Despite this fact, I recommended that he buy the official car of girls who dig girls when he started looking for something fast, versatile, unstoppable in the snow and utterly invisible to the po-po. Other than that invisibility thing, the WRX wagon might seem the better choice, but with the introduction of the 2.5XT, the Forester has become the sleeper to have. Using the same EJ25 as the STi, the Forester makes do with a smaller turbo, smaller intercooler, and less boost than the STi, but still manages to whoop ass over the WRX's EJ20.
Subaru rates the Forester's output at 210 hp, but the seat of the pants, the stopwatch, and most dynos suggest it actually makes more power than the 227-hp WRX. When I recently tested one on HKS's all-wheel-drive Dynojet, it made less than a WRX, but for this one time, I believe everyone else's dyno testing more than my own.
At first glance, the Forester is a big, dumb car, but that's what makes it invisible. It is, in fact, just an Impreza in frumpy duds. The wheelbase is the same, the track width is a near-perfect match for the WRX sedan (which is wider than the wagon), and the curb weight, at 3,289 pounds, is about 120 pounds more than the WRX wagon.
At first drive, it also feels like a big, dumb car. The steering is slow, the brakes are soft, and the suspension is perilously wallowy. Plus, it rides around on big truck tires that squeal and holler at the slightest hint of cornering. In spite of this, the XT can haul surprising ass through the twisties once you learn to trust it, and it can tear up dirt and mud like few other vehicles. All the big, dumb feeling is just an illusion, put there on purpose to convince people this Impreza wagon is really an SUV.
My dad doesn't off-road much, though, and hates SUVs as much as I do, so he bought his Forester and drove 3,500 miles to visit me and my wrenches for a week.
First up was the suspension. After debating every aftermarket suspension on the market, we settled on stock WRX springs and struts to combine enough firmness to drive like a car with enough suppleness to take the trashed East Coast roads the car will spend the next 200,000 miles on. One message on the NASIOC forums (North American Subaru Impreza Owner's Club) and I found four 10,000-mile struts for $250. Installation took less than an hour and lowered the car 2 inches in the front and 2 7/8 inches in the rear (that extra 120 pounds is probably back there). It's mildly ass-draggy now, but we pushed it back up a hair with some custom-made 1/4-inch spacers above the rear struts. Using stock parts means still having all the travel of a WRX, the dramatic lowering comes from the struts simply being shorter than the Forester's.
It takes a concerted, rally-trained effort to get the Forester to wag its tail, so we went hunting for a bigger rear anti-roll bar. The Forester's bar is the same 16mm diameter as the WRX, but the lesbians get a lightweight, hollow bar that's not as stiff. A big rear bar increases oversteer by shifting more load to the outside rear wheel in a corner, but the considerable weight up high on the Forester's roof will do the same thing, so we didn't want to go too big.
The STi gets its more tail-happy balance with a slightly larger rear bar and slightly smaller front bar than the WRX, so we left the Forester's front bar alone and squeezed in an STi rear bar. The STi end links happen to be exactly the same design as the Forester's, so the bar pops in very easily. The Forester's pivot bushings do ride in smaller brackets, though, so the STi bushings don't fit easily. I just lubed up the soft, rubber Forester bushings and squeezed the STi bar in. Not the best, but it should work.
The big truck tires, sized 215/60-16 (26.2 inches tall), went on eBay and were replaced with 225/50-16 (24.9-inches tall) Yokohama AVS ES100s. We were going to fit stickier Kumho Ecsta MXs in the same size, but they were on national back order the week we did all the work. In retrospect, the ES100 seems to have a more appropriate grip level for the stock WRX suspension and still has a very progressive handling limit. They're also a lot cheaper. In the winter, the big box will get Nokian Hakkapeliittas on stock '98 2.5RS wheels, powdercoated flat black by Shoreline Motoring in Huntington Beach. Kinda makes me wish it would snow in Southern California.
While that made it ride and handle much more like a WRX, the steering still felt like a truck. Both the Forester and WRX have three turns lock-to-lock, but that's a deceptive measurement. The Forester has a variable-ratio rack that starts out at a school bus-slow 19.1:1 ratio in the middle, then quickens to 15.2 near the ends. The WRX is a constant 16.5:1. After a bit of scouring, we found a used WRX sedan rack (the wagon rack has shorter tie rods, so it should be avoided) and swapped it in, holding it in place with Whiteline bushings.
The steering had a more dramatic effect on the Forester's feel than even the suspension, leaving the mushy brake pedal as the only evidence that the car used to think it was a truck. Under moderate braking, the brake pedal actually sunk below the gas, making heel-toe downshifting nearly impossible and accidentally mashing both pedals a real possibility. Mushy brakes can be caused by any number of design decisions. Flexy firewalls or brake boosters that move when you mash the pedal, or brake lines that balloon up under pressure, can both make the pedal soft. The master cylinder could be too small, requiring too much travel to push the pads to the rotors, or there could just be too much slop adjusted into the rod that connects the pedal to the booster.
After scouring every piece of documentation we could find to determine the master cylinder diameter, we finally realized that Subaru cylinders have their size cast into the bottom of the cylinder. Brett Carter at Mike Shaw Subaru in Colorado actually went scouring around the showroom sticking a mirror under the nose of every master cylinder until he found what we needed. The Forester has a 1-inch master cylinder, while the Outback VST has a 1 1/16-inch cylinder. That's a 13-percent increase in surface area on the piston, which will translate directly into 13 percent less travel to move those pads, and 13 percent higher effort.
We installed one of those (part number 26401 AC220S1, by the way), plus an MRT master cylinder brace that keeps the flexy firewall and/or brake booster from moving. Finally, diving under the dash, I turned the adjuster on the pedal rod until the slop in the pedal was about half its original sloppiness. Go too far on this adjustment and the piston won't slide back far enough to open the port to the brake fluid reservoir. This makes a sealed hydraulic system, which will cause the brakes to seize when they get hot and try to expand. Every time I adjust brake pedals, I take my wrenches with me on a brake-torturing test drive to make sure this doesn't happen. It didn't, and the brakes now feel better than a standard WRX.
Topping this whole operation off with some Kartboy shifter bushings that make the shifter feel more direct without making it any higher effort, the Forester was officially converted back to a car. If I had never driven a stock Forester, I would never know this one wasn't stock. This is how the car should feel. Sitting lower on normal car tires, it even starts looking good. With those '69 Camaro fender things and those pissed-off looking headlights, the WRX-ified Forester looks, well butch.