Quote:
Originally Posted by brucey
Starting looking into removing the roof rack further, and when reading the technical manual, I realized that the roof is touring style. It has an extra hump. I'm not so sure that its worth it once I realized just how small the racks really are.
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The wife's Legacy has similar roof racks. I removed the cross bars earlier this summer (this requires a Torx tool of the appropriate size). The remaining part of the roof rack is not going to be easy to take off. It looks to me like the inside pillar covers need to be removed, then the ceiling liner, and then the bolts from the inside. It will leave at least 3 holes per side in the roof which are going to need to be filled with something. There is no filler strip, as for the rack mounts on many other cars, because as you showed in your picture, the rack is actually on a raised portion of the roof.
At first glance it looks like the side rails are straight, so the rear part will follow in the wake of the front part, and the wind should pass over them fairly easily. However, if you stand in front of the car and look straight down the inside edge of the rack you will see that it bends inward towards the center of the car at the center support. That exposes the flat half of the trailing half of the rails to the oncoming wind (admittedly at a fairly shallow angle), and it exposes the front face of the last support directly to the wind. If you own another, taller, vehicle that could be used as a camera platform it would be interesting to "tuft" the top of the car and see what the air is actually doing up there. My other car is a Protege5, so no way to see the roof of the Subie from that.