It’s easy for us Americans 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.
Autocar’s Dan Prosser had the honor 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.
If it’s hard for you to watch that review and not want some Type R glory in your world, you can now buy a 2017 Civic Type R in the U.S. Sadly, you may have to pay out of your ass to get one.