The Perfect Street Evo?! – 800HP Evo IX

It’s a debate that will likely rage as long as cars exist, and we have yet another rid blurring the line and making it even hard to decide: At what point is a car no longer a “Street Car”?

This Mitsubishi Evo, sporting slicks on all 4 corners and sending a whooping 800 horsepower to each of them, is certainly streetable and blurs that line even more when you learn that the car runs off of pump gas. Well, it runs off of E85, which is readily available at many gas stations across the nation. With an AG Auto-built 2.0 liter powerplant being force fed intercooled air by a massive Precision Turbo and Engineering 6466 turbo and fuel management handled by Haltech’s Elite 1500 ECU, the car certainly has some race car components, but since we’re blurring the line between street car and race car anyway, who’s keeping score?

As you can see in this awesome footage from TRC’s YouTube channel, the car does a killer job of putting all that power to work, putting up numbers on the dyno that are nearing four-digit levels and dang near hitting 160 through the traps at a roll racing event at Palm Beach International Raceway.

One component of the car that would be the most likely to serve as drawing the line to make the car a race car in many eyes in the transmission. The Evo features a dogboxed PPG transmission that allows the driver to bang the shifts without having to bother with the clutch. However, this also means, in most cases, that the trans cannot be downshifted, which is obviously not something you want to deal with when driving on the street. There’s a real chance that transmission technology has changed and my intel is no longer accurate, but if the transmission can’t be downshifted back through the gears, that sort of disqualifies the car as a street car in my opinion. What do you guys think? Is this a street car or a race car? Let us know in the comments!