'00 Acura Integra GSR
The car on these pages is no longer. Dead, kaput, shit-canned, flat-lined. Now, before you get all nostalgic and teary-eyed, know that this isn't the reason we're telling you all this. Life and death are never black and white in the automotive world; anyone who's pieced together-or parted out-a car on the used market can attest to that. Hai Le has been on both sides of that coin, and while he's the man who created, enjoyed, and destroyed this silver stallion, he'll be the first to laugh off its unpleasant demise. Life, death, going fast, and going for broke are all to be expected when you live at the pace he does.
Hai has built his life by managing what happens post mortem in the automotive world. Think of him as an automotive undertaker/mad scientist, and his mortuary-Importwerkz Autobody N Paint in Stockton, CA-as the automotive equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. "I was always into cars," begins Hai. "All my older friends were into them when I was younger, so I was around the parts market from day one." Even before he could drive he could wrench. At 16 Hai began learning bodywork and paint from his mentors, and by the age of 18, he noticed a lucrative business opportunity: Scavenging parts from the dead, and creating monsters to flip for monster profits. Kind of. "I started out buying wrecked cars and pretty much stocking them," he says. OK, so maybe not monsters. "But Hondas were the big sellers, and after fixing and selling about a dozen of them, I started learning how to make money off customization." Muwahah! Monsters! "I've owned and built-up pretty much every Honda except for a DA Integra," he tells. "An EM1 Si, turbo '98 Integra GSR, a couple CRXs, lots of EGs . . . you name it." And somewhere, amidst those long, lonely nights, like the good doctor, he decided to create himself a companion-one with a slightly more radical build than the rest.
He had the knowledge, the facility, the connex, the cash . . . and in late 2006, it was the discarded, faded red shell of a wrecked '00 Integra GSR that caught his eye. "As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be perfect," he says. When we say this thing was stripped, rest assured-it was. But not quite enough for Hai. He stripped it down to the bare shell, knocked out the bodywork within a few days, painted the chassis and engine bay S2000 Silverstone Metallic inside and out, and began the reassembly process.
"Almost everything on this car, I bought used," he says, shamelessly. Hours of scouring eBay and Craigslist, and Honda-tech and NWP4life forums netted him a complete B18C5 engine and transmission, and a full JDM Integra Type R front-end and interior conversion before even taking possession of the car. Within a week he was adding Ground Control coilovers and Koni Yellows inside the wheelwells, and then stuffing them with +20mm 16x7.5 and 16x8 Sprint Hart CPR wheels he found a deal on from an Infinit Wheels rep in L.A.-five-lug, of course, which necessitated the ITR brake conversion front and rear. "The wheels were aggressive for the time," he notes. "I didn't want to get too crazy, being that this was going to be my street car." Good reasoning. We don't see what about that made him want to turbocharge it, but whatevs.