🏅 RWD Turbo Civic: THROTL's "FREK" | HALTECH HEROES

This is the Throttle 1999 Honda Civic, but not just any K-series swap. We actually turned the engine sideways and made this thing rear-wheel drive. So it's really special. We're here at the Throttle Shop, and I'm Mickey Andrade, the lead content creator here at Throttle. So we've dubbed this the Freak, and a lot of people kind of have a hard time wrapping their head around that because it's spelled F-R-E-K. And if you've been into Japanese cars for any period of time, you understand in Japan, they say F-R for front engine rear drive, and then it's an E-K. So F-R-E-K. That's where the name came from, and it's kind of a freaky car. So we just dubbed it the Freak. Essentially, it started because of my love for the E-K platform, but I always thought it should have been rear-wheel drive. You know, about 10, 12 years ago, I had this crazy idea of, man, I would love to, at some point in my career, have the time to actually get an E-K and start to figure out what it would take to make the rear wheels turn. You know, I took this chassis in particular in on trade from another car that I sold as partial payment, and it was just sitting here. It was an absolute disaster. It had a B16 in it that barely ran and started, and it was the perfect kind of donor chassis. It wasn't an immaculate car that I would feel bad cutting up or anything like that. So it was the perfect starting point to actually go down the road of making a rear-wheel drive E-K. So it's a K20A2, and the reason we chose that over a K24 was a little bit less displacement, but you get more RPM, and that was something that I really wanted. Coming from an 86 Corolla background, RPM is king, and I really wanted kind of that same feel in this car as what I had in my old 86. So we chose the K20A2. We sourced a manifold for it. We turned it sideways, and we put a decent-sized Garrett turbo on this. The goal was 400 to 500 horsepower, which we've achieved. With a little bit of headroom, we can go more if we want. I have a rotary background as well, so we actually went with a V-mount front setup, which is quite unique, especially for a Civic that would typically be front-wheel drive. So there's a lot of really cool surprises under the hood once we start digging deeper into this car, but what we did was we mated that K20A2 to an S2000 transmission utilizing a JSP Fab bellhousing adapter, and we had a custom driveshaft made locally here in Oceanside, California that mates up to an S2000 rear differential, which we basically created our own carrier for in the back of the car utilizing the stock subframe provisions. Subframe, I use that term loosely, but it's basically a beam that's welded in. In the back, as I mentioned, we have an S2000 rear differential. The reason we chose this diff is we knew it was pretty stout, up to about 600, 700 horsepower. Also, there's a lot of limited-slip differentials available for this rear diff. We also knew the gearing was gonna play nice with the S2000 transmission, because typically when you do something like this, you would probably use a CR-V diff or an old Civic wagon diff, and we weren't sure how the gearing was gonna match up with the S2000 transmission. So changing this out, this was an audible we called halfway through the project to just make a mounting provision for an S2000 differential, and it opened up a lot of opportunities for us to do much cooler stuff with the car. We then leaned on the driveshaft shop for rear axles. These are 1,000-plus horsepower rear axles, so we know those are gonna stand up to the amount of power we're gonna put through this thing and last at the track. One of the integral parts of this car setup, as we mentioned previously, is the S1 control arms in the rear. Basically, these replace the factory stamped steel arms, and these were made specifically for this project, and what's really cool is the offset pickups for the rear coilovers. It allows the axle to pass through. Now, this setup is normally meant for an all-wheel drive car. However, we repurposed it to use it for a rear-wheel drive only setup, and the nice thing was was they developed it so well that it actually didn't require a lot of modification on their part to make this work for us, so if you guys wanna duplicate this project, S1 is the go-to to get the rear setup just right and dialed in. What's cool is it's all adjustable on the fly at the track, and everything is heim-jointed or rose-jointed, so really nice stuff, really well put together, and works great for what we're trying to do here. The real challenge was the subframes, because a front-wheel drive subframe actually is quite large, and it sort of sits right where you need your bellhousing and transmission to sit, because normally it's sideways, and everything kind of works around it or through it. We had to basically throw that thing in the