This past weekend I found something pretty fascinating.  I follow a lot of Subaru pages on Instagram, so I usually don’t look too closely at what gets posted unless it’s something that really catches my attention.  The Instagram page of @subiewerks555 posted a picture of a Subaru Formula 1 car and a flat-12 Boxer engine saying: “Subaru tried many motorsports before they realized rally was their calling. This is a Flat-12 BOXER engine.”  After reading that, I was intrigued and confused.  I looked into it some more, making sure it was a legit thing.  More information showed up on the subject than I thought – it was true!  I have never heard about this side project of Subaru.  Seeing this for the first time really surprised me, here’s what I found out about this piece of machinery.

Formula 1 was on a rise of popularity throughout the ’80s and ’90s.  It was a thriving market for the automotive industry to advertise themselves more efficiently and appeal to a different crowd, and F1 was a great way to do just that.  Subaru decided to jump on board with this idea in mind and hired an Italian firm by the name of Motori Moderni.  Subaru would run the engine with the Coloni F1 team for the 1990 season.  Unfortunately the engine was becoming something that wasn’t what the team and Subaru had hoped for.  It was proving to be very unreliable from the start.  With only 8 out of the 14 races for the 1990 season behind them, it had too many problems and losses to make it worth while to finish out the season.  This engine was known as the Subaru 1235.  At the time, most F1 teams like Ferrari and Honda pulled out of 12-cylinder game, replacing them with lighter V10s and V8s.  The Subaru 1235 was 112kg heavier than its V8 F1 rivals, in addition to not having enough power to be competitive with the top dogs.  Most of the cars had anywhere from 600-700 horsepower.  Motori Moderni managed to tune the Boxer engine to 555bhp, but that’s all it could get.  The biggest advantage the 1235 had on its competitors was the much lower center of gravity, resulting in better handling and chassis rigidity.  Sadly, it still wasn’t enough to be competitive.  It even got a try in Group C racing but just like the F1 program, it flunked.  The life of the 1235 doesn’t end there though.



By the mid-1990s, Christian Von Koenigsegg was looking for a power plant for his supercars after Audi bailed from the engine deal.  He had a friend of a friend who knew the gentlemen at Motori Moderni – the same folks who built the 1235.  He ended up purchasing the rights to the flat-12 Boxer Subaru engine.  After some tinkering, the Italians modified the engine to end up with 580bhp by raising the displacement to 3.8-liters, stroking it, and inserting longer intake tracts.  Christian decided it will be worthy.  To this day, the engine mount positions are still used in the Koenigsegg Agera.

Not many know what really happened to the Subaru 1235.  As of September 2005, Jalopnik posted about one of the 1235’s being for sale on eBay for $30,000.  If you’ve got the money and could find one, do it – whether you were upset about it being a failure of an engine or not!  It would make for quite the living room decoration, and of course, a killer conversation starter.  The more you know.

By Zach Osborne – @momentum.rs