Subaru’s UK importer says it has recently negotiated a larger annual allocation of the BRZ sports car, so sales, which have been low, should soon start rising. Glenn Brooks tries out this rear-wheel drive sports car and isn’t keen to hand it back.
This car has been with us for a while but until now, I hadn’t driven it. The UK importer landed the first ones in Spring last year and since then, has sold just under 250 units. Its twin, the Toyota Hachi Roku, which is marketed as the GT-86 in Europe, has just racked up 2,400 sales in the UK. Want to guess which one I would nominate as the more sought after future classic by British enthusiasts?
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Before we get to the driving impressions, some more history. Projects 216a (Fuji Heavy Industries’ codename for the BRZ) and 086A (Toyota Motor Corp’s) were officially co-developed by FHI and TMC but you only need to look at the platform, powertrain and where it’s built to see that it’s really a Subaru first and foremost. Yet without TMC’s boss Akio Toyoda personally pushing the project, the funding wouldn’t have been so easily found.
The first time the world saw the Hachi Roku (Eight Six in Japanese) was a prototype at the Tokyo motor show in October 2009. The Subaru didn’t appear until the Geneva show in March 2011, and only then all we saw was the ‘Rear-Wheel Drive Sports Car Technology Concept’, a display of the BRZ’s drivetrain, the point being to showcase the boxer engine and RWD layout. A pre-production model, the BRZ Prologue, followed at the Frankfurt IAA six months later, with the covers pulled off the production car at November 2011’s Tokyo show.
I should also mention the debut of a prototype version of a higher-output variant, the BRZ Concept STI. This had premiered at the Los Angeles auto show earlier that November, just ahead of the Tokyo show. A production BRZ STI is now only months away from launch, Subaru having recently begun teasing it on its Japanese market home page. Enthusiasts have been speculating about more power or even a new engine but for now, Subaru is saying nothing.
Fuji won’t say if there is a BRZ roadster under development but there surely must be, the way the car has been designed with features such as frameless doors and wide sills. Toyota insists its FT-86 Open concept at this year’s Geneva show was merely a design study but don’t believe it – another convertible, this time closer to production, is due to be revealed at the Tokyo show in November. Can a BRZ roadster be far behind?
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By GlobalDataYou sit just 40cm from the road in this car. Similarly, the roof, which has a slight double-bubble profile inspired by a pagoda, is just 1,285mm off the ground. So while there is enough headroom for each front seat occupant, the roofline is low.
The way the seat is positioned perfectly in the middle of the sill and centre tunnel means your feet are correctly aligned with the pedals, and the steering wheel and instruments are immediately ahead of you. This is not always the case with RWD sports cars, as a thick transmission tunnel will sometimes see you sitting offset to the right, making for tiring long journeys as your legs have to be slightly splayed to work the pedals.
Stare ahead and the bonnet is low, the view in the rear-view mirror better than in many family hatchbacks, and the windows also give a decent view to the side which is a surprise considering how low you’re seated. You wouldn’t want to spend much time in the rear as this isn’t anything more than a 2+2. I would expect most owners to use the back seats as a place to put items that won’t fit in the smallish boot. At least the seatbacks fold so you can carry long items that way.
You look straight at a big tachometer with its redline at 7,400rpm, with the speedometer to its left. There is also a digital mph readout within the tacho gauge – you really do need to keep an eye on your speed in this car. Acceleration isn’t in the lunatic class, but the engine spins so readily and the gearshifting is such a joy that it’s all too easy to get carried away and want to push towards too-fast speeds.
And the cornering. Wow, in a word. I have a sort of home-made test loop in Somerset and the BRZ is without a doubt one of the best cars I’ve driven on the local roads north of Bath and up into Wales. It takes in narrow B-roads with postcard views, plus wider A-roads, motorways and some inevitable stop-start city centre snarls. For a model that was designed as an out and out sports car, the BRZ is a sensation on this route.
Would I want for the optional six-speed automatic? Maybe, if I did do a lot of city driving, but having driven the manual I would miss the delicacy of the throw – it’s as good as that of any generation of the Mazda MX-5.
