Colin McRae's personal Subaru Impreza WRX STI 22B sells for record number – UPDATE (2024)

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Colin McRae's personal Subaru Impreza WRX STI 22B sells for record number – UPDATE? ›

One of the three prototype Subaru Impreza STi 22Bs ever built has sold for a whopping £480,500. S447 YOX, AKA chassis #000/040, was the late Colin McRae's whip of choice – “getting him into bother” back when he was making history in the World Rally Championship in the 1990s.

When the hammer fell, the car – billed as “surely the ultimate road-going Subaru” – traded hands for £480,500, or $606,042, a near-record price for any Subaru vehicle up to this date.

Two years ago, a 1998 Subaru Impreza STI 22B was sold for an incredible $312,555 USD. But get this: another one recently traded hands for nearly double that price.

Gallery: 1998 Subaru Impreza STi 22B Formerly Owned By Colin McRae. The 22B celebrated Subaru's WRC team winning three consecutive WRC manufacturers' championships – 1995, 1996, and 1997.

It's that rare, thrilling, mindblowing time again: another Subaru WRX STI 22B is up for auction. Auction house Collecting Cars reckons this car [↗] will fetch close to $500,000 – and they're probably right, since car 156 of 400, with 40,000km on the clock, sold for A$402,000 in the US back in 2021.

There are 33,884,489 cars & other vehicles with valid MOTs. There are 5 SUBARU 22B left in the UK with an MOT.

An Impreza WRX rally car driven by Richard Burns in the 2000 World Rally Championship takes the crown of the most expensive Subaru sold overall, after changing hands at auction in 2021 for $US865,000 ($AU1. 344 million in today's money).

The Subaru Impreza 22B is Now Legal in the US, But It's Still Expensive. The most desirable Subaru comes with a hefty six-figure price tag… if you can even find one. The 25 year import rule has a way of shaping US car culture. It says that you can have almost anything you want if you're willing to wait long enough.

The original car used the 2.0-litre Boxer engine like that in the rally car, but for the 22B it was bored out to 2.2-litres. It also got other improvements, such as nozzles to spray water into the intercooler when driving hard.

Why did Colin McRae crash? ›

Sheriff Nikola Stewart stated, after the 16-day inquiry, that McRae had been engaged in "unnecessary and unsafe" low-level flying at the time of the crash, and that as a private pilot McRae was unqualified and untrained to fly at such a level.

Former world rally champion Colin McRae did not have a valid flying licence when the helicopter he was piloting crashed and killed all four people on board, according to an official accident report released today.

David Lapworth and his team at Prodrive found more power and torque in the turbocharged 1994cc, flat-four engine and the spec sheets say that it is good for 310bhp at 5500rpm and 367lb ft at 4000rpm.

The Subaru Impreza WRX STI 22B is one of the rarest creations from the company, a special two-door version developed during its successful run in the WRC in the mid-1990s. The company only built 425 globally and just five examples arrived in Australia – and this is one of them.

The 1998 Impreza 22B-Sti is one of only 400 ever made by the Japanese giant of the rare 22B performance car. In iconic Subaru Sonic Blue, one 22B is currently on sale by car auction house VVS UK in Cranbook Common, Kent, for £250,000.

Whichever way you look at it, Subaru created a truly fabulous machine. Only 399 22Bs were built for sale to the domestic market (another 25 were made for overseas markets including 16 allocated to the UK) and they pre-sold within 48 hours in early 1998, costing a shade under £40,000 at the time.

After several years of varying success, McRae switched to the M-Sport-run Ford factory team for 1999, driving the new Ford Focus rally car. The deal saw McRae earning six million pounds over two years, which at the time made him the highest-earning rally driver in history.

Power is quoted at 280hp, and when teamed with a short ratio gearbox, could get this Subaru from 0-60mph in less than 5.3 seconds. Needless to say, these cars were in high demand — especially with production being pegged at 399 examples for Japan only.

In 2017, Colin McRae's 1996 WRC test car sold for £230,625 (nearly $300K at the time), but in 2021, Petter Solberg's 2004 Rally Japan–winning Impreza sold for £369,000 ($522K), and a barn-find Impreza driven by both McRae and Carlos Sainz Sr. sold for $360K worth of Bitcoin in Australia in 2020.

Many journalists jumped to the mistaken assumption that 22 referred to the 2.2 litre engine and the B stood for Bilstein, the car's suspension manufacturers. The truth is 22B is hexadecimal (number base 16, used in the coding of computer programmes where the letter A to F are used for the numbers 10 to 15) for 555.