[dohcrxl]

Way way back in the "not so fast and oh so sillious" days ('97-'98 ) we took my buddy's bone stock 94 Mitsubishi Mirage LS coupe and showed the tail lights to a good group of cars. Just wait til I name them.

Stock specs on the lil Mirage: 2085 lbs, 113 hp, 5-speed tranny

First we made baseline G-tech runs and got a 16.6 best ET. Next we did a coolant bypass "modification upgrade" and cranked the distributor all the way advanced. Third we made some secondary comparison G-tech runs. I'll tell you what the car ran in a bit but first let me go to... Fourth we took the car to the track and opened up at least a dozen cans of whoop ass on... some Mustang GT's, mk3 Supra turbo's, Prelude vtec's, one Type R, one Eclipse GST, and a VW something VR6.

Some of them wanted rematches and either did worse or didn't do much better. The Type R disappeared after it ran. One Prelude vtec owner was so pissed at his modified car that he was jumping curbs out of a parking lot and doing donuts then came flying back down the strip and almost crashed into a fence. The mustangs wanted to look under the hood to see if we were "shooting". So we opened up the hood to a bone stock 1.8 litre 4 banger. Oh, secondary runs netted a best time of 15.2 which means all these guys shouldn't have gotten beat by a range of 2-6 car lengths.

I didn't think as much of this as I should've back then 'cause I didn't know any better but using my homemade calculator HERE, to go from stock time down to 15.2 the car needs at least 137 hp. This means that a coolant bypass and cranking the dizzy all the way advanced on that car added 24 hp!!! And why that is, is what I've never been able to for the life of me figure out all these years.

Disclaimer: Don't crank your distributor all the way to one side. I don't know why it helped on this car but it can seriously hurt yours. And there's not enough documented evidence to support any substantial gains with a coolant bypass so same goes for that. Also, this is just something I wanted to share. It was true and those who've known me for years now can take it as the truth. For anyone else, it's OK if you don't believe because the Mustangs couldn't either and they were staring at the tail lights the whole time. :wink:

 

[shorte]

I believe it, sounds like it was just one of those cars that just "worked".
I've seen things like that before a few times, a car without much of anything done to it but what it had just worked together REALLY well and the car screamed.
Many years ago I had a raggedy 77 Firebird, 350 pontiac engine with a mild cam and headers/exhaust, 11inch converter, 3.42 posi and some sticky tires. Back then I was stomping many of so-called 12 and 13 sec cars. (I think the car only ran 13.90-14.10) but it was pretty funny for a 3900lb junk car of mine.

 

[rex2nr]

gotta love "Wednesday" cars

 

[dohcrxl]

I've often thought about finding a used mirage like that one and experimenting with it starting in the same way. I think if I ever did though, I'd have to dyno it before and after as well as keep timeslips. I also wonder what intake header exhaust would've done for that car. It's occured to me though that one or all of those would've hurt instead of helped. Individual engine dynamics is something that's beyond me. I think that car just liked what it had for air intake and expulsion. How it made 24 horses for what little we did to it almost incomprehensible. It's easy to see 24hp on say like a v8 that was already making 300hp but on a 113hp 4cyl? I don't know.

Anyway, we had vids of that mirage running against a few of those cars I mentioned but 8 years later who knows where it is. Don't have timeslips either but you gotta be at least low 15 to do up all those cars. Oddly though, the mirage never beat my 93 Prelude si non vtec with IHE but did up 2 modified vtec models.