It was a scooter that put Richard Reeve onto the Honda City Turbo – a foldaway Motocompo 50cc scooter, to be precise. It was bundled with certain Honda City models as a last-mile solution for commuters.
Launched in 1981, the City was a bit too big to be a kei car (those tiny cars that, in Japan, enjoy lower tax and insurance rates) but it was still impressively small.
It came in various forms, although the one that attracts enthusiasts today is the rare City Turbo – a 750kg special powered by a 109bhp 1.2-litre turbocharged engine that is good for 0-62mph in less than eight seconds.
It was the brainchild of Hirotoshi Honda, son of company founder Soichiro Honda, and the founder of Mugen Motorsports, Honda’s racing arm. In fact, he created a popular race series for the little thing.
Having bought the Motocompo at auction, Richard desired a City Turbo to put it in. However, rather than pay a Japan-based agent to source one for him, he decided to do the job himself. “I wanted to buy it privately from its owner rather than from a dealer,” he says.
“I booked my flights, and a couple of weeks before I was due to leave, I was contacted by a private seller who, it turned out, was a City Turbo fanatic desperate to save the cars. I met him for dinner in Tokyo in October 2018 but his Turbo – a Mk2 registered in 1985 that enthusiasts call the ‘Bulldog’ because of its more aggressive bodykit – had been off the road for 20 years and was in Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.
“Over dinner, using Google Translate, he told me he would have the car, which had done 60,000 miles, properly prepared by one of Japan’s leading Honda City experts based in Fukushima, which, true to his word, he did.
“Then before I had it exported, he photographed it under cherry blossom trees – in Japan, a symbol of good luck and prosperity. The first time I saw the car in the flesh was in 2019, at Grimsby docks.”
Rather than rush home with it, Richard first trailered his City Turbo to a show, where it attracted huge interest from people fascinated by its rarity, race pedigree and starring role in the Gran Turismo computer games and then he took it for a drive, the first of many.
“It’s quite tall so when they were racing the model, there were a lot of roll-over accidents,” says Richard. “You feel every pothole too, but the engine pulls hard and, compared with Metros, Fiestas and Renault 5s of the same era, the quality of the car and how everything works is in a different league. It never fails to put a smile on my face.”
