Daniel Wu's Show-Stopping Honda S800

[Music] what's up guys larry chen here welcome to another episode of hoonigan auto focus 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 I have some one-on-one time with it this is just so cool and then of course Daniel is here hey 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 they 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 I'm gonna do with this year and also it was I almost died actually the doctor said it was if I waited one more day before going to a hospital I would have died so I had this kind of life for your firming experience I was like okay I'm 45 now what 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 learned 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 trying to elevate yourself and I was like okay I want to jump into something I've been doing films for 27 years I wanna take a break and I want to do something I want to build a car two years before with the Tonto I had Troy Hirsch built it but I had a little bit of guilt inside going I didn't really touch anything on this car besides his design and so I want to do I want to wrench myself and do it myself and so I chose this car the Honda has 800 to do it with which was a daunting task and only once I got into it that I realized how difficult and challenging this project was gonna be I'll just put it out there right now I've never actually seen a Honda s 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 is it a couple thousand but I think you know they never came to United States so they're all in Europe some mate as far as Guam so there's some right hands dry 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 when it was just literally sitting in a garage and I said hey what are you doing that car he's like nothing Excel 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 a similar idea small car high revving engine so it's like basically they took what their there 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 800 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 wanna die in this thing it's such a tiny little song 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 a small car socrates blocker exactly so this is really really cool I right off the bat I see some little elements that you kind of brought over all from the 510 yes this also has a design story also this car that one was called the Tonto this is called the Qin Pyrrha which in Japanese means like low-level gangster right and so the whole design brief was that the S 800 is a really classy cute looking car and so we're like okay if we're in period let's say this is the sick this is a 68 so let's say 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 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 Kray brothers they drove around e-types and stuff like that us hoon against we just wanted to go fast we just want to make it do burnouts 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 so and the story helps with every decision down the line it's like okay what are we gonna 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 is black red interior is gonna make it super gangster right and so all that from the body kit designed everything is comes from that that one idea I'm being gangster oh so these headlights same TV Marshall right yeah same manufacturer they were redone in Japan now so again same from the same source in Japan they happen to make this sighs I found that out but this is the last minute because what I was originally gonna do was just take the regular halogen headlights and just put a yellow film over them and then I found that FCV marchell made this sighs and so we had them sent out and they do it in the classic style with this little kind of spine last spine coming down the center they're just really nice details on it and so it fits this car perfectly so this lip this body kick was actually designed by Maris on tiara Elsa somi Rahsaan hit me up what actually I was in the hospital thinking about what I was gonna do and he hit me up he was like hey why don't we do a 5/10 together for SEMA and I go well I've done if I'd had already before but I had this car that's a hundred I like would you be interested and that's how I kind of got started because he went once he said yes I'm like okay let's do this for SEMA he goes send it to SEMA garage in 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 sent the data to him he designed the kit five months later arrives and I put it on it just fit like a glove you know like most bloody kids it never fits right right and this one because of the 3ds can't put it on he's got sure we just fit on perfectly you know there was no question about it 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 of the rear one yeah but it was like designed in a way 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 marathon he created rocket bunny and he decorated Panda he's more computer genius in a way like when I actually went to his shop in Kyoto he just has a bunch of computers and yeah he has like this crazy 5-axis machine that actually makes the parts out of foam and then they they make molds out of that that's how it is that yeah 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 is 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 like this beautiful s800 because there's no other kit like this no right nope nope there's none and like a lot of s800 owners i've hit me up and said hey we're gonna get this kid I'm sorry if he just wants to do one so that's it so his body kid is the front lip the fender flares in the rear tail mm-hmm 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 it hints su-kam 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 till I had to make sure he understood like you can't do it that wide he wanted to go really extreme on it 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 the stock design but we widened them so I basically rebelled the wheel so I took out the center the seven inches in the front eight inches in the rear basically just got new steel to hot rod trick basically the new steel wheel barrels popped out the center recenter them at my my own offset and then had them repainted gold or powder coated gold and then used 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 tie bar and also ties into the red of the interior what did I actually turn out to be it's 13 inch so 30 inch by 7 in the front and 13 by 8 in the rear but you can't see here but it's a 5 by 130 lug nut pattern which is the Porsche size right so I was looking for aftermarket wheels I actually want to put one nabis on it but they don't make that that bolt pattern for that small of a wheel because if they did that disk in the center it would be the bolt the hole would be too close to the edge and it can't do it that way so I really explored I splurged 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 outer now have this kind of this modern but retro look I'm actually surprised that Toyo makes 13 inch tires yeah yeah all right actually good they only have 2 choices and I got two sizes that they have and these badges are are they are they're all soccer as you don't look beautiful right like this car was so well designed and like a lot of people don't even know cuz like you you think a Honda early Honda's