A 5,600-mile 2000 Honda Civic Si coupe sold for $50,000 on Bring a Trailer two years ago. There's the sense that something ubiquitous is coming to an end.
Brendan McAleer
Like all the best cars, you hear it before you see it. A four-cylinder engine climbing in revs and switching over to the high-lift cam profile, the unmistakable hiss of forced induction, and then suddenly there it is: a little blue Honda coupe, all hopped up on boost and spoiling for a fight. Then a red hatchback, its all-motor build banshee-keening towards redline. Another coupe, this one with the piercing whine of straight-cut gears. Yet another hatch, as furious as a shaken bag of wasps. Civics. None of them civil.
“She’s my little deuce coupe,
You don’t know what I got.”
-The Beach Boys, 1963
Soon enough, there’s a small crowd atop this mountain parking lot, its pavement scrawled with the rubber graffiti of late-night shenanigans. Little hi-po nuggets from the golden age of Honda tuning. Somewhere, a trucker hauling DVD players shudders with foreboding. We are one Vin Diesel short of a Fast & Furious heist crew.
Alex Conohan’s blue 2000 Si coupe (SiR in the Canadian market) was first to arrive. He’s also into pickup trucks, but says he’s always had a Civic. This one’s a wild build, set up around a K20 swap with a Garrett GT3582 twinscroll turbo. Complete with a host of Skunk fuelling parts, 2200 cc injectors, and an E85 tune, it’s knocking on the door of 500 hp.
Brendan McAleer
The red hatch is Isaac Ho’s, and a bit of a rescue dog. Snapped up off Craigslist four years back for $500, it’s a former basket case that’s crammed with a laundry list of parts from longtime Honda specialist Spoon. Ho bought the car as a daily beater, but a friend with a shop had a B18 out of an Integra just sitting around, and one thing led to another. Piece by piece, the thrifty economy car hatchback turned into something fiercer.
It’s a common theme. Eric Hung’s white sixth generation hatch looks like the original hero EK-chassis Civic Type-R, complete with Grand Prix White paint, but it started out life as a lowly CX. In the mid-Nineties, this was the cheapskate model, roll-up windows and no A/C. Hung’s three-page modification list is a blend of OEM Honda Type-R parts and names like Mugen and Spoon. The car’s running a K20 from a Japanese-market Integra Type-R.
Brendan McAleer
Brendan McAleer
The dozen or so owners go through the typical meetup motions, popping hoods and exclaiming over rare parts. ASIMO is dangling from more than one rearview mirror. A couple of the cars are sticker-bombed, inside and out. Pat Woo has a stock RHD Type-R imported from Japan. Donald Urquhart brought the 1991 Si he had in high school, and a half-rabid ’96 CX track build with a trunk-full of Hoosier racing tires. The latter is a shared project among friends, and shrugs off an incredible amount of abuse. Galileo Galang’s 1992 hatch is one of the cleanest builds in the local scene. Friends Eli and Garrett showed up in an EK hatch with a sleeved B16 – the car was pulled out of some bushes and hasn’t been washed in over a decade.
Brendan McAleer
A significant proportion of the owners are middle-aged, only semi-reformed from the hoonery of their teenage years. Eli shows me pictures of the 1989 hatchback he inherited from his family when it was ten years old. A mainstay of the local scene in the early 2000s, when engine swapped and turbocharged, the Civic laid down 10-second passes at the local dragstrip.
When I reached out to the local Honda community for a few stories of Civic ownership, the response came in a flood. People talked about friendships formed over wrenching side by side, of paycheque-by-paycheque incremental builds, of nostalgia for late nights cruising in a hand-me-down hatchback.
Owners still run these cars as high-mile daily-drivers, but atop the mountain, there are conversations about how hard it is to find a cheap Civic these days. Somebody brings up the 5,600 mile 2000 Honda Civic Si coupe that sold for $50,000 on Bring A Trailer two years ago. There’s the sense that something ubiquitous is coming to an end.
Brendan McAleer
Hot-rodding and import culture seem as out of sync as Rockabilly and Eurobeat. Really, though, they are simply two sides of the same record. For the former, it’s all Hawaiian shirts, Edelbrock bolt-ons, and paint so deep you could swim in it. Pure Boomer nostalgia, the neon-lit fantasies of George Lucas’American Graffiti.
That film’s producers paid $1300 for the yellow ’32 Ford that was one of the stars of Graffiti. Some quick chopping was done to get it to look like a proper Highboy, but it was already modified. You didn’t have to pay much for a Deuce in 1973. Or 1963. Or 1953. It was cheap speed, personified.
American hot rod culture was born on the lakebeds of Southern California, interest building in the 1930s. The real boom came in the post-war period, with returning G.I.s flush with cash and mechanical training. If you could turn a wrench and afford to fix up some old Ford V8, you could go racing at Bonneville or cruising down Main Street, U.S.A. The kids of this time were born into an era blending rock n’ roll and rumbling V-8s. California myth-making was at its peak.
Brendan McAleer
The Deuce, the 1932 Model 18, was a staple of the time. At launch, it was the epitome of democratized speed, as the optional 221ci V8 would cost you just 10 bucks. Out the door, a V-8 Ford roadster was $410, and a coupe $485. Add in the four-cylinder versions, and Ford sold just under half-a-million of these cars.
At first, the Deuce was the getaway car for the likes of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. True mass escape came later, with the founding of Hot Rod magazine in 1948, and the rise of hot rod culture in general. The four-cylinder ’32 Ford, the Model B, was cheap enough for high-school kids to afford, and you could strip the fenders off and fit some white-wall tires for the look. Inherit a V-8 version when your uncle traded in his old car, and a mail-order catalogue and some skinned knuckles would have that side-valve eight sitting up and barking at the neighbors. You don’t know what I got.
