Building a Honda Civic in 40 minutes

This is my championship winning wheel to compete with the Honda Civic, but that wasn't always the case when I bought the car, it looked like every other Honda Civic you rolled your eyes at in this video. the 5 year journey of how I took my car from a regular Civic to winning championships and ranking as the leading car in the polls in a Cup race at Luna. Okay, this is all. I just bought this car, it's a 97 Civic DX that is made to look like a Type R, it has a B16 engine which is awesome. I bought it for $2,800, it works well, it works very healthy.

I'm very happy to clean it up and really turn it into a proper car rather than a feature car, the first step. When cleaning the car it was all about having it all one color, so we did a paint job in the garage to make the car Championship white. I made this as cheaply as I could and it actually turned out very good. This is the final product of the paint job, I think it turned out pretty amazing and I finally reconnected all the panels and everything is like the legit Type R, so I'm currently draining the coolant because I'm about to replace all these silicone hoses because they are ugly and also one of them has a leak.

I am going to replace the valve cover with the Type R valve cover, not the muin. uh, I'm changing the timing belt and water pump, new clamps, spark plugs, fuel filter, thermostat and a couple of miscellaneous gaskets. At this point we were ready to take the car on its first trip, the road trip from Key West, Florida to Nova Scotia. The car was freshly painted and had all the advantages of the Civic Type R. This is the biggest Honda possible, exactly, yes, so I hope. It will live up to my high school expectations of what a Honda should be.

It has all the advantages of the type R. It has rare type R. uh, type R, steering wheel group shift knob, rear lip of the type R wing. The front bumper skirts and, most importantly, the b16b of the type R , as well as the bar type transmission that has an LSD and yes, this car has VTEC, it just revs to 85,000 RPM. I haven't had much sitting time. with this car still, but man I really enjoy it, the Civic put 7,000 miles along the east coast. I really fell in love with this car, it's an amazing chassis and when I got home it definitely needed a wash and some cleaning, my goal was to make this a good daily driver that I could take to the race track on the weekends. , so I put on some nice wheels, cleaned up the engine bay and really just cleaned the car up like a Overall, I also took it to several race tracks like Gingerman Raceway in Michigan Toronto Motorsports Park in Canada and most recently took it to Virginia International Raceway and I raced against my friend with his Honda Civic swapped with his integra type bar and also the b16b engine doesn't even make 200 horsepower and you know where the natural progression of things would take a car enthusiast to get more power, so we retired the B-series in favor of a K-swap.

We're ready to take out the engine, let's go. I went ahead and took it out, removing the entire front of the chassis because I wanted the engine bay paint to match the championship white, but also because I needed to swap out the subframe with an Integra subframe to better fit the K swap Bare Bones. I mean, there's nothing here. I left the brake lines here because I didn't want to open up the system and let all that air in and make it a big mess, especially when I can just take it out, so I'm going to cover that wrap with some duct tape and it should be good to go there. .

This took a long time, but was very satisfying. This week we are swapping K, EK Civic and filling up a JDM K24. on it, we're going to open it up and do some quick internal things, we're going to put an S type oil pump, it's going to give a little more rev range, we're going to seal it with Moroso oil. Baffled Pan Oil Pan because this car will see track time and we're going to replace the head with a Z3 head which is the 8th generation Civic SI head while we're there we're going to put in a 50° cam gear.

To give a little more torque range and, um, lower some cams, we're going to put in an RBC intake manifold, right, RBC, putting a bunch of Kon tun parts on the car, some fuel, engine setup. throttle body, a bunch of stuff for the electronics, uh, for In this car we're going to use the Honda kpr ECU, it works, yeah the car was running but it wasn't running yet so we had to hook up a bunch of others things, like a working shifter and a full-size aluminum radiator to keep the car cool, all of this required fabrication, even the exhaust, so I opted for a 3-inch system instead of the typical 2 and 1/2 as I heard the 3 inch can make a little more power and I was looking for the same amount. horsepower as possible, ideally around 270, just a few more things to fasten and we would have the car on the dyno to figure out 268, as you can see we are back here in my garage, the K swap was successful.

