Originally Posted by jester444

This has been said many times before, and I'll repeat it. The only ways to get any kind of gains out of our engines are boost or new internals, neither of which are cheap, or go with a completely new engine altogether, which is even more expensive. It all boils down to how much you like this car. To be frank, the Civic was, is, and will always be an economy car. Honda did a very good job tuning this little engine to it's maximum performance as it sits in our cars. I'm not saying it can't be built to perform, but there are certain inherant difficulties that arise when you build a car up to do something other than what it was designed for. Say you have X amount of dollars. If you want a racer, then take your X dollars and put them towards a nice, RWD coupe or roadster, i.e. 350Z or S2000. Those are track cars. All cars are built to perform, just in different theaters. Those cars don't produce the mileage or daily-driveability of a 'vic, and a 'vic can't touch either one of those cars on the track.

If you're saying you don't have the experience necessary to install a turbo, then I'd bet it's safe to assume you don't have the expertise to pull the engine and rebuild it with completely new internals, either. And you don't have the money to do a swap, and of course you wouldn't be able to do that yourself. So any way you look at it, if you want performance, you're gonna have to bite the bullet and go to a third party. It will be more expensive, but I think you'll view the results in a favorable light.

If you don't need a fast car, you just want something fun to drive that returns good mileage and you can still work on and play with in the garage, then this is the car for you. In my opinion, Hondas are some of the easiest cars out there to work on. Things are just put together in a logical manner. There are all kinds of aftermarket parts in other areas that can turn your car into a great one, be it suspension, electronics, etc. It's all up to you.