S500, S600, and S800

Honda's First Sports Car: The S500, S600, and S800 (1963–1970)

Soichiro Honda drove the S360 prototype himself around Suzuka Circuit on 5 June 1962, with project engineer Yoshio Nakamura riding beside him. It was a company demonstration as much as a road test: Honda had spent the 1950s building motorcycles and had only just decided to become a full automaker, and its founder wanted the assembled dealers and press to see, in person, that the small four-cylinder engine screaming toward its redline behaved like nothing else built by a Japanese manufacturer. The S360 itself never reached showrooms. Honda's engineers judged that a slightly larger displacement would serve the car's commercial and export prospects better than the strict kei-class 356cc limit, and by the time the car appeared for sale in October 1963 it had grown into the S500, Honda's first passenger automobile. It arrived four months after the related T360 kei-truck had already put Honda-badged wheels on Japanese roads.

What made the S500 remarkable was not its size but its engineering pedigree. Honda had spent the previous half-decade racing motorcycles at the Isle of Man TT and in world-championship Grand Prix competition, and the small car's 531cc DOHC inline-four carried that education directly onto public roads: a chain final drive borrowed straight from motorcycle practice, a specific output and rev ceiling that made contemporary European economy cars look industrial by comparison, and a mechanical willingness to spin that had no real precedent in a mainstream road car of its size. It was a demonstration piece for what Honda's engine department could do once given four wheels instead of two, and it announced, quietly but unmistakably, that Honda intended to be judged as a maker of driver's cars rather than merely of cheap transportation.

The S600 arrived in March 1964, only months after the S500, with a larger 606cc DOHC four producing roughly 57 PS and, crucially, Honda's first fixed-roof coupe body alongside the open roadster from 1965. The pace of iteration says something about how the company was operating in this period: rather than committing to one specification and defending it for years, Honda kept refining engine, body, and driveline within a running model line, treating the S-series almost as a rolling engineering test bed that happened to be sold to the public. Development in this window also drew on Honda's growing international racing presence. The S-series shared a corporate moment with Honda's first Formula One entries in the mid-1960s, and the company's appetite for high-revving, small-displacement engineering was very much of a piece with what it was doing in Grand Prix racing at the same time, even though the road cars and the F1 program were separate engineering efforts.

The S800, introduced in January 1966, pushed the formula further: a 791cc engine producing roughly 70 PS, and, on later cars, a shift away from the chain-drive rear axle toward a more conventional live axle, a concession to durability and cost as the car matured from a low-volume specialty item toward a broader sales proposition. The S800 was also the first of the family exported to Europe in meaningful volume, giving Honda an early beachhead for the idea that a Japanese manufacturer could sell a genuine sports car, rather than an economical runabout, to European enthusiasts who had their pick of British and Italian roadsters. Reception in period was shaped as much by novelty as by outright performance: the S800 was fast for its class and unmistakably characterful, but it also arrived from a company still primarily known, outside Japan, for motorcycles.

Production of the whole S-series ended in May 1970, closing out at roughly 24,000–25,000 cars across all three models combined; the Wikipedia articles on the three models add up to 24,387. The end did not come from the S800 failing in the market; it came from Honda's engineering and regulatory priorities shifting hard toward emissions compliance and toward a new generation of practical small cars, the Civic in particular, that would define the company's next decade far more than any low-volume roadster could. For nearly thirty years afterward, Honda built no direct successor to the S-series concept: no small, driver-focused, motorcycle-engineering-inflected roadster wearing an "S" badge. That long absence is itself part of the S500/S600/S800 story, because when Honda finally revisited the idea for its 50th anniversary in 1999, the new S2000 was explicitly conceived as a spiritual return to what the S-series had represented three decades earlier. It was a car built to prove, once again, that Honda's engine department could still make a small displacement do something remarkable.

The S-series' legacy inside Honda is best understood as a proof of concept rather than a commercial triumph in its own right. It established, at the very outset of Honda's life as a carmaker, that the company's road cars would carry over the high-revving, small-displacement engineering discipline that had made its motorcycles competitive on the world stage. That lineage runs forward through the S800, the S2000's F20C, and even into the naturally aspirated engine philosophy Honda maintained long after most rivals had turned to turbocharging. Soichiro Honda's decision to let a sports car, rather than a sedan, be the company's first true passenger-car statement is also notable on its own terms: it signaled from day one that Honda wanted to be known for engineering ambition and driving character, not merely for building affordable, competent transportation.

Racing Heritage: Proving the Formula on Track

Honda did not simply build the S-series to look fast in a showroom; it raced the cars almost as soon as they went on sale, and the results arrived quickly. Barely a year after the S600's 1964 debut, it won its class outright at the second Japan Grand Prix, and retrospective motorsport histories credit the car with a further class victory in a Nürburgring endurance race of roughly 300 miles in the same period. That was a genuinely international result for a company that, outside Japan, was still known mainly for motorcycles. Honda's competition department treated the S-series the way it had treated its Grand Prix motorcycles: as a live proving ground for engineering claims a sales brochure alone could not make credible.

The clearest surviving picture of that effort comes from the 1968 Suzuka 12 Hours, where cars prepared by Racing Service Center (RSC) took the S800 to a genuine outright podium against purpose-built opposition. The #25 RSC-entered S800, driven by Kuniomi Nagamatsu and Yoshifumi Kikura, finished third overall and won the GT-1 class outright, beating both a field of sister S800s and Toyota's rival Sports 800. That was direct evidence that Honda's small roadster could run competitively against everything else Japan's domestic industry fielded in the class, as well as against its own stablemates. It is a rare case in published accounts of the S-series where a specific race, a specific car number, and two named drivers can all be tied together with reasonable confidence.

That competitiveness had a European postscript. By 1968, Honda France was offering a dedicated competition-specification S800 to privateer racers, feeding directly into the following that had already built up in France and Belgium around the S800's export sales. A Japanese manufacturer supporting privateer racing teams in continental Europe, only five years after Honda had sold its first passenger car, says something about how quickly the S-series moved from novelty item to a machine serious club racers wanted to campaign.