HONDA S2000
RESTRAINED STYLE, GREAT DRIVE
By 1998, Honda had been around for 50 years and already achieved incredible success with its motorbikes and cars, but it hadn’t made much of an impact in the sports or sporting-style car market. Much earlier, in 1963, Honda had made the S500, a very compact two-seater convertible, which was only the second model of the four-wheel variety the company had made. This was quickly followed with the S600 and then the S800. Engine size was the main difference, although a coupé body style was also added. Honda’s first four-wheeler was actually a small truck with a 360cc motor.
Production of the S-series finished in 1970 after seven years, with around 25,000 units of all three models in total having been produced. Honda then gave itself a 30-year hiatus from sports cars until it launched the S2000 in 1999.
From little acorns
Soichiro Honda, a very junior bicycle repairman, was not interested in school work. He created his own family seal and stamped his own school report to indicate that his parents had seen and read them. This worked so well that he enterprisingly started creating these ‘family seals’ for other students. Obviously, this budding entrepreneur was destined for greatness.
At 15, he started a mechanic’s apprenticeship, and, when he was 22, he started his own car-repair business. He even raced in a Ford in the First Japan Auto Race in 1936. A crash put paid to that particular effort.
The next year, he founded a company making piston rings for Toyota, although World War II and then a major earthquake also put paid to those ideas — and the factories. From the ruins of World War II, he sold that company and started the Honda Technical Research Institute. By 1948, he was producing his first motorcycle — ‘motorized bicycle’ is a more accurate description — which was eventually powered by a Honda motor.
Just a groovy little motorbike
By 1959, Honda was selling motorcycles in the US. A couple of years later, The Beach Boys were even singing about Honda-san’s bikes. From that point on, the company’s expansion was exponential, and, by 1964, it had become the world’s largest producer of motorcycles.
Bred on the race track
Honda has always proven its engineering expertise through motor sport. Soichiro Honda himself drove much of this. Honda entered Formula 1 (F1) and won the world championship. In 2010, every car in that year’s Indy 500 was Honda powered. Also, famously, in that race, there were no engine-related retirements.
Back to 1998, and Honda was ready to celebrate
50 years of company activity; a good place to start was a reinvention of its first real car, the S500.
Using its world-leading motorcycle technology, Honda had created the S500 with a four-cylinder, four-carburettor, needle-bearing crankshaft engine that comfortably spun to 8000rpm. This time around, the developers quadrupled the capacity of the motor and used their Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control (VTEC) system to create the most-powerful-perlitre naturally aspirated motor of any production car engine.
Technical developments
The VTEC system, a variable valve timing system, is effectively two camshafts in one. Its engine control unit (ECU) measures revs, speed, oil pressure, and temperature to change the profile of the cams. The advanced setting opens the valves higher and longer and therefore increases the power produced. At about 5800rpm, when many motors are getting breathless, this change happens and the power output jumps from about 112kw to 177kw. In typical Honda fashion, the engine revs out to 9000rpm.
This motor is positioned completely behind the front wheels, and so the front-engine rear-wheel-drive car has an almost perfect front-to-rear weight distribution. The top speed is limited to 255kph — surely fast enough — although the owner of our feature car, Grant Diggle, reports that, on a Honda test track, and with the limiter off, these cars topped out at almost 300kph.
The 177kw — or 188kw, in the case of Grant’s car — are readily used. The power goes through a manual but light and positive clutch, very crisp and neat six-speed manual gearbox, and on to the rear wheels via a limited slip differential. No flappy paddles, no double clutch; just the simple and correct older system: clutch, gearbox, and diff. And, in this case, there are no electronics and black magic between the driver’s feet and the tarmac.
These plain, simple elements are clothed in a body that sort of has a ‘pretty-face-shameabout-the-rear’ look about it. The front half of the car is a nice mix of clean, aggressive, almost straight lines and sculptured curves. The generous bulges over the front wheels are as beautiful today as they were when new, at the close of the last century. The shark-eye headlamps add appeal. From the windscreen back, though, the looks retreat to more ordinary Japanese design cues from the era. Any of us could have designed that back end.
