This past weekend I found something pretty fascinating.  I follow a lot of Subaru pages on Instagram, so I usually don’t look too closely at what gets posted unless it’s something that really catches my attention.  The Instagram page of @subiewerks555 posted a picture of a Subaru Formula 1 car and a flat-12 Boxer engine saying: “Subaru tried many motorsports before they realized rally was their calling. This is a Flat-12 BOXER engine.”  After reading that, I was intrigued and confused.  I looked into it some more, making sure it was a legit thing.  More information showed up on the subject than I thought – it was true!  I have never heard about this side project of Subaru.  Seeing this for the first time really surprised me, here’s what I found out about this piece of machinery.

Formula 1 was on a rise of popularity throughout the ’80s and ’90s.  It was a thriving market for the automotive industry to advertise themselves more efficiently and appeal to a different crowd, and F1 was a great way to do just that.  Subaru decided to jump on board with this idea in mind and hired an Italian firm by the name of Motori Moderni.  Subaru would run the engine with the Coloni F1 team for the 1990 season.  Unfortunately the engine was becoming something that wasn’t what the team and Subaru had hoped for.  It was proving to be very unreliable from the start.  With only 8 out of the 14 races for the 1990 season behind them, it had too many problems and losses to make it worth while to finish out the season.  This engine was known as the Subaru 1235.  At the time, most F1 teams like Ferrari and Honda pulled out of 12-cylinder game, replacing them with lighter V10s and V8s.  The Subaru 1235 was 112kg heavier than its V8 F1 rivals, in addition to not having enough power to be competitive with the top dogs.  Most of the cars had anywhere from 600-700 horsepower.  Motori Moderni managed to tune the Boxer engine to 555bhp, but that’s all it could get.  The biggest advantage the 1235 had on its competitors was the much lower center of gravity, resulting in better handling and chassis rigidity.  Sadly, it still wasn’t enough to be competitive.  It even got a try in Group C racing but just like the F1 program, it flunked.  The life of the 1235 doesn’t end there though.

By the mid-1990s, Christian Von Koenigsegg was looking for a power plant for his supercars after Audi bailed from the engine deal.  He had a friend of a friend who knew the gentlemen at Motori Moderni – the same folks who built the 1235.  He ended up purchasing the rights to the flat-12 Boxer Subaru engine.  After some tinkering, the Italians modified the engine to end up with 580bhp by raising the displacement to 3.8-liters, stroking it, and inserting longer intake tracts.  Christian decided it will be worthy.  To this day, the engine mount positions are still used in the Koenigsegg Agera.

Not many know what really happened to the Subaru 1235.  As of September 2005, Jalopnik posted about one of the 1235’s being for sale on eBay for $30,000.  If you’ve got the money and could find one, do it – whether you were upset about it being a failure of an engine or not!  It would make for quite the living room decoration, and of course, a killer conversation starter.  The more you know.

By Zach Osborne – @momentum.rs

The post Throwback Thursday: A Flat-12 Attempt appeared first on MFortyFive.

This week’s throwback takes us back 9 years ago, where “gymkhana” wasn’t a common word to be heard until one video changed everything.  Chances are if you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve heard of Ken Block.  Whether you’re a die hard stage-rally fanatic, YouTube fanboy, or have participated in some sort of “action sport,” Ken Block’s name gets around.  His world-famous Gymkhana YouTube videos are probably the reason why most people know who he is and what he does.  I found out about him by seeing an “eye-catching” Monster Energy/DC t-shirt in the skateboard catalog CCS, which I regularly got since I was into skateboarding at the time.  I googled “43 Block Monster Energy,” thinking it was some cool skateboarder with the number meaning left unknown, but I was wrong.  The first video I saw show up on Google was this one: “DC Shoes: Ken Block Gymkhana Practice” by Ken Block Racing.  I clicked the video and couldn’t believe what I was watching!  I was already a fan of Subarus but wasn’t knowledgable at all about them.  I just knew they came in blue and sounded really cool.  After watching the video I watched it again, and again.  The sound, the intensity, the driving, and just about everything in the video made me realize what Subarus were all about – having fun.

I couldn’t get over that first scene of him launching the car and sliding it so far at such a high speed and with great angle – probably still one of my favorite clips.  I knew about Formula Drift, which was starting to get a little more popular, but Gymkhana intrigued me so much more with it’s freestyle-like drifting, which greatly appealed to me.

