HONDA CIVIC TYPE R(EP3)

I PICK UP THE SEPTEMBER 2001 ISSUE OF EVO and flick idly through its pages. Nearly twenty years of automotive history separates today’s landscape from the contents of the pages in evo 035, but suddenly it feels like a lot longer. The cover heralded the arrival of Aston Martin’s new Vanquish, but in a month that saw seismic changes to the world as we knew it, thanks to the cataclysmic events in New York and elsewhere in the US, a lightning rod through the hot hatch world warranted a mere spread. The new Honda Civic Type R, tested at its launch – somewhere sunny by the looks of it – by our very own Dickie Meaden, with images courtesy of that reliable artiste of note, Andy Morgan.

I can tell you that it scored four out of five stars, and that its reception, it’s fair to say, was mixed. It’s always worth undertaking such research, even at the very real risk of losing hours with one’s head stuffed in old issues of evo, not only to see what our learned friends thought of the car when it was new but, crucially for an ‘Icon’ feature, to see how their views sat within a contemporary frame of reference. When I