Lifestyles of the fast and the furious

You’re stopped at a traffic light, loud hiphop blaring from your iPod-driven 10-speaker multi-amp’d audio system. Your fingers playfully tap the leather-rimmed steering wheel as you eagerly await the green light. Ahead of you is a clear stretch of empty road, stretching as far as your eye can see.

Suddenly your loud music is drowned out by the angry buzz of a racing exhaust as an impossibly low sedan painted a garish neon green pulls over beside you. The driver checks out your car. And almost as if to press the psy-war further, he cranks up his own sound system to out-bass your twin subs.

You try to ignore the dude. As a last resort, he blips the throttle a few times and gives you and your car a provocative sneer. Suddenly, the most basic of instincts click in your mind. It’s a primal urge first felt by our most prehistoric ancestors and lives on in every red-blooded male. This is war!

You surreptitiously move your hand to the gearshift knob as your feet stop their tapping and move to the clutch and gas pedals. Bad dude is still revving his engine, but his eyes are trained on the stoplight. Almost in slow motion, you move the gearshift lever into 1st. The light turns green.

But even before the green light waves hit your eyes, you’ve blipped the accelerator and deftly sidestepped the clutch a millisecond before you buried the throttle with your right foot.

Your car surges forward in a frenzy of engine revs, induction howl, exhaust roar and tire spin. You’re pushed back into the racing bucket seats. Suddenly every infinitesimal nerve ending in your body is alive – connecting you to your car. Man and machine, as one.

You don’t even have to look at the tachometer to know when to make the next upshift. You keep the pedal to the metal even as you shift up to 2nd. Again your highly tuned engine delivers a most satisfying surge of forward motion as your super-sticky 18-inch, 40-series rubber grab the asphalt.

You’re approaching 100 and getting ready for 3rd gear. From neck-and-neck, neon green car has dropped back a few feet, its driver’s face a mix of surprise and frustration. But its front bumper is still level with your door. So you slam the shift lever into 3rd and apply the coup de grace.

You flip a black rocker switch on the dash to arm your weapon. Then you hit a little red button…

Almost instantly the already blurred scenery racing past you seems to go into fast forward. Your car emits an otherworldly howl as it streaks away from the green car and its stunned driver, as if at warp speed.

You resist the urge to open your window for a friendly wave and a happy, "See ya!" It may not be your 15 minutes of fame, but it definitely counts as one of the most satisfying sub-15 seconds of your life.

Welcome to the world of the fast and the furious. And thanks to the cool guys at Speedlab along Quezon Ave., I got a chance to taste it even for a few days. No, I did not do any illegal and dangerous street racing. What you just read is purely a work of fiction.

What I experienced, however, certainly was not. As was the graphics-festooned pink-and-silver 2006 Honda Civic 1.8 show car bedecked with a A-Toy front spoiler and grille, side skirts, rear apron with diffuser (with center-mounted twin tailpipes) and a tall rear wing. To say that it turned heads wherever I drove it is a major understatement. Especially at night when I turned on the eerie glow of the High-Intensity Discharge (HiD) headlamps from Xenon Bulbs.

So the car looks furious. But what about the "fast" part? That, ladies and gentlemen, is effectively handled by a trunk-mounted twin-tank Nitrous Express nitrous oxide system feeding into a 1.8-liter VTEC engine that’s stock other than for an aftermarket K&N cone-type low-restriction air intake system. But the sound! Honda VTECs sound good at speed already, but coupled with the raspy intake and a hit of nitrous, it’s enough to send some racer wannabes back into the slow lane.

Living with a nitrous-aided stock engine gave me a new insight into the fast and furious lifestyle. First, forget about warp speed and traffic signs whizzing by so fast you could barely see them. That’s Hollywood. Even Fernando Alonso can read his pitboard at 300 kph.

You can also forget about Mad Max-like tire-screeching at the 3-4 upshift at over 120 kph. That is, unless you have over 500 hp at your disposal. What a nitrous oxide kit would do for a stock 1.8-liter motor is make it feel and go like a 2-liter (or slightly higher) whenever you press the button. Power output under nitrous is substantially higher than even with the most aggressive intake and exhaust modifications but less than an aftermarket turbo/intercooler setup. Don’t touch the nitrous button and you’ve got the fuel economy and drivability of an unmodified 1.8. Not a bad deal for an everyday driver, right?

But the Speedlab guys wouldn’t leave it at that. What’s a Civic worth that can go fast but can’t corner worth a damn? To that end, the Speedlab boys fitted it with an H&R progressive-rate lowering springs that drop the car about an inch and a half and give it firmer, more responsive handling – albeit at the cost of a somewhat stiff ride on bumpy roads and reduced ground and fender/tire clearance.

Speaking of tires, Speedlab fitted the car with 235/40ZR-18 Nitto NT555 tires mounted on 18-inch Need for Speed alloy wheels from Wheel Gallery. Needless to say, the combination of lower center of gravity, stiffer springs, and stickier tires give the Civic the proverbial cornering-on-rails feel. It also looks great – purposeful and low, the tires nicely filling up the wheel wells.

Expect some tire/fender, spoiler/road and underbelly/hump contact with this setup, though. If you plan to do this on a daily driver, stick to a 17-inch wheel or don’t go too low, especially if you regularly take passengers.

Other than these issues, my 5-member family was the fastest and the most furious one on the road for a memorable week. Speedlab made sure all of the Civic’s other dependable virtues were intact.

Living with a tuner car might be like going out with a high-maintenance supermodel. It takes extra effort to make her happy. But when she makes you happy, it’s almost mind-blowing. Cue 2 Fast, 2 Furious end-credits soundtrack…