Daniel Wu's Show-Stopping Honda S800

What's up guys, Larry Chen here. Welcome to another episode of Hoonigan Autofocus. I'm at Daniel Wu's personal man cave. He actually built a Honda in the Honda booth that was displayed at SEMA. It was a showstopper and I'm finally able to shoot it, have some one-on-one time with it. This is just so cool. And then of course Daniel is here to walk us through this beautiful build. This build got started because last year around a little after this time, I had a burst appendix, which then I was hospitalized for a week because I couldn't get it out. I was like really septic. And so I was stuck in the hospital for a week, just thinking like, what am I going to do with this year? And also it was a, I almost died actually. And the doctor said it was if I waited one more day before going to the hospital, I would have died. So I had this kind of life reaffirming experience where it was like, okay, I'm 45 now. What do I want to do with the rest of my life? I want to do something cool. I want to, I want to do something where I learn through the process. Because at 45, you kind of, you get to a point in your life where you're like, you've done a whole bunch of stuff and you, maybe you either stop learning and kind of keep doing the same thing you've always been doing, or you try and elevate yourself. And I was like, okay, I want to jump into something. I've been doing films for 20 something years. I want to take a break and I want to do something. I want to build a car. Two years before with the Tonto, I had Troy Ermich built it, but I had a little bit of guilt inside going, I didn't really touch anything on this car besides the design. And so I want to do, I want to wrench myself and do it myself. And so I chose this car, the Honda S800 to do it with, which was a daunting task. Only once I got into it that I realized how difficult and challenging this project was going to be. I'll just put it out there right now. I've never actually seen a Honda S800 in person or stock or any form. Maybe I've walked by one in passing without actually looking at it, not knowing what it is, but it's so crazy because you basically chose probably one of the hardest Japanese cars to restore because there's just not that many of them. How many did they even make? It was a couple thousand, but I think, you know, they never came to the United States. So they're all in Europe. Some made as far as Guam. So there's some right-hand drive versions that were from Germany, Belgium, France, Guam, places like that. But a lot of them are left-hand drive versions from England, Australia, and Japan. This is a right-hand drive version from England that ended up in Hong Kong with my friend. And then he had it for like six years and he wasn't doing anything with it. It was just literally sitting in a garage. And I said, Hey, what are you doing with that car? And he's like, nothing. I'm going to sell it to me. And then I bought it and shipped it over here. And then we started the SEMA build. It was a daunting task because I didn't realize how rare it is and how hard it is to get parts for this car. Super difficult. This is the grandfather of the S2000. Similar idea, small car, high revving engine. So it's like basically they took what their thought at that time was like a motorcycle engine and make it more robust for a car, but it revs like a motorcycle engine. So it's 8,500 RPM, low CC, it's only 791 CC. That's the moniker. And then 71 horsepower for such a small car. It's totally fine. Like I thought about, I've seen people do S2000 swaps for these cars, but I didn't want to die. Like I don't want to die in this thing. It's such a tiny little car. You don't really get a sense of how small this is. We just had it parked next to Daniel's Datsun 510, and it actually looked a lot smaller than the 510 and the 510 is already a small car. It's already a small car. Exactly. So this is really, really cool. Right off the bat, I see some little elements that you kind of brought over all from the 510. This also has a design story also. This car, that one was called the Tanto. This is called the Chimpira, which in Japanese means like low-level gangster. And so the whole design brief was that the S800 is a really classy, cute looking car. And so we were like, okay, if we're in period, let's say this is a 68. So let's say in 1974, a low-level gangster got this car, but it's like too cute. So how do you make it like more gangster? So the whole design brief for this car is just make this thing classy, but gangster. And so taking elements from kind of British gangsters, you know, the Cray brothers, they drove around E-types and stuff like that. Us hoonigans, we just want to go fast. We just want to make it do burnout. This is really cool that you kind of went to that detail to even kind of come up with a backstory almost for this thing. Yeah. And the story helps with