This CRX Has Twice the Engines for Twice the Price

The Honda CRX has long been a darling of a certain segment of the enthusiast crowd, but it wasn’t until around 2018 that it started to come into its own with the collector-car crowd. The good ones, anyway.

Turns out that January was a month for the good ones, as we witnessed some noteworthy sales of the smart little hatchback with the truncated rear end. At its mega Kissimmee auction, Mecum offered four CRXs and absolutely broke our brains with a 326-mile 1991 Si model that sold for $71,500—fully $35K over the #1 (concours) value listed in the Hagerty Price Guide and a world record for the model. A few days later, a more mundane 1986 HF with 8100 miles brought $23,100. Not outrageous, but not cheap, either. 

Then there’s this thing, which is brain breaking for its own reasons—chief among them its twin engines. This week it sold on Bring a Trailer for $43,471, including fees. 

Anytime someone adds an extra powerplant to a vehicle, you just know there’s a story there. So naturally, there’s a story here …

This CRX was a Car and Driver magazine project that eventually landed on the cover of the May 1985 issue. American Honda was on board from the beginning and supplied the magazine with a Greek White CRX, along with an extra 1.5-liter inline-four, three-speed automatic transaxle, and the requisite in-betweens such as wiring and a second front suspension to make the build possible. Long-time C/D editor (and frequent Hagerty contributor) Don Sherman led the charge. 

“Car and Driver had ample technical expertise, including three engineers on staff in the 1980s,” Sherman says. “Honda was very supportive of our creative efforts. We also had an in-house shop with a capable technician/mechanic. But the best ally was Racing Beat, located in California, which did all the real design and fabrication that was necessary for the twin-engine CRX.

“Using automatic transmissions simplified linkage configurations and the car’s operation. We allowed both boxes to upshift on their own and that worked superbly well. There was ample room in the back of the car to house the second powertrain without exposing our ploy in the exterior sheet metal. The finished car handled well, stopped nicely, and had decent acceleration, though not by today’s standards.”

The extra hardware added 600 pounds to a stock CRX’s 1850-pound curb weight but gave the car a near-50/50 weigh distribution. In C/D tests, the CRX hot rod was certainly faster than a stock model, with an 8-second sprint to 60 mph and a quarter-mile time of 16 seconds flat at 85 mph, with a top speed of 125 mph. In the accompanying 1985 story, Sherman wrote: “These figures would give it a respectable second place overall in raw performance in the group of sports coupes we’ve tested this month,” a collection that included the Audi Coupe GT, Chevy Camaro Berlinetta, Plymouth Laser XE, Ford Mustang SVO, Nissan 300ZX, Mitsubishi Starion ESI, Merkur XR4Ti, and the Toyota Supra. 

“To carry this ploy to the logical extreme,” Sherman says, “we studied the Honda Accord of the day, determining that its four-speed automatic-equipped 1.8-liter four-cylinder powertrain would also fit inside CRX confines. Luckily, Honda was still game, and they had a load of totaled new Accords that had suffered major sheetmetal damage during a transport train wreck. The second edition was naturally quicker than the first.” The mag followed up with an October ’85 story, and the car now sported a slick Mugen body kit that included flared fenders, side skirts, and a deep front valance. 

Sherman adds the Car and Driver crew “briefly considered turbos for phase three,” but by that point they had moved on to the next project. “To pay our tab for the Racing Beat work,” roughly $20,000 all in, “we sold the CRX2  (entertain us by pretending that “2” is a superscript, as it appeared on the car) to some wealthy reader.” 

The BaT listing notes the car spent two decades in long-term ownership in Florida, before moving on to the California consignor in 2022. It now shows 51,000 miles on the odometer. As presented this week, the twin-engine CRX still looks largely as it did 40 years ago, though it sports new graphics and newer 15-inch MSW alloy wheels. The fuel tank has also been replaced. Today, the car shows its age, and there are many small cracks and chips throughout the plastic body work. Included with the car is a fat binder full of fascinating original C/D notes, sketches, and schematics from the period.

While the sale price is no record in the sense that the Mecum CRX result was, it is without a doubt a record price for a twin-engine CRX. The buyer, Ron Sturgeon, owns the DFW Elite Toy Museum in Haltom City, Texas, and the car is headed there for display, a curiosity to anchor an entire collection of curiosities. This seems a fitting next chapter to the remarkable little car’s story.