The phrase "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" has to be one of the most misleading advertising callouts since the ShamWow guy tricked me into actually buying a ShamWow towel, when I already had a chamois towel in my garage. I learned the hard way that it's the same damned thing! Shame on you, ShamWow guy! Anyway, these Vegas ads are pulling the same trickery. It's really not about what happens inside Vegas, it's about the adventures getting to Vegas. See, I can pretty much list all the possible scenarios that can happen while in Vegas: Lose two month's worth of salary on a hand of Pai Gow, cheat on your girlfriend with some corn-bred college sorority sister who passed out drinking too many shots of Sex on the Beach, murder a homeless dude because you think it's legal in Nevada, and sexing up too many hoes, skipskaps and scaliwags on the hourly. So what happens in Vegas is exactly what happens to everyone else in Vegas, so it doesn't really stay there. Everyone knows what you've been up to.
Mike Sullivan, president of Mishimoto Automotive and owner of this Mitsubishi Evo X, knows exactly what I'm talking about. His journey to Vegas had more adventure, danger, and legal implications than a day's stay at the La Quinta Inn on Sahara Ave., the shadiest Las Vegas hotel, er, motel I've ever stayed in -- just ask the homeless guy I shanked. Mike hails from Delaware, the state that nobody really knows about. Mike and Mishimoto had plans to debut two cars for the annual SEMA show in Vegas, one of which is this Evo. Two days before heading out, the truck driver who was hired to trail the cars decided that he had better plans and didn't show up. So Mike was left with a tough decision: Stay home and edit Delaware's Wikipedia page to ensure that it still says it's a State and not some blip on the map, or man-up and drive the 2,800-mile cross-country trip inside the freshly built with a 0-mile odometer Evo. Thankfully he chose the latter.
He and his team covered up the Evo in blue tape to protect it from road chips, random Hmong pedestrians, and blood from running over homeless people. Ten hours into the trip, they realized the car needed to be re-tuned. So Mike was faced with another tough decision: let the Hmong cross the street and remove the dying homeless dude stuck on the intercooler, while searching for an Internet caf to check up on Delaware's Wikipedia page, or take a 6-hour detour to AMS Performance who were more than happy to help with the Evo. Thankfully Mike chose the latter. "After five-hundred dollars in gas, four speeding tickets, three worn-out drivers, and one minor detour, we arrived in Las Vegas in exactly 48 hours," Mike explained, "The trusty blue painter's tape was peeled off and the Evo made it to the show on time." Now what's better? Staying in Vegas wasting your money on post-op skeezers or driving cross-country inside a fresh whip with nothing but the sound of a turbo spooling in your ear? I would choose the former, but that's just me. Point is, the phrase "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" should be changed to "If you kill a homeless dude because you think it's legal in Nevada, you're dead wrong because it's not. Also, the skank you boned last night was a dude."
What's really amazing, though, is the resiliency of Mishimoto's Evo X. Despite having dedicated zero time tuning the engine and having everything fully modified, Mike, his team, and the Evo came out virtually unscathed. The body remained intact, which was a good thing seeing that it was the first Chargespeed Evo X kit in the States. "The blue tape held up well," Mike says, "But we had to reapply it every few hundred miles. During the trip, people would stop us and ask if we ran out of money to paint the car." I'm sure that joke got old real quick.