Without further ado, I would like to formally introduce you to our first project build ever, CSF’s EVO X. This blog is long overdue, and many if not most of you who are reading this may have already seen the car break the internet on social media during its debut at SEMA Show 2017 thanks to our media partners, SpeedHunters! Check out their story here.
Before diving right into anything and everything about this build. Let’s go back to when we first laid eyes on this EVO. On a typical bright sunny day in November of 2016, we paid a visit to one of our performance and R&D partners, GMG in Orange County, who also maintains CSF’s “Blue Dream” Porsche 996 911 Turbo!
GMG is a premier performance tuning facility that specializes in the European and exotic market. So imagine a shop full of high-end race-spec Porsche’s, Audi’s, Ferrari’s, Lamborghini’s and tucked in the corner was this lonely panda looking Mitsubishi Evo X. Curious like a Japanese tourist in Europe, we wanted to know what’s up with that Evo and what is it doing at a shop like GMG.
When we first met…we saw its potential…it was love at first sight!
So the guys at GMG begin telling us the story behind this Evo. GMG helped build this car along with Swisher Racing for the 2011-2012 Pirelli World Challenge Season. Unfortunately, this season ended early due to an accident. A new EVO X MR donor car was on deck and during the rebuilding phase, Swisher Racing decided to abandon the Evo X for an Audi R8 LMS, then to a BMW Z4 GT3. I don’t blame them those are pretty nice upgrades.
The roll cage was fabricated by GMG, which is one of the components that we’ve kept from the original roller shell. The cage meets the Pirelli World Challenge specs and it was a great piece to keep and build around.
The Evo sat at GMG as an unfinished roller/shell for a few years with a ton of spare parts, both OEM and performance, almost 2-3 sets of everything just collecting dust. From the looks of it, GMG was about 50% complete with transferring everything over from the crashed Evo to the donor shell. One of the focal points that really caught our attention was the intricate design of the roll cage. GMG designed and built this roll cage to Pirelli World Challenge specifications and then some. Because the previous driver was a bit accident-prone, additional safety features were incorporated with this cage. One of those features includes extra reinforcement on the driver side door to absorb any type of impact. After a few days of negotiations, we purchased the Evo shell and all of its parts from GMG, and the rest is history.
On a side note: If you’re thinking about the name Swisher and wondering if it has any relation to the Swisher Sweets company that makes cigars and blunt wraps, you’re right on the Money!! Bill Ziegler, Owner, and Director of Swisher, International, has a passion for racing and still competes from time-to-time in the PWC.
We packed up the parts in a small box truck, loaded the Evo shell onto our trailer and went off to the CSF HQ in Rancho Cucamonga. This was back in Winter 2016, our initial plan is to build this Evo for SEMA 2017. So the road to building one of the baddest cars of SEMA 2017 begins…
Don’t forget to follow up next time for the continuation of our EVO X build. Next story will cover the Evo’s first, of many, stops Sheepey Built. Stay Tuned… Stay COOL!
This is part one of our series on the rEVOlutionary build.
Thanks for the commendation Matthew.