I watched that video dozens of times throughout the years while it was still being circulated around the internet.  Ken Block was definitely one of my biggest inspirations for getting into Subarus – sounds cheesy, I know.  Back in the day I was a Ken Block fanboy.  As funny and tacky as it sounds, its totally true.  I still look up to Ken Block and what he’s doing in the world of business and driving.  I’m not afraid to admit that, even though Ethan and CJ make fun of me for it all the time.  There are now 9 Gymkhana videos total, and the recently announced 10th one is coming soon.  It’s incredible that the videos are still so popular and how he’s been able to further his career just from that.

I still love all of the videos, some more than others though.  I would still say the very first one is my all-time favorite.  No huge camera crews with helicopters and million-dollar supercars he’s sliding around.  It was a very grassroots-like style that I appreciate then and even more so now, with an astonishing 15 million views on YouTube.

I’m not saying the new videos are bad, but it wasn’t about the production and marketing.  It was all about the driving.  Even video games like DiRT and Forza Motorsport included Ken Block’s Gymkhana cars because kids like myself wanted to be just like him.  I figured this would be a pretty relevant throwback article to those mid-to-late ‘90s kids who grew up playing Gran-Turismo on PS2 and watching Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory.  These Gymkhana videos truly had a huge impact in the car community as a whole.  Ask someone at a car meet about Ken Block or Gymkhana, and that will probably spark a whole conversation talking about one of his videos.

By Zach Osborne – @momentum.rs

Image Source:

goo.gl/n8u5kE

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goo.gl/P24RrT

The post Throwback Thursday: Gymkhana – The First of Many appeared first on MFortyFive.

This week’s Throwback Thursday was inspired by a Craigslist ad I came across the other day.  It was for a 1989 Subaru Leone coupe with 274,000 miles and a 5-speed manual transmission.  This really sparked my interest due to my deep love affair with 80’s and 90’s imports.  Believe it or not, I owned a 1981 Volvo 242 for a little over a year, and have been strongly desiring to scoop up another 80’s car as a project since I sold it.  After reading the ad, I thought to myself, “What even is a Subaru Leone?”  It seems that most Subaru enthusiasts are passionate and knowledgeable about the newer, more popular models, and not so much the “vintage” Subarus that are often overlooked or forgotten about.  This is one of those models.

The Subaru Leone has been called several other names across the world.  Japan had always sold them under the name “Leone” (Italian for Lion), while North America sold them as “Loyales” and European markets referred to them as the L-series.  It was even called the “Omega” in New Zealand.  These cars were built from 1971 to 1994, making the Leone the third longest-produced model from Subaru, behind the Impreza (2nd), and Legacy (1st).  The Leone was built to replace the Japanese-market-only Subaru 1000, and started to be phased out after the Impreza was introduced in 1992 as the Leone’s successor.

Here in the U.S., you may also know this car as the DL/GL, but back in the day Americans just called these cars “Subarus.”  “Look at that Subaru, I drive a ’79 Subaru, the new Subaru coupe/wagon looks great!” and so on.  Subaru was a growing brand.  At the time, Subaru sold small cars to a country full of people driving cars twice the size.  They were “one of those quirky and up-and-coming car companies.”  Subarus were cars the average American didn’t know much about – cars that one might have seen and said “Oh, there’s one of those Subarus, I hear they can _______!”  The Leone/Loyale was the Subaru that sparked interest in Americans and changed up the stereotypes of mediocre Japanese-import econoboxes.  Think about it though, how many other mass-produced passenger cars from the 70’s and 80’s were offered in 4-wheel-drive, got great gas mileage, were dependable and had a high build quality?  These qualities shot Subaru sales up once the word spread.  These cars could be found everywhere up in mountain towns and northern cities during the winter.  The Leone/Loyale became the unofficial car of the outdoorsman – because it could actually take them into the depths of nature and back without a struggle.

Now for a bit of history on the car.  The Subaru Leone was brought over to North America in 1972 and spanned three generations in its lifetime.  It was originally offered with a 1.4L EA63 engine up until it was replaced with the 1.6L EA71 in 1976.  The car now made a whole 67 horsepower!  Leones were offered with a 4-speed or a 5-speed manual transmission, and eventually a 3-speed automatic transmission starting in 1975.  The cars were sold stateside in front-wheel-drive with trim levels of DL, GL, and GSR.  They started being built with optional 4-wheel-drive in 1975 which is where the significance of these cars starts to come in.   In 1977, something wonderful was created based off of the Leone coupe – the notorious Subaru BRAT.  I would talk about the BRAT, but that’s better off being left for another article in the future.  I’m saying that because this could very easily turn into a BRAT-focused article since I am so crazy about them.  Back to the history of the Leone now.

