CTECH Automotive Street/Track FL5 Build Thread

[ctechauto]

Hey everyone, new to the forums, but not new to the scene.

A little bit of an about us. CTECH Automotive was founded in 2018 after a decade of modifying and driving JDM and German vehicles. We began as strictly online parts sales for Volkswagen, Audi, Nissans, and Honda platforms. As our passion grew even deeper, connections and relationships formed over the years - on the street and on the track, we decided to open an independent shop to continue providing specially curated aftermarket automotive parts, and modifying and building cars in 2022. Over the years, we were drawn more and more to two particular brands that really focus on the pinnacle driving experiences: Porsche and Honda. This has lead us to become great friends of the leaders of one of our major sponsors and supporters over at a very popular Facebook group called Average Middle Class Garage Goals who share our deep passion for anything automotive and shop/garage related.

Feel free to head to the site (fine tuning still in progress): https://ctechautomotive.com/ and let us know if you're looking for any parts; we're happy to help the community, and would love to become a forum sponsor!

We have a few shop (and personal) cars here, namely, '97 EK9, '19 FK8, and a '25 FL5 that this thread will focus on. We also have a '14 Porsche Cayman S 981 dedicated track car that is towed by our Gen 3 Raptor. We're quite familiar with these platforms, hence the decision to expand our online sales platform.

We picked up the FL5 back in mid-February. We weren't planning on buying it this early, as we were expecting to dive into the platform late fall/early winter. We got a great deal (MSRP) through a referral especially considering the market here in North Texas that every dealer was still asking for markup so we couldn't pass it up! Obviously now with the tariffs, we're super glad we picked it up when we did.

2025 Honda Civic Type R FL5 in Championship White (#R-38506)

Our FK8, EK9, and FL5

About a week after we picked it up, we were in contact with Cobb Tuning as they were looking for a MY '25 to do their R&D to release their Accessport tuning support for '25. We headed down to Austin and with about 900 miles on the odo, Cobb went to work.

As we're super familiar with the Cobb tuning platform, everything went well. R&D validated that the MY '25 had no changes to the ECU compared to '23/'24 cars including the ECU bench unlock procedure. Got a Stage 1 93 oct OTS map on it, took a shop tour, and had a blast. I'll have to find the dyno chart, but on a low reading Mustang dyno it was IIRC 325whp/330wtq. Power band was even more smoothed out/linear and top end felt a lot more punchy all the way to redline compared to stock map.

We were also the first '25 to get a protune by our friend Alan Jackson at Edge Autosport with his e-tune service. As a "development" car, we did run into some Cobb Accesstuner issues (the tuning software) and we were able to get new revisions of the software pushed to the community after some trial and error. After a few revisions of logs back and forth, everything is looking great! This coming week we'll be getting with Alan again at a local-ish dyno to do more in depth testing for this platform and see what kind of power we can make over the OTS tune, and see how much power we can make safely and reliably. It won't be a "send it" tune, we want safety and reliably first and foremost.

Special thanks to Matt over at Cobb to host us and work with us on the R&D side of things. Happy to provide a car they were needing!

Anyways, we threw on some Eibach Sportline springs as stock heigh is quite 4x4 mode, Project Aero front lip, PLM wing risers, and along with hardwire radar detector, OEM Accord Homelink mirror, and a FitCamX dash cam.

Next up is awaiting our wheels. As a dealer for Volk Racing, we have (2) sets of CE28s coming in our next shipment in late summer/early fall. One set will be for sale: Volk Racing CE28SL 18x9.5 +35 in Pressed Graphite. Let us know if you're interested in this set!

We're going to keep the other set, which is normally referred to as "god spec": Volk Racing CE28N+ M-Spec 18x10 +40 in Dark Diamond Gunmetal. Going to go with 285/30/18 Yoko AD09s (we're super happy with A052s on our track Cayman, so we're sticking with the Yokos).

Some other things we're waiting on is:
Ohlin R&T with Sakebomb camber plates
Whiteline Lower Camber joints (on the way) - aiming for -3.5ish front camber to reduce some understeer and keep tire wear even on the track
Eibach rear camber arms
RV6 rear lower control arm buckets
Eibach rear sway bar
aFe Takeda intake
PRL Intercooler
HKS Hi-Power exhaust with Invidia front pipe
Acuity or Hybrid Racing shifter
ARP extended wheel studs
Project Kics R40 lug nuts
etc

I'll keep you guys updated on the build, and again, feel free to reach out through our site or email us sales@ctechautomotive.com if you have any questions or are looking for parts - we don't sell or even recommend anything we wouldn't use on our own cars. Excited to really take this platform up a notch!

