A little history on my STI…

I grew up in a generation where build threads was everything and the forums actually had valuable information. I would come home from school everyday to read up on NASIOC, WRXTUNERS, and IWSTI. These forums had a ton of information to soak in and my two favorite parts were the build threads and posting images of your car in the members gallery…

Which leads me to now. The death of forums was due to social media and the Photobucket crash of all the photos. All the photos have been wiped out or the quality was reduced to shit with a giant watermark over it. Social media only highlights the latest and greatest while leaving behind a “build thread” like option for us who grew up in that “golden era” of cars. And with those reasons above, I wanted to build a website so I could start a build thread of my car and others if they wanted to post about it. Please message me if you want to start a build thread here for your car!

In previous blogs, I talked about the STI a little bit. But in this blog, I’ll go a little more in depth with specific mods that I’ve done throughout the years that I think made the STI special to me.

2018: The first photo I took of my STI. Looking back on it, I should’ve been a little more diligent with buying this car. If its a dream car, it doesn’t mean you disregard a lot of checks and balances when buying a car. Moral of this photo? RUN THE CARFAX! I’ll talk more about this in another blog post… It’s quite a cool story if you believe in the universe and numbers.

2019: The STI wing was always a hit or miss for me. At the time, I wanted it to be back to Limited spec which required me to throw the lip spoiler back on the trunk. Sold the STI wing and used that money to repaint the trunk. A couple years down the road now and totally regret selling it as a SWP STI spoiler hardly ever shows up on the market. This is a one year only color for the STI…

2020: Bought some cool Illumaesthetic LED converted tail lights, removed the tint, and changed the exhaust to a Borla exhaust. This is about the time I got the car paint corrected and had a ceramic coat put on it.

2021: The only changes that were done was I removed the sideskirt extensions and changed the exhaust to a HKS Super Turbo exhaust. We decided to polish off the burnt tips for a more cleaner setup.

2022: The HOTBOI era. This was one of my favorite era’s of the STI. Was sitting on TE37 and slammed to the ground on air suspension. This was right around the time that I decided to do a major overhaul on the engine, brakes, and exterior package. A lot of time and money was spent fixing the previous owners “shortcuts” like shaving down calipers to fit wheels. All the rare goodies were slowly trickling in around this time…

2023: I was on a quest to get all the rarest goods that came on the GD. Picked up S204 BBS wheels, HKS Kansai diffuser, Ganador LED mirrors, Genome gauges, JDM headlights, and a RA-R muffler. This was one of my favorite stages in the build!

2024: Sourced a set of Enkei RA-R wheels and always loved the white on white look. I quickly realized the white wheels were a pain to keep clean and the brake dust was already caked on. Because of that reason, I took them off and put them in storage. Long term plan is to restore them back to mint condition!

2024.5: I got the S204 BBS wheels restored and had them powder coated in gold! This to me is PEAK setup on what Subaru’s should look like. I tried to find the closest color to the factory BBS gold that came on these cars and this was it. I got rid of the air suspension and went to a Fortune Auto coilover with an air cup suspension installed and I bought almost the entire Whiteline catalog. It completely changed the way the car drives and handles! Along the way, I went back to 100% stock engine and removed the custom tune I got done. The way the car handles and drives is more important to me than having a ton of power. And also living in California, it was essential for me to be able to drive the car without the fear of getting my car impounded and potentially crushed because of removing some emission systems.

Anyways, this is basically a ELI5 on the STI build. My plan is to eventually dissect each modification done to the car and explain in more details the reasoning on why I did xyz modification.

-Kurtis