Like a Honda; Mitsubishi's Lancer ES sneaks a peek at competitors' playbooks.(Mitsubishi Motors Corp.)(Brief Article)(Evaluation)

Mitsubishi's 2002 Lancer ES screeches around a hairpin en route to a midmorning coffee stop and the passenger remarks, ``That's about as much fun as you can have in a front-wheel-drive car.''

That's exactly the kind of response Mitsubishi hopes to elicit from its all-new compact sedan-that beneath its vanilla packaging, drivers will find the Lancer fun to drive. Not in a head-snapping, tire-ripping horsepower kind of way, or in a P-Zero handling kind of way, but rather in that hard-to-pinpoint fun ``feel'' that Honda patented with the Civics of old.

No surprise here-Mitsubishi emulated the Civic, Nissan Sentra, Mazda Protege and Toyota Corolla when it tossed the subcompact Mirage aside and sought to build a better car. Like those competitors, Lancer won't overwhelm with its prowess by any performance measure. At the same time, it won't disappoint when asked to perform the duties of a daily driver.

Packing a 2.0-liter, 16-valve 120-hp four-cylinder, the Lancer likes to rev in the 4000-to-5000-rpm range, but turns into a buzzing noisemaker as it approaches the 6000-rpm redline. That's okay, because Lancer's torque tops out at 130 lb-ft at 4250 rpm, right about where the engine spends a lot of its time. Unless you have a tremendous need for personal refrigeration, our testers recommend minimal use of the Alberta Clipper-level air conditioning, to reduce the noticeable compressor drag on the engine.

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