Jump LinksThe FQ-440 Never Left The UKMitsubishi Built The Most Powerful GEMA Engine Of The BunchIf You're happy With 291-303 Horsepower, A Used Lancer Evolution X Is Easy To RecommendMore cylinders mean more power, right? Higher displacements, extra combustion chambers, doubling an inline-four up to a V8 should, in theory, double the horsepower. Sure, in theory. In practice, there's a lot more to building a powerful engine than exploding more gasoline. What higher displacements and more cylinders really do is create more potential for power. Tapping into that power demands smart engineering.There may be no clearer example of this principle than the 4B11T packed into the Mitsubishi Lancer FQ-440 MR, based on the Lancer Evolution X. The 440 in the car's name refers to the 440 hp it gets out of the engine, a 2.0-liter straight-four equipped with a twin-scroll turbocharger, and carrying the limited-run compact sedan to sub-four-second 0–60 times. Here's how Mitsubishi, Chrysler, and Hyundai managed to put their heads together and outrun some of the best V8s available at the time. The FQ-440 Was Outpacing Muscle Cars Twice Its Size To get an idea of the kind of performance hiding inside the FQ-440's turbo-four, we can compare it to some of the leading V8 muscle cars of the era. So when we say "V8-beating," it's not just a catchy headline, it could actually run circles around the Challengers and Mustangs in its day. In fact, it can still outrun a lot of the V8 muscle cars of the 2020s, like the 370-hp 2023 Dodge Charger R/T.At a glance, the FQ-440 doesn't look so different from a standard Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X. The Evolution X is already a mean-looking car with a big, aggressive grille, a slick rear spoiler, and those cool-looking vents on the hood. The suspension has been dropped by about an inch and a half up front, and three quarters of an inch in the back, and it's got some new headlights and fog lamps, but all the real work has been performed under the hood.In building the ultimate all-wheel-drive, UK-only sports car out of a 4B1-powered Lancer Evolution X, Mitsubishi remapped the ECU, added an HKS turbocharger, and gave it a whole new set of lungs courtesy of a Janspeed exhaust, and intercooler. To handle all that extra power, you've got a six-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission, and Alcon brakes with six-piston calipers in the front. The FQ-440 Never Left The UK The FQ-440 was effectively a Final Edition send-off with only 40 units being built. The Evolution X would remain in production until 2016, but 2015 was the final model year. There was also a less insane version of the Evolution X Final Edition model, sending 303 hp through a five-speed manual transmission. Japan got 1,000 of those, Australia and New Zealand were sent 150 through the gray market, Canada got 350 units, and the US market received 1,600 units. The FQ-440 never officially made it out of the UK, though. The Mitsubishi 4B1 Engine Was Part Of A Global Collaboration While the 4B11T, and the Lancer Evolution it powered, were equipped with the Mitsubishi name, the engine was part of the broader GEMA (Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance) family, built in cooperation between Chrysler, Mitsubishi, and Hyundai. The intention was to develop different powerplants for each company's needs, based on the shared 4B1 platform.Hyundai initially spearheaded the project while Chrysler and Mitsubishi pitched in with their respective engineering knowledge and resources, resulting in the Mitsubishi 4B1 family, on which the 4B11T is based, Chrysler's World engine, found in models like the 2017 Jeep Patriot, and Hyundai's Theta engines, which have been powering Sonatas, Santa Fes, and Elantras, as well as various Genesis and Kia models, for more than 20 years. Mitsubishi Built The Most Powerful GEMA Engine Of The Bunch The most powerful factory-built Theta engine is the 276-hp turbo-four found in the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N. The Chrysler version of the GEMA engine taps out at 285 hp in the 2.4-liter powerplant found in the 2009 Dodge Caliber SRT-4. This leaves the FQ-440's 4B11T uncontested as the most powerful version of the engine across all three brands.The 440-hp 4B11T was the ultimate evolution of its own line of turbo-fours. The weakest of this series would be the still-impressive 237-hp engine found in the Lancer Ralliart. There was also a 403-hp version packed into the FQ400, which, like the FQ-440, was only available in the UK.If you want to talk about tapping into unlocked potential, the FQ-440 engine produces an incredible 220 horses per liter. If you could do that with a 5.0-liter V8, you'd have a two-million-dollar supercar on your hands, like the Koenigsegg Agera RS, which set the record for the world's fastest production car in 2017 with its 5.0-liter twin-turbo V8 producing 1,160 hp, or 232 hp per liter, and which initially sold for a cool $2.5 million. So yeah, the math checks out, you could say that the Evolution FQ-440 is a half-sized supercar. We're Not Getting This One In The US For Another 14 Years The 25-year-rule dictates that, here in the US, we can't go importing whatever we want until it's a quarter-century old. Well, to be clear, we can import it, but we can't legally drive it off of private property, so what's the point? The 440-hp Lancer Evolution still has 14 years to go before we can legally drive it in the States, and Mitsubishi only built 40 of these, so good luck buying one regardless.If you're looking for a consolation prize, we did get that 303-hp Final Edition Evo X, and we had the standard 291-hp Evolution X from the 2008 to 2015 model years. If You're happy With 291–303 Horsepower, A Used Lancer Evolution X Is Easy To Recommend Mitsubishi We covered the used Lancer Evolution X market a whie ago and found used models at anywhere from $14,402 to $33,929, depending on factors like model year and mileage. If we check in with AutoTempest to see how these estimates play out in real life, here's what we turn up. The Lancer Evolution X is an easy car to recommend, but we know that some of you will never be happy driving a 291-hp sports sedan knowing that there's a 440-hp version of the car out there somewhere, and you won't be allowed to drive it until your kids have graduated college. If that's you, we've got a whole list of affordable cars delivering 400 hp and up, like the Hyundai Genesis, cranking out 420 hp from a 5.0-liter V8, and selling used for under $20,000. Happy hunting.
