Fast Failures: Subaru's WRC monster

[toyscrota]

Article by David Evans of Autosport. Only able to read it by paying and I'm sad enough to do that
Anyway will copy and paste it here, some interesting reading. There is photos but I wont be adding them, nothing we haven't seen before.

Fast Failures: Subaru's WRC monster

By David Evans
Rallying editor

Subaru, 1997

Genuine beauty. What is it? Some say Duomo di Milano comes as close as is humanly possible to perfection.

Others would pitch the same arguments in favour of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum.

And then there's art, where one man's Michelangelo is another man's Matisse. Everybody can make a case for true, genuine beauty.

In reality, only one thing ticks the necessary boxes: the Subaru Impreza WRC97.

Look at it. Just look at it.

From every angle, the floor looking up or top down, it's a thing of exquisite loveliness. Prodrive's David Richards famously tasked designer Peter Stevens with lines that defined 100mph standing still. Job done.

Admittedly, the shimmering blue paint and shadowed yellow 555 livery accentuated the curves in way the car's plain navy predecessor could only dream. If the Impreza 555 had been an effective, but fairly ugly duckling, it had certainly grown into something more than worthy of a lingering look.

The Prodrive-built car's arrival trumpeted a new beginning in world rallying. In the biggest rules shake-up since Group B was banned 11 years earlier, the World Rally Car era was upon us.

Aimed at lowering barriers to entry for potential manufacturers and easing the homologation process, the regulation change also meant radically restyled rally cars.

Flares were firmly back in fashion. And they've never looked better than on the two-door Subaru.

There was no need for a reinvention of the wheel for Prodrive and Subaru. The Impreza was already a hugely effective tool that had taken three of four possible World Rally Championship titles in 1995 and '96. So Banbury's first World Rally Car was a revolution on the outside and an evolution under the skin.

The brains behind the new car, David Lapworth says: "The Impreza WRC97 was the start of a story for Prodrive. If you look back, you can see a lot of the parts which came on the later cars started life in 1997.

"At the time we weren't maybe brave enough to go all the way with certain things. But, as the cars evolved, so they became more and more advanced in areas like, for example, the tilting of the turbocharger or lowering the centre of gravity. These were started on this car.

"We set a bit of a precedent with the Impreza WRC97 and, if I'm honest, I think it wasn't a bad first attempt at a World Rally Car. It set us off in the right direction."

The fatter arches, bigger rear wing and scoops in the bonnet were definitely a glimpse into the future.

Lapworth adds: "The aerodynamics were an area where we got much more freedom with the World Rally Car regulations.

"We were allowed much bigger wings and wider wheel arches - we used both. Obviously, the extra rear wing gave us more downforce and more stability, but this was still quite an early stage in terms of aero. Looking at subsequent cars, it all got a bit more extreme from then on."

 

[toyscrota]

Evidence that Subaru wasn't about to reinvent the wheel could be found in the transmission. The Impreza WRC97 ended the season still with a H-pattern gearbox, shunning the more widely used sequential shift for the full season.

"There weren't any big, big changes on the transmission," says Lapworth. "The gearbox remained from the 555, as did the front and rear differentials. The change came with the rear diff, which was active as well.

"This gave us the chance to try every conceivable set-up in the conditions without having to work with ramp angles and pre-load; it just made the job of getting the car to a driver's liking - and then offering them more opportunity to dial the car to the conditions - considerably easier."

Dialing the car into the conditions is vital in the ever changing grip levels of the French Alps in January. Piero Liatti did that perfectly to give the Impreza WRC97 a debut win.

A month on and Kenneth Eriksson backed that up on a largely snowless Swedish. If you wanted to be mean-spirited about the new car's early successes in 1997, you could talk about a couple of dynamite tyre choices in Monte Carlo and Sweden, which put the result beyond question.

Certainly round one winner Liatti remembers his selection of Pirelli helped no end through the final day.

"We had a lot of snow that became rain for the start of the final day," Liatti says. "I took the intermediate tyre and we took a lot of time from [Tommi] Makinen. Basically, this is where we won the rally."

A month on and Eriksson's decision to ditch advice from the team and the tyre engineers and take a buffed - slightly blunted - stud helped ease him from the clutches of Carlos Sainz and the Spaniard's Ford Escort WRC.

