Why anybody would build a Mitsubishi Lancer (read: Mirage) is beyond us. It’s probably because in the States, the Mirage was a penalty box, the car you bought because you felt that you deserved to suffer. Underpowered, front-wheel-drive, and as visually stimulating as a cup of plain yogurt, the Mirage didn’t have anything going for it. Across the world, however, the Lancer, as it’s known, did have a hot model: the Evolution. With turbocharged four-banger power and all-wheel-drive, the Evolution series was the beginning of the rally rocket and the car that we would see start to take form in the 1990s and grow into it’s own by the turn of the century.
Neither one of these cars are actual Evolutions. Instead, they are both project cars that belong to Mighty Car Mods that have been worked on for a bit now. The blue car, dubbed as “2Sexy”, started life as the kind of body-kitted nightmare that you saw on the second Fast and Furious flick. It was stripped, reverted to mostly stock, and built to be more of a track attack kind of car, but after it’s first outing the engine croaked, so a later-model Lancer engine and other upgrades were installed. The orange one, “2WISTED”, was a magazine cover car built in the same vein as 2Sexy’s original design…radical paint, obnoxious modifications, fully done interior, a monster sound system and the overall feeling that we’d wanna retch. Is there a redeeming factor for either car? Yes…both of them are above the 300 wheel horsepower mark and both will move out. But Marty and Moog have a bet going between them. If we heard right, the loser of a fan-built competition is going to lose their car…permanently. These guys have done it before, with one of Marty’s cars getting flattened into a pancake. That’s some high-stakes stuff if we’ve ever heard of it.
One Lancer is built about the only way we’d ever take one on, the other is the stuff of our nightmares. But which one is the best? And which one has a date with two great big slabs of steel that only knows one job?
I kind of like the idea of building a US-market, late ’90s Mirage with a boosted to the moon 4G63 motor – but mostly for the evil sleeper factor, not for any merits the car originally had.