The Evo's wipers are pumping off the sort of relentless downpour that normally makes it hard to distinguish one rear end from the next. But not the GT-R's.

With its four vast exhaust pipes humming beneath four equally imposing LED tail-lights, with intimidating breadth and that fearlessly space-aged finish, there is nothing on the road to match it. I've never been seduced like this by a car. Not by my first Ferrari. Not even as a child, when I rode shotgun in a Rover SD1.

For the GT-R is a superlative of schoolboy fantasy, every inch of it meeting the exacting requirements of a day-dreaming 10-year-old. Staring across the relatively unimaginative dash of Mitsubishi's box-fresh Lancer, the contrast is acute, if understandable in a volume car.

Japan's approach to performance cars has, with very few exceptions over the years, moved in concentric circles of tuning. Standard cars are interfered with, with steadily increasing mania, until they can take no more. Then the tiny minority of punters still able to buy and run these cars interfere some more, and they go pop about every 3,000 miles. And so it'll doubtless be with the Lancer Evolution X.

Assured as we are that there's a different direction and broader audience in mind, it's the die-hard fans who will be queuing up at the showrooms, cheque-book in one hand, tool-box in the other.

Mitsubishi may have made a rod for its own back with this one. The car looks and feels as understated as the last, and is arguably less visually exciting for its tempered treatment of carbon inserts and snaggle-tooth spoilers. The Evo X is still one of those weird DVDs, but a slightly less shocking one. With paint barely dry, it's crying out for a big performance makeover.

In stark contrast, bullying its way through the suffocating rush hour ahead of me, Japan's new performance benchmark couldn't be drawing more attention. The sort of DVD that gets kept under the counter. Specialist content.

The sales pitch for the GT-R could not be more different from the Mitsubishi's. Nissan has dropped the Skyline moniker, and with it (it hopes) all those negative associations with its PlayStation past.

It does not want the GT-R talked about in the same breath as Imprezas and Evos, for despite a significant price disparity, there has been this tendency to lump Japanese tuning evolutions into the same bracket for years now. This is not, Nissan will tell you, another Skyline, but instead an all-new model with Europe's performance flagships as rivals.

Hours earlier, we'd weaved impatiently north of what by day is a drab, soulless and seemingly endless concrete conurbation, the traffic finally starting to thin over high, sweeping fly-overs as the GT-R spears off ahead. A gear and a stab of throttle sends the Evo after it, but without the shocking sense of urgency that I still clearly recall from the final fettlings of the last-gen car. The gearbox has that familiar short, sharp action, the turbo is still lag-less and the revs eager to build, but something's missing.

Since setting off, there's been a boring little rattle from inside the driver's door. It's joined on occasion by another one from somewhere in the centre console. This sort of thing just happens with cars, any car, and is usually easily rectified, but I'm guessing, as the GT-R's brake lights blink on momentarily in the near distance, that there's no rattling going on in there.