ABSOLUTELY buzzing

Honda's Si Civics brought agile, cheap fun to motorists long before the Type R name got anywhere near a hatchback

- CHARLIE CALDERWOOD

When the CRX Si was introduced in 1984, it was Honda's cake-and-eat-it moment. Weighing less than anything else in its class and boasting a fizzing 12-valve, fuel-injected engine, the Civic CRX Si not only showed that a front-driver could be a proper sports car without any excuses, but also that you could have all of that plus 40mpg for the equivalent of £21,000 in today's money. It was such a good idea that Honda put the same engine in its regular hatchback a year later, creating the brilliant proto-hot-hatch Civic Si.

The two cars here are from the American Honda Motor Company's own Collection Hall in California (see p126), and that's fitting because the 'Si' moniker that began with the CRX (and simultaneously the Prelude) in 1984 has had a longer career in the United States than anywhere else. You can still buy a Civic Si Stateside, where it's one of the very few new cars offered with a manual transmission. Four decades later and a consistent subset of Americans still can't get enough of affordable, sporty Hondas - even when the rest of the country has gone pick-up and SUV mad.

So successful had the Civic become by the early 1980s that Honda moved to a Detroitaping four-year model lifecycle with the third-generation car. Sharing few panels between them was a three-door hatchback, four-door saloon, five-door MPV 'Shuttle' and - to some surprise - a two-door fastback coupé. Thanks to looser emissions laws, Europe and Japan got a 100bhp fuel-injected CRX straight away, while Americans made do with a pair of carburetted cars for most of 1984. The less powerful of the two, a 60bhp 1.3-litre CRX HF, was marketed as the ultimate fuel saver of the range - the CRX being both the lightest and slipperiest of the new Civics, notching an impressive 67mpg (US; 80mpg UK) in the EPA's highway test. Within a year, America had received a lightly detuned CRX Si, with a 91bhp 1.5-litre 'four'.