This Honda S2000 Sounds Out of This World, Thanks to ITBs and 10,000 rpm Redline

This project is brought to you by the Gears and Gasoline YouTube channel. They specialize in high-quality builds, and if you take a quick look at their page, you will notice that they mostly do content oriented on Japanese cars. So, you can expect this S2000 build to be a good one.

Now, let’s get into this build. Mostly, when you see S2000 projects, you will find the engine to be stock, fitted with some sort of forced induction, or swapped for another one altogether. But this is no regular build, featuring a K20A2 block with a K20Z3 head and Individual Throttle Bodies.

While, yes, this is no revolutionary modification, it is pretty rare to see it on a street car, and for a good reason - mainly, cost. They are expensive and pretty difficult to fit in your car. You will have, to a certain degree, to work around them when it comes to mounting them and the auxiliary parts, and that is no easy feat. So, that’s why you mostly see ITBs on track-focused cars.

But, there are also a lot of advantages, which we will see if we take a look at the Gears and Gasoline video. First of all, if you fit ITBs into your car, it will sound absolutely amazing. Also, the throttle response will improve drastically, thus improving drivability a lot.

This comes thanks to their design. As the name already implies, you have a dedicated throttle body for each cylinder, which means that air travels much quicker and more efficiently to the inlet port than in a normal setup. All sounds good, and you would expect some high numbers coming out of this engine, but no.

Now, after strapping the car down on the dyno and doing some pulls, the guys from Gears and Gasoline noticed something - this fully built K20, revving to 10,000 rpm with ITBs, is making a disappointingly low power figure.

The car put down 214 hp (217 ps) at the rear wheels, which isn't only disappointing, but it is less than what it makes in stock form with the original engine, so why's that? Well, the guys said that there is a lot more fine-tuning left to be done, and some more things need to be figured out when it comes to parts compatibility. This is an ongoing project, so we can expect the power figure to climb.

What the guys over at Gears and Gasoline managed to encapsulate perfectly is that, for this setup, horsepower isn’t the biggest concern. As I said already, you don’t fit ITBs to your car for insane power figures - you buy a turbo or a supercharger if that’s what you’re after. What they bring to the table is driveability. And pair that with a VTEC engine that revs to a dizzying 10,000 rpm, and a lot of fun is to be had behind the wheel of this top-down sports car.