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Very new to the civic game, grew up working on trucks and other European cars, I recently purchased a 2001 Honda Civic EX sedan with 100,000 original miles and no rust as my delivery vehicle.
The local civic tuners expressed their opinion that it's a bad car that's not even worth upgrading because A) The d17 sucks and B) The automatic transmission is too weak
How much truth is there to this?
I'm not looking to drag race or anything crazy, just trying to figure out what my boundaries are.
If there are other threads that talk about this issue then I apologize, I tried searching for a little while but didn't want to be stuck scrolling for hours through the archives.
It’s not a bad car just don’t expect to make big power out of it unless you go turbo. You can put in a Stage 1 cam (if you can find one), intake, headers and tune with Hondata to get a decent jump in power but nothing crazy. They are economy cars so that is where they do best. The 7th gen has a known head gasket issue so I would keep an eye on your temp gauge.
Has the timing belt been done? If you don’t know that needs to be done ASAP.
It’s not a bad car just don’t expect to make big power out of it unless you go turbo. You can put in a Stage 1 cam (if you can find one), intake, headers and tune with Hondata to get a decent jump in power but nothing crazy. They are economy cars so that is where they do best. The 7th gen has a known head gasket issue so I would keep an eye on your temp gauge.
Has the timing belt been done? If you don’t know that needs to be done ASAP.
How much horsepower can the stock block and bottom end take? I'm use to working on Volvo's with forged bottom ends that you can boost the p*ss out of, what are my limits.
First and foremost I want to upgrade my suspension, but I was thinking about a head swap(would that solve the pesky gaskets?) With some ARP hardware, upgrading the valve train, cam, stainless steel racing headers, an actual cold air intake that sucks air from my fender well instead of the engine bay, and possibly some FI in the far far future. No idea on the timing belt, gonna look into that.
Have you looked at the stickies in the 7th gen turbo section? Also check out some of the builds. We have a few turbo ones. They don't make cams for the car anymore so you either need to find a used on or get your current one grinned.
The automatic is your weak link I would get a manual. 7-8 pounds of boost and 200HP seem to be the limit on stock internals.
