I WANTED TO LOVE THE GR COROLLA, BUT THE CIVIC TYPE R STOLE MY HEART
Call it the victim of high expectations. It sits in front of me, idling a grumpy note, its flared fenders like a promissory note for shenanigans. It’s the motorsports-inspired, variable torque-split, raucous, Toyota-built rally car of my dreams. It’s the 2023 GR Corolla, and it’s my second favorite car here.
Behind it is something simpler. The 2023 Honda Civic Type R sends power only to the front wheels, with no trick all-wheel-drive system. The homologation-special three-pot with its Eighties-style boosty powerband is nowhere to be found. The Civic gets its grunt from a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder, the engine layout you’ll find powering every boring, utilitarian crossover. The bodywork is less bulky, the interior less spartan, and the bumper less cartoonish. It is a Honda Civic, with a big wing, and plenty of power. It is not a new idea.
It is, however, a great one. Age does not dilute the brilliance. We may be familiar with the concept of making a fast, engaging version of the best compact sedan lineage the world has ever seen, but it doesn’t make it any less spectacular.
Yet, like the rest of us, I bias toward the novel. I had whetted my appetite in the Austrian Alps driving the forbidden-fruit GR Yaris, and now there was a bigger, more practical version heading to our shores. Manual only, all-wheel-drive, with a motor from the devil’s lawnmower and a face that was looking for a fight. As a lifelong fan of Toyota reliability, constantly disappointed by the company’s refusal to make enthusiast products, I let myself believe that my perfect car had arrived.
I was right, just not about the badge.
The Toyota, for its part, charmed me from minute one. A matte gray Morizo Edition arrived for Performance Car of the Year back in September, and I was captivated immediately. The style, the clarity of purpose, the theater, it was all unexpected for a Toyota hatchback. This is a company that will continue making a naturally aspirated 3.5-liter V-6 until the sun burns out, and it built the most powerful three-cylinder turbo production engine ever. Then it made an all-wheel-drive system to shame a Subaru, threw in a manual as the sole transmission option, and packaged it all in the unassuming body of a Corolla. It was a Toyota fan’s wildest dream.
Wild being the key word. Rolling onto the track at Monticello Motor Club during PCOTY, the GR Corolla pulled with the eager intensity of the Yaris I had fallen for back in 2021. It delivers its power like a punch, a force you see building until it whacks you in the gut. There’s no twin-scroll trickery, no half-assed simulation of a naturally aspirated mill. The GR Corolla is a big turbo, screw-around car, and it drives like one. If you don’t know how to keep it on boil, then you’re not going to go fast. Like all great cars, it makes you work for it.
Hitting curbs on a quick hill convinced me further. The GR Corolla Morizo Edition had that perfect rally car charm. It doesn’t accept beatings; it demands them. Driving this car isn’t a game of finesse so much as a fistfight on ice, delicate and brutal all at once. The shifter doesn’t feel polished, it feels hefty and rough, the kind of thing you find yourself slamming between gears.
The whole experience was fun in a ferocious way, something I didn't see coming from today's Toyota. It felt far faster than its 300 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque suggested, far more special than its drab interior and mass-market badge implied. For all the obviousness of a great Civic, I never expected a Corolla to get this good.
There is, however, a reason that a great Civic feels more obvious. Toyota’s newfound affection for enthusiasts is appreciated, but Honda has always worked a little harder at making its meat-and-potatoes products good to drive. The benefit isn’t just that the Civic Type R engineers have more experience focusing on driving dynamics. It’s that they started with a better platform.
Somehow, though, I wasn’t too excited about the Civic. There’s no surprise factor here, no trump card over the segment standards. The 2023 model arrived with 315 hp and 306 lb-ft of torque going to the front wheels through a six-speed manual transmission. No part of that is transformative. Every part of it is exceptional.
Because the Civic isn’t about ideas that sound great. It’s about good ideas, executed to perfection. Its engine has no world-first or best-evers to claim. What it does have is an exceptional powerband, that offers the sort of crescendo that VTEC fans will recognize and appreciate. The harder you rev it, the more it rewards you, its tach needle a blur as it nears its 7000-rpm redline. Luckily the Civic keeps you on your game, signaling shift points with perfectly timed and ultra-clear shift lights.
Reach to execute and you’ll find the best shifter available in any road car. The feel of the shift itself is less direct than in an ND Miata—since the Civic needs a linkage, whereas the ND gear lever goes right into the ‘box—but in terms of precision, spacing, and ease this shifter is second to none.
The same holds for the pedal box. Spacing is functionally perfect, making the delicate movement of a heel-and-toe downshift easy. More importantly, the pedals themselves are calibrated so well that I can’t reasonably criticize them. The clutch is light but easy to modulate, the throttle mapping linear and predictable, and the brake firm, reassuring, and seemingly immune to fade.
These controls are what stuck out in my head in the months after PCOTY. But when we gathered the GR Corolla—this time a Circuit Edition, not a Morizo—and the Civic Type R up again, for a head-to-head shootout, I didn't know what to expect. I had built up the Civic in my head after PCOTY, lusting after the feel of a perfect heel-and-toe, remembering how smoothly it handled 95-mph corners, and pining for the feel of that engine running to redline. Yet the more videos I saw, the more I found myself wanting to love the GR Corolla.
Second impressions only confirmed what I felt before. Compared to the standard, non-Morizo GR Corolla, the Civic Type R is in a different class. Make no mistake, the Corolla is a great car, but the Civic is a legend in the making.
I immediately felt all the things I had remembered and loved. I felt the perfect pedals underneath my feet, the reassuring clunk of the gear shifter, the delicate buzz of the engine that grows into a dizzying furor. While the Corolla couldn’t quite live up to my expectations, the Civic got even better. I realized that its seats, too, were among my favorites in any car, and that I’d never felt a transverse-engine, front-wheel-drive car handle mid-corner bumps with such grace. I reveled at how easy it was to get up to speed, and how simple it was to stay there. I relished every braking zone if only for a chance to heel-and-toe with the world’s best control scheme.
Because that’s the thing about perfection. It’s a force multiplier. Every perfect control becomes something you no longer have to think about. Shifting gears is no longer a matter of navigating the car’s controls, it’s about executing something intuitive, trusting the feel of your hands and feet to balance it all automatically. It gives you the confidence to chuck the car into corners harder than expected, knowing that you’ll feel the grip fading in your hands long before you’ll feel it slide, that when it does slide that it’ll do so predictably, and that when you want to power out the diff will work its magic and make the whole thing feel perfectly natural.
The barriers break down. You stop thinking about the controls themselves, and start thinking of the car as an extension of yourself. It’s how you feel using a fork or a pencil. Unaware of the instrument itself, focused only on the work.
A car is so complicated that such perfect harmony is impossible. There will always be something you’re not accounting for, some variable that tweaks the outcome. But the more you dial in the core controls, the less that happens, and the more time you can spend utterly engrossed in the act of driving. Building a machine capable of that is much harder than coming up with a cool idea. In fact, only a few companies on Earth can currently pull it off. Porsche builds the GT3 for the hardcore track rats, Mazda the Miata for weekend racers, and GM the Corvette Z06 for the somewheres-in-between. A handful of supercar companies try to deliver this experience to the ultra-wealthy, who also get their fix through the legendary classics. For the rest of us, there’s the Honda Civic Type R.