I've already been driving it on the street and it's amazing. I love this car. K is definitely the way. There are still a lot of things we didn't do while we were in the workshop. Andy was very efficient and fast. I can't believe we did this as quickly as we did, but there were a lot of things I didn't order in time, with most bills, they go on infinitely and I hope this one isn't infinite, but uh, there are still some important things that we need to do to this car before it's ready for the track, the most important thing will be the tires, so we're going to put on wider 15 by 9 wheels for the front and 15 by 8 for the front.

On the back I have a set of tapered decagrams that will go on this car in Bronze finish, they look pretty good. I'm going to wrap that in some 245 front tires and 225 for the rears. I'm going to go with the reverse. dagger talking about the back of the car, it still has drum brakes right now. In fact, I had purchased an Integra rear disc brake swap when I bought the car and it's been sitting there, so what better time to clean it up and put it on. At the top I have the ktuned camber arm so that's for adjusting the camber at the rear and then up there I have an arm at the tip that's also tuned so I can help align the rear. of this car to match the front end so everything here is officially new and I think it looks fantastic it's going to perform fantastic and I'm really excited to get this out on the road of course if you're going to upgrade the brakes rears, you should also upgrade the front brakes to maintain the correct bias.

I opted for some Porsche 986 calipers on the front with larger rotors as they have proven to be the best economical big brake setup for Honda as they have the right brake balance and clean up small 15 inch wheels. The car was starting to go pretty fast now, so I wanted to make sure it was safe, so I put in a cheap four-point roll cage to make sure it was protected. This meant removing a lot of the interior pieces as well to make room for the cage and, by nature, also further reducing the weight of the car to offset some of the weight added with the cage.

I'm trying to offset some of the weight by having this roll bar on the car and that battery weighs 26 pounds, so a good way to lighten this car a little bit is to use an anti-gravity battery, which is what it is, this is a lithium which is better than AGM, and it is me. I can't describe to you how light it is. That battery weighs 26 pounds. This battery weighs 3 pounds. It's amazing, like I've had heavier dishes than these. The car is fully prepared for its first competitive year. At the races we were entering the car in the Grid Life Time Attack Street Class, the class was filled with 400 horsepower evos and STIs, but I was excited by all the prep work we put into the car at this point on its first weekend. week.

We performed quite well, finishing fifth in their class of 18, of course it didn't happen without some complications in the last session. I ran the tire off the track and it ripped off my exhaust and wrapped around my control arm, so next order. The goal of the business was to fix that after the first successful competition. All I wanted to do was improve the car even more to see if we can get on the podium. Today we're installing a mxs 1.2 Dash on Mia along with a couple of sensors and a custom harness, deut as62 connectors, 37 pin for the main, 22 pin for the auxiliary harness and uh we made a full mil spec concentric braided harness so with Mia we are adding a couple of different sensors, with room to grow.

I've soured on some Ka who make Ka sensors, they make specialized sensors for cars, as do we. They have a two in one oil pressure and temperature sensor in one, the other sensors that we have added are tire temperature sensors today and that is the core of it all, suspension, we have oil, yes, oil pressure, oil temperature . I also have engine coolant on the right side after another testing event in Chicago. I realized that my tires were holding me back. It just didn't have enough grip so I decided to take the plunge and tried to get big 17 inch wheels that would fit so I could fit wider tires.

The car barely fit 255 wide tires in the front, that was enough for me. Now we move on to further weight reduction, a common theme with this. Built since the class I was racing in had no minimum weight requirements, I managed to get the car down to a ganty 2289 and then we went to Colorado to race at Pikes Peak International Raceway. The car had issues with the suspension setup all weekend but we managed to get the car to its first podium with little time between events, we couldn't get a new suspension in time but we were able to get another great modification which helped a lot With the performance of this car, today we are going to put a clutch type LSD in Ben's EK Civic with the increased traction provided by the clutch type differential.

