So here begins a series of reviews where I analyse the perennial crux that has befallen every new player of Gran Turismo - which car do I part with my starting cash with to take those first tentative steps onto the Gran Turismo racing ladder? I'll be analysing every single car that costs under 10,000 credits (all in GT2 for now) and summing up their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their potential for greatness.
So we start with the very first car I tried on my very first attempt at GT2, way back in 2000, when I was all of 8 years old - the venerable Honda CR-X. More specifically, this being GT2 and all, the 1993 Honda CR-X Del-Sol 1.6 ESi. Thingy.
Now, my primitive 8-year-old self had an absolute nightmare with this car, in fact, this car fell into the dreaded category of 'being so bad I had to start the game again with a fresh save because I couldn't win a bloody raffle with it'. Maybe it was my naive choice of race, my ham-fisted driving technique (think average current BTCC driver and you have an idea), or something else, but I remember swearing an oath never to touch anything with the CR-X badge on it again.
So here we are, ten years down the line, and I'm staring at the very car that threatened to derail my love of Gran Turismo before it had even began. My chance for ultimate revenge has arrived. This'll be easy - throw some hyperbolic bile at it, declare it a steaming pile of dog puke that drives like a drunken tramp in a trolley and with roughly the same amount of horsepower, and have done with it, moving on to infinitely better cars. But my conscience tells me to give it another chance. Maybe it was my own blithering, youthful ineptitude that fooled me into thinking this car was as awful as it was. A lot has changed in ten years - I've grown up (honestly), gotten better as a driver (again, honestly), and that youthful exuberance has all but disappeared (would you stop laughing at the back). So here we go - the moment of redemption has arrived.
Let's deal in facts first, shall we? It's a front-wheel drive coupe, not too much unlike the Prelude, of which I have very fond memories of sliding around Tahiti Road in the formative years of my GT career. It's relatively light at 1025kg, which makes up for a slightly underwhelming 125hp rating - underwhelming because the previous generation car from 1991 had 30hp more, and was also 65kg lighter. What does 'Del-Sol' stand for, 'had-one-too-many-burgers-and-large-fries'? Whilst it's been sunning itself en del sol, it's put on a few pounds, and found a few love handles. Still, pretty respectable figures, considering some of the wobbling fatties you can part with your starting 10,000 for.
Unfortunately, whilst 125hp sounds perfectly adequate in terms of horsepower, the 101.94 lb/ft of torque it produces wholly isn't. Simply put, when testing this car on the rolling hills of Tahiti Road, I couldn't help but wondering what else puts out this amount of torque. A hungry hamster? Ants returning leaves to their nest? This is one of those cars that doesn't roll and accelerate with gradual ease - more sort of wheezes and coughs along like an asthmatic moth lugging a multitude of flight cases.
It's a shame, as this one huge Achilles heel threatens to overshadow the good parts of this car. It grips the road in much the same way a snail grips a paving slab in your back garden, i.e. solidly and with never a hint of oversteer. In fact, this may be the first car I've driven which is impossible to oversteer. Being front-wheel-drive, it does understeer if you really slam the nose into corners, but give it a healthy dab of brake before turning in, and this is never much of a problem. And given a completely flat road, it launches well as well, and accelerates nicely; not raucously and aggressively like a scalded cat, more a sort of mildly grumpy one that's fed up that it hasn't been fed dinner yet. So, bar the blithering way it gets up any upwardly-inclined surface, this car is ticking every box in the 'not bad' category. But sadly, as soon as you put any other cars on the track alongside this, any recommendations I can give it begin to look very tenuous indeed.
My two test races for this series of reviews are the two races people are most likely to attempt first in their GT career - the first race of the GT Japanese Championship, at Mid-Field Raceway, and the first round of the venerable Sunday Cup, at Tahiti Road. And at both of these tracks, the CR-X del-love-handles flattered to deceive more than your average English politician. The assorted motley crew of Kei cars and compacts that feature in both of these races managed to show up a number of hitherto unknown problems - the gasping, wheezing engine was stretched to choking point off of the corners, and the brakes, whilst perfectly fine when cruising around on your own, are pretty much woeful in combat, with a heroic Toyota Yaris managing to outbrake me into a number of corners on Tahiti Road, and a Suzuki Alto Works threatening to cause a sensational upset at Mid-Field by barging rudely up the inside on the corner just before the first tunnel section, and whilst the hamster in my car's engine bay quickly stocked up on carrots, he nearly made a getaway, and it was only a mix of banzai cornering for the rest of the lap and a desperate last-ditch slipstream on the main stretch that took me to victory by just over 2/100ths of a second. Dear oh dear.
The sad thing is, the chronic lack of power is something that's difficult to remedy no matter how many new bits you clunk on - torque is tricky to modify without major mods to the engine itself which are near impossible in GT2, and if you are to spend any more money on this machine, go straight to the transmission section for new clutch and gearbox parts to help get what power it does have down as effectively as possible. But my best advice possible would be to not bother buying this thing at all - there's no point, not when (as I'll demonstrate in future reviews) there are much better cars that don't make every single hill a torturous exercise in wheezing and gradual deceleration for the same, or even less in some cases, money.
So it turns out my 8-year-old self had it right all along - unless you're prepared to plough money into it and drive like a maniac just to get decent results, this lumpy, unshaven excuse for a coupe is a waste of time and dosh, and will see you limping up the GT2 ladder as opposed to scrambling rapidly up the rungs.
So we start with the very first car I tried on my very first attempt at GT2, way back in 2000, when I was all of 8 years old - the venerable Honda CR-X. More specifically, this being GT2 and all, the 1993 Honda CR-X Del-Sol 1.6 ESi. Thingy.
