Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
SUBARU became a prominent contender in motorsports in the 1990s shortly after the release of the Legacy.
Created by bringing together Subaru's core technologies, the Legacy first demonstrated its high level of performance by breaking the 100,000-kilometre world speed record in the year of its release.
Subaru decided to use the World Rally Championship to further demonstrate the Legacy's abilities to the world.
The WRC is a championship for rally vehicles created from production models, so it serves as a handy proving ground for winning models to demonstrate their superiority to a large worldwide audience.
While Subaru was confident that the Legacy would be the ideal base model for the WRC, it first had to overcome the problems involved with organising and managing a WRC team.
Ryuichiro Kuze, then president of Subaru Technica International (STI: the department in charge of Subaru's motorsports activities), was introduced to a company called Prodrive, on a trip Kuze made to observe the 1989 Safari Rally.
With a factory in England and the personnel needed to support rally entries, Prodrive was exactly the partner that Subaru needed. Since both companies were looking to win WRC rallies, they soon signed a partnership agreement.
This agreement was the start of the SUBARU World Rally Team that would later rise to the top of the WRC.
