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" This article originally appeared in the August 2004 issue of Road &amp;amp;amp; Track. We know The Fast and the Furious crowd and rally fans love this car here on the West Coast,&amp;quot; Managing Editor Matthew Miles said, calling me one winter afternoon from our California office, &amp;quot;but we&amp;#039;d like to know how it stands up as a daily driver for a guy who lives in snow-bound rural Wisconsin.&amp;quot;  I looked out the window at the brown tundra of our front yard, which was frozen solid but nearly devoid of snow, and blinked.   &amp;quot;We can get you an STi for a couple of weeks,&amp;quot; he continued. &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you and your wife Barb take it on a long weekend trip, maybe up into the north woods, and see how it works in the real world.&amp;quot;    I nearly told Matthew we&amp;#039;d had a rather dry winter here in the Midwest, with just the slightest dusting of snow, but there was no sense in deflecting a perfectly good chance to drive a hot little 300-bhp shoebox full of dynamite like the STi. Besides, maybe it would snow before the car got here. If not, we could drive relentlessly north in search of the white stuff.   As it turns out, I needn&amp;#039;t have worried.  The very Friday evening our test car was dropped off, an ice storm hit Wisconsin and freezing pellets that sounded like birdshot hit our windows all night. In the wee hours this thick glaze of ice was capped off by about 3 inches of snow and then the temperature dropped to 7 below zero, with gusting winds. By morning light our yard looked like the summit of Everest, but without all the empty oxygen bottles and tattered flags.   And mountain climbing, so to speak, would be the very first task.   It was Saturday, you see \u2014 trash day here in the sticks \u2014 and we had to haul our sorted recyclables to the dump. Which entailed negotiating our ridiculously steep driveway and climbing an unplowed road out to the highway with a trunk full of bottles and cans. What could be more &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; than that?    I tried hauling the trash in my Ford van, but it slid off the driveway and did a slow pirouette into the middle of our lawn, barely missing a tree. So I abandoned the van to await warmer weather, transferred the trash into the surprisingly large trunk of the Subaru and I was on my way. Effortlessly, and very quickly. It was the fastest trip I ever made to the dump, summer or winter.   Which is another way of saying that the STi&amp;#039;s huge hood scoop soon proved itself to be not a phony styling exercise, but a harbinger of things to come.\u00A0  That scoop is the first thing you notice when you climb into the Subaru \u2014 other than the supportive bucket seats and racing-style aluminum pedals with Swiss-cheese holes drilled in them \u2014 and it fills a substantial part of your field of vision. Open the hood (after chipping away the ice) and you&amp;#039;ll find the scoop feeds a gigantic intercooler with the letters STi emblazoned in red. It&amp;#039;s your first \u2014 but not last \u2014 clue that this is a real performance car. Those letters, incidentally, stand for &amp;quot;Subaru Tecnica international,&amp;quot; the company&amp;#039;s motorsports division.  The intercooler feeds a smooth-yet-snarling turbocharged 2.5-liter flat-4 engine that produces a remarkable 300 bhp at 6000 rpm and 300 lb.-ft. of torque at 4000 rpm. At low rpm it feels like a perfectly docile midsize economy sedan, but as the tach needle climbs above 2500 rpm, you can hear a tell-tale turbo whine and the car starts to rocket down the road. By 3500 rpm, it&amp;#039;s already in a very responsive and meaty part of its power curve, and at 4000 rpm you can use the throttle to pitch and control the car at any attitude on snow-packed roads. Even with a trunk full of trash.  The upper reaches of the tach, with its 7000-rpm redline, are needed only for maximum acceleration on dry roads. Much of the fun is in the midrange. It&amp;#039;s a beautiful engine, hooked up to a 6-speed manual close-ratio gearbox. Nice shift action, except for a slight notchiness dropping into 6th. The Subaru, of course, has all-wheel drive, and it also has a Driver Controlled Center Differential (DCCD) system on the console. Switch it to the Manual mode and you can vary the amount of lockup between the front and rear axles if you want, dialing all the way to full lock for hard slogging through the outback. But even in the normal, Automatic mode, it has all the traction it needs to dig through almost anything. Steering has a fair amount of torque steer and self-centering, but is quick and accurate through the corners. The brakes are ferociously powerful, yet easy to modulate. Quite an impressive package, even on that short first trip. When I got back from the dump, I said to Barb, &amp;quot;We have to take this car somewhere more glamorous for a winter weekend. You must share the experience.