The steel was forged in the fires of Nagoya and it came across the gray Pacific in the bellies of great ships to be sold under names that were lies.
The car was the Conquest.
It was a Mitsubishi Starion in its bones and its blood and yet it wore the badges of Dodge and Chrysler and Plymouth like a man wearing another mans coat in a cold season to hide a heart that beat with a foreign rhythm.
Truth remains.
In the early years of the 1980s the American giants looked to the East and saw a hunger they could not satisfy with their own heavy iron so the Chrysler Corporation reached across the world to grasp the hand of Mitsubishi in a pact of shared survival.
The machine was a marvel.
Under the sloping hood sat a 2.6 liter G54B engine with a turbocharger that breathed the hot air of the road and turned it into a terrible forward motion that could match the V8 Mustang in a race to sixty miles per hour and win the respect of those who value speed over heritage.
The engine hummed.
It produced one hundred and seventy-six horsepower and later it produced one hundred and eighty-eight and it sat low to the earth with wide flared fenders that looked like the shoulders of a tensed fighter waiting for a bell that would never ring in a land that was not his own.
Loneliness is a mechanical defect.
We must feel a deep kinship for these machines because they were orphans of a corporate marriage of convenience and they carried the weight of two worlds on their four rubber tires while the drivers shifted through five gears and felt the surge of the turbo like a sudden prayer answered in the dark of a desert highway.
The road opens.
It was a vehicle of glass and light and whistling air that proved the spirit of a machine is not found in the badge glued to its trunk but in the way it carves a path through the wind and the way it makes the driver feel less alone in a vast and silent country.
Fate is a gear.
The counter-narrative
Purists suggest the rebadging of the Starion was a cynical erasure of Japanese engineering excellence that served only to confuse the consumer and dilute the ancestral pride of the American assembly line.
Importing rare JDM cars into the US has been a popular pastime for gearheads for decades, especially in tuner circles where cars like the Nissan ...Other references and insights: See here
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