every decision down the line. It's like, okay, what are we going to do here? Oh, gangster. Okay. We'll do this. Like the interior, red interior. It's like, how do we make a gangster? Okay. If the body's black, a red interior is going to make it super gangster. Right. And so all that from the body kit design, everything is, is comes from that, that one idea of being gangster. Oh, so these headlights, same manufacturer, right? Yeah. Same manufacturer. They're redone in Japan now. So again, the same from the same source in Japan. Uh, they happen to make this size. I found out about that. This is the last minute because what I was originally going to do was just take the, um, regular halogen headlights and just put a yellow film over them. But then I found out SCV Marshall made this size. And so we had them sent out and they do it in the classic style with this little, uh, kind of spine glass spine coming down the center there, just really nice details on it. And so it fits this car perfectly. So this lip, this body kit was actually designed by Marison from TRN. So Marison hit me up while actually I was in the hospital thinking about what I was going to do. And he hit me up and he was like, Hey, why don't we do a five 10 together for SEMA? And I go, well, I've done a five 10 already before, but I have this car that I say a hundred. I was like, would you be interested? And that's how it kind of got started. Cause he went in once he said, yes, I'm like, okay, let's do this for SEMA. He goes, send it to SEMA garage in LA. And so it arrived in long beach, went straight to the SEMA garage and we 3d scan the whole car. He never saw the car and then send the data to him. He designed the kit five months later it arrives. And then I put it on and just fit like a glove, you know, like most body kits that never fits right. Right. And this one, because of the 3d scan, put it on and he went, shoot, it just fit on perfectly. You know, there was no question about it. And the same thing with the flares, like with flares, you're always like, is it this way? Is it this way? Do I have the front one or the rear one? But it was like design in a way that just went on and it's like, Oh, there's no question about how this fits at all. So it was really easy. So for those of you guys who don't know Marison, he created Rocket Bunny, he created Pandem. He's more of a computer genius in a way. Like when I went to his shop in Kyoto, he just has a bunch of computers and he, yeah, he has like this crazy five axis machine that actually makes the parts out of foam and then they make molds out of them. That's how it is. I never knew. It's such a crazy process, but he just has it in his head. And also the fact that he can make these renders just in the 3d world, even before it goes on the car, he kind of has that advantage, you know, it's a game changer. It really is. And he has people like him have changed the aftermarket industry. And, but what's really cool to me is that he still has the bandwidth to make these one-off projects, uh, like this beautiful S800 because there's no other kit like this, right? Nope. Nope. Nope. There's none. And like a lot of S800 owners have hit me up and said, Hey, where can I get this kit? I'm like, sorry, if he just wants to do one. So that's it. So his body kit is the front lip, the fender flares and the rear tail. And so that all came from a sketch that I sent him. And then he, we went back and forth and that was really interesting because you know, his English is not that great. I can't speak Japanese. So it was literally direct messaging and Instagram with like three or four words at a time, sending it back and forth. I'm like, okay, I think he gets it. He originally wanted the flares like four and a half inches or something like that. I was like, I can't find wheels for that. So we had to, I had to make sure he understood like you can't do it that wide. He wanted to go really extreme on it. I was like, it has to be a little more subtle because there's just no way to make it work. So tell us about the wheels. They're really special. It's a stock design, but we widened them. So I basically re-barreled the wheels. So I took out the center, the seven inches in the front, eight inches in the rear. Um, basically just got new steel. It's a hot rod trick. Basically new steel wheel barrels popped out the center, re-centered them, uh, at my, my own offset and then, uh, had them repainted gold or powder coated gold. And then you, this original hubcap was originally Chrome with a black circle in the center. And since the car was all black and I kind of wanted to do this red as a kind of reference to the type R and also ties into the red of the interior. What did it actually turn out to be? It's 13 inches, 13 inch by seven in the front and 13 by eight in the rear, but you can't see here, but it's a five by one 30 lug nut pattern, which is the Porsche