SR: Stefan Nijenhuis – MY ’99 Subaru Impreza STI V5 Type-R

31 July 2021

Stefan Nijenhuis – MY ’99 Subaru Impreza STI V5 Type-R

Hi Stefan! Welcome to the first “Short Report”!

Tell us something about yourself

Thanks for having me in the first “Short Report”!

My name is Stefan, 37 years old and I live in the beautiful Drenthe together with my girlfriend (which is also a car enthusiast and drives a modified MR2) and our dog Macho 😊

Since a little kid I always loved the sound of the boxer engines from Subaru and always wanted to own one.

You’re welcome! So tell us something about your car

While I was driving a honda for a couple of years I was looking for something different and faster.

An Ibiza Cupra or a 1800 20 VT, but could not find one that suited me.

Then my mom said to me: “You’ve always loved the Subaru sound, go look for one”.

Therefore I went looking for a Impreza GT Turbo and eventually bought one in Hilversum when I was 23.

After 9 years of driving it with pleasure and modified it to my liking the rust devil came across our path.

I started talking with my friend Renzo about my plans with the GTT.

I wanted to restore it completely and repaint it or buy the same model again, but a more unique one.

Renzo came with a tip about a rare 2 doors Impreza STI Type-R for sale, which was already on Dutch plates.

So I arranged the number of the current owner and showed my interest for the car.

There was a meeting the next week where we both were going to.

That was the first time I saw my current car, I’ve talked with the owner and looked around the car.

It wasn’t love at first sight, but the most important thing was that the chassis was solid and the bodywork not messed up.

A couple days later we negotiated about the price and a week after that we met up at VeldeTuning, so the Subaru doctor Mike could lay his special eye on the car.

He was surprised about the perfect condition of the bodywork but also found some flaws at the suspension and under carriage.

Mike told me that the flaws were manageable and that I would make a good buy given the fact the body of my GTT was already half sacrificed to the rust gods, so I bought it.

When driving home in the “new” Impreza and the GTT behind me I soon found out how dangerous it was to drive.

So when we safely got home I stored it straight in to the garage for my new adventure in the winter of 2016/2017, making one hell of an Impreza out of two.

It was one big mess in the garage, two cars which were both completely disassembled, and of course both needed to be rebuilt again.

But with the help of Renzo and Mike for the info and supplying the right parts we were off to a good start.

When the coupe was completely stripped, we brought it to the paint shop where it received a fresh lacquer of Subaru steelblue.

And in the meanwhile we build up the GTT again with parts from the coupe we were not going to use and sold it as a driving project car.

Shortly after the coupe got back from the paint shop the GTT was collected by it’s new owner.

Now I had all the room to build up the coupe again with fresh parts delivered from Veldetuning

In April 2017 we were going to JapFest at Silverstone UK and the plan was that we were going with the Coupe (which we were secretly building) as a surprise as they thought we were going with the MR2 of the misses.

The coupe was just finished in time and directly had it’s first ultimate test drive to the UK.

And as I had hoped it drove flawlessly

And that’s the story that from 2017 I’ve been driving in this quite unique, self-refurbished, right-hand drive Subaru Impreza V5 Type-R STI.