Making The Monster

Mad scientist Stuart Jackson has brought his brutal Subaru Impreza to life by transplanting the modified heart and lungs from a Newage model into a lightweight classic body.

- Dan Goodyer 

There’s a little bit of Victor Frankenstein inside all of us. As performance tuning enthusiasts, we like to take cars apart and rebuild them to be stronger, more powerful and ultimately faster. As a result, the beasts we create are often completely unique. This is exactly how 30-year-old RAF radar specialist Stuart Jackson has approached his two-door Classic Impreza.

With no formal training in mechanics, a lot of enthusiasm and inhuman amounts of patience, Stuart has created what many people would consider to be the ultimate road-going Subaru Impreza. It’s all the best bits of the newage Impreza stuffed into a lightweight two-door Classic body shell. It weighs nothing, has short gearing and a turbo that spools up at lightning speed. In short, it’s a formidable point-to-point weapon.

The engine is a fully-built 2.1-litre, based on an EJ207 block, with AVCS heads and a billet MD321T turbo from Lateral Performance. It punches 450bhp and similar torque through a close-ratio six-speed ’box, with a ton of suspension work to make sure it handles properly, and topped off with big brakes and a wide, sticky tyre on each corner. It looks great, too, with a set of ABW Motorsport arch extensions, carbon-fibre spoiler and bonnet scoop, plus Lamborghini paint. Incredibly, Stuart built this whole car in his home garage from a bare shell in just 364 days! However, the story really begins many years and several Imprezas ago...