Edmunds Review: 2008 Honda Civic Mugen RR

Honda's Own Skyline GT-R
By John Barker, Contributor Email Date posted: 09-08-2008

Our first sight of the rarest and probably most desirable Honda Civic on the planet is a flash of blood-red paint and a glint of black wheel spokes a couple of hundred yards away, parked in a roadside turn-off in the middle of England. Even at this range, we know it's the real thing, and up close the 2008 Honda Civic Mugen RR is even more striking.

When the Mugen RR went on sale in Japan last September, all 300 examples were snapped up in just 10 minutes. This is the only example in the U.K. and is likely to remain so, as RRs are now changing hands at a premium in Japan. While the standard Honda Civic Type R costs $25,600 in Japan, the Mugen RR went for $43,900.

That's a premium of $18,300 for what appears at first glance to be a gentle massaging of the already impressive JDM Civic Type R sedan. The more you delve into the details of the 2008 Honda Civic Mugen RR, however, the more plausible becomes Mugen's claim to have built the ultimate front-drive car.

The Mugen Way
Mugen, of course, is the Japanese word for "Unlimited," and it began when Hirotoshi Honda built a racing car in his father's workshop back in 1965 while he was still a student at Nihon University. And, yes, his father was Soichiro Honda, the patriarch of Honda. Mugen has specialized in high-performance and motorsports with Honda products since it was formally established, although the company was restructured in late 2003 under the ownership of M-TEC.

Mugen is well known for offering tuning and styling parts for Hondas, but everything on the RR is unique and will not be on sale separately. Take a chunk out of one of the forged-aluminum 18-inch wheels and you'll have to prove that you own an RR to get another. The same goes for the carbon-fiber front airdam and rear aero diffuser, the aluminum vented hood and the adjustable carbon-fiber rear wing.

Despite these lightweight pieces, the RR is only 22 pounds lighter than the Honda Civic Type R upon which it is based, even with the lightweight carbon-fiber Recaro racing seats inside the cabin.

You won't find a substantial power uplift either. In prototype form, the RR was said to have a 256-horsepower, 2.2-liter version of the Honda K20A engine, but the production version sticks with the standard displacement of 1,998cc. Mind you, the 237 hp it does produce is more power than the stock 222-hp Type R unit. The improvements come from a ram-air intake, a larger cold air box, new intake and exhaust camshafts, stiffer valve springs, a 4-2-1 exhaust manifold, a low-restriction catalyst and dual exhaust.

Track Record
Now, we're big fans of the Honda Civic Type R, even though its appearance in Japan as a four-door sedan instead of a three-door coupe caused something of a scandal (Honda U.K. even built its own Type R coupe in response).

The Type R's grooved, street-legal slicks, limited-slip differential and a K20A with a 9,000-rpm redline make it pretty impressive. The Mugen RR sets out to be even more focused, but we can't help but cynically imagine that this will be like the difference between a four-blade and a five-blade disposable razor, i.e. largely imaginary. After all, the Civic Type R's own K20A spins out 225 hp at 8,000 rpm and 158 pound-feet of torque at 6,100 rpm.

Nevertheless, the Mugen RR is 2 seconds quicker than the Type R around the Tsukuba Circuit, the 1.3-mile road course that Japanese car manufacturers regard as an important standard of speed just like the Nürburgring Nordschleife (only, you know, shorter). So the RR does the business.

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