Big horsepower types like to harp about how “there’s no replacement for displacement,” but I’d like to offer a coexisting idea: there’s no replacement for lightness and engagement. Try as they may through sticky tires, trick torque vectoring, and carbon fiber dash trim, modern performance cars just cannot truly replicate the feeling of slipping into a proper classic roadster. A roadster that doesn’t have to comply with modern safety or emissions standards. A roadster that doesn’t feel compelled to come with Apple CarPlay or adaptive cruise control. A roadster that represents a historic high for Honda: the 2009 S2000 CR.
We drove a whole lot of cool stuff in the past 12 months and our Drive of the Year award celebrates that one magical drive that rises above the regular new-product-launch grind. Prototypes, concept cars, one-offs, restomods, ATVs, solar-powered pogo sticks, all of that falls under here. We drove quite a few retro cars in 2024, and quite a few of them were of the “JDM Hero” variety. But one stood out from the rest. Powered by a 2.2-liter naturally aspirated four-cylinder that revs to the moon and paired with one of the best-feeling manual transmissions the world has ever seen, the 2,855-pound 2009 S2000 CR is the ultimate, final version of Honda’s already-transcendent rear-drive sports car.
New suspension components made the CR sharper, the convertible soft top was replaced with a hardtop to accommodate a chassis brace that nearly doubled the car’s torsional rigidity, and the stereo and air conditioning became optional extras, relegated as opt-in items in the name of weight-saving and Porsche GT-like driver focus.
The result is a sobering reminder of both what we lost and what we could’ve had.
In his retro review, former Staff Writer Chris Rosales wrote, “Romance wafts from every crease, stitch, and pixel. It’s intoxicating, the thought of returning to the ‘90s when this car was new and exciting. Before the benefit of time, experience, and the internet added influence and comparison—when something could exist as a singular idea. It’s a car that left an imprint so strong that it’s one of the few memories from my single-digit years that vulcanized itself into my brain. And it’s a car that sidesteps the trope of being flawed but loveable. How could it be flawed if it was conceived to be exactly this?
“It was so ahead that it’s still the benchmark by which sports cars live. It still sets competitive lap times at track events across the U.S., still has chassis balance and handling manners that are joyful yet precise, but it transcended by valuing experience over anything else. The S2000 CR doesn’t feel old. If anything, it feels like the alternate timeline we could have had. In every shift, every kiss with the thrashing 8,000-rpm redline, every tiny mid-corner adjustment that it always accepted, more and more lament built up in me. An extraordinarily tiny number of cars achieve today what the S2000 did 24 years ago.”
“It’s everything that time forgot. We all forgot that it’s OK to have squeaks and rattles over bumps. We all forgot it’s OK to feel the engine wriggle and vibrate around town. We all forgot it’s OK to have heavy, offensive, notchy shifters. Most of all, we all forgot that it’s OK to fucking feel something when we drive a sports car. We don’t need refinement, a good stereo, or even a roof. It’s simply about motoring and the sensation of operating a machine that was designed to make you feel.
“The S2000 CR does the thing that the Porsche 911 GT3 Touring does now: Feel special at all speeds. The difference is that the S2000 was an everyman’s car in its time. There is no truly affordable car made today that vibrates, hisses, and overwhelms the senses like the S2000 does. For that, you’d have to brush with death in the $100,000 Lotus Emira, slide around in the $350,000 narcissist’s machine that is the Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica, or experience the 9,000-rpm, valve-overlapping howl of a $200,000 911 GT3.”
Yep, Honda once built an completely-attainable sports car that delivered a driving experience that can only be rivalled today by six-figure halo vehicles where the engine sits behind you… and we all just let it die on the vine with a whimper. We’re sorry, Honda. We didn’t know what we had until it was too late. And that’s why we’ve decided to give the S2000 CR its long overdue flowers as our Drive of the Year in 2024.