Stolen Team Japspeed Subaru found in Reading
GOOD NEWS!!!!
The one-off Subaru Impreza drift car driven by drifting legend Steve “Baggsy” Biagioni and stolen on Saturday evening has been recovered following a high-profile internet appeal.
The Team Japspeed Subaru Impreza was driven away from Santa Pod Raceway around 7pm Saturday – and then, incredibly, filmed on the M25 just 45 minutes later.
The person filming the car didn’t know the car had been stolen at that time, but later posted the footage on YouTube. When news of the car’s fate became clear, word quickly spread. The YouTube footage of the stolen car was even featured on BBC News!
Internet forums soon started a ‘car-hunt’, based around initially patchy evidence: The Subaru drove from the M1 onto the M25, and was last seen heading onto the M4.
Further spice was added to the story because the car is not road-legal. It was being driven without number plates – and the video footage shows umpteen other road rules being broken too.
Furthermore, the car only has a 20-litre fuel tank. With very high racing car-like fuel consumption, this meant the car would almost certainly been stopping at filling stations often.
Details like this helped the internet community piece together evidence, and ensure the rear-wheel drive six-cylinder Impreza was discovered within a day: last night, it was confirmed the £50,000 Subaru special had been found in Reading.
“We cannot go into too many details due to the ongoing investigation,” said the team in a blog last night, “but the car was found partially stripped in the early hours of the morning (Reading area) by Thames Valley Police.
“We will know later today if any extensive damage has been done, but right now we’re just beyond happy to have the car back relatively unscathed – it seems we got the car just at the right time.”
The impact of the high-profile Subaru theft has been huge, with the forum post appeal for help spanning multiple pages. Without the power of internet communities, said the team, the car probably wouldn’t have been recovered at all.
Now investigations begin, into how the car could be driven away from a car show in broad daylight, and how an unregistered, not-road-legal model could have been driven at such erratic high speed for many miles, all without being stopped…
The Damage 
And finally Baggsy looks happy to get his car back 
