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Talkin' about an Evolution

Rush hour Tokyo is saturated with neon, noise and the smell of miso soup. At the kerbside, pig-tailed girls in tiny plaid skirts and thigh-high white stockings stop tobe snapped by their boyfriends beside our Nissan GT-R and Mitsubishi Evo X.

Straight-faced businessmen start up inquisitive, broken conversations about the pair, all of them already very aware of these national icons - interested, awed and utterly reverential.

Directly across the wide pavement from where we're parked is a brightly lit shop front. There are signs in the window in Japanese, dotted with the odd English word, but its wares remain a mystery. I weave amidst the camera flashes and stockinged legs to the doorway. It has an almost celestial quality, like one of those cinematic interpretations of crossing Heaven's threshold, as I blink into the light and step inside.

Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, is shelf after shelf densely packed with DVDs. Every single cover displays the flawless features of a Japanese manga girl, with perfect outsized round face and perfect outsized oval eyes. Their tiny mouths are pursed into expressions of blank but coquettish innocence.
And on every cover, this childlike purity is wantonly shattered by a super-sexualised pastiche of the sort of physique you see in porn films. Gigantic, gravity-defying breasts bursting out above minuscule waists, long legs tapering in razor-sharp stilettos.





Everywhere I look, a nipple is narrowly averted by a judicious strand of jet-black hair, a bare crotch concealed by a tiny, sylph-like hand. And all about me, middle-aged men in suits and thick glasses stand side by side with young guys in the multifarious fashions of Japan's youth, listening to iPods and sifting idly through the shelves before them.

This deeply weird place reveals something, God knows exactly what, but something quite significant about Japanese thinking. All those girls surrounding the cars - sort of cosmopolitan, faux-naive, St Trinian's - are revealing something similar. The GT-R and Evo reveal it too.

They tap into something really primal that, with all our pretensions towards sophistication and understatement, we in Europe have strayed far away from. As if to say, 'This is what we like, and we know it's what we like, because we really know ourselves', Japan is producing things to sate its deepest, purest desires. Whether you approve or not, that's simply a cultural thing.

I have just 24 hours with the GT-R and Evo X, and there's only one thing on my mind as I tail the Nissan through downtown Tokyo. Is the Skyline's successor really going to be worth more than double the list price of this Evo?





The Evo's wipers are pumping off the sort of relentless downpour that normally makes it hard to distinguish one rear end from the next. But not the GT-R's.

With its four vast exhaust pipes humming beneath four equally imposing LED tail-lights, with intimidating breadth and that fearlessly space-aged finish, there is nothing on the road to match it. I've never been seduced like this by a car. Not by my first Ferrari. Not even as a child, when I rode shotgun in a Rover SD1.

For the GT-R is a superlative of schoolboy fantasy, every inch of it meeting the exacting requirements of a day-dreaming 10-year-old. Staring across the relatively unimaginative dash of Mitsubishi's box-fresh Lancer, the contrast is acute, if understandable in a volume car.

Japan's approach to performance cars has, with very few exceptions over the years, moved in concentric circles of tuning. Standard cars are interfered with, with steadily increasing mania, until they can take no more. Then the tiny minority of punters still able to buy and run these cars interfere some more, and they go pop about every 3,000 miles. And so it'll doubtless be with the Lancer Evolution X.

Assured as we are that there's a different direction and broader audience in mind, it's the die-hard fans who will be queuing up at the showrooms, cheque-book in one hand, tool-box in the other.

Mitsubishi may have made a rod for its own back with this one. The car looks and feels as understated as the last, and is arguably less visually exciting for its tempered treatment of carbon inserts and snaggle-tooth spoilers. The Evo X is still one of those weird DVDs, but a slightly less shocking one. With paint barely dry, it's crying out for a big performance makeover.





In stark contrast, bullying its way through the suffocating rush hour ahead of me, Japan's new performance benchmark couldn't be drawing more attention. The sort of DVD that gets kept under the counter. Specialist content.

The sales pitch for the GT-R could not be more different from the Mitsubishi's. Nissan has dropped the Skyline moniker, and with it (it hopes) all those negative associations with its PlayStation past.