The second generation of the Leone came in 1979, and things started picking up.  They were now being made as two-door coupes, three-door hatchbacks, four-door sedans, and of course everyone’s favorite – the five-door station wagon variant.  This generation of the Leone was now offered with a dual-range, 4-speed, 4-wheel-drive transmission that made it capable of any weather or terrain it found itself in.  1980 brought a new engine for the Leone.  The cars started coming with a flat-four 1.8L EA81 engine, and in 1983 it was available with a turbo thrown in on certain models.

The third and final generation of this car is probably the most widely recognized.  I’m sure some of you have seen one at some point, past or present.  This generation just screams late-80’s/early-90’s styling, I mean look at it.  Square, boxy, straight lines everywhere and almost “bland” looking (I know, how dare I insult Subaru’s design).  But that’s what was in at the time, and it did well – people loved them.  This generation came about in 1985.  They were now being made as three-door hatchbacks, four-door sedans, and the practical and ever-so-popular station wagon.  Subaru dropped the 1.6L engine for North American versions due to the lack of any usable power.  The cars had another new flat-four 1.8L engine instead – the SOHC EA82 that made 90hp, and the turbocharged version that put out 115hp.  The 5-speed manual transmission cars got a respectable 25 city/32 highway MPG on the normally aspirated engines.  The later half of this generation had a slight facelift and tons of previously-optional amenities that were now standard.  Some of these include a full digital instrument panel, cruise control, air conditioning, power steering, power windows, power locks and mirrors, and even a pneumatic suspension with selectable heights.

Although this car died off the year I was born, I remember seeing one every now and then and sometimes not even recognizing that it’s a Subaru.  I’m so used to seeing Imprezas, Foresters and Outbacks that I sometimes forget the earlier days of Subaru.  Cars like the Leone paved the way for Subaru in North America, and it deserves recognition and appreciation from us enthusiasts.  These cars are becoming harder and harder to find unfortunately, just like any other vintage car.  It’s a shame seeing the less common ones, like the coupe for example, sitting at a junkyard or rusted halfway up its doors, but hey, at least they were out being used and enjoyed by their owners, and that’s what’s important.  So thank you, Leone/Loyale/DL/GL for making such a large impact on Subaru’s North American market.  Without you, there may have not been a Legacy, Impreza, or even Forester brought stateside.  If one day I can find and afford to own one of these alongside the countless other projects I’d want, you bet I’d buy one.

By Ethan Pfab – @indecisivewagon

Image sources:

https://goo.gl/xGsCbS

https://goo.gl/Ezs8Lo

https://goo.gl/FtcRgH

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The post Throwback Thursday: The Subaru that made Subaru, Subaru appeared first on MFortyFive.

This week’s Throwback Thursday was chosen out of nostalgia.  This car was, and still is one of our all time favorite Subarus.

I still remember seeing this video for the first time.  It was 2013.  We were fresh out of high school and just starting to explore the world of cars and modifications.  The “stance” trend was emerging into the mainstream all over the country.  “STI OMG” may be considered a pioneer in the world of stanced Subarus and possibly one of the first well-known STis with that particular color combo, and once this feature video of it was uploaded the car spread like wildfire.  (You know it’s a famous car when people know exactly what it is by what the vanity plate says).

It was easily one of the most timeless looking and cleanest Subarus out there back in the day.  The white/WRB color combo set it apart from the crowd, especially with the wheel choice and fitment it had.  Personally, this car was one of the reasons why I’m so heavily involved in the car culture now.  It inspired me to build something simple and clean.  CJ says “This car reassured the idea of wanting an STi when I grew up.  It inspired me to have this vision of wanting a ‘less is more’ style build, no tacky decals or underglow, etc.  This was one of the first cars I saw on the internet with ‘stance fitment’ and I thought it was the coolest thing.  I lived in SoCal at the time and always hoped to see this car at a meet or show.  I didn’t even understand what some of the mods were on the car, I just thought it looked cool.  Looking back, I have a better understanding and appreciation of the car for sure.”

The Chargespeed lip and skirt extensions, the bright white Work XD9s, the non-tinted “fishbowl” style windows – it was a perfect example of “less is more.”  In my opinion, I think that “stancing” a car was much simpler back in this time period.  You didn’t see many crazy flares, double-digit camber, ridiculously stretched tires or massive chassis mount wings.  Although everyone has a different taste, I believe this car was one of the best to ever do it.

By Ethan Pfab – @indecisivewagon

Image Source:

Header: https://goo.gl/4Ewcq3

Video: https://goo.gl/ak3Tx5

The post Throwback Thursday: The Iconic “STI OMG” appeared first on MFortyFive.