- Prodrive boss admits Subaru’s gold wheels were a factory mistake.
- Speedline accidentally shipped gold wheels instead of charcoal gray.
- A victory at Monte Carlo forced Subaru to keep the accidental color combo.
Some color combinations belong to one car and one car only. Subaru’s blue paint with gold wheels is one of them, a livery burned into the memory of a generation through the brand’s rally exploits. What few people realize is that it stuck around not purely through clever marketing, but partly because of a factory mix-up.
Prodrive chairman David Richards played a pivotal role in transforming Subaru into a motorsports legend. The partnership between the British engineering firm and the Japanese automaker ran for 20 WRC seasons and delivered 46 wins, three straight manufacturers’ titles in 1995, 1996, and 1997, and three drivers’ crowns in 1995, 2001, and 2003.
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Richards recently sat down with The Intercooler podcast to look back on decades of running race teams, with plenty of behind-the-scenes material along the way. The whole thing is worth a listen, but the best moment comes when he explains the gold wheels, which turn out to have been a complete accident.
The Prodrive boss said: “…and of course, the gold wheels, everyone remembers the gold wheels. We turned up, the first rally from the WRC was in Monte Carlo in ’97 … we turned up there with the new car and the wheel manufacturer was Speedline, I think, from Italy, and they sent the wheels along. They were supposed to be charcoal gray. Peter Stevens, the designer of the car, he was appalled to hear that when Speedline sent the wheels, they sent the wrong color and they’re all gold.
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And so we looked at the car and said, ‘Oh god.’ We had a few to do on the start ramp and things, and then everything else was gold. So we won the event with Piero Liatti, and I then went to the president of Subaru and said, ‘Look, I thank you very much for all the applause we got, I just really have to apologize about the wheels, but we’ve sent them all back to get them painted gray.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, we’ve done all the advertising, you’ve got to remain with gold wheels from now on.’ And that’s how the gold wheels happened. It wasn’t by design, it’s a complete cock-up quite frankly.”
The Subaru Impreza WRC97 went on to win eight out of 14 rallies during the 1997 season, easily securing the manufacturers’ championship for the Japanese brand. WRC fans might also remember that Subaru’s Colin McRae narrowly missed out on the drivers’ title to Mitsubishi’s Tommi Makinen by a single point that season.
The Earlier Tobacco Sponsorship
While the gold wheels of Subaru’s 1997 rally car were originally supposed to be finished in charcoal gray, the color itself wasn’t alien to the brand’s history. The original 1994 Impreza WRX STI road car already came fitted with gold wheels, as did the earlier 1993 Subaru Legacy RS. Those were directly inspired by the Group A rally cars’ title sponsor, tobacco brand State Express 555, matching the yellow and blue theme of their cigarette packs.
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However, when the new WRC regulations were applied in 1997, designer Peter Stevens wanted to modernize the look of the new widebody racer with different wheels. Had it not been for Speedline’s legendary factory shipping blunder at Monte Carlo, the iconic blue-and-gold signature might have been erased from Subaru’s history right then and there.
