A thin veneer of ice coats the road, trees brood under a bruised skin of winter sky and above the buffeting sound of a bitter November wind, the scream of a high-revving VTEC engine running at full lick rises.
Seventeen years on, the Honda S2000 remains curiously unique, and a uniquely capricious thing to drive. Underneath that pointy, arrow-shaped bodyshell lies all the ingredients you’ll need to make one of the finest sports cars ever, with a ballistic engine, perfect weight balance and rear-wheel drive.
But the car’s schizophrenic personality and the fact that its real thrills were hard won and only properly arrived in brief moments means that it remains one of the most dichotomous, unpredictable but utterly brilliant cars of recent years.
That’s what I keep telling myself anyway, because right now I’m having a horrible time of it, frankly. The clock has just struck half six on a freezing cold, late November morning, the temperature’s reading somewhere in the region of -2 and I’m stuck on a congested M56. Not exactly ideal convertible sports car conditions.
Beneath me, the S2000 chunters along at idle with a cranky purr. The fact it’s so cold that I feel like I’ll permanently stick to the metal gear lever every time I swap a cog does little to remedy my own crankiness, despite the best efforts of the heater huffing dry, but at least warm, air into the cabin.
Just ahead of me, the Car Keys camera crew sit in their long-termer kit car with bum warmers on full whack, and although it’s me lucky enough to be the one behind the wheel of this frenetic little cult convertible I can’t help but feel a bit jealous.
I’m just hoping it’ll be worth it. The S2000 has been sitting on my driveway for a few days now, and besides commuting to and from the office, I haven’t really had the chance to properly explore its abilities, let alone its limits.
On the motorway it’s loud and grumpy, the steering wheel awkwardly positioned thanks to the fact that it’s non-adjustable, while the chassis is rigid to the point that it skips and hops across uneven surfaces like a flat stone across water.
I’m well aware of what it can do when shown a good, open bit of tarmac though. There is a reason the S2000 is often referred to as an MX-5 for grown-ups, after all, despite the fact that it’s also one of the most classic examples of ‘always the bridesmaid, never the bride’.
"There is a reason the S2000 is often referred to as an MX-5 for grown-ups, after all"
Affordable, good looking and with an old-school, open-topped demeanour, the S2000 should have been an instant runaway hit, but it was often overlooked in favour of cars that were seen to be better and more manageable all-round packages like the BMW Z4 and the Porsche Boxster.
First unveiled at the 1995 Tokyo Motor Show as a concept car, Honda eventually put it into full production in 1999 as a 50th birthday present to itself. The S2000 lasted for a full ten years, during which time more than 100,000 of them were made, with around 8,000 making their way onto British roads.
Designated S2000 for its 2.0-litre engine, its name was also a tip of the hat to the Honda sports cars of the 60s, a decade during which the Japanese company built the gorgeous S500, S600 and S800 roadsters.
Even when sitting stationary on a driveway or squashed into an underground parking space, it really is a pretty thing too and, if you’re a petrolhead of a certain disposition, it’s likely to be a car you’re very familiar with. Whether you know it from Gran Turismo, from The Fast and The Furious or just because you’re a fan of pure-bred sports cars, the S2000 is something of an icon.
At least the morning’s traffic has given me an opportunity to appreciate the simplicity of the car, which proved to be a large part of its appeal. There’s no driving modes or adjustable whatsits to fiddle with here, just that most classic of old-school sports car recipes: engine behind the front axle, power to the rear, snappy manual gearbox and absolutely no whiff of a turbo anywhere.
The equipment list is similarly simplistic, with a few buttons which you can prod to adjust the air conditioning and a basic radio which I don’t bother turning on. Early models didn’t even get stability control, for God’s sake.
Simple they may have been, but things weren’t broke and so Honda never saw the point in fixing them. The car remained essentially the same throughout its entire production run, save for a few tweaks to the earlier versions which were notorious for their twitchy handling in the wrong hands.
As a consequence, that also means that virtually any S2000 comes with a sort of time machine effect. The model I’m in, graciously loaned by Honda’s heritage department, was actually built in 2009, but climb inside and it feels a decade older, maybe even more.
Anyway, having broken free from the early morning schlep somewhere around Deeside, we’re finally making progress into the heart of the Denbigh Moors and I’m at last able to find some decent, flowing roads to properly stretch the car’s legs.
Much like Honda’s other rockstar cars, the Civic Type R and the original NSX, the S2000 was a car that was defined by its engine. A naturally aspirated 2.0-litre DOHC VTEC, it produces 237bhp and 207Nm of torque in its standard tune, and revs freely all the way to 9,000rpm, something that’s almost unheard of in this day and age.
"Much like the Civic Type R and the original NSX, the S2000 was a car that was defined by its engine"
It’s hard to overstate just how much of a marvel this little engine is too as it whines along the road. All-alloy and infused with fibre-reinforced parts, it was built using all of Honda’s racing experience and design know-how and was named Engine of the Year for four years on the bounce.
Given that the S2000 weighs a trim 1,260kg, it can scamper from 0 to 62mph in a shade over six seconds, before zooming all the way on to 150mph. But, as I was starting to find out, the absolute best of it isn’t exactly forthcoming.
