Cheap Fascination
by David Finlay (19 Feb 07)

The main selling point of Subaru's most recently-introduced Impreza is that it costs £12,495, which puts it roughly at the same level as the cheapest Ford Focus. But there is more to the 1.5R Sports Wagon than a low list price. In a way that is quiet to the point of bashfulness, it is also one of the most fascinating cars Subaru has ever produced.

We have already dealt with the 1.5R in a short test based on an hour's experience at the UK press launch. At that event, several of my colleagues were vociferous in their disapproval, considering the car to be offensively slow.

If you think of Subaru as a sporting manufacturer - and there have been enough World Rally Championship successes and high-performance road cars to make that a strong possibility - the 1.5R does indeed come as a major shock. Its 1500cc engine (a flat-four boxer unit, following long-standing Subaru tradition) produces a measly 104bhp, and a fair proportion of that power is absorbed by the four-wheel drive system before it reaches the wheels.

But what the four-wheel drive system also does - along with the typically excellent suspension and the boxer engine's low centre of gravity - is contribute to the 1.5R's handling, which is as fine as that of any other Impreza, and outstandingly better than that of any other car in the price range. This leads to a bewildering combination of two abilities, as I found on the same afternoon during this test.

Coming out of a roundabout on to a dual-carriageway and taking the engine to the red line in each gear, I found that the 1.5R was unable to keep up with a 1.4-litre Astra. But a couple of hours earlier, on a brutally technical piece of country road, it made short work of a Golf GTI (a car with nearly twice the power, and comparably more expensive) that was being driven so hard it was actually taking off on some of the fiercer sections. For a car that can't get out of its own way in a straight line, the 1.5R is mesmerisingly capable on the twisty stuff.

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