Late last year I flew into Los Angeles to report a story on southern California’s unique, vibrant, influential car culture. Nearly half a century earlier a slightly more talented writer did the same thing. Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities was 32 years old and on his first assignment for Esquire. His brief was pretty much the same as mine: go out there, meet the guys building these extraordinary-looking hot-rods and ask why kustom-kar kulture, as they like to spell it, took off in southern California and had such an impact on the wider culture, and whether the lumbering Detroit carmakers could learn from it.

Tom Wolfe is a character in America’s unfolding drama

It was a big deal for Wolfe. He panicked and got a terrible case of writer’s block and just typed all his notes out in a long memo to his editor, Byron Dobell, who’d arranged for someone else to write the story. But once Wolfe relaxed the easy, impressionistic style in which he wrote the notes made great reading. So Dobell just knocked the ‘Dear Byron’ off the top of the memo and ran the whole thing in the magazine. The story, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby, is seen as one of the first examples of The New Journalism, even if Wolfe was panicking rather than consciously innovating as he wrote it, and it’s one of the best things ever written about cars. I have a copy of the original 1963 Esquire on my desk as I write this, but you can buy the story in the Wolfe anthology of the same name, and there are a few other car-related classics in there too.

I wasn’t trying to copy, outdo or update Wolfe’s piece. There’s no point. What he saw in ’63, I saw last year: the great hot-rod builders like the great artists in their studios, building cars of the most perfect stance and proportion for those who could afford them (not cheap), but staying outside the automotive mainstream, with the big carmakers paying attention and doing what they can to capture some of that automotive mojo, but never quite getting it.

Cars like this ‘surf woody’ helped cement the Barris legend

Counter-cultures don’t usually last fifty years, but this one has lasted even longer, and goes back to the end of the Second World War when GIs came home with a need for speed that the old Model A Fords they’d left behind couldn’t satisfy. That mixed with the nascent LA art scene and the racing on dry lake beds and illegal late-night public-road drag strips and the weather that encourages summer-night cruising to create the whole kustom kulture. It influenced so much: not just car design but journalism — not just Wolfe’s story, but half of America’s big mainstream and modded car mags grew out of Hot Rod magazine — and music — Brian Wilson and Little Deuce Coupe — and film. George Lucas’s first big flick, American Graffiti, is pretty much the perfect summation of that whole scene. Shot on a tight budget, it was riotously profitable and he wasted the proceeds on some flop called Star Wars.

Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth created a more monstrous myth than that of Barris

And astonishingly, the people haven’t changed either. George Barris has been at the chromed hub of Cali’s kustom kulture since before the GIs came home. He invented the name. Already, by the time Wolfe met him for his Esquire piece, he was “the biggest name in customizing”, and a “solid little guy, five feet seven, 37 years old, and he looks just like Picasso”. Wolfe liked the great artist analogy: Barris’s ascent, he said, was like “Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice, except that Barris emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles”.

He was right to make the comparison. While the work of the other great hot-rod builders, like Alex Xydias and Pete Chapouris of the famous SoCal Speedshop focused on pure, perfect automotive form, Barris and Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth pushed on into art, their cars as much free-form scuplture as transport. Roth passed in 2001 but Barris’s vast canon of work now includes everything from subtle kustomizations for the Hollywood glitterati of the fifties to the Batmobile of the sixties and countless other movie cars. Detroit was paying attention, and still is. “I was amazed,” Barris told Wolfe in ’63 about his first trip to Detroit’s design studios. “They could tell me about cars I built in 1945. And all this time we thought they frowned on us.”

