Hoonigan Honda S2000 Gets Down and (Very) Dirty at Global Time Attack

Brandon Kado experiences California’s Central Valley up close and personal and S2Ki wonders how far you can engineer a car in your garage.

If you’ve ever raced at Buttonwillow Raceway Park in California, this screengrab will look familiar. Get anything wrong on the road course and, as Brandon Kado from Hoonigan found out, you’ll be finding John Steinbeck-caliber dust in your car for years.

Kado ran his Honda S2000 at the Global Time Attack Super Lap Battle in Buttonwillow. He headed there with Hoonigan regulars Vin and Bernoo in a couple of boring BMWs. You can find them doing some basic prep work for the rigors of chasing all-out in Episode 152 of Hoonigan’s “Daily Transmission.” For Kado’s S2000, that was mostly upgrading the brakes to two-piece rotors.

Ultimately, the Hoonigans lacked the pace of the super baller-level GTA competitors. However, they had fun just the same. And Kado, well, he made a mistake approaching Buttonwillow’s famous “Phil Hill,” one of two areas at the track with elevation. The end result found Kado trying to make his S2000 livable while contending with “Buttonwillow Lung” from inhaling his own dust cloud.

Perhaps more interestingly, they checked in with Mike Kojima, editor of MotoIQ and experienced race car engineer. He was contributing effort to the 480-horsepower Spoon Honda Civic. He goes over the details on it. While it represents a stout GTA entry, Kojima says with a straight face that a good garage engineer could duplicate it.

We don’t know how serious Kojima is, but what do our readers think? Certainly, a novice might struggle with it. However, if someone has built cars before, a turbocharged K-engine swap isn’t out of the question. Aerodynamic principles are well-established enough that one could follow those to make good lap time.

Could a good homebuilder replicate this kind of time attack machine? What about with an S2000 instead of a front-wheel-drive Honda?