We Build A Lifted Subaru BRZ Wilderness

The Project Car: Sometimes We Just Can't Leave Well Enough Alone
There resides in the human psyche an overwhelming urge to fiddle with a good thing. Which is our excuse for project cars. We once stuffed a Pontiac single-overhead-cam inline-six into a Jaguar XK-E. Who but Car and Driver would install two engines in a Honda CRX? On occasion, projects bore actual fruit: a 212-mph Corvette—427 cubes, 603 horsepower—that we built to celebrate the magazine's 40th. A 150-mph 1998 Ford Crown Victoria that almost won the Hooker's Choice Award in a Nevada race. And an otherwise matronly 1996 Mercedes-Benz E320 that achieved 198 mph with a V-12 in its proboscis. Now, a Subaru BRZ joins that glorious pantheon.
Imagine you're driving a Toyota 4Runner. A huge one. Or a Jeep. Yeah, a lifted Jeep. With big tires, antennas for comms, and a Dometic cooler full of Klondike bars. Now imagine thumping along your favorite off-road trail, mixing it up in beautiful brown mud while giant tread blocks stomp over downed tree limbs and reveling in the belief that you won't meet traffic along your secret path. Then, you see it. No, you hear it first. It sounds like a swarm of bees fighting in a civil war. Your heart sinks as the noise moves closer. You can't believe what you're about to ask yourself. Is that . . . a Subaru?
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
Driving through a limestone mine is slow going. There lies some rather treacherous sand beneath this cavern's standing water, and it's best to keep the lights on to avoid dropping into the three-acre lake.
But on our endeavor, traffic would be of no concern. Just north of Pittsburgh is an off-road passage that leads 250 feet underground into a limestone mine that last had a pickaxe swung at it in 1914. The 0.8-mile loop is part of an off-road tour at Mines & Meadows ATV/RV Resort, which usually allows only side-by-sides and other all-terrain vehicles to pass through the mine's 84-inch-wide entrance. However, the resort made an exception for our project Subie.
In the past year, we've made some dramatic changes to one of our favorite sports cars, the four-time 10Best-winning Subaru BRZ. Last year Subaru's public-relations department called and asked what we might want to do with a BRZ sentenced to the crusher after living a life of press-car abuse. We don't know what rev-limiter agony this BRZ experienced, but we thought we'd give it a nice final outing before it met a hydraulic press. Shortly after the automaker's offer, Subaru of New England posted an April Fools' joke on Instagram: a rendering of a BRZ Wilderness. That gag became our goal.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
You're reveling in the belief that you won't see another soul on the way to your secret spot. Then, you see it. No, you hear it first.
A mere appearance package wouldn't do for our BRZ Wilderness. Instead, our modifications needed to send the BRZ beyond the Target parking lot filled with TrailSports, Rock Creeks, and Timberlines and into some actual mud. To get us deeper off-road than any BRZ has been, this car would need a higher ground clearance, tires with tough sidewalls to survive many jumps, more LED lighting than a construction site, and an exhaust that would make it as loud as a Ferrari 458 Italia at wide-open throttle.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
To build it, we started by raising the suspension two inches. Emboldened by the lifted silhouette, we tore apart the BRZ to reduce the stock car's 2840-pound weight as much as possible. This is arguably the most satisfying part of any project: the removal and wanton destruction of things destined for the trash. It's also the easiest.
The BRZ shed 35 pounds after we removed the muffler. Its interior underwent a plastecotomy as we gutted it of unnecessary weight, tearing out carpet and 80 pounds of heated front seats. They'd be replaced by proper racing buckets with six-point safety harnesses that would require a quality roll bar (we'll do a safety cage if we take this car racing).
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
To get the parts we needed, the folks at Competition Motorsport in West Des Moines, Iowa, invited us to their toy store. Their showroom looks like Fernando Alonso's walk-in closet, with every size, color, and brand of racing suit, helmet, and glove on display. We left with Sparco Evo seats (weighing a mere 15 pounds each) and a bolt-in roll bar made with Docol R8 high-strength steel. The fabricators here can customize tubing for just about any application, and they welded ours together in three hours before sending it to the paint shop. That's quicker than most Car and Driver staffers answer emails.
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
With the installation of new bucket seats, six-point safety harnesses, and a roll bar, we were able to rip out more than 20 pounds of airbags and seatbelts.
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
To aid in the BRZ's weight-loss journey, Competition Motorsport also sent us home with a lithium-ion 12-volt battery from Antigravity Batteries. It's 21 pounds lighter than the BRZ's original lead-acid unit and helped keep the finished car's weight below 3000 pounds.
Subaru didn't have many directives or guidelines but did ask that we not change the engine. So the 228-hp 2.4-liter flat-four is completely stock, which is probably the primary reason the car remains operational today. Perhaps Subaru knew what so many of us know: Engine modifications have left countless projects permanently on jack stands, much to the chagrin of neighborhood associations the world over.
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
Forced to leave the BRZ's flat-four alone, and our cherry-picker dreams dashed, we consoled ourselves by engaging in a little Sawzall therapy: We sliced the front bumper in half. Inspired by every press release we've read from Bentley and Pagani, we embraced the "bespoke" concept for the bumper's replacement. Making a new bumper is far outside our welding abilities, however, so we headed to Ishpeming, Michigan, to visit Sub-Zero Fabrication. The owner, Cory Dennis, put together a pre-runner-inspired steel bumper in just two days using 18 feet of 1.5-inch drawn-over-mandrel steel tubing. His custom, er, bespoke solution includes a wide removable skid plate with a gap at the bottom that allows small rocks to escape.
