Subaru announces another WRX special edition
BY MIKE COSTELLO | 9th Jul 2012
Just 300 examples of the car will be sold in Australia, with extra features including leather trim, black-coated 17-inch alloy wheels and door mirrors, a black STI rear wing and special numbered badges.
The car can be had in either black or an eye-catching tangerine orange paint finish, with stitching on the seats and steering wheel in red on the black cars and matching orange on cars finished in tangerine.
The Club Spec – which is based exclusively on the four-door bodystyle and offered only with a five-speed manual gearbox – will cost $1500 more than the standard WRX at $41,490 plus on-road costs.
This is substantially less than the last time a Club Spec WRX edition was offered here – the Club Spec 10 in April 2010, priced at $49,990 plus on-roads – but that also came with revised suspension, satellite-navigation and a sunroof.
Buyers will also be offered the option of fitting a cut-price STI kit to their Club Spec, which adds a front lip under the spoiler, a shortened shift on the gearbox and the company’s ‘flexible tower bar suspension’.
This kit normally costs $2100 but will be only $1000 on the special edition model.
Subaru Australia managing director Nick Senior said the Club Spec would sit alongside previous limited-run WRX editions and would further spur interest in the hot sedan, which is based on the previous-generation Impreza small car rather than the new model launched in February this year.
“WRX continues to have tremendous appeal in its widebody form and, combined with the retained value traditionally achieved by these limited editions, there’s likely to be a lot of interest in these cars, which can be differentiated even further from standard WRX with the addition of the STI kit,” he said.
The ‘widebody’ form mentioned refers to a facelift of the Rex in September 2010, when Subaru added the muscular flared wheelarches from the flagship STI to the more humble WRX range.
Subaru Australia will further bolster its performance car line-up later this month when it launches the hotly anticipated BRZ coupe, which was jointly developed with the Toyota 86 that was released in Australia last month from $29,990.
The next-generation WRX is scheduled to arrive in Australia in the second half of next year.
