It’s no good checking your calendar – April 1st was months ago, and Honda UK really has built a pickup out of the latest Civic Type R.
The work of Synchro Motorsport, the team behind several Honda racing programmes in the past, the “Project P” Type R was devised and created in some of the quieter moments at Honda HQ, and follows on from previous forays into unusual engineering in the form of the Race of Remembrance diesel CR-V racer and an estate version of the previous FK2 Civic R.
The concept isn’t due to make production and isn’t currently road legal, being based on an unregistered pre-production car used for testing the current FK8 Civic Type R, but Honda does have plans to put the car on the road, and project chief Alyn James told us that the project didn’t require many compromises from the regular production model.
‘Many of the people who worked on this project were also instrumental in developing the road car’ he said, adding that this insider knowledge meant there were few structural compromises in removing half of the roof and the rear hatch from the five-door production body.
The only issue they’ve had in fact has been a small electrical glitch with the rear adaptive dampers, which sometimes throw up an error code over certain road surfaces – though the dampers themselves still operate as intended.
