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"R&amp;amp;amp;T: What makes the Mitsubishi Evo a good candidate for building a rally car versus any other car like an STI or WRX, or anything else with awd? And, more specifically, why the newest Evo and not an Evo IV?   JB: Let&amp;#039;s compare the Evo X versus the Evo IX versus STI, from our standpoint anyway. The Evo X is better than the IX. It&amp;#039;s bigger, which is not better, but with the roads in United States and Canada, they tend to be somewhat wider than the European rally roads and they&amp;#039;re more flowing, which means a bigger car is not much of a drawback as it might be over in Europe. The Evo IX was the best Evo that had ever been done before the 10. They did their homework right on that with respect to the previous generations.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: When you say best, what exactly do you mean? Is it engine, chassis or everything?   JB: They had developed the car up to a fine point by the time they got up to the IX. The X is totally different. Totally different engine, gearbox, transfer box etc. Everything is completely different. This engine is a much newer design, maybe 4 or 5 years old, where the old engine [the 4G63] in the previous generations is a much older design [20 or so years old]. I&amp;#039;m not an engine expert by any means, but I&amp;#039;ve been told that the combustion chamber and things like that are better in this engine. It took some time for people to figure out and begin developing good parts for the Evo X, but now I would say an Evo X is faster down a 10-mile special stage than an Evo IX. Certainly the engine is one of the things that&amp;#039;s better about it. And same compared to the Subaru. Subaru is a very good car, many people run Subarus, but their engine is not as good as an Evo engine, an Evo engine is very, very good. And the Subaru engine does have some problems, as we&amp;#039;ve seen in certain situations.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: What sort of problems?   JB: Well, the two that come to mind that I&amp;#039;ve heard of, is that sometimes they have a water issue; a lack of water, overheating, I don&amp;#039;t know exactly. And as you get more power, a boxer engine doesn&amp;#039;t have a big block that has 4 cylinders in a row, you&amp;#039;ve got 2 cylinders pushing on each side and apparently sometimes people have problems keeping the crankshaft in a straight line in the middle of the block. This is more a problem for the heavily modified engines, I&amp;#039;m not saying they&amp;#039;re having these issues with a stock powertrain, but again this is all hearsay.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: You said something about the drivetrain of the X being superior, but Antoine briefly told me that most of the drivetrain on your car is not stock. Is there anything that&amp;#039;s stock about that drivetrain?   JB: Oh well, I don&amp;#039;t agree with the driver [laughs]. Okay, well the gearbox is a dog box. The standard one would be okay, but it&amp;#039;s slower with the synchromesh. It&amp;#039;s the same casing, but we switched out the gears so the gears are definitely stronger. The center differential has a different type of clutch plate system, but it&amp;#039;s not that different. The halfshafts and rear differential are stock, we&amp;#039;ve got a different limited-slip in it, but it&amp;#039;s a European rear diff (out of the Euro Evo X RS) that doesn&amp;#039;t come with AYC (Active Yaw Control). The U.S. (market) AYC diff is definitely not as strong. You can&amp;#039;t piece out the U.S. AYC diff because they don&amp;#039;t sell pieces for it. If you have a problem with your street car, you send it back to Mitsubishi and they&amp;#039;ll send you another one. It&amp;#039;s an exchange unit, so there&amp;#039;s nothing you can do. We don&amp;#039;t know ourselves from testing but the AYC diff we believe is not as good or strong for rallying.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: Aside from the engine, do you think the Evo has advantage in the chassis compared to the STI?   JB: Don&amp;#039;t know. Not sure.   AL: But of course we&amp;#039;re going to say, &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; even if we&amp;#039;re not sure [laughs]. I&amp;#039;ve driven a Subaru in a couple of rallies but not enough to make a clear judgment on both cars. They&amp;#039;re both good.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: Any faults with the Evo? Obviously you&amp;#039;re very fast in it, you won the Rally America Championship. But are any weaknesses to the car you&amp;#039;d like to try to work out?   AL: Well like John said, the Evo is a bit of a big car so sometimes when it&amp;#039;s a bit narrow and technical it&amp;#039;s a little hard to change directions because of the size of the car. But in general I think we have a very good car. We have good power and very good suspension and the handling is great. If we had tons of money we could probably find little things, but in general there&amp;#039;s no big thing that comes to mind that I&amp;#039;d say I want to improve on.   JB: You can&amp;#039;t make a big car into a small car.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: So like the fenders, you can make them out of carbon fiber, but you can&amp;#039;t really modify the dimensions of them?   JB: Right, you could. But all that does is cost more money, and that&amp;#039;s money we don&amp;#039;t have...though that&amp;#039;s not the case for some others...   R&amp;amp;amp;T: [laughs]   JB: But really, if we were going to do something with the car, it&amp;#039;d be nice to be able to take 100 lb. out of it. It&amp;#039;s not heavy; it&amp;#039;s under 3000 lb., which for a big car like this is very good. But to take that weight out it&amp;#039;s going to take a lot of money because you&amp;#039;d have to take the rocker sills apart and things like that.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: Speaking of money, how much would you say this car cost to put together?   JB: $200,000.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: $200,000 as it sits?   JB: Yeah, so if someone came up to me and said build me an Evo X, I&amp;#039;d say bring me a car plus $200,000 and we&amp;#039;ll have it for you.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: So that&amp;#039;s $200,000 on top of the cost of the Evo?   AL: Yes. But that&amp;#039;s a full spec open-class car that can win in North America   R&amp;amp;amp;T: Or that has won in North America.   AL: You could have another open-class car that&amp;#039;s prepared at a different level and get away with maybe $150K, but to have it exactly as it sits there will cost you that much.   JB: And it&amp;#039;s not the most expensive car out there.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: Do you guys have any factory backing from Mitsubishi?   AL: We do have some support in Canada, but we&amp;#039;re not a factory team.   R&amp;amp;amp;T: How much of this car would you say is stock, or remains stock? It&amp;#039;s kind of difficult question because so many things are different and $200K is a lot of money.   JB: Maybe about 25 percent. It has a stock rear diff, rear and front halfshafts, uprights, wheel bearings, all suspension arms, etc.   AL: The big thing is this\u2014this is the stock chassis with all the stock suspension points.   JB: You could go in and redesign a suspension arm with spherical joints and it would probably cost you about $800 to make one versus about $300 for a replacement stock arm. It&amp;#039;s maybe a little less performance but not a lot (stock versus modified). But that&amp;#039;s how you would get this car to cost $300,000.   (Be sure to see our &amp;quot;Rallying Roots&amp;quot; story in the March 2011 issue of Road &amp;amp;amp; Track.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a16774/rt-interview-john-buffum-and-antoine-lestage/>