HONDA ACCORD TYPE R

A liberal sprinkling of Honda Type R fairy dust on the late-'90s Accord produced an unlikely evo icon and a genuine performance bargain

-  ANTONY INGRAM

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ONE WITHOUT THE WING? I'M not convinced I have. Put down £23,000 for a Honda Accord Type R in late 1998 and, were you so inclined, you could politely ask your local Honda dealer to leave its prominent aerodynamic aid off the specification list. If you'd opted for Nighthawk Black Pearl or Titan Silver Metallic rather than this car's Vesuvio Red, it'd be in the running for one of the decade's most anonymous-looking performance cars.

But nobody actually did that, right? It takes a certain kind of buyer to choose a family saloon with a set of Recaros and a red line at seven-five, and that buyer is probably going to leave the big carry-handle on the back right where it is, subtlety be damned. Along with the Escort Cosworth, there may not be another car whose wing-delete option was so roundly - and justifiably - ignored.

Other things you're liable to ignore in the Accord Type R include following traffic, whose presence the wing neatly obscures like a redaction line on a government document, and the consequential fuel bills from spending as much time as is reasonably achievable exploring the promised lands above 5800rpm. Ignoring your passenger occasionally grabbing for the door handle or one of the Recaro's raised bolsters is, like the rear wing, entirely optional.

If today's spectacular and smaller-winged 'FL5' Honda Civic Type R (get used to the chassis codes folks, this is a Honda story you're reading and there's more where that one came from) has only one real weakness, it's that it feels more like a sports saloon than the more compact and rambunctious hot hatchbacks it competes against. Accord-sized, almost.

Accord-sized exactly, as it turns out: at 4595mm long, the current Civic is to the millimetre the same length as Honda's first four-door Type R. Today it makes the Civic feel a class size above most other hatches, though thanks to Honda's obsession with mass, not a class above in weight.