Street Racers Part Deux: Showtime - Magazine Face Off - Super Street Magazine

For those of you that followed along last year's issues of Super Street and Project Car, you'll remember us editors going up against each other in the Street Racers issue and accompanying stories. We built Jonny's car using dope parts, such as an OBD1 B16 swap, JDM front end and 16" SSR Super Fins. Gary and his band of merry men at Project Car built a CRX out of cheap parts, including a junkyard turbo, a fake Mugen kit and a plethora of eBay parts.

After both builds, we took them to the drag strip to see who could spank the other. Although our Civic EF had a better reaction time, their CRX EF had a better 1/8-mile time, not to mention an assload more torque. It was so obvious that they cheated. Well, not really, but that's the excuse we're going to go with - that and we would've won had it been a full quarter-mile.

Since we built our EF for all-around purposes, and not just race, we wanted to bring them into our court. This time we challenged them to a battle of show. Both magazines will continue to build their cars, take them to car shows and see which one people like more.

If you check out the current issue of Project Car magazine you'll see them putting tons of time and effort into a full makeover of their CRX. Even with the complete makeover, they're going to have a hard time going up against some of Jonny's new parts.

When you own an EF, there's one must-have part that puts you in a special class above the rest of EF owners. With the help of Ernie Uy (see JDM Bounty Hunters article, October '08), Jonny scored the unicorn Mugen Power EF muffler. With a quick stop at Gearheinz Power & Service, a new mid-pipe was made and the muffler was installed. Not stopping there, Jonny found a genuine Mugen valve cover; expensive and not for everyone, but for a die-hard Honda lover, this is the one part that separates the bandwagon ballboys from the diehard Mugen lovers. Aside from the Chase Bays wire tuck harness, the engine bay still needed more. An old school touch came in the form of a stainless steel DC Sports header and now the engine bay has now gone from stock to bling blang.

We debuted both cars on the show circuit at the Eibach Honda meet this past May, and by the time you read this, we'll have shown them one more time at the SpoCom show. But we would love it if you came out to this month's Nisei Showoff on August 15, provided you're in the Los Angeles area, to come see the cars in person, vote for your favorite car and to show support to both mags for putting in countless hours of work into two incredible projects. All of us will be on-hand to talk in-depth about either car and if you just want to say "hi" or "you suck", we'll be there for your amusement. Plus we need to put an end to the madness, crown our car the supreme winner and show Old Man Gary who can throwdown (even though our car actually runs and still has a/c).