Photos: 1st Generation Civic SCCA GT-5 Race Car (Parted)

[Jszilagyi]

Hi - I am new to this forum & want to show some photos of the racecar that I drove back in 1987. My dad owned this car & he bought it from a guy named George Leach who worked at King Honda in Milwaukee, WI. Dad bought the car in about 1986 and I went with him to pick it up. The car doesn't exist anymore, but I still have a lot of the spare parts from it.

My Dad always had #30 since he started racing, but this car was a different number when he bought it. He started racing in about 1969 and had a Devin Crosley "D" sports racer, and then a Mini Cooper, and then the Honda (all w/ #30) and he mostly raced at Waterford Hills in Michigan.

Here are some of the details on this race car:
EB2 or EB3 1200 cc engine w/ the following modifications:
Mugen Intake w/ (4) Keihin Slide Style Motorcycle carburetor
Mugen 90 degree distributor Adapter to clear intake
High Compression Pistons
HP camshaft
Adjustable camshaft Gear
Deep Sump Oil Pan w/ Modified Pickup

Suspension:
Adjustable Struts w/ Adjustable Ride Height
Tubular Suspension Arms

Panasport wheels 13" x 6"
Wide IMSA style Bodywork
Banjo Mathews Roll Cage

[Jszilagyi]

The reason that this car doesn't exist anymore is because my dad cut it up and made it into a rear wheel drive tube frame car, but never finished it. The car sat for a few years and was later scrapped out. The toughest part of the rear wheel drive setup was dealing with the counter clockwise engine rotation since this is opposite of most other engines. The stock style 1200 cc engine would turn the wrong way when used with a rear wheel drive transmission & rear axle. We thought about using a reverse cut axle gear like a front axle from a 4 wheel drive truck, but this would still load the transmission gears in the wrong direction & they would probably fail.

The plan was to make a 1200 cc reverse rotation engine (see the photos shown below). This required a different camshaft since the timing of the events was different. A special camshaft was made & installed. The engine was never run & I don't think the gear drive setup that my Dad made would work since there wasn't any grease or oil on the gears.

Today there are better options for this problem. G-Force makes a special rear wheel drive transmission that has the output shaft on the lay gear in the transmission (instead of the main shaft). This allows the use of a counter-clockwise engine, but the driveshaft turns the correct way to work with all rear axles. The gears in the transmission are loaded correctly in this setup.


http://www.gforcetransmissions.com/tran_gf5r-import.asp