When Porsche meets Subaru

New Zealand has only five of them and four have already been sold. Prospective buyers will have the opportunity to bid for the fifth. ALASTAIR SLOANE meets the Blitzen.

Porsche Design is part of the Porsche empire but separate from the more illustrious car company.

Its designers, including New Zealander Simon Fraser, work out of a studio overlooking a lake in the Austrian village of Zell-am-See, a tourist centre 80km from Salzburg.

Fraser and his colleagues take a concept and turn it every which way, ultimately to give it lasting value.

Their clients have included bigshot companies like Grundig electronics, watchmaker IWC, camera-makers Contax and Rollei, Japanese giant Yamaha, sunglass leaders Carrera and Bausch and Lomb, and a couple of mobile phone heavyweights.

A year or so ago, Porsche Design added Subaru to its list. The Japanese carmaker wanted a swept-up version of its high-performance, all-wheel-drive Legacy, the RSK B4.

The car already had a rally-bred chassis and turbocharged 2-litre motor and a modest go-fast body kit, but Subaru hankered after a limited-edition hustler, a bandit like the Red Baron.

Porsche Design quickly added the visual oomph with unique front and rear bumpers and rear spoiler, and 17-inch black alloy wheels to set off the tomato-red body.

It also trimmed the interior with special upholstery and gave the instrument panel a metallic look. It called the car Blitzen, German for lightning.

Subaru then tinkered with the suspension, adding lightweight alloy components.

"When we first saw it at the Tokyo Motor Show last year some of the dealers harrassed me about importing it," says the general manager of Subaru New Zealand., Wally Dumper.

"Subaru in Japan were reluctant to give us any at all. They wanted to keep it purely as a domestic model. I don't know how many were manufactured but the limited-production run ended in March."

New Zealand is the only country outside Japan to get the Blitzen, which comes with either a five-speed manual gearbox or electronic Sportshift.

The Sportshift unit is a three-way transmission, offering a traditional automatic mode or a clutchless manual using either the gear lever or steering wheel-mounted Formula One-style buttons.

But the five-speed manual RSK B4 is more powerful than the Sportshift model, developing 205kW at 6500 rpm and 343Nm at 5000 rpm against 190kW and 319Nm.

Dumper figured New Zealand buyers would go for the manual Blitzen. Five have been imported, each costing $75,000. Four have been sold and the fifth is on Subaru's fleet. Next month potential buyers will be invited to bid for it through dealers.

In this latest rendition of the Legacy, the RS designates a performance model, the K that it is turbocharged (the German word kompressor is recognised worldwide), the B for its boxer engine, and 4 for permanent all-wheel-drive.

Power from the flat-four engine is directed to all four wheels, the torque split 35:65 to the front and rear axles in the Sportshift and 50:50 in the manual model.

The Blitzen is a lickety-split sedan, sprinting under turbo boost from zero to 100 km/h in under six seconds. It points like a good gun dog and grips like glue.

Suspension changes have improved the ride, certainly through the twisty stuff. Damping is better and the steering feels marginally more accurate than the standard RSK B4.

The Blitzen comes with up-to-the-minute safety systems, a high level of standard equipment and a three-year unlimited warranty. It is, like the RSK B4, a supercar for all seasons, only more exclusive.

The Blitzen arrives in New Zealand at a time when the Subaru Legacy - the Herald's 1999 Car of the Year - is gathering more international praise.

The Legacy topped a customer satisfaction poll in Britain for the second year in a row and the Impreza finished runner-up. The Subaru brand itself scored the highest overall rating out of the 31 carmakers involved in the survey of 24,000 owners of two-year-old cars.

In the United States, the Legacy came top of its class in a crash test involving seven medium-sized cars. The score was based on good, acceptable, marginal and poor ratings. The Legacy was the only one of the seven to receive an overall good rating.