Japanese tuners have a style written “VIP” but pronounced “bippu,” which entails modding cars for a “clean, yet heavily reworked, luxury theme” replete with oil-pan-scraping suspension drops and silly-big wheels.
And so we have the Legacy 2.5GT VIP, debuting at this year’s SEMA show. It rides on air suspension to let it drop as low as you’d like over its massive 20-by-10-inch wheels wearing stretched Falken tires. The Subaru’s stock top-mounted intercooler has been supplanted by a Mishimoto-supplied front-mount unit—allowing the switch to a smooth, un-scooped hood. There are billet dress-up parts from SPT replacing the oil cap and battery tie-down, as well as a custom engine cover. The otherwise untouched 265-hp turbo boxer-four feeds its power to a stock six-speed manual transmission and on through Subaru’s usual all-wheel-drive system.
Using parts from the Japanese-market Legacy, Subaru replaced much of this show car’s bodywork, substituting the aforementioned smooth hood plus new front and rear fascias, grille, HID headlights, fog lights, and power-folding chromed mirrors. Also present are new roof and decklid spoilers. The car is coated in Shinjuku Black Plum paint with chrome accents.
Inside is where the VIP theme really takes off. The seats and door inserts have been recovered in red diamond-pattern leather, and rear-seat passengers get bucket seats with a concealed compartment for storing valuables. A JVC touch-screen head unit is connected by way of a carputer to two rear-seat touch-screens and outputs to two JBL amplifiers, six speakers, and two 10-inch subwoofers. The sound will definitely be loud, but the style is clean.
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