EVO tuners are anxious people. They're anxious to know how their cars will be evaluated. They're anxious about acceleration, anxious about braking, anxious about drivers and tires and anxious about how many runs they'll be allowed. They're anxious right up until you ask them to be somewhere early so you can put their car on a dyno and measure its output. And then they're late.
The two full days of EVO flogging began at K&N in Riverside, Calif., where each car took a turn on the chassis dyno. From the dyno, we went directly to California Speedway in Fontana, where we measured braking, acceleration and lateral grip. The final test would be performed at the Streets of Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond, Calif. In all, there are five tests to see what the best in the country can do with Mitsu's bad boy.
As the umpires of this contest of Mitsu madness, we came up with a few rules. First, fuel was unrestricted. California's pump gas is an insult to the world of boosting and high specific output, so we allowed race gas and every competitor chose to use it. Second, no one was to show up on Hoosiers or Kumho A710s. These, the stickiest of the sticky street tires, would have put any competitor at such an unfair advantage that every car would have needed to use them to produce meaningful numbers.
Then we decided to not pick a winner. No, not because we're wimps, but because there are too many differing costs and tuning philosophies among this bunch to narrow to one winner. In other words, this was not a shootout, it was a gathering of cars and tuning talent to see just how far the aftermarket has progressed with the vehicle we named the 2004 Sport Compact Car of the Year.
At 7 a.m., there were three EVOs in the K&N parking lot, including the stock RS version we drove ourselves and used as a baseline for all five tests. Seven more were AWOL. Cell phones chattered and our ears rang with excuses.
By 9:40 a.m., eight cars had spun the rollers. The Vishnu crew ran into a logistical glitch. The lug nuts for the car's Volk wheels were in another vehicle, which had a flat tire 200 miles away. They were given 20 minutes to hit the dyno or be excluded. The show had to go on and there was no time to wait. At 10 a.m., with its stock wheels and stock Yokohama rubber, the Vishnu car was strapped onto K&N's dyno.
Five minutes later, our cell phone rang to confirm the Buschur Racing customer car wouldn't make it-clutch problems, apparently. As we rolled out of K&N, we'd tested nine cars-eight tuners, plus the EVO RS. Power ranged from RB Motoring's 279 hp to Road/Race Engineering's 469 hp. The RS turned the rollers at 241 hp.
It's not obvious from the photos, but there are some affordable cars in this group. Cars with only a few thousand dollars in mods. Cars with stock turbos, stock brakes and stock tires. EVOs are so good, it seems, many tuners leave well enough alone. Either that or they simply don't have their shit together. We found out which soon enough.
One of the most stock, ironically, is from Vishnu Tuning, which claimed to have had "issues" with the more powerful car it intended to bring. The Vishnu car, a customer-owned machine, is a simple Stage One setup with a reflashed ECU, Vishnu exhaust and HKS cams. Nothing special, or so we saw. Aside from a Cusco rear anti-roll bar, everything else in the suspension, including the wheels and tires, is stock.
Works rolled up in a slightly more modified EVO, but still one of the milder cars in the group. Its reflashed stock ECU controls a 4G63 fitted with an ATP/Works turbo kit, a Works throttle body and Works exhaust. Works/Zeal coil-overs suspend the chassis and huge 255/35-18 Pirelli P Zeros on Works/Desmond Regamaster forged wheels make it stick.
RB Motoring, without much time to prepare, rolled into our test of EVO insanity with a striking silver rig slathered in vinyl attitude. The RB car is a collection of carefully chosen bolt-ons designed to increase performance without proportionally increasing price. Standard goodies like a Mines downpipe, Attain titanium exhaust and an A'PEXi airbox improve flow. An A'PEXi Super AFC controls fuel while SARD 700 cc/min injectors deliver it. Ohlins PCV coil-overs handle spring and damping duties while 18-inch Work wheels and 245/35-18 Goodyear GS Fioranos improve grip.
