7 Road Cars Prodrive Helped Develop

British motorsport firm Prodrive has seen success in pretty much every form of racing it’s entered. It’s racked up countless wins in the World Rally Championship, European Rally Championship, British Touring Car Championship, V8 Supercars, plenty of GT racing series and the World Rally Raid Championship. It even ran the BAR-Honda F1 team during its performance peak in 2004.

Amid all that success, though, the company’s somehow found time to help manufacturers turn out some pretty special road cars, too. Here are six of the best, plus one all-Prodrive attempt that could have been phenomenal if it had ever made it past the prototype stage.

Subaru Impreza P1

Possibly the definitive Prodrive road car, the Subaru Impreza P1 showed that not all the best special edition Imprezas had to be confined to the Japanese market. Emerging from Prodrive’s long-time running of Subaru’s World Rally Team, the P1 was a UK-only model developed specifically to be as good as possible on Britain’s uniquely terrible roads.

It had the two-door Impreza body, not normally available in Europe, because it was the stiffest shell available, and Prodrive developed a new exhaust and catalytic converter to get the 2.0-litre turbo boxer four to a JDM-matching 276bhp without falling foul of tiger European emissions regulations. Most importantly, though, it had a unique suspension setup that made it devastatingly effective down a knackered B-road.

With only 1000 built, it’s no surprise that the P1 is now among the most desirable Imprezas of all. Prodrive had fettled Imprezas before and has done since, but the P1 is The One. Of course, it’s since revisited the idea of a very special Impreza with its staggering P25 restomod.

Aston Martin V8 Vantage Prodrive

When it launched the all-important baby of the Aston Martin range in 2005, the V8 Vantage had the looks and the soundtrack but not quite driving experience to go toe-to-toe with the Porsche 911.

Enter Prodrive, which by now was running Aston’s GT racing programme. It developed a suite of add-on bits for the Vantage, which included a remap, new exhaust and higher rev limit to take its sonorous 4.3-litre V8 from 380 to 425bhp, a set of two-way adjustable Bilstein dampers, and forged allows that dropped 10kg of unsprung mass from the car. All this helped turn the Vantage from a merely very good sports car into a great one.

Alfa Romeo Brera S

Speaking of cars that didn’t quite have a drive to match their looks, the Alfa Romeo Brera was a far more extreme example. Yes, it was utterly gorgeous, but it was a bit of a boat next to the other sports coupes of the day.

Fed up with the kicking it was receiving from the press, Alfa’s UK division asked Prodrive to develop a special edition, the S, once again just for our rubbish roads. The engines – a 182bhp 2.2-litre four-pot, or a 256bhp 3.2-litre V6 – were left alone, but Prodrive fitted Eibach springs, Bilstein dampers and a set of delectable lightweight alloys. Most notably, it ditched the rear driveshafts from the normally all-wheel drive V6 version, saving plenty of weight. Only 500 were made, but they were the best-driving of all the Breras by a country mile.

Mazda RX-8 PZ

Another noughties coupe (sort of) that offered far less to complain about in the handling department, the rotary-powered Mazda RX-8 was nonetheless another car to get some improvements from Prodrive in the shape of the UK-only PZ.

Like the Alfa, it got Eibach springs and Bilstein dampers, plus a set of lightweight OZ wheels. It received a new aero treatment too, with Prodrive going as far as fitting new, lower-drag door mirrors. Once again, the engine, a screaming 227bhp 1.3-litre twin-rotor, was left alone. The tweaks were well-received enough that a couple of years later, the non-limited RX-8 R3 got a similar set of changes.

Isuzu Rodeo Prodrive Performance Pack

We’ll confess, we had no idea this existed until we were trawling the internet for images for this very feature. As it turns out, though, back in 2006 Prodrive developed a ‘Performance Pack’ for the Isuzu Rodeo pickup, of all things.

The package essentially involved tweaking the ECU to boost the entry-level Rodeo’s 2.5-litre turbodiesel four-cylinder from 99 to 126bhp, and from 167 to 222lb ft. Not exactly a rocketship, then, but apparently it was all covered under the Rodeo’s standard warranty. Which is nice.

Range Rover Autobiography Ultimate

Everything we’ve covered so far has been all about taking a car and making it better to drive, but in 2011, Prodrive helped create something that wasn’t really about the driver at all. A rare limited edition version of the L322 Range Rover, the Autobiography Ultimate was an attempt at creating a Rangie that was all about the rear seat passengers.

Changes included a pair of individual, electrically reclining back seats, a bigger rear console complete with a drinks chiller and an aluminium laptop table, and even a pair of iPads included (it was 2011, so our expectations were a bit lower).

While it wasn’t possible to build these changes on the Range Rover’s normal production line, it didn’t make financial sense for Land Rover to create new tooling for such a limited-run vehicle (500 were planned, although 714 ended up being made), so Prodrive created a dedicated facility at its Banbury HQ to carry out the conversions before sending the cars back up the M40 to Solihull for final delivery.

Prodrive P2

Oh, what could have been. The Prodrive P2 was a fully functional prototype sports car that teamed a Subaru Impreza powertrain with a bafflingly complex active differential. It was so cool that we recently gave it a feature all of its own, and we’re sure that if it had ever been made, it would have been an instant modern classic. We’d like to live in the parallel universe where that happened.