What this bunch proves is that with a few careful tweaks (and a fistful of bucks) you can suddenly wind up with absolute balltearers capable of bestowing gelding status on some alleged thoroughbreds. 

Don’t believe me?  Not one of these cars would have any trouble lapping a racetrack in respectable time, not one of them is anything less than totally absorbing to drive and not one of them needs more than 13.9 seconds to cover a standing quarter.  That’s right, not even the Integra with its non-turbo, 1.8-litre engine. 

Speaking of which… the Integra is the work of Technik Tuning and is more a function of careful additions rather than wholesale changes.  Careful stuff like a tune-length four-into-one exhaust that’s also lagged to keep the heat - and energy - in the pipes and not the engine bay.  But ditch the non-essentials like the fancy dress-up bits and you’re left with a standard VTEC mill that hasn’t been touched from the rocker cover down.  So where’s the extra 25 kW at the wheels come from?  Mainly the exhaust, a re-programmed chip, new inlet manifold incorporating a cold-air system and tine tuning like slotted cam-drive sprockets to allow the cams to be phased just so. 

If anything, getting the cam timing spot on the has actually reduced the severity of the kin-in-the-date when the hydraulics lever in the big camshaft profile at 5600 rpm.  Where the stocker gets all feisty at that point, the modified car certainly gets a leg up, but not to the same extent.  Since it already has more top end, this must surely be down to the extra-fat bottom-end surge that makes this Integra something really special. 

But the noise!  Lord, the noise.  The massive gob on thing hints at lots of decibels and you aren’t going to go home disappointed.  Where some loud cars can be punted along fairly unobtrusively be keeping the revs low, the Type R offers no such facility.