Celebrity hookups were Barris’s stock in trade

Artists like Barris and Roth could never go work for corporate behemoths, so instead the global car industry came to them: the biggest change since Wolfe’s story is that virtually every major carmaker now has a design studio in southern California, hoping that their hyper-edumacated young stylists will catch whatever it is that makes SoCal cars so great. Meanwhile Barris, at 86 looking like the well-aged pop star he is, keeps at it. To paraphrase William Shakespeare (if you haven’t heard of him, think of him as the George Barris of literature): “Age cannot wither him, nor kustom stale his infinite variety”…

The name George Barris is synonymous with car customising. It was George and his brother Sam that revolutionised the art of custom cars in America back in the forties and fifties by reworking the likes of Ford and Chevrolet cars to emulate coachbuilt designs. Their creativity went on to influence the way Detroit designed cars.

But Barris is of course a household name thanks mainly to his involvement with the TV and movie car scene, the most famous of these being the original Batmobile. George is still busy building cars in his North Hollywood shop and recently took time out, at the age of 83, for his first visit to UK shores. We were lucky enough to catch up with him at the Rhythm Riot’s Barris Kustom Show and ask him a few questions about his career.

Influx: Welcome to the UK George, it’s great to have you here.

George: Why thank you. It’s amazing to know that what we were doing all those years ago has such an influence on today’s young people.

Influx: We would love to know where the business began for you.

George: Well my brother Sam and I had been playing around with old cars from a very early age, hopping up the family sedan was our first project. It was some time in 1941 that I was first approached by a customer to perform work on a car. I had the job of installing a set of tail lights in a ’32 Ford. The customer was happy, paid his money and a seed was sown.

Influx: Business was booming for you right from the start and you attracted Hollywood stars. Who were your more memorable customers?

George: We were doing work for all kind of flamboyant people. Zsa Zsa Gabor had a Rolls Royce that we reworked for her and we installed a drinks cabinet with crystal glasses and more gold than you would believe. It was however a much more modest star that springs to mind. This young man often visited the shop when he was in town and made a point to get to know every member of staff. He would always strike a conversation, asking how so-and-so’s kids were doing at school, or how another guys wedding had gone, he always remembered the little details and called everyone sir. That young man’s name was Elvis Presley.

Influx: We’re guessing it wasn’t all glamour back then, hotrodders and customisers weren’t always looked on favourably.

George: Man that’s right, I was always in trouble with the cops! They always seemed to be waiting for us when we would take a car round the block for a test run. I would get pulled for different reasons, too low, too loud, I even got stopped once for running dual headlamps! This was the early fifties and every production car has single headlamps so the cops didn’t understand. It was only a few years later that every car out of Detroit would have the same headlamp set-up we had designed.

Influx: What is your all time favourite car from the shop?

George: That’s a tough one, but if there was one car I could have again it would be the Golden Sahara that I built from a my own wrecked 1953 Lincoln.

Influx: We know you suffered a terrible fire at your shop in the late 1950s. How did you bounce back from that?

George: We lost all but one car in that fire, that was the Model A Roadster pickup “Ala-Kart”. We just picked up the pieces and got on with it. We got that car finished for the Oakland Roadster Show and came away with the ‘Americas Most Beautiful Roadster’ trophy. We went back the next year and won it again with the same car, something that had never been done before. Everyone in the shop had a real positive attitude and we have a lot of fun. That’s my advice to everyone out there, do what you gotta do and have fun doing it.

Neil Fretwell runs the Vintage Hot Rod Association

image via Bike Exif

Three-chords, crap equipment, not much talent, lots of enthusiasm. Young men and women have been in garage bands since skiffle was The Next Big Thing, but it was only during the wave of 1977 punk that the garage bands broke big.

Top-selling punks may not have had the same skills as the Stones or Fleetwood Mac, but they offered an alternative that was lapped up. A similar revolution is happening in motorcycle customisation.

Image:Wrenchmonkees

Like punk rock often said it was rebelling against the overblown excesses of ten-minute guitar solos and prog rock, the new generation of custom builders are the antithesis of American Chopper’s fat tyre monstrosities, and showrooms full of 190mph traction-controlled superbikes. And, though the movement started before the global meltdown, its growth has mirrored the fall in sales of big ticket bikes.

