900hp RWD Honda Civic... Drift Car! SEMA 2019 Madness Begins

Hey, Louis, what are we shooting today? Oh, we're shooting this rear-wheel drive Honda Civic Coupe. It's pretty sick because I'm shooting it and Larry's not, because he sucks. Don't fire me, Larry. Hell you, you. Is it really because he sucks or is it because he's busy doing something else? Yeah, he's actually, no, he's just sitting around the car. He's just really busy, so yeah. Yeah. Speak of the devil. What's up, guys? Larry Chen here. Welcome to another episode of Hoonigan Autofocus. We are out here in Las Vegas for the SEMA show and we have something really special for you guys. It's a legit rear-wheel drive Honda Civic drift car. I got my buddy, Chris. What's up? Jean-Hurray, Jean-Hurray. Jean-Hurret. Jean-Hurray, however you want to say it. This guy, I always see him when he's very sleep-deprived. He's very tired all the time because he builds these things that are just absolutely amazing. Pretty cool. I had a chance to kind of see the GTR that he built for Bagsy for Battle Drift 2, which I was on the set for. But also, on top of that, Chris drifts himself and he built a S2000 drift car. Probably not the first, but one of the first really functional ones. One of the new school builds. Yeah, new school builds. Sorry, Steph. Yeah, and Gary, and Gary. Yeah, and Gary. You guys build some cool stuff, but the S2000 that Chris built, super cool, super new school. And that's kind of the whole thing. He's a big Honda guy. And that's kind of why you built this Civic, huh? 100%. When the GRC cars came out, I saw that and I was like, I want to build one. That's like, it's going to look so good sliding around on dirt. It's going to look even better sliding around on pavement. Okay, so that's kind of the thing, right? There's not that many front-wheel drive cars that are converted into drift cars. The most famous one, of course, looking at you, Frederick, and Steph, Toyota. You know, it started with the Scion TC, then it went to the Corolla Hatchback. And it's kind of one of those things where a lot of people have been crying foul over the years about turning a car that was never meant to drift into a drift car. You've kind of taken inspiration from Rallycross. Those kind of were never meant to be all-wheel drive, right? But they were great, and they've won a lot of events. And now we legit have a Formula Drift spec Honda Civic rear-wheel drive drift car. Yes, and it's true to form. It's Honda-powered, it's proper. It's a four-cylinder turbo, and it's everything you need in FD today, you know? It looks really, really cool. So you're actually going to be the wheel man. Yeah, so our goal for this car was to build an FD-spec vehicle that not necessarily is gonna get thrown into FD right away, but to go to festivals like Gridlife and such fun stuff with it, and really get the car out there and show what it can do, and proof of concept, really. And then once I feel comfortable, maybe we will take it to FD, who knows? I feel like a lot of people are maybe rushing into FD too quickly sometimes, especially if it's something like a platform that's unproven, or if it's something that's just a brand new build. There's just so many things, kinks, things to kind of work out, especially with something like this that's 100% completely custom, which we're gonna go over bit by bit right now. Let's just start off with the body. What do we have here? What did it start life as? So the body in white program from Honda Performance Development was built for racers who wanna build something from scratch, but they don't wanna necessarily buy a whole car, and they don't necessarily wanna scrape the undercoating off it. So HPD, Honda Performance Development, supplied us with a body in white chassis. We had a lot of parts to acquire at that point to get it to look to the 2020 facelift. But yeah, we just started from basic chassis, worked our way from the cage, tunnel modifications, chassis modifications to become rear wheel drive, obviously. It was a lot of work, a lot of thinking, a lot of time, a lot more time thinking than executing, really, because you gotta really plan everything out step by step, because you start cutting up a car, then you're like, oh, I have to go backwards now. The whole car is a 2020 Civic Si spec, except for our own in-house made ABS plastic Civic D spec fender flare kit. And what inspired you to kind of have these kind of flares? It's like the whole Rocket Bunny thing going on? Yeah, you know, a little bit of that, but then our rear is kind of a one-off. We did it kind of more, we did a body pull. Like we literally took a 3D render, just pulled the body out to fit where we think the wheel would fit. So we wanted a little cutaway in the back. We wanted it to be kind of Rocket Bunny-ish, but not just copying a style completely to the T. It's really, really wide. I mean, how much wider is this versus the stocks of it? Four inches per side at the farthest point of the wheel. So the actual control arms are about two and three quarters wider per side. So, but yeah, with the width and offset and everything, running a nine and a half in the front and a 10 and a half in the rear, you end up with a lot more width than on paper when we originally drew it. On top of a steering angle, it's also the fact that you could fit a lot wider wheels and tires. How much steering angle does this thing have? We have had it right around 74 degrees. We have a few modifications we're going to change and wheel offset, and we're