1998 Honda Civic Hatchback

My strongest and most-lasting impression of Roger Scalise came when the Super Street staff went snowboarding with some of Southern California’s best-known racers. You may have read the story about it in our May issue. Here’s what you probably didn’t know. Roger went with us and showed us his underwear. Yes. His underwear. Roger wears both boxers and briefs. At the same time. We didn’t ask him to drop trou; he volunteered.

Roger could be a great snowboarder; I have no idea. I spent all day falling down on the bunny slope while Steph Papadakis, Super Street Editor Richard Chang, and the bi-pantied Roger whooshed away to the expert slope. But I have the image of Roger’s skivvies burned into my mind. I can’t shake it. As I sit down to write this feature on his very-cool turbocharged ’98 Civic hatch, which he didn’t drive to the mountains that day—the day he showed us his underwear—I’m having a hard time concentrating on the car.

But this is a car magazine. It’s about cars and not underwear. So let’s stop thinking about what Roger wears underneath his clothes and talk about this beautiful black hatchback. I’m going to at least give it a try.

You can see that it has a Prelude motor. That’s an easy one. Roger says that what he learned from building up this car was “how to make a Prelude motor live.” Indeed. It lives and breathes and puts out 648 hp at 7,400 rpm and pulls a 10.30 quarter-mile time at 144 mph. Not too shabby.

To get those results, Roger had his shop, Westside Motorsports, do a port-and-polish job, balance and blueprint everything, and then add the FasTrax turbocharger, which probably has something to do with how fast the hatchback can go. But you can’t just drop a turbocharger into the engine bay and expect wonders; you need things like a Speed Pro ECU, the first one ever installed in a Honda, an A’pex blow-off valve, a Spearco intercooler and pipes, and a GReddy boost controller. A Dynomax exhaust, and ADF header, also help.

This is a race car. It goes fast because of all the reasons we enumerated above. But speed isn’t everything in racing. All the power you create under the hood needs to get to the ground, too. The Civic hits the ground on Hoosier slicks wrapped around Racing Hart wheels when it’s at the racetrack. On the street, Roger swaps in Racing Hart Evo C2 wheels with Pirelli rubber.

Externally, the hatchback benefits from the light weight of a carbon-fiber hood and the bold impact of Modern Image and Redspot graphics. Prelude parts aren’t limited to the engine bay, either. Inside the passenger compartment, you’ll find black leather-covered Prelude seats and a Prelude shift knob. Perched in the driver seat, Roger can oversee everything that’s happening both inside and outside the car with the Auto Meter gauges that were installed in the Traffic Jams dash. All the interior work was done at Westside Motorsports, too.

Roger says that he built this car to prove a point. He didn’t say what the point was, but I guess that’s OK, because I’m still distracted. I keep coming back to the fact that Roger calls his tighty-whities his “dun-dun-na-nas,” as in “I’m a super hero and now I’m going to fly off to save someone. Dun-dun-na-na!” It’s something that I will never forget. No matter how hard I try.