The long version

These sold in Japan for well under fifty grand and spent years as the car a certain kind of rally obsessive would grey-import at real financial pain just to drive — and some still do, tuning knowledge for the EJ22 engine passed down like folklore. That world has been almost entirely priced out by collector demand chasing the 400-unit story and the WRC pedigree; six-figure sales now draw bidders who could not tell an N-spec from an S-spec. The rare owner who still autocrosses theirs gets treated like a local celebrity, mostly because everyone else's 22B has not left the trailer in years.