But a Colin McRae Safari win skewed that view slightly. On three rallies as radically different as the Monte, Swedish and Safari, a hat-trick demonstrated a car with truly diverse abilities; speed as well as reliability.

Subaru's third title was looking safe, while McRae headed home from Africa at the top of the table and well worth a tenner for a second title in three years come November.

Not quite. Double cambelt failure on the next round in Portugal gave cause for concern. New Zealand was the same, Finland the same again. McRae's season was coming off the rails.

Beneath the skin, things were not all well with the Impreza WRC97. The engine was a major cause for concern. Lapworth remembers that worry well.

"Undoubtedly, the engine's Achilles Heel was the camshaft drive," he says. "Different harmonics in the engine were affecting the belt and causing the failure. The belt tooth profile and tensioner were redesigned while increasing the belt wrap on the crankshaft pulley.

"Don't forget, in those days, we weren't doing anything like the level of pre-season testing with the cars that Volkswagen are doing now. We had no hint of this problem early in the year until Portugal. In all honesty, we weren't quick enough to get the issue sorted.

"The Japanese way was to approach it very conservatively, with a lot of research into why it happened and how it could be prevented. What we needed was an immediate fix. Five engines were lost in total and it's fair to say any one of those cost Colin the title."

McRae and Eriksson suffered the vast majority of the engine failures. Running a largely asphalt-based part programme, the flat-four ahead of Liatti ran well.

"I have only very good memories of this car," he says. "My favourite result came in this car: the 1997 Monte Carlo. Winning in this car was special.

"I had done a lot of work with the car in the winter of 1996, a lot of testing. Colin didn't want to do so much of the testing and set-up work, so I knew the car very well."

Liatti's memories of that 1997 season are, however, tainted slightly. In Sanremo, he was told to slow down to allow McRae past to boost the Scot's wilting chances of the drivers' title.

"That was my rally," he says. "My win. I was an Italian winning in Italy, but the team told me to stop and let Colin past. David Richards told me with two stages left, that I had to finish second.

"I went full attack in the last two stages and then paid the price in the last control by taking the penalty. If Colin won the last three rallies, he had a chance of the title. He won the last three, but still didn't win the title..."

Mid-season, McRae had fallen out of love with the car as well, as he struggled to make the wider track work.

"Unfortunately," says Lapworth, "we weren't able to replicate the geometry [from the Impreza 555] on the wider car and Colin couldn't get the same degree of confidence that he could in the narrower car.

"It's not really possible to objectively measure how much that confidence was worth in terms of stage times, but the answer was a compromise, known as the medium-track car. In reality, this was only marginally narrower than the wide-track - not that we told anybody at the time.

"Maybe there was a bit of psychology in there that helped Colin."

There's no doubting the car's speed when it was on song, but equally you question whether Subaru's third title would have come had M-Sport had longer to prepare its first ever manufacturer entry on behalf of Ford.

Or if Mitsubishi had been given the budget to run two full factory cars on every round of the championship. Individually, Mitsubishi's Tommi Makinen and McRae jointly set the most fastest times in 1997 with 78; collectively Subaru totalled 124 while Mitsubishi could only put together 99.

McRae had seen enough and, had it not been for a watertight contract with Subaru, he would have been off to Ford a year earlier than he ultimately was.

Like Lapworth says, the Impreza WRC97 was the start of a new chapter for Prodrive. And that chapter wasn't too many pages old before the car really started to come good. Three years on, the P2000 was just about as good as the Impreza World Rally Car could get.

Robert Reid remembers his first test of the new car alongside Richard Burns.

"We were in Girona," says Reid. "We went up the road in the 1999 car to set a benchmark, came back and got in the new one. Immediately, Richard asked me the time. Very, very rarely did he ask me if that was right. That time: 'Are you sure?' It was that good."

A second per mile faster is thought impossible from one season to the next, but that's what Prodrive achieved in the winter of 1999. And that car's foundations were laid with the Impreza WRC97.

 

[JAMIE-TYPERV6]

Cheers lad... Great read and insight into my all time favorite!!

 

[toyscrota]

Cheers lad... Great read and insight into my all time favorite!!

No bother Jamie. (sorry haven't been on here in a while!)

I always found it funny that the other teams had developed the sequential gear shift in 97 but Prodrive kept the H-pattern right up to the P2000 albeit I know it was semi-automatic! But that is a serious development of a car in the winter of 1999 as they say.