The Pursuit of Perfection

With a clever fusion of high-end parts and genius motorsport engineering, torque developments international has potentially built customer james moodey the world’s finest Mitsubishi Evo x…

- Andy Basoo

What makes a build special? What elevates a car above others in its automotive demographic? Well, if you’re a long-term reader of this fine publication you’ll know such adoration is not dependent on money spent, nor is it determined by big power figures or the amount of branded aftermarket parts applied. And yet, on face value at least, those may appear to be the reasons why James Moodey’s exceptional Evo X is gracing the cover this month. They’re not. Let us do our best to explain why…

This is James’s first Evo and, by his own admission, he wasn’t enamoured by the styling and concept of the car when he and his brother first bought it together. That said, he was blown away by the car’s performance in stock format. More importantly he instantly saw the car’s potential with ideas and possible tuning options firing around his synapses at alarming speed. ‘The initial plan was to keep it simple and to build a fast road car, but it didn’t take long before we started looking into what kind of power we could extract from the turbo charged 2.0-litre running gear.’

The Evo X utilises an all aluminium 4B11T engine as opposed to the cast iron 4G63T as found in previous generation Evos. A combination of high retail and running costs along with the economic downturn in the UK meant the Evo X didn’t sell well and, as a result, not many specialists had experience with pushing the new aluminium heart reliably to its limit. One tuning house pitched a 500bhp build to James using uprated internals, turbo, front-mount intercooler as well as a host of other parts. James agreed and his Mitsubishi was soon going under the knife.