probably going to get closer to 78 to 79 degrees. It's the evolution of drifting, you know? 79 degrees? Yeah. So if you're not doing backwards entries- Then I'm not doing it right. I'm going to be so upset. Yeah, something's broken if we're not doing backwards entries. So I really do like the look of this car. It does kind of look like a rally cross car just from first glance. And on top of that, it could be like a time attack build too in that, or more of a touring car because there's not as much downforce aero. It just has a lot of character. It's so cool. So tell me about the rear here, body-wise. Going back to the GRC cars, I really love the wing on the GRC car. So I contacted Oldsburg's OMSE and they actually had some of the wings left over and I got one from them and it was perfect. It was exactly what I wanted for the car because that's what, that wing really inspired me to build this car to a rear-wheel drive car. That whole car plus the wing, obviously. It was a cool piece I needed to have to make this, my vision come to life. And then obviously just creating the width to make everything fit and give it the look of a drift car, you know? So, but yeah, everything else is pretty much Honda. We wanted it to be true to the car itself and make sure everybody knew it was a Honda when they looked at it, you know? Not be like, what is it, you know? It looks so cool. All right, so right off of that from the outside you see kind of a special thing here. So that's the fuel filler? Yeah, so we got, Radium supplied us with one of their dry brake quick fill systems but we didn't want to just mount it traditionally inside the trunk where you have to pull the lid off and get everything separated. We wanted it to be quick and we also wanted to kind of blend into the body. So we had a 3D scan of the car done when we did the body kit. So we said, well, why don't we put the filler here but we didn't want to do a door. So we just decided to make a billet piece that's all CNC machined and bolts in from the back to fill the car. It's so cool. It looks amazing and that's kind of the thing is why not show off the cool little parts? And that idea came from kind of, if you look at the NASCARs, they have the giant dry brake there, it's kind of out in the open, E85, you know? And I was like, okay. A lot of people don't understand with drift cars, you pretty much have to fill it up every lap you take. 100%, yeah. Especially the pro drift cars. So like as soon as the guys come in for a tire change, they're adding fuel every single time because they're running a lot smaller fuel cells versus an actual traditional race car. Yeah, because we only get two laps per set of tires. So two laps per set of tires equals two gallons usually in an eight gallon tank. You don't want to have any issues, so. So tell me about the wheels. So NK gave us the new GTC01Rs. They are beautiful. I love these wheels. When they came out, I was just blown away with the new pocket design they did in here, like kind of a pocket milling and extra lightening on everything. And it just had a look that was, you know, very technical looking. I really wanted it like that, so. Just looking at it from this side, the brakes are pretty serious on this. Yes, yeah. 13 inch Wilwood's front and rear, four piston caliber front and rear, dual on the rear, obviously, drift car. We went to a vented front, a little bit heavier duty, so we can actually do hot lapping. We can also probably do some time attack if we wanted to. So let's just get this out of the way here. Let's pop the hood and see. I already see something crazy. Oh, what? So what we have there, we made an equal length. I call it medium long tube because we're shooting for a certain power band. Also what we wanted to try and do something different where a lot of four cylinder turbo manifolds, they pair them kind of a cross flow pattern. We did a spiral flow pattern. So it's pulsing in a full spiral. The idea is we're trying to get a different note out of the car, different sound. So we'll see what it sounds like, see if the proof of concept comes to reality. But that was the idea. It's really cool what you've done here. It's super clean. So tell me about the motor. So the motor is a K24A1, came from a mid 2000 CRV. Same motor we ran the S2000, never had an issue, never pulled the motor, never had one problem. Super reliable, not in Honda power for you, right? Did some trick things to this setup specifically where we isolated the motor from the subframe. So we made these billet CNC mounts that are double shear with some large half inch bolts, six of them. And that isolates. So if we have a subframe damage or whatnot, we can pull the subframe with four bolts and a steering column bolt. Wow, that's really cool. Talk about forward thinking. So how much power do you think you're gonna make in this thing? This motor exactly with that turbo and the exact package we have does 926 of the tire at 30 pounds of boost. What? 926? Yeah. What? I mean, what fuel are you running? We're on the Thunderbolt E85 fuel. We're gonna try and push this one a little harder though. The new motor with the new rods we're running, they say I'm good for 12 to 1300 horsepower. So we're gonna max it out just to see what it'll do. We won't probably run that anywhere because we won't have enough tire probably, but we're gonna try it just to see. We do run nitrous. We do run a direct port nitrous system. We just use that for our anti-lag. And we also will be kind of experimenting with an anti-lag system