Subaru introduced the Impreza as a 1992 model in Japan, and the hot-rod WRX version was available there from the beginning. Australian car shoppers could buy Impreza WRXs starting in 1994, but Subaru shoppers in the United States had to wait until the second-generation Impreza showed up here in 2002 in order to buy new WRXs. Today’s Junkyard Gem is one of those early WRXs, a wagon now residing in a Denver-area self-service yard (just a few rows away from a rare junkyard example of its spiritual predecessor: the Mazda 323 GTX).
I find examples of the WRX in Front Range car graveyards with some regularity, because Colorado drivers love Subarus and plenty of WRXs roam the state, but nearly all of them have been crashed beyond easy recognition and/or stripped clean. This one appears to have avoided sliding backwards into a concrete abutment at high speed and/or being rolled into a ball during its two-decade career.
The WRX remained an Impreza through 2014, after which it became a model in its own right. You could get the Impreza Outback Sport here all the way through 2011.
The engine in this car was a turbocharged and intercooled 2.0-liter boxer-four rated at 227 horsepower and 217 pound-feet.
I didn’t see this car’s hood anywhere nearby, so I’m guessing that its final owner removed the hood in an ill-advised attempt to solve an overheating problem (which never works, especially when the overheating is caused by a blown head gasket). It’s also possible that a junkyard shopper bought the hood with its mean-looking scoop, but you’d think that the valuable factory intercooler would have been snagged by the same shopper in that case.
A five-speed manual was standard equipment in the ’03 Impreza WRX, though unclear-on-the-concept WRX shoppers could get a four-speed slushbox for an extra grand (about $1,683 after inflation).
How many miles were on it? Without attaching a battery to fire up the ECU and enable the electronic odometer, we can’t say. I’ve found a discarded Impreza with well over 300,000 miles on the clock, but I suspect that WRX miles are harder than regular miles.
The interior isn’t so rough, so the blown-head-gasket theory is the one that best explains this car’s presence in such a place.
The MSRP for this car was $23,795, or about $40,033 in 2023 dollars.
Owning the road just got a lot more affordable.
As was nearly always the case, the WRX’s home-market TV commercials were a lot more fun than the ads we got on this side of the Pacific.
