I've never really cared for convertibles. Yes, I know how much fun they are to drive, have a lower center of gravity and handle better and so on. I'm well aware that some of the most legendary sports cars in antiquity have taken convertible form; some will even argue that a convertible is the true form of a sportscar. My argument is: a roof is always cooler; some kind of a roof is better than none. Glass roofs are cool; Targa tops kick ass! Even.... no, wait... sliders are never cool.
Anyway, try to imagine any one of your favorite cars right now as a convertible, and you'll see what I'm getting at. JZA80 Supra? R34 Skyline? Evo 9? Civic hatch...? Lame! Take even, for a minute, the cars that were offered with a convertible option, and you'll probably prefer the hardtop version: 350z? S13 240? Mini Cooper? FC RX-7? Starting to agree? For a minute there, I thought the Saturn Sky might be an exception to my rule... until I saw Ben Schwartz's drift Sky with the hard top! Then there's the Miata. Aside from the occasional fat college girl, I've never seen anyone apart from old men drive them.
When the Honda S2000 was released in 1999, I actually liked it. It was a Honda and rear-wheel drive-what was there not to like? Oh yeah.... that. Oh well. It revved to 9K, made more horsepower per liter than some exotics ten times the price. After time, I was able to look past the ragtop and actually enjoy the car more and more for the performer it was. Still it always provoked a nagging sensation in the back of my mind-like a fun, cute girlfriend who just happened to have really crooked teeth and whistled all her S's-that kept me from truly falling in love with the car. That is until recently, when I saw the shots of Brian Kim's red, hardtop S2000.
California-native Brian Kim is 23, a recent college grad searching for employment as a pharmacist, and enjoys golf, friends, and hockey. For all intents and purposes, Kim is a lot like many of us. He likes hamburgers and (though we may be hard-pressed to admit it to each other) a movie called The Fast and the Furious, mostly because its what got him into the sport compact scene years ago. What makes him a little exceptional is that at 19 years of age, Kim went out on a limb to buy his first tuner car-this New Formula Red S2000. Kim bought the car for the same reasons any of us would: rear-wheel drive, 9,000 rpm, and Honda. Not afraid to admit it, he also bought it to turn heads; no shame in that, since that is one job the designers at Honda built it to do.
At the time Kim acquired his S2K, most of his friends were on their first cars, too, so it doesn't surprise us that his first few years as a tuner were indecisive at best. "At first, I wanted to strip it out completely and just make it fast," he says. "But that gets kind of annoying on the street." Instead, he stuck with the basics: bolt-ons, suspension, aftermarket front bumper, and some odd aesthetic mods. Albeit not completely sure of his direction with the car, Kim had been satisfied with it to this point, until one day when Murphy's Law slapped him in the fender. "I was backing out of a tight space," he explains, "WHAM! Right into a post." What could've gone wrong did go wrong that day. Taking the event as a divine message to "change his ways", Kim looked a little closer into the world of S2000s when planning his next move. That's when he found Mike of Evasive Motorsports. "Mike had a badass S2000, and knew his stuff when it came to parts," he explains, "I trusted him to find an original look for my car." Mike suggested replacing the damaged fender with wider units from J's Racing. "And that meant I would have to bolt them up to a J's Racing front bumper," continues Kim, "Before I knew it, I ordered the rear over-fenders, bumper, sides-everything."