Getting the Most Out of a 2023 Subaru BRZ
The 2023 Subaru BRZ is not a complicated car, but it does have specific quirks that most people miss until they have already spent money fixing them. The FA24 engine makes 228 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque, which sounds fine on paper. In practice, the power delivery is lazy below 4,000 RPM and gets sharp only once you cross that threshold. That is the core of what you are working with, and everything else follows from that. I picked up a used 2023 BRZ with about 12,000 miles on it. The previous owner had done nothing to it except basic maintenance. I drove it hard for three weekends straight and noticed the car was not performing anywhere near what the specs suggested. The transmission was dragging the engine down instead of letting it breathe. Here is what I learned after spending about $4,000 and two weeks of testing to make it feel like the brochure promised. The first thing you need to understand about the FA24 is its VVT range. Subaru tuned the intake and exhaust cams very conservatively out of the box. The power band is narrow by design. If you shift early, you are just lugging the engine. Most drivers shift around 5,000 RPM in a manual because they think that is normal. It is not. You need to shift closer to 6,500 to 7,000 RPM on second and third gears to stay in the useful torque range. I learned this the hard way on a track day at Portland International Raceway. I was getting out Turn 3 slowly and had no idea why. Another driver in a stock C8 Z06 pulled past me doing roughly the same pace in a significantly slower car and told me I was rev-matching too aggressively. He was right. I was downshifting and blipping the throttle so much that I was bleeding speed through every gear change. Once I eased off the rev-matching and trusted the stock clutch more, lap times dropped by about 1.8 seconds per lap. That is the kind of delta that comes from understanding how this engine actually behaves rather than how you think it should.
The automatic transmission in the 2023 model is a 6-speed that has been reprogrammed from the previous generation. It is not a bad shifter, but it still prioritizes fuel economy over driveability. You can manually select gears, but the computer will often hold a gear longer than you want if it thinks you are coasting. The workaround is straightforward: put it in manual mode before you enter a corner and leave it there. Do not try to exploit the auto mode for performance driving. It will confuse you more than help you. One of the bigger issues people run into with the 2023 BRZ is front tire wear. The car puts significant lateral load on the front tires during cornering because the steering ratio is quite quick at 12.1:1 and the front suspension geometry is aggressive for a low-slung coupe. I replaced my front tires after 8,000 miles because the inside shoulders were worn down to the belts. The rear tires lasted nearly twice as long. This is normal for the platform, but it is not obvious unless you are actively track daying the car. If you are doing street driving, you will get maybe 15,000 to 18,000 miles out of a set of fronts before they become illegal in most states. The rear tires should last 25,000 miles or more. The suspension on the 2023 BRZ is stiffer than the 2022 model, which improved handling but made the ride noticeably harsher on imperfect roads. The damping is not adjustable unless you buy aftermarket components. I ran the stock dampers for about six months and found that bump compliance suffered on rough backroads. The car would skip sideways over expansion joints at speeds above 40 mph because the springs were too stiff for the pavement conditions. I installed a set of Tein Endless Variable damper kits with 48 levels of compression adjustment. The sweet spot for street use was around level 20 out of 48. Going lower than that made the car wallowy through corners. Going higher than 30 started making the ride unbearable on broken asphalt. This is not a problem that shows up in reviews. You have to live with the car for a while to understand it.
The braking system is another area where the specs look good but reality is different. The front rotors are 12.4 inches and the rears are 12.0 inches with 4-piston calipers up front. That sounds adequate, but these are single-piston floating calipers at the rear and the brake pads are relatively soft for a sports car in this price range. Under hard street driving, the brake pedal feels firm and the initial bite is strong. Under sustained track use, the rears fade noticeably after about four to five hard laps. I replaced the pads with Hawk HP+ compounds and bled the system with Castrol SRF fluid once, and the fade problem went away almost entirely. The upgrade cost about $350 and took about 90 minutes if you know what you are doing. If you do not know how to bleed brakes properly, have a shop do it. A bad bleed will make the pedal feel spongy and kill your confidence in the car immediately. Weight reduction is one of the most effective modifications you can make to this car, and it is also one of the most overrated. Removing the rear seats saves about 60 pounds. Taking out the spare tire and jack saves another 30 or so. These are real savings, but they do not move the needle as much as people think. The BRZ weighs about 3,125 pounds as delivered. Dropping 100 pounds gets you roughly a 0.1-second improvement in acceleration and a marginally better turn-in response. What actually matters more is unsprung weight. Upgrading to lighter wheels, like a set of Volk TE37 Racerings, saved me about 25 pounds per corner compared to the stock wheels. That is 100 pounds of unsprung mass removed, and it made the car feel significantly more agile over bumps and through direction changes. The difference between 100 pounds of sprung weight and 100 pounds of unsprung weight is not linear. It is more like a 3:1 ratio in terms of how the car responds. So wheel upgrades are worth far more than weight removal from the cabin. The exhaust system on the 2023 BRZ is restrictive at the rear, mostly because of the underbody panels and the muffler design. I swapped to a cat-back system from Mishimoto and the sound improved without losing any low-end torque. The gains from the exhaust are minimal, roughly 3 to 5 horsepower at the wheels, but the auditory feedback makes the car feel much more connected. That is not nothing. Driving engagement is a real performance factor.
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There is one thing I want to be honest about: the 2023 BRZ is not a car that benefits enormously from bolt-on modifications. The stock internals are stout, but the engine management is conservative. A tune alone will add maybe 8 to 12 horsepower at the crank, and that is after you spend $600 to $1,000 on a custom map. Most people who chase horsepower on this platform end up spending $5,000 or more and only gaining 20 to 30 horsepower. The return on investment is poor. What you gain instead is handling refinement, braking capability, and tire grip. Those are the three areas where the BRZ actually improves with modification. Spend your money there and you will have a car that feels faster than the numbers suggest. If you are buying a used 2023 BRZ, check the CV joint boots. Subaru had a recall on the front drive shafts for early 2023 models built before mid-April. If the boots are cracked or leaking grease, the CV joints are likely worn. Replacing a front CV axle costs about $400 to $600 per side at a shop. It is not a catastrophic failure if you catch it, but it will get worse quickly. I saw a car with torn boots that started vibrating at highway speeds. The vibration increased when turning left because the left CV joint was under maximum load. Once they replaced both front axles, the vibration stopped completely. The infotainment system in the 2023 model is one of the worst parts of the car. It is slow, unresponsive, and the screen resolution is mediocre. There is nothing you can do about it except install an aftermarket unit or use Apple CarPlay through a wired connection. Wireless CarPlay is not supported natively. If you want wireless, you need a dongle and even then it is unreliable. I use a wired connection and have not bothered with a fix. The head unit is not worth the money to replace. It is an annoyance, not a failure point.
The 2023 Subaru BRZ is a car that rewards understanding over spending. The base specs are honest. The performance is real. But the execution requires you to work within the engine's limitations rather than fight against them. Drive it harder than you think you should, change gears later, and invest in tires and wheels before you invest in power. That is the actual path to making this car perform at its best.
