TOUCHSCREEN WITH CLEVER SMARTPHONE LINK

There’s no in-built satellite navigation – a little inappropriate given our spacey theme – because Mitsubishi argues people habitually use their smartphones to get around. So a Smartphone Link Display Audio (SDA) system is standard kit, offering Apple CarPlay and Android Auto compatibility. Plug in your smartphone for pared-back access to its functions on the seven-inch touchscreen, including Maps.

You control the screen either directly by touch or via the touchpad located near the gearstick. This takes a little while to fathom, but spend a couple of minutes and it quickly becomes second nature: gentle swipes across the touchpad take you from highlighted box to highlighted box on the main screen, while you push at the slightly squidgy surface to select options.

We arrive at Kielder around 5pm, dropping down from the brilliant B6357 that wriggles its way over the landscape. After the steady cruise that revealed impressive refinement on the way up here, this is the first time I can sense that this Eclipse Cross is equipped with Mitsubishi’s Super All-Wheel Control four-wheel-drive system, not the front-wheel drive of entry-level specs.

FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE TO TACKLE GRAVEL AND SNOW

Mostly it still feels as front-wheel drive as you’d expect of any car with a transverse engine (the standard bias is 80/20 front-to-rear). But accelerate hard and early and you can sense the bias shifting rearwards to take some workload off the front tyres – in low-grip conditions, up to 45 per cent of torque can make its way to the rear. Like the Lancer Evolutions, you also get Active Yaw Control to accurately direct torque across the rear axle, and a choice of three settings: default Auto, Gravel or Snow.

That night we head up to the Elf Kirk lookout, LED headlights picking out startled rabbits as we crawl up the gravel road to the car park at the top. A location that seemed benign during our daylight recce now seems eerie, every sound making us twitch nervously. Then again, there is a solo traveller in a Let’s Off-Road Discovery rustling around in the bushes with a torch, and a pair of campers steaming up the windows in a VW California. It’s all very disquieting, but the sight of us with our cameras and spotlights seems to out-weird them all, and soon we have the idyllic blackness to ourselves.

It’s a breathtaking scene, the moonlight glinting off Kielder Water, and stars sparkling like diamonds on black velvet overhead: Orion, the Big Dipper, an aeroplane, and, oh, erm, billions and billions of stars.

Thankfully, eclipses are predictable things, and NASA lists the time, date, location and duration of every eclipse due until the year 3000 on its website – there’ll be another partial eclipse visible from the UK in 2021. But predicting the British weather? That’s another thing altogether.

As we head along the coast, down from Turin towards Genoa on the E80, the temperature drops, a fine spray of rain begins to fall, and the scenery looks gloriously Mediterranean, with lush, towering mountainsides dotted with colourful houses just visible in the hanging mist above us.

SOAKING UP FLORENCE'S ATMOSPHERE

Finally we ease into Florence, picking up our guide Riccardo Cacace, who magics tickets and secures the choicest viewing spots. Many of the roads are already closed in preparation for the game, so we park up, grab our kit and lug it halfway across the city, through bustling crowds in temperatures that are now back into the 30s. We think we’ve got it tough, then we watch the pre-match parade strutting through Piazza Della Signoria. There are people dressed in full renaissance costume, some tossing huge flagpoles 10 or so feet in the air (and, more impressively, catching them), some wearing armour when, really, the police already seem to have everything under control.

But there is an undercurrent of tension. Four teams (the whites, blues, greens and reds) take part in the Calcio Storico, each one representing a different quarter of Florence. Played a couple of weeks previously, the semi-finals have already seen their fair share of incident: Riccardo tells us a blue player kicked a referee and the whites progressed to play the reds in the finals via an appeals process, despite the blues leading when the game was abandoned. Today, the defeated blues prowl the streets, all bulging muscles, sprawling tattoos and puffed chests; they chant that the whites need to win on the pitch, not off it, and right now it seems the most important thing in the world.

