Translation by Kenta Ogawara (Tokyodrive.tv)
You're chillin' at the tower of your local road-course track at the end of a long day of testing. Your car already packed and ready for the drive home, you're watching the field of time-attackers and drifters take their last few runs. Everyone's feeling a little loose-even the RWD grip guys are entering the turns extra hot and throttling through some intentional oversteer, playing the drifters at their own game. And just after they do, down the straight comes a dark-colored Civic hatch. No roll cage or crazy aero, nothing to give it the appearance of a serious track car. Like its RWD brethren, it, too, enters the approaching corner with excess speed, and right when you expect its front wheels to break traction at turn-in-its noob driver locking up the brakes and plowing into the outside wall-you hear a clutch-kick, and the Civic's tires erupt in a fury of spinning, smoking, squealing awesomeness. But not the front tires. It's the rears powering all that chaos as the Civic's tail whips around, its front wheels turning full-lock, guiding it sideways through the apex. A Civic is drifting. Sweet mother of Li'l Wayne, what on earth is going on?
Whereas American drifting has gone the "bigger, meaner, tougher" route, building ever more intimidating machines with bigger engines and glorifying the rebellious, outlaw spirit of those who pursue it, the Japanese perspective has always praised doing more with less, celebrated the triumph of the hardworking underdog, and reserved a special place in its collective heart for all things crazy and off-the-wall. We can't think of a better example of those last few ideals than this RWD-converted Civic.
Its owner, Daisuke Nakai, lives in Tokyo, but the man who got his hands dirty was mechanic Masanori Ida, based in the prefecture of Gunma, situated deep in the megalopolis' Northwestern outskirts (read: the sticks). A humble man of few words, "I wanted to create a legend," is all Masanori-san cared to comment on why he decided to undertake the project. But don't let that lead you to expect typical Japanese refinement and attention to detail from this particular build. Don't think its RWD conversion was planned for years and carried out over months of meticulous perfection. The truth is that the process by which it was hacked together is as backwardly glorious as the concept of a RWD Civic itself-love it or hate it. Check out the sidebar of the Civic's modified transmission tunnel on the next page; it's constructed from scavenged Nissan oil pans. That's only the beginning.
So, how exactly does one convert a Civic from front-wheel-drive to RWD? The preferred method seems to be either to shoehorn an LS1 engine and trans into the bay and a solid axle into the rear end (read: tons of fabrication), or swap over select parts of Honda's Real Time 4WD drivetrain and suspension from a Civic Shuttle (wagon), Integra ZXi, or Ferio RTSi, and adapt it to your Honda engine of choice (slightly less work). Learning that Nakai dropped a wrecked AP1 S2000 off at Masanori-san's shop along with his soon-to-be-converted EG4, the logical assumption would be that most of the roadster parts were adapted to fit the hatch. That's not the case. Masanori-san swapped in the S2K's F20C engine and six-speed trans, and threw out almost everything else.