Tag Archives: CRX

Here Comes the Sun*

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Winter is coming here at The Lego Car Blog Towers. But whilst us North Northern Hemispherers are steeling ourselves for it getting dark by mid-afternoon and defrosting the car both before and after work, our readers in the Southern Hemisphere are getting ready to enjoy sunny summer days.

Cue the perfect car for the sunshine, and one – in the US at least – named after it; the lovely Honda CRX / Del Sol.

Produced when Honda were at their glorious peak, the CRX / Del Sol brought affordable, economical, reliable fun to the masses, and in targa form open-top motoring too.

This fabulous Technic recreation of the Del Sol captures the real car brilliantly, and comes from previous bloggee (and TLCB Master MOCer) Nico71.

Featuring a removable transverse 4-cylinder engine driven by the front wheels, working steering via ‘HOG’ and the wheel, rear suspension, opening doors, hood and trunk, and a stow-able targa top, Nico’s model is as luminous inside as out, and you can see more of his fantastic Technic Del Sol at his excellent website (where building instructions can also be found), and via the video below.

YouTube Video

*Today’s title song.

Accessibly Interesting

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Having just posted a hugely valuable exotic car built from another hugely valuable exotic car, you might be surprised to learn that at The Lego Car Blog, we rather prefer the ordinary. So much so we’re running a building competition in search of boring vehicles.

You see, it’s easy to make a squillion-dollar supercar that precisely eight people will buy, not drive, and park in a garage hoping it will one day be worth two-squillion dollars, but it’s much harder to make something hum-drum fun.

It’s even harder these days, when the only thing that sells are angry-looking crossover-SUVs with too much power and too little handling finesse, but back in the 1980s, a number of affordable, interesting, fun cars could be had from car manufacturers who today wouldn’t know fun if it ran them over.

Honda were one such company, who – at the peak of their engineering brilliance – created a small 2+2 front-wheel-drive coupe built from standard economy-car parts and powered by a dinky (but clever) 1.5 or 1.6 litre engine. And that was the ‘sports’ model, base versions had a 1.3!

The result was fabulous, and a car that was infinitely more fun to drive than a BMW X7M or whatever the hell they’re trying to pass off as as a ‘sports’ vehicle this week.

Flickr’s Mihail Rakovskiy has captured the humble CRX beautifully in Creator style, recreating its ’80s aesthetic brilliantly and including opening doors, tailgate and hood, a superb interior, and a realistic brick-built version of the little Honda 4-pot that powered it.

It’s a fantastic homage to a Honda’s proof that power and price are no match for cleverly engineered affordable fun, and there’s much more to see at Mihail’s ‘Honda CRX’ album via the link above.