2002 Subaru Impreza WRX Wagon // "ASH"

With overlanding and soft-roading taking the world by storm, we were inspired by the cool rigs we’d see on the road and on social media. We wanted to build our very own softroader. Over the past couple years, we’ve had our hands in building lifted Crosstreks, Foresters, and Outbacks, but this time around we wanted to build ourselves a lifted Subaru from a different era.

          

Cue the Bugeye Wagon. With opportunity knocking at our door, we snagged a rather rough 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX Wagon for a pretty good deal. The mission was simple: give the body work some love, freshen up a couple things, and add a few shiny new parts to finish it off.

          

          

At first, the WRX didn’t drive right, but a minor drivetrain fix and fresh tune up had this wagon driving perfectly. The paint was heavily sun-damaged, so the next step was a shiny new coat of Platinum Silver Metallic paint. As you may have noticed from our past WRX Sedan restoration/build, we have a thing for silver Bugeye WRXs. Once paint was finished, we addressed a couple minor aesthetics. The old hazy headlights were swapped out for a fresh pair with blacked-out housings, and the straight-piped exhaust was cleaned up with a sweet Prodrive exhaust!

          

From the very beginning, we knew we wanted a suspension lift, so we contacted our friends over at Pedders USA for a set of their Forester struts for a 2-inch lift. To complete the lift setup, we reached out to Primitive Racing for a set of their trailing arm spacers and Whiteline for their camber bolts to correct the suspension geometry. 

          

We mounted our tire of choice, the Falken Wildpeak A/T Trail, onto a set of 17x7.5 Motegi MR139 wheels in Satin Black to give it the rugged appearance we were after. With the lift and wheel setup installed, the WRX Wagon is looking almost perfect. It just needs more lights!

          

To the refreshed front end, we added our Ultimate Light Bar setup with the XL-R Sport and our new Light Conversion kit for the 2002-2003 Impreza WRX. The XL-Rs are the perfect replacement for the OEM fog lights and compliments the round headlights well. With each build that we work on, our love for older Subarus continues to grow more and more. We hope you enjoy this build as well!