If you have been keeping up with the blog for the past few months, I’m sure you could have seen this one coming. As with all my “daily’s” I can’t just leave them stock no matter how hard I try, even after telling myself it’s a waste of money to fix them up. What person needs three modified Civics’? Apparently, I do, I mean one of mine I haven’t even driven in a year and the other one only gets driven once a month if that. I believe the hardest part about having a daily that isn’t modified is that it just isn’t fun to drive, it’s not exciting to look at and it doesn’t have any soul. With all that being said, it was inevitable that I was going to tinker with this one until I had tipped the scales from the comfortable boring side to the slightly uncomfortable but fun side.
The first decision I had to make was… Would I get either 17’s or 18’s: 17’s would be the most logical ones for “performance” yea, yea, yea… I know that there are plenty of these chassis in Japan that are tracking 18’s but the general thought process would point to 17’s being more performance oriented. Since this is Functiontheory not Showcartheory I was leaning towards 17’s, especially since it would be cheaper for 17-inch wheels and tires. However, I hadn’t completely ruled out 18’s though either. Who was I kidding, this car had nothing to do with performance and the 18’s would look better because that larger wheel would fill up more of the wheel gap between the tire and the fenders? Maybe this is Showcartheory… 18-inch wheels just have such a bigger visual impact and really make you say UGH! Jesus Christ, this was a tough decision and I ended up going with a 17-inch wheel, even though I still think an 18-inch wheel does look good on these chassis. Maybe if I had the SI with a K20 I would have gone with 18’s.
Ok it was settled; 17’s it was going to be.
Now what wheel was I going to go with? With the 17-inch wheel selection being an extensive one, I had many options to choose from, but there were some criteria that I had set for myself. One of the main things was, the car was going to be a daily, be parked outside and in parking lots for extended periods of time. This meant that buying Rega’s, TE’s, Mf10’s, Wesport’s, Advan’s, or any other big dollar wheel was only going to increase the probability of theft and that was something I was obviously trying to avoid. The wheel color had to be a basic and non-flashy, something that would not be noteworthy, catchy, unforgettable, or significant in any way… You know, a color that wouldn’t catch people’s eye, or a color that someone wouldn’t always notice and remember being parked in certain locations for prolonged periods of time.
As you saw from the picture at the start of this post, I decided to go with RPF1’s. Not only does the iconic style of these fit the 8th gen surprisingly well by complementing its body, but they are also not really that WOW of a wheel. To me, this meant why would someone want to risk trying to steal them, they would only end up with one of the most played out, boring, vanilla, lack luster wheels out there.
Next up was sizing, and boy oh boy there is just too many damn opinions out there about what “fits” an 8th gen, making it incredibly confusing to decide on what size to go with. Not only was I finding it hard to see what size would actually “fit”, but the RPF1 in any size below 9 inch has that horrendously ugly “shell” style spoke look which IMO is probably the ugliest thing out there. So, if you’re going with an RPF1 in a 17 inch, it better be a 9 inch or wider. Now that I was going to be stuffing a 17×9 wheel onto an 8th gen chassis I really had to consider offsets and rubbing issues.
Starting with the front, if you go anything higher than a +40 offset you are most likely going to rub the inner tire/wheel on the McPherson strut/spring with the size of tire I wanted to run. Now this can be avoided if you switch to a full coilover, but the car just can’t be that low or it will still rub on parts of the coilover with +40 or higher.
On to the rears… The 8th gen chassis rear doesn’t allow much for “wide” or “low offset” without having to run excessive negative camber or rolling your fenders enough for the body to not look stock. This made things a bit challenging since I like to run square set ups, so I can rotate wheels/tires to help increase life. After doing some research on long outdate forum posts I was able to conclude that I would not be able to fit any 17×9 with an offset lower than +45 on the rear with the size tire I was trying to run.
You’ll notice I mentioned “in the tire size I was trying to run” and this means that of course if you were to get into less wide tires and start stretching tires onto the 9-inch-wide wheel you would easily be able to fit wider and lower offset wheels, but I’m not interested in building a stanced out hellaflush civic. I was trying to stuff some 245 on this thing, I wanted ALL THE BEEF because what performance the engine was lacking, I was trying to make up for with some good ol’ fashion mechanical grip. Remember this isn’t Showcartheory and the car still needed to remain fun and functional. Plus, when you start to stretch the tires without having the car slammed it will look super dumb. As I was currently on swift springs, I knew the car wasn’t that low and that I needed some thicc meat to fill in the wheel gap as much as possible. Plus, this was the first chassis that I have had where I can start to put some more manly sized tires on, and I wanted to exploit that to its fullest.
