Two years ago, Roddy Zaun didn't know a whole lot about Hondas. He liked reading the import mags and had an Accord he'd loaded up with ICE. Hailing from Arizona's New Age hippie mecca, Sedona, Zaun didn't have much in the way of local talent to learn from, but he soon graduated to a simple DA hatch, a car he "bought from some dude for $800, and then probably spent $8,000 fixing up a motor that was bad from the start."
Then a friend happened upon this right-hand-drive DA in Phoenix, decided she couldn't afford it, and alerted Zaun to the prospect. "That morning I sold her my car and drove down to Phoenix and bought the right-hand drive [DA]."
The Integra is a right-hand-drive conversion, done by a previous owner by welding in the front end of a Japanese market Integra XSi: firewall, everything attached to it, and the dash, including the control switch for the folding side mirrors.
Unfortunately the B16A that came with the Integra wasn't in the same shape as the conversion. Zaun says it smoked when he first bought it, then deteriorated within a few weeks into bad knocking. Zaun and his buddy Kelley Wolfe removed the head, then the oil pan, to get a look at the pistons. They found the rings were shot, one of the cylinder walls was scraped, a bearing was spun and the crank was scored. This was a dead motor.
"It was kinda good timing because the latest issue of Honda Tuning had this feature for a shop [Superior Racing Development in Tempe, Ariz.] that had built four B20 Civics," Zaun says, revealing the source of inspiration for his own project.
He and Wolfe sourced a B20 long block from a local Phoenix yard and hauled it to Sedona. Now, pulling apart a motor is one thing, but a VTEC conversion is a whole different beast. The guys yielded to local professionals-or so they thought.
The shop in question installed the head without a VTEC oil supply line. No problem, the guys thought. They'd do it themselves. But the head not being drilled properly to begin with, the pistons flooded with oil at start-up. Luckily the shop accepted responsibility for the gaffe and made it right the second time around, with Zaun standing nearby and guiding the Honda newbies through the procedure.
With his B20 in running VTEC condition, Zaun worked out the rolling stock with TEIN adjustable coil-overs at all corners and 16-inch Rota Circuit 8 wheels shod with Falken rubber.
Back to the B20: Zaun installed a cold-air intake, JDM Type R header and 2.5-inch custom cat-back exhaust to open up the engine's breathing. But the chipped PR3 ECU was really meant to run a B16 and the extra displacement caused a lean mixture. Zaun brought in an A'PEXi V-AFC to regulate more fuel and with some dyno tuning got the DA up to 160-wheel hp.
On slicks with a gutted interior, that was good enough for 13.9s at the dragstrip. Not bad, but of course Zaun wanted more.
"I was gonna go all motor and bought Skunk2's Stage 2 cams," he explains. Realizing he'd need to bump the B20's 8.8:1 compression considerably to squeeze the best from the cams, he started thinking about pistons, and before long he was on the turbo path.
"A ride with a friend in California who has a CRX with a B20 turbo clinched it," Zaun says. "That car was awesome. So I sold the cams and started looking for a turbo." He found a manifold, T3/T04 turbo, wastegate and 2.5-inch downpipe on eBay. Parts in hand, he headed for the shop that gave him his initial inspiration. SRD installed the turbo kit, intercooler, and fabricated the plumbing. Engine management still plagued overall performance however, and SRD recommended an OBD-I conversion and a switch to Hondata engine control.
LoCash Racing solved the conversion with its simple $175 OBD-0 to OBD-I harness that lets users add the required two-plug OBD-I distributor and four-wire oxygen sensor, along with a plug-in connector for the existing harness to the gray plug OBD-I ECU. Almost too simple, but not without problems.