Kenchan, who lives somewhat close to me always has great info, but as he admits the auto on any small displacement motor is going to suffer a second or even more in the 1/4 mile.

I put 37k on my 07 sport manual and have now had my 09 sport manual for a couple of months. With the 09, it has a wider torque torque band, and you can definitely notice the extra punch at lower RPM.
At around 5 grand, it only feels a little stronger but max RPM is quite a bit higher, so obviously a top end gain as well.

MotorWeek and some of the mags have reported essentially the same as what I reported above.

My real world $.02 as the mechanical aspects have been covered in other posts quite well

 

none of those articles say that it is straight-up vtec-e. it may be similar, but no dice.

 

That article covers the earlier 1.3 and 1.5 engines. There is a second article that covers the engines fitted to the second gen Fit/Jazz, including the GE8:

Honda L-Series SOHC i-VTEC Engines for the new GD Honda Fit/Jazz

From these two articles you get an understanding of the differences between the two.

When discussing tuning, I tend to recall a motorcycle magazine here in Oz that had an advice column. Some guy wanted to know what he could do to make his 250cc sport bike go faster. The mechanic's reply was "not much", 250cc sport bikes are already highly tuned out of the box and its almost impossible to extract much more out of them.

I think a lot of light car engines are like that these days (particularly Honda ones). Cylinder heads are pretty well designed these days, and it's not like an old Mini where you can get another 10-15HP with a die grinder, a better exhaust, and an extra carby.

88kW from a 1.5 litre engine would have been hot hatch material in a car weighing this much 20 years ago, and that hot hatch would have had a less efficient engine than these ones, and a much narrower torque band.

I take my example from an '86 Toyota Twin Cam 16 I owned once. It had the 4AGE engine so familiar in Toyota Sprinters and in it's day was considered pretty fast and sporty for a small car. My Honda Jazz outperforms it in just about every way.

So don't bemoan the fact that further tuning is hard, celebrate that Honda has done most of it for you! Think of the money you'll save.

Or else get a turbocharger. Your call.

 

this is such a good point! look at what old ef era civic si's made power wise, and that was before sae standards!

 

Well yeah it's a pretty good engine, I'm not dissing it at all, just the only thing about it is that you really can't put a header since the exhaust manifold is inseparable from the cylinder head, which I guess for emissions is better, but I wonder what spoon & j's would do with this if they were to make a racing fit, but this would be awesome if it isn't for that fact.