ASM Honda S2000 and Dent Sport Nissan 240RS Maxi - Attack Time

If you closed your eyes and listened to the machine-gun fire erupting from the wastegate a few feet ahead, you'd swear there was only one place you could be. Individual throttle bodies twist open on corner exit and the anti-lag cuts out to expose a singular, shrieking 2.0-liter echoing down the straight and you're sure of it. But pop the eyes back open and let the rain permeate your eyeballs on this dreary Virginia day and you'll quickly realize you're not somewhere in the Black Forest watching old Group N rally cars fly by.

You're at this year's GTLIVE event at Virginia International Raceway, with the emphasis on 'International' this time around. Thanks to the appearance of one of the most highly touted naturally aspirated cars in Japan and the hard work of a couple guys in a Boston garage, a classic David-and-Goliath story is brewing.

Autobacs ASM S2000
The Honda S2000 campaigned by a company called ASM has a daunting reputation in Japan, because it's able to blitz the notorious Tsukuba Circuit in less than a minute. Until ASM flew through the checkered flag at 57 seconds, anything under the one-minute mark was considered an impossible feat from a naturally aspirated car. ASM brought a roadgoing version of the supercar to GTLIVE last October.

"The car I brought to the US is actually my personal car I purchased back in 1999," says Shinichiro Kanayama, co-owner of ASM. "I've always liked working on cars, so I started buying parts from Mugen and Spoon, and started doing a series of modifications." A clear indication of just how far this initial modification led is the odometer. The S2000 has covered about 87,000 miles during its six-year life. It may not seem like much here in the land of the interstate, but in Japan this kind of mileage is almost unheard of.

With each new click on the odometer, Kanayama would find something he was unhappy with and attempt to tune it out. The car quickly became a test bed for what would soon be ASM upgrade parts. Since the car is (still, amazingly) a daily driver, these parts are designed with some degree of practicality in mind. Kanayama admits it would have been simple to design an exhaust system to net a little more horsepower. However, overall durability and daily practicality would have taken a hit. More importantly, ASM was determined not to engineer anything that wouldn't be street legal in Japan.

Though the screaming S2000 you see here isn't the Autobacs Tsukuba Special which recorded the blistering 57-second lap time, the exterior is very similar. The roll cage is the same, but much of the factory durability was retained in an effort to keep the car capable in the rain and over time.

At 2491 pounds, this car is nowhere near as light as the 1984-pound Tsukuba Special, but it's still 400 pounds lighter than a stock S2000. Most of the weight reduction can be attributed to carbon fiber body parts. Interior plastics and the electric roof were also thrown out. Weight reduction generally translates to loss of durability, but Kanayama claims this car, while significantly lighter, is more rigid than stock

"With the Tsukuba Special, we're trying to show how capable an S2000 is when you enhance its performance to the extreme," says Kanayama. "However, the car is not practical for everyday use. For it to run properly, the motor needs to be warmed up for 20 minutes. It has a sequential gearbox that makes that loud gargle noise inside the car. And the car has been lowered substantially, which makes driving on public roads impossible. It doesn't even come with a catalytic converter."

To Kanayama, a car is only practical when it can be driven every day without the driver worrying about parts breaking or being harassed by cops, regardless of how fast it's capable of going. This S2000 is a direct derivative of the Tsukuba Special, just more practical and intended for daily use. The engine was built by Toda Engineering, just like the one on the Tsukuba Special. And it uses the same 57-second suspension kit, which ASM claims is comfortable enough for everyday use with your significant other sitting in the passenger seat.

ASM's purpose in building the TsukubaSpecial was ultimately to develop parts for street use. The idea is to go as fast as possible around the circuit and then tune down, step by step, until the parts that were used to extract fast lap times are streetable and street legal. "The quest for building the ultimate S2000 doesn't end at the Tsukuba Special. Rather, this (referring to the S2000 at the GTLIVE garage) is really our final destination."

Before coming to GTLIVE this year, ASM heard that race tracks in the US weren't as well-groomed as the ones in Japan. Instead of approaching it like a full-on race event, ASM is treating it like street driving in Japan. "To us, this is a great opportunity to verify how well our experience in time attack competitions is being applied to our street parts. That's why we're using radial tires. We could have used S tires instead, but with this event being the very first shakedown for the car, we decided to stick with the radials."

Believe what you want, but the fact is the car rockets around Virginia International Raceway with a vengeance, netting ASM lap times in the two-minute, 28-second range. It should-the S2000 took about a year to build, with about six months of that spent with Toda Engineering deciding on the perfect engine and developing the body. After a year of design, three months were spent dialing the car in, though ASM reports that no VIR-specific settings were used. Any logical person could make the deduction that ASM has nothing to worry about this rainy weekend in Virginia.

Dent sport 240RS Max
When you have a winning car with a winning budget, you're on top of the world. But there's always someone pushing to jam a twig in your chrome spokes. Today, Dent Sport is the fly that won't shoo out of ASM's cockpit. With the countless hours of labor spent designing the perfect S2000, it seems odd that a couple of guys with a donated 240SX and a garage could actually succeed.

It started as a dream in Boston after Bill Washburn set his eyes on Yoshi Koguchi's green-and-white 180SX on the internet late one night. He knew then and there that he would soon build a car with a similar paint scheme, but a wholly different mission statement. The Dent Sport 240SX is built for circuit racing and grip driving, not for drifting. And of all things, it takes much of its inspiration from rally cars of the past.

"I should give thanks to many of my favorite competition cars (Sport Quattro S1 E2, Porsche 917/956/934, Lancia Delta S4, JGTC Group A R32 GT-R, every Group A8 rally car during the 90s, and so many others) for providing continual inspiration growing up and during the build of the car," says Washburn.

The project started to materialize during Washburn's days as a mechanic, where he began to collect parts he'd need even before he had the chassis on which to mount them. The first parts to sit eagerly in Washburn's bedroom were a set of brakes from a Skyline GT-R (R32). Almost immediately after opening Dent Sport Garage with co-founder Alex Grabau in 2003, a 240SX was donated from a guy who needed the car out of the driveway within two days.