Are you adult enough for an R-rated car? And are you young enough to appreciate one? Honda hope so. There have already been Type R versions of the Integra and Accord. And now here comes a new, fruitier Civic - a high-performance hatchback or, as some of us prefer to think of them, four-wheel boom-box.
The "R" stands for "racing" - and also for "rather more fast than you really need to go". As the advert for the Type R says: "Bye bye, GTi." And hello speed cameras and points on your licence.
The Civic Type R is the product of a familiar kind of makeover in which a company takes a natty, low-key, likeable runabout with no pretensions at all to being a snorting road-eater, and renders it amusingly yob-friendly by the addition of a handful of pertinent features. Typically, the car suddenly sprouts alloys as high as an elephant's eye. Out goes the sober aluminium radiator grille and in comes a panel of black mesh, suggesting the air duct at a high-security correctional facility. And the bodywork emerges girdled in a set of low, go-faster skirts.
All these fetching modifications can be checked off straight away in the case of the Civic, which is alloyed, meshed and girdled beyond your wildest dreams. Or indeed your widest dreams. There are new Tarmac-level bumpers at the front and the rear, an enlarged roof spoiler that could almost double as an awning for camping purposes, and what Honda's literature refers to, fabulously, as a "side-sill garnish" - nothing to do with the pointless, bin-bound sprays of lettuce and cress served with baked potatoes in pubs, but rather an additional, bevelled panel bracketing the underside of the door, with a less than discreet "Type R" logo on it.
So far, so wide. And the width continues inside, with the white dials, the sideplate-sized steering wheel and the chill-beneath-the-palm alloy gear fob. The seats are clad in mock suede with red stitching and form a passable impersonation of a pair of Cher's trousers, circa 1968. They hug the body much as bears are reputed to and include an additional side-bolster at shoulder height to reduce the possibility of tipping yourself out of the door at sharp corners. The red stitching continues on the leather-clad steering wheel, for additional purchase and reassurance during the more extreme acts of acceleration. (Some hot-hatch owners only feel they've been for a drive if the shape of the steering wheel's stitching is embedded in their fingers afterwards.)
Extreme acceleration is definitely a possibility, and perhaps even inevitable. The 2-litre engine thrums impatiently after ignition and comes attached to a six-speed gearbox, which is the motoring world's equivalent of Spinal Tap's "all the way up to 11". Honda have put some more struts in to make the car more rigid than the common or garden Civic, and the suspension is lockjaw firm. You'll feel the thud of the road beneath you, possibly a thrill for drivers with Formula One fantasies, but not necessarily a pleasure shared by passengers.
Six gears does seem like over-provision, especially for contemporary, traffic-clogged urban drivers who think it a remarkable day if they manage to get out of third. Honda insist, though, that the sixth gear here isn't merely a cruising mode for fuel-economy purposes, but a valuable driving tool, forcing the engine forwards to new levels of white-knuckle performance. And I agree with them. At any rate, that seemed to be the case on the two occasions when I was lucky with the traffic lights and actually got my Civic into sixth.
However many of the gears you use, there's no denying their easy proximity to one another - a mere brush of the stick apart, in true competition style. Yet the gearstick is still where it is on the regular Civic, poking out of the dashboard in a faintly rude manner - a strong reminder of the car's original ambitions and of the quiet family man beneath the boy-racer. (There are further traces of this, perhaps, in the way the car flashes up to 60mph, but doesn't drain the petrol tank every 500 metres. This is a performance car designed to appeal to people who worry about petrol consumption.)
Is it worth pointing out that the boot seems remarkably capacious for a little car? Probably not, given that the average Type R owner is either going to want to leave the back empty, for fear of impeding the car's performance, or is going to stuff it with sub-woofers in the hope of sending out bass signals at bowel-threatening frequencies.
Apparently, the 15-year-old who piloted that Cessna aircraft at the weekend into an office block in Florida had an ambition to drive a Honda Civic. Make of that what you will. Honda imagine this tweaked version of a proven favourite will appeal mostly to purist petrol-heads and mention in particular "those who race competitively several times a year". But that hardly narrows the field. Anyone involved in taking children to school in the morning races competitively several times a week. Is the Civic Type R your kind of car? How much of a hurry are you in?