For a start, there’s less torque than a Ford Granada from the early 1980s and peak twisting force doesn’t arrive until a staggeringly high 7,500rpm. I’m willing to bet that many of you sitting reading this right now will never have even hit 6,000rpm in your lives with the advent of modern turbo-diesels.
That means that in order to actually go anywhere at a decent pace, you have to row up and down the gearing to keep it high in the rev range. From a standing start, you need to use the gears to get the forward momentum going, as below 6,000rpm sometimes it struggles to feel like a sports car at all.
But, as boot meets carpet the revs steadily rise and rise, reaching boiling point as the counter passes six. The cam profile switches and… BAM. Houston, we have lift off with the power of ten thousands ‘VTEC kicked in, yo’ memes as the car aggressively screams its way towards redline.
Later versions had a few tweaks here and there to straighten out the power delivery, but it still tends to feel like it arrives in three distinct stages: nothing, still nothing, then EVERYTHINGALLATONCE. Speed; fury; noise from the Honda’s howling four-cylinder and then, with a stab of the brakes, it’s all over again, fading into the Welsh mist like the receding ebb of a dream that leaves you wondering whether or not that really even happened.
The speed at which the S2000 flips from underwhelming to utterly, utterly rabid upon opening the taps fully makes the car feel practically bipolar. Newcomers to this little roadster and its frenetic personality mighty find it confusing to begin with at best; at worst, frustrating and tiring.
Many other sports cars, the MX-5 and Cayman to name but a couple, welcome exploration. The best sports cars, they say, are the ones that practically beg you to push harder and harder, further towards the limit. The S2000 sometimes feels like it’d really rather you just buggered off.
At times like these, you can understand why the frenzied Honda remains something of a cult car: if you went to buy a sports car and test drove it back-to-back with more or less any of its main rivals, you’d find the alternatives much more immediately welcoming. The S2000 doesn’t require driving so much as it requires taming.
But it’s got an incisiveness, a purity and a depth of character that’s just so utterly absorbing. You could spend hours zooming up and down the same stretch of tarmac, rowing that fantastically slick gearbox to and fro and just revelling in the sheer excitement of it all. Indeed, I have.
As we tangle through the long, sweeping corners that criss-cross the Denbighshire moors like arteries, the thing that stands out for me the most about the car isn’t the engine, but the sheer tactility. Every little piece feels like it’s seemingly vibrating in harmony, humming the chorus of some mechanical tune that rings off the trees and sings in your hands.
The steering itself isn’t particularly feelsome, but the rack is quick and so direct, and the chassis so communicative that you can feel absolutely everything telegraphed from the road surface up through your body in a perfect HD picture.
It can still be a notoriously spiky car to drive if you’re rough with it and not fast enough to catch it, given that the back end is prone to simply swapping ends at a moment’s notice, but to me right now that’s as much a part of its old-school philosophy as the retro-tastic dials and slightly crappy plastic cabin.
This isn’t a car that’ll massage you along the road, nor is it particularly forgiving. Traction can come and go in a snap of the fingers. It’s mechanical and it can be uncompromising in its own way, not to the point of terror like an old TVR or a Carrera GT, but it demands your concentration at all times when running at full pelt. In spite of such attention-seeking behaviour, or perhaps because of it, I just can’t get enough.
"The chassis is so communicative that you can feel absolutely everything telegraphed from the road surface up"
All good things must end though, and for the S2000 that end came in 2009. In the wake of the global financial crisis, Honda immediately scrapped all of its performance cars and after doing so has struggled to recoup its mojo ever since.
Recent years, which have brought the return of both the Civic Type R and the NSX, prove that there’s hope. Will we soon be hearing the pitter-patter of tiny roadster wheels as a successor to this scrappy, raw little machine makes an appearance? The way things are going, I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.
Yet with prices starting from only five or six grand, the original remains a serious temptation. It’s a fantastic drivers’ car, and I can only apologise if would-be S2000 owners have read about its highly-strung temperament and find themselves put off. They shouldn’t.
Maybe it sounds too much work for some, but consider this: if you’re going to buy a car, a slightly older sports car no less, what could be better than one which only reveals facets of its character over time? You only need to take one look at the incredible aftermarket scene birthed by this car to realise just how absorbing S2000 ownership can be.
As the last dregs of sun drain down behind the hillsides, I find myself reflecting on how I felt towards the start of the day, and how I now feel a bit silly to have been irritated by it. Before there was such a thing as electronically-adjustable dampers, variable steering modes and whatnot, driving a performance car brought with it a certain amount of compromise almost as a prerequisite.
That didn’t matter, because those that bought them cared so much about driving them that those compromises were trivial in comparison to the thrills that the car offered. With that in mind, in an age where the majority of new cars, even the lairiest of performance models, can feel a bit too safe, considered – even contrived at times – the S2000 is utterly refreshing.
Frenetic, highly-strung, but fast and dripping with exuberance and sheer driving joy, it’s a starkly brilliant reminder of what sports cars used to be in a simpler, purer time. Simple, pure, and absolutely thrilling.
