The car didn’t stop moving. It would park and someone, a ghost, a flash, would slip behind the wheel and take it back out again.
Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let's get into it.
It was my first time at PCOTY, and I didn’t quite know what to expect. I didn’t know what the days would be like, how much we would drive, how manic it might be.
I also didn’t know what it’d be like to be presented with a handful of 200-odd mile-per-hour cars, set loose on tree-lined backroads, bumpy, potholed, and at times slick with the on and off rain showers you get in the Catskills. I did not love the moment when our BMW M4 CSL stepped out, hydroplaning at maybe half a mile an hour, down some greasy road almost into a one-lane bridge. On that same drenched day, I drove the bright blue Corvette Z06 Chevrolet had given us with about the same trepidation as I would carrying a bright blue faberge egg.
These cars had some awe shining out of them. A vibration. Desire radiated from their engines, and fear radiated from their wide tires.
Another car had that same kind of aura, but it didn’t cost six figures. It was maybe the fastest car we had at the test, if you could average out how little time it spent sitting still. It was handsome but not beautiful, powerful but not overwhelming, with an engine that was hard to remember after you got out of the car. Still, it was probably the hottest thing at PCOTY, and the car nobody could leave alone.
The thing about the Civic Type R is that everything is so well judged. You don’t linger on the engine because you are so absorbed in the handling, in the way the pedals match the weight of the steering that match the weight of the gear shift. It’s a car that dissolves around you until all you have is a long and winding reservoir road opening up in front of you. I jumped into the perfect red bucket seat to get a ride with Reviews Editor Mack Hogan just to get a little more time. Even if I wasn’t driving it, I didn’t want to be away from it.
It had character. The first time I drove the CTR I got a completely different impression of the thing. Maybe it was down to how tight of a road I was on, maybe it was something else, but the car just felt dominated by the engine alone. It was just boost boost boost redline over and over, the rest of the car feeling like it was scrambling to hold on. It drove like how I always dreamed those overpowered front-drive Alfa Romeos that I’d seen on mid-Aughts Top Gear were like.
Again, the specs aren’t shocking. It’s a front-wheel-drive liftback sedan with 315 horsepower and 310 lb-ft of torque. Its 2.0-liter four cylinder comes with Honda’s VTEC, of course, turbocharged like the CTR before it, to say nothing of countless tuner Civics sniffing around drag strips before them both. It is not the lightest at 3150 lbs, about as much as the 1980s Volvo station wagon on which I learned to drive stick, but it’s not wildly heavy. It’s not objectively faster than the car it replaces, hardly any more powerful. An evolutionary step, and a small one. The only dramatic departure against its predecessor is the new car’s styling is dramatically toned down. Looking at the fact sheet alone, if any car at this PCOTY would be bland, you would think it would be this white Honda.
But it had that ineffable magic to it. Mack said it was the closest car he’d ever driven to a 911 GT3. It had that same philosophy to it, just in a front-drive package. More of my coworkers called it like a touring car than they had any right to.
The Civic Type R had us questioning how we judged PCOTY.
Is it the greatest car in attendance that wins? Or is it simply the car we want to drive the most? The one we see ourselves with, the one that fills our dreams? The Civic Type R quickly filled at least one of our driveways; editor-at-large Travis Okulski traded his Miata for one. That’s high praise from the guy who started his writing career with Miata: The Answer To Every Question.
It wasn’t the best-sounding car at PCOTY, nor was it the outright quickest. Other cars left you more short of breath, more taken by how they ate up the road ahead of them. I just don’t know if there were cars that were more desirable. The Civic Type R gave so much and asked so little. We all could imagine ourselves with one, and I wanted to taste a little bit of that life every time I drove the thing.
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It’s weird writing these little retrospectives. There will be more Civic Type Rs. Maybe there will be better ones, that couple brilliant handling with a more characterful engine. How will we look back on this particular Civic Type R then? Will it still have its luster? How then will I look back on these few days we spent up in the Catskills, swooning and dreaming at what will no longer be the flashiest newest most exciting car. I can’t tell you what car won, I can only describe what it was all like. I’ll cherish, at least, the memories of everyone arguing on a windy roadside pull-out, changing votes back and forth, some gleefully declaring it the best thing they’d driven out of everything there.
All I knew is that it was the car I wanted to go home in, and I certainly wasn’t the only one fighting for the keys.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
