2002 Acura RSX Type-S - The Chameleon

I thought deVera was going to kill me, but instead he crawled under the car with a screwdriver and helped scrape the 80 pounds or so of mud out from the undercarriage. It must have been the delirium of having busted knuckles and mud flicking in our eyes but at that point we committed to making the car go fast. In the off-season I failed to load the car on the trailer with enough tongue weight and jackknifed it while entering the freeway. Time for paintjob number two-Lamborghini Sunburst Orange this time.

By the middle of the '04 season, the car was running at the front of the H1 field and hitting car shows between events. The wheels and tires went from 17x7 wheels with 205 series tires to 18x9 with 245s all the way around. An ATS final drive compensated for the larger diameter. The guys at Endless USA re-valved the dampers for 18kg/mm front and 30kg/mm rear Swift springs. The stock front brakes were replaced with Stoptech four-piston calipers and two-piece rotors. We found some aerodynamic grip with a Versus Motorsport front splitter and rear wing setup. The car was working great in the corners and the braking zones, but it was close to 300 pounds overweight and the motor was a dud.

Even with Toda cams, a thin head gasket, and an hour of Hondata tuning, it would only put out 217 wheel-hp on a very generous Dyna-Pac dyno. That was about 30hp short of what we were expecting from it. Our best guess was that the motor had been overheated or otherwise traumatized during its press car days and it never really recovered. These things have a way of working themselves out though. I missed a shift and zinged the motor. Half a lap later it spit a rod out into the splitter. The tow truck guy picked it up and showed it to me through the windshield.

We were at a crossroads. With a fresh motor we had a strong shot at the championship, but campaigning the heavy strut-car against older, lighter, double-wishbone Civics was expensive. And the lack of exposure wasn't selling a lot of soda or oil with deVera's sponsorship money. On the other hand, Sport Compact Car and Super Street had just held the first U.S. Time Attack a few months earlier. "Didn't you say there was a drag motor somewhere?" I asked.

Things get a little fuzzy here. The car bounced back and forth between five reputable shops in Southern California. Some conversations weren't pretty and others were downright ugly. Still somewhere in the middle there was some really nice fabrication done with a return line for the fuel system, plumbing for the Accusump and oil cooler, and a gorgeous one-piece downpipe and exhaust crafted from Burns stainless materials. Close to two years later, the car ended up at XS Engineering where everything was buttoned up and dialed in to the tune of 450 wheel-hp.

The motor was the original K20A2 AEBS drag engine, which included sleeves bored out to 2.2 liters, Arrow rods, Ross pistons, massive head porting, and oversized valves of unknown diameter. I wish I knew more but it runs now and I'm not taking it apart to check. To keep the power out of the ludicrous realm, stock Type-S cams were used with an out-of-the-box HKS turbo kit. Finally it was tuned for VP MS109 fuel with an HKS F-Con V-Pro ECU. The relatively small turbo spooled instantly with an almost perfectly flat power curve from 3,000-8,500 rpm.

By Andy Hope

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