Yahoo Autos The 2017 Subaru BRZ Is a Great Way to Save $10,000 Per Second on Track
How the mighty have fallen! The last time I was at Summit Point's Shenandoah road course, in the middle of June, I had the whole place to myself and a brand-new McLaren 570S to rip around it. This time, I was sharing the course with over one hundred fellow drivers, and I was behind the wheel of a relatively humble 2017 Subaru BRZ. My best time at Shenandoah with the McLaren was about 1:36. This time, in the BR-Z, I turned a 1:51. Around a racetrack, fifteen seconds is an eternity.
Luckily for me, numbers don't tell the whole story. This past weekend's event was run by my friends at TrackDAZE, and it was actually a lot more fun to hang out with them than it was to be all alone at the track four months ago. And that BRZ? It might be fifteen seconds slower than the McLaren, but it's also more than $170,000 cheaper. That's more than ten grand a second, you know. It's also a hell of a lot of a fun. Come with me as I talk you through Shenandoah and the changes made for 2017 to one of the all-time great entry-level trackday cars.
Note: TrackDAZE uses the configuration of Shenandoah shown above, including the straight-line segments in green bypassing the Bus Stop and the chicanes on the Back Straight and Stone House Straight, as well as the Old Ram bypass that cuts out Turns 21, 22, 1 and 2.
The start/finish line at Shenandoah is on what I always think of as the "back straight". There's another start/finish line next to the paddock, but TrackDAZE doesn't use that configuration of the course. So we'll start on the back straight. This year, manual-transmission versions of the BRZ have five more horsepower, for a total of 205. I can't say that I noticed. They also have lower gearing, with a final drive ratio of 4.3:1 instead of 4.1:1. It doesn't exactly make the little coupe a rocket ship. Still, by the time we hit the brakes for Turn 20, we're doing over 105 mph. With the old car, you could hold it in fourth, but now we grab fifth.
One great thing about the BRZ: The brakes are really up to par, even with stock pads. Yes, you can fade them if you want to, but just by dialing the aggression back a tiny bit it's possible to get through a day without changing fluid or pads. There's an upgraded brake package coming later this year, but if I bought a BRZ I'd be satisfied with some race pads and 600-degree fluid.
Turn 20 is a long left-hand hairpin. For 2017, the BRZ gets revised damping, new springs, and a bigger rear sway bar. I think the net effect of the changes is to bring the car closer to the hilarious tossability of its Scion FR-S-sorry, Toyota 86-platform mate. I've always recommended that my friends buy the Scion FR-S over the BRZ; I can now stop doing that. During some time on Summit Point's wet skidpad, the BRZ proved to me that it can hang the tail out with the best of them.
Unfortunately, there still isn't enough power to drift on throttle alone. The "Old Ram" turn at Shenandoah is off-camber, however, so you can exit it in proper tofu-delivery fashion and hustle the Subaru down through the "Cave Esses" to "The Hammer," a 120-degree left-hander. The BRZ now comes with a instrument-panel display that can show you how much g-force you're generating, how much power the engine is putting out, and so on. But it's a pretty small screen, and at Shenandoah there's not a lot of time between turns to look at it.
After Stone House Straight it's time to go up through a climbing left-hand turn that then drops sharply, Laguna-Seca-style, onto the Range Straight. The BRZ is very easy to steer with the throttle here. I've compared it in the past to a trainer jet aircraft; it behaves like a Corvette or Ferrari F12, but everything happens a lot slower. It still has those Primacy tires, standard issue on such notable performance cars as the Toyota Prius-but that's a good thing, because they have a very wide limit. You can really push yourself in each corner, knowing that you'll get plenty of warning courtesy of the squealing rubber.
Turn 11 is a long right-hander that leads to the Bridge Straight. It showcases how well the BRZ turns in, even on those Primacys. You'll catch a lot of more expensive hardware in Turn 11. The problem is that you'll have to yield to them again up the Bridge Straight. A C7 Corvette Z51 can hit the "ski jump" at 114 mph or so, and the McLaren 570S does it at 124, but the BRZ is hard-pressed to exceed 100 here. So it's pretty low-stress. You still need to get it right, though, because the front wheels will get light in a hurry.
The old "Sport" ESC mode is now called "Track," because it's had the reins loosened a bit. For the Carousel, with its bumpy concrete plates, you'll need to go to Track mode. Otherwise ESC will panic and stop the car. The BRZ is one of those cars I feel good about turning ESC off in almost immediately. But when it rains, as it did on Day One of my weekend, I'll start with it on, and it's actually pretty non-intrusive.
You'll catch a lot of more expensive hardware in Turn 11.
Going up the hill from the Carousel, you'll probably see that tiny red light on the dashboard flashing. That's the rev-limit warning. In factory trim, the BRZ is so quiet, and it revs so smoothly, that you'd better keep an eye out for the light because you'll never shift it just based on the sound. Turns 17 and 18 are good places to try your hand at drifting a tiny bit, because they're off-camber. At the very least you can spin the back tires; the BRZ keeps its Torsen diff for 2017 so you'll be spinning both. If you have to throw in a lot of correction, you might find yourself accidentally activating your phone via the new infotainment buttons on the steering wheel. I don't like 'em.
Our final turn is 19, "Big Bend." I like to grab fourth gear right after the apex. You'll be on the limit of the tires, so the shift will squeak 'em a bit. Not to worry. Few cars are as easy to drive on the absolute edge as the BRZ. It's really the complete package; everything in balance. You could spend your first five years with it, or your first fifty days on-track as a driver, refining your capabilities to match your own.
We used the BRZ for a total of nine 30-minute sessions at Shenandoah; two with me driving and seven with R&T's Deputy Online Editor Bob Sorokanich behind the wheel. The car never got hot, never faded the brakes, never complained. It would bump and squeak a bit in the Carousel, but so did the McLaren. If you're new to the trackday game and you want a hardtop coupe that will both teach you how to drive and continue to reward you after you've become proficient, the BRZ is still a good choice. The 2017 changes don't manifestly alter the character of the car, but they are almost all positive ones. And look at it this way; compared to a supercar, you'll save ten thousand dollars a second. How can you be unhappy about that?
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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