[jim_howard_pdx]

Dark 5.0, when I first met my buddy running the CRX he was racin his mom's new magnum 360 truck. Ran 14.1 quarter times. Not bad for a work truck with an attitude. He told me the CRX was chosen for autocrossing because it is simple to exceed 1.0 G. In fact he is doing like 1.15 G through the corners. He went with a full race cage, fully reiforced steel strut supports both front and back.

Then he is a typical 19 year old. So he has to have a thumper. His stereo can make your hearing fail in a matter of seconds. He said his sub boxes, amps, equalizers, wiring, and braces add about 200 lbs to the car.

He also liked the fact that his CRX has the lowest gears of the 5 types of Honda transmissions.

The R integra motor is nothing to sneeze at. It does 0-60 in 6 flat in a 2650 integra with higher gears. It does the quarter mile at 13.76 in the Integra body. So look what he did. He is running more gear, a full race header, wide open exhaust without CAT or Muffler. He has a mandrel bent tuned exhaust to produce maximum torque.

He runs a race clutch so he can rev and dump. The ultra light weight wheels and drag slicks weigh one third less than a typical setup you see on an American Musclecar.

His 12.4 times are ultra consistent. He is afraid to run NOS. I cannot blame him. True R engines are still a rarity in the United States. Most of the Integra R's in our town are fakes. His engine is a true R from Japan. It was raced in Japan, so it is possible that the team ran improved R cams, but they are still JDM (japanese domestic manufactured) pieces.

When you bump the cam in a 1.8 liter engine it goes from 190 to 196 or 200 to 205. Not like when we went 540 to 601 horsepower with just a cam and tunnel ram set up on the 428 scj.

This is a fun little car and it gets good gas mileage and goes around corners like nobodies business....

The engine is potent, and I dare FORD to show me any engine they have ever built that produces 100 horsepower per liter of displacement, can run a whole season without problems, and gets 25-30 miles per gallon driving home on the freeway........

Common FORD it is about time you put in some engineering to catch up to the performance world out there. HONDA has owned CART racing for three years in a row.