with our next manifold revision since now we're on drive-by-wire as well. It's kind of cool. It's like minimalist, but it's so much going on. I love how much access there is, right? So like the arms and everything here, the hub, you could see so much of everything. So tell me about the suspension right here. So we, with Olson Custom Works and I partnered up for this build. Good friend of mine. He's a CNC machinist, car enthusiast, builder. He's been building cars from companies like West Coast Customs, Hess Motorsports. He's been around the block. He's done a lot of things. So we, he took his ideas and my ideas and we've put together, this is our whole mastermind project for three months together. He developed those arms. That's unbelievable. They look so good. Fun fact about those arms. The grade of aluminum, I think it's 7150, is actually the same grade of aluminum that they use on the landing gear on the Boeing 777. So we can make it thinner, but it's stronger. Like, I love this too. Even just the camber plates, like how well-machined all of that stuff is. Same material as well throughout. The knuckle was actually designed by RTS, Race Tech Services. It was actually their BMW knuckle kit because it was almost the same geometry of what we were looking for. So we kind of used it as a modular piece and adapted to that. Very, very simple, minimalistic, like you said. And we just wanted to make it easy to work on, easy to look at, you know. So there's not going to be any more besides like an air filter here. Might be there. We're going to do probably an oil cooler and we're going to stack them, probably in a power steering cooler. And there's a fan on the front of the intercooler to blow through. So we'll kind of utilize that airflow to kind of get through all the coolers. Yeah, it's really simple. I love it. We pushed the motor so far back that we actually had our cam sensors had to be potted. So we couldn't actually plug them in. We actually had to pot wires into them and then make extensions to plug them in because we didn't have enough room. But it got our balance exactly where we wanted it. So that was a sacrifice we had to make. You've built enough drift cars to kind of like build one for yourself. Yeah. Pretty much the ultimate. Take all the bad things I've seen and make all the good things happen. You know, it's the culmination of, you know, what, almost 12 years now in this sport and building something that I wanted to build. I love it so much. Very cool. All right, so let's move to the back then. All right. I know you got a lot of crazy stuff going on in the trunk. Got your big gaping hole for your vents for your radiator. You know, this is actually not that bad though. This is kind of manageable in terms of like, it doesn't ruin the body line either. Right, right. Yeah, we were trying to keep it away from screwing up the body line, you know, trying to keep Keki Honda happy here too. We didn't do too crazy like of a tube chassis on this car because we knew it's first generation, first year. We want to just do the minimalist things to make the car functional and usable and get it out there, get testing. You know, we're not going to go straight head-to-head competition. So we're not worried about huge crash repairs and whatnot. More demo aspect, lifestyle, fun stuff for its first year. So we wanted to put all the efforts into making things that are functional and usable on the track. That being said, you know, we left factory crash beams in it, which are made of aluminum and really robust. So we're like, you know, let's just leave that. It's no point in adding some tube to make it heavier. We also remounted the radiator, obviously. It's a, you know, big 13 inch fans. It's a Honda, so you don't need a lot of cooling. This is probably three times more than the factory engine came with. You know, we got a 50 gallon per minute pump, which is 10 times bigger than the factory one it came with. Winter's quick change, you know, we got the typical, you know, FD spec big boy winter's quick change and drive shaft shop axles. Radium supplies for the eight gallon fuel cell with their surge tank. A fun thing that we did then is, you know, one of those things is like serviceability. We're always thinking about how fast we can work on things and how fast we can fix problems. So what we did was the engine of the radiator on a hinge set up down here. So it has these little mounts that are on the hinge, they're bushing. And right here, when you release this one Allen key, it rolls back and it's tethered by the dash 16 and line. So it won't smash into the back here, but then we can access the fuel cell with six bolts and pull everything apart. Tell me about the rear end set up because obviously this never came rear wheel drive. Like what did you do? Like, did you make a new subframe? So it's a factory Civic subframe. We decided to keep it kind of within the FD rule book. This one would actually not pass FD spec because of the way we had to do it. But we tried to keep it as close to that rule book to follow just in case it did go that way. And we knew that we didn't have to go crazy on redesigning things. Right, so in terms of the cages? Everything, everything is FD spec except for the subframe. Yeah, but like you were saying, this is like proof of concept, something that you kind of have to build to kind of see if it'll even work. It's more of a passion project for me, this one. It's been one of those cars where you're like, I gotta do it. I gotta do it before somebody