Back in the 90’s, Mitsubishi’s Lancer Evolution high-performance program was one of the most popular things to come out of Japan. Those days sure were fun for Mitsubishi.
Unfortunately, the Evolution program doesn’t hold the same cache as it used to, but nevertheless, it still carries a lot of weight as far as performance cars are concerned.
Bulgarian tuning firm, Vilner, is determined to bring the Lancer EVO X back to prominence with interior upgrades and even brought in one of its contemporaries, Overdrive, to take care of the exterior and performance improvements.
Inside the Lancer EVO X, Vilner decked it out with a black leather upholstery to go along with white colored accents and stitching. The roof lining has been outfitted with black Alcantara while the steering wheel and gear lever were treated with carbon trim. Rounding out Vilner’s work is a pair of OMP front bucket seats with a piano black decorative trim. Outside, Vilner also put in new LED lights on the car’s headlamps and taillights, replacing the standard lights the car comes in.
Meanwhile, the Lancer EVO X’s exterior was treated with carbon elements to go along with a Greddy exhaust system, an adjustable K-sport suspension, and a set of 18” Weds Sports alloy wheels. Under the hood, Overdrive also gave the car a power kit that spikes the output of the car’s 2.0-liter turbocharged engine all the way up to 400 horsepower.
We’re definitely hoping and praying that this isn’t going to be the start of a new trend, but we find it oddly unsettling to see two accidents on the dyno block in a span of just a few days.
We just recently caught hold of a video involving a Ford Mustang Shelbycatching fire while in the middle of a dyno test and now we found yet another video of a car – a Mitsubishi Evo – having its own bad day on the dyno block.
The video starts about as normal as any dyno video we’ve seen in the past with students from Mech-Tech college in Ponce, Puerto Rico dyno testing the Evolution VII. But towards the end, the Evo begins to tug violently on its restraint before completely going out of control and falling off the dyno during it’s test run.
Fortunately, nobody got hurt from the accident, including the driver inside the car who may have escalated the accident by stepping on the brakes when the car began to fall off the dyno. Here’s to hoping that we don’t see any more of these accidents on the dyno anytime soon.
And speaking of hoping, we all hope that everybody involved in this accident has the right insurance to take care of it.
A civil war has erupted in the automotive world and it’s all thanks to the Japanese. This has nothing to do with baseball, sumo wrestling, or the World Cup. It doesn’t even have anything to do with Honda and Toyota, the two biggest car companies in the Asian country. This is a battle of the younger persons car; two rally machines that have been fighting for years.
In the left corner we have one of the most prolific rally cars of all time, the 2010 Subaru WRX STI. Not quite sure what all those letters stand for but it’s bound to be something with speed or rally in it. The STI has been refreshed time and time again and it has always lagged behind the Mitsubishi in terms of sales and track performance. Yet, that hasn’t stopped them from releasing this new version and making it that much better.
In the right corner we have the 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X and you guessed it, this is the tenth version. The Lancer Evolution is a definite boy’s toy. It’s hard on the blacktop, dull and boring inside, but all that doesn’t mean anything. It’s this cars rally heritage that makes it so good where it matters.
So, which Japanese rally car takes the champagne and which will win in TopSpeed’s epic battle, the STI or the EVO?
We haven’t heard a whole lot from Mitsubishi these days so imagine how excited we were when we found out that a Mitsubishi AMS Drag EVO VIII caught everyone’s attention at The Texas Mile after it broke the world record for a standing mile on a four cylinder with a top speed of 228 miles per hour.
While the record itself was an achievement in its own right, it still got overshadowed by the events that transpired as soon as the car crossed the timing traps. Watch this video and you’ll notice at around the 1:22 mark that smoke starts coming out of the car only as a small preview to the flames that literally start coming out from under the hood. Driver Eric Jones vainly tried to activate the fire suppression system, but when he realized that it would be for naught, decided on a better course of action by jumping out of the car.
Overall, the AMS team had quite an eventful time at The Texas Mile and if it wasn’t for the Evo-catching-fire-after-breaking-world-record episode, the boys from AMS would have had a weekend to remember. Although, I think it was a weekend to remember anyway.
The great thing about YouTube is you that can scour its site for a few minutes and find auto commercials from other countries that you wouldn’t be able to find simply by flipping through the channels on your local cable network. While there may be times where different languages prevent us from fully-comprehending these ads, the sheer satisfaction that comes with watching them is sure worth it, even if we don’t understand them sometimes.
Thankfully, this particular Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution commercial from Australia is dialogue free so we can enjoy it for what it is: a visceral treat that promotes the Mitsubishi Evolution as capable of defying the laws of physics. Give it a look and tell us that you weren’t floored by this visual masterpiece.