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[ItsMeNickG]

Beautiful build, and welcome!

 

[ctechauto]

Beautiful build, and welcome!

Thanks Nick! Funny to see you here, I follow you on my personal account (and now on CTECH) on IG! Your build is epic!

 

[ctechauto]

SOLD!!!


Bump, selling our PLM wing risers we used for testing:

https://www.civicxi.com/forum/threads/fs-plm-fl5-wing-risers-brackets-used.57107/


This is a used (pre-owned) set of wing risers that came off our shop car (FL5). They include a set of OEM Honda Wing Riser Seals #74912-T60-J00 already installed on the brackets. They have been used for approximately one month for testing purposes only.

You will be saving $100+ off new price which is $395 from us/PLM. AND with free shipping!

We are a vetted forum sponsor, and we've uploaded a handwritten note on the OEM Honda Wing Riser seal packaging for verification purposes, as well as listing them on our website for ease of purchasing!

$275 shipped in the lower 48!

https://ctechautomotive.com/products/plm-wing-riser-brackets-fl5-used

 

[ctechauto]

New blog post is up!

https://ctechautomotive.com/blogs/news/dyno-time

We got some dyno time a couple days ago with our buddy Alan Jackson over at Edge Autosport to see how the street e-tune he did performed in a controlled environment. As mentioned earlier, our shop FL5 was the used for Cobb Tuning's beta R&D for the MY25. Previously, on Cobb's dyno it baselined stock at right around 300whp/300wtq and with the Cobb Stage 1 OTS 93 octane map, it gained +20whp and +20wtq (maybe +30wtq). The dyno we used with Alan was a Dynojet, and oddly enough, it read low, at least compared to Cobb's dyno. Maybe it was also because it was kind of warm, with virtually no airflow to the IC (the dinky fan did basically nothing) as IATs were climbing to close to 120F just sitting there or there was some sort of correction factor going on.

Either way, it doesn't really matter at that point as we were going to baseline everything on this dyno and with the baseline on the same dyno, the deltas would be accurate. We baselined it at 283whp/298wtq on Cobb Stage 0 93 octane (aka: Stock map).

Run 2 would be the street e-tune Alan had tuned for us. While the street e-tune performed pretty well, driveability was great, and validated the logs we captured, Alan wanted to try out a little bit of a different strategy using torque modeling compared to what he did previously on the e-tune.

As you see, the final results in Run 3 are quite a drastic difference. 326whp/343wtq

The final tune gained peak +43whp and +45wtq from baseline!

We're very happy with the tune, and you can definitely feel the additional torque up top, and the powerband is much improved.

Fast forward to tonight - we installed the aFe Takeda Intake, did more logging and testing (75-ish miles driven tonight while logging). Logs to me look good from AFR to LTFT, but of course sent it off to Alan to verify as he's the expert tuner here.

Looks cool, spruces up the engine bay a bit, and makes a little more noise. We have this intake on our FK8 as well, so we've had good experience with it thus far.

 

[ctechauto]

New blog post is up!

https://ctechautomotive.com/blogs/n...ere-impatiently-waiting-on-some-major-parts-1


We've started gathering (or, rather, hoarding) some parts while we're impatiently waiting on some of our major parts off backorder from a few manufacturers. In the mean time, the mod bug bit us again, of course, and we threw a couple of quick mods onto the shop FL5.




Drivability, Drivability, Drivability!

The first quick mod is a drivability mod. The FL5's throttle positioning is quite far away from the brake pedal and it makes heel-toe rev matching a bit more cumbersome and challenging, especially coming from our floor-mounted OE throttle on our track Cayman. We don't have big feet here, either, so when most people use the "side-foot-side-foot" of heel-toe rev matching, we actually have to be very literal and use "heel-twist-ankle-toe" method of downshift rev matching. If you've ever seen the Initial-D anime, this is what it looks like in reality for us:

We went with the ACUITY Instruments Throttle Pedal Spacer. It's an incredibly well designed and machined part that is so simple (relatively) and solves a common issue on this platform. The ACUITY Throttle Pedal Spacer (or more technically, Accelerator Pedal Relocation Bracket), helps resolve this problem by providing three unique new positions for your accelerator pedal. In addition to moving the pedal toward the driver, the ACUITY Throttle Pedal Spacer allows you to move the pedals closer together, laterally, to aid drivers with narrow feet.


