LJ Garcia's 1996 Honda Civic DX - Feel's Good

To me, this was the most ambitious project ever, and I have way too much to say about how it came to be. Now it became my personal christmas gift to the man that built the car back in the day.

It all started by accident, where I was still pretty early into 3D modelling. I wanted to tinker around the idea of a long term project, which was to remake LJ Garcia's Feels Civic from 1999. There are tons of photos of the car when it got resprayed to yellow, however there isn't enough love for the time where it was painted Candy Cobalt Blue from House of Kolor.

The more I was playing around, making parts for the car, and also test fitting the RacingHart C5s I made, I felt like I should try to continue with it. So I did, but I had one problem: a lack of resources.

Disclaimer: Long story, if you want to skip the story, go to [*].

I'm a old tuning magazine collector and archiver, I have a folder with over 100,000 images from cars from the 2000's import scene, however that doesn't mean that I know everything about each and every car I have saved. Out of sheer coinsidence, I managed to find the Import Tuner Magazine issue, including 2 others, with LJ's car on Ebay for a reasonable price and immeditially bought it. Now here's where things get funny. They got shipped pretty easily from the US to Europe until they switched couriers to [due to legal reasons, I am not allowed to name any names]. The couriers that shall not be named have a 10 day deadline until stuff that doesn't get picket up gets sent back. After waiting 7 of those days, with me getting no package, but several "we couldn't find your address" notifications, I had enough of their game and went to where the magazines were stored. They told me that they didn't scan the codes correctly, so nothing got shipped out. It felt like they held the magazines hostage at this point. Thankfully the day after, they did infact do their job and delivered the magazines, which meant that I could continue working on the virtual recreation.

However, that isn't where the story ends about the magazine, but more about that later.

[*] ^TLDR: I found the IT Magazine with LJ's car, bought it, and almost didn't get it because the courier didn't do their job correctly.

Having the magazine obviously meant that I'd have more photos of the car, right? Well kinda. It turns out that for the magazine shoot, they only shown off the left side of the car, which had me guessing what the right side looked like. I ended up leaving the right side blank with an exception of the Team Wizdom driver side window decal and also the 2020 Auto Body decal on the rear right quarter window that you can barely see in one picture. Getting the exterior right was pretty easy with the decals out of my way. Obviously I already knew what bodykit, wheels, brakes and intercooler he ran, but what I didn't know (and still don't) was nearly the entire interior.

The article mentions the brands, but no model names. I contacted Sparco for help, identifying the steering wheel and seats, but I never got an answer and eyeballed those. The shift knob is by Räzo, but again, no model name. I couldn't even find out who made the pedals, which I am the least satisfied with from a modelling perspective. They are literally just planes with a texture. I was lucky with one thing however, which were the foglights. A few months ago, a OG in the tuning scene by the name of Joey Lee (@stickydiljoe) took part in a Meguairs photo project, in which for the final prompt he took photos of what's left of LJ's Civic.

I was halfway done with the car at that point and I was looking for what the foglights were. I knew that they were from CATZ, but I didn't know which model they were. Without a name I couldn't look for reference photos, so I decided to reach out to him for some help. I told him about what I am doing, and he agreed to help me out.

And while he helped me out, I unintentionally helped him out too. For a car show that goes by the name of Wekfest, where the next show was in Los Angeles, he brought Garcia's Civic for everyone to see for probably one last time. He prepared a display board that would give a little bit of context aobut the car, for those that don't know. I sent him my entire Team Wizdom collection, including all of the scans I had of it. Turns out, he actually used them for the display board. Bummer I never got credited for them officially, nor did another buddy who scanned the Super Street issue with it from 2000. But instead as being known as the guy who's scans from overseas made it onto a display board at a car show, it'd be much cooler to be known as that guy who recreated the car anyway, right?

Credits featured in the last picture.