My first time in Los Angeles, I only wanted to see the canyons. This wasn’t my first time, but we began in the canyons anyway.

This story originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of Road & Track.

The pavement skitters over dusty ridges, past pines and glimpses of the basin below, 80-mph skidpad corners and tight slow ones almost too steep to walk. Asphalt ribboning out from the city and ending at some national forest or dam or God knows what else, L.A. yawning out beneath you like a sheet on a bed. You feel both in the place and not, simultaneously leashed to that sprawling mass and gone.

Nate Hassler

It was my Integra. A 2001 Type R, 130,000 miles, sold new in Kansas City. The first owner, a woman named Jean, told me that she bought the car because it was cute. Honda built the thing as a serious homologation special, welded body reinforcements and an 8400-rpm four like a bag of bees, but Jean said its face made her laugh. So she went with her gut and wrote a check. Then she took care of the car for years—no crashes, rust, repaints, or mods. Even the stock radio.

All of which, by extension, made me go with my gut. A decade and a half after she wrote a check, I wrote a check, and I thanked her, and Jean’s Integra became my Integra. Shortly after that, I pulled it out of my garage in Seattle and drove to California.

There is one more thankable light here. To the mid-1990s Acura Integra—basically a brawny Civic, and sold as a Honda in Japan—a Honda chief engineer named Shigeru Uehara added that gem of an engine, a wing and air dam, a close-ratio five-speed, a helical limited-slip. Then he deleted some sound deadening and tweaked the suspension until the 2639-pound result batted through corners, neutral and manic. It remains one of the most live-wire front-drivers ever built.

America saw this piece of work as an Acura, from Honda’s luxury division. Just 3823 road examples found homes here, a smaller distribution than BMW’s vaunted first-generation M3. The car quickly became a tuner weapon, a three-letter mononym (ITR), a frequently stolen vault of Civic hop-up parts. And a machine regularly flung into ditches by drivers unfamiliar with how you have to treat a front-drive car when some genius engineers it to clock a corner like bejesus.

The interior is loud, the ride flinty. The naturally aspirated engine displaces only 1.8 liters but makes 195 hp. Hypershort gearing means 80 mph is 4400 rpm in fifth. The whole thing is single-serving, aimed at short trips.

But oh, the canyons.

Nate Hassler

Our shores have officially seen only one other Type R Honda: the front-drive, 306-hp Civic Type R, sold since 2017. That car is some 500 pounds porkier than an ITR and styled like a manga about indigestion. Like most modern performance cars, it is also turbocharged, mildly laggy, and complex.

Maybe you prefer your small hatchbacks fat and complicated. Some people are only okay with those qualities while flinging over a decreasing-radius yump on some hairy back road with the inside wheels in the air and the outside ones hanging out in a transcendent little velvety side-slip. At which point it is entirely possible to forget the rest of the world and simply feel like some kind of solid-gold hero, no matter what you are driving and whether or not it weighs, by old-Integra standards, more than a herd of elephants on Sunday.

So this magazine called Honda and borrowed a Civic Type R for an experiment. And into the hills we went.

Who knew the same basic idea, done twice, could be so far apart from itself? The two machines have little in common—mostly that side-slip trick at the limit and the customary delicate-notchy Honda shifter. The Integra’s hydraulic steering is more talkative and granular than the Civic’s electrically assisted rack. The new Honda has high flanks and shadowy insides; the old one is all sun and dash at your hips. Rocks ping off the Integra’s thin floors and echo through the car. In the Civic, you hear little but hushed wind noise and anonymous engine drone.

Nate Hassler

That motor is fine, as turbo fours go, but it feels like lost plot. The Civic spits torque in one fat wave, its digitally managed peak stretching from 2500 to 4500 rpm. The Integra is a low-speed weenie by comparison, sharper in throttle response but relatively devoid of grunt. The Acura famously uses Honda’s first-generation VTEC system—a second set of cam lobes optimized for high rpm, their followers engaged by solenoid. For the first two-thirds of the tach, the Integra might as well be asleep. But above six grand, it churns out a creamy smack of power and enough intake honk to choke a goose.

That noise is the difference in a nutshell. If the Integra didn’t exist, the Civic would be a revelation. It fire-hoses pace and wants you awake. But the Acura is shouty and good nervous. Where the new car is all suspension compliance and whispered flattery, the old one wants you to believe that your unstoppable genius is the only thing keeping you both out of a tree.