We headed to Road America, but that event didn't go as planned, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, yeah. Great, it's going to need new paint, eh, unfortunately the next event was only a couple of weeks away so the repairs had to be done as quickly as possible. We put it back together off-camera and made it to the final event of the season in Gingerman. Race track where we could see how much faster we made the car from its first event of the season at the same track, it looks a little worse for wear. I left it looking a little rough for the sake of time, to my surprise.

The damage wasn't that bad, the car is fine now and none of the suspension components were damaged, it was just mainly the bodywork, so the fender, the hood, the front bumper door, my goal for this event is beat what I did last time we were here, which is a 14.7, hopefully with the bigger tires and less weight on the car and the differential and everything, I should be able to go faster than that. You went from 424 to 411 to 40.2, got 2 seconds and two laps, that's it. a FR Drive record is that we have finally done it. I'm over 30.

I beat my previous time by almost 2 seconds and broke the Forward Drive record by 8 seconds. Fourth place overall for the season, which isn't bad. bad, especially if you are the first season among 80 drivers in the lineup, although not all 80 cars are competitive to get on the podium next year. GLI has introduced a new class this year called Club TR and that class can run Arrow, which means I can put a big splitter and a big spoiler on this car and I'm really excited to do it because I've wanted it all last year, so I'm very excited to finally be able to put some downforce on this car. car so yeah the look of this car is about to change a lot as you can see this wing is clearly strong enough to hold 155 pounds anyway these are 5 inch tall side skirts to try lower that space.

Help again. Lower the resistance. In this car we go with the wood splitter, we usually recommend a 2 inch, but this time we go with a 3/4 because it's a little more robust, it's a little more rigid in those moments when things are rigid and that That's what Ben does. We asked for it and the rules allow about 3 inches from the bumper overhang, which means 3 in extension from any point on the bumper. It's a really simple type of divider to use. We took the car to a test event and set the fastest lap time I have ever achieved at VIR, the car was getting really fast now we just had a few more changes to make the car class legal before starting competition for the year, that's right, we are in an incredible case again with my Civic because I am changing the timing attack classes thatThey allow Arrow now.

I have to run a different engine setup so we're going to put this car on the dyno first to see how much I currently get and then with the fully loaded K24 we're going to run it. Put it in, we'll see how much that engine performs and compare the difference well, since it turns out this car doesn't make as much power as it did 14 months ago. It looks like we're only making 239 horsepower, which is for example, what was that 29 horsepower less than what it was making in February 2020, so we ditched the worn-out K24 cam motor in favor of a K24 completely original and class legal long block, we upgraded the oil pan with a better baffled unit Elite 2 pan and through the New engine in the car, since this class does not have a power to weight limit, we wanted to squeeze the most amount of power possible from the stock block, so we did about 80 PS on the dyno trying to figure out different intake setup configurations that we threw in. on a cutout and took out the SPS intake manifold and ran it over and over again until we got to the amazing final number of 250, where I think 250 is probably the most for anyone regardless of engine or platform in this 250 class It's probably the most you can do, yeah, no, it should be, it should be a solid engine.

I think it will run throughout the season without problems, so yeah, hopefully the next work on the suspension, yeah, it never ends because this. The new class allows two-way adjustable coilover shock absorbers, we can adjust compression and rebound separately. I'm just here to test the new suspensions I have, get the damping and compression and everything. Those things checked today is the day we all put them together and make it work. I prefer to do it on a test day like today, where I can have everything dialed in and feel good. I don't have to worry about that. when we actually get to a competitive track day that's the goal here today let's have some fun last year the car did a 39.8 and this year it's in the low 39s right off the bat at least a second faster than the last one time. year, so we are in a good place for the start of the season at the first event of the season.

