LAHORE – If you are the sort of a person who remembers every drag race sequence from the fast and the furious movies. And if every time you watch those drag race sequences you crave to be behind the wheel of a modified car while thinking about the adrenaline it will give you. Well, this article is meant for you. Most of us petrol heads in Pakistan face one major issue while trying to acquire a fast car which is that most of us are on a very tight budget.
Mostly the cars with relatively larger displacements such as the Civics, Corollas and the Accords are driven by our fathers or used by our families. So modifying them is rarely an option. Most of us wind up with the second car of the house, which is usually an old model and offers no performance at all. Well, imagine it’s a quiet Sunday afternoon you have some guests over and your mother sends you over to the nearest Gourmet to get some pastries and patties while at the same time she yells “don’t even think of taking your dads Civic, take the old Charade instead”.
On your way you stop at a traffic signal, as you casually glance over to your right you see a brand new shiny 1800cc Honda Civic driven by someone with large Gucci shades on. When the driver of the Civic is done showing off the TV navigation in his car to his date he gets a glance at you and your old Charade. You start revving your Charade’s engine to encourage the guy in the Civic to rev his civic up to 7200 RPM and accelerate from the traffic signal and smoke starts coming out from its tyres. Well, you get successful in getting the reaction desired from the Honda’s driver and as the light turns green he revs his engine and drops the clutch in hopes of leaving you in his tyre smoke while at the same time impressing his date.
You rev your Charade drop the clutch and just enjoy the priceless look on the face of the Honda’s driver which you can see in your rear view mirror all the way till the end of the road. Sounds impossible right?? How can a 20-year old hatch embarrass an 1800cc Honda Civic? The basic laws of physics give us the answer. The most important thing to consider when analyzing how fast a car can accelerate is to consider its power to weight ratio i.e how many kilograms of the car does each horsepower produce by the engine has to carry.
I have presented some statistics to make things clearer
Now you must be asking yourself that how do you get a Charade to produce 130 bhp? Two different shapes of the Charade were imported to Pakistan ranging from 1983 to 1994 in manufacturing dates. Both of these shapes are equally good candidates for modification. When you start to play with the power to weight ratio of a car like the Charade because it weighs so less to begin with, the sky is the limit. There are a number of different setups possible in the Charade. Each has its own cost and they produce different levels of performance.
However, I think to begin with you should just get a Honda D16 engine installed and run it stock. The D16 was offered in Pakistan from 1996 to 1999 in the Honda Civic Vti. It is 1600cc and produces 130bhp. Because this engine was offered in Pakistan by Honda Atlas for more than three years its spare parts are readily available and many mechanics are well versed in maintaining or fixing it. This engine produces 130bhp, which is very impressive as the 1800CC engine which was offered in 2006 produces only 10 more bhp despite having 200 more cc’s.
Like I said, with a little bit of imagination you can go crazy with the Charade. It can be turned into a monster which will eat cars like the S2000 and the 350Z for breakfast but such a monster will be expensive to build and you will not be able to use it as an everyday car. The reason I suggest a simple swap of the original engine with the D16 is that this modification is relatively less expensive and there will be no loss in the reliability or the practicality of your car. In fact if properly installed and maintained, the D16 will be more reliable than any original engine of the Charade.
You will be able to put a smile on your face and long screech marks on the road every time you touch the 7200 rpm redline of the D16 Charade and also use it as a reliable everyday commuter for you and your family.
