Rappers love to make it rain $100 bills in their videos. Stand-up comedians live to make it rain F-bombs during their live stage shows. Manny Pacquiao can't help but make it rain knock-out punches when he's in the ring. And in Sweden, they make it rain blonde supermodels and Volvos-or so the stereotype goes. But truth be told, Sweden is about a lot more than beautiful women and safe but boring station wagons. In recent years, Koenigsegg has put Sweden on the map as a legitimate producer of exotic supercars, and thanks to Reine Delwall this Scandinavian nation is also gaining international recognition for its ability to build truly jaw-dropping tuner machines like his Mitsubishi Evolution VIII.
Back in 2004 when Reine bought his EVO brand-new from a local dealership in his hometown of Bandhagen, Sweden (a suburb of Stockholm, the nation's capital), his plan was to just do some light tuning on it to get it up into the 350hp range. Like most of us, he started with the usual bolt-on power-adders and then upped the ante a bit by replacing the factory ECU with an AEM EMS. Things didn't quite go as planned during that first EMS tuning session, though, with a melted piston damaging the block, crankshaft and cylinder head.
But like a true enthusiast, Reine manned up and used this piece of misfortune as reason to order a JUN 2.2-liter stroker kit along with a bunch of other serious go-fast goodies, including a Full-Race Stage 3 GT turbo. Handling engine assembly and parts installation himself, with the help of a few friends, Reine also landed the first of many sponsors when Stack provided him with a ST8110SR Street Turbo Dash Display. This was the beginning of what any EVO enthusiast who has visited Reine's blog (http://zevo.se) or read his 32-page thread on evolutionm.net knows simply as zEVO (a name chosen for the project because of Reine's online nickname, ZyBeR).
The zEVO build was progressing nicely when in December of 2006 Reine decided to take it to an exhibition in Norway. Although the stroked 4G63 had only been partially tuned prior to the show, he couldn't resist strapping it to the rollers during a dyno competition and making it rain 505 whp. Not too shabby, and after some further refinement over the winter of 2007, Reine took his Mitsu to an event in Estonia that turned out to be more of a three-day rave than a car show. Maybe it was the trance music or the ecstasy in the air, but for whatever reason Reine agreed to do some car stunts with zEVO for an Estonian television show during the event, resulting in some failed wheel studs, a stray wheel and some serious damage to the front left corner of the car including a demolished Damd front bumper and front fender.
As luck would have it, Reine already had a Varis front bumper on order, but with the damage to his front fender he called this legendary Japanese bodykit maker to see what they might have to complete the exterior repairs. That's when Varis offered him the first production version of its Super Taikyu widebody kit, an offer Reine was more than happy to accept. According to our man in Sweden, "The kit arrived during late summer of 2007. My friend Tokan and I began installing the kit at this point, hoping to have everything done for the Paris Tuning Show in mid February 2008, but as usual we had another setback. I had a skiing accident, breaking my right leg, leaving me bed-ridden for four months and delaying the car build by about a year."