I made some more improvements off camera. I put on a larger carbon fiber Zebulon rear spoiler and the party favorite, a headlight intake duct. They were ready for the competition and in front was Ben Thorne, good job, friend Ben from the YouTube channel Gears and gasoline. I had finally won my first event with the car and I was ready to do it again at the next event at Autobon Country Club, uh and out. in front of his second win 34 779 Mr. Ben Thorne in the white widebody car I love it honey I got it I made it today if you don't continue to develop your car in a competitive class you will be left behind in a weak point that I had . with the car at this point it was the brakes.

I was overheating the relatively small rotors given the grip the tires were producing, so it's time to say goodbye to these amazing Porsche brakes. Go with something better. I put on stoptech c43 nickel plated competition calipers with a much larger and more importantly thicker rotor to help with heat dissipation. I then took the car to Illusions Wraps to give it a more professional look. Many thanks to Valve for taking the risk to sponsor the car title. I think it looks fantastic. correct Club TR in P2 Mr. Ben Thorne, the delivery of Valvoline. I've done a lot of things to this Civic since the last event, in particular you might notice these Fender vents, that will help give it a little more Force I up front.

I also have an intake box which in theory should give me a little more power and the biggest modification is not seen which is a U brake booster delete which should help some of my braking modulation and should help to prevent some of that braking lockup. In the last event I was very happy to take home a second position for the event, which in the general classification puts me in first place in the championship, so we are champions of the TR 2021 season of the club and I couldn't be more currently happy with the Civic I. I think it's actually quite competitive. uh, where it is with anything, the competition gets fiercer and everyone keeps going further and further, so if you sit back and let the competition catch up to you, I mean, you're going to start falling behind, everything progresses, everyone They try harder. and um, that's what we're going to do with the Civic, push it a little bit harder and try to keep it on the pointy end of the lever, that pretty much wraps it up here at Annie's shop, for now the car is completely stripped down. ready for a roll cage, so now let's load this empty shell onto our trailer and head to Minnesota.

We're going to have Artsom weld the cage, so we have an 8o cage here, uh, 8 points. It means that we have 8 attachment points to the chassis, the cage will be TIG. I will weld plates to the chassis just because of the material and how thin it is and then to those plates all the tubes wet each other. and for the mounting plates we have anti-intrusion bars or food bars sometimes people call them uh with the door bar design. Ben really wanted the window cranks to work, so they are a little on the higher side, but that's to clear the window cranks. and that's safer, the door bars are very tight, they basically touch the door here as much space as we can without removing the glass.

At this point we're going to paint everything here and it will look nice and fresh when it's finished. It doesn't rust because this is just bare metal and it will rust so the cage needs to be painted at a minimum and if we are going to paint the cage we might as well paint everything else here, painting the inside took a lot longer than I would like to admit. , while I had the engine out, I also went ahead and cleaned and repainted the engine bay to keep it fresh. I think we're going to go to the board.

Ben wants a little suede in his life. I tried to persuade. Got it out of this but didn't run a full interior, then we moved on to the mechanical upgrades we did this offseason, which included a complete engine re-machining upgrade and a transmission gear upgrade, so these are Gearx gears what we have here. We're rated at 500 torque or so, which is a nice set of closer ratio gears here and will be much better for B on the track. We also changed my differential. We upgraded with a stronger multic OS clutch plate differential after getting When we put the car back together, we tuned it on the dyno and made about 230 horsepower at the wheels, a lower number probably because Andy recalibrated your dyno since last time.

These are some new Titan 7 R8 wheels that have the same design as my previous setup. They are 10 inch wheels, while the previous ones were 9 inch wheels, which is already quite ridiculous, but with a 255 tire you should have more contact patch on a 10 inch than on a 9 inch, then we took the car at Valin headquarters in Kentucky, where they custom blended a thinner oil so my engine would have less parasitic losses through oil viscosity. The car was now ready for the next year of competition, unfortunately at the first event of the year the AC seals on my transmission started leaking.