The key to knowing why this car handles and holds the road in such a masterful manner is its low weight, allied to a low centre of gravity. You can tell the chassis engineers knew what they were doing but they also had a superbly designed powertrain to work with.
The BRZ and 86 have a bespoke engine, Fuji’s 2.0-litre horizontally opposed four-cylinder FA series, which is based upon the existing FB. The newer FA has an 86mm x 86mm bore and stroke, designed to deliver 100PS of power per litre. All components were redesigned with a demand to reduce the weight of each. Maximum power of just 200PS is reached at 7,000rpm. The 205Nm torque output is developed at a similarly heady 6,400-6,600rpm.
The height of the FA’s intake manifold has been reduced by 65mm and the engine sits 120mm lower than the equivalent FB does in an Impreza. It is also positioned 240mm further back in the chassis. The intake system normally branches out from the rear to the front, but in a first for FHI, the throttle body is aligned at the front, due to how far back the engine is mounted. Such a direct feed is claimed to reduce the pressure within the intake system by 20 percent compared to an ordinary layout tract for an FHI boxer engine.
The BRZ has a strut suspension system with L-shaped lower arms. The diameter of the springs was reduced and the struts themselves mounted beside rather than on top of the tyres. This allowed FHI to maintain adequate suspension travel but allowed a reduction in the height of the top mounts. That also gave the designers a way of lowering the height of the bonnet.
The steering system uses electric rather than hydraulic power, which FHI engineers say was done to reduce power losses and weight. The electric motor had to be moved as unlike in the Impreza and Legacy, it would not fit below the engine. So, on RHD cars, it has ended up being mounted under the instrument panel.
If you’re a fan of BMW or Audi interiors, you might not be too taken by the BRZ’s. But if you remember that this vehicle was designed as an out and out sports car, you’ll love it. You won’t find much of the soft, thick, plastic that adorns the interior of a TT. There again, you aren’t paying TT money so things like the manual seat adjusters, lack of rain sensing wipers and cheap-feeling headliner are easily forgiven.
I drove the car in a downpour and soon realised that the layer of thick soundproofing material that most premium brand cars have between the roof and the headliner isn’t there in the Subaru. But so what? An enthusiast would applaud that level of attention to detail to keep weight down at all costs. And these are the kinds of people who buy this model.
Both the BRZ and its Toyota 86/GT86 twin (in the US and Canada there’s no Toyota but instead the otherwise identical Scion FR-S) are made on the same line at Fuji’s Ota plant in Japan. If you’re a manufacturing obsessive, stand by for a potentially exciting fact: the line which formerly built Subaru’s now discontinued Stella minivehicle was taken out to make room for the 86 & BRZ. If you’re not a production nerd, this might still be of interest, as Fuji still sells Kei-class cars but it now sources them from Daihatsu – yet another example of the Toyota influence in action.
The BRZ probably isn’t making the kind of money for Fuji or TMC that a premium priced model would. And yet, it is undoubtedly proving to be a nicely profitable project – just a few days ago, Toyota said it had sold 30,000 Hachi Rokus in Japan since the April 2012 launch, and over 70,000 cars worldwide. FHI is yet to announce how the BRZ has been doing at a global level but in the US, Japan and Australia, three of its major markets, sales have been brisk.
The UK has never been a major destination for Subaru exports (1,187 cars sold in the first seven months) and that doesn’t look like changing any time soon. There are various reasons for that, some of which are to do with our company car tax system. We aren’t offered the Impreza, so it’s just the BRZ, plus the Legacy, Outback, XV and Forester.
Subaru’s British buyers are famously loyal and the cars tend to stay with their owners for many years, which is great for the brand’s reputation but not the best if you’re trying to increase overall sales. Personally, I like the fact that the BRZ is destined to remain under most potential customers’ radar. You wouldn’t call it hard core in the style of the Lotus Exige S but I also can’t quite see people considering a Golf GTI cabrio thinking too much about it either.
Some very good Japanese sports cars – the Honda S 2000 was a recent one – are somehow destined never to sell in big volumes in Britain but they can become cult objects nonetheless. The BRZ seems to me as though it will be looked back upon in a similar way.
