HONDA CIVIC TYPE R IAUDI RS3 I HYUNDAI i30 N IBMW M135i I VW GOLF R
Honda’s stellar new Civic Type R has wowed us in isolation. How does it hold up with the cream of today’s hot hatch crop in hot pursuit?
I don’twant anything touched.’ Accord-ing to legend, those were the chief test pilot’s first words when he taxied to a halt after the Spitfire prototype’s maiden flight. Of course, it’s a tale too good to be true: what he meant was that he didn’t want any settings changed before he’d reported his ob-servations. But in the more romantic, apocryphal sense of the story, that’s how many of us felt after driving the previous Honda Civic Type R. The old FK8-generation (launched in 2017, retired in 2021) was sublime to drive, up there with the very best of all front-wheel-drive performance cars. It might have won a few more friends if it didn’t have such a right-up-in-yer-face design (like a Transformer mid-transi-tion from car to robot) but to drive – spellbinding.
Still, Honda has touched the Type R, which is now based on the latest FL5-generation Civic. Sure enough, the design has been toned down to a less polarising look – one which, to these eyes, appears a little blobby and amorphous in pictures but is fantastic in person: smooth-surfaced and purposeful.
There are other pertinent changes too: it’s longer, lower, wider and with a wheelbase increased by a con-siderable 35mm. That growth, and mandated gasoline particulate filter, mean it’s slightly heavier (but only by around 25kg, thanks to lightweight components such as an aluminium bonnet and resin tailgate). There have been useful gains in cooling, efficiency and re-sponsiveness, and Honda’s also overhauled the steer-ing and gearshift – both of which were already stellar. If it wasn’t broke, should they have fixed it?
Let’s find out. I climb into the Civic’s bright red bucket seat (with optional red floormats to match) for the first time at our test’s layby basecamp partway up a wind-beaten South Wales mountain. CAR’s James Dennison, Curtis Moldrich, Alan Taylor-Jones, Adam Binnie and I have brought along a quartet of high-power hot hatches to see how many chinks the Type R has in its armour. An obvious one is its price, up from £33k for the old FK8 car to a stiff £47k for the new one. That takes it right into superhatch territory, so we’ve brought along three of Germany’s finest all-wheel-drive premium hatches to compare it with (al-though one of them is wearing an optional saloon shellsuit). They are the BMW M135i (with recently re-vised chassis), Audi RS3 (with the aforementioned sa-loon body) and the benchmark of benchmarks, VW’s Golf R (here in limited 20 Years spec, celebrating the milestone since the Golf R32’s launch in 2003).
