[tahdizzle]

Originally Posted by Sideways&Smiling

Close enough to the same thing. You know the prototypes and test mules for your car were literally RWD-converted Legacies and Imprezas, right? The whole concept was highly influenced by RWD-converted Imprezas that were being used for drifting in D1. The FR-S/GT86/BRZ is NOT built from the ground up to be the best that it can be in every way without compromises. It was built to make a fun, good looking driftable RWD car that they could use an existing Subaru chassis and its components to make a relatively inexpensive to build (compared to designing & building a new sports car from the ground up) sports car. This is why Subaru was initially against the idea altogether. Subaru is conservative when it comes to looks and very much believes in AWD and turbos. They didn't think anyone would pay the same amount of money as a WRX for a RWD car with an NA engine, whereas Toyota was banking on the fact that if they could make a simple, but cool looking, RWD car the aftermarket would blow it up into a popular tuner car, just like the Silvia before it. Reusing suspension, brakes, etc. is not a coincidence.

It's rather smart, really. It would be nice to see other companies do something similar if they need to save on costs to convince the bean counters new small, light RWD vehicles are worth building. The reason we haven't seen anything from Nissan yet is because they DON'T have a small, light chassis to work with at the moment.

Use the Cube chasis!

As far as the entire chasis debate.

It may have been based on a legacy/impreza chasis, however; just looking at the difference between the 15 WRX and the 15 STi in ground clearance and COG is enough to say they are a different chasis.

and when comparing the BRZ and WRX chasis, there are more differences yet.