A 2001 Acura Integra has sold for $204,204. Unfortunately, your clapped out Viper killer is still going for the same price as it did before, because the record breaker is no ordinary Integra. For one, it’s an Integra Type R, the best-handling front-wheel-drive car ever built. It also has less than 4800 miles on the odometer, making it about as new as new can be.
The car, which sold on auction site Bring a Trailer, is, of course, mint. There’s also the matter of how most ITRs were beaten hard back in the day. They were more expensive than other Integras, but not that much more. The sticker included in the sale of this car shows a price of $24,930; a 2001 Integra GS-R’s MSRP was $22,780. It was still affordable to owners who hooned and modified the hell out of them. Only 3,850 were imported to the US. Pristine examples such as this are extremely rare.
The auctioned car is finished in Phoenix Yellow, the most eye-catching of all the ITR colors. While we believe Championship White is the most iconic color due to its connection with Honda race cars dating back to the RA272, yellow was the color most likely to be abused by attention seekers back in the day. We don’t have any stats on how many were produced in each color, but we lived through that time.
Another factor that may have influenced the sale price is that this particular ITR was being sold by Peter Cunningham, who established and drove for the Real Time Racing. RTR campaigned a variety of Hondas in SCCA World Challenge, capturing several championships during the height of the Tuner Era. These races were televised, and fans could follow their exploits in their living rooms every race weekend.
Normally we don’t care about celebrity cars, because 1.) paying a premium for an otherwise average vehicle means you’re paying for the celeb’s name, not the car, and 2.) most celebs have terrible taste in cars. We skipped writing an article about the recent sale of the famous orange and black Veilside Mazda RX-7 that sold for $1.2 million, because that price primarily reflected the car’s role in Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift.
The Integra Type R, on the other hand, was the winningest and the most famous of RTR’s cars. Cunningham knows these cars intimately. It wasn’t just a random car picked by movie producers for maximum flash, which then had a movie star’s butt placed in it. If you’re a fan of that movie star’s butt, no judgement, and spend your money as you see fit. This ITR was an opportunity to secure a piece of Honda history from the man who helped build it.
Put all those factors together and it makes sense why this 2001 Acura Integra Type R sold for nearly double the price of the next-highest example. That one was a 2000 Phoenix Yellow with approximately 7000 miles on it, which sold in 2022 for $112,112. However if you have ITR dreams, don’t fret. There are still plenty of solid ITRs for sale for far less than $200,000 out there. This sale isn’t setting a new bar for ITR prices, unless they happened to have ridiculously low miles and were owned by a racing legend.
Images: Bring a Trailer
Lots a torque steer in that Viper apparently. LOL.
The silver lining of ITRs ballooning in price is that its still *just* a ’90s Honda – you can always just buy a cheap clapped-out base model Integra, swap in a B18C5 + ITR transmission, add some chassis reinforcement and have basically the same car for a fraction of the price. Plus, you won’t feel bad about driving the piss out of it or modifying a survivor stock Type-R.