else does because to me it's like a no brainer. Like it has to be done. So, I mean, what about the transmission then? G-Force GSR, Andrew's internals, pretty standard FD stuff. Triple seven and a quarter clutch. And then driveshaft shop, carbon fiber driveshaft. All the typical stuff you see at every pro level FD car. So this is kind of where really a lot of the magic happens in terms of making it a rear wheel drive car, right? Yeah, this tunnel was a few weeks of staring at it before I actually started cutting into it because I really wanted to make sure it was exactly what I wanted. Still be within the guidelines of the FD rule book of cutting away it, but also making sure that I have enough room to do what I need to do underneath the car, aka packaging, transmission, the exhaust system, everything else, lines. All the fluid lines are running up to the top of the tunnel. Having lots of room between the transmission that we get bolts out and be easy to work on, so. This is pretty cool. I like your setup here with the e-brake, how far back that slave cylinder is. You just wanted to have more, I always hated bumping my elbow on the reservoirs right next to the shifter. It just cleans it up a little bit, less eyesore. Makes it so I can put the seat a little closer, tighter to the tunnel. Just packaging. I just wanted everything to be clean, simple and easy to get at. New fun thing, we have a lithium ion battery behind the passenger seat from Antigravity. It's their jumpstart technology. It's a five pound battery with like 900 cranking amps. Wow, it's so few buttons and so few, like that's kind of the thing is with your builds, it just screams minimalist and how clean everything is. Like all the zip ties are cut and just the interior is all finished and sparkling, you can eat off of it pretty much. The cage is tied in so well. Yeah, minimalist and simple, but effective and functional. My philosophy in cage building is, I want the driver to be a hot dog in a hallway. I don't want the cage bumping into the driver. I don't want anything protruding in the driver's way, bumping elbows, anything like that. Pushing everything, the maximum around you, the biggest sphere around the driver is better. Another thing we did was we went to a PDM this year. Rywire Motorsports. He just supplied me with his black box, 30 channel PDM. So there's no fuses, no relays through the whole car. AEM's new flat panel carbon fiber display. It's really thin carbon fiber composite body. It's really cool little piece. The pedal box area, everything is just so finished and so clean. I love all of this so much. And I love that you still have the stock dash. It's a 2018 dash actually, but yeah, it's just two little bolts. There's one like right below you there and one right here that dash comes out in two bolts, done. I just love it. I love it so much. It's so finished. And that's kind of the thing I love about your builds. It's like no stone unturned, not one thing untouched. You touched pretty much everything on this car. It was one of those builds where like, I wanted to make sure I hit every check on the list. You know, there's no, we didn't think about this. We didn't think about that. And I think literally we spent three months, four months, maybe just thinking about everything before we started executing anything. But that also leads up to being able to execute things in a fashion where you're more efficient because you've thought about it so much, you've engineered it so well that now it's just literally pouring out of you into the car. A lot of people will start building things and then have to go back and do revisions where we've thought about it so much, it's exhausted. We know it's gonna work. So what kind of ECU are you running? AEM Infinity. We've been with the AEM Infinity program since 2013 when they kind of got started. So we know it so well, it's like, I don't ever want to change unless, you know, there was something else that was better, but I think it's the best for what we do. So versatile of a computer. So, you know, like we can put a GM throttle body on a, you know, Honda motor and not have an issue. It's like, there's all kinds of things you can do with it. It's just, that's what I call the infinity, so. All right, well, I think we've pretty much went over a little bit of everything. And for those of you guys who are gonna comment, hey, take it to Build Bio. We did a Build Bio just now, okay? We talked about everything, all right? But he will take it to the burn yard and he will smoke those tires for you guys. That'll be a really cool video in itself. I just love it. I love, this is what I love. I love people pushing the limit. Hot rodding new age. Do yourself a favor, guys. Google 2005 Formula Drift Irwindale Finals. And just to see what drift cars were back then versus now. Forget about it. It's completely different. Being there, I mean, I've been there since 2005. I've been part of FD, you know, working on teams. And like you just said, Larry, it's a whole new level now. The builds are crazier. The drivers are more nuts. And it's just, I don't see it stopping anytime soon. So I'm excited. All right, so he has to, so Chris has to take this to the show right now. Yeah, so we got to get going soon. Yeah, right now. So we're going to actually help him push it onto the trailer and then we're going to keep giving you guys updates from the show and from our pre-shoots. It's going to be a crazy show. So thanks for watching. And that's a wrap. Oh yeah, that's the shot. Yes.