Update: Subaru has released renderings of its BRZ Concept STI headed to the 2011 Los Angeles auto show. Check out the info and images here.

MANUFACTURER, CARPIX, BRENDA PRIDDY & COMPANY, KGP PHOTOGRAPHY

Yoshio Hirakawa, Subaru’s senior manager for engineering, looks at me expectantly. My upper lip wears beads of sweat after a mountain-road flog in a prototype of the new front-engine, rear-drive Subaru BRZ sports coupe, a joint venture between Subaru and Toyota with production slated to start next spring. I tell Hirakawa that I’m convinced. I tell him that this car could not have been engineered by Toyota. Nope. No way. He bows deeply.

Subaru called the secret meeting at a golf club in the hills behind Malibu. The internet is afire with rumors that Subaru is “getting a version” of Toyota’s new pseudo-Celica. Subaru sees the situation differently. The company maintains that it did the lion’s share of the engineering and development work on the car, and wounded corporate pride no doubt played a role in our invitation to drive it well in advance of its production.

We started the day in a windowless room papered with blueprints of a car code-named “AS1,” which will be sold in the U.S. as both the Subaru BRZ and the Scion FR-S, to which we say, “WTF happened to real car names?” Subaru project leader Hirakawa and Toshio Masuda, senior project general manager for product planning, laid out their case: The road map agreed to in April 2008 was for Toyota—which owns 16.2 percent of Subaru’s parent, Fuji Heavy Industries—to do the project planning and styling for the new car, while Subaru would handle engineering, testing, and production. The post-earthquake schedule, pushed back a couple of weeks by the disaster, has the assembly line rolling in May 2012 at Subaru’s build center in Gunma Prefecture, Japan.

To reduce cost, Subaru and Toyota will share nearly identical versions. The common parts bin includes one circa-200-hp, port- and direct-injected flat-four engine; two Aisin six-speed transmissions, including a manual and a conventional automatic; one basic interior; and one set of body stampings and glass. Badges, wheels, and some small trim items will be different. Last year, Toyota decided to sell U.S.-bound cars as Scions, so technically there will be three iterations of the AS1, including those sold as Toyotas in foreign markets where Scion doesn’t exist.

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But whose car is it really? Senior project general manager Masuda says that only Subaru personnel were in the engineering bullpens and at the test track during the car’s three-year gestation. How often did Toyota check in? “Meetings with Toyota were always necessity based” and not regular, Masuda says, meaning that Toyota did not drive the project from the back seat.

Masuda goes even further to assert that the engineering of the AS1 dictated its styling, rather than vice versa as with most sports cars. Toyota’s designers shaped the body but only after the hard points of the chassis, powertrain, and passenger compartment were fixed by Subaru

“We delivered the best chassis we could,” he says, “and then the styling of the car was basically [Toyota’s] role.”

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