So we bought a 2007 Honda S2000

It’s no secret that we’ve done extremely well over the past year, financially. As the most popular-yet-hated automotive portal in the region, we’re finally getting our dues in terms of advertising money from carmakers we haven’t pissed off. What better way to celebrate than to buy a new car, especially since we’ve sold off our longstanding Jeep and BMW late last year. We were having crazy thoughts at the time on what our new mascot car should be, as we were looking at everything from the upgraded Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 to the new Porsche 911 Carrera, with everything in between, such as an older Nissan GT-R and an even-older Ferrari F360. But then as we waited for year-end payments to reach our bank account, we came to our senses and realised that putting down a full cash payment on a half-million dirham car was retarded, sort of like a lottery winner going on a crazy spending spree. We decided to take our car journey slowly, so when we came across a stupid little low-mileage Honda, we bought it.

It’s not just any stupid little Honda though. Our car is a black 2007 Honda S2000. Our only criteria for shopping was that the car had to be a sports car with a manual gearbox. It also had to be somewhat reliable, look somewhat decent and we had to have somewhat of a good relationship with the carmaker, though we were actively breaking that last rule when we were actually shopping. Though we wanted something more premium, the S2000 exceeds all our criteria anyway.

Interestingly, we skipped a couple of other sports cars that we went to see simply because the interior wasn’t kept in good condition, even though the cars drove fine and the service histories were complete. We were tired of driving around in that rat-rod BMW M Roadster of ours, and a bad cabin was also a sign of how the owner drove the car. An interior is easy to fix up, but problems with an abused drivetrain only show up later. We also skipped modified cars. This was the only S2000 we went to see.

We’ll go into detail about our S2000 later. But it’s worth noting that this car sat in basement parking for most of its life until it was bought by UAE Touring Car Championship driver Aslam Moola a year ago, and then we bought it from him. We picked it out of an online classifieds ad because it has only 15,000 km on the odo. We paid Dhs 85,000 in cash for it, which is on the high side really, as that means a depreciation of less than 40% over five years! But now we’re seeing people asking for even more money for the S2000, as if encouraged by our announcements on the DriveArabia.com Facebook page about our purchase. This car may well have the highest resale value ever, and is already becoming a classic since its demise in 2009.

This is our first time driving a Honda S2000. It’s been two days with the car so far, and we’re still figuring out how to drive something that sounds like it’ll blow up all the time. This should be interesting.