England rugby’s revival under Eddie Jones is an extraordinary turnaround. You know the story: in 2015, the team become the first World Cup host to fail to qualify for the knockout stages. In the two years since, Jones has steered England to successive RBS 6 Nations titles, and whitewashed Australia 3-0 Down Under.

How, with largely the same group of players, has Jones extracted such a profound improvement in performance? ‘There are three areas. Mentally it was about changing the mindset. I think they were happy to be a good team and we want to be a great team. Physically we’ve got much fitter than they were. And tactically we wanted them to become England, not a copy of another country.’ For other country read New Zealand; England won’t obsess about side-to-side attacking play, but on being hard to beat.

We meet Jones in the epicentre of English rugby, perched on green plastic beside the extraordinarily thick shagpile of the Twickenham grass, an intimate conversation under steep banks of seats more typically host to 82,000 braying supporters. The 57-year-old coach thinks like a CEO and talks like a CEO: it’s all about the leadership and strategy to achieve a clear goal – winning the 2019 World Cup. He swats away my opening question about the upcoming autumn internationals against Argentina, Australia and Samoa with this statement of intent: ‘Everything we do is about preparing for the World Cup – it’s not about these games but the World Cup.’

EDDIE JONES ON WHAT MAKES THE RBS 6 NATIONS SPECIAL

Jones has coached the Australian and Japanese national sides, participating in the Tri Nations and its Asia Pacific equivalent. How do they differ from the RBS 6 Nations? 'The level of rugby varies, it can be very good or very poor. The big difference is the social context, you’ve got these six countries that all live very close together, but within it there’s this enormous rivalry and all the other countries hate England! They see England as the country with the most power, the most money, so you’ve got this quite intense competition with this real dislike of each other. You’ve got a travelling group of fans that add this fantastic environment to the games. You go to Scotland and you can have 20,000 Englishmen there, both sets of spectators want to win, they enjoy the game and have beer or tea afterwards.'

He continues: 'It's one of the unique games in rugby in that you’ve got such competitiveness but then there’s this cohesion between the fans because everyone loves the sport. That’s one of the reasons why the 6 Nations is such a loved tournament: it has intense rivalry but with great cohesion.'

So what will be Jones' strategy for the 2018 6 Nations tournament – is the coach already plotting his detailed approach, or is it each game as it comes? 'We want to win the tournament but our focus is on winning the World Cup. We’ll make selections, we’ll make tactical decisions in the 6 Nations [geared towards] winning the World Cup. But that’s not to say we don’t respect each game.'

The conversation has, inevitably, led back to the 2019 World Cup. So, with just two years to go, how's the progress: if today’s England team was a car, which would it be? ‘Definitely a hybrid!’ says the coach. Typical Jones: an additional power source to boost performance. Anything to get an edge.

JUST 178BHP, BUT THE WORLD'S FASTEST 2.0 LITRE

That’s the engine in our wide-body model, another peach plucked from Mitsubishi’s heritage fleet. Coded 4G63, the single-cam, eight-valve engine is the predecessor to the dohc 16-valve motor that powers all Lancer Evolution models through to the IX. Change the oil every 3000 miles warns the sticker on the door casing; let the car idle for 60 seconds or more after a hard drive. Those were the days.

The Starion’s engine fires with a gruff, clearly turbocharged note, and hangs onto revs when you release the throttle, like the rev needle’s in zero gravity. Unfortunately this car isn’t quite on song, so the turbo kick that should take hold at around 2500rpm doesn’t arrive until 4500rpm. Perhaps that’s why the Starion feels much more GT than sports car, perhaps the sluggishness exacerbates the feeling of relatively soft suspension and a tendency to understeer; there’s certainly no chance of kicking out the tail on the power today. But evocative and of its era, a car to cherish and enjoy? I’d love one.

Was the name really a mispronunciation of Stallion, as legend suggests? It’s a plausible assumption, given the Starion’s positioning as a Japanese Ford Mustang, other Mitsubishi names with an equine bent, and the horse’s head that appears at the end of the period advert you’ll find on YouTube. But it’s notable that insiders put the emphasis on the second syllable, and the official word has it that Starion is a contraction of Star of Orion.