Ironically, while the ITR is generally seen as a peak of a golden age, the Civic’s tuning philosophy is more traditional Honda. The American Honda Motor Company opened for business in an L.A. storefront in 1959, but its founder, Soichiro Honda, had been in manufacturing since 1947. His early products carried a distinct stream of enthusiastic pragmatism, a cheery reflection of the belief that you shouldn’t have to understand a high- performance machine in order to own and maintain one.

The point was almost egalitarian—make neat experiences accessible for ordinary people, Honda felt, and they’ll get more than they expect and want to come back.

Plus, he just loved cars and driving, and who can argue with that?



Honda

American Honda is now based in the L.A. suburb of Torrance, but the company’s original home, at 4077 Pico Boulevard, still stands. There isn’t much to see, but the ITR found its way there anyway, after the canyons, on the principle that a lack of gift shop does not invalidate a desire to rip through an intersection at the top of first gear because you want to hear brassy intake yell echo off historically significant walls.

By the mid-1950s, Honda wanted to expand outside Japan. He and his managing director, Takeo Fujisawa, began market surveys in Europe, for Honda’s motorcycles and cars; he sent Kihachiro Kawashima, his 39-year-old sales manager, on a survey of North America.

Kawashima visited the United States, but he came back unsettled. The place would be too hard, he told Fujisawa—the country was too focused on cars, not yet accepting of bikes, and Honda was then bike-centric, in no position to build an automotive lineup that might work in the States.

Fujisawa went quiet for a moment. “On second thought,” he said, “let’s do America.” If the company wasn’t a hit there, he reasoned, the rest of the world would never come.

Automotive history is rife with optimism, but the Pico moment is striking—coming to America in the middle of a midcentury boom, trying to convince a proud people to buy your work when their economy was bed-rocked on buying from home. All at a time when the nation mostly associated Asian culture with nasty stereotype and a deep-seated sense of Other.

Still, Kawashima shipped off to California, founding Honda’s first overseas outpost with little more than a few bikes and a healthy dose of self-doubt. Inauspicious, as beginnings go.

To say nothing of the space he found to call home. The Pico building has a footprint smaller than the average modern McDonald’s. It hasn’t changed much; you can tell what once was, but the building currently houses a health-care clinic, and the original street-front windows are walled over. American Honda, on the other hand, now sells around 1.6 million cars and trucks every year. Which is the sort of change that happens when you gain a reputation for making a reliable, affordable, relatively cheery anything that takes a long time to fall apart.

Nate Hassler

I parked the Acura at a meter out front and crossed the street to get a better view. The Type R looked small and happy there, dwarfed by passing SUVs, in the way that cars with mouthy bumpers always seem to be smiling.

Torrance came next. And another inauspicious setting—an unmarked warehouse, in an office park near a drainage canal, a few blocks from the freeway. In this space, Honda runs its American Honda Collection Hall (AHCH). It’s little more than a big room, and closed to the public, but the facility’s plain white walls hold 51 museum-grade automobiles, from unrestored Indy cars to a near-perfect Phoenix yellow ITR originally used for brochure photography.

There are many reasons to be in that building. I walked right by most of them, to a far corner of the room, and found myself under a lift, staring at a rear anti-roll bar the size of a baseball bat.

Nate Hassler

From 1997 to 2002, the SCCA World Challenge T2 driver’s championship was dominated by one badge. In a cutthroat era of a cutthroat series, over 57 starts, Integra Type Rs landed an astonishing 16 wins, six driver’s titles, three manufacturer’s titles, and 39 top-five finishes.

The car on that lift was part of it—simple, diabolically effective, run by the Wisconsin team RealTime, and driven by a pro named Pierre Kleinubing. His name is still on the windshield. I watched that exact tub race on TV in high school. I long ago knew it from pictures. That anti-roll bar was a RealTime modification, passing through holes cut in the trunk, for geometry and packaging. Front-drive race cars tend to like a lot of rear roll stiffness; this wasn’t so much a fresh solution as a clever execution of an obvious one.

Thirty minutes later, when I pulled myself from under the RealTime car and looked around, it occurred to me that the hall was basically one big tribute to that process. Tiny old Accords that comfortably held four adults. Snappy, tight shift linkages in cars that had no business being fun to drive but were anyway. Paper-thin panel gaps from a time when Detroit couldn’t do paper-thin anything. The surprise lay in how uncommon the room felt. As with old Toyotas, nice old Hondas are perpetually rare. People buy the cars and squeeze them of use, then wake one day to find the things spent, not worth enough to rebuild. The curse of ordinary nobility.

I said something like this to the AHCH’s curator, a retired Honda employee named David Heath. He smiled gently, gesturing at the cars.

