As a car-loving child of the late 2000s, two of the most legendary cars on the road were the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo and the Subaru Impreza WRX STi.

The base Impreza and Lancer were compact, affordable sedans and hatchbacks that were highly modified to become some of the greatest modern rally cars. This performance was transferred to the road cars, resulting in relatively inexpensive performance vehicles that outdrove their competitors. There was the base version, the warmed-up WRX, and then the truly hot STi. Being as well-built as Japanese cars are, they could be tuned to hit impressive performance figures, with a massive community built up around doing so.

Then both companies stopped making them.

For Mitsubishi, the reason is clear: the car company is one branch of an enormous Japanese corporation, and after years of mismanagement, it is not a particularly important one.

A third of it is owned by scandal-rife Nissan, and it has gradually pulled out from the British, American, and Communist Chinese markets. Their current range is made up of three mid-sized crossovers and the Mirage, famous only for being the cheapest new production car you could buy. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that they don’t have a performance variant of a compact sedan.

Subaru, though, is another story. They should be selling a WRX STi but just aren’t.

Along with a robust, relatively successful lineup of SUVs and the Impreza and Legacy sedans, they sell the BRZ; a handsome, well-reviewed entry sports car built in collaboration with Toyota. This could be a good draw to showrooms and a strong seller for Subaru, but they have continually botched the sales of it. When the BRZ hit the market, Toyota’s almost identical version, the GT86, sold far more due to better availability and a better dealer network. That continues to this day, where the new GR86 outsells the BRZ five to one.

The current generation WRX, introduced in 2022, has been handled even worse. It used to be that the WRX and STi were both versions of the Impreza, with a legacy back to racing. Even if the STi didn’t sell in huge volumes, it had higher margins and kept buzz around Subaru, so that mums, office workers, and taxi drivers across the world would think about the Impreza when looking to buy a runabout. The clout of their rally success and the hype of the sports versions would drive volume sales of the base Impreza.

But now, the Impreza and WRX are separate models, with no STi version. Rather than make a good compact sedan which they could then make sportier, Subaru instead developed two different designs — which cost a lot of money — and neither has much purpose, as they’ve been poorly tweaked to appeal to SUV buyers.

The Impreza is now a chunky hatch-cum-estate, and the WRX is an odd jacked-up compact-ish sport-ish sedan with plastic wheel covers. But why would an SUV buyer choose either when they can just buy an SUV? They don’t, which is why Subaru has a range of quite good SUVs which unsurprisingly outsell both the Impreza and WRX. Forester sales increased by six percent this year, whereas WRX sales have fallen almost forty percent.

The great shame is that under the surface, the WRX isn’t a bad car and could be made great if it lost the SUV dreams and focused on being a compact performance sedan. Subaru is a beloved brand, but nobody cares about them. Bringing back the STi would be just the thing to do it, as a proper performance version of the current WRX, and Subaru has proven itself capable of doing it.

Subaru has just unveiled their latest concept car, Project Midnight, based on their Airslayer Gymkhana rally car. It has a menacing matte-black, slashed-up, splitter-equipped, massive spoiler-fitted body kit, drops 1,000 pounds off the standard WRX, and puts out 670 horsepower and 680 lb-ft torque from a 2.0-liter classic flat-four engine. It looks incredible and is sure to drive amazingly when it debuts at the upcoming Goodwood Festival of Speed.

If they released a road-ready version of this and called it the STi, there would be huge buzz around Subaru again, with orders out the door and a lot more attention to their standard models.

Instead, it’s just a one-off concept. What a shame.