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Mighty Car Mods has long been one of my favorite Youtube channels. Known for modifying a variety of cars in an incredibly informative and interesting way on video, these guys have progressed immensely since their first video in 2008. Their latest creation is arguably their coolest: a Subaru Impreza WRX STI swapped Subaru Levorg, which is the wagon version of the Impreza that we never got stateside.
Martin Mulholland and Blair Joscelyne, known as Marty and Moog on the show, have built their share of amazingly tasteful and well-engineered cars. Australia, while strict about car culture and modifying cars, allows pretty liberal customization of cars as long as the correct procedures are followed. In the past, they’ve done fully road-legal builds like an RB26-swapped Datsun Fairlady Z and an all-wheel-drive turbo three-cylinder swapped Daihatsu Mira Kei car. They also do feature-length films of trips to Japan, Germany, and across the Australian Outback.
But the builds that always captured my heart were from Marty, who has a deep love for Subaru wagons. Starting with a first-generation Subaru Legacy RS Turbo wagon, he has chronicled his wagon love for over a decade on the channel. Highlights include the original Gramps and Super Gramps builds, where he took a second-generation Legacy wagon and swapped in a 3.6-liter flat-six engine from a Tribeca and put a Garrett GTX3576R on it. That car got flooded in a repaint, so he took the drivetrain and swapped it into a fourth-generation Legacy wagon known as Super Gramps. That car is the reason I owned a 2008 Legacy Spec.B for a year.
The latest entry into the MCM dynasty is an otherwise diminutive Subaru Levorg that Marty bought specifically to modify. If you’ve watched MCM enough, you’ll learn that all modern Subarus are like big lego sets where everything bolts together across different models. In the case of the Levorg, it’s built on the same global platform as the current-generation WRX STI. In theory, everything from the STI bolts onto the Levorg, and the wiring can be patched together.
So MCM purchased a crashed 2018 STI as a donor vehicle to do a complete swap of the Levorg. Like all of their builds, they disassemble and reassemble the car like the factory would, removing parts from the STI in large subassemblies like the front subframe and engine, and simply lifting it into the Levorg. And their theory was right; everything bolted in perfectly. The Levorg even had holes cut into the firewall for a clutch pedal and hydraulic cylinder. The likelihood is that the Levorg, Impreza, WRX, and STI all use the same firewall stamping.
After some wiring work thanks to their dedicated cast of expert friends, the Levorg runs and drives like a completely stock 2018 WRX STI, with the six-speed manual gearbox included. As a long-time MCM fan, this build and series gave me serious echoes of the very best MCM videos. The payoff of seeing Marty and Moog drifting and doing axis donuts in the Levorg would bring a tear to anyone’s eye.
The duo plans to mod the car and make it better than it already is. I’m excited to see the car progress and am also very jealous of Marty’s garage. Watch the series in its sweet four-episode span, and join me in dreaming about having my own Levorg STI.
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