Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart Sportback Project Car Dyno - Let The Base Kick

If you haven't heard by now, we took on a new year-long project, a 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer Sportback Ralliart, with the hopes of creating our own pseudo-Evo and a cool-looking one at that. So far, the car generates a great deal of attention on the road because people aren't sure what to think of it. An Evo? Not an Evo? An Evo wagon? No, correct and maybe! One truth is clear: they all like it. As we've finally got a good break-in on the engine and picked up a new set of wheels and tires, we're looking further into what kind of product support and development we can get from our friends in high places. Until finished parts come into play and before we starting bolting parts in, we thought a visit to Road Race Engineering to get the car base-lined would be the best place to start.

At the hands of RRE's dyno tuner, Mike Welsh, the car was positioned onto their in-house Dynapack rollers. Soon, we would become one of the small handful of tuned Ralliarts in the country, and naturally, we were curious to see how our car stacked up against the others in stock form. Four pulls later, the verdict was in: a respectable 210hp and really good torque with 192lb-ft. Mike told us there were other Ralliarts that were able to hit upwards of 218hp but their torque wasn't nearly as strong as ours. Other factors to consider on why we didn't have as much power all came down to how a car is broken in and just being lucky by having a strong engine to begin with. We were pleased though since throughout the break-in process we were stuck mostly in traffic and needed the low-end torque to zip around.

We asked Mike what kind of power the other tuned Ralliarts were putting out and what type of modifications we might want to consider as we get our project under way. He told us we could easily work with our stock turbo and "be able to hit stock Evo horsepower figures with a new up-pipe, Evo X intercooler, downpipe and free-flowing exhaust," not to mention a very noticeable feel in day-to-day driving performance. Once the stock configuration is maximized, switching to an Evo X turbo should place us well into the 300hp category but we'll have to start thinking about transmission cooling once we hit it, especially if we plan to take the car out for road racing. That means the hunt is on for a stock Evo X intercooler because we've already found some prototype engine bolt-ons that we're going to test out for our next update. 300hp, we're locked in and aiming for you...