1994 Honda Civic Si - NYC Street Fighter

593 HP @ Wheels Down Right Tearing It Up
As your eyes glance at the white drt Civic poised on these pages, something triggers. "Wait a minute, didn't you already feature this Honda in a previous issue?" Making sure you didn't pick up an old copy of Turbo, you quickly glance at the cover for assurance. Well, the cover says November 2000-it must be a new issue. As your pupils reaffix themselves on the Civic, you realize it is not the same white Civic that graced the March 2000 issue of Turbo. Both vehicles are white; both were built by drt; both were shot on the same yellow background, but each was built for different purposes. The original drt Civic, a 1997 Civic EX coupe, was strictly a drag vehicle from Day One. No interior, one seat, fuel cell, roll cage, Lexan windows, gutted doors, full slicks, etc. While the 1994 Civic Si featured here is capable of pounding the 1320, its main mission is cruising the boulevards of NYC on a daily basis.

Civic owner Dirty Harry (DH) first purchased the Honda new in 1994. Being close friends with the drt crew, it was only a matter of time before DH started tinkering with the Honda. When he finally stepped up to the plate, drt's Javier Ortega and Rafael Estevez were primed and ready to build DH the hardest hitting Civic this side of strip.

Originally, a high-compression 2.2-liter DOHC VTEC nitrous-fed Prelude powerplant was to motivate the Honda, but drt balked at that idea, and favored boosted Prelude power instead. Being turbo junkies themselves, the drt crew already knew what it needed to make the engine reliable. The H22A was disassembled and only the top-end was retained. The drt crew wanted a larger displacement engine so it elected to go with the non-VTEC H23 bottom-end. The block was torn apart and cleaned thoroughly before being sent out to the machine shop. Unlike B-series engines, H-series engines do not utilize iron sleeves in the block.