By definition, sport compact tuners have respect for the understated and overlooked. In contrast to owners/builders of traditional muscle and sports cars who seek to improve the performance of already potent platforms, we welcome the challenge of making performers out of cars that were never intended to be such. Sure, there are some imported, factory-packed big power exceptions, but what gives our movement its allure and separates us from the masses of "traditional" gearheads, is our willingness to craft our first place finishers from gas-sippers and grocery-getters that were designed to go from point A to point B unnoticed, and in half the time we expect them to. Accomplishing more of anything is always admirable, but doing it with less is even more so, and welcoming that challenge is the defining characteristic of an import tuner.
The vast amount of compacts on the road today, coupled with the growing popularity of the tuner movement, presents us with an additional, ever-growing obstacle in building our cars: staying original. Countless examples of our cars' most prolific styles of build have been thrust into the limelight over the years, and what was cutting edge only a few years ago is now routinely duplicated. While this presents many options for building our cars tastefully, doing so in a unique and influential manner is a task becoming continually more daunting. Originality, it seems, is the key ingredient in making one's self an inspiring sport compact tuner, but even originality is only useful alongside good taste, and a recognition of hidden potential-qualities that only come with experience.
Hailing from the eye of the modern-day automotive customization storm, Long Beach, Calif., native J.P. Cao has experienced the forefront of the most influential sport compact builds over the years first hand. Now 22 years of age, J.P. originally purchased this '95 Civic DX in his high school years while looking for a simple means of transportation. "I actually bought it from a LBPD officer who had modified it a little and was pressured into getting rid of it by his superiors," recalls J.P., "I knew a little bit about cars at the time, and knew Civics were the new things to get into."
Months after purchasing his stock Frost White, single cam-powered DX hatch, J.P. had the Civic sprayed Championship White, swapped in a B18, changed the suspension in favor of a scarce Japanese manufacturer and added equally rare JDM accessories throughout. It was one of five different builds J.P. would undergo with the car and marked a time when the JDM craze was just about to blow up. "When the whole JDM thing happened, we were some of the first to bring the style to the mainstream," he explains. "That's when I realized there was more to be gained by doing something different. Today, anyone can do what we did back then, but being the first to do it meant something."
In the years that followed, many imitated the builds they saw coming out of Southern California. With a determination not to follow their beaten paths, J.P. began to realize that so many of these cookie-cutter tuner cars lacked what he felt to be a key ingredient in car culture: personality. "You could look at so many cars and not have any idea what the owners are like," he explains. "I decided I want my car to reflect as much of my life as possible, and show where I've come from." Life in Long Beach taught J.P. a value of honor and pride in personal accomplishments that fewer and fewer of us seem to realize in the modern day. "In my community, nothing is free. If you want to be respected, you have to earn it through hard work and determination," he explains, "and when you succeed in doing something the hard way, you have even more of a reason to hold your head high. Once I learned that, I knew I wanted to build a car that could be an example of how great things can be accomplished with what most people take for granted." It might sound a bit contradictory to veterans of the scene, with the Civic serving as the traditional icon car of the import movement, but J.P. decided to hold onto his EG because he felt the platform had become under-appreciated. "Tuners are afraid to build Civics anymore," he explains, "because they feel nothing new can be done with them. I wanted to show that there can be."
While J.P. decided that much of what he added to the Civic over the years had to go, he elected to keep the LS motor for the same reason he kept the car altogether, "I thought about doing a VTEC B-series, or a K, but I wanted to prove there's no reason to count out the LS." He did yank his previously stock swap out, though, and sent it to a close family friend, Alex at Sheepy Built in Long Beach, to be prepped for boost. Wanting to keep his car as streetable as possible, J.P. decided to keep the stock rods, but had Sheepy bore the block .25mm over to allow for a slight bump in displacement via oversized Arias pistons. With the crank knife-edged to better balance the lighter slugs, attention was focused on the LS's cylinder head so that its fluid dynamics might rival that of its VTEC cousins. Sheepy had a set of one-off cams machined, ported the head to complement them, machined the OEM valves to three angles each and added a set of custom valve springs to ensure their function remains consistent at high rpms. A fresh OEM headgasket and a set of ARP headstuds were added to ensure the new plant held all the power it produced.
When it came time to address its driveline reinforcement, J.P. went to great lengths to ensure his EG remained as streetable as its powerplant. "The LS gearing is great for a boosted daily driver, but worn syncros are a big problem in older trannies," he explains, on having Sheepy disassemble the five-speed LS tranny to have the syncros carbon coated for added durability during hard shifts. J.P. also understood that a stiffer clutch and lighter rotational mass can better transfer energy to the wheels, so he elected to replace the stock flywheel with a lighter StreetLite unit from ACT and couple it with one of the company's street car-friendly sprung six-puck clutch kits.