Slightly OT : Civic Type-R or alternative?

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Saab 9-3 Viggen with an Abbott Viggen rescue kit and a Maptun Stage 5 kit?

RX8 not a hot hatch but surprisingly practical though you may struggle to get one for £11k but I would expect the same with a CTR.

clio 172 182 or cup i think best meets your criteria and you can get a new

He needs a 4 seater the Cooper S doesn't forfill that. (Well it dose have 4 seats but the back of the front seats do touch the rears)

you can get a CTR for 11 easily. as long as you dont want black.

You'd struggle to get an RX8 for sub 15k

VTec lump is nasty. Having to rev to 8k to make decent progress soon becomes very tiring. You've gotta continually row the box, and it can be very difficult to keep it on-the-boil on an unfamiliar road. You have to drive everywhere sounding like a wasp with it's nads trapped in a vice - VTec howl is a large negative, when you and your passengers are hearing it continually, all day every day.

Apart from that, they're great cars.

There are any number of small cars around, offering the performance of the Civic these days - and they almost all come with a nice torquey Turbocharged engine. Go drive the Leon Cupra (R), Megane 225, Astra Turbo (Coupe), Octavia vRS etc. etc. - on a day-to-day basis, they're all much nicer !

Don't forget the Fabia vRS Tdi PD130 and he Ibiza TDi 130 as well. OK, they are oil burners, and OK, they won't have the pin sharp handling that the CTr is famed for, but they do have bags of low down stump pulling, and I know that the Fabia is amazingly spacy and larger than you imagine (about the same as CTR instead of being small like the older Polos were).

And lets face it, 180BHP is achievable from the VW TDi's and suspension can always be sorted if needed.

or you could guy the Type R and have near on 200 BHP as standard :o)

But only if you rev the Nads off which was Noms only complaint with it.

I don't mind that TBH. I like the fact it's a bit jekyll and hyde. I found around town it's easily nippy enough without going over 3500rpm, same as the T16 is off boost. I drove it from Oughtibridge (sp?) near Sheffield over the A628 on Friday afternoon, and got caught in the wrong gear once or twice. Found the solution was to just use 3rd and 4th, easily quick enough for me. I did take it on a couple of country roads in the daylight I knew well and didn't have any probs, and I don't tend to go that fast on roads I don't know well , so I don't see it as a problem :-) The ride is firm though. That might get wearing after a while.

Thanks for the other suggestions as well everyone, I'll look into some of them.

Question - what it's got ABS and EBD - what's EBD?

Mike

It is my understanding that EBD stands for Electronic Brake-force Distribution

Dunno exactly what it does - sorry.

Douglas

It's a bit like a cross between ABS and traction control.

and we all know nom likes a bit of VTEC bashing, I've been in the type R and its no where near as annoying as he makes out..

Cool, it has 'camshafts'!

That's cos on it's own, it's a pile of s*it.

Technically it's an excellent invention, and if Honda choose to combine it with forced-induction for some lower-down pull, I don't doubt the result would be very nice indeed.

Er, I've been in and driven one more than once, and it's more annoying than I make out.

Electronic Brakeforce Distribution.

It's basically ABS v2.0 - it automatically adjusts the brake force applied to the front/rear and/or left/right as required to keep you on the road.

But a decent four-channel ABS system already does this, so the gains are minimal if any :)

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Yeah, two of them, to Maptuns own specs.

so are you, utterly utterly argumentative, I've been in a Ti and it was utter utter s**te...

Yep.

Was it broken ? Mine's great !