New Impreza STI and 235i go hunting for Yankee B-roads. In the snow.
"WE SELL SHOVELS AND QUICKLIME"
No doubt there's an entirely innocent reason why a hardware store on the border of the dark, empty forests of the Catskill Mountains is advertising a) sharp-edged spades and b) bone-dissolving powder. Most likely it's catering to all those hygiene-conscious upstate New Yorkers who like to dispose of the carcass of last Sunday's roast chicken in clinical, remnant-free fashion.
Maybe I'm just a little on edge. Last night, I was woken, jet-lagged, at 3am by the noise of a bull elephant attempting to dry-hump the door of my budget motel room. Blearily opening it, I discovered the wardrobe-sized ice machine across the hall had loosed itself from its mooring and vibrated across the corridor in an apparent attempt to make beautiful icy babies with my door. I called reception and asked if they could possibly switch off their horny ice machine. They said it wasn't possible, "in case someone needs ice". It's late winter on the mountainous eastern seaboard. It's 3am. It's minus twenty outside. Who needs ice?
Where the 235i is slathered thick with 21st-century technological butter, the STI parties like it's 1999. Our test car doesn't have satnav. We improvise by gaffer-taping photographer Wycherley's iPhone to the dash, thus creating the First World's first in-car infotainment system with 100 per cent iPhone compatibility. We discover this makes it impossible to use the STI's own infotainment set-up, but this turns out to be no great loss. BMW's iDrive Subaru's system ain't. That said, iDrive itself isn't quite perfect. The 235i's satnav has a whingeing East Coast accent and refers to roundabouts as "traffic circles". Traffic circles? Seriously?
A tempting road snakes off to the left, plunging down a mountain face resembling, in gradient and iciness, the rear of my freezer. WELCOME TO PETER'S KILL AREA, reads a sign at its entrance. We decide to give it a miss, on the off-chance we'll encounter a smiling man wearing a namebadge reading "Hi, I'm Peter!" and leaning on a shovel.
But it is, in truth, a bloody-minded sort of car, one you'd buy because of its flaws rather than in spite of them, a car that chases rally-spec thrills at the expense of any comfort or sociability. But for the rest of us, the rest of us who don't have a rally stage on our doorstep and for whom snow is an occasional surprise rather than daily chore, the STI is probably too focused of purpose. Especially when the M235i proves that even a rear-drive coupe on winter tyres can handle some pretty serious power. And, yet better, that the light, biddable, fizzy BMW coupe is alive and kicking.
We park up on a bridge spanning a vast, frozen reservoir, the Catskills calm, watercolour-still and utterly, utterly empty. We haven't seen a car or human in hours. I realise two things. One, I might have slightly overreacted about the shovelly hillbilly thing. And two, I'm properly smitten with both these cars. Truth is, given sufficient budget and floorspace, you could justify both an M235i and Impreza in your perfect B-road garage. They're proper drivers' cars, proof that real-world heroes trump showboating supercars every time - a fast, practical, mildly threatening combination. Like shovels and quicklime.
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