Nestling in a drab-looking building in the northern suburbs of Tokyo is a cache of hidden treasure. Tucked away in an unlit corner of renowned Honda tuner Mugen’s showroom, alongside a racing version of the Japanese-market Civic Type R, is a Mugen concept Civic Type R made, as far as practically possible, of carbonfibre.
Like so many industrial facilities, Mugen’s M-TEC headquarters gives precious few clues to the delights that lie within its walls. But the signs are there. Aside from the modest ‘Mugen’ sign, there’s also a strange handle on the door to the modest showroom. It’s made from the crank of an old V10 Mugen F1 engine. It’s the sort of touch that lets you know that these people really have a lot of petrol flowing through their veins.
It’s day two of PH’s trip to Japan and, having sampled the new Civic Type R Mugen concept yesterday, Honda/PH competition winner Nick and I are here at Mugen for a snoop around (slash official guided tour of) Honda’s version of M Power.
Actually, the analogy to M Power doesn’t quite fit because, although Mugen is owned by the Honda family, it is entirely independent of Honda. Mugen was set up in 1973 by Honda founder Soichiro Honda’s son Hirotoshi, mainly as a competition-biased tuning firm. Even today Mugen takes its activities deadly seriously. “Competition is always our primary focus” says Mugen’s head of European operations, Hiro Toyoda. “The tuning side is important, but motorsport must come first.”
He’s not kidding, either. As we wander around the factory, almost everything seems motorsport-related. Toyoda-san says that around half of Mugen’s business centres on motorsport, but it feels like more than that. In one workshop we see a Formula Nippon car being stripped down to its bare components right next to a Japanese Super GT NSX race car, gleaming and ready for a weekend’s racing. On the other side of that are two Honda Insight hybrids (yes, you read that right) being turned into racing cars for a forthcoming seven-hour endurance race.
Everything Honda does, it seems, Mugen turns to some sort of motorsport or high-performance use. And it does so with an almost unbelievably tiny workforce – just 180 people worldwide. But that is of course the whole point of Mugen, as Masahi Honma, one of Mugen’s marketing chaps points out: "Honda’s excellence is in manufacturing, but Mugen’s excellence is in craftsmanship."
Which brings us back to that rather wonderful carbonfibre Civic. It turns out that this car was originally planned for production. It is based loosely on the standard car, but packs a bored-out 2.2-litre version of the 2.0-litre VTEC with 256bhp and 220NM of torque (to power something that weighs 150kg less than the standard car!), and is an utterly, joyously insane creation that was only killed by the current global financial crisis. Nobody would talk costs to me, but you can bet it was going to be a lot of money.
And now the company that seriously considered producing a carbonfibre Civic wants to expand its presence in the UK – possibly with a production version of the three-door Civic concept we saw yesterday. Mugen: As far as this PHer is concerned, with an approach to performance motoring as mad as this, you are more than welcome anytime...