Road test: Subaru BRZ

By Jonathan Crouch

May 28 2014, 5:00 pm

The BRZ is a new kind of Subaru sports car and is now more affordable than you might think.

Apparently, the BRZ’s name tells you everything you need to know about this car. ‘B’ stands for Boxer engine, ‘R’ for Rear-wheel drive and ‘Z’ for Zenith – the ultimate in affordable thrills. Is that what this is?

From an early glance at the stats, you might wonder. There’s nothing especially startling here, the 2.0-litre flat-four engine producing 197bhp and 151lb/ft of torque, enough to get you to 60mph from rest in 7.6s on the way to a top speed of 143mph.

Plenty of comparably priced hot hatches can match or beat that. But none of them can deliver the driving experience on offer from this Subaru.

It’s a normally aspirated, front-engined, rear-wheel drive coupe. Let’s start with that. For a keen driver, the recipe doesn’t get much purer.

Plumb in a boxer engine that helps it to a centre of gravity lower than a Ferrari 458, add a proper mechanical limited slip differential and offer a six-speed manual gearbox with three beautifully spaced aluminium-plated pedals in the footwell and you have what most would agree is a very good start.

Even from this point it would have been easy to get things wrong. But Subaru didn’t. On the contrary, the BRZ is so right in so many ways it’s almost as if the hand of Porsche has worked upon it.

There’s a simplicity to its controls, a delicacy and tactility to the steering and the pedals that offer the keen driver so much.

In recent times, Subaru has moved to make this car more affordable, reducing its list price by £2,500 to around £24,000 (or around £25,500 for the automatic version). That means it’s over £1,000 less than its Toyota GT86 design stablemate.

Value can be a tough issue for potential buyers to agree upon. On the one hand with this BRZ, you’re still paying the best part of £25,000 for a car that’s can’t hold a candle to a Kia Cee’d when it comes to creature comforts and technology. But on the other, you’ve an enthusiast’s tool that nothing else in the sector bar this Subaru’s Toyota GT86 sister car can match.

To find another sports coupe that can deliver such rich feedback and flow so beautifully through the bends, you’d have to turn to the kind of Porsche Cayman that the Japanese engineers apparently used as a development benchmark – at nearly double the price.

The light weight doesn’t only help the performance. It also makes a big difference to your running costs.

Subaru quotes a combined cycle fuel figure of 36.2mpg, a return that at first glance is a little behind obvious coupe segment rivals. But virtually all of these are turbocharged, a configuration that in the real world tends towards much thirstier figures.

This BRZ in contrast, should easily return over 30mpg on a regular basis, even if you enjoy yourself in it – which means that you’ll get a decent operating range from the 50-litre fuel tank. That’s about as much as you can ask of a car like this.

The CO return isn’t quite so impressive at 181g/km for the manual model. If BMW can make a 270bhp 3 Series coupe emit less, Subaru ought to be doing better on this score.

It’s worth pointing out though that, a little surprisingly, the emissions figure improves to 164g/km if you opt for the 6-speed automatic model. All of which is of course identical to the efficiency you’ll get from this same design badged as a Toyota GT86.

Let’s be clear about this: the Subaru BRZ is a very special car. Better indeed than any true World Rally Blue Subaru optimist could hope to expect.

It has a beautiful simplicity that speaks of paring back to the essence of driving purity, including just enough of what you need and nothing that you don’t.

Like its Toyota GT86 design stablemate, this is a hero car for our times, one that rewards the properly talented driver without making the less proficient feel clumsy or unworthy.

Of course, you’ve to pay for your pleasures. The cabin could feel more luxurious, the engine could be cleaner and more refined and the whole package needs to be thrashed before it’ll give of its best.

But correcting these things would add weight and dilute the very essence of this car, so instead, Subaru has focused on the things that really matter. The result is a car you’ll enjoy very much.