Mitsubishi Evo IX: They say that stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person the trouble of learning. We've certainly witnessed the consequences of stereotyping in the last week or so. Yet in the simple world of motoring, it's worth challenging a few more stereotypes while it's topical to do so.
Imagine Valentine's night and you anxiously await the arrival of your daughter's new boyfriend. What would your first impression be if he pulled up outside in an Evo?
High Octane fathers may be torn between youthful glee at knowing someone who owns such a pin-up car, and pure terror at handing over their offspring to someone whose car has an airplane wing attached to the boot. To the uneducated eye it could well be mistaken for a modified motor. Yet it is so much more. 'Modified' fans work hard to capture and enthral two of our natural senses: sight and sound.
There's another sense, however, that must be catered for if a car is truly to achieve greatness: touch, or in this case physical feeling. The feeling of power as you touch the throttle; the way your body lurches back into the seat; the way a car sweeps through a corner without complaint; the way it follows the line you set it with pinpoint accuracy. That's what distinguishes the great cars from the fancy paint jobs and noisy exhausts that gather outside the nation's chip shops on a Sunday night.
That's where the Evo and its ilk come in. These are much more than the sum of the initial sensory assaults will have you believe. Of course it looks like the motoring equivalent of a schoolyard bully. With its enormous boot spoiler and the air outlet on the bonnet, it's the sort of car that would steal the petrol money from the small city cars in the car park.
This is the ninth generation of a car that epitomises the mantra of motorsport engineers who earn their daily crust with mainstream manufacturers: test, transfer, repeat. Mitsubishi has been bringing the lessons of its rally experience on to the road for decades now, and since 1992 they've been doing it with the Lancer Evolution range.
Nine generations on, the road car now bears a striking resemblance to the racing model that tears up the chippings on the forest routes of the World Rally Championship. Indeed some local competitors take the current road-going model, make a few safety and performance modifications and hey presto, they've a fully-fledged racer.
Yet just as common is the passionate motorist taking the Evo to the local supermarket before dropping the children to football practice. For Evo engineers have cracked the code to creating a road-going version of a race car: practicality. It takes on the persona of a fully-fledged racer, yet seats five adults in relative comfort; it offers all-wheel-drive adjustments for tarmac, gravel and snow, yet can potter along a city street without raising a hair on your granny's head.
So what's new to the latest addition to the range? The Evo IX has several minor tweaks, but the only one that matters is 20 extra horses under the bonnet. With prices up by €1,500, that's roughly €75 a horse. And these aren't some nags bought at the local horse fair. These are horses of the thoroughbred variety.
The power output is now 280bhp. Just to remind everyone, that's from a four-cylinder 2-litre engine, not some six-cylinder monster. It's an incredible engineering feat. And that's just the start; if you want you can opt for the FQ340, which offers - as you can probably guess - 340bhp.
It doesn't end there: while Mitsubishi don't officially support anything other than their officially tuned models, there is a vibrant tuning sub-culture around the Evo, with several owners managing to bring the power output up to 400bhp.
The Evo IX is ridiculously good to drive. On the track and in the tight twisting chicane, the rear of the Evo IX swung ever so slightly out of line - even with the four-wheel-drive system in full flow, but there's loads of signals and unlike the average supercar, understeer doesn't arrive in one big bolt but rather in a steady flow, allowing you to use it to your advantage and swing around the corners. Yet off track and again it tootles along like a regular saloon, albeit dressed like a samurai and gurgling like a rally car.
We regularly spend time looping around test tracks in various classes of cars, but that day with the Evo is one of the highlights of last year. We just fell in love with its ability.
Back at home, we expected that some of the lustre would be lost when faced with rush-hour traffic and the 5km/h crawls. Amazingly our fondness with the Evo only grew. Sure it attracted all sorts of disapproving looks, normally reserved for a Stringfellow dancer in a nunnery.
Yet behind the wheel, it had all the decency and decorum of a small supermini. Ignore the massive fin that hovers in your rearview mirror and this felt like a regular saloon, at least until you tickled the throttle.
Then there's the price: at €51,495, that puts it in the same class as an Audi A4 2-litre Quattro, a BMW 325 SE or a Lexus IS250 Sport. All competent, classy executive fare. Yet with sales of the BMW 3-Series now overtaking those of the Ford Mondeo, there are a few people out there seeking to make more of a statement in the company car parks. For attention seekers, opting for an Evo is like setting fire to your trousers and running through the office.
Of course, there are similarly testosterone-charged steeds on offer from others, most notably the fellow Japanese marque of Subaru. Last year we had the chance to try out it on a race track, followed later that week by its arch-rival,the Subaru Impreza WRX Sti. The latter was in truth a purer racer.
Yet it was that rally purity that in the end swung us round to the Evo. While on paper - and arguably on the track - the Sti will have the beating of the regular Evo, the Mitsubishi is just that little bit more pliant to everyday motoring needs. We could live with the Evo on a wet Monday morning, treading through the traffic to work. Doing the same with the Sti is like taking a thoroughbred on a pony trek.
There are also other better priced and less hardcore models on offer, such as the VW Golf Gti and the Ford Focus ST. One outsider worth considering in all this is the new 130i M Sport.
And the Evo has its failings. For €50,000-plus you'd expect a better finish. Take the boot floor, which is composed of cheap carpet glued on to what seems like a thin layer of plywood. Yet for all that, the Evo would be the one we'd choose, for its flexibility, its fiery temperament on the track and its sheer fun. Forget the stereotypes: evolve.