That bumper isn't there just for looks. It moves the lowest point of the front end closer to the wheels, greatly improving the approach angle. This earned it a ramp-travel-index score of 231, putting it 231 points higher than the $223,450 Porsche 911 Dakar that couldn't even climb the ramp.
Cory Dennis
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Car and Driver
Subaru typically dresses its Wilderness models with black wheels and Yokohama Geolander A/T tires. To optimize off-road traction, we hit up Yokohama for a set of Advan A053 gravel tires in their softest compound. This rally rubber forced us into a 15-inch wheel, so we went all in on the race-car look with Speedline Corse 2118s.
KATHRYN GAMBLE
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Car and Driver
After author Irwin burned holes through steel tubing during a crash course in TIG welding, Competition Motorsport's top welder, Russ Gyles, told us we had a bright future in flute making.
KATHRYN GAMBLE
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Car and Driver
The Advans are a middle finger to every pothole we've hit near our office that's ever bent a wheel or flattened a tire. Built for abuse, they were unfazed by landing 15 or more jumps. On dirt, you can drive to the limits of personal bravery, and their tread will hold grip or slide the car as much as you choose. On the highway, they emit a lovely whine, a sort of tire-noise equivalent of a GT3 racer's straight-cut gears. With most of its sound deadening in a dumpster, the BRZ is as loud at 70 mph as a Jeep Wrangler 392 at wide-open throttle. The soft compound didn't enjoy going around the paved skidpad, which after just two laps grated the outside tread like it was a block of Parmesan. Though to the tires' credit, they still managed 0.85 g on their way out. More ground clearance came courtesy of a 2.0-inch lift using parts from Anderson Design & Fabrication: steel spacers that we attached above the stock struts, 1.5-inch-tall aluminum pucks that we installed between the chassis and the rear subframe. We later replaced the original struts and steel spacers with a set of Yellow Speed Racing (YSR) Dynamic Pro Gravel Rally coil-overs that promised to be more robust than the stock setup. The YSR coil-overs are giant assemblies that use 55-mm damper bodies, have relatively soft spring rates, and come out of the box as tall as the original front suspension with the spacers attached.
The fronts were wonderful. They had the BRZ gliding over speed bumps, potholes, and off-road trails with supreme softness. But the rears gave a back-pulverizing ride and sent the rear end of the car airborne over our parking lot's speed bumps when we were traveling as slow as 13 mph. We're hoping a replacement set cures the harshness, but that didn't stop us from taking the BRZ where no sports car has gone before.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
We chased this April Fools' joke into the depths of that limestone mine, pursuing our goal of going beyond the wilderness and deep into the Earth's crust. The mine maintains an average temperature of 56 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a superb place for cultivating Snow Cap mushrooms; it also seems like a horrifying place to be on mushrooms. Holding up the stone ceiling are damp columns of multimillion-year-old rock that were once illuminated by the tiny headlamps atop the helmets of the men working here. Even with the BRZ's approximately 24,170 lumens of aftermarket front lighting flooding the walls (the Alien Lasers spotlights shouldn't be activated within two miles of an airport), this is still an absolutely forbidding and spooky place to off-road. Just wait until overlanders hear about underlanding.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
We replaced the seat-heater switches with a control for the front 42-inch LED light bar and rear roof- mounted SXSUSA Alien Lasers spotlights.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
A mine shaft is one of the strangest places to drive. It's a lot like parking a car in your parents' garage—a tight fit, overcrowded with stacks of materials that predate your birth. The only vista is darkness, and whatever's living in here will find you before you ever see it. It's fun, but we're still suckers for a good sunset.
We put plenty of sweat equity into this build, but the parts alone add up to nearly $15,000. Lamborghini charged more than twice that to turn a base Huracán into a Sterrato, which forgoes a bedroom atop its roof. Our Subie's $46,302 as-tested price is under the starting point of a Honda Civic Type R, which, despite its giant rear wing, isn't getting as many frequent-flyer miles as this BRZ.
Austin Irwin
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Car and Driver
Roof-rack tabs get welded to the roof.
We do have regrets. Rear-wheel drive is obviously a significant limiting factor to how far off the pavement you can go. Just getting back to the staging lot of a Michigan off-road park required a running start. Our tent and rally-focused tires cost us in straight-line performance. A 2022 BRZ we tested reached 60 mph in 5.3 seconds and had a trap speed of 100 mph at the quarter-mile mark. With all the stuff attached, our BRZ slowed to 6.1 seconds to 60, and we crossed the quarter-mile 9 mph slower. Racing bucket seats look cool and save weight, but climbing in and out of the cockpit more than twice in a day is a blatant reminder of how much weight we should personally try to lose. We probably also had room for at least eight additional feet of LED lights. Oh well.
Marc Urbano
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Car and Driver
The idea to jump the car with the tent fully open was received with disdain by other tent makers. However, the folks at C6 Outdoor told us to send it.
Taking a stock car and making it into exactly what you hope for is never a straight path. It takes hours and hours, which in this case were put in mostly by this author and photo assistant Charley Ladd, whose personal cars languished during the build. Project BRZ continues our tradition of building what manufacturers have yet to make. Here's hoping Subaru's sense of humor is wild enough to sell something like a BRZ Wilderness.
Austin Irwin
Technical Editor
Austin Irwin has worked for Car and Driver for over 10 years in various roles. He's steadily worked his way from an entry-level data entry position into driving vehicles for photography and video, and is now reviewing and testing cars. What will he do next? Who knows, but he better be fast.

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