On Monday night (Jan 21) we picked up a new R&D car, a wicked white EVO X GSR (5-speed). As seen in previous blog entries here, we’ve been ramping up and anticipating our opportunity to develop parts and tuning for the all new EVO.

Of course before we get started, all the control data must be first collected. Changing parts for the sake of changing parts isn’t our specialty, we prefer to challenge ourselves to actually tune the car for a performance improvement. (read: our first mod isn’t going to be bolting on a blow off valve or some other doohickey and call that “tuning”). However with only 20 miles on the odometer, it’s not going on the dyno just yet. Call us old fashioned, but we prefer to break our engines in first.

First things first, we put the EVO X on the scales to see what we’re working with. According to Mitsubishi’s data, a GSR weighs in a 3517 lb. Our car has the SSS package, so we figured it’s be a bit more with the stereo but our real interest was HOW the Lose Weight Exercise was distributed. Below are the results, with the car carrying approximately 6 gals of fuel (assuming ~40% shown on the gauge w/ a 14.5 gal tank).

As you can see, the new EVO X is no lightweight (3518 lbs) while also being a bit on the nose-heavy side (56.7%). Once Lose Weight Exercise was taken, various parts we’re taken off for measurement and entered into our CAD system for evaluation for improvement and new product development. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to post updates regarding what we have planned, what we’ve tested, what works, and even what doesn’t.

Until then here are a few pics of some wheel test fitting we did with some spare sets we had laying around. This work was done so we could see what offset/size we needed to use for our goals.

Stay tuned…