Former Northern Ireland champion Denis Biggerstaff currently owns Colin McRae’s first World rally championship Subaru Impreza - in fact, he drove it to 14th place on the international Rally of the Lakes at the weekend - but has decided to sell it on the world’s biggest internet auction site.

“I want to upgrade to a newer version,” said Mr Biggerstaff, from Dromara, “and thought it might be a good idea to put it on eBay because it is quite an historic car. It might be of interest to a collector as well as other drivers.”

The Subaru, registration number P18WRC, was the first of the new breed of World Rally Cars to have been built by the Subaru team nine years ago and was driven by the former World champion from Scotland.

It bears the designation PRO/WRC/97.001 - indicating it was built for Subaru by Prodrive, the Banbury company which runs the Japanese manufacturer’s World championship programme; that it is a WRC car, constructed in 1997 and that it was chassis No 1.

The four-wheel-drive, two-litre, turbocharged Impreza, which accelerates from 0 to 60mph in three seconds, was used in the World championship that year by a number of drivers, including McRae, Italian Piero Liatti and Sweden’s Kenneth Eriksson before being sold into the hands of privateer competitors.

It first came to Northern Ireland in 2001 to be driven by Owen Lamont and two years ago was bought by Biggerstaff, a two-time Northern Ireland champion and former British rallycross champion.

Posted: 05|3|06 at 12:34 pm. Filed under: UK News.