The new wave customs are neither chopper nor café racer, but they borrow cues from all genres. They tend to start with unloved, cheap Japanese bikes – though the burgeoning scene is sending prices of air-cooled, spine-frame Jap stuff roofwards. Anything from the 1970s onwards is fair game. Singles, twins, fours; two-stroke or four; Jap, Brit, German, Italian: animal, vegetable or mineral. This isn’t a cult with a basis is performance one-upmanship. It’s creativity and originality (without straying into parody or overt gimmickry) is what pushes the boundaries and attracts the four-figure facebook ‘likes’.

image: Untitled

One reason this style of custom is becoming so popular is due to the fact they’re relatively easy and cheap projects to complete by someone, anyone, with a few spanners. You don’t even need a garage to be in this garage band. Inspired hopefuls see bikes being fawned over on the Net and, like a thousand oiks of previous generations watching Top of the Pops in the late-70s, think ‘I could do that.’

Wheels, brakes and suspension can be changed, but aren’t always. Rake, trail and wheelbase all tend to remain the same. No one is building one-off frames or investing in forced induction or race tuning. Replace the tank, seat and bars with stuff picked up cheap online or at the autojumble. Paint is simple or non-existent. Steel or alloy tanks stripped bare and lacquered or left to ‘weather’ are popular.

image via Bike Exif

Next, junk standard airboxes and exhausts and fit filters and new silencers. If you’re more adept, make a new sub-frame for the stripped-down back end. Fit new tyres – chunky is best — and a tiddly taillight. Voila! But, like a punk band, however much you sneer and spit, if you haven’t got the chops you are going to fail. For the garage-built bike scene, if the stance of bike is hinky, it’ll still look like an unloved bike with a rusty petrol tank and knobblies, however hard you try. There are plenty of those around.

Image: Deus

The godfathers of the scene are the Wrenchmonkees. Based in a cellar in the outskirts of Copenhagen, they modified a trio of big, four-cylinder Kawasakis back in 2008, before moving onto twins and singles. It’s no coincidence two of the original trio of Monkees were professional photographers.

They shot and disseminated their tough street bikes in a fresh, urban style. The Monkees themselves – Per, Nicolas and Anders – didn’t look like stereotypical motorcyclists from any pigeon-hole, either. They wore a gene-defying mixture mountaineering Gore-Tex, full-face lids, dark jeans and skateboard shoes and rode in cities, not the unrealistically empty racetracks of mainstream bike ads.

A new generation of motorcyclists saw them on a new generation of website – blogs that would cherrypick inspirational images from all over the web and mash these images of bikes up with architecture, art, cars, tattooed femmes and historic style icons. The Wrenchmonkees didn’t look out of place.

Coincidentally, Deus puffed spores of goodness from their sweet-smelling Sydney HQ. Though not garage-built, their big dollar Yamaha SR500-based builds were close to faultless and had a cleanliness only a truly well-built road bike can achieve. They’ve influenced a thousand builders from Beijing to Bristol, some who copy on the cheap, others who have moved the game on.

People who wouldn’t dream of wearing full leathers and riding a superbike or pulling on a cut-off denim and riding a chop realised there was a bike scene waiting for them. They just had to make it. And they have.

Images Sideburn/Jonny Wilson/Subsculptures

Britain has some great motorcycle events, but many are as stale as the last supper’s leftovers. A few years after first launching our own independent motorcycle magazine, the Sideburn team started thinking about bigger events. We were jealous of cross-genre shows in Yokohama and Brooklyn and knew British riders needed something more stimulating than sitting in a field wearing a jester’s hat while listening to an AC/DC tribute band.

The result was Rollerburn. Held last November, in Nottinghamshire, it mixed a broad custom show with a slalom skateboard race. It threw in a full, all-girl roller derby match and an art show. Thirty dealers and three bands set up. A couple of Arctic Monkeys paid on the door. Comedian Charlie Chuck destroyed a drum kit. Donkey!

