£1000 Challenge
The Galant may hit 250k miles – if we sort its various niggles
Mitsubishi Galant
JON BURGESS The Galant smells like a Japanese car should – man-made fibres with a whiff of stale screen wash. I got used to the hum over the weekend it replaced my modern SEAT conveyance. It managed a respectable 33mpg in my care; great compared to the 18 clicks a gallon horror of my Jeep Cherokee, but poor compared to a diesel Leon 5F in need of a new cambelt. In deference to its age and mileage, 33mpg is nothing to be sniffed at. The ancillaries may sound like R2-D2 getting shot (and the tensioners have become more vocal since I last drove the Galant to Radwood last year) but that 4G63 is still a stout beast, surviving on nothing more than routine maintenance. It may be in very basic trim but that may well have contributed to its longevity; it’s still willing to send the rev counter arcing round its huge halfmoon face with a nice snarl to boot. Better than 110bhp has any right to sound, certainly. I had rather hoped that the work we’d done to the rear end would have made the Galant less nervous around corners, but its habits remain the same despite the trailing arms having been reattached – fore and aft are still not on speaking terms. The rock-hard Maxxis mud and snow tyres that are fitted certainly don’t help matters and neither does the utterly lifeless steering. It was never meant to be a B-road monster but neither was a Peugeot 405 – which would make mincemeat of the Galant on a cheeky Sunday afternoon drive.
Not that many phase 1 405s would have held together anywhere near as well as the Galant’s interior; it’s managed most of the way to the moon with nary a squeak, despite its twin trip meters being seemingly predestined for mini-cabbing.
The motorway is the Galant’s happy place, and the gods of door seals decided to spare me the weird flapping drone that characterised my trip to Goodwood in 2019. It took me to Club Expo at the British
Motor Museum without incident; 1991 was a wee while ago now, but it still looked like a modern car compared to some of the machinery that other guests brought along, including a pair of Rover P4s and a Peerless GT (stuffed in an electric car parking bay). That the UK lacks a strong ‘youngtimer’ scheme for near-classic cars wasn’t lost on me – and our hobby needs to appreciate that nostalgia for the Nineties and Noughties is growing by the minute if it is to attract the next generation of enthusiasts. Otherwise, it was business as usual. The back pressure in the filler neck meant that fuel still went everywhere but the fuel tank, the seats still had too much adjustment and the boot was still full of water – courtesy of a knackered tail-light cluster gasket, as it happens. Tiny faults like these probably killed thousands of E33 Galants back in the day – that and the Scrappage Scheme. Water sitting on floor pans never bodes well for the long-term survival of sheet metal; the Galant’s previous owner spent so long undersealing the outside that they stopped paying attention to failing seals. I ended up stuffing the bag full of spares behind the passenger seat because the bag holding said parts was sopping wet. The Galant’s regular custodian, events editor Charlie Calderwood, is on the case with cracking this nut. We can either make a new one from a template and some similarsized gasket – or hassle parts contacts I have in Japan. I can’t see the Galant having too many issues making it to a quarter of a million miles; when it does, it’ll be one of the rarest cars in our fleet.