It does not want the GT-R talked about in the same breath as Imprezas and Evos, for despite a significant price disparity, there has been this tendency to lump Japanese tuning evolutions into the same bracket for years now. This is not, Nissan will tell you, another Skyline, but instead an all-new model with Europe's performance flagships as rivals.

Hours earlier, we'd weaved impatiently north of what by day is a drab, soulless and seemingly endless concrete conurbation, the traffic finally starting to thin over high, sweeping fly-overs as the GT-R spears off ahead. A gear and a stab of throttle sends the Evo after it, but without the shocking sense of urgency that I still clearly recall from the final fettlings of the last-gen car. The gearbox has that familiar short, sharp action, the turbo is still lag-less and the revs eager to build, but something's missing.

Since setting off, there's been a boring little rattle from inside the driver's door. It's joined on occasion by another one from somewhere in the centre console. This sort of thing just happens with cars, any car, and is usually easily rectified, but I'm guessing, as the GT-R's brake lights blink on momentarily in the near distance, that there's no rattling going on in there.





When busy fly-overs give way to near-empty motorway, the Nissan is off in earnest. The Evo's torque deficit is obvious, as I wring out every revolution available to keep the GT-R in sight. And, impressively, it just about manages.

When these cars finally arrive in the UK - the Evo on 1 March and the GT-R early next year - Nissan will be asking more than twice as much for its product as Mitsubishi will be for the car I am in now. And that dreaded combination of scarcity and ultimate desirability is already prompting predictions that the first GT-Rs will be commanding as much as 30 per cent over list. So that's three Evos.

It goes without saying that these cars warrant scant comparison anyway. Both companies would be keen for us to stress that. But can the GT-R really be worth twice (if not three) times that of the Mitsubishi? That might depend on the vagaries of your DVD collection.

Up in the hills north of Tokyo, the Evo makes better headway, with its low kerbweight and four-wheel drive combining to impressive effect. If there's one thing wanting, it's stopping power. Not awful by any means, but stop needs to be more than a match for go to inspire enough confidence, especially on unfamiliar roads. But the GT-R is a big thing, with 477bhp to misuse, and it soon becomes clear that on the right sort of road, an Evo at full bore will have the upper hand over a GT-R at more like half.

After 15 minutes of switchback ascent, we pull up in a lay-by, high over some nondescript agricultural plain. It's a brutal landscape, with dense, unfamiliar undergrowth clawing its way over the aged and cracking concrete buttresses that shore up the hillside where the road has cut a path. There is just as much litter, as many fag butts and carrier bags, scattered about here as you would expect to find at any impromptu stop in the UK. The only sign of life is a tractor moving noiselessly through a field far below. No cars, no planes, no birds.





Drawing alongside the GT-R and seeing it in such utter isolation for the first time, I'm struck by how logical it looks. By which I mean, for all its courage and experimentation in design, the finished product knots together so well as to make perfect sense. Maybe it's just the upshot of having stared at endless renderings and long-lens spy shots, but to stand beside this car now is to look upon a near-perfect representation of the 21st-century sports car.

It's back to that schoolboy fantasy. Otherworldly, yet right here in front of me, and as spectacular and dramatic in the metal as any car I have ever clapped eyes on. Nissan has achieved something truly remarkable here. And it's at a standstill.

As I get out of the Evo and shut its flimsy door, I'm drawn helplessly to the GT-R, sucked into its cockpit, and into a different world of performance, design, quality, and, sadly, money.

Enough has been written about the abilities of the GT-R, so scant mention here: it steers and brakes beautifully, accelerates hard enough to upset the moon's gravitational pull, and all the while makes a sound like a washing machine in that final, maniacal spin, when you think it's about to punch through the kitchen ceiling. In short, it's absolutely extraordinary.

The Evo's moment in the sun is yet to come. Think FQ-400, pared down, tuned up, carbon aero kit and 15mpg. If you can't afford a GT-R, and not many of us can, an Evo X to do bad things to is a suitably top-shelf substitute.

Words by Matt Master

Photography by Patrick Gosling

Damn, that GTR is pretty in this shot!

It is a huge car but with 550-600 ps that doesn't seem to matter too much

Give me the Evo and the spare £30k I would have over not buying the overrated GTR.