Out of the blue I remembered this car today. It was during my impressionable years when JDM was still new to me that I first saw this car in the flesh. I was in Tokyo for the Auto Salon and it was January 2001. I was a Honda fanatic and was in the midst of a turbo 1993 Prelude VTEC project which ultimately went horribly wrong.

During my wide eyed time at TAS one car really blew my mind and showed me what Japanese tuning was really about. It was the Top Fuel Honda CRX Del Sol. Now dont get me wrong, I think Del Sol’s are lame now and they were definitely even lame back then as well (although the VTEC version did have a great engine at the time).

Yet Top Fuel managed to do something back then that was impressive, they made the Del Sol badass. So badass in fact that I’d go out as far as to say that it’s still bad ass when compared to the best tuner cars of 2008.

Why? They took the front wheel and front engined Del Sol (boring) and made it rear engined, turbocharged and rear wheel drive. FF –> RR as they say. So now we have a 500+ HP, rear engined super light weight rear wheel drive Honda. A car that weighs in somewhere in between a Beat and a NSX with the power of both of them combined (and then some).

It was a really interesting car and I have a hunch that everyone has since forgotten about it. So I wanted to raise it back from the dead.