I’ve owned my S2000 for near on 5 years now and I’ve done very little to it. I didn’t want to chav it up, mostly because I didn’t want to throw away good money to make something worse than it was originally. I have replaced the alloys for the exact same ones, only in mint condition as the originals were quite badly corroded. I replaced the interior and side lights for LED one’s, because they look and work better. And that’s about it to be honest. I removed the honda badge (above the S2000 ones) on the front wings, surely that reduced the weight too lol. I have replaced the stereo for a Bluetooth jobby with hands free, I’ll cover that in a separate post, one day, oh and I fitted heated seats which I think I did a write up for on S2KI, I’ll try and find that (pre-blog).
Anyway, I had been toying with the idea of selling it, but it’s not worth too much, except I know it’s been cared for and well looked after, so to me it’s worth a lot. I couldn’t find a suitable replacement and so now I’ keeping the S for the next couple of years. This led me to explore the possibility of tasteful modifications.
Any modifications that are not on show are a winner as the car then looks less appealing to tea leaves. I guess everyone has their own opinion on tasteful, you can see some truly awful examples on BarryBoys, thankfully there aren’t too many S2000′s on there.
I could be tempted to replace the exhaust one day, but for the moment the current one looks and works just fine. If that ever develops any issues then I could be tempted to replace this, but only for something with similar diameter tail pipes, not the bean cans some people go for.
In the end, I opted for the K&N induction kit, £219 delivered from POTN on eBay. There are little to no real power gains to be made from this modification, but it does make the most fantastic noise at V-TEC. Seriously, it growls like a beast possessed, epic. S2000 owners will know about the trick of removing the air box cover to generate lots of noise, but when I tried this I lost all my power at the top end of the rev range, a problem I noticed during an overtake up a hill. With the K&N fitted I have at least the same power then before, possibly a tiny bit more, but I do have a massive grin on my face when I V-TEC it now! It’s also an easily reversible mod if I ever do sell the car. (+9bhp according to K&N – ooh!)
The job was mostly straight forward, there are a few mistakes in the instructions, most notable the short and long pipe from the engine are the wrong way round. Fitting was a little fiddly, especially getting to the back of the bolts on the new box and fitting the seal around it. All in all it took about 2 hours, but I wasn’t at all rushing as I had the whole day and wanted to do it correctly. The old box was massive and actually quite heavy, so the car is now more efficient too.