“Many were donated by employees. It says something about the company, I guess. They just keep coming.”

Nate Hassler

It can be difficult to picture a time when they didn’t. The first car Honda brought here was the 1970 N600, a two-cylinder hatchback that sold like used socks. But a few years later, during a national fuel crisis, the company popped out the 1975 Civic CVCC—a larger, impeccably built four-cylinder hatch that passed federal emissions standards without a catalytic converter. The world’s engineers raised a collective eyebrow, then took notes.

The pattern continued. The first US-built Accord, assembled in Ohio in 1982, has been hailed as one of the most perfectly resolved family sedans in history. Almost a decade after that, the first NSX recalibrated the supercar industry, proving that absurd performance didn’t require constant maintenance or high cost of repair. The years since have seen Ohio Accords deemed worthy of export to Japan and a second NSX (the current car) entrusted to Ohioans for design and build. Honda is now one of the largest exporters of American-made vehicles, full stop.

Call it all a charming reminder of this country’s urge to nourish the better idea. And, like the hall, a reflection of one of the happy by products of living in a nation founded by immigrants: We’ll weave anything into the fabric of this place if it seems to jibe with our ideals.

And on that note, in one final stop, I went to find a piece of The Fast and the Furious. I was 20 when that movie came out, in 2001—a southern kid, reading Sport Compact Car and R&T, watching the coast from afar. Los Angeles speed culture felt impossibly foreign, a distant world of sunset light and tuner shops on every corner. And in the middle of that arrived this consciously absurd film, a live-action cartoon of California’s import-drag-racing culture. Its star, Vin Diesel, hijacks semi trucks with modified cars while operating a small convenience store. An Integra shows up. There are nitrous-oxide jokes. Explosions predominate.

If that sounds stupid, that’s because it is. I hated the thing for being Hollywood inaccurate while also loving its ridiculousness. It was a letter from a place I desperately wanted more of, in any form, regardless of the message. It meant something to me, though I’m still not sure what.

So I felt compelled to Google the address of the store that stood in for Diesel’s market, near L.A.’s Echo Park. A short drive later, there it was: a small, siding-covered bodega, in that old-L.A. pastiche, where you can’t tell if the walls went up in the 1920s or last week. There was a deli counter in back, just like in the movie. The older gentleman behind it eyed me funny when I took a picture, but not so funny as to suggest that people in brightly colored cars didn’t occasionally drive up and photograph themselves while asking about the tuna sandwiches.

Nate Hassler

As I got in the car to leave, a family arrived in a small SUV. They parked across the street, tumbled out, and began taking pictures. One of the kids, a boy way too young to have seen F&F in theaters, pointed at the Integra and gibbered.

“Type R!”

The parents, undistracted, continued taking selfies. I had to chuckle at the parallel: A movie showcases a fake kind of car culture. People who saw the film visit bits of that fakery and in the process accidentally run into a rare real piece of said culture, but the set dressing ends up being more interesting. Unless, of course, you are the sort of person who probably spends too much time thinking about cars, wondering why no one seems to get you.

Short version: Hi, kid, I get you.

As coda, I notched the Acura into gear and drove 120 miles south to San Diego, watching the sunset from I-5 traffic. My friend Carl Nelson, a BMW tech in La Jolla, had a set of Japanese-market Integra Type R seats in his shop. Carl had found the seats on Craigslist—they were half the reason I drove to California in the first place. Home-sale Type Rs wore neat Recaros with fat bolsters and grippy fabric. American ITRs got a boring version of the standard Integra chair.

Leave it to the Japanese to fit a hot-rod Civic with buckets nice enough that a BMW guy would think they’d look good in an M3. Leave it to California to rock Japanese-market car parts in the local classifieds. Carl offered me the seats on long-term loan, because he’s just that kind of guy. After a few hours on the freeway, I walked into his office and said hello. Then I spent a few minutes taking the seats apart, Jenga-fitting the backs and squabs into the Acura’s trunk. The hatch shut with a hollow, solid thunk.

I had a few minutes to kill before heading out, so I lit up my phone and sent the browser to Craigslist. My thumbs keyed “Honda” into the search, almost reflex.

Pages of results popped up. Mostly rust-free and high-mile, no winters to eat them to pieces. I looked into the street and saw Integras and Civics and Accords tootling through traffic, the third or fifth car at every light. They stood out and didn’t. Mr. Honda’s legacy, that accessible special, a strong, bright thread woven deep into the fabric of the state where it’s always seemed at home.

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