Honda Civic Type R wears front-wheel drive hot hatch speed king crown – price here

For the first time, Honda is giving the Civic Type R a turbo engine.  Those it has to beat all sport turbo engines, so a Type R turbo it must be.

Even more boy-racer styled than the previous Honda Civic Type R, and much more elaborate than any of its rivals which are mostly subtle.  Huge spoilers, splitters, black wheels with red rim trim… all standard.

Inside the seats are again in black and red suede-clotch, for visual and high-grip purposes.

Good to see the Honda manual is alive and well – the Honda S2000, for example, had a really slick sporty short-shifter manual gearbox, and Honda is giving the Type R a 6-speed manual (no DSG or auto business found here).  It also sticks to front-wheel drive.

4-cylinder, front-wheel drive manual hot hatch speed king crown

This new Type R is claiming the new hot hatch speed king crown, in the category of 4-cylinder, front-wheel drive manuals.

0-100km/h from standstill is over in 5.7 seconds, compared to rivals which need at least half-a-second more:  looking at just the manual gearboxed rivals, to compare apples with apples, the MINI John Cooper Works manual is the closest, needing 6.3 sec, while main rivals Ford Focus ST and Volkswagen Golf GTI (front-wheel drive manuals) require 6.5 seconds.  Yes, the 4-wheel drive VW Golf R is quicker off the line, as it puts its power down through 4 tyres, and the 5-cylinder RS3 or 6-cylinder M135 are faster… but Honda has managed to get hot performance out of a 4-cylinder engine through the front wheels.

Top speed is a supercar-challenging 270 km/h!  Other hot hatches are limited to 250km/h, with only the Audi RS3 Sportback with an optional package can be de-restricted to 280km/h.

How does it do that?  A Honda V-Tec turbo engine of 2.0 litres makes 228kW and 400Nm.

Price

There is no soft way to say this – the Honda Civic Type R costs a lot more than its direct rivals like GTI and ST:  where others play in the R400-R500k bracket, the Civic Type R is positioned nearly head-on against other seious hot hatches like Audi S3 Sportback (R 566 000), BMW M135i 5-door manual (R 558 000) and Volkswagen Golf R (R 537 400 for the manual).  The Honda Civic Type R price is R 586 400.