"Are you sure you want it?"
It was a question I'd heard many times before, just not in this particular context. Once, when offering someone money for their beat-up, blown-motor, rat-shit Miata (their words). Another time, years before, when agreeing to a one-inch-punch competition with a much larger friend. Occasionally from strippers, always from bartenders, and of course that one time I offered to babysit a friend's cat for "a few days," so she could secretly relocate to Florida and stop answering my calls (sage advice: don't offer random favors to chicks simply because they're cute). But never from the owner of a car I'd just offered to feature in Import Tuner.
"You do know this is the most hated car on the forums, right?" the owner asked. I did not know that. And once I did, it made me want it even more. You see, we at Import Tuner have a strict policy of almost always featuring the most performance-oriented street and track rides the world over. But we do realize that what's popular isn't always what's functional, so we reserve a special place on our pages for those cars that people like, but we can't exactly explain why. Kind of like Chenn Masauan's '00 Honda Civic DX.
Of course, Carter liked the car because "it's trendy," in his words. "That's what all the kids are into." But that doesn't mean we all agreed. Some hated it-partly for the same reason Carter liked it-and the rest of us, well . . . we saw a confused vehicle: slammed to the ground, glaring-red interior, wheels poking in at all the wrong angles, and an engine bay presentation seemingly conceptualized by fans of Alice in Wonderland, acid, and the chess club. "Confused," yet interesting, not only for how great it was at pissing people off, but because through the hood of that Looking Glass bay and behind those broken-looking wheels lurked genuine performance mods.
Chenn would like us to set the record straight: The broken-wheel look was a complete accident, one made in the midst of building his car for time-attack duty. "They're Sprint Hart CP-Rs that I bought off a friend of mine. I didn't realize they modified until after I bought them." The two-piece Sprints had been separated by SoCal forum presence Opossum Jenkins, and their spokes were rejoined with widened barrels, resulting in a 16x8, +10mm offset wheel up front, and rears weighing in at a massive 16x9.5 +0mm. "I didn't have time to get new wheels, so the only thing I could do was stretch some tires around them, modify my Blox camber kit in the rear, and camber them in as much as possible." And why didn't Chenn have time to re-barrel the Sprints or get new wheels altogether? Because he built the car in seven days.
Chenn's story with this Civic began back in 2005, when he first spotted it sitting in his neighbor's driveway, gutted and perpetually awaiting modification. "It just sat there for years. The owner never had time for it. I kept asking him to sell it to me, and then in 2009 he finally did." Chenn's first move was to strip it down completely, stitch-weld the chassis, remove all the sound deadening material and undercoating, and sand it inside and out in preparation for Top Secret Gold paint. "I've owned a bunch of cars, including a turbo drag Civic that Junior from JDM Theory started back in the day," he tells. "But I really wanted to build this one for time-attack." He rolled the fenders as needed to fit an aggro set of BBSs, and while the car was sent off to the paint shop, he got started on the engine.
The old car's turbo setup was cool, but this time around Chenn wanted to stay N/A. A JDM B18C Type R engine was sourced and rebuilt with 13:1 Cosworth pistons, Eagle rods, B16B cams, Supertech valves, Skunk2 springs, a custom three-angle valve job, and an ITR header and exhaust, among other supporting mods, before it was Crome-tuned by Derek Parris to make 218 whp. But unlike a lot of die-hard performance guys who really don't care about trivialities like having a clean bay, Chenn minded the details. "The checkered paint was a dare," he explains. He was originally going to do battleship gray, but when he started coming up with random ideas just for fun, a friend bet him that he couldn't do checkers. "He said, 'no way. It's impossible!' I painted the whole bay white, broke out the tape and black paint, and proved him wrong." But was it easy? "It was a pain in the ass!" he says. At least the valve cover was easy: Chenn sent it out to Opossum and got it back a few days later dipped in 24-karat gold.