. After a day of acclimatization and lessons in Australian culture, which involved the eating a kangaroo, we were ready for some track testing. Note, Australians don’t really eat Kangaroos but some places serve it to tourists. Nevertheless, Kangaroo tastes good. The next day the real fun began and the Whiteline staff took us to Wakefield Park, a local racetrack that Whiteline uses for development testing. This alone impressed us. Many aftermarket suspension companies don’t do track testing with professional drivers and engineers. For some, a blast on twisty public streets does it.
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| You had better drive the cheap car until you learn how to shift with your left hand, rally champ Brett Middleton scolds. |
We were brought to the track in Whiteline's flagship vehicle of sorts, the P25. A P25 is a joint development between Whiteline and MRT, one of Australia’s top Subaru tuners. The goal of the P25 was to build a car that a successful businessman would buy to get around in Australia in lieu of some sort of super expensive sports touring machine. In Australia’s laid back culture, conspicuous displays of wealth are considered to be ostentatious and made fun of. With only 1/16th the population of America and about the same land mass, lightly populated Australia does have its share of rough back roads as well. Many of the smaller towns outside of the few urban areas have unpaved or rough asphalt roads. These sorts of conditions make the rally bred WRX a practical sports car. A well off person may very well choose a STi over a Porsche in Australia for these reasons. It’s this sort of condition that Whiteline's suspension kits are designed for. Conversely, many of the suspension kits from Japan are calibrated for Japans network of well-paved and maintained roads, hence the stiffer calibrations that we were used to seeing.
The folks at Whiteline and MRT had more in mind than building a practical sports car with the P25; it’s more like a practical supercar. The target was to turn just as fast of a lap time or faster at Wakefield Park than a Porsche GT2 while keeping a decent ride and having a perfectly tractable untemperamental engine. Whiteline developed the P25’s supple yet grippy suspension, while MRT handled the engine and brake development. MRT stands for Middleton Rally Team, named after Brett Middleton, champion rally racer and Whitleine test driver. MRT’s 2.5-liter motor has about 500 crank horsepower on pump gas and a broad and tractable powerband. In Australia you can buy a P25 from some Subaru dealers in a way much like purchasing a Saleen Mustang from select Ford dealerships in the States. If a P25 is purchased, the motor comes with a 6-month warranty, unheard of for an extensively modified motor.
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| Once I could shift it right, the P25 impressed me with its velvet hammer combination of civility and good old fashion kick ass. |