We check out Jorge’s Peach popping stanced Honda Civic EG…
Prowling through the streets like some malevolent fruit-hued Adonis, this angry little modified Honda Civic EG displays that screw-you attitude worn proudly by all true cut-throat bon viveurs. It plays by its own rules, and it doesn’t care who it upsets. So what if you don’t like the camber, or you scoff at the auto ’box, or you prefer a little more go to back up your show? Ask its owner Jorge Lupton how much he cares about that sort of negativity. Hell, he’s painted the damn thing in a shade of juicy peach just to ram it all right down your throat. It’s a Jordan Belfort of a car; hard-living, uncompromising, existing in the now. It makes no apology, because it doesn’t need to.
For Jorge, this is very much a visual demonstration of how he lives his life, day in, day out. He’s been monkeying about with cars since before he could even drive, and his back catalogue boasts a lengthy roll-call of sweet modded rides. “Ever since I could drive and before, I wanted a Lupo low and wide – so I made that happen, I’ve had two crazy-low static Lupos,” he says. “Then I moved onto a Mk2 Golf and a ’68 Beetle, but I always had the heart for a Honda of some kind. One day a friend of mine let me know that he was selling a B16-swapped Civic coupé, which I just had to buy as a daily while I finished my Beetle project – and it was on the drive home from picking it up that I realised I love the roar of a Honda engine! So it wasn’t long before the Civic coupé became the main car for me: new wheels, new seats, new suspension, taking it to every show I could… mainly VW ones, to annoy the VAG lovers!”
This new-found enthusiasm for Hondas was working out pretty well for Jorge’s creative juices, and by the winter of 2015 he’d bought another daily runabout and elevated the coupé to full-fat main project status, taking it off the road to do the build justice. After five months of work, Jorge proudly climbed aboard, rasped his way toward Mod Nats and… totally destroyed the car about five miles after leaving home.
Remember that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where we see Belfort’s Countach after his destructive drive home? That was effectively the scene Jorge was confronted with as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes the following morning, assessing the damage to see what could be saved. With typical pluck, he fixed up all the damage and then went a step further, installing air-ride. But the car never felt the same after the crash, so he stripped it all down again, squirrelled the Air Lift equipment away, and ditched the rest. Time for a new start.
“I’d wanted an EG Civic for a while,” Jorge ponders, “but never saw the right one pop up for sale – or if I did, it was at the wrong time! I finally found this one on eBay; it was in London which is about three hours from me, but I took the risk and drove up to have a look. When I got there it looked alright, but it was an auto, had a small bit of rust, and a ding on the passenger side door and wing. I offered him £200 less than he was asking and he took it! I’d never driven an automatic before this, and my first thoughts when buying the car were obviously to swap in a manual – but it drove amazingly, and I actually like the idea of having an auto stance car, it’s just such a cruiser.”
Having got the car back to the unit, our intrepid adventurer wasted no time in stripping the Civic down to see exactly what he had. There’s no point bolting things onto a wonky base, you’ve got to perfect the fundamentals first, so Jorge had a good poke around to see what was what. And what he revealed was… not ideal.
“I took the sideskirts off, and both sills where rotten and stuffed with newspaper from a month before, which as you can imagine but a bit of a dampener on things,” he grimaces, understandably aghast. “The car was in bad shape paint-wise, but thankfully the overall body wasn’t too bad apart from a wing, a door and the sills! I had the sills repaired at my friend’s garage, Lowlife Chopshop, and after that various bits were in primer of course, so the idea then was to do full paint. Luckily for me my cousin owns a spray shop in Telford called Fred Wilson Restore.”
Before the car was prepped for paint, however, Jorge felt it prudent to install the air-ride setup he’d rescued from his previous Civic. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? It was a straight fit, barring a few tricks and tweaks, and while he was at it Jorge sent the front hubs off to Gizfab in Skegness for them to be shortened. The boy had plans, you see… having spoken to MPC Motorsport over in the States, he figured the ideal setup for the EG would be their drop forks and rear control arms – which they gave him a hefty discount on, simply because they thought his cars were cool! How’s that for customer service?
“I’d always wanted BBS wheels but never had the money, although this time round I was keen to make this car the one,” he assures us. “So I thought ‘bugger it’; when I saw my mate was selling his RMs super-cheap, I had to get them! They were in perfect specs for my car, and I asked my kind mother to loan me the money and she bought them for me!
“When I got the wheels I obviously wanted to fit them straight away. The rears fitted with -10 degrees of camber after cutting and modding the arms down a little bit; the fronts took about five hours of arch-bending using Fast Car magazines, a bible and a Demon Tweeks catalogue! The arches were absolutely battered but it didn’t matter – the wheels fitted after all.”
With the car all together, Jorge took it out for a few shakedown runs to check everything was in order before delivering it to the paint shop, around three hours from home. The guys did the bodywork and prep together on the weekends, with Jorge falling into a routine of finishing work mid-afternoon on a Friday, driving up to Telford and working on the car all weekend, a pattern that played out for around four months in the end. But all the effort is in evidence in the finish, as the bodywork is flawless under that in-your-face peach paint. “I have to recommend Fred Wilson Restore,” he enthuses. “He is a top quality painter and I owe the bodywork to him! I just helped prep the car as much as I could…”
As is so often the case with cars we feature, the build came right down to the wire before its debut show, being finished a couple of hours before the Civic was due to unveil itself at Fitted UK. “It was a crazy rush, but we got there!” Jorge laughs. “And the reactions have been amazing – young people love it, old people are really confused by the air-ride.” Which is why we do these things, of course. And now that the car’s hibernating for the winter, we can expect some fresh new tricks for the 2018 show season. Jorge’s already elbows-deep in wire-tucking the bay, and we’re pretty sure we heard him whispering about a B16 engine swap. So soon enough this aggressive little EG, this wolf of all streets, will be amping up its prowling habits into full-on street-racing. And it’ll be taking no prisoners along the way.
TECH SPEC HONDA CIVIC EG
Styling:
Peach paint, smoothed front bumper, smoothed JDM tailgate, M3 mirrors, aerial deleted and smoothed, widened front wings, USDM sidelights, all-red taillights, fuel cap delete with gold glittery paint fuel cap neck, BYC ducktail spoiler, EG SR front lip, H8 EG X private plate
Tuning:
D15 1.5-litre SOHC, automatic transmission
Chassis:
9.5×15” BBS RM with 3.5” lips, Air Lift Performance air-ride with 3P management, MPC 2″ drop forks, MPC 2″ drop rear LCAs, 2″ shortened front hubs, chassis notched for driveshafts and track rods, shortened Hardrace camber arms
Interior:
Corbeau fixed bucket seats, DC2 Recaro rear seats, black plastics, Mountney 10″ steering wheel with quick-release boss, upgraded door speakers and head unit, simple boot build
Thanks:
“Fred Wilson Restore, Lowlife Chopshop, Gizfab, Auto Finesse for the sponsorship, my girlfriend Ashleigh for being the main cleaner, and my mum for always being supportive and loving the cars I build!”
Words Dan Bevis Photos Slim Jules
