EVO Vs STI Snow Challenge

Todd Lassa: Mitsubishi Evolution versus Subaru WRX STi. We've tested these two cars every which way except on snow and ice. Today that changes. Here at the frozen thunder near Sault Ste. Marie where it's -4 degrees Fahrenheit just 9 degrees warmer than the US icefall. Frank Markus: That's right Todd! This is it. We are a continental car testing ground, we're going to test them on stock summer tires. That will be exciting. Then we are going to put snow tires, the same kind of snow tires on to find out which of these complicated all-wheel drive systems performs the best in the conditions for rallying or they were designing. Todd Lassa: Then we're going to take them out on a road course and find out why the Finnish are such good rally drivers. Frank Markus: And see how Michigan drivers compare. Todd Lassa: Exactly. Well, we started the day on the summer tires of that the cars came with and of course you just don't want to do that out here. This was just basically kind of a base, kind of test show what these cars would do on this kind of surface with summer tires. And the answer is, they don't do much. Even with all-wheel drive, you don't have any grip for accelerating, for cornering, for stopping. So here at the continental proving ground we've got a set of continental winter tires on each car and that makes all the difference in the world, of course. Now they handle like rally cars that you would take up to a Finland to compete with. The grip, the handling, the braking is so much better of course. It's what you need to do if you own one of these cars and you live in a Northern climate and you want to drive it year around, you need winter tires. You need a set of separate tires just to take for the advantage of the car of course you would be much safer. Frank Markus: The numbers we're looking for today, of course we did our acceleration times. We're not able to get a quarter mile where we have to brake with the summer tires. I think we've got the quarter mile on a winters. We did the braking again from as high as we could, 40 miles an hour in the summers, more like the 70-80 in the winter tires. Then we went to our figure 8 courses, two separate courses, one for each car so that they each had virgin snow route at the beginning and then we ran laps of our little handling course as well. Todd Lassa: Rally fans you know this car and you know its competition. We've got one of the two rally based cars right here. This is the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, all-wheel drive. You have three different settings right here, a button on steering wheel to trying all different, all three modes. We discovered that the Gravel setting looks best. You can drift the car nicely, it feels a little looser. You can go into a turn and if it's slide back toward say, a snowbank, you can power out of it very nicely. Frank Markus: This is Subaru's top of the line Impreza WRX STi. Alright! In this one, the main thing you've got is this SI-Drive, Sport, Sport Sharp and Intelligent. We left it in Intelligent the entire time. These one's really adjust your throttle and so forth and throttle input you really want this to be as smooth as possible on a snow. So Intelligent seemed to be the way to go. Center Drift, as we said, we like the manual mode, one down from full-lock. Todd Lassa: This has been your Classic Chevy versus Ford sort of story. The guys who like Subarus all will always prefer the WRX STi. The guys who like Mitsubishi will always prefer the EVO and the EVO X is no exception. Either car will do you great, if you find a good patch of snow, some place to drive at the way we just drove these, you'll enjoy either car, but the Mitsubishi feels looser on the snow, especially on the handling course. You can fling it around a little bit more. As I said, if you put it in the Gravel setting, it drifts very nicely and what you can do is you can kind of catch it up as you're drifting toward a snowbank, you can power out of it very nicely. But Subaru feels a little tighter, a little more, let's say European in flavor if you will. It's kind of tighter car. Also good, easy to fling around, but not quite as loose as be a Mitsubishi.