£26k buys you a used hot hatch guaranteed to put a smile on your face 🤩
As you might expect from a car with this much power, the Civic Type R has the sort of grunt you might more readily associate with a full-blown sports car. Put your foot down and the muscle is both immediate and immense, yet the car doesn’t give up its charms early. Hold it in gear and it’ll charge on into the upper reaches of the rev range, before you snick sweetly through the gearbox for the next ratio and repeat the whole joyous process.
There’s a terrific engine note, too, that ranges from a warm throb at lower revs to a racer-esque warble at the top end, and it's delightfully free of the sort of overblown crackles you’ll find on some other hot hatches. But the Civic Type R isn’t just terrific in a straight line. It gobbles down each corner you throw at it, using the terrific traction bestowed on it by its limited-slip differential to chomp its way through the apex and hurl you out of the other side.
Inside, the standard Civic’s interior has been jazzed up with flashes of red, making it feel very racy, but the most notable change is the pair of bucket front seats, upholstered in bright red fabric, that provide lots of support and comfort. Like all Civics, the Type R feels solidly built and snug, but the effect is spoiled by an infotainment system that’s slow, awkward to use and dated to look at.