Last December, our wandering man of intrigue Jonathan Ramsey drove a Subaru BRZ prototype at Japan's Tochigi circuit under somewhat controlled conditions and was nonetheless very impressed. Then, in that same month, SoCal lad Michael Harley – he who knows a thing or two about hot-footing it on closed circuits – took the practically identical Scion FR-S for many unfettered laps on the island's short and sweet Sodegaura Forest Raceway. He, too, was left extremely enthused by the experience.
My turn now. We needed a real road test of the Subaru BRZ just to see if this car really does merit the "zenith" part of its name represented by its final letter. Can the stellar handling and light weight we've already raved about translate into something you could happily drive every day?
The roads on which Subaru sent me with their new star pupil could not be more appropriate: the ominous Route Napoleon in southern France. This is perfect, because the number of new car drives following the Geneva Motor Show has been mind numbing, and I frankly needed a spectacular car-and-road pairing to recharge my enthusiasm. I can think of no better combo for this than a promising sports car and this insanely technical French two-lane. I am here to find out if, in the real sporting car world, 200 horsepower and 151 pound-feet of torque are enough to keep the fire burning in me.
f I'm being flat-out honest, only the Subaru WRX STI and 2.5 RS before it have ever inspired me much when it comes to Fuji Heavy Industries' body of work. Everything else they have done until now has always been appreciated, even the Brat and the Baja in their own particular weird ways. But for me, they have all, to a greater or lesser degree, felt like cars built by robot people for robot people. I enjoy it when the vehicle wrapped around me shows signs of body heat, of cardiac and pelvic passions, of risks to be taken. I love what the Japanese do for our industry, but the Europeans and Americans have generally cornered the market on flagrant driving machismo.
Approaching the first long drive of the Subaru BRZ, all of this is going through my head, together with the preceding opinions from Messrs. Ramsey and Harley, plus a chorus of other career opinioneers. Will the power/torque numbers be enough? Will the 215-width Michelin summer tires feel like too small a footprint for consistent hookup through and out of the hundreds of incredible curves that await me? Is the handling of the BRZ indeed spectacular but the lower revs exhaust voice too plain? Do I even care about trying the six-speed Aisin automatic transmission with paddles and Sport mode?
For the entire day, as it turned out, my drive partner and I greedily protected our silver Subaru BRZ Limited with six-speed manual, also by Aisin. We did this because after just ten or so miles of driving, we both realized that this BRZ with its short-throw shifter was destined to be even more of a great car moment in our lives than we had anticipated.
Talk to any driving enthusiast who's been lucky enough to have spent a day on the Route Napoleon and they'll go on breathlessly about the road. But they will also frequently state that they "just wish" they'd had this or that other car rather than the one they actually had. Well, we hauled Gunma butt for roughly 200 miles with rarely a straight or flat section for pausing and collecting our thoughts. It's telling that at no point did I wish I was in any other car, because the BRZ, while certainly not the all-time quickest over this route, would prove to be the absolute epitome of this type of sports car. Get my drift here?
Read more by Matt Davis at Autoblog.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment