Above and Beyond - 1996 Honda Civic Turbo
Commissioned To Transform This '96 Civic Into A 750hp Drag Racecar, Je Import Performance Took The Project To Even Greater Heights, Smashing The Target By Over 100 Ponies. James Evans Of Je Gives Us The Back Story On How The Shop Hit Its Marks With A Combo Of Prelude Power
A Fat Turbo, And A Bottle Of N2o
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Many of us have known the pain of paying for shoddy
workmanship. Ask around-horror stories of consumers getting ripped off by shops are not uncommon among automotive types, especially where engine work is involved. Indeed, that's how this 1996 Civic DX hatchback ended up on the doorstep of JE Import Performance in Baltimore, Md. The owner got a raw deal with his H-series swap and turned to JE for the assist. JE was only too happy to oblige.
Now 12 months, $30K, and countless dyno hours deep into the combo race/street car, the Civic is just about set to be unleashed on the world of drag racing. We caught up with shop owner and project head James Evans, who gave us the quick and dirty version of how this hatch came to be.
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Honda Tuning:: I know the owner of this Civic wants to remain anonymous for the story, but when he brought the car to you, did he have any idea what he wanted done?
James Evans: The owner lives in North Carolina and someone down there did a really poor job at putting the motor in; it was barely running. He brought the car to us on a trailer and basically told us to get this thing running. We found a bunch of problems that required the motor coming out, and it kind of snowballed from there. Before we knew it, he was asking for 750hp, and we went above and beyond that.
We've had the car for a year, and recently the owner told us he now wants us to build him a 1000hp turbo K-series in another hatchback. The guy completely blows me away, but I'm not going to complain, you know?
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HT:: Was he basically rubber-stamping every one of your suggestions? JE::Yeah. Along the way he'd check in, and we'd come up with ideas. As soon as he decided he wanted to make it into a pretty fast drag car, we immediately told him what he's going to have to do for a turbo and stuff like that. The fuel system was a bit of a learning process on this car because everything we tried wasn't enough. Because of the nitrous and amount of boost we're running, we ended up going with a monster 1,000hp setup just to get enough fuel.
HT:: What was the issue you were running into that you had to come up with something so elaborate?
JE:: Just fuel starvation, even on the dyno. At high RPM, the pump couldn't keep up. We went through the highest flowing Walbro and Bosch pumps. Then the lines weren't big enough to carry sufficient fuel. We ended up switching to an Aeromotive pump, which uses a -10 AN port-most guys that are running over 700 horsepower are using lines roughly that size, especially with nitrous. The nitrous needs that extra burst of fuel.
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