Reviewing Suki’s Honda S2000 from ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’
Doug DeMuro shows us around the iconic pink Honda S2000 from the ‘2 Fast 2 Furious” movie then takes it for a test drive.
The first Fast and the Furious introduced the world of loudly decorated tuner cars to the movie-going mainstream. The follow-up, 2 Fast 2 Furious became the second movie in what’s now a long-running franchise. In the second movie, Johnny Tran‘s infamous black Honda S2000 with a “$100,000 engine” became the girl-racer Suki‘s pink S2000 with anime-inspired graphics. That was literally the case as the same S2000 was redecorated to appear in the sequel. Currently, the actual car used in the movies lives at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, California. Thankfully, the museum let everyone’s favorite car enthusiast Doug DeMuro loose to review one of the most recognizable S2000 cars on the planet for his self-titled YouTube channel.
The story goes that the S2000’s owner lent it for filming the original movie, then the production company purchased it to use in the second. By the time 2 Fast 2 Furious was shot, it had a Compton supercharger kit added to the HKS exhaust, HKS Suspension, and an RE Works strut tower bar. Suki’s S2000 also still rode on the same Andrew Racing Mesh wheels as Johnny Tran’s. As it was a female character’s car and it was the turn of the century, the crew painted it Shimrin Pink.
The airbrush work was done by Noah Elias, who is most well-known for paintwork on Alpine audio show cars. The outside of the car looks sharp and well put together, but the inside is another matter. As DeMuro explains, “… ultimately, the thing about movie cars is that they are designed to look good for a purpose on camera, and in this car’s case it’s purpose was being seen from the outside.” That means the interior was hashed together purely to look good for a few shots of Suki driving.
Amazingly, the interior is trimmed using the fluffiest material that the builders could find: Bath mats. They don’t look good up close and haven’t aged well. However, 16 years ago, the interior only had to look good for a couple of brief moments in the movie. The paint wasn’t clear coated either as it wasn’t prepped to last longer than filming. Hence the paint is faded on the outside and a darker hue inside the door jams.
Unfortunately, while we do see a seeing a 40-year-old man driving a pink S2000 around LA, there are no outside shots of it moving. Instead, we get a great view of the misaligned steering wheel and a giant boost gauge that doesn’t work. Ultimately, this is a real movie car that happened to have been owned by a genuine enthusiast first.
DeMuro isn’t impressed by driving the vehicle. “It’s just so bad,” he explains, “Movie cars are just so bad. No attempt is made to make them look good unless it really is going to be shown closely on camera.” Which is a shame because we want to love this S2000, but reality is often harsh. So, with that said, we’re going to go and watch 2 Fast 2 Furious again and enjoy the movie magic of this car making way too many gear changes during its race scene before jumping a bridge.
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