Race-proven technology inspires the Honda S2000

Looking back on the summer recently I felt a tingle in my spine thinking of one particular car.

Reminiscing on these dark, miserable, damp November evenings, thinking back on Honda’s Formula One inspired S2000 was as good as sitting at a warm log fire with a 12-year-old single malt in my hand.

Sure, the cloudless bright sunny week we shared together helped, but it goes deeper than that. The S2000, a car built by Honda to celebrate its 50th birthday, is a thoroughbred sports car full of racing-derived technology.

The bright red Honda convertible is the most powerful normally aspirated (non-turbo) car in series production today, and this is from a 2.0 litre engine. If one was ever under the illusion that life’s little pleasures are about having a pint or smoking a Havana then forget it. The pleasure of driving the S2000 and the feeling it bestows far outweighs any pleasures to be derived from the aforementioned.

The S2000, Honda’s first rear-wheel-drive car in 35 years, is the spiritual successor to the S800 sports car of 1965. Designed and built alongside Honda’s NSX supercar, the S2000 is really a car with two personalities.

The Jekyl and Hyde side to this car means you could easily loan it to your granny to go shopping, safe in the knowledge that she will not drive herself into any trouble or have a nervous breakdown because of its speed. The other is that the S2000 drives like a little Civic until you hit just short of 6,000 rpm.

At 6,000 rpm or thereabouts, the S2000’s Vtec engine gets its second wind. With an ability to red line to 9,000 rpm, the true character of the S2000 is felt. To really feel that supercar sensation through your body, simply switch on the ignition and press a large red button to fire the unit up. Then select first, second, until reaching sixth, revving the living day-lights through all the close-ratio gears.

If you are lucky, you will cover 0-60 mph in 5.7 seconds, 0-100 mph in under 15 and reach a top 150 mph speed, producing 240 bhp in your wake. If you’re unlucky you have not gone beyond third gear, sufficient for you to have to look at photos of your beloved car from behind bars.

This Honda has the ability to scream its head off. The sounds it produces are all pure racing car.

The one disappointment is its sedate feeling below 6,000 rpm. The lack of flexibility before this figure means that to enjoy this car’s capable engine, you really have to break the law in order to get it up to the magical rev. figure. This I have a problem with. Then again, if I had plenty of money, lived next door to Mondello Park or visited the German autobahn regularly, the engine alone would be enough to persuade me to purchase one.

While the engine plays a very major part in the overall story of this supercar, it’s true meaning does not end there. There are people - and I could be one of them - who would enjoy that feel-good sensation simply by opening the garage door and looking at this car’s exquisite styling. With a front that tapers away like an arrow, this car has flare and real presence.

The S2000 boasts other fine technological advancements. The gearbox proved sleek, precise and a delight to use; the suspension (independent, double wishbone on all four corners) offered precision and composure and the brakes will slow it up as quickly as it propels itself.

The other amazing factor is that I got 27 mpg out of this car overall. Its cockpit is sparse but few things are lacking from a design viewpoint. I found the dash area a little cheap-looking and unexciting apart from the rev. counter and start button. The driving position suited me but I could envisage some drivers having problems adapting.

If you could only dream about owning a £43,500 S2000, the one bit of satisfaction that really comes from seeing this car in action is knowing that, somewhere down the line, some of this race-bred technology finds its way into normal family-sized Honda models.