I was also trying to keep the stock body and didn’t want to roll any fenders or run excessively negative camber in the rear. The car needed to remain tasteful and not look clapped out, so I ended up going with a slightly staggered setup to ensure optimal fitment. 17×9 +35 up front and 17×9 +45 in the rear with 245/40 tires all around. Now this is still an aggressive size and required some camber dialing in on the rear and some rear fender “shaving” to ensure no rubbing. Up front needed the fender tabs that hold the fender liners on to be bent up (this can just be done by hand with your fingers) and It’s also worth mentioning that in the driver rear, there is the fuel filler hose that has a plastic cover over it that the inner wheel can rub on if you run too much negative camber, so keep that in mind too. When I first put my wheels on, they did barley rub on this plastic piece but after adjusting the camber slightly more positive there was no longer a rubbing issue. As for “shaving” in the rear, all this meant was I took my angle grinder with a flappy wheel and ground off some of the lip on the inner rear fenders. This allowed me to run more positive camber because, I didn’t want tons of negative camber in the rear, and I didn’t want to rub on the fuel filler hose cover. The is an easy enough thing, just make sure you don’t go ham at it otherwise you will get it to hot and burn the paint off. just take it slow, use a brand-new flappy wheel and apply slight pressure, make the flappy wheel do the work. Keep in mind that if you do this you should apply some paint to the areas you grinded on otherwise you might start to get rust that will develop, and that shit is cancer.
Another thing that had to be taken into consideration when choosing wheels was… This unprecedented time in our life where the world is in a pandemic and the availability of items was lacking. I had to decide if ordering some rarer Japanese wheels would be worth waiting for months and months to get, or would it be better to just get a more common wheel that was more readily available.
Basically, the RPF1 is a great wheel, is light, it’s on the cheaper side, not as desirable to would be thieves due to its “vanilla-ness” and these were all the things I was looking for when choosing wheels. On the other hand, the RPF1 is a very “basic” wheel that has been pretty played out and is usually the “go to” wheel for people that want a “real” wheel but can’t really afford “real” wheels. No matter what your opinion is of these wheels they are still the choice of many roads racing teams because they are cheap, light, and can stand up to the harshness of racing.
They shipped freight and arrived on a big truck.
Mounted, balanced, aired up and ready to go on right off the truck.
I wanted to try out a new tire and I didn’t want to go with a 200tw tire (because after all this car was going to be driven lots of miles) After contemplating what tires to go with I ended up trying out the Yokohama Advan apex tires. Yokohama claims these are a 280tw tire but since the A052 blurs the lines of a street class tire, who’s to say that maybe their claim of 280tw isn’t closer to 240tw or less. Don’t be fooled by me wanting to get “longer life” out of the tire, I haven’t gone soft on you and want a quiet 500tw tire. No, grip is still very much the main factor when trying to decide on a tire and I just wanted to try something that wasn’t specifically a 200tw tire.
It’s worth noting that my first overall impression of the Apex advans is… The tires are very slippery/loose when cold and being this is a streetcar it does take a lot to get them up to temp especially since Vegas is chilly during the winter. My hopes are that when it starts to warm up here in Vegas, the tires will have better grip right away.
Since the wheels were clean and off the car, I wanted to add a little protection to help keep them looking brand new after a few weeks of being on the car.
Last time the car will ever have the stock wheels on it.
Below you can see the weight of the 17×9 RPF1 with 245/40 tires. Coming in at just under 40lbs
Compared to the stock 16 inch wheel coming in at just over 40lbs. Not bad considering the amount of traction gained by the substantially wider tire.
As always when installing aftermarket wheels, you can’t use the stock “acorn style” lug nut and you’ll need to get an aftermarket type lug nut. If you run the stock lug nuts with aftermarket wheels the lug nuts won’t allow the wheels the seat properly and this is not safe.
I decided this would be a low key way for me to install some cool stuff on the car without drawing unwanted attention to it.
Spoon chromoly lug nuts seemed like the most unnecessary ones to buy for a car that would never see any track use. I could have gotten along just fine with some basic muteki lugs, but who doesn’t like some Spoon goodies.
Here it is, freshly rolled out of the garage.
I grabbed my camera and took it out for a drive to find a place to take some nice glamour shots of it with its new wheels. I found a place to snap a few pictures but while I was taking pictures, I noticed that the tires were dirty from driving through a dirt parking lot and there was a lot of dust on the car.
So I ran home, washed the car and then drove back to the spot I had just been taking pictures. It was quite darker now and I was just catching the tail end of the golden hour. I rushed to take pictures of a now clean car, before it got too dark.
I was excited to finally get wheels on the car, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed in the way the car looked. Don’t get me wrong, the car does look very tasteful but the image in my head of what I was going for wasn’t quite met and at this exact moment I decided that I no longer wanted a smooth comfortable daily driver. I was completely bit by the bug and needed to continue to modify the car. Yes, the car looks great as is, but it could look much better if it was lower… like, a lot lower. To me, it felt like why spend the money on modifying it, for it only to look somewhat modified yet still stockish. I would go on for a few weeks fighting with myself about whether to go full retard and invest more money in this car or not… I tried talking myself out of it, I really did! unfortunately, I just couldn’t stand the way the car looked “halfway” modified. It should have either remained completely stock, or I needed to just go all in. After a few weeks I remembered that stock sucks, fuck financial security and it was time to do some dumb stuff.
Below I will leave you with a teaser for what’s to come in the next few blog posts. Yes, It’s still only a R18 8th gen and I’m totally wasting my money. Im just trying to stay off drugs.
Annnnnd two bonus ones of Evers NSX.
If this is the first article you’ve read about this car, please take a moment to get yourself all caught up on why I go this car, what my original plans for it were and what things I have already done to it. You can click the links below to read all about it.