Taking it to the track in 2015 Subaru WRX STI

(Credit: Antuan Goodwin/CNET)

Imagine for a moment that you’re on your favorite driving road, ready for a quick and curvy blast, but instead you find yourself stuck behind some tourist who’s slowing your ride to a crawl, thanks to their unfamiliarity with the road. Imagine the frustration that you’d feel; now imagine that the road is your favorite race track and that both you and the slowpoke ahead are both driving 300-plus horsepower, all-wheel drive, race-bred sport sedans. What a waste of speed! This was my first lap piloting the freshly announced 2015 Subaru WRX STI ’round Madza Raceway Laguna Seca, my frustration increasing exponentially with each turn as I balanced trying not to bully the poor guy with wondering how bad of a slap on the wrist I’d get from our hosts for blowing past him at this no-passing-allowed press exhibition event.

Just when I was ready to tempt the rules, the slow poke prematurely dipped into the pit lane, leaving me with a clear shot at the track’s long front straight and a sudden outlet for the red mist that had been building over the lapping session. Perhaps it was this red mist that caused me to misjudge the braking point for the track’s infamously tricky Turn 2 hairpin, but it was certainly the genius of the 2015 STI’s revised symmetrical all-wheel drive system that saved my bacon in the end.

The STI Based on the newly announced Subaru WRX (and, ultimately, the Impreza sedan)… [Read more]