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t we drive it up to Door County and visit our boat,&amp;quot; she suggested. &amp;quot;Good idea. &amp;quot; Door County is the thumb-like peninsula that extends northeast into Lake Michigan from the mitten-shaped Wisconsin. It&amp;#039;s a popular tourist area of small, rocky harbors and old fishing villages, sort of the Cape Cod of the Midwest. Only without the cod. We have lake trout and whitefish instead.  Barb and I keep a sailboat up there in the summer, in a harbor called Ellison Bay. We treat the boat like a north woods getaway cabin, living onboard and sailing on those rare summer weekends when I can tear myself away from wallowing in the restoration of some cruddy old British sports car. In the winter, the boat is stored in a big unheated building with a bunch of other boats. We&amp;#039;d been planning all winter to make a trip to Ellison Bay and look at the hull while it was out of the water, to see if it needed any work. Exercising the Subaru would be the ideal excuse for this 500-mile weekend drive. Barb immediately dug out her two favorite travel books, Wisconsin&amp;#039;s Most Painfully Expensive Bed &amp;amp;amp; Breakfasts, and A Guidebook to Restaurants that Cost Slightly More than a Used Lamborghini, and got on the phone to make reservations. Meanwhile, our photographer friend, Brian Blades, flew out from California to join us. We picked him up at the Madison airport and headed northeast. For being, essentially, a thinly-disguised World Rally Championship car, the STi&amp;#039;s ride is not too bad on the highway. It initially feels a little harsh and stiff, if you&amp;#039;ve just stepped out of some fluffy luxo-cruiser, but, as the miles wear on, the suspension feels merely firm and well-damped, and it doesn&amp;#039;t irritate or cause vibration headaches on a long road trip. There&amp;#039;s a little extra tire noise and jounce over bumps, but the agility and flat handling seem worth the trade. The STi has a remarkably good compromise between ride and roll stiffness, for such a serious and capable performance car. Front bucket seats, with their perforated blue cloth inserts, are wide enough to accommodate a variety of bums, yet supportive enough with side bolsters and wings to hold you in place. Lumbar support is good, and the seats are long-distance roomy and comfortable. The rear seats are similarly well-shaped and comfortable, but a little lighter on leg room. I could just barely sit behind a driver&amp;#039;s seat adjusted for my 6-ft.-1 self, but the front passenger seat offers enough leg room that you can move it well forward, so some gawky lummox of a guy can sit happily in the right rear. It&amp;#039;s a 4-passenger car where one of them should be petite. Which is always ideal anyway, if you ask me.  Overall, it&amp;#039;s a nice cabin, with tasteful, low-key interior panels and a user-friendly dash panel that allows you to find and operate the sound system (6-CD in-dash player) and climate control without a graduate degree. It has an anatomically correct steering wheel with nice thumb-grips and an aluminum STi surround on the shift boot, but is mercifully devoid of over-the-top boy-racer styling flourishes. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean the guys at the gas station don&amp;#039;t notice the car. With its gold 17-in. BBS wheels, visible Brembo brake calipers, hood scoop and tall basket-handle wing on the trunklid, the Subaru all but electrifies young car buffs on sight, and we met dozens of bystanders who knew exactly what it was, how much horsepower it had and about what it cost (ours was $32,550, as tested, with a list of $31,000). All wanted to know how we liked it. Speaking of gas stations, the STi takes super premium fuel (93 octane) and gets reasonably good gas mileage we averaged 21.06 mpg in three fill-ups, not bad for a car of this horsepower, driven hard on snowy roads in some of our photo sessions. On the highway, we got just under 23 mpg. After cruising up the Fox Valley though Green Bay in heavy Friday afternoon commuter traffic, we finally struck off on the lonelier and prettier two-lane roads of the Door peninsula. This place got its name, incidentally because of a narrows between Washington Island and the tip of the peninsula, a stormy, shipwreck-strewn passage known by the early French settlers as La Porte des Mortes, or Death&amp;#039;s Door. Naturally, Barb and I picked this area, above all others, to sail. You can never be too reckless.  So we headed north toward Death&amp;#039;s Door in the gathering darkness, through Sturgeon Bay and the quaint villages of Egg Harbor and Fish Creek, past wintry cherry orchards and closed produce stands. Our white High Intensity Discharge headlights (dash-adjustable for non-irritating beam height) bored into the night, taking us through the old Moravian fishing settlement of Ephraim (still no drinking allowed in town) to the Yacht-Works Marina at Sister Bay. There we stopped for Mexican food at La Puerta, a lively restaurant next to a pub called J.J.