trash and start from scratch, so we literally started with just a square beam of thick steel, hollow, and I was able to actually make the pickup points for the front suspension pickup right off of it, and it actually bolts into the stock unibody in some factory locations, which is really cool, because now we can literally undo the suspension and drop the whole subframe out the bottom of the car, and it's easy to work on. We even went so far as to cut the rear floor pan out, and those panels are removable, so you can actually service the diff from the top if you're at the track and you don't have a good lift or something like that to put the car on. It's fully serviceable from inside the car. You literally remove the seat, pull the panels off, and you can actually pull the diff through the car. So now that we've moved inside the car, I can kind of show you guys around a little bit. One of the ideas with this car was to sort of keep it sort of street car looking, so we did stick with a stock dash, and we kind of gutted it out and trimmed it back to accommodate the roll cage that was put in. It is a full cage. We also integrated the factory door cards. However, we did not use the bottom sections. We just used the top section to make it look somewhat street car-ish, and one of the things that we really wanted to focus on was making sure that this car was comfortable to drive, and so we actually reached out to Vintage Air, which are known more for sort of hot rod air conditioning systems and stuff, but they make a kit called the Magnum, and we were actually able to fit it in the factory location, and this car actually has functioning air conditioning, and it blows cold, like high 50s. We did use the factory S2000 gearbox, so this is a hybrid racing shifter. We've integrated our factory center console area with our touchpad and our Vintage Air system here to control the AC. We've also added a set of nice Kevlar Sparco seats, harnesses, we've got a Greddy steering wheel in here, which is a VTEC Club limited edition, which is really cool for me to have. I'm a big Honda guy at heart, so this is a really neat piece, and in the back, we've got a fuel-safe 10-gallon fuel cell routed to the stock filler location, which I think is a really cool feature. As far as the engine management system in this race car goes, we've got an Elite 1500, we've got a CAN bus expander, and we also have the wide band on the kick panel plate, and that's routing to our IC7 dash where all of the data from the 1500 is displayed here for the driver to kind of keep an eye on the vitals of the engine and the car and the fuel system and everything that goes on that's communicating from there to here, which is really nice to have it all in one place and to be able to set the parameters so if you have a fault or a failure, it's all right there in front of you. We love these things. So I'm not necessarily a race car driver. In fact, I'm a hobbyist at best, but I do like to go fast and I do like to keep it off the street. I'm a big advocate of anti-street racing and takeover stuff, because this is not a street car. This is actually purpose-built to be used at the racetrack and it was something that I wanted because I've never had my own race car before. I've had heaps of street cars that were really cool and I could take them to the track, but I wanted something that was actually, I didn't have to worry about setting it up to be driven on the street. It could literally sit in the shop, it's set up to be used at the racetrack, throw it on a trailer, take it there, unload it and race the snot out of it, load it back on the trailer if something breaks or whatever, and take it back to the shop. This is my private track car. I love this thing to death. It has now become sort of a community track car for the shop here as well. And we do plan to get this out to a lot of events in 2023, including some gridlifes and stuff like that. I'm definitely no pro car driver by any means, but the enjoyment of it for me is what's most fun. And the camaraderie of being out the track with the guys and friends is basically what all the blood, sweat and tears went into this for. We really want to enjoy it together as a team here at Throttle and hang out with our other friends that have race cars. And like I said earlier, I used to be able to throw it on a trailer and take it to the track and not have to worry about driving it back and that sort of thing. It's just purpose-built to go thrash and have fun in. So yeah, I'm not by any means any pro or anything like that, but this is something that we can rely on. It's a pretty fast car. It makes a lot of horsepower and it's fun to drive. Thanks for watching guys. If you like this video, smash that like button. We put out a new video every week and sometimes even two. So don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more awesome content.