The 2024 Subaru BRZ tS Is One of the Greats
The road was almost too slick to stand on. Up in the mountains, a fog had set in so thick it seemed determined to stay all winter. In this quiet scene, I rolled out of a steep uphill intersection and shouted, half surprised and half amazed at how easily I’d caught this Subaru BRZ tS’ back end. It stepped out so far, so quickly, I swore the tS took up two lanes.
This was the old Targa Florio route, one of them at least. The Circuito Grande loops around the Madonie mountains east of Palermo, the way still marked with historic signs. After all, this was the last of the car world’s great road races, and the roads themselves haven’t gone anywhere. Mostly.
Heavy rains washed a good few sections down to bare dirt, and other rough stretches heave and fall for kilometers at a time. Big oil-pan-killing humps and jumps and dips threaten our intrepid BRZ.
This is an easy car to talk to, an easy car to handle out here. The tS (it stands for tuned by STI), runs a pair of fancy dual-pass internally-valved shocks up front, made by Hitachi, and revised chassis tuning to keep up with those changes. Subaru’s STI arm revised suspension damping and upscaled the Brembo brakes front and rear. The springs are the same as the mainline BRZ, as are the rear shocks; only the front end gets the Hitachi Sensitive Frequency Response Damper, SFRD for short.
These shocks are an entirely mechanical system that do the same job as more expensive, more complicated active suspension systems. Under a certain amount of load, the shocks act one way, giving you good comfort over small bumps and on your commute. Above a certain load, they toughen up, giving you better wheel control at high speed or on a twisting mountain road like this one. You can indeed feel the difference up here, the nose of the car eating up the many imperfections it encounters and never straying from its course. You always know where the car stands, and it’s no trouble to feel grip changing underneath, the greasy pavement impersonating black ice.
And then we hit something you’d call “a kicker” in the off-road world, a bump that unloads the back of the car. Once again the tS steps out, way out, onto the narrow edge of a cliffside. Even then, it’s light work snatching back control. This car is so confident, so communicative, so easy to read, so easy to hustle.
On a road like this, though, we curse Subaru for cheaping out. They didn’t spend the money to fit fancy shocks to the rear of the car, which creates an imbalance between compliance and response between the car’s front and rear ends.
The BRZ’s 2.4-liter flat four has more than enough torque to pull up out of tight hairpins and plenty of horsepower to blat up to third gear on the short little straightaways between them. It's got plenty of brakes, too.
It is somewhat academic to discuss the raw specs of the car, as they are the same as a stock BRZ, but it’s worthwhile to remind people how honest the BRZ is. You get 228 horsepower up at 7000 rpm, 184 lb-ft. at 3700. Compression is set at 12.5 to 1 and the FA24 engine drinks premium at a rate of 20/27/22 mpg when prodding forth the tS’s 2846 lbs. If you want a classic sports car in 2023, it’s this, the GR86, and the Miata.
The tS answers a first question: Is this a good car to live with? Yes, of course. But it’s more than just a simple car. The BRZ tS’s talents are deep enough, exciting enough, that there’s always more to unlock, both from the car and from yourself.
A second question is more difficult to settle on: Is this a significantly better car than a plain BRZ? It’s five grand more for the tS versus the basic “Premium” BRZ, and two and a half grand more for the tS versus the mid-level “Limited” trim, which also comes with a manual and also comes with Mister Bib on your sidewalls. Both those upper two trims of BRZ come with 18-inch wheels and 215/40/R18 Michelin Pilot Sport 4s. It’s a couple grand, then, for two (not four) new shocks, bigger brakes, and revised tuning. Is it worth it? The question just doesn’t feel all that important having driven the car. The tS is great! It’s sensational! Sliding around Sicily in second and third gear, was it all that different from a base BRZ? Sort of.
The front suspension does feel like a meaningful change, and the cost is not extraordinary. It’s not a huge chunk of change up front, especially when you consider the price of a similarly sophisticated set of dampers on the aftermarket.
The tS mostly reminds you how good the BRZ is in general. This is one of the great cars of our era, a genuine revitalization of the low-power, high-excitement coupe. For years—decades it felt like—the enthusiast landscape begged for a car like this; something you can lean on and rely upon when you are pointed down a mountain, in the clouds, unsure of the slippy asphalt between you and the breathtaking view you only see from the bottom of a cliff.
I didn’t want for more power. I didn’t want a fancier transmission. I didn’t want a turbo, or a V-8, or anything. I had four cylinders and a limited-slip differential. That was plenty.
There are more powerful sports cars, more boutique, and more expensive, too. It’s easy for the mind to wander up a class into cars like the Toyota Supra, the Nissan Z and Z Nismo, the Mustang, the Camaro, and the BMW M2. But on that Targa Florio course? Out on real roads, in the real world? I’ll take the Subaru.
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