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Our Cars: Honda Integra Type R DC2
2 years ago
Mills actually chose the rapid Integra Type R for entirely practical reasons
And then there was the colour. Or, rather, absence thereof. With its Championship White paint (recalling Richie Ginther’s first F1 win for Honda, in Mexico in 1965, (which was also Goodyear’s first F1 win – you’re welcome)) and matching wheels, comedy (for the era) rear wing, garish sticker sets ahead of the rear arches and lurid red seats illuminating the cabin, the Integra Type R looked like it had driven out of the pages of a Ripspeed catalogue and was on the hunt for a Max Power cruise.
All of which is to say, you don’t buy a car like this with your head. Right…?
Wrong.
My thinking in the run-up to buying my 1999 Integra Type R was entirely practical and, for once, not even close to registering on the Man Maths scale of wishful thinking.
It went a little like this. Which cars have you most enjoyed driving over the past 15 or so years? Now narrow it down to those you can afford to buy. And now narrow it further to those you can afford to run.
"I knew there could be only one choice for a thrilling driver’s car that was in my price range, should offer Casio-watch reliability, and wouldn’t cost drown-your-sorrows-in-a-pint-glass sums of money to insure and service: the Integra Type R"
That last point was important. I’d owned a Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 for a few years, which I bought as a cosmetically mint example for £5000, and then spent half that again getting the suspension and various other bits refreshed – a running cost that had not been factored in. (Barclaycard, my old friend, once again I found myself indebted to you.)
So when the time came that there were funds in the bank and permission from Mrs Mills to engage spend mode, I knew there could be only one choice for a thrilling driver’s car that was in my price range, should offer Casio-watch reliability, and wouldn’t cost drown-your-sorrows-in-a-pint-glass sums of money to insure and service: the Integra Type R, or DC2, as it’s known in geeky Honda circles.
The fact that all this thinking had been done during a car launch in Germany, in May 2015, fuelled by one stein too many and late-night bar conversation with my learned colleagues of Her Majesty’s Motoring Press, was neither here nor there. The logic stood.
“When you’re a young road tester, armed with a fuel card and an Integra Type R, you find any excuse to clock up the miles – nearly 2000 in my case. So I knew what a good example should feel like”
That same evening, I clicked on the best and most expensive example advertised on PistonHeads, emailed the owner, and before you knew it had arranged to get off the plane at Stansted, head to Chelmsford and view and test drive the first example I’d spotted. In the dark.
Silly? Perhaps. But I had an ace up my sleeve. I’d road tested many a DC2 back in the day, and it was a car seared on my memory, especially after managing to bag one for three weeks one Christmas. When you’re a young road tester, armed with a fuel card and an Integra Type R, you find any excuse to clock up the miles – nearly 2000 in my case. So I knew what a good example should feel like.
But that wasn’t my only card to call on. I had a torch on my iPhone! Actually, after meeting the vendor – let’s call him Will, because that was his name – it transpired he worked for Ford. Will had several nice cars to his name, including a mint 993-series Porsche 911 and Mk2 VW Golf GTI 8v with a GTI Engineering 2-litre conversion that was undergoing the sort of obsessive build that only a true petrolhead would dream of undertaking. And I had a friend who worked at Ford. One call later, I’d established that Will’s cars were the envy of Ford’s entire engineering department at Dunton, and wanted for nothing.
The DC2 is one of those rare cars that gets better the harder you work it
We shook at £7995, for Will’s spotless 43,000-mile, Milano Red example. Unlike a white model, it came with black Recaro front seats, matching those in the back and not screaming aftermarket mod to the uninitiated. And the Asahi Tec lightweight alloy wheels were finished in Kaiser Silver, which is decidedly better at hiding traces of brake dust. There was a further, and very welcome pièce de résistance, which any fan of Japanese cars of this era will likely appreciate. In the car’s thick history folder was a receipt from Rust Master. While it was still relatively young, a previous owner had wisely warded off rust and had the underside and all nooks and crannies sealed against the elements.
Happily, the Integra was every bit as spellbinding as I remembered it. It is a car that only reveals its true intentions when you step up to the plate and swear an oath of allegiance to drive it as hard as you dare. Then the depth of its abilities shines through. It is one of those rare cars where the harder you work it right at the limits, the better it gets. In time, I added a set of fast-road brake pads and the same RPB discs from the Civic Type R Cup cars, because, frankly, the brakes weren’t always operating at the same level as that mesmerising front-wheel drive chassis.
But what of the original logic that informed my buying decision in the first place? Well, before saying anything, permit me to perform an ancient dance to the car-reliability Gods. (Give me a moment, I’m not as sprightly as I used to be…)
Right, with that over, the answer is simple. In the as-near-as-dammit nine years I’ve owned the Integra, I haven’t had a single problem with it. And as dull as it sounds, that really is part of the reason I am so full of admiration for what Honda achieved with this special machine.
Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll find an excuse to convince Andrew and Dan to let me dive deeper into what makes it tick as a driver’s car – a car Evo magazine declared to be ‘as pure and focused in its own way as any Porsche RS’. But for now, take it from me: buying an Integra Type R is a surprisingly sensible thing to do. At least if you get a good one.
Photography by Charlie Magee
