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Everyone wants what they cannot have. Boys want ridiculous cars, like Lamborghinis and Vipers and such. Slightly older boys want what they see in the pages of an entirely different type of glossy magazine. Tons of folks living in Japan want Chevy Astro vans. (Go figure.) Cap’n Rich wants to meet the A-Team. I’d like peace-of-mind. Ain’t gonna happen. It is this innate desire for what we cannot have that drives the human psyche in general, and specifically, a Honda performance market gone mad for R.

No American Civic could possibly approach the sheer factory chic that the Cult of R has built up around Honda’s subtly, if completely, re-engineered overseas-only boy-racer. It is equal parts horsepower and myth that fuel the Civic Type R’s mystique. Ever driven one?

Unless you have some influential friends or have been to Japan recently (or both), chances are you haven’t. That makes it impossibly cool, above and beyond whatever good and bad points it may or may not possess.

For many, having that red R automatically puts it ahead of the tweaked-Civic pack, no matter what any of us do or say. These folks will undoubtedly lead a life of disappointment as the things are damned hard to come by in this country. (Though we’ve found at least one place that may be able to accommodate, see page 240.) The rest of us will build a better R, one that will be legal in this country. And one that will offer a better torque band than Shawn Hiller’s Civic is a rare beast.

Shaun’s ride beats the Type R at its own game on paper, starting with a cheap-ass CX model hatch as a starting point, and manages to do it with a sense of factory cool that usually goes out the window when hop-ups get rolling. So much is invested in sheer excess: wheels the size of small, starving African nations with vaguely French names, wings with enough down force to turn tsunamis and tornadoes away, tachometers that block half of the windshield, paint schemes that roughly equate to staring into the sun, in colors and combinations not seen in nature.

The silver paint and Mugen MF10s seen here seem positively old-fashioned, if not minimalist in comparison. There’s nothing that spells fashion disaster here, nothing that will make you look back in five or ten or twenty years and wince and ask yourself what the hell you were thinking.

JDM (which stands for Japanese Domestic Market) basically means do it like the factory would do it. Show some restraint —more, even, than the factory (and their merry-yellow R) might be inclined to show. Cherry-pick the best factory components and put them in a combination that is your own (in this case, 2000 Si sway bars and chairs and a Japan-spec Integra GS-R mill). Add just enough to differentiate it from lesser models. And make sure that you’re packing the necessary wallop under the hood.

For Shawn, the necessary boot to the head came in the form of a ’98 1.8L Integra GS-R mill, pumping out slightly more than the U.S. B18CI’s 170hp rating. Some Type-R internals, better breathing, more fuel, and before you know it you’ve got as much at the front wheels as a Type R has at the flywheel and you’ve got an extra 30-plus foot-pounds of torque to boot.

This is never, ever, a bad thing (Unless your right foot is lead, like mine–JK). No turbos, no nitrous, no bolt-on gallimaufry, for the most part, just solid factory-style performance. The way the factory oughta be doing it in the first place. A little ECU reprogramming here, a little head porting there, some Type R internals, and a couple of other things invisible to prying eyes, even when the hood is raised, and you’re well within the parameters of JDM style.

About the only thing missing from a full JDM conversion is the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. Unless you find a Japan-spec shell somewhere and start popping all of your own components onto it, that just ain’t gonna happen. Even if you did find one, we doubt that the DMV would look kindly upon you cruising around while sitting on the wrong side of the car. Explain that one to the cops next time you’re pulled over because The Man doesn’t like punk kids driving anything other than Chevelles. Might be cheaper and easier to hold these pictures up to a mirror if you need to carry the illusion further. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

So which scenario is less painful: wanting something you can’t have, or having something that may quite possibly be better than that other thing you can’t have? The legend of R will remain untarnished, but JDM-style conversions offer a chance at legend-like performance and style that you may not otherwise be able to approach. Read about what you (probably) can’t have and decide for yourself.