A Subaru BRZ STI Might Finally Be Happening

The Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT86 twins have been with us for five years now, but a properly hot version of either one continues to elude us. That might just be about to change.

We’ve had dollops of false hope so many times, but this time it might actually be happening on Subaru’s end, with the Subaru USA Twitter account tweeting out what looks to be the back end of a BRZ with a huge STI-branded wing attached. Oh, and there’s an ‘STI’ hashtag, just after a date - 8 June 2017. So whatever this is, we won’t have long to wait until we find out.

The rear wing certainly seems to match the one fitted to a BRZ prototype that’s been seen in various spy shots, so we’re crossing our fingers hard right now.

Should this be the BRZ STI we’ve all be hoping for, there’s a big question mark as to what would power it. The STI Performance concept Subaru released in 2015 was packing a race-derived 2.0-litre boxer-four with anything up to 450bhp, depending on who you spoke to. A less extreme version of that would do quite nicely.

Of course, there is a chance this is another false dawn, and what’s actually being cooked up is a range of chassis and aero improvements. We’re intrigued/terrified to find out…