Giving a Prelude the muscle it yearns for
ELEGANT, sophisticated, luxurious and sublime are just some of the words used to describe Honda’s beautiful Prelude sports coupé in its “heyday” in the 1990s.
The car was expertly sculpted to be one of the most beautiful and timeless shapes to grace South African roads. Unfortunately for the Prelude, its looks were perhaps its only merit, mainly because Honda elected not to fit its VTEC power plant to the South African version of the coupé, which rendered the car a non-starter in the performance stakes.
Imran Khan, the owner of this week’s featured vehicle, recognised the potential in his pre-millennium Prelude and decided to balance the scales of beauty and performance.
Khan, a successful businessman passionate about car performance, lives in Port Shepstone on the South Coast.
His car has an impressive host of performance enhancements: Brian Crower 300-degree camshafts, a Brian Crower high-rev kit, a Precision 6262 turbocharger and a Dicktator 60-2 performance engine management system installation.
In keeping with the upgraded performance, the Prelude also has a Tein adjustable uprated suspension system and a set of TSW 17-inch mag wheels married to Bridgestone 215/40/17s at the rear and 225/50/15 Mickey Thompson slicks in the front.
Khan’s Prelude build has been a labour of love. “It has been seven years of fun with records broken. Participating with the car in events started at a dyno day in Port Shepstone where it dominated at 363kw and 550Nm of torque. It dominated every event entered into, pushing the limits each time until it broke the straps and jumped off the dyno at a Honda event hosted at Dyno Tuning Services. So we’ve stopped at 516kw and 766Nm, at the wheels, at 1.8 bar boost.”
Shortly afterwards, the car was crowned Dyno Queen on the local car scene, said Kiran Ramdhani, Khan’s friend and build collaborator.
Spurred on by Ramdhani, Khan raced his Prelude at the Dezzi Raceway for the first time in June last year and achieved a time of 12.1 seconds down the 400 – impressive for a fully trimmed 1.5-ton street car. They’re now aiming at sub-11 seconds in September.
It was not disclosed how much was spent on this build. SERVICE PROVIDERS: Performance Developments:yerushen Moodley. Autotronics: Nizaam Ali. Japtronix: Kiran Ramdhani.