2001 Subaru Impreza WRX review from UK and Ireland

At the 32,000 mile service, the car needed a new fan belt, rocker cover gasket, locking wheel nuts, and brake pads and disks.

I once read somewhere that everybody should own a Scooby at some time in their life. Should they?

This is a stunning car. This isn’t some tarted up sport version like many manufacturers will turn out. This really is a detuned street legal rally car. It has permanent four wheel drive. The hand braek is sharp and cuts out the central differential, so you can do hand brake turns with little effort.

The first time you open the boot, it nearly flies out of your hand, it’s so light. Tap on the bonnet and it sounds like it’s made of plastic. It does have air conditioning and the smart option of both CD player and tape drive with the radio. And the basic seats are proper sports seats, although better ones can be specified.

The long travel suspension isn’t hard. It soaks up rough roads, allowing you to put the power down without skipping all over the place. Which, with the smooth engine makes for fantastic motorway cruiser. It’s easy to find yourself at ninety when you thought you were only doing about seventy.

With the four wheel drive, it almost never loses its grip. Trying to pull out from a side road in the wet, and the front wheels won’t spin. The car just launches forward as if it was dry. And the couple of days I’ve had to go to work in the snow were the best ever. There was about five or six inches of snow on the road the first morning. Just turn the car in early and power drift round. I’ve never driven a car so controllable in the slippy stuff.

It all sounds like the perfect car, but it isn’t. Steering gets pulled from side to side depending on the road surface. I improved this by changing the Yokohama tires for Dunlop.

It may be a four door, but the short wheel base makes it pretty cramped in the back. And a very young boy in his Corsa wants to race you all the time.

But it’s the cost of running it that’s the bigger problem. It’s supposed to be the same insurance group as a Civic Type-R. But the day I bought it, I found it was about a third more expensive.

Servicing isn’t cheap either. Not quite BMW money, but if the car needs any extras, the Subaru dealers will charge through the nose for labour.

However the biggest cost is the petrol. I was expecting twenty seven or more to the gallon. But instead I’m only getting twenty four.

This is a civilised rally car for the road, but I use it mainly to commute twenty miles each way to work in rush hour traffic. And as I said, at the last service the car needed a new fan belt, rocker cover gasket, locking wheel nuts, and brake pads and disks, all of which seamed a lot for a car with only thirty three thousand miles on the clock.

So? Should everybody own a Scooby at some time in their life? Yes! But probably not for too long if they have a high mileage.