Taking on Super Touring 2 in NASA’s Nastiest EG Honda Civic

A long-running labor of love that began in the early nineties, long before the heyday of NOPi and “Fast and the Furious,” Tage Evanson’s Civic has gained a small cult following.

Evanson was born in South Korea but adopted and grew up in Red Bluff, California with his American family, where he’d start to see the beginnings of the sport compact craze around the time he was driving to college in his ’89 Civic.

Even before the speed freak in him was truly realized, Evanson was keenly interested in automotive customization. He lusted after lowriders and the burgeoning market for lightweight Japanese cars, and after graduating from college, he grabbed a third-generation Acura Integra GSR. This car was agile enough to test his mettle. Soon, Evanson was spending weekends pitching his car around a makeshift cone-lined course in a parking lot.

The exacting nature of autocross had him hooked. “I loved the precision and close margins,” he said. Plus, for little money, he could enjoy the pride of the underdog. “Everyone wanted a Corvette, but not many could afford them. Because the Hondas were light, they tended to do well in autocross. I loved beating the expensive cars in my little Integra.”

As his understanding of the mostly modular Honda range expanded, he had to ask why the EG Civics were often faster than his Integra. “I realized two things: the Civic was lighter, and the CX model had the same wheelbase, track width, and size as the Integra. So, I bought a base model ’95 Civic CX, the lightest version available, and swapped the Integra’s motor, trailing arms, larger wheel bearings and disc brakes, faster power steering, and subframe.”

He’d built a GSR in a lima-bean-shape suit, and he named it “Casper.”

From early days, he’d had an interest in extracting everything the B18 engine had to offer. The earliest iterations of his bored and cammed engine displaced 2.0 liters and made 225 horsepower, which is ample power for a 2,200-pound Civic. At tighter tracks like Musselman Honda Circuit, INDE, and Firebird, he was hard to beat.

The dual-wishbone front suspension and short wheelbase made the car naturally quite lively, and so improving the handling was not difficult. All he really fussed with were spring rates. The front-heavy Civic is believed to benefit from lots of rear rate, and though this might encourage some rotation, “There is a limit to how much rear rate one should run in one of these. The car can get a little excessively tail-happy over bumps if it’s too stiff,” he elaborated. His KSport RR dampers with 18kg/mm front and 16kg/mm rear springs kept the rear in contact with the pavement under heavy deceleration and prevented the splitter blocks from scraping.

To achieve his preferred directness and corner-entry rotation, he opted for the front sway bar from a base Integra and an ASR 32 mm sway bar. Other FWD tricks, like running a little rear toe out, further improved the car’s turn-in.

The initial appeal of the inexpensive Civic and its B-series engine started to fade after he blew half a dozen engines in short succession. “I picked a platform thinking I’d save money, but the cost of rebuilds made me wonder if it wasn’t smarter to start with a Corvette,” he said.

It was too late to alter course. Instead of a new car, he bought a newer VTEC motor to power his Civic. The K24A2, with a Hondata KPro ECU and a few bolt-ons, made as much power as any of his highly-strung B18s with much more torque. The K24, suited to the comfortable Acura TSX sedan it was pulled from, needed a few alterations to run comfortably on track.

“That in-pan pump isn’t designed to spin high without cavitation. The remedy is simple: the pump from an RSX Type S and the K20A2 that powers it,” Evanson said. “That pump pulley is larger, thus spins slower. It also allows for baffles to be added as it’s noticeably smaller than the K24’s in-pan pump.”

To keep the motor working in its admittedly large rev range, the K20A2 transmission was filled with a collection of Element, Civic, and RSX gears. “I wanted tall second and third gears, a shorter fourth, and super short fifth and sixth. Along with a 4.7 final” Evanson added. That torque, sent to a Kaaz 1.5-way LSD and Hasport axles made for a reliable, potent package.

At the Modified magazine Tuner Shootout in 2011, Evanson decided to run the Civic in a 60-minute enduro and show what he was capable of, as a builder and a driver. Unfortunately, he had failed to secure the transmission mount, so the transmission side dropped out of the car after a hard launch, which ripped the oil lines out of the bulkhead and lit the oil on the red-hot header. Because he had removed the rear window in a short-sighted attempt to reduce weight and aero drag, when the oil lit, it snaked under the car, climbed the diffuser, and leaped in through the rear aperture so hard it blasted out the side glass.

Evanson emerged from the wreck badly burned. The second-degree burns on his face were bad, but worst were on the back of his neck and his chin, which are still sensitive today.

In light of this and his kids entering high school, Evanson decided to shelve his Civic project, and was able to race a Radicals for several seasons, which were instructive.