Sideburn magazine focuses on motorcycles that ‘go fast, turn left’ from the worlds of dirt track and speedway, and also the road bikes loosely inspired these worlds and the DIY ethic, but we wanted Rollerburn to have much wider appeal.

The roller girl connection came from feature we did on the cult 1970s movie Rollerball. Roller girls go fast and turn left too. And a lot of them are better looking than the majority of people who turn up at British bike events. They were in.

The show bikes were inclusive too. This wasn’t a chopper show. Exhibits ranged from Shinya Kimura’s Junkyard Phantom (that featured in the movie Iron Man) to a Rossi replica Ducati Desmosedici RR.

The artist Conrad Leach created an 8ft square painting to face the ramp (it was later auctioned for charity) and slalom skaters, some of who turned up on their own Harley lowriders, launched themselves down it.

The highlight of the nine-hour event was world’s first and last indoor Rollerball drag race. Three 600cc dirt track race bikes towed three fearless rollergirls down the 150m strip. The team of TT hero Guy Martin and Catfight Candy won the three-way heat. Candy limped away with friction burns as big as your fist.

People came from all over the UK, France and Spain. The only lows of organising an event like this is the fact it takes over your life in the run-up, when you regularly ask yourself, ‘why are we doing this?’ That and the fact we couldn’t do everything we wished due to restrictions from the venue. It’s the kind of stuff that made me publicly state ‘never again’. The highs are the feedback, in the form of smiling faces on the day and internet buzz after it. That’s what makes me think, maybe we should do it again.

It’ll take some beating, but we’ll try. And there wasn’t a jester’s hat in sight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

www.sideburnmagazine.com

Photography John Isaac/Magneto

The long, lonely stretch of road that is Camber Sands is the sort of place you’d usually hurry through to more pleasant pastures such as nearby Rye. Unless, that is, you’re holidaying at the massive Pontins holiday camp there or remotely interested in 50’s car culture.

If you are then you’ll know that Pontins is kept in business by hosting some of the biggest Rocking events this side of the Thames. Now in its 15th year the ‘Rhythm Riot ’ is as its promoters promise ‘3 days and nights of 50’s music and mayhem!’

[Show as slideshow]

The Rhythmn Riot sells out months in advance and the holiday camp has never been so packed. Thousands of rockers from all over Europe and further afield descend on this damp stretch of Kent Coastline. With three different venues catering to the Lindy hopping, jiving crowd right through to late night Burlesque acts by the lovely Missy Malone, Cherry Shakewell, the music (and the mayhem) goes on every night until 5am; often continuing as impromptu Chalet parties until lunchtime!

[Show as slideshow]

The Rocking scene has always gone hand in hand with a real love for classic American cars. This year’s Riot was no exception. The faded stucco of Pontins’ once grand frontage was an acreage of rusted out old jalopys, ridiculously overfinned Cadillac land yachts; Tri Chevies, Hillbilly trucks and everything in between. Even the odd British classic found its way into the melee.

[Show as slideshow]

This year’s highlight was of course a visit from the legendary customiser George Barris, who’d flown over especially for the Riot. A UK based collection of Barris show cars was on display too, thanks to Gary Hillman. His taste for the weird and wonderful has curated an amazing collection, including one of the very few official Batmobile replicas complete with Batphone and flames out of the afterburner exhausts.

[Show as slideshow]

The Vintage Hot Rod association and Jack Hammer Speed Shop had again helped out in bringing the Hot Rod/Custom element to the event. As well as curating the Barris cars the brought artists displaying pinstriping, great artwork from Jacqueline Davies, and a stunning ghoulish Model A hearse in black with so many one-off details you could have spent all day checking them out.

[Show as slideshow]

On Sunday Rye’s local police had their hands full as they directed the traffic for the traditional cruise, ensuring the ‘normal’ cars didn’t interrupt the show for the Rye locals. The fully restored 1956 Bedford coach followed a mile long line of Americana, led by a smiling George Barris in his Batmobile.

