Honda’s got quite the show car planned for this year’s SEMA conference: A 900-plus-horsepower Civic Si drift missile that’s been fully converted to rear-wheel-drive. Built as part of the brand’s efforts to showcase its 60th anniversary here in the United States, the Civic is just one of several top-notch vehicles heading to the show.
Front-wheel-drive cars aren’t usually on the list of great drift vehicles, for the obvious reason that there’s nothing powering the rear wheels to initiate a slide. The 10th-generation Civic, as great as it is, has that problem—but not this car. Exactly how it was converted to rear-wheel-drive is anyone’s guess, as the company is playing its cards close to its chest with this one, saying only that the car “required extensive modifications to the chassis to turn it from a front-wheel-drive car into a rear-wheel-drive one.”
Honda at least tells us that it enlisted Jeanneret Racing and Olson Kustom Work to help build the insanity you see here.
Power is said to come from a 2.4-liter “K24” engine, a tuner-favorite made by Honda that propelled everything from the ninth-gen Civic Si to the CRV family-hauler. The engine in the drift car is putting 926 horsepower to the wheels, or roughly four and a half times more than the K24 produced in its most powerful application (205 hp) for the Acura TSX. There’s no word on how Honda pushed the engine to those numbers, but it’s a safe assumption that there’s a healthy amount of forced induction going on.
We do know that the car’s rocking a special body kit with flared wheel arches and a giant wing. The wheels are clearly custom, and the front appears to have been modified a bit to handle the extreme steering angles associated with drifting. We’ll have to wait until SEMA opens on Tuesday to get all the details, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed that there will be a tire-shredding demonstration to show it off.