ファルーク
April 20th, 2007, 09:18 AM
Conforming to Type
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/01large.jpg
Source: Topgear
During the Cold War, If you wanted your enemies' secrets, you just nicked them. A plane or a bomb, maybe even a person on a good day. Then you took them to pieces to see how they worked. There's no end of this sort of thing going on in the motoring industry.
One company buys another's key new car, and reduces it to a big pile of bolts to work out how to build something as good, if not better. Now Honda has the money, and God knows it's had the time, to take every other hot hatch in the shops to bits and build something truly extraordinary off the back of it. Expectations are high for the new Type R, then. But, like first-date sex, this can be a problem.
And when you bear in mind that we, the promiscuous collective motoring press, have already been to bed with the likes of the Focus ST and Golf GTI and not found them wanting, the pressure is really on Honda to perform.
Overtly emulating its rivals would have been a mistake, though. The Japanese still can't quite match the better end of the European market for touch-point quality and an overall sense of class. And neither can eastern car design ever quite reconcile itself to our equally particular western aesthetic. The already odd-looking Civic would have had its work cut out following the formula of modest hatch outline with tick-in-the-box 'sporting' accoutrements.
So someone very high up at Honda must have said and I'm probably paraphrasing - "**** it. And **** them. Manga bodykit it is." And there you have the foundation of the Type R. This is a wholehearted embrace of what it is to be Japanese
more
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/1.html
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/1/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/2/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/3/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/4/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/5/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/6/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/7/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/8/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/01large.jpg
Source: Topgear
During the Cold War, If you wanted your enemies' secrets, you just nicked them. A plane or a bomb, maybe even a person on a good day. Then you took them to pieces to see how they worked. There's no end of this sort of thing going on in the motoring industry.
One company buys another's key new car, and reduces it to a big pile of bolts to work out how to build something as good, if not better. Now Honda has the money, and God knows it's had the time, to take every other hot hatch in the shops to bits and build something truly extraordinary off the back of it. Expectations are high for the new Type R, then. But, like first-date sex, this can be a problem.
And when you bear in mind that we, the promiscuous collective motoring press, have already been to bed with the likes of the Focus ST and Golf GTI and not found them wanting, the pressure is really on Honda to perform.
Overtly emulating its rivals would have been a mistake, though. The Japanese still can't quite match the better end of the European market for touch-point quality and an overall sense of class. And neither can eastern car design ever quite reconcile itself to our equally particular western aesthetic. The already odd-looking Civic would have had its work cut out following the formula of modest hatch outline with tick-in-the-box 'sporting' accoutrements.
So someone very high up at Honda must have said and I'm probably paraphrasing - "**** it. And **** them. Manga bodykit it is." And there you have the foundation of the Type R. This is a wholehearted embrace of what it is to be Japanese
more
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/1.html
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/1/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/2/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/3/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/4/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/5/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/6/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/7/large.jpg
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/03/stories/11/images/8/large.jpg