THE UNDEFEATED

HONDA'S FK8 CIVIC TYPE R IS OUR LINEAL CHAMP, WINNING EVERY MOTOR COMPARISON AS WELL AS BOTH PERFORMANCE CAR OF THE YEAR AND BANG FOR YOUR BUCKS. WE PAY OUR RESPECTS WITH A FINAL DRIVE IN THE END-OF-THE-LINE LE SPECIAL

FOUND MYSELF SITTING at the Porsche table at the Australian Motoring Awards in 2018. As my predecessor, Dylan Campbell, walked onto the stage to announce the winner of Performance Car of the Year, at my table cuffs were being shot and ties straightened. The new Cayman S was surely a shoo-in. And then he announced a Honda Civic as the winner, cementing a historical quirk that a Cayman never won PCOTY.

The FK8 Civic Type R also won Bang For Your Bucks as well as every comparison it ever entered. While the Porsche 911's record at PCOTY might well suggest that it was the definitive MOTOR champion, even Zuffenhausen's iconic coupe can't boast the 100 per cent knockout ratio of the Honda. That it's also relatively affordable only underscores the Civic's bona fides as the people's champ.

What's more, there's a symmetry here. Just as the shutters come down on MOTOR, so this generation of the Civic Type R bows out. We'd heard that Honda had retained one example of Australia's 20-car allocation of the run-out $66,700 Type R LE, a car that generated such demand that a lottery system seemed the only fair way to assign vehicles. This avoided the feeding frenzy that surrounded Canada's 100-car quota were all were sold online within 240 seconds.

A few wheedling phone calls secured us some time with the Type R LE, Honda letting us know that this pristine low-kilometre car would shortly be sold. While the 228kW/400Nm outputs of the 2.0-litre turbocharged engine are identical to standard Type Rs, the way the LE goes down a road is subtly different.