So what sort of rally car did you go for then?

Group N, Group A, WRC, or just a road car which looks like a rally car

 

IIRC the original purchaser of my uk22b paid £39995, the imports were £5k more originally? Agreed, a low mile 22b might keep its price, or indeed increase. However, I doubt many on here are in a position to never take the car out for a spin or if they do, would probably have to pay for a hefty rebuild, which they all seem to have had at least one. Thereby detracting from future resale prices. It's certainly feels good to drive one about, and you're at the top of the Subaru food chain, but such 'frivolous' pleasures don't come cheap when in your heart of hearts you know any typeR sti will perform the same for nearly £20k cheaper.

 

you are right it will do the same job for alot less money,if your into anythin ,its nice to have the best one and I always wanted a rally car so I bought the best lookalike I could find.sorry ----- ****

 

Who are you calling an ****? Sorry, but if I wanted a rally car I'd go and buy a real one (easily for the money of a 22b) not a typeR with flared arches.

 

it wasnt for you if u read it look at the post before yours before you spill your cup of tea

 

You're clearly out of or depth here as well as being out of your tiny little mind.

The 22b is as close as you can get to a mainstream manufacturer factory built rally car.

There was nothing before it and there's been nothing close to it since.

As for the other guy saying he could buy a rally car for £25K. Sorry mate but you obviously have no idea of the costs involved in building one.

Daz

 

Im with you on this one

 

Thing is, how many of us are actually sensible when choosing a car ? If we were we would all be driving nice safe Volvos or diesel Mondeos. Running an Impreza in the UK is pretty daft when you think about it with the crap weather, speed cameras, roads full of myopic mums in 4x4's etc... In its lifetime I would bet most of our cars get used to their full potential maybe 5% of the time.

I'll bet most of us buy with our hearts rather than our heads, which is why there will always be a market for cars like the 22b - if you love Imprezas then why would you not want arguably the most exclusive one you can get ?

 

give that man a cigar

 

You must either be a spotty teenager or a bit nuts?

Yeah, it may well be as you say "as close as you can get", but its not a rally car, nor would it survive a single rally stage.
Most likely it would limp out on 2 or 3 wheels if its lucky enough.

However is the Spec C not the group N production car?
And the donor car for the WRC?
Maybe just a little bit closer to a factory built rally car than you'd think eh

Brilliant - you can be his co driver then



Shaun

 

Well, the other guy here, sorry mate, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Even a 2 minute search of the net provides a whole rack of PROPER Impreza rally cars for sale, most of which well below £25k. I'm obviously not on about £300,000 Subaru team cars, but pukka rally cars none-the-less. And IIRC the 6R4 or an RS200 might blow your theory about a mainstream manufactured car available to purchase by the public, maybe even an RS500. The 22b is nothing like a rally car I assure you, and put it within a sniff of offroad and you'll have one very damaged car.

I have no axe to grind with the 22b at all, just that it's not worth £25k at all unless all you want to do is pose around at Subaru meets.

 

My case in point. Just how much is an RS200 worth?

I never said it WAS a rally car I said it was just about as near to one as you could get from any manufacturer.

As for the 22B it was the homologation model and would quite happily cope with Monte Carlo!!

Have you got the first idea what a car has to go through to become a group N car??? Even the Spec C you're looking at the car plus £60K atleast.

Also if you think a standard spec C will cope with a full on Rally stage you're clearly not all there!!

Look at the premiums these cars are fetching:
RS500
RS200
22B

Finally if you can show me a subaru rally car that will pass scrutineering at any one of the UK rallies as it stands for £25K i'll go and buy it. It will compliment my 500bhp road car nicely and I'm not talking about a car with just buckets seats and a bolt in cage either.

Ladies and gentlemen, the defence rests

 

Sure, as would any other car for that matter too - no real stress on the suspension there now is there


Yes I do as it happens

I haven't lost my mind yet But in defence I never said it would.
Infact thats my whole point they are just road cars - thats it.
They wouldn't cope with a decent stage with humps/jumps etc.


OK.
Rally Cars : Rally Cars : Subaru Impreza RA Tarmac Spec Rally Car

I've just saved you 15K

Or a Prodrive built car - 5K saving.
Rally Cars : Rally Cars : Prodrive Group N Subaru

Shaun

 

 

Jesus wept, the defence rests, PMSL, what's your next winning case Ian Braidey's appeal? How on earth can you say a 22b is the closest car on the road to a rally car by a mainstream manufacturer when RS200 or 6R4 is mentioned. You mention their prices, that's an additional thing you're now tagging on, and not part of the original point about mainstream 'rally cars'. Who mentioned £60k plus spec C's, I didn't. Do a search and you'll find actual Impreza rally cars for much less than £25k.

The main point was someone bought a 22b as they wanted something as close to a real rally Impreza. The 22b is far from a rally car (very, very far away) and you could get real impreza rally cars for much less than £25k. Or something very similar to a 22b, like an RA, for less than half the money.

The defence rests, PMSL

 

Whilst I don't agree with your rhetoric about the 22B et al I will gladly eat a big portion of humble pie and all the trimmings with regard to finding the cars for sale infact thankyou as I've sent an enquiry off about one .

Nutta,
Isnt price very intergral to this issue? i.e a ten year old car for X amount?

I never said the 22B car was a rally car I said it was the closest thing that subaru produced to being a rally car.

When the 22B was built it was built to meet the Homologation requirements of the time.

I'm repeating myself here.

