2003 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution Road Test – Review

Street racing and video games have sparked a global struggle for vehicular coolness, all of it centering on the homologated, half-pint rally car. Until last year, America remained aloof behind a wall of prickly crash and emissions laws. Then Subaru lobbed one over in the form of its multitalented 227-hp WRX sedan and wagon.

The response by Mitsubishi is, to borrow a diplomat’s phrase, disproportional.

Meet the new 271-hp Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution for America, or the Evolution VIII if you already speak Evo lingo or have been following the breathless reports out of Japan. The Evo offers feline reflexes, hammerhead power, and more urbane polish than this genre of super-boosted weed whackers is known for.

Thanks to Uncle Sam’s hard-nosed standards, the seven previous versions of Mitsubishi’s souped-up Lancer (a.k.a. the Mirage), which began in 1992, were not sold here. Mitsubishi has built an Evo that crashes softer and stinks less. The first of 6500 Evos to be imported this year should be arriving about the time you’re reading this in February, priced at about $29,500 for openers (hard numbers were still being firmed up at press time). For now, sedans only.

The options are a sunroof and a rear wing that is smaller and cheaper than the hand-made carbon-fiber helicopter blade pictured here. There is only one transmission, a five-speed manual. If dealers demand it, the Evolution GT-A model, with its button-shifted five-speed automatic but 31 fewer horses, might come stateside in 2004.

The Evo represents a substantial price stretch from the base $24,720 Subaru Impreza WRX sedan. Mitsubishi figures the extra beans under its Evo’s hood, plus some swank styling and interior gloss, earn your additional dough.

Here are the facts. You decide.

An Evolution body shell is just a humdrum Lancer until workers at Mitsubishi’s Mizushima factory weld in the numerous steel body stiffeners. They include a V-brace behind the back bench (thus, no folding rear seats); extra gussets in the windshield base, door pillars, and trunk; additional spot welds on the strut towers and rear-suspension attachment points; and a tubular front strut tower brace that is tied into the cowl at a reinforced bracket.