size, right? So I was looking for aftermarket wheels. I actually want to put Watanabe's on it, but they don't make that, that bolt pattern for that small of a wheel. Because if they did that disc in the center, it would be the bolt. The hole would be too close to the edge and they can't do it that way. So I really, and I explored, I supported so many different brands of wheels because I wanted to do something more modern, but I'm actually glad how this turned out and happy how it turned out, how this kind of this modern, but retro look. I'm actually surprised that Toyo makes 13 inch tires. Yeah. They only have two choices and I got two sizes that they have. And these badges are, are they original? They're all stock original, like beautiful, right? Like this car was so well designed and like a lot of people don't even know. Cause like you, you think of Honda, early Hondas, and you think of the CVCC or the NZs, which are really simple looking cars. But this one was like, Honda was going, okay, we're going to make cars now. What does the rest of the world doing? And they went and looked at like MGs and, and Jaguars and whatever. And then they made this car that's based off of what was happening at the Zekeis at the time. But everything else, like all this like design work here, this is really cool stuff. I really, really love the Honda logo. That wide Honda logo. Yeah. That's above the S800. It's so beautiful. And this is stock. This is on the car originally. Wow. Um, one thing I have to tell you is that this is actually two cars made into one because the car that I got from Hong Kong, when it arrived here, it looked great. And then pictures look great. I'd seen it previously six years before it was in good condition, but I didn't realize in the nineties or something, it had been rest restored with fiberglass body panels. So I was like, Oh, it looks perfect. There's no rust. When we got the fiberglass body panels off, there was rust everywhere. And the frame was completely rusted out. I'll show you the frame that's out there. In a panic, I got online on eBay and I found a guy that was selling parts. And I go, you got a lot of parts. So you, do you have a parts car? And it turns out he had a car, a convertible sitting in his, in his backyard in LA, uh, that he was meant to restore for 12 years and just sat there and he didn't do anything. So I went literally the next day, I drove down there with the trailer, picked it up, brought it up here, and we chopped the crap out of that thing to get this thing. Wow. So all these panels, all the quarter panels are from that donor car. The frame underneath is also from the donor car. And then basically anything else that was rusted out in this car, we took from the donor car. The donor car had its issues. Also, there was no engine. There was a bunch of issues with that. So, so I feel better about chopping that one up. Well, you saved this car essentially. Yeah. I mean, this thing, it was junk. Like the frame, you see it in a minute. It looks like the car was half the car was parked in the ocean. I mean, the rest is that bad. And I was just like, I almost, I almost pulled the plug on the whole project at that moment. And it was lucky that we were able to find the donor car to get this thing where it was. Wow. 250 hours of rust repair, of bodywork to get this car, this little 11 foot car into the shape that you see it is now. It's so small. Oh man. I just love the design elements of this. Yeah, it looks very Jaguar. All this, this gas thing, you know, all this is like, it's just really cool design stuff. And so we really played off with all that stuff for any other decisions. So like the interior is custom, but those rails weren't there originally, obviously it was just carpet back there. And the rails kind of relate to all these pieces that are all over the car, all the bright work on the car. I love that so much. This is the tail that Miura-san made kind of reminiscence of the Z tails, the Fairlady Z tails. But this also like really reminds of like a old Ferrari. Yes. Yeah. So here's the thing. These are actually Ferrari taillights. So several reasons why. One reason why is the original taillight is really nice, but it was broken. They were both broken and you cannot find them anywhere. Like even the secret places that sell S800 parts don't have them. And so I had to make a decision, like what are we going to do? And one element that's really cool in the back of this car is this, this, this really just flat piece here. Yeah. And a lot of Italian cars have that. Ferraris, the Alfa Romeo TZ had that. And so I wanted to like accentuate that idea. So here's obviously matte black as opposed to the gloss black and the flatness, but then the bullet shaped lights kind of accentuate this curve here. And these are actually Ferrari GTO lights. It's easier to find a remade Ferrari GTO lights than Honda taillights. That's