By the early 1960s, when Brian Wilson and Roger Christian penned Little Deuce Coupe, the 1932 Ford was already established as an icon of the hot-rod scene, perhaps the icon. It was simple and it was everywhere; a blank sheet of paper waiting for any gearhead to write their story on it.
Brendan McAleer
The Deuce celebrates its 90th anniversary last year, nearly a full century of being whatever people wanted it to be. At the Northwest Deuce Days gathering, held this past July in Victoria, B.C., more than a thousand ’32 Fords and other hot rods ringed the harbor. You could walk down the rows of cars, seeing endless variety on a single platform: here the expected small-block Chevy V-8, there an Oldsmobile Rocket 88, candy-coat paint or flat primer, chrome and pinstripes or bare metal patina.
It was a rainbow-hued gathering of the car that brought speed culture to the masses – but among those masses, there’s a gathering gray. Paul Le Mat, who played drag racer John Milner in American Graffiti, is now 77 years old. If you’d been sixteen when you saw the film on its theatre debut, you’re now 65. The Deuce is immortal. Its fanbase, perhaps, is not.
Brendan McAleer
If you were 16 years old when you watched Dom and Brian blow the doors off that fool in the Ferrari F355 in the original The Fast and The Furious, you’re closing in on the big Four-Oh. You can probably still remember all the quotes from the film – more than you can afford, pal – but soon it’ll be possible to throw out your back while unloading the dishwasher. (Just tell everyone it was a mountain bike crash.)
The fleet of all-black Civics that The Fast and Furious street-racer crew uses to hijack tractor-trailers full of DVDs have an air of movie goofery to them (a discreet getaway car does generally not have neon underbody lighting), but hot Hondas were an established phenomenon by the early Aughts. Import culture was everywhere, and while Dom’s FD RX-7, Brian’s Mitsubishi Eclipse, and the mighty ten-second-or-less Supra were all heroes, the heartbeat of the scene had VTEC.
Brendan McAleer
And it wasn’t because Honda engines were powering the very real racing exploits of Ayrton Senna’s McLaren MP4/4. Although maybe that’s why you begged your mom to replace her Oldsmobile Cutlass with a white Civic Si hatch in 1991. Which she probably didn’t. Sensible mom bought an automatic DX sedan.
So did hundreds of thousands of Moms and Dads and even Grandmas who didn’t care one whit about steely-eyed Brazilians or double-wishbone suspensions and thought VTEC was that company that made cordless phones. Consumers on the whole wanted efficiency, reliability, and solid resale. Fun to drive? Great icing, but it was Honda’s basic cake recipe that packed showrooms.
So, like Henry Ford’s mass-produced stroke of genius, the Civic became ubiquitous, both new on the street and in the used car classifieds of your local newspaper. You got good grades, Dad perhaps bought an Explorer, and you took the family autobox DX to college. Maybe you had a friend with a shop. Maybe you spent some of your summer job money on an exhaust the size of a potato cannon. Maybe you bought a bare-bones CX and learned how to fiddle with tire pressures at autocross. Maybe you installed a cheapo short shifter kit in your college roommate’s silver DX hatchback as a Christmas present. I did.
Brendan McAleer
Whether sedan, coupe, or hatchback, Civics were everywhere, and they could be whatever you wanted. Overnight parts from Japan if you want to, but also the cars were basically Lego. Integra engines fitted right in. Disc brake upgrades were simple. The aftermarket was huge, simply because the customer base was also huge. The Civic had good bones, both a lightweight platform for a ground-up build, or the reliable daily that got an upgrade whenever an overtime shift put a bit of extra cash in your pocket.
Early on, the old school hot-rodders didn’t get it. Front-wheel-drive equals fail-wheel-drive. Scoffing at the kids with the fart can exhausts and forgetting the time when they, too, hacked up their cars in questionable ways. It’s what you do when you’re a kid. Half-baked modification is the key to learning by doing. Many a great artist started out drawing with crayons.
Brendan McAleer
Brendan McAleer
Today, though, one of these modified golden age Hondas can turn up at a cars and coffee and get a bit of grudging respect from the old timers. The Friday night street legal drags have seen too many quick Hondas making twelve and eleven second passes; there’s almost always a track-rat Civic in any group at the local racetrack. The Civic has long proved its bona fides.
Perhaps, too, there’s a shared sense of time moving on. If you’re thirteen now, hooked on Forza and Gran Turismo and itching for your license, statistically, your parents drive a CR-V or a RAV4. The modern Civic is still a fun to drive machine, and there’s still a solid aftermarket for it. Even if it’s the size of an Accord now, it’s the good bones are mostly there. But today the masses buy crossovers, and how do you build a Forester into a hot rod? Subaru don’t even make the turbo versions any more.
Brendan McAleer
Back on the mountaintop, brief chats done, the owners climb back into their machines and fire them up. Off they scorch, that signature hot-Honda beehive of sound. It’s a riotous cacophony, one immediately recognizable to anyone who was interested in the golden age of sport compacts and import tuning.
Gradually, decibel by decibel, the sound fades into the distance. Scratch the surface, and passion in the Honda community still runs deep and broad. But every golden age has its end. It’s only as it fades that you realize. Little Honda Civic, we didn’t know what we had.
Brendan McAleer Contributing Editor Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Keyword: The Honda Civic Was a Generation's '32 Ford