We bought a new car. Its a 2006 Subaru Legacy GT spec B 6MT.

Trying to find out the exact model of your Japan-import Legacy is like going down the rabbit hole.

What you want: Official Subaru Legacy STi package. Didn’t know you could get one of these.

What you don’t want: A dressed up ‘regular’ GT. One of the ‘options’ at the dealership. The Bilstein and STi badges were stick-ons.

You are after one close to the top one, but you might actually be looking at the bottom one. We were happy if we could a bonafide manual GT-B.

We decided that if we could convince ourselves the car we were eying up had Bilstein shocks (what I am taking as the ‘B’ in ‘spec B’)  then we were getting what we were paying for. There seems to be differing opinions that ‘B’ stands: For ‘Blitzen’? Or just B=better? I am sticking with Bilstein. I failed to find a telltale answer online to answer the question “Does it have Bilsteins?” (perhaps because it is a question an ignoramus asks?) so here my answer.

Hopefully this will be useful to someone who asks the sales-person the same question on a second-hand car dealer’s forecourt and they shrug their shoulders.