This greased the underside of the car and my rear tires left me with a drift car for the weekend. This meant I couldn't set a time fast enough to make the podium, but we fixed that later and made a big improvement. the car with some new fortune AO ​​dreadn Pro two-way adjustable coilover shocks that highlight all the stops for the next event at New Jersey Motorsports Park, so we are two 2,000 of a second behind Pace, we are still in second place, but at 2,000 It was a very close battle for first place. I did everything I could to buy time, including removing drag from my rear bumper.

Grant Davidson and Sgra were barely out of reach, so I finished the event in second place. The same thing happened in the next one. At the event in Mid Ohio we were a tenth of a second between Ben and I, we have 1116 seconds or so, a little over 10, so it's very tight, the car feels super loose, which is a good thing and a bad thing. . I can rotate. the car, which is good, I can take the corners, but it's bad because I'm losing a lot of speed doing that and I had a couple of Tokyo Drift moments there.

Peter Grber has raced with us for a couple of years. Ben Thorne. big slide over the ridge nine picks him up he was going for it there Greg he's still cooking he's still on a flyer here this lap we'll also follow him to the start and the finish oh again big slide will he hold on to it? Unfortunately, this time I finished second behind Grant Davidson once again, but the next event was Lim Rock Park, a track that really suits my car and my driving style. I was really excited to be able to go out to such an iconic track and Lime Rock I think is my favorite track so far.

I mean, there are still more tracks to explore, but I really like this track and 1 Ben Thor with a 586. I was saying all season that I was going to pass gear and gas. two P1s, yeah buddy, yeah my trailing arm finally decided to come loose, yeah it's cracking right there when you put on some wider tires with lots of grip it puts a lot more load on the trailing arm and all that extra high load of GeForce pushing the trailing arm actually cracks the structure of the trailing arm, so that's not the only weak point.

There are actually a lot of weak points on this rear trailing arm. The next weak point is where the hub mounts the top bolt and bottom bolt on the trailing arm. They are known to crack too, luckily mine hasn't cracked yet, but we're going to hold it up now so it never cracks, so now it's time to move on to this side of the trailing arm where I clearly have a rubber bushing and that is not like that. Good track cars, you want them to be spherical so there is no deflection, mainly in the rear, it will deflect a little when braking so the car will loosen up a little, that's fine with our ball joint, that leaves one last thing for the rear. arm and that's a brace that runs the entire length of the arm and is much more structurally sound so it's less prone to bending so we want it to be super strong.

We're going to compete door to door with this Civic. year, so now we are ready to make some modifications to this car to fit it on a wheel to make its class a little better, but there is something important that I have been putting off, something that I was not allowed to do in my previous class , but now that I'm going GTC, I can and also higher because of the whole splitter and everything, so we need to slim it down, which might help reduce some drag and to achieve that we're going to pipe the front end, which means that We are going to cut the wheel arches. in the engine bay so the wheels can go up right now.

I can't make this car lower than it currently is because the wheels actually make contact with the wheel wells here, a trailer fender, and we're just going to fix this to fit the correct size metal that fits into the wheel well and then weld it on when the wheel clearance increases, the control arm clearance should also increase, so we had to cut and weld the strut tower caps to clear the movement of the Control lines. There are approximately 120 hours. of Labor put the C axle on the front of this car, we still had a lot of work to do to homologate the car for its wheel in the class, so we decided to lower the tube so we could do it in time for the season.

To start, this is the result. This is my Honda Civic with gltc speec fully prepared now and we are ready to race this weekend at Watkins Glenn International, but I need to show you some things I did off camera to prepare this car. "The new class and a lot of it included safety equipment. Fortunately, some companies wanted to sponsor us to make sure we are safe this year. One of those companies is Raceequip, who sent this full containment seat if I have a side impact. I will protect my head and I also have this window net here to protect me from any flying debris.

