WRC B-series Honda CRX, Part 2

 FOR PART 1 OF THE WRC B-series Honda CRX, CLICK HERE!

Sometime last month traveling between the Hungary and Spa F1 races, Ben sent me these pics from his mobile phone. With F1 races being all over the world, he has got to have a crazy phone bill. Then again the last time Ben was here in the US for a month during his tenure at Pectel, I heard his phone bill was over $2500. I guess thats why Ben and I can have random conversations about Nissan RBs, ECUs, beef jerfky, F1, Cosworth and Subarus wherever he is in the world. Maybe AT&T or Virgin picks up the mobile phone bills?

Anyhow, Elmo has made some progress on the CRX recently and it's coming together quite nicely. This little Honda CRX track car is getting some very nice parts put on it. I imagine that the parts and time getting put into this CRX are probably more expensive (when the parts were new) than the CRX itself was (also when it was new). If you remember, Elmo was a fabricator at Prodrive during the Subaru WRC days. It sure does show.

For those of you who followed the WRC Imprezas, you'll remember that Calsonic was a sponsor and so this intercooler probably looks familiar. It usually sat behind the upper front grille in the WRC Imprezas where an intercooler belongs (not on top of an engine). This Calsonic core is a proper tube and fin intercooler lighter in weight and higher in efficiency than any stacked plate boat anchor will ever be. For more details on the super clean fabrication on the radiator and intercooler, check out part 1. Since the WRC Imprezas changed a lot from year to year, I bet there were always plenty of "obsolete" parts in the scrap bins at Prodrive back in the day. I also bet that the guys who worked there had first dibs!

At all four corners are some kind of forged 1pc BBS 18" wheel and an AP Racing monobloc caliper. You can take a wild guess where the brakes probably came from (a WRC Impreza if you couldn't figure it out), but I'm not sure where the wheels came from. If you take a close look at the center of the wheel, it looks like Elmo fabricated an adapter to fit these BBS wheels onto the Honda's 4x100 PCD lug pattern. If that's the case then these BBS have some kind of giant 4 lug PCD pattern. Wherever they're from, they sure as hell don't make the car look anything like a hella flush CRX with ski racks and a vinyl bra.

Here's a closer look at the BBS wheels and AP Racing monobloc brakes. The calipers are huge and look like they could wrap around some larger rotors. Each one of those lug nuts have some text laser etched on them. I'm guessing they are serialized when new and mileaged (replaced at a regular interval). Once again, the guys who worked there probably had first dibs on he used parts.

Up front are a pair of Recaro/Prodrive Kevlar bucket seats. With those two names on them, you know these seats weren't cheap. They don't look like WRC seats so maybe they're Group N Impreza seats. Either way, they're pretty damn nice. You can also see Elmo's superb craftsmanship on the door bars.

Here you can see the Kevlar cloth of the seats. I'm willing to bet that these are genuine Kevlar seats and not some made in China seat with yellow painted or dyed fiberglass cloth and some shitty vinyl ester resin laid up by some 12 year old kid in a dirt road village in China somewhere. Moving on....here you can also see some more of Elmo's excellent craftsmanship. Triangulation is the key word here. Fun fact of the day: this small little rear section of the CRX has more tubes than the entire cage of the CyberEVO.

You can see here the 18" wheels are a pretty damn tight fit for the little CRX. This car is like the anti-hella flush. As Mike would call it, it's hella-functional.

I think Ben got the car running on the factory/Zdyne ECU, but from the sounds of it he wanted to change out the ECU. He asked me what I thought he should use for a simple car like this. Naturally, I said the Apexi Power FC (with an adapter harness).

That's about it for now. Isn't this one of the coolest CRXs in the world?