At the 2004 Tokyo Auto Salon, Mugen stunned showgoers with the Fit Dynamite concept. The Dynamite had everything we wanted from a tuner car, with a built 256hp K20A from a DC5 Integra Type R, a widebody kit that looked straight out of the BTCC, and every inch of it was slathered in a rich Firecracker Red. At last year's show, Mugen followed suit with another Firecraker Red seductress-the Legend Max. The Max was a JDM Honda Legend (our Acura RL) crammed with no less than a 590hp MF408S Le Mans V-8.
For this year's Auto Salon Mugen capitalized on Honda's reluctance to offer some kind of home market Si-variant with the Civic Dominator (if you look hard enough you can see our event coverage in this issue-turn a few pages and you won't have to squint as hard). The Dominator is a Civic sedan with a supercharged K20A making 296 hp finished off in-you guessed it-Firecracker Red. The years of Mugen's Auto Salon booth visits have begun to instill in us some sort of Pavlovian bloodlust at the mere sight of this color.
Positioned just behind the dominating presence of the Dominator turntable at this year's Auto Salon was what looked like another version of the Fit Dynamite finished in a much less sinister Shining Pearl Orange. Aside from the "Hiya, how ya doing?" orange that was in stark contrast to the "You know you want me" red there was more to this Fit that separated it from its hot-blooded siblings and also made it feel more like a Mugen car than any of those other concepts.
Mugen (AKA M-Tec Co., Ltd.) is a tuner like no other. A common misconception draws parallels between Mugen and such in-house "OE tuners" as Nismo, TRD, and Mazdaspeed. Truth be told, Mugen is a stand-alone aftermarket tuner that specializes in Honda engines-some of which just happen to be to F1-spec. This particular Honda tuner was an F1 engine supplier from '92-'99, garnering three wins in the most technologically sophisticated (and surely the most pompous) motorsport in the world. Mugen's magic Honda touch may have something to do with the fact that it was founded by Hirotoshi Honda-as in the son of Soichiro. Although Hirotoshi's father was also the founding father of Honda the automaker and the tuner have never established a formal affiliation.
Which brings us back to Mugen's little orange Fit Spec-D (as in Dynamite). Mugen has always been about sensible cars, tuning cars that show dramatic performance improvements across the board while still preserving that unmistakable Honda DNA (no doubt because of the shared DNA between the patriarchs of Mugen and Honda). The Fit Dynamite, much like Mugen's other Firecracker Red fantasy trips, was an exercise in engineering might, a concept car, a "what if" approach to a question that was never asked. But this Shining Pearl Orange Spec-D is not that kind of a car.