Hi all, been lurking on P-WRX for a while now pretty frequently, just generally reading the cool stuff others are doing with their cars and not posting much at all. Inspired by the recent thread questioning the future of these forums and being put off by the overall lack of interesting/intelligent discussion on SOWA, I figured I should change this.

A bit of background about myself and car, I’ve always been into cars in a pretty major way, but I’d never been a massive Subaru fan, generally preferring Nissans and euro stuff. After losing interest in a project car I had, and needing a daily pretty quickly, I starting looking for something that was fun, cheap and practical. I ended up finding an old RS wagon with some pretty decent mods for a price I couldn’t argue with. The car leaked every fluid it could, had a slipping clutch and seen the better part of 400000ks but was still the most fun car I’d ever owned.

After busting a coolant pipe, the RS sat for a while before I decided to sell it and save up for something a little tidier, hoping to find a decent GC8. After a few months of looking I was coming up with doughnuts, everything I’d looked at was either flogged within an inch of its life or just too expensive for what it was. It was at this point a friend suggested looking at bugeye STI’s. As much as I knew they had all the good stuff I wanted under the skin, I just couldn’t get over the appearance. After driving a few though, I was pretty sold and ended up picking up the car I have now, an early 03 build with low ks and service history from new.

I’ve had the car about 18 months now but came pretty close to selling it earlier this year, only to realise that I probably couldn’t get anything much better in the price range these are in now and replacing it with a Porsche 944 turbo would not be the wisest financial decision you could make

Since then I’ve spent a bit on it, just doing stuff I should have done when I first got it.

Current mods are:

Work GT5 18x9 +38 wheels
Kumho KU36 tyres
Tein Street Advance coilovers
Replica Prodrive front lip
Ebay rear window visor
22mm Cusco swaybars front and rear
Kart boy endlinks front and rear
Whiteline diff and outrigger busings
Kartboy shifter bushings
Perrin pitch stop mount

So far I'm really happy with where the car is at, I like the way it looks and it handles nicely. Thats not to say I don't have plans for it, and in the future I'll probably look at getting the following done:

Get the boot painted and the holes welded up
03-05 tail lights
tidy up the front lip
05-07 STI steering wheel and center console
headers and tune
get all the car park dents removed

I'm currently pretty broke so I'm in no rush, I'll probably start a proper driveway thread once I start doing a bit more to it.

Pretty keen to get out and meet a few like minded people, so will try and get along to any future events and hopefully start being a bit more active around here in general.

Cheers, Matt.

Obligatory Pictures of car:

When I purchased it


Currently