The Subaru WRX has been sadly absent from the UK market for a while now, but the brand’s US motorsport division is nevertheless using a UK event – the Goodwood Festival of Speed – to debut a wild-looking one-off based on the car’s current iteration.
It bears the impossibly cool name of Project Midnight, and from what we’ve seen of it so far, it’s not messing about. It features a massively widened body, racing slicks and a vast rear wing that Subaru seems to have pinched from a ’90s Formula 1 car when nobody was looking. Rather appropriately, it’s all finished in a particularly mean-looking matte black colour scheme.
Subaru ‘Project Midnight’ – rear detail
But what’s powering this mad-looking machine? Well, we don’t know yet, but from what Subaru’s said about it so far, we wouldn’t hold our breath for some pop-banging boxer heroics like Subarus of old.
See, Subaru is bringing to Goodwood alongside Travis Pastrana’s Family Huckster, a 1983 Subaru GL estate that’s been modified beyond recognition into an 862bhp, active aero-equipped doughnut machine that arguably stole the show at last year’s FoS.
Subaru ‘Project Midnight’ – front detail
That car uses what you expect a Subaru to – a massively turbocharged boxer-four that fires it along in a flurry of slightly offbeat noise. We’re promised that Project Midnight, though, is a “radical departure” from the Family Huckster and that it’ll “shock the crowd in a completely different way.”
Does this mean it could feature a high-performance electric powertrain? At this point, we don’t know, but either way, we wouldn’t put an attempt on the fastest time up Lord March’s driveway this year. Trying to make that happen will be motorsport’s ultimate example of nominative determinism, ex-F1 pilot Scott Speed. No, really.
The light of dawn will be shed on Project Midnight on the opening day of FoS on 11 July, if not before. Regardless of what powers it, we’ll be watching closely to see what it can do.