Now we also have full fire suppression, so there are three nozzles in the engine compartment and two nozzles in the cabin that I also put in these flat door panels. to protect me from any window glass in the event of a side impact and perhaps the coolest piece of all the FIA ​​F1 rain lights, so now that we have all this additional security, let's go to Watkins Glenn I have detuned the car to 23.8. horsepower, previously it was around 230 so I've cut almost 30 horsepower to be in this class, it's a power class for 8 so I'll be going door to door with Corvettes andall of which generate much more power, but are heavier.

Ben Thorne is currently ranked 25th, where he started. I think he was at 26, so he moved up with room. This car is incredible, it is a very fast car, we have seen that in recent years it has won in so many. In many time attack tests, but now that we've moved on to wheel, I'm not performing as well on Watkins Glenn. I finished in 25th position. I had to upgrade the car to be competitive on this new class of wheel, so I started with an inline carbon fiber Formula 1 intake that connects to the hole in my headlight to force air in at higher speeds.

We also need to convert the car to a five-trunk configuration so we can use a wider tire in this class than the number one and axle number. two looks, both are functional, we have five lugs, now we went from a 17x 10 tire to a 18x 10 1/2 and 265 wide tire, lastly, we needed to improve the arrow to further maximize the class rules. In fact, I put a smaller one. rear wing but with a gooseneck and a more aggressive profile, this allows me to get more power in the class and at the same time maintain the same level of rear downforce that I had before, so we are going to tune the Civic so that it has 206 horsepower at the wheels to meet class rules, welcome back to Mid Ohio and Lexington Ohio.

I'm Ben, 15th, best starting position for him in only his second round, top 20 is a great place to start, should be a lot of fun to watch. work your way up, woo, good car, good car, well that was fun, oh man this field is so incredibly competitive. Wow, they want to be on the track and we'll remind you again if you're on the green flag and we're racing on the circuit Legends grid life touring cup is on I have to defend a little now Rosenberg Big Time on the side with shla behind him on the 410 S2000 there's Hans Waridal Ben Thorne in 12th and 13th so close to the top 10 mate so close to the top 10 car here two places away I think I broke an axle What do I think I broke an axle?

Are you kidding? I'm not even kidding, man. I was in P1. I know the OEM axles, which is a pretty difficult task because they don't make them anymore. I have some. here and we're going to rebuild them, put new boots on them, obviously, put new grease on them and put those WD40 straws on them.The last changes we made were mainly weight reduction, we reduced the weight of the car by about 80 pounds, then we added an Acuity shifter a lot better positioned and some OEM type bar shift cables. I then cut my front splitter into just a bottom pan to help utilize the RS class even more and help its Arrow balance.

I would say successful mods, successful updates. I'm pretty sure the car is faster than before, if anything I can drive it more consistently with that stick shift now, so it's all going to Laguna Sega. Okay everyone, I'm here with Ben and Ben from Gears and Gas, how are you feeling today? Every event I've been through I've moved up the ranks a little bit so at Lime Rock I was 12 and I'm feeling pretty good and I'm aiming for the top 10 here, that's Ben Thorne from Gears and the gas again continues its track and advance in this series.

Nagard snuck around Thorn on that final lap and takes fifth place. It's Ben Thorne on the pole. the 166th Auto Parts Honda Civic preview you're sitting on the pole in a TTC race at Laguna sea no big deal thanks for that green flag flying Ben Thorne shoots into turn one on the outside he's next to Moore sideways on the first turn Hilo the Californian right behind him in turn one he's doing it come on Ben run run run run run oh my god dude yeah he's opening a gap this is literally the best case scenario our baby it is doing.

Ben Thorne is leading a gltc race in his first year of competition I know he was the expectation I don't think he knew it would be a reality here Greg leading this race and pulling away from Zack Moore in the 272 no oh do you have a problem is it slow, no, he has it, yes, he has a problem, oh no, he's running away incredible. Larry Moore comes by, here comes Rosenberg, now, oh you've got to be kidding me, my OEM shift cable came off and stuck the car in fifth gear, my first win. We missed it on the last lap, but we know we have a car that can win, this just means we will have to come back next year even stronger.