Bruce

Grins. Snorts. Laughter. Armloads of steering lock, great gobs of throttle, and even more laughter. We slide sideways through an enormous pile of cast-off rubber--marbles--and come to a stop, laughing, inches from a pair of yellow slalom cones.

"Ackthph!" says my passenger, enveloped in a translucent cloud of black dust. "I can taste the tires."

We are at an autocross course at - ONLY REGISTERED AND ACTIVATED USERS CAN SEE ALL LINKS - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER's Tokachi Proving Ground, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. This is the middle of nowhere. I am attempting to convince a preproduction - ONLY REGISTERED AND ACTIVATED USERS CAN SEE ALL LINKS - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Evolution X that I am the world's most talented drifter, but the car isn't buying it; every half lap, I dissolve into helpless laughter and go spinning off into cone-mauling oblivion. Every so often, I force myself to stop cackling and pull things together for a clean, fast, drift-free run--but those are depressingly easy by comparison. They're also a lot less entertaining

Next run. Flick--I throw the wheel right and pop my foot off the throttle. As the back end jinks out, I wind the wheel into the slide and watch the world come at me through the side window. More throttle: the front end claws us back into line, and we crisply rocket off toward the next slalom. The grin might as well be painted onto my face.

On dry pavement, unmodified all-wheel-drive street cars aren't supposed to be this much riotous, opposite-lock fun. Furthermore, bigger, plusher updates of stripped-out rally rockets aren't supposed to upstage their lighter, smaller, and rowdier predecessors. But therein lies the key: the 2008 Lancer Evolution X is a far better car than most people expect it to be.

Although there have been ten incarnations of the Lancer Evolution--the X in the Evo X's name represents the Roman numeral ten and not the letter X--the Lancer sedan upon which it is based has undergone only four generational changes since its inception. The most recent of the four gave birth to the 2003-07 Evo VIII and Evo IX; that platform was the first Evolution-spec Lancer to come to the United States. As you'd expect, it was also the best-selling of the bunch, clocking in at about 60,000 examples worldwide. (To put that figure into perspective, consider that Evos I through VI sold fewer than 60,000 units combined.)

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