The crew at RS*R had a clear mission. They wanted to put the tune back in tuner and turn their micro manufacturer demo car into a true performer, the way that cars built by manufacturers were originally intended to be made. Because John Masuda, president of RS*R USA, was a huge Honda fan, the decision was made to use a Honda platform. However, the Honda camp had a sparse selection of cars deemed suitable for drifting with their front-engine, front-wheel drive configurations. Aside from the high-dollar NSX supercar which has drift obstacles of its own, there was one other car in the Honda stable that would fit the S2000. Naysayers almost immediately dismissed both RS*R and their weapon of choice. You can't drift a road racer.RS*R only makes springs and mufflers what do they know? But with some extra power, a load of suspension tuning, and literally dozens of hours of tweaking and seat time, RS*R found the ideal formula.
The idea was to build a drift car that rivaled the dominators of the drift scene (the Silvia and the AE86 ) to come up with a Honda-based platform that was as light as an AE86 Toyota Corolla and as powerful as a Silvia. We needed to find a combination of these aspects, says Ben Chong, Director of Business Development for RS*R. These would yield the ultimate drift car, so to speak, that would be freely available in the US market, unlike a lot of the older platforms or the JDM-only models.
The S2000 is designed for road racing giving unreal grip an antithesis of what drifting is all about. A trial run proved that task would not be easy, as most testing concluded that the car was indeed built to hug the turns and blast through the straights and that the usable powerband was too far up the RPM range to make it a potent drifter.
To first correct the situation, the car was delivered to Gary Castillo of Design Craft Engineering and completely dissected. Castillo essentially reverse-engineered Honda's masterwork and modified it to suit RS*R's purposes. First the car was stripped to the shell, removing all panels and passenger amenities except for, oddly enough, the power windows. The dissecting effort proved fruitful as Castillo and the RS*R crew learned valuable amounts of information about the how the car was designed and what it was designed to do - almost a class in Honda engineering.