Farewell LANCER Evolution! Great car of world rally championship conquest faces sad end

The LANCER Evolution of Mitsubishi Motors is going to finally stop the production of the current model.

Whenever the new model goes out it becomes the news for the media. The reason is that it finally ended in the history of the famous cars of this company.
 
The first generation model of LANCER Evolution made the debut as a special version of Lancer small sedan in 1992. A high power turbocharged engine and four-wheel drive system was adopted because it was developed as a base vehicle for World Rally Championship (WRC) participation.

The LANCER Evolution acquired the driver king in the year 1996 and 1997 season in the WRC, and shined with the two crowns of driver and the manufacturer in the next year 1998.
The Impreza of Suburu participated from Japan, made the rival presence in the WRC, and showed off the overwhelming strength in the rally field in the second half of the 1990's.

There was a PR effect in such a brilliant result, and this gave birth to the enthusiastic believers not only in Japan but also in foreign countries.
As a result, a total number of 154,000 cars was sold all over the world.
However, the domestic sales of last year was only 621 cars.
During its peak period, it was such a lonely number of 1 car in 15 minutes.
The production end is due to no other option, why did the sales of the LANCER Evolution that was the pronoun of the performance car of Japan had such a poor fall?

The Mitsubishi Motors, fell into a serious financial trouble due to the cover-up of defective vehicles became known in the year 2000, received the support of the Mitsubishi group, and management from the other business within the group was sent to manage this group.
The people having the knowledge and love of such cars, feel that the sales of the LANCER evolution was not large amount like a family car, and it was just a waste and did not reflect the ratio of the money and people involved in the development.

Moreover, the regulation was changed in WRC from the year 1997, and a major change from the base car was approved. In a word, it is not necessary to develop a high performance market model.
To add up, the final blow came as the world recession due to the Lehman shock of the year 2008.

To rebuild the management structure for Mitsubishi Motors discontinued the new development of the non-profitable car starting from the LANCER Evolution and the motor sports, and started to focus the management resources that lead to the profit like the EV, SUV, compact car, and light car.
The performance of the LANCER Evolution has hardly evolved after that, and it is in the shadow of not even making sufficient advertisement.
In a word, the LANCER Evolution has already become a “Dead body” from the last few years.
However, the old rival Impreza is continuing the WRX contrastingly, and it maintaining the sense of existence as the image leader of Subaru. What is this difference?

Subuaru also withdrew from the WRC in the year 2008 due to the effect of Lehman shock, but unlike the Mitubishi motors the Subauru’s major shareholder Toyota has appreciated the car making of Subaru that it does not possess and is supporting it. Subauru is the company where the passion and romance towards the car overflowed originally.
Subauru redefined the WRX as the high performance and high quality road car after withdrawing from the WRC. It is not in good health because it spent the effort in the development and sales activity to match with the redefinition.

The fate of the LANCER Evolution and WRX seems to have been divided by the fact that whether the parent company holding the string of the purse is a “Car lover”.