On our list of "oh-shit" experiences, a fifth-gear highway pull on high boost in the Hasport turbo K20 EK ranks right up there with falling off a cliff. Dip into the throttle at 4000 rpm and boost is instant. Suddenly, the cars a couple of lanes over doing 75 mph aren't moving. Neither, you notice, is your car. Earth is now one giant dyno roller, and you're spinning it, fast. With power-to-weight that betters a Ferrari Enzo, this kind of high-speed acceleration is reserved for few vehicles on Earth.
Driving this car gives you a sense of purpose because it exists to do one thing: make ludicrous power and go very, very fast. The rest is secondary.
The interior is stock except for comfortable, well-bolstered Recaro seats, in line with Hasport's mantra "If it ain't doing something, it ain't on there."
Like Samir in the comedic classic "Office Space," we also are not pussies, but a stiff ride, no stereo, no A/C, no power steering and 40 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic doesn't exactly build Pontiac excitement. The car drives well, however, and the refinement in the powertrain, from tractable off-boost oomph to spectacular shift feel, is pure RSX.
Even the loud sticker package does little to impress Southern California motorists, where riced Hondas are as rare as taco stands and even front-mount intercoolers are cause to yawn. Ditch the vinyl and we'd blend like paint in a bucket. Even with the relatively small diameter 2.5-inch Thermal R&D exhaust, the car is loud, the kind of loud that makes you push in the clutch when you see a cop coming the other direction (they look anyway).
Hasport had the very specific goal of extracting 450 wheel hp from a K20, and sticking it into something light. Reliability at those power levels means investing in race-grade parts and expert involvement. Eric Valdez of Street Image in Baldwin Park, Calif., cinched together the bottom end. The block pulled from an '02 RSX received AEBS sleeves stuffed with forged, overbore 88mm pistons from JE riding on forged Crower rods. Eric measured every tolerance in the rotating assembly before bolting it all together. Then Hasport finished the engine in-house, bolting the original Type-S head back on and dropping it into the Civic using its own billet-aluminum and welded-steel EKK1 mount kit.
Rev Hard's turbo kit for the '02-and-up Civic Si was selected as the basis for the huffing part of this monster. The Rev Hard kit uses a tubular exhaust manifold to hang a Garrett T3/T4 turbo off the back of the engine. A divorced Turbo Smart wastegate ensures a minimum of 7 psi of boost, and reroutes exhaust flow back into the exhaust stream. AEM custom-bent an aluminum intake pipe but otherwise the installation utilizes 2.25-inch aluminized tubing from Rev Hard to move pressurized air through a front-mount intercooler. Making the ever-important "pffffffft" sound is a large and beefy-looking Vortech billet blow-off valve. Hasport custom-manufactured a 2.75-inch downpipe-as the one provided with the Rev Hard kit for the EP3 Civic did not fit-that continues into a Thermal R&D 2.5-inch exhaust. At these power levels, we suspect a 3-inch exhaust would free a whole lot of ponies.
Near mid-millennium-horsepower figures from a 2.0-liter engine require a river of fuel and enough energy to scare a lightning bolt. Moving large fuel loads starts with a big pump. Hasport selected a Walbro 255 intake pump, which pushs fuel through an AEM billet fuel rail and through big RC Engineering 550cc injectors. AEM also stepped up fuel pressure with one of its regulators. The stock RSX ignition system isn't up to the task of lighting off compressed fuel loads at more than 20 psi of boost, so AEM fitted the car with its new, four-channel CDI, or Capacitor Discharge Ignition system, that uses Denso CDI coils to store and throw huge pulses of energy through the spark plugs.
