How is it that something so innocuous as Honda's diminutive Fit could create such a stir at the latest SEMA Show? Is it possible for something so small to be The Next Big Thing? And how is it that this car puts 2.56 liters worth of engine in a 1.5 liter bay? Finally, how can it be that Leigh Guarnieri, a man who's built many a project vehicle and is more connected to Honda than Tony Soprano is to Jersey's waste management, has never tweaked a Honda before this one?
Contradiction, incongruity and contrast are all appropriate descriptors for not only the Honda Fit but most especially this Honda Fit. This car wasn't even a twinkle in Leigh's eye until a few months before SEMA. It seems the Honda peeps had an extra Fit sitting on a shelf at HQ and they approached Leigh to build the car.
Leigh's Honda bond runs deep. His father owned a Honda motorcycle dealership in Connecticut for 15 years and now he's a parts marketing manager at American Honda. Leigh himself even spent five years at the big H doing computer engineering before landing his current gig as the director of marketing, sponsorship and special projects for Extreme Dimensions.
Leigh was helping Super Street with our ill-fated Fit project when he received a last minute call from Chris Martin at Honda. "I have an extra automatic with a rattle in the dashboard, do you want it?" Leigh accepted the car, slushbox, rattles and all. His original plan was to do a show car to promote ED's new Couture line of kits while the Super Street Fit was bound for super lap battle with ED's carbon fiber Carbon Creations kit. According to him, "It really snowballed after that." This Fit more than snowballed; it was a full-scale avalanche quickly burying our Super Street Fit and any plans we had for B-Spec domination.
"The theme of the build started with the rollcage," Leigh continues. "I just wanted to do a full interior normal car with a really cool cage in it. Then the rollcage guy said, 'We can't save the interior.' The theme went from normal to racecar pretty quickly in a matter of two or three days."