Despicable Me

19 December 2022

Meet Minion, the 781kw nine-second street car

Words: Rene Vermeer Photos: Richard Opie

The Mitsubishi Evolution is the pinnacle for many automotive enthusiasts. For Rizwan, this rang true - now even more so since it's packing over 780kW at the wheels; a true nine-second bright yellow monster. Technology: the advancements allowing us to obtain the previously unobtainable. Imagine telling the dreadlocked, chrome-dripping performance car enthusiasts of the early 2000s that in the distant future we'd be street driving road-legal, stock-looking, nine-second Mitsubishi Evos - you'd have been clipped around the ears for speaking such dribble. Yet here we are - technology, you beautiful thing. Gone are the days of spliced airflow meters with air-fuel controllers, octane boosters, and manual-bleed valves on spiced-up factory turbochargers. We are in a new era now, with previously high-end race car tech now in the affordable realm, and the result is what you see before you here: Rizwan's 780kW street-legal drive-to the-shops nine-second weapon "I don't have much history with cars," Rizwan tells us. "I never had any cars during my teenage years, as we couldn't afford one. I did have a couple of Hondas when I came to New Zealand though. That's how I came about this Evo; I swapped it for my last Honda, an S2000, in 2014." Back then, the value of both those cars was fairly similar, and Rizwan came out on top with a bone-stock 2003 Mitsubishi Evo VIII GSR, in bright yellow.

"This is when the 'Minion' build began," he says. What we love most about featuring people's builds in the pages of NZ Performance Car is the story around just why a certain enthusiast built what they did.

Rizwan's 780kW Evo build started because of a joke with some good friends, he tells us enthusiastically: "Everything just started as a joke with the boys at Autech in the evenings, when I would visit. The next thing you know, we started building it." Rizwan's relationship with Sam at Autech began around the same time that he purchased the Evo, as, being new to the Evo game, he was looking for sound advice on the platform.

"Sam came to fix the Evo when I was stuck and it didn't take long before we were friends," he recalls. "From then on, everything Evo was Sam on speed dial." As with most builds of this nature, this one progressed in stages - trials and tribulations all leading to the final result. For Sam, the initial engine build was a stock block, 4G63 producing a still-impressive 280kW at the wheels - plenty for a street car. In what seems to be a natural progression for torque-craving Evo owners looking to dominate the street, Rizwan decided to build a 2.3-litre stroker engine, which saw Minion producing 480kW at the wheels in its final form - a combination good for a 10.3-second quarter-mile (0.40km) time.

It wasn't until the third build though that things got a heap more serious. If 480kW was enough for a 10.3-second quarter, what would you get if you added more than 300kW over that? Rizwan decided he'd like to find out. "Watching [the] Motive DVD channel and roll racing in Australia makes me itch, as the lads over the ditch can do it so well, so we should also try," he tells us.

Article kindly provided by: themotorhood.com