Little Big Horn

Words by Iain Kelly  Photos by Mark Pakula

This lurid Honda is all about decimating the opposition and records on the track

Picture this: your company has spent tens of thousands of dollars investing all their skill and talent into building a piece of equipment from the ground up to take on the reputations of your peers and a bunch of numbers on a stop watch. The only reason this car exists is to go around a track faster than any other car in that class can and when it comes down to it, when you’re strapped into this sadistic lump of tin in the pit lane, it’s just you, the car, the track and those numbers.

So why is the job that much harder than simply steering around the circuit? Because there is the prestige, the emotion and ego-stroking bragging rights to come with pasting everyone else to take a win in the time attack class. The mechanics and engineers who build and set the car up have to prove their talents as the shop’s name rests on the performance it delivers, while the driver has to keep the animalistic hell on wheels off the walls while also pushing as hard as that thing will give.

A win at a time attack gives any workshop massive amounts of credibility in the publics’ eyes, particularly if they set a new lap record as that’s proving that your car is the best there’s ever been. Customers wouldn’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to end up with a second-rate machine, now would they? And all this pressure is ahead of one of Japan’s most revered tuning companies: J’s Racing.

When they take this Honda Fit (nee: Jazz) on a tour of Time Attack events in their homeland and the USA, Honda tuners around the globe will start to sweat about the type of massacre this 238kW 2.4-litre, seam-welded and gutted hybrid will bring down on them. Yep, you read that right, this tiny little egg box is packing a modified K24 as well as enough suspension and chassis mods to make the tin man have wet dreams.