It’s easy to forget that the 2017 Honda Type R traces its roots all the way back to the early 1990s. In nearly all iterations, the basic ingredients were the same: great lightweight chassis, excellent shifter straight from the car heavens, bright red heavily bolstered seats, and a hilariously peaky engine. This review of five old Type Rs will make you thirst for some Type R goodness in your life.
Photo: Autocar/YouTube (screengrab)
Autocar’s Dan Prosser had the honour of hooning five Honda Type Rs: a 1998 Integra Type R, a 1999 Accord Type R, and three Civic Type Rs — a 2001, a 2007, and the outgoing 2015 model. Unsurprisingly, he was impressed. By all of them.
There’s something magical about the formula for putting together a Type R variant of a standard Honda. You take a regular, lightweight compact car platform, cut out even more weight, slap a limited slip diff up front, throw in a VTEC engine that revs to the sky, and make sure the shifter is worthy of the Stick Shift Hall Of Fame.
The result is a practical boy-racer-mobile with tons of space, great handling, and lots of great sounds from an engine that begs to be revved to redline.