This is all attached to the wheels via double wishbones on each corner, and those wheels are slowed down by an ABS brake unit. This, incidentally, is one of the only concessions to driver aids on the car; Honda deliberately attempted to keep the driving experience as real as it could.
Japanese import
Our feature car is the first model, known as an ‘AP1’. During its 10 years of production, there were only two real iterations of this car. The facelift model, the AP2, was released in 2004. Our car was the fourth of about 100 S2000s that Honda New Zealand registered here, and only the 260th down the Honda assembly line in Japan. This one carries the number plate ‘S2003’; Honda New Zealand kept the S2000 plate for its demonstrator vehicle and offered the others in the series free to the first 100 vehicles sold.
Owner Grant, who spent his working life in the car industry, bought this car with 30,000km recorded in 2005. Since then, he has used it as his daily-driver and has added another 125,000 to that total. In all of those kilometres, he has only needed to complete the standard Honda services. Changing oil and filters are the main features of those services, and that brings a smile to his face as he explains that standard Honda pieces are all his car requires — no expensive parts with expensive European brand names on them necessary.
Early on in its life, Grant helped the car’s breathing by opening up the supply of cold air to the fuel injection. This added about another 10kw to the output with absolutely no internal or electrical modifications to the motor at all.
No flappy paddles, no double clutch; just the simple and correct older system: clutch, gearbox, and diff. And, in this case, there are no electronics and black magic between the driver’s feet and the tarmac
… and here to stay
New in 1999, you needed $69,900 to buy one of these, and, 10 years later, they were still the same price brand new. After that prices faded down into the mid teens, but the last couple of years have seen them begin the inevitable climb. The graph currently resembles a hockey stick, but that is rapidly becoming a ‘U’ which will eventually become a rather large tick. A quick look at the prices now being commanded by those early S500, 600s, and 800s will confirm this.
Already, online prices here vary from well below $20K for a tired import to well over $50K for a well-looked-after, New Zealand– new example.
Out on the road, the initial impression is of a car that is very tight and comfortable. The seats are not exactly wrap-around in style but they hold you comfortably in place. The cockpit is cosy and everything is within a comfortable reach. The dashboard display is old-school electronics: a strip rev counter that frames a large digital speed indicator and the rest of the necessary read-outs. The whole compact display is reminiscent of a motorcycle dash from the era, although some reports claim that Honda also used the then-current F1-style display. At the time of production, Honda was due to re-enter the F1 grids, powering the British American Racing (BAR) cars.
On the road
The car is fired up via a large starter button — quite a novelty 20 years ago. The motor at idle is quiet and not intrusive, even with the electrically operated hood down. Around town, the motor hides its sporting characteristics, but out on the open road, the 179kw gallop willingly into action. The engine whips up to those 9000 revs without ever becoming strained or bothersomely noisy.
On a brisk winter’s day, with the hood down and the heater on, the cockpit is a very comfortable place to be at 100kph. Top-down motoring on such a day may look a bit ‘try hard’ but we are perfectly comfortable. The ride is tight and supple, never crashing over bumps and lumps. Grant says that the back end of the car will step out without too much provocation, although, with the launch of the AP2, this problem was corrected with some rear suspension improvements.
As Grant says about his car, “Having seen the car as a ‘body in white’ on a visit to Japan for Honda New Zealand, I managed to convince my wife that buying one would cure my midlife crisis. It’s aged gracefully and is the perfect city and back-country road-blast car.”
The internet has been abuzz for the past few years with talk of a relaunch of the S2000. There’s even a Youtube video on what it will look like, but, for every piece of speculation, there seems to be a denial from Honda itself. So, for the moment, it would seem that owning the most recent S2000, which now has to be at least 20 years old, is the only way to own one of these modern classics.