The Riot is a grand tradition, bringing together people with an endlessly appealing passion. Long may it continue.

http://www.rhythmriot.com/

The Mitsubishi Evo, much as we love it, is the only ‘halo car’ the company has. The trouble is that the Evo has been a cult success: so mythologized that its parent has almost been forgotten. It’s an Evo far more than it’s a Mitsubishi, and little of its mojo has ever rubbed off on the rest of the range.

Perhaps this is because they’re too far apart. The Evo has always been a no holds barred, banzai supercar-slayer, while the bulk of Mitsubishi’s global range has been automotive white goods: functional, reliable, clever in their way, but a little dull.

And Mitsubishi could really have used the help on occasions. Despite the explosive growth of the Japanese car industry in the seventies and eighties it has never achieved the colossal scale and global footprint of Toyota, or the reputation for obsessive-compulsive engineering of Honda, or the stable links with a foreign carmaker that Nissan now enjoys with Renault. Like Toyota, it had a brief false start making cars before the war — its very first was a four-wheel drive saloon, spookily akin to the Evo – before getting sidelined into war work and taking its time to find its feet in Japan’s extreme post-war austerity, finally hitting its stride in the sixties.

Mitsubishi Motors is part of the vast Mitsubishi keiretsu, a very Japanese way of doing business in which a ‘family’ of firms with the same name, shared origins and often with cross-shareholdings co-operate. They share the red, three-diamond ‘propeller’ logo; actually not a ship’s propeller as many think, but an abstract rendering of a Japanese clan symbol.

The keiretsu’s greatest product was probably the Zero naval fighter of the Second World War. It was noted for its extreme speed and manoeuvrability, again an odd precursor of the Evo’s attributes. It’s always easier for the winning side to take pride in their war machinery but we doubt Jaguar or Bentley would try to sell Spitfire or Lancaster special editions to Germany. But this didn’t stop Mitsu making a ‘Zero Fighter’ special edition of the Evo (below).

The keiretsu also stepped in to buy out Mitsubishi Motors after a torrid financial time in the nineties and noughties, the nadir coming in 2000 when it admitted that it had covered up safety defects for 20 years. In 2004 former president Katsuhiko Kawasoe, who had resigned in 2000, was arrested with 10 others after two more deaths brought more cover-ups to light. The massive sales slump after the 2000 revelations forced DaimlerChrysler to end its relationship with Mitsubishi Motors.

But there is more to Mitsu than the Evo, scandals, red ink and misjudged special editions. Its small cars are often terrific, evidenced by the i. The i-MIEV was one of the first of the current crop of half-decent electric cars to get to market. The Pajero off-roader (despite sounding like the Spanish slang for masturbation, another misjudged name) is well-regarded in places where people depend on such things, and there have been sleeper performance car hits like the Starion coupe of the eighties, or the big 3000GT, or the very under-the-radar hot VR4 versions of the Galant (above). Trouble is, too few have noticed: we’ve all been distracted by the noisy thing with the big wing.

Images: Mitsubishi Press

Evolution is the right word. The look of the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with latte-sipping men in black rollnecks and everything to do with dirty-handed blokes in overalls.

This purposeful product started as a porridge, three-box Japanese saloon with a wing and got progressively more steroidal as its power multiplied. It has always been as ugly as it is fast, but like a broken nose or a cauliflower ear its deformities have always signalled its intentions and been part of its appeal.

The Evo was actually an evolution from the Colt 2000 Turbo (above), whose badge it wore at the beginning of the journey in 1981. The looks have a clear link to the Evo, but the engine is the real bond; this was the first to use the legendary, endlessly-tunable 4G63 2-litre turbo four which would remain an Evo constant until the introduction of the Evo X in 2007. It made around 168bhp here, but eventually would be stretched to over 800bhp. Mirror-script lettering on the front spoiler — ‘Turbo 2000’ in this case – urgently needs to make a comeback.

