Honda Civic Type R
A mighty, mighty thing. Honda has gone hardcore, and how: a pure charger.
£18,180 – £32,295
The new Honda Civic Type R is the hot hatch we’d all been waiting for. Well, providing you wanted your hot hatch to be a racetrack refugee with a level of tenacity and steely determination rarely seen in this class. Where most rivals have followed the template laid down by the Golf GTI and R and built cars that are easy-going and adaptable, Honda has gone hardcore with the Civic Type R. Very, very hardcore.
The 2016 Honda Civic Type R is now turbocharged, but combines this with a manual gearbox, limited slip differential, ultra-taut suspension and a bodykit that’s, at best, in questionable taste.
The Civic Type R will cruise on a motorway and make a reasonably civilized job of it. But it will also be letting you know that there are many places it would rather be, all of them involving corners and heavy use of the throttle. It’s an absolute charger of a hot hatch, cut from the same cloth as the Megane Trophy (and a spec’d up version of its successor, the Cup-S).
Its focus is intense, its mission to get down any given stretch of road as fast as possible. It likes speed, in other words, and is amazingly capable at delivering it. Short travel suspension, gorgeous six-speed gearshift, fabulously feelsome brakes and vast amounts of thrust, plus the front end is as grippy and tight as they come. There’s not a huge amount of steering feel or throttle adjustability, but wow, does the Civic suck you in and order you to drive it hard. The addition of a turbo has barely dented the top-end VTEC bite, and has added something entirely new – torque. And lots of it.
Idiosyncratic is probably the best way to describe it. The tiered dash is oddly structured and it takes a while to learn how to operate the various screens and menus (a full set of hot hatch dials is on offer in digital form, if you can find them…). However, the gearchange is beautifully positioned and it has perhaps the best set of seats fitted to any road car at any price. These alone set the tone for the driving experience.
Honda Civic Type R Photos
Further back there’s enough room to swing a cat. The flip-up rear seats might have been done away with, but they’re spacious for passengers and the deep, wide boot is vast: even with the seats up, it offers nearly 500 litres. Of course, it’s a five-door too, boosting family-friendly status. That’s if you can bear the grumbles around town where the rather sudden ride may arouse some debate…
No, it doesn’t have the quality of the Golf R despite costing almost exactly the same, but you’ll buy this one precisely because it’s not the Golf and therefore you won’t care about the modest 38.7mpg and 170g/km CO2 figures. Residuals aren’t available yet, but while the divisive looks will dent them slightly, the car’s low production volumes should keep the Type R heavily in demand on the second hand market for a while to come. Honda’s already telling us there’s a bit of a waiting list forming for it… Source by topgear.com
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