EK9 KNOWLEDGE: Honda Recaro L-Modular / SRD / Speed seats

Recently i started to clean and refurbish the OEM seats in my EK9 and thinking about ways to repair the infamously wearing out side bolsters on them. As usual with my projects, it quickly escalated into a full investigation about those seats, collecting old documents and whatnot.

So here we go: The original reclinablel Honda EK9 seats are made by Recaro in Germany, and are red with red stitching. In the above picture from the original japanese EK9 Facelift sales brochure, you can read “red RECARO bucket seat” in english at the bottom left. That’s right. the EK9 only ever came in Red Recaros.
Except for the EK9 “Rx” (racing trim base) version, which had the standard EJ / EK seats. and where only installed as a placehoder, to be replaced by your personal preferred racing seats anyway.

The same seats have also been installed by Honda in the DC2 typeR Integra. But here available in the three colours black, red and blue, depending on the body colour.
Here’s a photo from a Japanese DC2 Brochure with all bodycolours and the three seat colours.

Now regarding the Naming. You will find many names they’re called: Recaro Speed, Recaro SR, or simply EK9 seats.

What is right and what wrong? Well, if you start to dig deeper, you find the original seat is not a single seat, but a modular system, called the Recaro L-Modular:

Modular means that you could choose from a variety of different back and lower cushions and combine them to a seat that fitted your needs.
You can clearly see that the EK9 Seats are made of a combination of SR Rear and D Lower cushion combination, resulting in an “SRD” Seat:

Her you can find some further details of the single parts:

If you compare it to the EK9 seats, this is what we got, except the EK9 most probably got a custom version with a small recaro logo below the seat belt holes, vs the big RECARO stitching usually at the top of the headrest.
By comparing the seat drawings, it even seems however that the headrest on the EK9 seats are slightly lower than the ones on the SRD / or Speed seats.

The same seats were not only used as an OEM seat by Honda, but as far is i know it was also used by Porsche back in the day and most probably also a few others manufacturers.

And then it was such a popular combination back in the day, that Recaro in Germany decided to slightly modify it and give it an own name and sell it as the “RECARO Speed” (SR3) seat:
In fact it was and still is so popular that Recaro decided to re-release the old seat again for sales
https://www.recaro-automotive.com/de/dynamik/recaro-speed

According to this site, the speed was a lightly modified version of the SRD with smaller sholder pads and a slightly higher headrest than the SR.
I cannot confirm this without having them side by side or actual drawings with measurements. but by looking at the pictures, it seems legit especially when compared to the EK9 seats.

Having Recaro still producing them is a good sign for the Honda Enthusiast. Because it means that spare parts are still and will be available for a while.

Personally, i can recommend Capitalseating for original spare parts. They offer a huge range and many original recaro spare parts and have almost every single part from the seat available.

Be careful, there are many fake parts around on the interwebs. most in cheap and bad quality or wrong colours. Here’s a guide how to spot the fakes. That excellent website is also the source of the L-Modular catalogue picture

And those parts are definitely needed, because the seats are notoriously wearing out on the side cushions as seen here on my seats:

They’re also known to fade and become pink-ish, when exposed to the suns UV-rays for long periods. Luckily my seats have kept the original colour.

The seats have become so popular, especially in the Honda scene that they have been sold around and put in almost any imaginable car. That of course made it interesting for cheap Chinese makers to produce fake replika seats.
Meanwhile there are so many EK9 seats around, that i personally have the feeling that many of them must be fake seats.

I’m currently trying to get hold on a bit of original documentation and better pictures to post here, and I’ll update this post whenever i find something. but so far, this picture from the original EK9 brochure will close this post.
After all it’s one of the most comfortable OEM “sports” seats i have ever been in. While the fabrics are not the most wear-safe ones, the seat itself is really a gem, and definitely a part of the EK9 DNA that made it famous.