The wonderful news of Honda’s Type-R making a comeback soon had sent waves of joy throughout the auto community, especially to the JDM lovers as it was, and still is one of the great icons that Honda had produced along the years. Earlier on, there were speculations that this new car will be powered by the 1.6-liter turbocharged engine destined for the WTCC car, and Honda CEO Takanobu Ito himself had set the bar pretty high by claiming the car to be that fastest front-wheel drive car to go around the Nurburgring.
But with such an ambitious target to achieve, the 1.6-liter engine might not be the best choice to go against their benchmark car around the legendary German circuit; the Renault Sport Megane 256. So how do they exactly plan to counter such problem? With more power of course; specifically from a 2.0-liter turbocharged engine that Honda Institute President Yasuhisa Arai himself had confirmed.
“We have an idea of the products our rivals are developing and regardless of what anyone else produces, our car will be the fastest front-wheel drive model around the Nurburgring when it goes on sale. And we will do whatever we need to in order to make that happen”.
Even with the turbo route that they are planning to undertake, Arai hoped that the engine could still offer the similar top-end rush that the naturally-aspirated VTEC Type-R once delivered. Aside from the power plant, Honda is also looking into a trick suspension setup that could somehow minimize the torque steer and also a line of performance-boosting tweaks, such as fitting a mechanical limited-slip differential or even using rear-wheel steering.
The new Type-R sounds very promising, but we would have to wait for quite a while as it will only arrive in 2015. And that is not the only problem as Honda UK had set the price for this new Civic Type-R to start from no more than £25,000 (RM 122,000) to make sure it is still competitive on the price tag. So a sky high target with a down low budget; could Honda actually pull this out?