&amp;#039;s where we often stop for a margarita as consolation after a hard day of sailing. It&amp;#039;s the kind of place Jimmy Buffet would like, if he had warmer clothes. And maybe a Scandinavian parrot. After dinner, Barb guided us back down the coast to a Fish Creek bed &amp;amp;amp; breakfast place called The White Gull Inn. Beautiful old place with antique furniture and a welcoming fireplace in our room. We found the lonely Brian a room near the broom closet, under the stairs, while Barb and I reveled in our room&amp;#039;s spacious Victorian splendor. The only downside was that it cost slightly more than a new set of forged pistons for my Lotus Elan.         In the morning, we drove up to look at our boat in the storage barn. The hull looked good, as far as we could tell in the dark, cold building. Outside, the wind whistled and snow tendrils snaked through the parking lot. Was it possible this was the same planet upon which we had sailed in shorts and T-shirts during the summer? It is these vivid contrasts that make life in Wisconsin so compelling. Not to mention the fun of using jumper cables.  After that, we showed Brian around the peninsula, cruising through the white birches and conifers of Peninsula State Park, up to the Washington Island ferryboat crossing at Gil&amp;#039;s Rock, through Bailey&amp;#039;s Harbor and down to Whitefish Dunes State Park on the Lake Michigan side. That night we had dinner at a restaurant called T. Ashwell&amp;#039;s, just a block inland from our boat slip at Ellison Bay. It was in Barb&amp;#039;s guidebook, highly recommended. A piano player in a black cocktail dress played beautiful low-key jazz at a baby grand, wine glasses glittered, the fireplace crackled and candlelight flickered. The food and ambience were superb, but I couldn&amp;#039;t help noticing that our dinner and wine cost about as much as a new Snap-on brake-line crimping tool. Worth it, though; sometimes you have to get out of the garage, relax and enjoy life. Now that I think about it, this is what nice road cars are for. Also, the owner and chef, Tom Ashwell Smith, turned out to be a life-long car buff and came out of the kitchen to ask about our STi in the parking lot. How he spotted it out the window in the dark, I&amp;#039;ll never know. This car was getting as much attention as the first Miata I drove, 14 years ago. In the morning, we drove up to Ellison Bay to look at the frozen harbor, and Brian took a picture of me in my parka standing on the ice where our boat normally lives. We&amp;#039;ll carry it as a reminder to quit complaining when it&amp;#039;s 105 degrees Fahrenheit next summer. After that, we cruised down to a little inland body of water called Europe Lake, and I did a few circle-track laps on the snow-covered ice. This open environment allowed me to throw the car around a bit, and I found it quite pitchable, and easy to balance with the steering wheel and accelerator, with strong power-on recovery as it straightens out. It also makes quick and precise handbrake turns, when a 180 is called for, as it so often is during a movie chase scene or after a bank robbery. A whole day on this frozen lake would have been great fun with the STi, but we decided to leave before realty signs started popping up in the lawns of the surrounding lake cottages. This is the peaceful north, after all. Except for the snowmobiles, which make quite a bit more noise than the Subaru, but don&amp;#039;t handle as well.  As the sun began to sink in the west (typically), we headed back to southern Wisconsin, stopping five hours later in Madison for dinner at Paisan&amp;#039;s, our favorite pizza place. When we got home, the STi actually made it up our driveway without wheelspin or other rally-car theatrics. In the morning, I drove Brian fearlessly to the airport, despite rapidly accumulating snow on the highways. Miraculously, his flight came in and he was able to return to Southern California. That word, &amp;quot;fearlessly,&amp;quot; figures large into my experience with the Subaru these past few weeks. Unless you get really deep snowdrifts, there&amp;#039;s no road too daunting to tackle with the STi. This is also true of many big fat SUVs, of course, but there is a difference. The STi is a genuine pleasure and a lot of fun to drive on those snow-packed roads, while an SUV merely trundles along. The Subaru Impreza also has sports-car-quick steering and a low center of gravity, so you can pitch it around without fear of going on your roof. It&amp;#039;s like the difference between a Cobra and a Cadillac of the 1960s. The WRX STi is simply an all-weather sports car. And living as I do in a place that gets all weather the Subaru is almost a new form of liberation.  I&amp;#039;d expected this car to be stiff, noisy and somewhat demanding as a daily driver, a hair-shirt factory racer with, perhaps, more than its share of rough edges, but that hasn&amp;#039;t been the case. The Subaru has a nice feeling of solidness, quality and high finish. It gives you neither more comfort than you need, nor less, and it makes an altogether user-friendly everyday car. Yet beneath it all is the soul of a fire-breathing rally car. You can feel it and hear it lurking there, even while driving calmly but fearlessly to the airport. It&amp;#039;s a car that&amp;#039;s ready when you are. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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