In FQ-360 guise, the IX was the last Lancer Evolution before a new, more rounded version arrived on an all-new platform. Sadly, the new X was the last of the breed, as Mitsubishi steered away from high performance and combined its expertise in SUVs with plug-in hybrid drivetrains. But the new focus also paved the way for a remarkable resurgence in recent years, and there’s a fair chance you’ll know someone who owns an Outlander PHEV. Introduced in 2014, it quickly became Britain’s best-selling plug-in hybrid in 2015, with 11,000 units shifted. It’s still doing the business today.

DRIVING TODAY'S ICON, THE PLUG-IN OUTLANDER

The PHEV uses a 2.0-litre to drive the front wheels, with an undernourished-sounding 119bhp, but it also adds a 60kW electric motor on each axle to boost performance and bring four-wheel-drive capability without a propshaft connecting front and rear axles. The 11sec 0-62mph time might disappoint, but there’s certainly a strong shove in your back through the mid-range and plenty of poke for overtaking.

Given a full charge, the PHEV can manage up to 32 miles in pure EV mode, and travel at over 70mph without burning a drop of fuel. But it’s with the business maths that the PHEV really scores, especially its 7% Benefit-in-Kind rating, which saves some company car drivers thousands. A more recent update has seen combined mpg climb from 148 to 156mpg; yes, a stretch target in real-world driving, but keep it charged, do short trips and you’ll see the benefits.

As a family car, the Outlander PHEV makes a lot of sense, with acres of space, great comfort, and interior quality and refinement that’s a giant leap on from earlier products. And while it inevitably can’t make your nerve-endings fizz like an Evo, the Outlander targets a very different kind of driving experience, one that’s likeable in its own way and better suited to stress-free longer journeys with its supple suspension and easy acceleration.

The brakes – key to harvesting wasted energy, remember – feel too fierce at first, the steering a little wooden, but there’s something very satisfying about wafting away silently in a large SUV powered by nothing but electricity.

WHICH LEGEND TO TAKE TO IRELAND?

But as we wrap up our day at Anglesey, it’s Mitsubishi’s high-performance history that tugs harder on my heart strings. And when I’m asked to pick one to take over to Ireland to continue our Six Nations tour, there’s an obvious choice. Read on for the next leg: an adventure in the brilliant Lancer Evolution MR FQ-360.

Almost 10 years ago, Mitsubishi UK put aside a Lancer Evolution IX MR FQ-360 by HKS, one of just 200 made. Preserved as new at its headquarters, covering minimal mileage, today it stands as the most original example of the last of the true Evos. So it’s surprising that we find ourselves gunning this precious piece of automotive history up a deserted Irish mountain road an hour south of Dublin, a little over 600 miles on the odo, rediscovering the roadgoing link to Mitsubishi’s world rally success in a country still famed for rallies run on closed public roads.

We get to Wicklow Gap at dusk, golden sun diffused through clouds like light through a cinema projector, the road snaking from the valley floor. I thought I’d mentally moved on from the Evo, but from the snug embrace of the driver’s seat this thing’s a revelation.

For all its reputation as a PlayStation rendering of real life, there’s surprisingly gritty detail to the Evo driving experience: fast-paced steering that feeds back every nuance of the road surface with startling clarity, a chassis that’ll pivot into oversteer with a lift of throttle and flick of the wheel, and six close-stacked gears that add a layer of intensity missing from paddleshift transmissions.

REMEMBER WHAT THE FQ STOOD FOR? FLIPPING QUICK

But what really jumps out after its near-10-year hibernation is the speed: boosting ferociously, gripping hard, the Evo reels in the road like a vacuum cleaner latching on to a pair of lace curtains. Phlum! The road seems to be sucked through the huge front air intakes, then spews out of your rear-view mirror like roadkill. Even if you’ve no idea what the FQ in FQ-360 stands for, there’s a fair chance you’ll blurt it out the first time you’re asked how this car feels; it really is expletive-inducingly quick.