Hi all, been watching lot of u tube vids on maintence etc, stumbled on few negative videos about head gasket, (one said all Scoobys up to 2011 have same issue), is this true does anyone know? 

Yep I am afraid so. It is usually a matter of when not if. Lots of failures on the web. Signs, pushing coolant out of the overflow tank, overheating but tricky to diagnose unless badly blown from what I can gather. Either head gasket or heads lifting underboost. I am no expert but I if you search you will find many HG blown on the 2.5. Frequent oil and coolant changes and make sure battery is good and clean. Make sure you have a oh sh** fund lol. Good excuse to forge the motor. Stop looking for problems or you will scare yourself from ever enjoying it.

Ha ha, I'm not looking for problems, I'm looking how to make sure I can do my best for my dream car lol, so if there's likely to be a problem I can catch the early signs to prevent complete devastation, mine has been looked after, full service history, very clean,, and I want to keep it that way 😉

The 2.5 engines have a pretty bad reputation, but most of these issues seem to come from modifying.

 

Any make of car has their own problems some far more serious on modern designs. Ecoboosts catching fire, same for BMW EGR valves overheating and catching fire both dangerous to your health. I believe both have caused fatalities. Blown HG is just a danger to your wallet.

First off, the 2.5 is just as bad from hawk onto even the final edition, doesn't matter if its wrx or sti, they all suffer from ringland and headgasket issues.

Subaru stopped doing a proper forged engine in 2001 (well before the 2.5 came in ironicly)

Modified and standard doesn't make any difference up to a certain power, over 350bhp and your on borrowed time on a stock 2.5.

Well looked after or not (although poor maintenance will always result in a less reliable car) they still fail.

I hear a figure of about failure rate of around 35%. which is pretty astronomical in car terms but in truth it's a educated guess. Really its pure luck if you get a good or bad one. I know of at least one car that had 3 engines within 10k miles from new 😮

That's the bad, the good is built right the 2.5 is an epic road engine, plenty of low down grunt. Well looked after and tuned right they are proper weapons on the road. 

Proper forged rebuild will prob start around 7k ish for a proper decent basic forged build (assuming you don't do it yourself) with an upper limit really depending on how far you wanna go as far as power goes.

 

Well keep my fingers crossed I got a good one ha ha