1998 Honda Civic VTI-S (hatchback) review from UK and Ireland

Front anti-roll bar joint broke away from the anti-roll bar, dealer replaced it for £60 inc labour.

Battery needed replacing at 57k.

On the whole pretty reliable.

I bought the car standard and was more than impressed with the performance, for a 1.6 the engine had a lot of grunt and despite the common misconception I thought it was actually very torquey low done for a 1.6, even more so then my Pulsar GTI-R at low revs and that was 2L turbo.

The model I have is the dealer special edition VTI-S, I believe 200 were sold in the UK. This means that the car has a different gearknob to the standard VTI and a set of bumper lips front and rear as well as a mid level rear spoiler.

My VTI-S came with all the dealer options so I have the full black leather interior, leather door cards, leather steering wheel etc. Honda cat 1 alarm and immobiliser. The car was fitted with the Honda Accessories lowered supension option too, but in my opinion this makes the car sit a bit too low. Bizarrely it has the bumper mounted parking poll option too.

I have changed quite a few bits since buying the car 2 years ago. The standard alloy wheels are very heavy and not good for acceleration so I replaced these with a set of 15" Rays TE37s in gold, these are extremely light and made the car feel a lot better. I've swapped the motor out for a B18 out of the Integra Type R as well, I had the block stripped and pistons etc replaced with Spoon Parts. I've fitted a Mugen 4-1 exhaust manifold and full Mugen twin loop exhaust with decat, an AEM V2 intake and had the car unichipped. It now makes about 200 BHP and 140 ft/lbs torque. I can recommend going to the 1.8 from the 1.6 as the added power especially off VTEC makes a huge difference to the way the car drives and did not effect fuel economy. The car now makes the same power off VTEC then it did at peak when it was standard!

The handling on the car is terrific, the Civic is very balanced and precise and feels stuck to the road.

Brakes are excellent too, but do get hot a little quicker then one would like, if track days are your thing then I would recommend swapping the brakes for ones out of the MG Rover as they have bigger discs and calipers that are not so prone to brake fade.

Fuel economy is good, I get about 30-38 MPG on average depending on how hard the car is driven, motorway MPG is around 40 MPG.

Before this I had a Pulsar GTi-R that was heavily modified, running around 350 BHP. Although the Civic is slower (actually not that much slower!) The Civic is the better handling car, far more fun to drive and gets considerably better MPG (Pulsar was 8-12 MPG!)

Buy one, you won't regret it!