Awesome Mitsubishi collection up for grabs

The cars are being sold in an online auction run by Auto Auction. Bids will be accepted at all through April, with the hammer falling on 30^th April. The disposal is all part of Mitsubishi winding up its UK new-car operations, which began in this country with Colt-badged models in 1974.

The very first Colts to arrive on our shores, the Lancer and Galant, are in the sale but most interest centres on the sporting offerings. Mitsubishi added a new word to the motoring lexicon when it coined “Evo” for its sportiest Lancers, and four of them are in the sale, each representing the pinnacle of their respective generations and all with low mileage.

The star car has to be the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VI Tommi Makinen Edition from 2001. Signed by Tommi Makinen, it is car number six of a model that celebrated the driver’s fourth world rally championship title for Mitsubishi. It’s been owned since new by Mitsubishi Motors in the UK and has covered just over 10,000 miles.

There are two Evo IXs in the sale, one for the road and one for the stages. The road car is a 2008 MR FQ-360 HKS, the final edition of 7/8/9-generation Lancer Evolution models and one of only 200 cars in the UK. This one has fewer than 5,000 miles on the odometer.

That’s certainly a quick car (as colourfully alluded to by the FQ in its name…) but quicker still is the Evo IX Group N Works rally car that won the British Rally Championship in 2007 and 2008. But if it’s the rally look you want in a street machine then the car for you is the 1989 Galant 2.0 GTi rally replica, created to promote Pentti Airikkala’s involvement in the 1989 Lombard RAC Rally.

Evo X was the final Evo model in 2015 and Mitsubishi’s heritage example is one of 40 special models badged as the FQ-440 MR that were created to mark the brand’s 40^th anniversary in the UK.

Examples of both the Mazda RX-7-chasing turbocharged Starion of the 1980s and its potent and good-looking replacement, the rare 3000GT, are in the sale. The 3000GT is a pre-facelift pop-up headlamp model that’s said to virtually be as-new.

It wouldn’t be a Mitsubishi fleet without 4x4s of course and as well as a couple of that British favourite, the Shogun, there’s a super-rare 1983 Mitsubishi Jeep CJ-3B (they built it under licence from Willys) and, bringing things up to date, a deliciously over the top L200 Desert Warrior project pickup truck built for Top Gear magazine.

Also available in the sale are private registration plates: lots of them, all familiar from a thousand test cars over the decades and with both CCC and MMC represented a reminder of the importer’s changing status. The privately-owned Colt Car Company, based in Cirencester, imported the first Mitsubishi into the UK in 1974, and the debut Lancer from that year’s Earls Court Motor Show is in the sale. The cars were rebranded as Mitsubishis by the 1980s but it wasn’t until 2008 that the importer became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese giant.

Mitsubishi has had some recent success in Europe – its Outlander plug-in hybrid was class leader in 2020 – but has now decided to pull out, apart from selling two rebadged Renault models in some left-hand drive markets from 2023. In the UK, though, this autumn will see the end of Mitsubishi as a new-car importer, its future presence only as an aftersales business to look after the 400,000 Mitsubishi vehicles on UK roads.