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The P25 did reach its design goals, it is capable of lapping Wakefield about 2 seconds a lap faster than the GT2 while costing about half of the price. At Wakefield Brett rode with us to show us the ideal drive line. He was rather nervous that the dumb yank was going to do something dumb and smash up the P25. We didn’t disappoint him. We continually fumbled the left hand shifting (Australia is RHD) overevving the engine and making him wince. Not wanting to see his masterpiece of an engine scattered over the track, Brett handed us the keys to an Opal Astra compact car to get used to left-handed shifting in a cheap compact car before driving the P25 again.
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| The Whiteline crew is eager to hear about my first true driving impression of the P25 |
After a session we were ready to drive the P25 again, this time seriously. We noticed the tenacious grip, supple ride, powerful brakes and broad powerband immediately. More importantly, this STi did not exhibit the spasticness of understeer and sudden violent transition to oversteer that is a STi trademark. The car had a progressive build up of slight understeer that could be countered with trail braking or lift throttle. Stronger rotation could be induced with left foot braking. Power on oversteer could be easily be invoked with the right foot and it was progressive and easily controlled. The WRX’s tendency to rear up under hard acceleration was greatly diminished. The normal rubbery STi steering felt much more communicative and sharp. We were amazed that this soft riding STi was the best handling WRX we have ever driven. In fact we felt that the P25’s ride was better than Project STi’s stock suspension which had brought us to the airport!
Knowing our EVO biased preferences in chassis dynamics; Whiteline had the balls to bring out an EVO 9 with some of their mild suspension upgrades for us to do a direct back-to-back comparison with the P25. To our amazement, the P25 felt better than the EVO for all attributes other than the EVO’s superiorly fast steering rack ratio. We were impressed by Whiteline’s confidence in letting us drive the P25 car against what they knew was what we felt to be one of the best handling cars in the world knowing full well we were going to report it as we saw it.