We'll call XS Engineering's EVO the middle of the road in this group of heavy-breathing over-achievers. The XS EVO still uses the stock turbo but virtually every other part of performance consequence has been replaced or upgraded. XS has replaced nearly every bit of plumbing surrounding the turbo on both the hot and cold sides. And those stock pieces that remain, like the exhaust manifold, turbine housing and oxygen sensor housing, are extensively ported. XS bolted on JIC's FLT-A2 coil-overs and the baddest Brembo brakes in the test-four-piston billet calipers with titanium piston inserts at both ends.
Then there are the others-the big-mod, big-motor machines. Exotic tubular exhaust manifolds, huge turbos and stand-alone engine management are the norm here. Cars like TODA Racing's 2.3-liter bad boy, stroked to 100 mm (over the stock 87.8 mm) and wearing a prototype XS Engineering Racemax turbo kit, including a GT3037 turbo and cast manifold. The stock suspension was replaced with TODA/Fightex coil-overs and a Progress rear anti-roll bar. Toyo RA1s in 235/45-17 replaced the stock rubber. TODA showed up to demonstrate it had more than just a few Honda tuning tricks up its sleeve with parts for Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Mazda.
Sparco and A'PEXi collaborated to bring perhaps the most well-rounded car of the bunch. Designed to excel at every discipline, this pampered machine got as much attention as a delicate F1 car between tests, but with the exotic hardware onboard, that's almost expected. An A'PEXi RX6 IHI turbo and gorgeous stainless-steel manifold combine to make big, usable power. Naturally, A'PEXi's Power FC stand-alone ECU controls the engine. N1 coil-overs, also by A'PEXi, combine with an adjustable Progress group rear anti-roll bar, 245/40-17 Yokohama A032R rubber and 17x8.5-in Volk Racing Gram Lights to balance the chassis.
Never a tuner to miss any test involving Mitsubishi's 4G63, Road/Race Engineering showed up with its big-dog EVO. The Road/Race car was built in cooperation with GReddy and uses many of its hard parts. The most significant are GReddy's T-67 25G turbocharger, tubular exhaust manifold and Type R external wastegate. HKS cams, an RRE downpipe and JIC titanium exhaust also help flow. AEM's EMS stand-alone ECU does the brainwork. Road/Race reworked a set of JIC FLT-A2 coil-overs to its own specification and combined them with JIC camber plates, an RRE rear anti-roll bar and a John Mueller-spec alignment to make the EVO turn.
Rhys Millen Racing's EVO showed up with an HKS GT2835 turbo kit, including a bad-ass tubular manifold, RMR intake, downpipe and exhaust. Controlling the engine is an Autronic ECU tuned by RMR. Tein Flex coil-overs and Tein's cockpit-mounted Electronic Damping Force Controller, in combination with a Cusco adjustable rear anti-roll bar, make the chassis work. Stillen brake rotors are used with stock Brembo calipers and pads. Seventeen by nine-inch Enkei RPO2-J wheels and Yokohama AO32R rubber complete the package.
The EVO RS, Mitsubishi's latest edition to the EVO family, was the perfect car to baseline this test. It's lighter than a standard EVO by 88 pounds, thanks to a lack of air conditioning, stereo, power locks, power windows, power mirrors and sound deadening. It also packs a front helical limited-slip differential. So, theoretically, the RS should be the fastest EVO you can buy.
Experience told us the minimal weight loss wouldn't matter much, but we did record the quickest acceleration times we'd ever measured from an EVO with this car. It hit 60 mph in 4.8 seconds and ran the quarter in 13.3 seconds at 101.3 mph.
On the racetrack, it does things most of the modified cars could only dream of. Around the 180-degree Turn Eight, the RS is a rallyist's wet dream. Pitch it in with a little flick in the opposite direction, then hold on as the front bites and pulls the car into easily controlled oversteer. Nearly every other car in the test understeers painfully around this corner. This unconventional technique actually proves to be nearly a full second quicker per lap, proving again how much understeer sucks.