Orchestrating the release of this energy is a prototype AEM EMS stand-alone engine management system for the RSX Type-S. AEM installed its own 3.5-bar MAP sensor and its UEGO wideband sensor to accurately monitor air/fuel ratios. Once installed, the EMS was tuned on the dyno at AEM in Hawthorne, Calif., along with street testing for calibration of the rpm-dependent boost controller and traction control system. On the low boost setting, the EMS will supply between 12 and 16 pounds of boost, depending on rpm. Toggled to high boost, where race gas is obligatory, the car makes a constant 19 pounds. This is, of course, possible thanks to the integral electronic boost controller.
How much is too much power in a front-wheel-drive car? When the driven tires also happen to be steering, any amount of slip translates into understeer, the curse of an otherwise brilliant layout for packaging and efficiency. Limited-slip differentials help overall driving dynamics a whole lot, but spinning both front tires while turning only exacerbates understeer.
Traditional aftermarket traction control systems like RaceLogic use wheel-speed or ABS sensors, but the AEM system can make do without by making calculations based on rpm vs. vehicle speed to detect wheelspin and retard spark, temporarily killing power. As it turns out, we never got to explore the efficacy of the EMS traction control system because it wasn't functional while we had it, but the idea is wonderful and we look forward to experiencing it in action.
On our dyno, the low-boost setting, tuned for 91-octane gas, yielded 365-wheel hp and 280 lb-ft of torque. Despite the 17-inch R-compound tires, switching to high boost on the dyno yielded tire-on-steel drum burnouts. The solution was a set of 15-inch Dunlop Inferno drag radials and using fourth rather than third gear (third gear even spun the tires on low boost). Viper-like 455-hp to the wheels resulted, along with a stonking 378 lb-ft of torque. Although turbo lag is not apparent on the dyno, some was experienced on the street between shifts, so this could very well be a product of toasted turbo bearings (the turbo was swapped shortly after our test).
So what is accomplished with all that power? On low boost, the car spins the tires through third gear for a 13.2-second quarter-mile run at 105 mph. On high boost, the car spins the tires through fourth gear, and broke the lights at 13.0 at a remarkable 117 mph. It was during one of the high-boost runs that something bad happened to something forged in the engine, most likely from a temporary lean condition. One theory is that the damage occurred on the skidpad, which was run prior, where the g-forces and a light fuel fill may have momentarily denied fuel to the engine under load.
The RSX Type-S six-speed originally attached to the engine was retained, but received a Type R mechanical limited-slip differential. This tranny is geared for an engine not rich in torque, meaning lots of shifting to keep the engine singing in VTEC. Even with the large, unsophisticated T3/T4 turbo, enough bottom end exists, making the first two gears almost totally worthless for forward propulsion. As Coleman alludes to in this month's "Technobabble" (page 16), first through third gear are not this car's forte.
With 450-wheel hp as the goal, drivetrain reliability was an issue. Clutchmasters provided a Stage 3 clutch setup for the car, which employs a Kevlar disc pressed by a heavy-duty pressure plate, and bolted it to its aluminum flywheel. The result is a light clutch/flywheel package with both high torque capacity and a liveable, if firm, clutch pedal. With tons of power and sticky R-compound tires, axle life is an issue, but the Driveshaft Shop Stage II axles have held up to all the tuning, hard testing and track use thrown at them.
While purists will argue that only a manual steering rack offers truly precise steering feel and feedback, we say let them parallel park a manual rack, front-engine car with R-compound tires in 90-degree heat.
Another downside to most manual steering racks is that they have extremely slow ratios. The rack installed on this car goes four full turns lock-to-lock. The car turns in well, but so much steering input is required, you feel like you've run a marathon after just a few miles of mountain road flogging. A selection of power racks will bolt into the car, yielding a quicker ratio and decreasing the sweat factor.
Still, this Civic handles. Progress Group supplied the car with its CS-2 coil-over kit using 450 lb/in. springs in the front and 650 in the rear. The suspension was selected for our Time Attack Challenge, which we'll cover next month, in particular, and is Progress' track setup, as used on numerous Honda Challenge cars. Progress also installed its 22mm rear anti-roll bar, making the hatch particularly eager to rotate off throttle.
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