Evo I
Built as the basis of the World Rally Car, and the first to carry the Evo name and number. Arrived in Japan in 1992, making around 240bhp. The II and III were pretty similar (to non-Evo geeks, anyway).

Evo anoraks take note: what follows is just a few of our personal highlights, and not an exhaustive history.

Evo V
The Evo IV introduced in 1996 was an all-new car and the basis of the Evo V and VI, but it was these later cars that started to arrive in Europe in numbers, first from grey importers and, eventually, officially through Mitsu’s importers here. Sparked the Evo-Impreza wars that dominated car magazine covers in the late nineties and early noughties.

Evo VII
Another all-new car in 2001; it was heavier but kept getting quicker and cleverer. The short-lived GTA automatic version – which came with an auto gearbox and could be specified with a luxury leather interior, chrome door handles and without a wing, was a personal lowlight. Deservedly rare.

Evo VIII FQ400
Having resisted importing the Evo for too long, the UK distributor then embraced it a bit too enthusiastically with the FQ — or effing quick — series. It was an extraordinary name for a big corporation to give a car, but it was an extraordinary car. It was hard-tuned Evo with a warranty that you could order from a showroom; as the name suggests it had 400bhp and could nut out a three-second 60mph dash. With 200bhp per litre, very regular servicing was essential.

Evo X
All change, again. This time the Evo gets a bespoke body, its looks defined by fancy designers in Europe but with due deference shown to the past. All change under the bonnet too: emissions regs finally killed the 4G63, but the 4B11 is a worthy replacement and proved robust enough for the loons at Mitsu UK to offer another FQ400. The SST sequential-manual gearbox is the other big departure.

Evo XI?
Um, not sure yet. The Evo X will be discontinued from March and there’s no clear plan from Mitsu on what will assume the Evo name, but rumours from the Tokyo motor show suggest it will be a long wait and it won’t be turbocharged saloon. Something green seems the best bet, possibly usng the in-wheel electric motors Mitsu has been experimenting with for a while. So lots of torque and four wheel-drive still…

Every now and then a star becomes associated with a brand of car, usually by accident. Think the various incarnations of 007 and Aston Martin, of course, and perhaps Steve McQueen with the Ford Mustang. You could probably come up with a bunch of examples.

But it’s rare in the world of showbiz to have a situation where a global superstar is associated almost symbiotically with a car. Jackie Chan and Mitsubishi Evo is the only example we can think of.

The relationship between the Martial Arts movie superstar and the Mitsubishi corporation began at the end of the seventies, when an agreement was drawn up between the Chan empire and the car company to use Mitsubishis exclusively in his films.

Of all these, the most blatantly Mitsubishi branded is 1995’s Thunderbolt (below), in which Chan plays a Mitsubishi factory employee who graduates to test driving and then on to, well, saving his sister from the evil embrace of kidnappers, an equally malign bunch of street racers (in Skylines) and generally, the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But in terms of pure Evo-tastic action, 1998’s ‘Who Am I’ has to take the gong. Check out the central car chase scene in which a handcuffed action hero and two lovelies (one of whom is also handcuffed), evade a series of bad guys and cops in the streets of Amsterdam, seeing off an interesting assemblage of vehicles, ranging from an old Rover and a brace of 3-Series. Check the way the Evo itself lays waste to the bad fellahs, and the way the ‘Everyman hero’ image of the car is perfectly illustrated when a skillful stunt driver flicks the chased Evo snugly into a parking spot and thus goes unnoticed by the authorities as they streak by in pursuit. I wonder if this was written into the contract.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But its not only about product placement, this hookup. As honorary President of Ralliart China (the company’s motorsports arm), Chan hosted a series of celebrity-dotted race junkets that brought in the Asian glitterati to circuits all over the region. In 1995, Ralliart went ahead and sealed the deal into automotive immortality when they produced 50 Special-Editions of the Evo IX, with a requisite acreage of Carbon and Jackie Chan’s signature all over the detailing.

