August 2022 - Dylan S. // Phoenix the Adventure Wagon
Hello, I'm Dylan and this is Phoenix, the Adventure Wagon. I’ve been in the car scene most of my life. My father did competitive car audio and I spent my summers traveling with him to competitions and car shows. When I turned 16 I wanted nothing more in the world than a black F body Camaro- so obviously I got a 92 Honda Civic hatchback as my first car. As fate would have it that was the same year as the first Fast and the Furious movie when import tuning peaked. The conservative gas sipper went through some drastic performance and aesthetic changes to say the least.
Fast forward in time, I had owned a lot of vehicles. At the time I met my wife I was driving a slammed NB Miata and a 400hp street WRX sedan. When we decided to get into camping there was only ever one logical solution, buy an Impreza and put a lift kit on it. I found a great deal on a low mileage Impreza with a rebuilt title, lifted it 2 inches, built a skid plate and put on some general grabbers and we hit the road. The little Impreza that could took us down forest roads, Jeep trails, fields, woods and any other place we had the curiosity of exploring. I realized I enjoyed driving it more than my street WRX. Only one logical solution, find a WRX Hatchback with low miles and swap the lift over. After a couple of months of looking I found a great deal on one a state away, I picked it up and moved everything over.
The transition to Rally Cross was pure circumstance. When you’re driving a lifted WRX on mud tires, you’re obviously going to be asked if you rally race it, but when all the rally courses are a four-hour road trip away it’s not practical. Shortly after the initial covid outbreak I stumbled on North Texas Rally Cross, someone had started a club about an hour from us. With nothing else going on it was easy to convince the wife to check it out. We fell in love. It was a great setup, they change the course every time with fluctuation in elevation and different jumps. We’ve been doing it for two years, and we are currently in the process of building my wife her own Rally-X car.