Its full name is the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII, but you can call it the Evo. And other road users can call it what they like because the chances are you won't be able to hear them above its caterwauling engine.
The Evo is a performance saloon with the emphasis on performance. Its popularity is already proven among people untroubled by g-forces and speed cameras alike. The out-going model was crowned "Top Performance Car" by the illustrious cable television channel Men and Motors. Top Gear magazine has unimprovably described the new one as "mad-arsed". It's a rally car that's been very thinly disguised as a road-goer. To the point, in fact, where it isn't really disguised at all. Certainly the banana yellow model that I tested didn't seem to be trying especially hard to go undercover.
An Evo will allow you to drive it perfectly sensibly at speeds in the vicinity of 30mph and, if necessary, in a straight line. It may even permit you to use it to pick up an elderly relative from the station. But it would far rather you jammed the accelerator through the floorboards, locked the steering up and slid it into a bush on its roof. That's this car's idea of a good time.
It has a comically vast rear spoiler, tall enough to obscure most of the visibility available in the rear-view mirror and broad enough for passers-by to shelter under on a wet day. And the car is kitted out inside with urgent red clocks and furiously sporty moulded Recaro rally seats which you can slide into on your own, but which you really need to be packed into by two willing members of your mechanical support team.
The joke, of course, is that if you stripped off the spoiler, smoothed over the air induction feature on the bonnet and unbolted the hilariously hearty exhaust pipe (it looks as though you've got one of the more prominent bits of the Pompidou Centre trapped under your back axle), you'd be left with an achingly dull-looking saloon.
The same goes for the Evo's chief rival, the similarly priced but marginally less powerful Subaru Impreza. In fact, the Evo is even less radical in shape than the Impreza, which at least boasts a huge elevated air-scoop. The intake on the Evo, in contrast, is modestly flush with the bonnet. Apart from the headlamp clusters there is little about the essential profile of the Evo that sets it apart from any old mid-range repmobile of the last 20 years or so.
But just any old mid-range repmobile doesn't go this fast. If the basic 2.0 litre turbocharged 276 bhp model doesn't stand your hair on end, you can spend £2,000 more for the 300 bhp FQ-300 package, which is so rally-ready it practically comes with its own patch of Welsh forest. Both now feature newly lowered suspensions, new traction control systems (for particularly challenging corners), and a six-speed gearbox which, in any normal car, would be one speed more than really is strictly necessary, but here enables you to take full advantage of the engine's terrifying capacity for acceleration. The gear-shift travels barely the length of a matchstick between one gear and the next, which means you can shove it about with all the gleeful confidence and reckless vim you might bring to the joystick on an arcade game. When I went back to a regular saloon after a few days in the Evo, hunting for third felt distressingly like groping in a wet bin-liner for a pound coin.
The acceleration is tarmac-strippingly fast. I popped up the road to the corner shop at one point and appeared to get there the day before I set out. You wouldn't go so far as to say the Evo actively endorses illegal behaviour on the public highway, but it does seem to be fairly broad-minded about it. You can reach 60mph in less than five and a half seconds, leaving wide open the opportunity to go from nought to a five-year driving ban in considerably less than half a minute.
My favourite feature was the manual switch which altered the car's handling according to the road surface - tarmac, gravel or snow. I also enjoyed its assumption that you would ever go slow enough to tell what was under your wheels.
But even a plain stretch of motorway offers a unique sensation when taken at speed in an Evo. The emphasis is not on comfort. It's all about feeling the surface of the road skimming the seat of your trousers. The world took on a jolting and frenetically blurred aspect which will be familiar to anyone who has seen those images secured by a remote-control camera mounted in the dashboard of a rally car on television. Something similar used to happen on Star Trek when the Enterprise was pestered by a meteor shower.
Afterwards my fingers had to be prised off the steering wheel with a shoehorn. It was fully 20 minutes before I sufficiently recovered the use of my knees to be able to bend my legs and swing them out of the door. And it was another day and a half before the colour finished returning to my cheeks. But that's rallying for you. What a performance.