And you can see the symbiosis logically. Or what the advertising and marketing departments of the world used to call ‘synergy’ — Jackie Chan as understated, vibrant, unassuming yet powerful and explosive, the Evo and the star share a set of core values, proper and true.

The Evo might not save the world in itself, or do back flips and cause explosions with nary a sniff of combustable materials, but in the same way as Jackie Chan makes the commonplace cityscape erupt with action, this earthy piece of engineering makes everything seem fun and copes with danger most sublime…

words & pictures: Michael Fordham

Back in the primordial soup of post war Japan – a nation demoralised and devastated by unimagined military defeat, there was a little seed of determination left in the Japanese people despite the suffering endured. The phoenix rose, industry boomed and an economic miracle ensued.

This remarkable turnaround was motored primarily by the Japanese capacity for making stuff that people all over the world people wanted to buy. Especially the cars.

The Japanese automotive aesthetic might repel as many as it attracts, but in terms of sheer numbers and influence, Japan continues to be, along with Germany, the major exporter of automotive machinery on the earth. But more than that, in the darker corners of car and bike culture it the Jap thing reaches deep into the corners, as well as basking in the sunlight of the mass market.

And one of the most cultish, delightfully understandable corners of the world of Japanese car cult is that of the Evo. Having Evolved from the workaday Colt way back at the end of the seventies, the Evo has gone through a multitude of suitably evolutionary jumps.

So when we got to play with its latest manifestation, the final and numerically resonant Evo X, we felt as if we were in a position to look at the last of a great lineage of superbly appealing everyman heroes.

//The Looks//
Simple. Proletarian. Uninspiring. Badass. Boring. Boy racer-ish. These are the most common appellations we heard whilst spending a week with the Lancer EvoLution X SST FQ 330. It’s a keyboardful of signifiers that means the following: this is the tenth manifestation of the Lancer Evo, it’s rather quick, comes with a dual clutch semi-auto box with flappy paddles and packs 330 horsepower.

What it amounts to at skin level is a very old fashioned format, the three box, four door three-pillared formula that arch rivals Subaru ditched last time out for their Heavy-Industry flagship the Prezza, and probably to their regret.

The fact that now the three box Scooby is back is testament to its enduring appeal, and its one you can’t imagine Mitsubishi ever losing sight of. But at either end of the Evo X there are of course telltale pantomimes of its far-from-complacent DNA. Most obvious is that wing, of course. It’s a bevelled, three level piece of steel whose obvious utilitarian aspect is obscured by the car’s otherwise workaday stance. and the fact that it at times obscures rear visibility.

At the front of course, the various gapes, louvres and wide-open grillage whispers of the need for oxygen. From the front it is unmistakably rally-bred. On the standard version there’s no carbon fibre additions, just simple steel trimmed with plastic.

It sits relatively high so that the shocks an do their job, too, and the Yokohamas that come as standard have enough profile on them to help smooth the bumbles and keep it moving quickly in the right direction.

From the rear three quarter the car is at its most unspectacular, and with standard colourways, and nice but commonplace Alloy style, the layman could easily miss the explosive potential of this tight, wheezing, fizzing driving machine.

//The Drive//
There a simple test we’ve adopted to rate a cars practical use/fun value. On the school run, there a really appealing sequence of double-bumps at the top of a long, steep, sweeping hill. The kids want you to get air. Shameful, I know, but how can you deny the little lovelies?

Put it this way. The ‘willy feeling funny’ factor was rated ten out of ten. Read into this all you want, but dropping the left paddle on the SST twin clutch selector into second and a pre-kicker ckick back up into third, pushing the revs up into the red, will shore up real and tangible hang time. Now you’re torquing.

This car isn’t even the madman 360, let alone the full-blown mentalist that is the FQ400. But mark you, this entry level EVO is powerful enough to match most things that even vaguely resemble it and other everyman cars. Though, it has been said, on the more extreme manifestations of the car a more traditional box needs to be stirred to handle the affect, in the 330 and for your correspondent, the flappy paddles work brilliantly.