“The Radicals taught me how violent I’d been behind the wheel; I’d gotten accustomed to flicking the car into oversteer – something ingrained from autocross,” Evanson said. “That approach wouldn’t work well in the Radical, which was about 800 pounds lighter, better balanced, lower, and less forgiving.”

When he returned to racing his Civic in 2015, he brought a new smoothness to his driving that earned him a half-second here and there.

That wasn’t the only change in his approach. Up until this point, Evanson had, as he put it, “prioritized function over form.” Ugly but serviceable. Wood screws or zip ties were all right as long as they got him to the finish line. However, after a brush with death and noticeable signs of fatigue at the front end, he decided to acid dip and seam-weld Casper for a new lease on life.

The structural reinforcements made more power a possibility. Evanson had run in Super Touring 2 for some time then, but he hadn’t gotten close to the power ceiling at his weight. When his longtime sponsor offered him a free Jackson Racing supercharger kit, there might’ve been better kits available, but this one was free, and free was hard to argue with.

On only 10 pounds of boost, Tony Szirka of UMS Tuning extracted a healthy 320 wheel horsepower from the Eaton M62-blown motor after trying several different pulley sizes. “With a supercharger, either you increase the size of the crank pulley or decrease the size of the supercharger pulley to increase power,” he added.

The problem then was that Evanson’s budget was constrained, and so he sidestepped the vital addition that is an intercooler. “I’d guess that about 90 percent of his problems are self-inflicted. He’s just so nonchalant about picking critical parts,” Szirka laughed.

Evanson was off to the races, but only for a short while. After two laps, the intake air temperatures were as high as 235 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hasport sent him a small-batch intercooler kit to bring the temps down, but that only highlighted how he was overspinning the blower. “At some point, you have to watch the supercharger bearings,” added Szirka.

“Then I went to the Merc Racing charger and tried every pulley configuration I could.” Because the new supercharger was detuned to remain legal in ST2, this setup only increased peak power by another 10 or so horsepower. The healthy midrange torque and cooler running temps made it a keeper.

Though he kicked himself for not going with a turbo, he was pleased to see that the positive displacement supercharger kept throttle application intuitive. “The car’s always been traction-limited mid-corner, but the nice thing about the supercharger was that it made the K24 feel like a V6,” Evanson said. “All I had to do was add power progressively.”

This ran well enough in TT2 and ST2 for a few years, but Evanson eventually got the itch to discover what this car would be capable of without a rules set limiting him. The old import tuner in him had arrived, admittedly a little late, to the party.

Though that first lap with 450 horsepower was all he had hoped it would be, it didn’t last. As he came down the front straight at Chuckwalla to start his second lap, he noodled a rod, which punched a hole in the block. Szirka’s worries were proved right. On top of all that, the resulting fireball exiting the exhaust destroyed the rear bumper.

With a forged bottom end and a Quaife sequential gearbox for the start of 2022, Evanson was back in the game. Though this lever-operated setup worked well, he sought out a set of column-mounted paddles and an autoblip function, but the AEM Infinity ECU he’d been using was not equipped to handle rev-matching.

So they band-aided the issue with a Geartronics transmission controller, but it proved a costly mistake that cost him two gearboxes.

“Every time we shifted, the Geartronics controller would send a signal to the relay, which would cut spark momentarily and allow the next dog to be engaged. However, the 20 ms latency of the relay system kept the dogs from engaging cleanly,” Szirka explained.

Evanson, like always, learned to drive around it. “Now, I just lift before pulling the paddle.”

This last failure served as a turning point. “I’ve finally got him to shell out for quality parts,” Szirka chuckled. With the Emtron SL6 ECU that’s on its way and a real torque request system in place, Szirka hopes to make the powerplant reliable, quick-shifting, and more usable.

Continuing that trend, Evanson recently upgraded to a set of MCS two-ways, but has yet to see much improvement in lap time, though consistency has improved.

“What [Szirka] said about me being cheap, he’s not wrong. Until recently, I’ve tried to come up with wild ideas before spending real money. Anyone that paddocks next to me will attest to my persistence and determination when my car breaks. I’ve done so many trackside repairs, which probably shouldn’t have been done just to get to the grid,” Evanson said. “When the engine mount ripped out of the chassis at the championships, I pulled the motor and fixed it onsite with a 110v welder and generator. I probably should’ve waited ‘til I had the right parts, but I’ve always made do without.”

That fighting spirit and willingness to improvise, even if occasionally shortsighted, is something commendable in this day and age of tailor-made perfected solutions. Evanson has been able to drive around whatever mechanical shortcomings he’s had with his talent, fortitude, and OCD. When you have those qualities in abundance, it’s all right if the car lags behind one or two steps. You can drag it along with you.