the ironic thing about this. That's incredible. And then another element here is the custom exhaust done by Remarque and Greddy. Kind of reminds me of like the E-Type exhaust. Exactly. I had an E-Type before. And so originally this car was split out here and it was cool, but this looks harder. You know, this is way more gangster. And so I told Kenji over at Greddy, I was like, Hey, I want, I want dual tips coming out and you know, angled tips. And so Kenji and Andy from Remarque actually came up here and installed, did the install for me. Couldn't believe they did it when there had so many other SEMA builds going on at the time. It looks great. It really, really does. I love how tiny the pipes are, right? How tiny the pipes are. Oh, one and a quarter inch. And so we wanted, we originally wanted titanium, but his factory didn't have pipes that small in titanium. So then we had to go to stainless steel. So after I finished working on this car, like I go into another car and work on it, and like everything felt big and clumsy, right? Because everything on this car is so tiny and minute. Yeah. Cause essentially, I mean, it's like a motorcycle engine in a car. And that underside, it all looks brand new. So you guys really kind of took it down. I mean, this was like frame off restoration. So we took it all apart and cleaned everything up, the frame repowder, coated everything, all that stuff, and just made it basically brand new. The only thing that's not brand new is this rear glass. And you can see there's a bunch of scratches on it. Cause you just can't, you can't get them. There's no way you're going to be able to find a glass like this, but did you, were you able to restore this? Yeah. So I had took this out and had it repolished. All the bright work was done, sent off to a place in Hayward where these guys, this father and son operation where they just polish metal. And that was a fun part about working on this is like using all these, like old school style shops to do the work on this car. And just kind of getting to know that process of like metalwork or metal polishing and seeing what those guys do and seeing, letting their art shine, you know, and it's a lot like architecture. You know, when you design a building, you're the designer of the building, but you hire a lot of people like carpenters and skilled craftsmen to put in the detail work that helps kind of make your vision a cohesive whole. Yeah. So like, what did you guys do for the rubber too then? So I was lucky that the rubber is a place in Germany that sells a lot of S800 parts and they reproduce their own rubber. So all the windows and stuff like that, they had, they had new stuff that I could use. Wow. Yeah. So it opens like a jag. Well, I can honestly say I've never, ever seen this engine before. Yeah. It's, it's kind of like you have to work your way around it. It's really big considering it's only 791 CCs and 71 horsepower. But you know, obviously they took the motorcycle philosophy and just made it a little more robust for a car. So here's the air filter, carbs, little tiny motorcycle carbs. In fact, you can use Honda motorcycle carbs if you, if these are bad. And then the motor, everything, we kept stock on this car. So nothing, we modified, we didn't modify anything. We just replaced it with all the new parts if we could. And we rebuilt the motor, rebuild the transmission, rebuild all the slaves, everything that did all just restored it to that new condition. I don't even know what to say. I mean, looking at this honestly is giving me goosebumps because this is potentially what it looked like when it was pretty new. Yeah. Yeah. Doing little things, right? Like, I mean, this is all cleaned up. This is all brand new. Like the master cylinder, slave cylinder, all of the little hardware here and there. Oh, just so cool. The brake and clutch lines done with the copper tubing, you know, the old schools, we were going to do modern, but I was like, no, I want to keep it old school. Let's do it the old school way. But it was like, who's going to bend this copper piping? Like, I can't, I can't do it. So I didn't have the confidence to do it. So luckily two blocks down the street, there's a vintage Ferrari shop. And I walked by there and I was like, Hey, do you guys do that? And they're like, Oh, in fact, we have the best guy in the Bay area to do it. So he did that for us in a day. It was awesome. It would probably take me a week to try and get something serviceable. You know? So did you actually paint this? Yeah. I had that powder coated. Okay. So this is kind of one of those things. There's a theme that kind of goes through the car, but it also ties into the newer Type R car. Yes. Yes. And that's what I was trying to do is like, create a theme for the car, but also relate to the history of Honda, you know? And I thought that was important. But seeing that, knowing that