Welcome to one our new project cars for 2004: a Honda S2000. The car is on loan from American Honda, a crew that genuinely seems interested in seeing their cars perform in “our” forms of motorsport. The S2000 has been a strong autocross performer since its 2000 introduction, and we’d like to see if the new car can continue that run.
Our car is a Berlina Black model with the matching black interior, and like most Honda products, there really aren’t any available options. However, our car did come with a catch: come and get it.
American Honda is located in Torrance, Calif., while GRM’s headquarters are in Ormond Beach, Fla. While shipping the car cross-country would have been easy, we decided to go retrieve the car ourselves. We figured the 3000-mile journey would tell if the car was really for us.
Honda left the car at LAX on Christmas Eve, and we caught a direct, one-way flight out of Orlando International Airport for only $137. We retrieved the car from the park and ride and started heading east Christmas morning. Along the way we visited some regular GRMers, including Tim Sharp, Lorne Trezise and Tim Baxter. The funny thing is that we saw two of our regulars while they were visiting their families for the holidays. (By the way, Tim Sharp’s mom is very nice.)
Despite the somewhat poor weather—lots of rain in Southern California and Arizona plus dust storms in Texas—the little car did just fine. We were tempted to take a northern route home, but figured that staying on I-10 would minimize the chances of seeing snow.
As it turns out, we totally avoided any frozen precipitation, although the weather did cause some accidents: We passed five separate fender-benders in the Los Angeles area as well as two pretty big accidents later on. If you don’t wear your seat belt, perhaps you should reconsider. One was particular ugly, and we got to the scene before any emergency vehicles did.
The car itself did extremely well, never missing a beat and never giving us any trouble. However, the car was pretty filthy by the time we got home.
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