One of my insane project car ideas involves a Camry. Take a late 80s/early 90s Camry wagon, a 1st gen Lexus ES250, the motor from an MR2 Turbo, and the transmission from a Celica All-Trac and throw them in a blender to make the turbo AWD manual Lexus wagon you never thought you wanted.

This was the game where one of the tracks was inside a dead whale, right? As a kid I always found that particular part a little disturbing, unless I dreamed it.

Thanks!

Yep, another day in the life of a manager. It’s not the greatest job in the world but the money’s decent.

I went to bed at 11 after watching some of the Simpsons marathon on TV. Didn’t drink. Got up this morning and went to work. Had a customer complaints that we were open later this morning even though it’s been on our front door for weeks.

Heh, the FD was probably enticing when it was new, but once it started breaking down every 6 months, not so much.

Viscous. Although most of them have been either dismantled and have parts in import shops or shipped to the UK/New Zealand/Australia long ago.

The car I’d most like to import (4th gen Honda Prelude Si VTEC with a VLSD and nothing else) becomes legal to do so later this year. The problem is finding one.

Yeah, the combination of short gears and a low redline is not good for longevity. The H-series engines really should have had a 6-speed with them, but that would have made the car even more expensive than it already was at the time. The S models with the F22 from the Accord had longer gears.

Yeah, the tensioners on them weren’t great. The regular H23 had a manual tensioner setup, but the H22 and H23 VTEC have automatic tensioners, which have to be replaced every time you change the timing belt. There are manual tensioner conversion kits for the VTEC engines, but I stuck with the auto tensioner at the…

Yeah, the redline is like 200 RPMs lower on it than the H22. I’m running my original ECU for now, so I just don’t rev it past 75-7600. I don’t really need to anyway. Officially the peak power is the same, but the power comes on at a much lower point than the H22, and most of the time even close-to-stock versions make…

The 80s are going on in that picture.

John B approves.

I want it.

I’ve had an H22A and an H22A4 in the past. I didn’t notice much of a difference between them, aside from one being in a 4th gen and the other in a 5th. My current 5th gen has the little-known H23 VTEC (engine code H23A), which was used in a JDM Accord wagon from 1999 to 2002. The overall power numbers are more or less…

The H22A indeed had 200, but that was the engine code for the JDM model. The USDM 4th gen VTEC had the H22A1 with 190 HP. The 220 HP version of the H22, also called the H22A, didn’t come out until 1996 or 1997 when the 5th gen Prelude Type S and SiR S-Spec were released in Japan. The 200 HP H22A was also still being…

Also, Senna once appeared in a Prelude ad.

Yep, the only one pushing more naturally aspirated power out of its 4-pots back then was Porsche, with a bonkers 240 in the 968 (although Olds had that limited production Quad 4 that made 190, same as the detuned USDM H22). The 4th gen Prelude and 968 were years ahead of their time.

24 years after the 4th gen Prelude came out in Japan with 200 HP (the H22 was available from the get go there), the current/outgoing Civic Si has...205.