SOMETIMES, SILENCE CAN SPEAK MORE eloquently than any words. We’re sitting in a press briefing at the Honda Civic Type R launch in Estoril, Portugal. Taking us on this deep dive of the new CTR’s technical highlights is Honda Europe’s highly impressive Kotaro Yamamoto. Joining him from Japan via Zoom is CTR programme chief Hideki Kakinuma.
It’s all brilliantly Japanese, with lots of colourful and highly detailed slides with evocative/slightly bizarre headings, such as ‘Objective of “Ultimate Sport”’ and ‘Human-Vehicle Unity Handling’. They feature a bewildering array of graphs and traces, illustrating everything from throttle blipping performance to gearshift load. After half an hour I feel like I’ve entered a parallel metaverse created by the makers of Gran Turismo.
Having exited the matrix we’re invited to ask questions, with Yamamoto translating for Kakinuma. The silence comes when a media colleague asks if any other hot hatches were benchmarked by Honda during the development of the new CTR. Having listened to the question, Kakinuma glances upwards as if scanning his memory to compile a list. Then, after a prolonged pause and with a deliciously deadpan delivery, Yamamoto faithfully relays his answer: ‘Mmmm… No… We
