A couple months ago, the idea of a ‘new’ car started up at the Demaras family dinner table. It began with gripes about mechanical issues with the Mini Cooper. Before long, it turned into sharing AutoTrader ads for practical crossovers like the Subaru Crosstrek. Knowing I had to work quickly, I tried steering Alice toward a late-model Subaru WRX instead.
My friend Duane at Can Jam Motorsports immediately called my bluff. He said I just wanted a new VB-chassis WRX to take out on weekends. I laughed off the accusation… even though deep down I knew he was probably right.
About a week after Alice got the keys to her shiny new Subaru, I was already scouring Instagram looking for a local car meet to show it off. The hilariously named Shift.Faced.Society was hosting an unsanctioned pop-up meet in the parking lot of an industrial building in Ajax, just east of Toronto.
Yeah, the same old crowd of hooligans was there filming themselves speeding between warehouses. Everything wrong with the modern Toronto car scene. But ignoring the braindead BMW drivers, there were some genuinely cool cars at the meet, including a black Honda Civic coupe that looked like it should be stealing DVD players from transport trucks in ‘The Fast and the Furious’.
One middle-aged dad brought his son out in a 1992 Acura Vigor wearing a period-correct body kit and chrome wheels. Parked nearby was a heavily modified first-generation Acura TSX with a hand-painted finish that made it look like it had rolled straight out of a comic book. Another enthusiast showed up in a right-hand-drive Toyota Altezza wagon imported from Japan — a rare cousin to the Lexus IS sold here in North America.
Seemingly out of place at a tuner meet was an older Lamborghini Gallardo glowing with yellow underbody lights. It’s hard not to steal the show when the Italian exotic you’re driving costs five times more than everyone else’s car combined. But that’s probably just jealousy talking.
As for the ’23 WRX, with its silver Enkei PF01 wheels, painted side skirts, duckbill spoiler, and OEM+ styling philosophy — it fit right in. The new WRX feels like a modern evolution of the classic turbocharged Impreza formula that helped define import tuner culture in the early 2000s.
The pearl blue paint, hood scoop, flared fenders, and rally-inspired proportions all carry traces of the original Bugeye WRX, just with two decades of added comfort, refinement, and safety engineering. And honestly, it felt good watching people walk over to chat about the new car.
For all the nonsense that comes with modern pop-up meets, there’s still something special about standing around a parking lot at dusk talking about cars with strangers. Different ages, different backgrounds, wildly different vehicles — all connected by the same enthusiasm. And for one evening in Ajax, Alice’s new WRX became part of that strange little community too.