Ah, Mitsubishi…where did they go so wrong? In the 1990s they had a great lineup of sports cars if you were looking. If you lived overseas, you got access to the earliest Lancer Evolutions, but that didn’t happen in North America, where the Mirage (the renamed Lancer) was simply an eco-box. But we weren’t hurting for choice, either. If you wanted a neat off-roader that was everything you needed and nothing you didn’t, you got the Montero SUV, itself just a renamed Pajero. If you wanted something that could stomp roads and corners, however, Mitsubishi’s two brightest stars of the 1990s were present: the Eclipse, one of the earliest tuner car icons, and this all-wheel-drive monster. In North America, it was called the 3000GT (or, if you wanted to fake like you bought American, the Dodge Stealth) but elsewhere, this was the Mitsubishi GTO. 3.0 liters of twin-turbocharged V6, all wheel drive, all wheel steering, active aerodynamics, a very comfortable interior and the ability to corner like a roller coaster cart gave the GTO/3000GT/Stealth the ability to redefine your idea of what a fast car could do. Most Japanese sports cars might have been restricted to the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” horsepower limit that Japanese manufacturers kind-of adhered to in the 1990s, but 320 horsepower was well above that limit, and for the time period that the car was sold in, that was a stout figure, period.

I drove one of these cars first in high school. My aunt had one, a black Mitsubishi twin-turbo. The car would just flat rock, and not just in a straight line, either. I’d borrow her car and go into the mountain roads outside of Colorado Springs and wear that sucker out, and it never, ever showed an ounce of an issue for the trouble I put it through. More often than not, I had a friend in the car who refused to believe that I was sincere when I said that I’d ditch my Monte Carlo for the Mitsu in half a second, right up until I was confidently running Ute Pass on Highway 24 at speeds I still won’t admit to. You might not like JDM cars overall, but there are some that are worth mentioning, and the GTO/3000GT/Steath are right up at the top of that list.