Call me a neo-fetishist, but I fail to see why they shouldn’t be standard on every car you’ll ever drive. On the Evo X it makes sense most of all, and adds to that preternatural feeling of responsiveness that even the still present turbo lag can’t really eradicate. When you push the selctor forward into Sport mode and pull the stick toward you to select manual shifting, it seems that all you have to do is think a manoeuvre and it happens. In the rough roads of the Eppynt range north of Brecon very quick changes of direction in sideways sleet were handled superbly. In fact, we doubt there is a better handling car in these sorts of roads on the entire planet.

The engine revs right through soaringly to the eight thousand range, and the slingshot response from second to third and fourth is thrilling.

Stopping is incredible too, thanks to those vented discs and Brembo calipers, so that you can stomp the brake thirty or forty yards later than you would think possible and scrub off all that’s required. Balanced, confident and calm in the most challenging of situations, this thing deals with the inconsistencies better than any saloon we have ever driven.

If anything and surprisingly, the first thing to go when you push it is the front. There’s a hint of washout that surprises, especially as it is so difficult to get the back end out. What’s more common is a nicely controllable four wheel drift, stepping out to the side. This is ultimately enjoyable because it’s easy to correct.

We read somewhere that the Evo would be the quickest cross-country car in the world. We think whoever wrote that was spot on.

Sure, we can argue about it, but we’re probably going to end up agreeing that the Ford Capri was the definitive car of the 1970s, in the UK, at least. The dates match; first sold in ’69, the Capri’s sales started to slump in the late seventies, though it struggled on to 1986 in the UK, two years after it has been killed off elsewhere. It had the right looks for the decade that taste forgot; the curvy, Coke-bottle styling was straight from Detroit. The Capri was intended to copy the sales success Detroit was having with the Mustang too, and create a pony car for Europe.

But the timing was way off. Just as the Capri was going on sale here, recession and spiralling oil prices were killing the US muscle car stone dead. But this just made the Capri yet more representative of its time; under that long, glam-rock bonnet, the engines and transmissions were the automotive equivalent of the three-day week. Mechanically, the Capri shared much with the Ford Cortina, described by CAR magazine as ‘a calculated attempt to sell the public ordinariness’ and ‘one of the least exciting automobiles a major British manufacturer has had the courage to launch since the middle fifties.’

The Capri didn’t improve on it much over its three generations. Depending on where and when you bought it, your Capri might have had as little as 70bhp and no more than 138bhp until 1981, when the range-topping three-litre Essex V6 was replaced with a fuel-injected, 160bhp lump. Ironically, it was even sent to the States where it sold tolerably well for while in straightened times despite – or perhaps because of — its pencil-neck engines. Leaf springs meant the ride and handling wasn’t much better, but at least it was light; seventies austerity standard equipment and a laissez-faire attitude to safety meant your Capri probably didn’t weigh much more than a tonne, flyweight by today’s standards.

A few were brave enough to give road-going Capris the go to match the show. The South Africans gave it the V8 it deserved, dropping in the 5.0-litre V8 used in the Mustang to create the sadly little-known, low-volume Perana . In the UK, in its final days, the Tickford Turbo coaxed 205bhp from the 2.8-litre V8.

But if the standard cars were so terrible, why did we love them so much? Some smart TV product placement deals helped, as did the fact that it made a wicked looking race car which drew some famous names. Hill and Surtees raced a beautiful RS2600; Lauda and Mass campaigned a RS3100 in which the latter won the ’72 European Touring Car Championship, and the Zakspeed cars based on the MkIII were all wings, skirts and scoops, looked sharp enough to draw blood and won the predecessor to the DTM in 1981.

But ultimately, we loved the Capri because it did capture a bit of the Mustang’s mojo: while it might have been less than stellar to drive, it was still a desirable, affordable blue-collar hero, and that was about all you could expect at the time.