You can find pretty much anything you like for sale on Facebook. Take ‘Vermont garage sales’, a buying and selling group with 33,000 members in the bucolic Northeastern US state. Recent items listed there include a cowboy hat, a pair of child’s rollerblades, a small motor boat, and checks notes the door from a legendary Subaru Impreza rally car driven by Colin McRae?
Yep, someone in the sleepy little town of Barre, Vermont, has gotten hold of a genuine piece of rally history, and it could be yours. Its gold colour scheme and bodywork damage makes it instantly recognisable as the door from the Impreza the 1995 WRC champion drove during the 2006 X Games, when the extreme sports tournament – a bit like the Olympics, but with baggier clothes and more people saying ‘gnarly’ – first included rally as one of its disciplines.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen the clip that made this car famous. Approaching the end of the rally stage, which took place in and around the home stadium of the LA Galaxy football team, McRae launched the Impreza over a jump at a preposterous angle.
Landing hard with the car sideways, the impact popped a rim and caused the car to dig in and roll over. In typical McRae fashion, he almost immediately powered off once the Impreza was back on its wheels, only losing the win by half a second to eventual victor Travis Pastrana. Pastrana summed up the Scotsman’s commitment in a post-stage interview: “Dude, Colin McRae is straight up a god!”
The door from Colin McRae’s X Games Subaru Impreza rally car
Anyway, 18 years on from that iconic moment – in what would prove to be one of the last high-profile events McRae would enter before his untimely death in a helicopter accident in 2007 – someone’s apparently pulled the door out of a barn in rural Vermont.
It’s not too surprising that it turned up there – the state has long been the home of Subaru’s US rallying activities – but it’s the sort of thing you’d normally find for sale in a motorsport memorabilia auction, not a random community Facebook group.
Honestly, the $5,000 (approx. £3,800) being asked by the seller might be a bit ambitious, but as he says: “You know, or you don’t.” It’d certainly make a unique spare part for a hawkeye Impreza owner.
