From Write-Off To Racer: Mission Motorsport’s Subaru BRZ Project

I’d like to start with a confession: I love cars enough to spend my working life writing about them, but my actual mechanical ability is close to zero. The work I’ve carried out on my own cars extends to changing wheels and headlight bulbs (occasionally at the same time thanks to the truly ridiculous engine bay packaging of the second-generation Renault Megane).

If something breaks on my car, I ring a garage, and brace for the impact it’ll have on my wallet. Not the most sensible way of doing things when I own an 18-year-old Alfa Romeo, but the thought of doing any of this stuff myself fills me with equal parts dread and stress.

It was with some nerves, then, that I accepted an invite to spend the day with Mission Motorsport. MM is a charity that works with injured and sick armed forces personnel, helping rehabilitate them through the wonderful medium of motorsport.

MM gets its beneficiaries involved through everything from the operational side, to working on cars, to actually racing them – often at the Race of Remembrance, a 24-hour race that takes place at Wales’ Anglesey Circuit over Remembrance weekend every November.

The organisation’s latest project is a 2016 Subaru BRZ, which is why I’m at its workshop today. This BRZ’s had a bit of an off that’s led to it being declared a Category N write-off. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who’s spent countless hours browsing AutoTrader, and you’ll have doubtless spotted plenty of cars with a big orange blob next to their name declaring them Cat Something.

They’re often temptingly cheap, but the knowledge that these cars have been damaged often leads to us, erm, writing them off. But what do the categories actually mean?

There are four, and the two big ones, A and B, are a death sentence for a car. A Cat A write-off has to be crushed, while a Cat B can have any usable parts salvaged before it meets its end. A Cat S, meanwhile, can be repaired, but the car will have suffered damage to structural elements so it needs to be fixed professionally.

That leaves us with Cat N which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that big a deal. It denotes a structurally sound car, but one with damage that the insurance company still deemed uneconomical to repair.

That doesn’t mean it has to be uneconomical for everyone, though. Take this automatic BRZ: it had been spun around, scuffing up its front and rear ends, but structurally, all was A-okay.

Wait, automatic? Yep. That’s just what MM was after because it’ll eventually be turned into a fully certified racer for this year’s Race of Remembrance, where the plan is to enter it with a squad of drivers who are paralysed from the waist down. That means hand controls, which leaves a manual out of the question. It's the planned driver team – Steve 'Dusty' Binns, Dom Pearson and Mike Smith – that are helping me out today.

Before that, though, it’s being returned to factory specification as part of MM’s training programme. Workshop manager, Aston Dimmock, talks me through the rationale behind the choice of BRZ. “It’s purely luck that it was a Subaru – I’m a bit of a Subaru pest – so for me, that was a win. They’re the same as a Toyota GT86 – cross commonality of parts is a lot easier when you’re endurance racing.” Indeed, the charity already has a race-prepped GT86 that’s sitting on the adjacent lift to the Subaru.

By the time I join the team, work’s well underway: the Subie’s scuffed-up WR Blue panels have been swapped out for ones that look factory fresh, and the bits you can’t usually see are next on the agenda. Today’s big job is one that should be nice and easy for a total amateur: replacing the rear subframe. Oh.

Thankfully for me (and probably everyone else), this ends up being a trickier job than anticipated thanks to some particularly recalcitrant diff mount bushings, which are coming out of the new subframe to be replaced with some Powerflex items. While a lot of banging and swearing goes on in the background, I’m left to work on some less important jobs. Stuff like helping reattach one of the front wishbones. Oh, again.

At the time of writing, that was around a week and a half ago. Since then, the car’s been thrashed on track at least twice and I haven’t received any angry phone calls, largely because everything’s been signed off by actual professionals.

Nevertheless, this was one of the most rewarding few hours I’ve spent in a while. A good number of people reading this will already be familiar with the satisfaction that comes from actually getting your hands dirty and mending something, but for me, it’s a new and exciting feeling.

What makes that satisfaction deeper are some of the potential savings. Mission Motorsport sourced all its BRZ parts from eBay’s Certified Recycled programme, which sees perfectly usable parts salvaged from vehicles that have otherwise reached the end of their lives, and sold for a lot less than they would be from a manufacturer.

Combine that with the fact that, well, you can’t really pay yourself for labour, and it all starts to look very appealing. Obviously, it’s not something you can go into blind, and if you’re an amateur, then some training’s definitely worthwhile – you really don’t want to take chances with the safety of your own car.

Truthfully, the stuff I did on the Mission Motorsport car was a drop in the ocean. The people who are committed to this project, and actively benefiting from it, have got a real job on their hands: four and a half months to turn it from an effectively standard BRZ into something that’ll survive a round-the-clock endurance race, as well as get to grips with driving it and, in some cases, get their race licences in the first place.

It’s a big undertaking, but one that the value of is immediately apparent after spending the day with MM. There’s a sense of real camaraderie here, even if it’s tinged by lots of swearing. They did get those bushes out in the end, apparently.

Not long after spending the day in the workshop, I pitched up on a drizzly airfield to get a sense of what it’ll be like for the crew driving this car, which meant forgetting everything I’d learned about driving up until now. More on that soon…