January 11, 2008 A Look at the Home vs. Away Team

04:15pm by Cheechoo (Cars)

When most of us think of a mass-produced car built by a major automotive company, we think that the car is the same throughout the world. We think that if someone buys a Corolla in the U.S.A., it’s the same car that you can get in England, Japan, Luxembourg, or Djibouti. This is wrong for many reasons. Firstly, a lot of the times a car company will release different models under the same name because they try to tailor the car to the region. For instance, if there were a country where the average person was 6’10” and weighed 300 lbs, then the version exported to that country would probably be bigger and have a lot more space inside the car. But sometimes car companies build special versions only for their Home country (what I’d like to call the Home Team) which are better and more appealing than the versions they export (the Away Team).

An example that everyone is familiar with is the GT-R of old, which was a sport version of the Skyline Saloon/Coupe that never made it to the U.S. However, Nissan decided to finally bring the Skyline over in its newest iteration (The V35 Infiniti G35 in 2003) and also the sport version (The Nissan GTR in 2008).

What I’d like to look at today is a fine example of different cars under the same moniker – The Honda Civic Type-R. The following was a video made by Fifth Gear, a great British Television program. They compared two versions of the Civic R: Britain’s vs. Japan’s. Guess which one’s faster. And after watching the video, try and compare either of these cars the the US version of the Type-R – our very own Civic Si. Who’s getting the shortest end of the stick? The Europeans, Japanese, or Americans?

Here are some quick stats:

USDM CIVIC SI 197 hp 139 lb-ft 2877 lbs

UKDM CIVIC TYPE R 198 hp 142 lb-ft 2792 lbs

JDM CIVIC TYPE R 225 hp 159 lb-ft 2794 lbs

Photos and information from rsportscars.com and vtec.net