Honda Civic Type R review

£50,050. Wow. Buy it through Honda’s lease scheme at £429 a month on 6.9 per cent APR and you’ll have shelled out £58,852 by the time you actually own it. When it first came out, if you wanted the 'Carbon Pack' that added black woven stuff inside and turned the rear wing into a carbon fibre sculpture, that was an extra £3,265. Not an option now, mind.

But let’s use the base price and look around. Toyota builds the closest natural rival in the shape of the GR Yaris – one of the few manual hot hatches left. That starts at nearly £46k. The Focus ST is £37k but destined for the afterlife; the i30N is already there.

A 4WD VW Golf R is now £44k before the many options you need to add, an Audi RS3 is almost £60k and a Mercedes A45 (another one set to be scrapped) even more than that. Performance- and reward-wise the Civic is worth it, the biggest hurdle is that it’s nearly £15,000 more than the old one and essentially the same underneath.

Honda can justify it because supply will be limited. It won’t say how limited, but hundreds rather than thousands is Honda’s line. Expect the Type R, like the Toyota GR86, to be well over-subscribed.

There’s a reason for this. Group CO2 targets. Even though we’re now outside the EU, we still have the same strategy. Sell too many Type Rs, fleet emissions go up and Honda gets fined. In other words Honda can only sell Civic Type Rs provided Jazz sales are strong, so the best dodge is to reduce supply and increase profit.

There’s a dodge to that though, but you’ll need the hide of a Rhino to do it … go and buy an old one. Do it soon before others do and make residuals even stronger.

Running costs aren’t too bad thanks to 34.4mpg, but the fuel tank is only 47 litres – small for a big car. So although the claimed range is 355 miles, in reality panic is probably going to be setting in after 280.

CO2 of 186g/km means first year tax of £2,190. Ouch. Plus another two grand for five years’ worth of the ‘Expensive Car Supplement’. Double ouch.

As mentioned your interior colour options inside are limited to what you see above, but exterior colours include black, red, blue and grey. We'd go for Honda's classic Championship White, though. That’s another £650 to find.