If you thought Travis Pastrana’s “Family Huckster” was a rad wagon, wait until you get a load of this fresh Subaru Gymkhana build.
By Gray Van Dyke
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In the wake of the late Ken Block’s untimely passing, Travis Pastrana has taken up the Gymkhana mantle as a means to keep the viral YouTube sensation alive. Along with fresh stunts and new locales, it means that Subaru has replaced Ford as the carmaker of choice. 
The 2020 installment kicked things off with a WRX STI that was hailed as the “wildest STI ever,” and Subaru and Pastrana subsequently followed up the car with an even more ludicrous project in the form of a wagon-based creation dubbed the “Family Huckster.”
Not content to settle there, however, they’re back once again. If you thought the last Gymkhana car was crazy, wait until you see the new build.
It’s called the “Subaru Brataroo 9500 Turbo,” and it’s a vehicle that owes its name to its donor, its absurd rev range as well as its filming location. For the next installment of the Gymkhana series, Travis Pastrana will be heading Down Under, and he’ll be driving the build you see before you.
While the car is technically based on a 1978 Subaru BRAT, it’s a loose approximation at best. Inside and out, Hoonigan and Subaru worked to make the truck fit for hitting jumps, getting sideways and enduring whatever other shenanigans the team may have gotten up to while filming in a country that invented the term “hoon.”
As such, under the hood, the Brateroo packs a turbocharged 2.0-liter boxer-four engine courtesy of Vermont SportsCar. Along with bringing a tenfold power increase over stock (now up to 670 horsepower and 680 lb-ft of torque), it’s also the highest revving Gymkhana car to date, capable of screaming above 9,500 rpm.
To ensure that the BRAT could accommodate the extra grunt, the team ditched the stock transmission for a six-speed sequential SADEV gearbox and fitted a set of motorsport-grade differentials.
What’s more, Vermont SportsCar provided a full chassis and roll cage setup that has been engineered to the latest WRC safety standards. (Considering one of Pastrana’s previous jump attempts in the Huckster, it’s for good reason.)
Riding on a set of gold KMC wheels, it’s made only better by its bodywork. That’s because, beyond head-turning visuals courtesy of Khyzl Saleem, the BRAT’s new look provides some impressive functional benefits. 
For one, the Brateroo’s bodywork is made from full carbon fiber, so it brings obvious weight savings compared to the stock sheet metal. 
Moreover, according to Subaru, it features “the most advanced active aerodynamics on a Gymkhana car to date.” In practice, this means that, along with a set of front fender louvers, the Brateroo also incorporates two interchangeable rear wings.
Both feature an adjustable angle of attack and actuate upward, though they’re sized such that one is designed to serve as a more general purpose option, while the other is optimized to provide high downforce at speed.
Taken together, it makes for an undeniably trick setup — and that’s not even addressing the cockpit integration.
To give Pastrana input over the active aero from inside the car, the build team repurposed the stock HVAC controls, complementing the retrofit with a carbon-fiber dashboard, flax-composite wood-grain accents and a period-correct Uniden CB radio.
You can currently catch the Brataroo 9500 Turbo at the 2025 SEMA Show in Las Vegas. According to Subaru, the next Gymkhana film, titled Aussie Shred, will premiere in early December on the Hoonigan YouTube channel.
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