this car was going to go into the Honda booth, celebrating their 70th anniversary in America, even though this car was in America, I wanted to have a lot of homage elements to Honda for that. So like the red hubcap centers for the Type R and this red Honda also, because just everyone knows the Honda logo is red, right? So I want to try to incorporate that as much as possible into the car. Is this the first Honda you've ever built? Yep. Yep. Yep. This is actually the first car I've ever built. There's only a few people in the world I feel like that could do everything themselves. But like when you build a car like this, you're like the conductor and you're like orchestrating everyone and people all over the world to kind of help you put this together. And it's just so cool to see that. The interior is perfect. The interior is like the cherry on top of all this. The interior is done by my friend Danny at DJD Designs in Hayward. And he mostly does muscle cars. In fact, he had a car at SEMA that won an award at Camaro for muscle cars. So this is a very unique experience for him. He doesn't even really do European cars that much. And so the design brief on this again was like, I just wanted this thing to look classy and maybe very European. Because, you know, again, this car has a lot of elements to it. And so the seats actually were originally in this design, it's just they were black, black vinyl. And so I just chose red leather for all this. And this is all, you know, the red part is to contrast the black and make it look, you know, just more gangster. Again, going back to that theme, certain elements like this is brand new. Originally, it was only to here with like an ashtray in it. But we decided to extend it out. And it made the shift knob even shorter, which is really cute. That's the shift knob. Wait a minute. So you can literally shift it with just a flick of your wrist. Wait, hold on. And it even has the script on it. You know, what's funny is I thought the shifter on the S2000 small, like that's where it came from, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is like a turn indicator on my FJ. That's right. And then look at this. I mean, this thing, the parking brake thing is tiny, like a little tiny thing. And this is the original steering wheel repolished. This is a new old stock item that I found on Yahoo Japan that I accidentally bid on and got. I wasn't really, I was setting my limit, which was $500. And it cost me $500 for this thing. Just for that. But it was new old stock in the original bag and not open. So that was kind of cool. A little piece there. And then the gauges, look at the gauges. These are original gauges. So beautiful, the design. It's like a watch. Yeah, it really is. And even this stuff, like where it says hazard warning. Yeah, yeah, very cool. The, see the red line, 8500. Turn signal, high beam. Yep. It's kind of interesting to me. I like this, the horn. Which is right at your hand, right? Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. It's interesting to me that all of this is in English. Yeah. So this was, this was made for the British market. It was made for England. Okay. So you see like in the inside, there's a little different codes for different markets for what it was. And you can tell what country it was meant for by those codes. This actually kind of reminds me of the S2000 also. Right. And that they, they had like a panel that hides like all of the entertainment area. Yeah. So there was a stock radio, but I don't like to put radios in my cars because I like to listen to the motor. So this is the delete plate, I guess that it comes with for the, the, if you don't have that option. So I kept that in there and just refurbished it. That's cool. And then you've got the choke right there. Choke, wiper, lights, and then this down here, B for bonnet. And the back here is so cool. Yeah. So originally the rear was just black carpet. That's all it was. And I was like, we got to shush this thing up. So let's go, let's go all the way through with the leather theme all the way across. And so this is, this is it like fill it in. Oh. And then we put in these luggage rails, all that kind of stuff to kind of harken back to the British Jaguar style design and stuff like these, this detail also on the original design. Yeah. That locks it. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Okay. Now you can actually get stuff out of this, this trunk. Wow. But they, you know, they thought of everything. They thought of everything on this car. And so it really wasn't much to have to like modify. We just made things slightly better. You know, what was the original color on the original cover was silver. I mean, let me pull it out for you. And it looks so different. The car looks completely different. So that was the original. It looks like great condition there, but it was not like that. Okay. All right. This is really cool. I love this build so much. That means a lot to me that Larry, Larry likes this bill. You know, I have to pinch myself every day. Like this morning we were at Z car garage and we were just driving all of their coolest cars there. And then not so much later we're here at Daniel Wu's place, checking out his car. So you have an amazing job. It's not so bad. So this is the original frame. Look at, look at this. Oh my God. Really bad. I mean, there's it's all over the whole thing. And so like when I pulled the body off, I was, I just stared at it for like 20 minutes and went, can we even fix this? Like, can we fix this? And at one point I almost gave up. I mean, all the, where the body mounts go, there's rusted through there. See that? So this is not even serviceable. Is there a reason why you're keeping this though? No, we're, we're waiting to actually chop it up and send it to recycling. It's not usable at all in any way. It's actually kind of cool how small it is. Like you could pretty much pick it up. I picked it up by myself in the middle. I just picked it up like a wheelbarrow and just walked it over. Like everything on the car you could do that way. Yeah. Even the body, the body, two of us lifted it off, you know? So it's like, it's pretty, it was pretty easy to work on in that respect. But then because it's so small when you're in the inside trying to like connect wires and stuff like that, it was a, it was like a lot of yoga contortionist. It's just super cool to see that you've saved this car. A lot of people like to say, for example, the RWB cars, a lot of people like to say, Hey, you're ruining these cars. You're chopping them up. Whatever. I just say, you know what? They're becoming something greater than what they were, which is just a stock 911. You know, it's potentially going to be someone's pride and joy that they'll keep forever. It's just something that would just get, and most of them are, you know, standard stock 911. So they're not like some rare fancy one. And I think, you know, if you did that, people would be up in arms, but I don't, I don't have a huge problem with that. You know, if it's done well and done with taste, it's like, that's fine. And that's kind of the thing with you've made it something greater than it was, you know, it, it potentially could have just been taken to the junkyard, um, after maybe a couple more miles, hopefully this inspires other people to restore these classic Japanese cars, because in terms of price and in terms of, um, historic value, everything is going up. You know, you look at the 2000 GT now it's more than ever, you know, and then cars like this S 800, it's going to be really rare to see in good condition like this. Yeah. And that's what I was kind of my proudest proudest moment at SEMO is the fact that like just watching people come up to it. Cause even like super car guys, a lot of people didn't know what it was and the fact that they were introduced to it and learn something in that moment of seeing that car, um, was, it was cool. It was cool to see that you could actually get a car guy to change his perspective or, or learn something new or see something new for, you know, and, and that was kind of, that was the point where like, if we're going to do something for, for SEMA, let's do something that stands out and is different from the rest. Hey, I've been going to the SEMA show since 2006. And we never, like, I never expected it to be like it is now where you could see cars like the S 800 or even 240 Zs and all so many Supras. It's just so cool to see where the culture has gone. And then, uh, you got people like Daniel who would just dropping the mic on everyone with this awesome Honda build. So thanks again. Um, let's, let's actually go for a ride in it. I'm actually kind of curious to see how it drives on the road. I'm actually surprised how roomy this thing is for how small it is. It actually is. I mean, other than the headroom, the space inside is actually not. Yeah. I'm impressed. Mini Coopers are like that too. You get in. Mini Coopers have so much room and it's interesting. This kind of has like an echo effect. Like I'm talking and it's everything so close to me. Like I can, I can hear myself louder if that makes any sense. Oh, this is so crazy. It does sound like a motorcycle. Yeah. It's crazy. Also what you heard when it starts up, it doesn't have like a kick over. It just starts up like a motorcycle. It's like that. Yeah. Here we go over the golden gate bridge. So cool. That exhaust though is nice. That's what sold me on this car originally. I was on YouTube, like in a YouTube hole, and I found this video called Honda S800 sound, and it was just the dashboard and the sound. And I was like, yo, what the car is that? And then I looked it up and I'm like, Oh, it actually looks really good. I'm like, I want to get one of those. That was like 10 years ago.