Subaru Made a 670-HP BRAT. Canonize the Man Who Built It.

Let me tell you about the 1978 Subaru BRAT.

It was a truck built by cowards. Not the men who screwed it together, the men who did the paperwork. The BRAT was a little pickup, and America taxed little pickups, so Subaru bolted two plastic jump seats into the cargo bed, called it a passenger car, and drove straight through the tariff on a technicality. That is the whole heritage. A truck so unglamorous, so determinedly cheap, that its defining feature was a pair of buckets in the back designed to fool a customs form.

Nobody was supposed to love it. That was the point of it.

Now look at what Subaru Motorsports USA and Vermont SportsCar have done to its memory. They built the Brataroo 9500 Turbo. A modern tribute, they call it, to that plastic-seated apology of a pickup. And into this tribute they put a turbocharged 2.0-liter Subaru Boxer producing 670 horsepower and 680 lb-ft of torque.

Read that again. Six hundred seventy horsepower. From a flat-four. In a BRAT.

You do not do that by accident. You do not stumble into 670 horsepower. Somebody stood in front of the least serious vehicle Subaru ever sold and decided it deserved to sing. They gave it to Travis Pastrana, they turned him loose in a Gymkhana film called "Aussie Shred," and more than 12 million people have watched the thing slide, jump, and cross water since. Twelve million views for a joke truck reborn as a weapon.

And on July 9-12, they are taking it to the Goodwood Festival of Speed Hillclimb Shootout for its UK debut. The most prestigious hill in motorsport. Formula 1 machinery, prototypes, the whole quick and serious world lined up to climb it, and Subaru is sending a BRAT. Pastrana has finished second overall up that hill before, in an Airslayer and a Family Huckster. The team took first-place ICE and second overall in both the 2024 and 2025 Shootouts. I will not tell you what the Brataroo does this year, because it has not run yet, and a man who invents a hillclimb time deserves to walk up that hill himself.

Here is what I know without a stopwatch.

An engineer builds a car to win. That is a job. But the man who takes the humblest, cheapest, most apologetic truck ever sold, a truck that existed to dodge a tax, and gives it 670 horsepower for no reason except that it would be glorious, that man is not an engineer.

That man is a saint.

I mean it in the full ecclesiastical sense. I want a feast day. The ninth of July, marked in red on the calendar of every garage in the free world. I want a stained-glass window: the BRAT ascendant, a flat-four for a halo, 680 lb-ft radiating out in gold leaf. I want pilgrims driving up a hill on their knees. I want whoever bolted that Boxer together canonized, robed, and prayed to by every kid who ever loved a car for no profitable reason at all.

Because think about what this proves. An industry that spends most of its waking hours apologizing for horsepower, rationing it, taxing it, sanding it down into an appliance, still contains people who will take a punchline of a pickup and make it produce 670 horsepower purely to be watched. Purely for the show. Purely because it is wonderful.

A civilization that can still do this to a BRAT has not entirely lost its soul.

Light the candles. Ring the bell. Somebody bring the concrete for the plinth, and I will mix it myself.

Second overall is a fine record. Sainthood is the correct one.