It took about 5 minutes to install and we were off on a test drive. We chose Position B out of the three total positions to choose from, and it moved the throttle pedal 11mm up and 11mm to the left. This definitely felt more fluid when we were test driving and immediately felt the much needed throttle pedal position change when downshift rev matching and heel-toeing (we keep the auto rev-match system disabled though, out of preference). We highly recommend this throttle spacer to improve driving dynamics.

JDM, yo!

Do you remember when you were younger and growing up around JDM cars, how actual Japanese Domestic Parts (JDM) parts that are imported into the US will always give you that giddy and excited feeling? Maybe, it's just the nostalgia it brings, or the "rarity" factor (maybe combination of both?), but that's what we felt here when we wanted to dress up the engine bay a little bit with some bling factor. We went with a Cusco OS Front Strut Tower Bar. The CUSCO Front Strut Tower Bar is designed to increase chassis strength, eliminate body flex, vibrations in order to optimize the vehicle's handling. It's beautifully crafted and anodized in CUSCO Blue for lighting up the engine bay. It uses existing mounting location for a "bolt-on" installation.


It's just the small things, right? Of course, we're going to add more Cusco and other JDM goodies on our FL5 in the future.


We have the strut bar in stock and ready to ship on our site HERE and we also carry a whole suite of other CUSCO products as well.

AHH-CHOO!

In our last blog update, we mentioned that we installed the aFe Takeda Intake on our shop FL5 for a little bit more induction and turbo noise. Elevating that giddy excitement we mentioned above, we decided to also throw on a Turbosmart Kompact Blow Off Valve (BOV) for that hilarious and fun blow-off noise of owning a turbo car. Yes, we're still children at heart here.


The BOV is a direct-fit high-performance replacement for the factory plastic unit. The Turbosmart Kompact BOV suits the new generation Honda VTEC Turbo engines found in the Civic Type R (FK2, FK8, FL5). It can handle high boost levels and is made of billet aerospace-grade aluminum with high-temperature seals.


We also understand that this may be one of those mods that are a touchy subject on a non-recirculated (vent to atmosphere (VTA)) unit on a MAF vehicle, but being data driven individuals, we validated with Alan Jackson (our tuner) over at Edge Autosport with datalogs that there was no ill-effects of installing a BOV on this platform. The logs didn't show anything besides a brief, momentary, in-between shift slight elevation of richness in the AFR; that's actually to be expected since it is a VTA unit (rather go rich than lean!). Otherwise, no other weirdness we've seen in the logs from Long Term Fuel Trim (LTFT) or Short Term Fuel Trim (STFT) feedback loops or targeted values being wonky.


We have had this BOV in our FK8 as well for a few years now, and again, no drivability issues, no idling issues, no un-intended compressor surge or boost leaks, either. On our FL5, it has been no different in experience and we actually think for some reason, the FL5 with the Turbosmart BOV + aFe Takeda Intake is louder than the same mods on our FK8!


If you're looking for a fun BOV noise to pair with an aftermarket intake like the aFe Takeda Intake, look no further than the Turbosmart Kompact BOV.

You can find both the aFe Takeda Pro Dry-S Intake (black) HERE on our site, and the Turbosmart Kompact BOV HERE on our site; both are in stock and ready to ship.


We also have the aFe Takeda Pro Dry-S Intake (red) HERE.

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

Thanks for sticking around and we hope to reveal more of our shop FL5 build once we get some more fun parts delivered to our shop. Now to twiddle our thumbs again and hit refresh a million times a week hoping the parts will show up soon!

 

[ctechauto]

Threw on some "temporary" (in-betweener) wheels on our shop FL5 while we wait for our container to arrive end of summer/early fall. I actually like them a lot more than I thought I would as they kind of remind me of AVS Model 7s a bit.

Enkei TS7 18x9.5 +45
Yokohama Advan Apex V601 265/35/18

You can find these wheels in stock and ready to ship on our site HERE . We also have black and bronze colors available!

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