For £25K you can buy a car that one of the most successful rally cars ever was based on. That aside the 22B is the best shape of ANY Impreza and that is what the whole thread is about its appeal and thus keeping its value, not whether its an actual rally car or not.

the 22B is far closer to a rally car than a WRX, Turbo 2000 etc thats the point i'm trying to make.


I've spent way in excess of £25k not to mention hundreds of hours in my garage doing the work my self turning my UK 1999 Turbo 2000 into a 500bhp road car but I would swap it for a 22B in an instant.

The 22B may not appeal to everyone but they hold their value for a reason!!!

 

You owe me humble pie too for first pointing this out

If you are now bringing price into the account then of course, a £100k RS200 is a lot pricier than a £25k 22b. But, on the flip side a £5k ra is much beter value than a 22b, incidently, the RA is the base used for a large amount of privateer Impreza rally drivers I'd assume. I still contend that an RA will be the closest thing to a rally car that Subaru has produced, ok, flared arches ommitting.

As an added point, I would not sell a modded UK car for a 22b as you'll soon get bored of the low power as standard. I have written quite a few accounts of 22b ownership, I'm not saying everyone will agree with my conclusions, but, I'd say they are soild opinions from someone who owned one for a while (amongst several other classic Imprezas). I myself have shied away from massive bhp conversions, as I soon learnt that big money modifications are essentially a waste of money if you change a car as often as I do. I'm more than happy with 320 reliable/usable BHP for a price of around £7k all in (including the car and a full rebuild and some cosmetic changes). TBH I wouldn't even swap the car I have now for a 22b if they were worth the same.

 

If we change this slightly to "I said back then, it was the closest thing.............."

Now its the spec C which takes that place.

How about "For £25K you can buy a 10 year old car that one of the most successful rally cars back then was based on. Or for similar money you could buy a more modern and probably more reliable version"

I don't dispute that.
All I'm trying to say is that you'd get much better value for money and pootentially a more reliable vehicle with the more up to date car.

If you're going to buy the 22B and drive it 3 or 4 times a year then whats the feckin point in the first place.

If someone decides to drive into you, where will you get panels for example?

However, each to their own and all.

Shaun

 

At the end of the day it comes down to taste. I like the shape of a 22B I wouldn't keep it standard engine and drive train wise though.

I never buy cars for resale value. Take the one I've built I'd never get back what I've put into it so I'll just keep it.

I've just bought a two door shell funnily enough. The aim with this is to turn it into a very capable track / time attack car.
Again though if I could respend what I already have my base car would always be the 22B. Like my 500bhp road car now, it would be used every single day too.

Daz

 

did the car at the begining of this 3 page spread ever sell

 

Nope its on Autotrader still.

Autotrader - SUBARU IMPREZA 22B WRC

 

For a track car, I'd never even consider a 4x4 coup. Why not just get an Elise with a typeR conversion, only 210 bhp, but would beat even a 500bhp around a track , £16k too :

 

Are you kidding?

Look how well the Subarus are doing in Time Attack!!!

First (Zen) and second (Roger Clark) in the Pro Class I believe an Elise(Guglielmi) was third. But lets not start another debate lol.

If I build a 500-600bhp track biased Impreza i'm sure it would be a match for a fettled Elise.

 

I'm sure you'll have rings run around you by a typeR Elise The handling of even the standard Elise I had was much better than any Impreza I've owned. The Elise is essentially built for the track and the road second, the Impreza is the other way around. Trust me, try one and you'll soon forget about throwing money at an Impreza.

 

Subaru's as an everyday car bore the s--- out of me,the wife had an evo 9 then I bought her a fsti,evo 9 every time 22b just to keep and get stressed about Let the debate begin

 

A client of mine has a 190 Sport which has been set up for track as he's racing in the Lotus Cup Club Championship next year. Whilst it's quite nimble I've had the privelidge of being passenger in one of the time attack subarus and it was unbelievable.

I have no doubt that when my car is finished it will run rings round my client's car as its only going to be 170bhp (class limit). That said I also have no doubt that if he was to make that 170 bhp into say 300bhp then the tables would be turned.

 

Nice. Import typeR conversions are 210 stock and utterly reliable, you can easily make 300 plus bhp with a supercharger. Time attack being straight line sprints? I dunno what that is, but an Elise is more of a car for bends than straight line.

 

Time Attack Series - Official Website

Its not straight line sprints. Its the fastest lap times around a track in this case, Donnington Park, Brands Hatch, Silverstone with the final round being at Knockhill.

 

I think the 22b is stunning and true iconic car for it's year. Out of all the scoobies it's probably the one that holds any kind of value.

A true collector and fan will pay whatever he/she believes the car is worth, like any make/model of car out there.

In this day and age of OTT refinement where your simply a passenger as apposed to a driver, classics like the 22b and to some degree, the RA's are more sought after. I went from a newage car to my classic STi RA for that reason, to drive the damn thing and not be driven by the electronics.

I agree they are getting on a bit, I am sure the people who do buy the 22b's tend to be the collector types who will do very minimal driving in them to keep their value.

That example in the ad is hideous in my opinion (with all that gash crap stuck on) and not worth the money for that fact alone.

 

The 22B was never a homologation special, the WRC rules where such that no road cars needed to be built. Not like the old group A where 5000 road going models must be built to compete, this was reduced to around 2500 in later years.

Have a read, The FIA Homologation Specials

Should pass scruitineering, http://www.rallycarsforsale.net/photos/p26807n1.jpg