Now, my primitive 8-year-old self had an absolute nightmare with this car, in fact, this car fell into the dreaded category of 'being so bad I had to start the game again with a fresh save because I couldn't win a bloody raffle with it'. Maybe it was my naive choice of race, my ham-fisted driving technique (think average current BTCC driver and you have an idea), or something else, but I remember swearing an oath never to touch anything with the CR-X badge on it again.
So here we are, ten years down the line, and I'm staring at the very car that threatened to derail my love of Gran Turismo before it had even began. My chance for ultimate revenge has arrived. This'll be easy - throw some hyperbolic bile at it, declare it a steaming pile of dog puke that drives like a drunken tramp in a trolley and with roughly the same amount of horsepower, and have done with it, moving on to infinitely better cars. But my conscience tells me to give it another chance. Maybe it was my own blithering, youthful ineptitude that fooled me into thinking this car was as awful as it was. A lot has changed in ten years - I've grown up (honestly), gotten better as a driver (again, honestly), and that youthful exuberance has all but disappeared (would you stop laughing at the back). So here we go - the moment of redemption has arrived.
Let's deal in facts first, shall we? It's a front-wheel drive coupe, not too much unlike the Prelude, of which I have very fond memories of sliding around Tahiti Road in the formative years of my GT career. It's relatively light at 1025kg, which makes up for a slightly underwhelming 125hp rating - underwhelming because the previous generation car from 1991 had 30hp more, and was also 65kg lighter. What does 'Del-Sol' stand for, 'had-one-too-many-burgers-and-large-fries'? Whilst it's been sunning itself en del sol, it's put on a few pounds, and found a few love handles. Still, pretty respectable figures, considering some of the wobbling fatties you can part with your starting 10,000 for.
Unfortunately, whilst 125hp sounds perfectly adequate in terms of horsepower, the 101.94 lb/ft of torque it produces wholly isn't. Simply put, when testing this car on the rolling hills of Tahiti Road, I couldn't help but wondering what else puts out this amount of torque. A hungry hamster? Ants returning leaves to their nest? This is one of those cars that doesn't roll and accelerate with gradual ease - more sort of wheezes and coughs along like an asthmatic moth lugging a multitude of flight cases.
It's a shame, as this one huge Achilles heel threatens to overshadow the good parts of this car. It grips the road in much the same way a snail grips a paving slab in your back garden, i.e. solidly and with never a hint of oversteer. In fact, this may be the first car I've driven which is impossible to oversteer. Being front-wheel-drive, it does understeer if you really slam the nose into corners, but give it a healthy dab of brake before turning in, and this is never much of a problem. And given a completely flat road, it launches well as well, and accelerates nicely; not raucously and aggressively like a scalded cat, more a sort of mildly grumpy one that's fed up that it hasn't been fed dinner yet. So, bar the blithering way it gets up any upwardly-inclined surface, this car is ticking every box in the 'not bad' category. But sadly, as soon as you put any other cars on the track alongside this, any recommendations I can give it begin to look very tenuous indeed.
My two test races for this series of reviews are the two races people are most likely to attempt first in their GT career - the first race of the GT Japanese Championship, at Mid-Field Raceway, and the first round of the venerable Sunday Cup, at Tahiti Road. And at both of these tracks, the CR-X del-love-handles flattered to deceive more than your average English politician. The assorted motley crew of Kei cars and compacts that feature in both of these races managed to show up a number of hitherto unknown problems - the gasping, wheezing engine was stretched to choking point off of the corners, and the brakes, whilst perfectly fine when cruising around on your own, are pretty much woeful in combat, with a heroic Toyota Yaris managing to outbrake me into a number of corners on Tahiti Road, and a Suzuki Alto Works threatening to cause a sensational upset at Mid-Field by barging rudely up the inside on the corner just before the first tunnel section, and whilst the hamster in my car's engine bay quickly stocked up on carrots, he nearly made a getaway, and it was only a mix of banzai cornering for the rest of the lap and a desperate last-ditch slipstream on the main stretch that took me to victory by just over 2/100ths of a second. Dear oh dear.
The sad thing is, the chronic lack of power is something that's difficult to remedy no matter how many new bits you clunk on - torque is tricky to modify without major mods to the engine itself which are near impossible in GT2, and if you are to spend any more money on this machine, go straight to the transmission section for new clutch and gearbox parts to help get what power it does have down as effectively as possible. But my best advice possible would be to not bother buying this thing at all - there's no point, not when (as I'll demonstrate in future reviews) there are much better cars that don't make every single hill a torturous exercise in wheezing and gradual deceleration for the same, or even less in some cases, money.
So it turns out my 8-year-old self had it right all along - unless you're prepared to plough money into it and drive like a maniac just to get decent results, this lumpy, unshaven excuse for a coupe is a waste of time and dosh, and will see you limping up the GT2 ladder as opposed to scrambling rapidly up the rungs.
Rating: 37/100
Spec Sheet:
Engine Type: L4 SOHC
Displacement: 1998cc
Power: 125hp/6900rpm
Torque: 101.94ft.lb/5000rpm
Dimensions: 3995mm x 1695mm x 1255mm
Weight: 1037kg
Drivetrain: FF
Machine Testing:
0-400m: 0:16.894s - 80mph
0-1000m: 0:31.092 - 106mph
Top Speed: 142.21mph
Spec Sheet:
Engine Type: L4 SOHC
Displacement: 1998cc
Power: 125hp/6900rpm
Torque: 101.94ft.lb/5000rpm
Dimensions: 3995mm x 1695mm x 1255mm
Weight: 1037kg
Drivetrain: FF
Machine Testing:
0-400m: 0:16.894s - 80mph
0-1000m: 0:31.092 - 106mph
Top Speed: 142.21mph
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