As of August 2010, Honda announced that it would no longer offer the Civic Type-R due to increasingly strict emission controls in Europe. The Japanese manufacturer went longer than most, continuing to offer a high-performance normally-aspirated hot-hatch.
For many Type-R fans it represented the end on an era, but recently Honda has announced that it is preparing to fight back, with a new turbocharged Civic Type-R in 2015 - which the company claims will be 'the fastest front-wheel-drive car to lap the Nurburgring’.
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The legend of the Type-R started back in 1992, when a stripped out, lightened Honda NSX was created for a very limited number of customers. This very first Type-R model was intended to be used on track only, but it was the foundation for a range of high-performance road cars with the introduction of the Integra in 1995.
evo has in the past named the DC2 Integra as the greatest front-wheel-drive performance car of all time, and it certainly introduced the Honda brand to a younger generation of buyers in the UK. The 2001 Civic Type-R was arguably the most important, as it proved that Type-Rs could be built and sold in larger quantities, without compromising the company's ethos.
