Our friend Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained has been teaching us all about the engineering behind cars. His lessons range from maintenance considerations like how to change your oil to describing automotive systems like how rotary engines work to the physics of speed, best exemplified by his explanation of how the Viper ACR broke 13 track records.
But, like us, Jason is a car guy, too, and to prove it he recently bought the embodiment of fun on four wheels, a Honda S2000.
Jason has plans for his S2000. He's calling it a project car, and he wants to make it better than it was when it was new 15 years ago.
First off, he's going to do some basic maintenance, including a differential oil change and a transmission fluid change. He's also going to throw on a set of sticky summer tires and perform an alignment.
He also wants to do some modifications, but before that, he's going to lay down a baseline by doing a dyno run to find out what horsepower it is putting out now versus when it was new.
Then come the mods. He's going to change the final drive ratio, remove some weight, switch out the exhaust, and maybe even supercharge it. The goal is to add some torque and keep it as a daily driver, at least for now. That means no suspension changes.
Unfortunately for the time being, the weather in Jason's Pacific Northwest home is cold and snowy, so some of these modifications will have to wait until the weather gets better. Then again, as mechanics in the Midwest know, you work on your car in the winter and test it out in the spring.
Plenty of videos will follow as Jason makes headway on his project and we'll be sure to run them here.
Stay tuned.
