2005 Honda S2000 Test Drive

A Honda for Road and Track

The S2000 may not be the most refined sports car on the market, but it's got the power and handling of a more expensive roadster.

From The Driver's Seat

We might say from the driver's "perch" in the case of the S2000, because although taller drivers might find it reasonably easy to drive this Honda, wider ones never will. The seats are narrow, whether measured across the hip or across the shoulder supports, and the transmission tunnel and door panels impinge on where your knees sit, so you cannot alter your leg position to get more comfortable. And this latter point about leg position applies even if you aren't of especially large build.

Electric seats (ones that allow for adjustment of the angle and height of the leg bolster) would help the situation, because then at least you could lift or lower yourself depending on the length of your legs. But no such option exists here. Bottom line: Sit in one for a while before you buy, no matter what.

You might think that's a given, but more than half of all new car buyers never even drive the model they purchase; they just check it out in the showroom and that's it.

The rest of the setup is more straightforward and livable. The wheel is nicely formed and meaty, with good thumb notches for extra grip, and the tiller has a height adjustment as well. There's a start button for the engine rather than a typical ignition (you still insert a key on the right of the steering column, but the motor trigger is to the left of the wheel), a configuration now becoming strangely more common in performance automobiles. It was cute a few years back, but now it seems a little gimmicky -- one more thing to teach the valet.

We do very much like the fan and radio volume controls. These operate via two simple rocker switches to the left and right of the wheel; you can increase the fan speed or lower the volume on the radio without removing your hands from the wheel. In fact, all the crucial car functions can be operated easily by the driver since they all rest mere inches from the wheel. This is good design; a sports car pilot shouldn't have to remove his eyes from the road to change the radio preset, and with the S2000 he won't.

But he will have to forgo bringing much else along for the ride. The cargo space in this car is minuscule, less than the capacity of almost any other car made, including a Corvette or a Porsche 911.

Nope, you say, you weren't buying a convertible sports car to transport your Samsonite, but you might want room enough for a weekend getaway, and depending on how many pairs of shoes your spouse brings along, you may be hard-pressed to get the trunk shut even on 48 hours' worth of clothing.

Pack light, however, and pick your retreat to, say, coastal Maine in the fall or coastal California in almost any season, and you'll be driving the right car for the occasion.

The S2000 rails nimbly around corners, its electric power steering weighting up in a progressive fashion toward the limit. We said the tiller was slightly more communicative about what's actually happening at the front wheels (you already get great, through-the-hindquarters sensation about the grip at the back wheels in the S2000). But this is a minor beef, and there are few if any cars in this price range -- save perhaps the aforementioned Miata, Ford's SVT Focus and the Subaru WRX -- that even come close to this level of steering precision sans annoying twitchiness.

The other delight, of course, is the drive train. And by this we don't just mean the screaming engine -- which, at its 9,000 rpm peak sounds like the whine of a super-bike hell-bent for the finish line -- but also the brilliant six-speed gearbox that ratchets with the perfect degree of clutch and wrist action.

Here you have Honda at its best. Yes, we've come to know and love the No. 2 Japanese carmaker for making extraordinary engines and transmissions for Civics. But doing the same thing in a sports car only proves that Honda is at the pinnacle of automotive engineering. And like its counterpart BMW (also independent and relatively small), it has managed to thrive by focusing on inventiveness and verve for the craft of carmaking, letting the other guys make cookie-cutter transport.

Besides the aforementioned comment that the S2000 isn't as lively at low speeds as we'd prefer, our other concern is that when you bang the throttle to the floor and go at full-blast "this-one-goes-to-11" speed, you eventually have to shift, and when you do, you're just past the top of the torque curve.

Depress the clutch, and suddenly all that torque disappears, the rear (driven wheels) naturally readjust to the sudden lack of force being poured through them and you have to reset the steering angle to counter the lower torque. You have to do this in every car, by the way. But in the Honda S2000, because that torque peak is so high, the act becomes conscious, since with each upshift from redline you feel the back tires lose their bite, a possibly scary sensation if you feel it with the car pointed even five degrees off center. You can adjust to this quite easily, of course, by knowing when to shift and when not to; suffice it to say, you shouldn't approach the limits of steering and torque simultaneously.