Like an Aussie drag racing Ricky Bobby, Nick Zervos just wanted to go fast. Not just any kind of fast though-he was determined to build the world's fastest Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.
This is no mean feat, especially for a full-bodied car going up against semi tube-framed machines that were already knocking on the door of the seven-second mark. But Nick doesn't back down easily, and when his dedicated crew helped put the EVO II over the line at Willowbank Raceway in Sydney, Australia last month in a stunning 7.943 seconds, it proved that it's possible to go fast without spending stupid money. Just like Ricky Bobby, it seems the Castrol Edge-backed APC team also wake up every morning and piss excellence.
Nick had spent a lot of hours on fellow Aussie EVO head Rob Barac's yellow gen-three Lancer and wanted to push the boundaries of the knowledge that they had already picked up.
"It interested me because I was amazed with the reliability and the power of the EVO," he says. "I knew I could crack over 1,000 hp with a little extra work, so Rob gave me a shell that he had laying around, and got me started. "
Again, not an easy task-hitting a grand on the dyno from a four-cylinder is a big job requiring a whole lot more than just a fancy fuel system and an unfeasibly large turbocharger.
The original plan was to get the 4G63 angry enough to lay down some low nine-second passes, but when some New Zealanders dipped into the eights with big-money, semi tube-framed set-ups, Nick changed his game plan. But by setting his sights even higher, many doubted that a near full-bodied beast was capable of running faster than the Kiwi cars-especially considering the EVO's tendency to spit out drivetrains.
Nick admits that trying to get the driveline to survive a high-velocity quarter mile was the biggest challenge in the project-closely followed by getting a good run down using an H-pattern gearbox.
Starting at the business end, Nick fabricated a lot of the engine components at his Advanced Performance Centre. The methanol-breathing 4G63 still uses the factory oil pump and wet sump, but that's where the Mitsu bits stop. A modified Eagle 4340 crankshaft mates to Crower I-beam conrods and custom-specification JE pistons with Pro Series pins. Up top, APC DR camshafts and 2G DR heads use 1mm-oversized valves on both sides, with APC's own valve springs and titanium buckets.
A chilled-out approach to induction has proven extremely effective-an ARE air-to-liquid intercooler knocks the intake charge back even further, by drawing from an iced water tank that's fitted in the cabin where the passenger seat in less-motivated EVOs would normally go. Nick chose a mighty Garrett GT42R turbo, mated to an HKS external wastegate, to feed boost into the equation, with a 2.5-inch pipe running directly off the gate and a massive four-inch dump pipe straight off the exhaust side of the hairdryer.
Getting enough fuel into this set-up was the next challenge, with a fat APC purpose-built plenum housing extra injector bosses-meaning there's now room for twelve (count 'em!) 1,680 cc Bosch injectors, fed through a bunch of Magna fuel filters by a Kynsler mechanical fuel pump, from an ARE 12-liter fuel cell. The spark comes from a Motec CDI-4 through four direct-fire Bosch T-coils, with a top-shelf version of Motec's awesome M880 ECU calling the shots.
This single-minded selection of power parts added up to a 915 horsepower dyno run, with the Garrett blowing 34 psi of boost with no nitrous.
Putting this sort of grunt to the ground is easier said than done when using out-of-the-box driveline components, and there's been probably been enough scrap metal pulled out of the Mitsu to melt down and build a whole new one.