Driving Sports

There are few colors in the import tuning world that evoke the image of speed like the color gold. Ok, perhaps gold isn't the speediest color in the tuning world, but over the past several years, the tuning Gurus at COBB tuning have released not a few cars plastered with their gold livery. There was the "Clock Car," a very fast 2006 STI that appeared at Subiefest 2 at PIR, their Mazdaspeed 3 and even the GTR, now there is this, their 2008 Mitsubishi EVOX.

This car leads a bit of a coddled and yet sometimes hard life, it is the workhorse of the EVO world. It spends alternating spans of its life pounding out run after run on the dyno and then sitting in its stable while the COBB engineers crunch the data mined from its ECU. This is THE car that is the progenitor for the new line of EVOX AccessPORT tuning units.

We caught up with it at COBB's West Coast R&D facility, Surgeline Tuning where head tuner, Tim Bailey, continues the process of refining COBB's array of tuning capabilities. Since these cars are new and are becoming increasingly complicated from the factory, COBB and Surgeline are always looking for new tuning strategies by unlocking the secrets hidden in the stock ECU.

So far, with minimal bolt-ons and using the COBB AccessPORT, Tim has been able to tune the new EVO X up to over 350whp and 350wtq with the stock turbo! Like the 4G63-powered cars, the new EVO loves the boost, to the tune of 26psi, stock turbo, stock block. Stay tuned for more EVO news from COBB and Surgeline Tuning. www.cobbtuning.com, www.surgelinetuning.com.