We asked ourselves, are we crazy? Surely this can’t be done? But what if it could? What if you could daily drive your autocross car, your track day/time trial car, AND have it be spouse and family friendly? No, that is definitely crazy!
Sure, most of us can get by. We can make sacrifices. Heck, I drove a ‘07 STI around town with a side pipe and no muffler all for the “sake of winning”. The downside? Well, no one would drive with me, but sometimes that’s good. Hey, it was light! We’ve all driven cars with 750 lb/in springs and twin tube shocks on the street because we couldn’t afford a truck and trailer. No it doesn’t ride THAT bad…does it? We’ve pulled the A/C out of cars in Texas to drop 30 pounds before a big event. The list goes on and on. You know who you are.
In this time of high fuel costs and tightening spending, we believe the trend of multipurpose cars will become more and more important. With gas over $4 per gallon in some places, you begin to feel the crunch when you tow a car 1400 miles to an event. When the pump shuts off at $100 and you haven’t finished filling up you begin to ponder, is there a better way? I don’t think as “car guys” we’re about to roll over and pick a new hobby. Sure, basket weaving is relaxing, but nothing compares to wide open throttle acceleration or making yourself keep your foot down through a 100 mph corner hoping it sticks this time. No, not many hobbies compare to cars. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
So, if we could find this “car nirvana”, what would it be? What would it look like and what classes could it run in? What are some nice to haves? Lists are subjective, but we had some ideas. It needs to be a smaller displacement motor so probably turbocharged. It needs to have 4 doors, gotta carry people too. All wheel drive could be nice, how many times do you lose in the rain? It happens when you bring a two wheel drive car to the event ask me. One problem though, we LIKE the way rear wheel drive cars handle. Of course we want to make parts for it so it has to have a little “left on the table” from the factory to improve on. It needs to run on street tires. Forget towing a tire trailer and changing tires at the track. We’re lazy and 18″ race tires have gone from pricey to astronomically pricey!
That starts the conversation and narrows it quickly in our minds. Street tires – SCCA autocross has some very nice street tire based classsing structures. We’re familiar with that. NASA TT has some nice classing as well that accounts for treadwear. A plan wouldn’t be complete without hoping to run One Lap of America and a return trip to the GRM Ultimate Track Car Challenge to boot! Don’t forget Redline Time Attack and Super Lap Battle. All possibilities.
Again, this may be subjective, but we think we’ve found a car that can check all our boxes. Friday we headed over to Don Herring Mitsubishi in Irving, TX and test drove some Evos. By Tuesday the next week, we picked up our 2008 Mitsubishi Evolution X MR in Wicked White as they say. You might say, “yikes, but you didn’t factor in price tag?” Yes, the price of entry into the Evo is a little steep, bordering BMW levels. But if you step back and look at the package (and magazine articles) the Evo is a relative bargin to the cars it gets compared against. All the major magazines have done “track car” articles and the Evo is coming close to cars that start at $25,000 MORE than the Evo. It has brakes, power, suspension, and again, checks off our wants and desires. Better yet, it leaves room for improvement on suspension and power! But what about fuel mileage? More on that later. We plan to improve the abysmal mileage the Evo eeks out.
In short, we’ll be combining the strength of Vorshlag and AST along with a few key partners to build what we feel is the Ultimate Dual Purpose Car, Project UDP. Short term planned mods include Vorshlag camber plates, AST 4200 coilovers, turbo back exhaust, and ECU tuning by Cobb Tuning. Stayed tuned for more!
Ready for stickers….
