Japanese Cars and Car Modifications

There’s something about fast Japanese cars that really turns me on! Don’t get me wrong I’m not about to start wearing my baseball cap backwards and listening to Snoop Dawg sing the virtues of the fast and the furious, but a saloon car with big bolt on bits and massive alloys sitting on rubber band tires floats my boat.

Over the years car manufacturers have got better and better at recreating what the kids have been good at for years. If a young’un has taken his granddad's old hand-me-down Subaru Legacy, painted the wheels gold and stuck a picnic bench spoiler on the boot together with some stickers, then why can’t they do the same?

Mitsubishi over the years have cornered this market brilliantly - the Evo range of Lancers is breathtaking, from the fist Evo 1 right up until the last one the 10 or X depending on who you talk too. The X comes with a different range of horse powered engines, from the 300 BHP FQ300 (and yes the FQ does stand for what you think it means), to the FQ400, which is powered by 2.0-litre turbocharged MIVEC lightweight aluminum engine that has been upgraded - and develops 403bhp and 387lb.ft of torque on offer from just 3,500rpm.

The top speed is limited to the same 155mph, but the 0 to 62 mph acceleration time has dropped to 3.8 seconds - which makes it the fastest Evolution lineup yet. Albeit at £50,000. It’s great!

So for Mitsubishi it would make sense to make a more affordable car that would fit into its impressive model line-up. Their base car is a Colt, a cracking little gem of a motor that your Mum would drive! They know that, so they had their tuning-arm ‘Ralliart’ breathe on the little hatch and tweak the 1.5 litre turbocharged engine to a maximum 147bhp at 6,000rpm. Cracking!

But some things are never enough, and if you want to appeal to the base cap backward brigade then why not go even further with the help of Walkinshaw performance. It's a famous name from the 80’s and 90’s who lit the blue touch paper with Jaguar and also Volvo with world-beating race cars.

I was one of the first journos in the world to be allowed behind the wheel of the little fighter and it’s a belter! A few suspension tweaks, a stiffer ride, bigger exhaust and a performance boost  ensure that once the few bugs are ironed out and they get the price right, it will be like Bruce Lee on steroids....

Mike Brewer