When you first popped in Gran Turismo 4, you may have noticed a little company on the "Tuner Garage" map that you didn't quite recognize. If you were good and won the Polyphony Cup race in the "Extreme Hall," you may even have acquired a curiously fast S2000 built by that same company.
And finally, if you were anywhere near as obsessed with the game as we are, you probably wondered just who Opera was, and how an S2000 with near stock horsepower was able to accelerate so quickly. Since much of GT4 is based in reality, we surmised that a real Opera Performance shop must exist. It does, and we tracked the small company down in Japan to let us probe the race-ready S2000 for ourselves.
Take a two-hour drive or 12-second shinkansen (bullet train) ride from Tokyo towards Yokohama, and you'll run into Opera Performance in a small town known as Fujisawa. If you were to make assumptions about the size of Opera Performance from its notoriety in the fabled video game, you'd expect to find a large tuning shop with multiple service bays and shelves loaded with parts.
But like many noted tuners in Japan, the Opera garage is just that - a garage. It's small but immaculate, like a fine jeweler's or watchmaker's shop. Upon entering, I feel as though I can eat off the floors but doing so would spoil its perfection. Tools are set in toolboxes with millimetric precision and every surface is kept sparkling clean. In the center of the second bay sits the notorious S2000 - the wheels are off and it floats in the air supported by jackstands. It's clear what the creator wants to emphasize.
Considering it took Opera Performance founder Yasuyoshi Yamamoto six months to reengineer the suspension of this racing car, it's no wonder he's keen to show it off. In the rear, anti-dive and anti-squat characteristics have been completely eliminated with redrilled pickup points and A-arms mounted at completely different angles (parallel to the earth) from stock. There isn't a flexible bushing to be found, all having been replaced with solid aluminum non-compliance bits.
I'm awestruck as I notice stitch-welding through the inner fender and around the floorpan from below. After crawling under the car, I'm presented with the most comprehensive display of welding genius I think I've ever seen - the undercarriage is a jigsaw puzzle of stitch welds and Swiss-cheesed bracing members. I look up and find the gas tank; it's clear the entire stock system has been removed in lieu of a substantially smaller, custom-made 10-gallon unit, straddled with dual 255-lph fuel pumps cradled by custom-manufactured brackets.
Clearly, this isn't for the faint-hearted. And as I dig deeper, my heart starts to sink: How am I going to convey this level of detail and intricacy to our readers? I've only just seen the underside of the rear end and I'm completely, as the Brits say, gobsmacked. Before I'm allowed a peek at the rest, Yamamoto-san requests that I don't reveal many of the things he's done to the S2000 and other cars he's created. He explains that they are in the prototype stage and could easily be duplicated. It's a load off my mind but also disappointing because many of the things my eyes were privy to are unlike anything I've ever seen before, yet common-sense enough that I wonder why no one's thought of them yet.
Then he does a 180 and hands me a comprehensive DVD detailing the entire build of the S2000, and as we go over it on his computer screen, the extent of work he's created becomes abundantly clear. It's scarcely believable that the car you see on these pages started as an unsuspecting Spa Yellow S2000.
Stock structural members have been analyzed for their efficiency and Swiss-cheesed if they are anything less than first-rate at doing their job. In their place are literally hundreds of custom pieces, circle-drilled and chamfered to reduce weight while retaining substantial rigidity, then MIG-welded to the stock sheetmetal. In areas critical to the structural rigidity of the chassis, stock body panels have been doubled in thickness to increase torsional stiffness.
When I swing the driver-side door open, I note that the shell is made of pre-preg carbon-fiber - Yamamoto does that in house too. As we continue our walk around, he points out that though the fenders, doors and hood are done in dry carbon, they retain the look of the stock body and are painted to match the rest of the car. In Japan, there's nothing cool about leaving those carbon-fiber pieces unpainted. The exhaust has also been made in-house; in fact, the only substantial pieces I can spot that Yasu actually outsourced are the individual throttle bodies from Toda Racing and the Arqray header - a product of the boutique exhaust company run by the brother of the owner of Fujitsubo. Yeah, hardcore.