Gymkhana's 1978 Subaru Brat with 9,500-RPM Redline, Active Aero Is One Super Ute
20 comments
·November 11, 2025stickfigure
Can we just bring back the Brat? A compact 4wd pickup truck with a pair of jump seats in the bed.
Pickup trucks are great, but they're only available in "behemoth" size in the US.
bluedino
> Pickup trucks are great, but they're only available in "behemoth" size in the US.
Not all trucks are 1/4 or 1/2 ton in the USA.
There's things like the Honda Ridgeline, Hyundai Santa Cruze, and the Ford Maverick
Subaru had the Baja for a little white but they only sold a couple thousand per year.
throwway120385
Wouldn't you need to flag a sheet of plywood in the back of a Maverick? My old '06 Canyon doesn't require that and it's actually a smaller truck than the Maverick.
fragmede
you’d need to flag a sheet of 4x8 in quite a few of the full sized pickups after you get the extended crew cab which shrinks the bed and makes them more of an SUV than a truck. THeres a platonic ideal of a truck bed holding 2x4 and 4x8 sheets, but it’s more of an ideal sometimes.
danans
Something like that:
SilverElfin
Looks amazing. How does someone with no car tuning / mechanics skills get something like this premade?
joncrane
Nearly impossible. For the same price and effort, you can probably get a high end Porsche 911 or similar which will be way more practical.
The next level up would be to get a modified car from a company that has very strong ties to the manufacturer, such as Ruf with Porsche, Roush or Saleen with Ford Mustangs, etc.
Trust me either of those options will be more than anyone but the 1% top skilled or thrill seeking individuals can handle.
UniverseHacker
You don’t- without that knowledge you would not know what to pay someone to build and why. It’s also going to be extremely complex and unreliable, and likely not street drivable or street legal.
bob1029
Unless you would be planning to keep it at a race track, you would not want to own a car like this. It would almost certainly be miserable to drive at legal speeds. That 2.0L engine isn't going to make any useful power below 5-6k RPM. Keeping a turbo like that spooled for any meaningful duration is guaranteed to get you pulled over by the police.
Grazester
Premade as in have someone built it for you? Well, the same way they did it. You offer up a load of money to a reputable build shop and come back in about 2-5 years depending on how busy they are.
hoofhearted
Vermont Sports Car.
They build all the fast Subarus for everyone; Travis Prastana, Bucky Lasik, Ken Block, Lia Block.
The Huckster, the Project Midnight; all them too.
bigyabai
> someone with no car tuning / mechanics skills
I'm just going to pull the band-aid off, you're probably not the target audience for a drag-race sleeper rig.
wickedsight
Money, lots of money.
linsomniac
Just to quantify it, most "restomods" start at $100K USD.
Decades ago I had a buddy that did something similar with a VW Bug that he did "on the cheap" doing almost all the work himself and things like paint through connections he had, I never talked price on it but it was at least $30K I'd bet and probably more like in the $50Ks, and took around a decade.
DebtDeflation
Honestly, just learn it like anything else. Understand the basic components of an internal combustion engine (block, crankshaft, rods, pistons, camshafts, cylinder heads, valves, intake and exhaust manifolds), the 4 cycles the engine goes through (intake, compression, power, and exhaust), how fuel delivery and ignition systems work. And then there are tons of resources on tuning and you can get the software for a laptop.
Grazester
Then there is the building of the engine and understanding clearances for specific applications and RPM's, value train harmonics when thing start getting to crazy high revs like 9500.
Still very learnable but outside the scope of standard engine rebuilt stuff.
yourusername
>Honestly, just learn it like anything else.
If you're starting from 0 that's probably a decade long commitment before you're able to start to execute a project like this. There's a youtube series 'project binky' where a pair of professional car tuners rebuild a mini cooper and stuff a Celica engine in it. They already have all the skills, own a shop and all the tools and it still took them years.
spike021
similarly, there's a youtube channel called Mighty Car Mods that does builds also and even the ones they "rush" can take months and thousands of work hours from people from multiple disciplines (body repair, paint, electrical work, tuning, etc.). Not cheap at all.
tony-john12
[dead]
I would like to see a comparison between this and a Lancia Stratos.. They somehow share the same vibe