anything of the CVCC or Tansy's which are really simple looking cars but this one was like Honda was going okay we're gonna make cars now what does the rest of the world doing and they went looked at like mgs and in Jaguars and whatever and then they made this car that's based off of what was happening in the Z case at the time but everything else like all this like design work here this is really cool stuff I wide on this is that this is on the car originally Wow one thing I have to tell you is that this is actually two cars it 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've seen it previously six years before it was in good condition but I didn't realize in the 90s 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 it'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 are you d of a parts car and turns out he had a car convertible sitting in his group in his backyard in LA 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 up here and we chopped the crap out of that thing to get this thing while I was so all these panels all the quarter panels are from that donor car the frame underneath is also from the donor car and in 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 point well you saved this car essentially yeah I mean this thing it was junk like it the frame you see 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 it was lucky that we were able to find the donor car to get this thing where it was 250 hours of rest pair a body work to get this car this little 11 foot car into the shape that it you see this it's so small oh man I just love the design elements of this like this reminds me 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 decision so like the interiors 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 loved that so much this is the tale that Muresan made kind of reminiscent of the details the Fairlady Z tales but this also like really reminds me of like a old Ferrari yes yeah so here's the thing these are actually for re 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 to sell at 800 parts don't have them and so I had to make a decision like what are we gonna do and one element that's really cool in the back of this car is it's this really just flat piece here yeah and a lot of Italian cars had 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 accentuated this curve here these are actually for our GTO lights easier to find remain Ferrari GTO lights 10 Hans under the lights that's the ironic thing about this that's incredible and then another element here is the custom exhaust and by remarking ready kind of reminds me of like the e-type yes 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 I told Kenji / agretti I was like hey I want I want dual tips coming out there and you know angled tips and so Kenji and Andy from remark actually came up here and it stalled didn't install for me couldn't believe they did it when there had so many other SEMA builds going on inside it looks great it really really does I love how tiny the bike right how'd tiny the vibes are I wanted one and a quarter and so we wanted we originally wanted titanium but his factory didn't have pipes at small in titanium so then we had to go to Santa Steel so after I finished working on this car like I'd go into another car and we're gonna make everything felt big and clumsy right because everything on this car is so tiny and my new yeah cuz essentially I mean it's like a motorcycle engine yeah a car yeah and that underside it all looks brand-new so you guys kind of took it down oh yeah we do we I mean this is like frame-off restoration so we took it all apart cleaned everything up the frame Reap outer 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 no because you just can't you can't get them there's no way you're gonna be able to i glass like this but did you were you able to restore yes yeah yeah so I had took this out and had a repolished I'm all the bright work was done and sent off to a place in Hayward where these good this father-and-son operation where they just polished metal and that was a fun part about working on this it's 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 metal work or mellow 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'd I'm 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 you know so like what did you guys do for the rubber to them 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 had new stuff that I could use Wow yeah so opens like a Jag well I can honestly say I've never ever seen this engine before yes it's kind of like you have to work your way around it it's really big considering it's only 791 cc's in 71 horsepower but um you know obviously they took the motorcycle philosophy and just made it a little more robust for a car so here's their filter carbs little tiny motorcycle carbs in fact you can use Honda motorcycle carbs if you if these are good bad and then the motor every everything we kept stock on this car it's nothing we might have 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 out all the slaves everything that it 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 doing little things right like I mean this is all cleaned up yeah this is all brand new yeah like the master cylinder slave cylinder yeah all of the little hardware here and they're just so cool the brake and clutch lines done with the copper tubing you know the old schools we were gonna do modern but it's like now I want to keep it old-school let's do it the old-school way but it was like who's gonna 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 the day it was awesome I would probably taken me a week to try and just even get something serviceable you know so did you actually paint this yeah I had that powder-coated okay so this is it's a so yeah I don't one of those things it's a theme that kind of goes through the car so ties into the newer type archive yes yes and that's how I 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 gonna 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 Amash 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 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 yeah it's just so cool to see that the interior is perfect and tiers like the cherry on top of all this the interior is done by my friend Danny at DJ D designs in Hayward and he mostly does muscle cars in fact he had a car at SEMA that won an award at Camaro from muscle cars so this is a very unique experience for him he doesn't even really do European cars that much and so I would 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 European elements to it and so the seats actually were originally in this design is 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 two here with like an ashtray in it but we decided to extend it out and they made the shift table even shorter because look at that you that's the shift no 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 yeah other throws like they're there you know what's funny is I thought the shifter on the s2000 small like that's where it came from basic yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean this is like a turn indicator on my FJ yes right and then look at this I mean this thing the hump I can bear anything is tiny like a little tiny thing and this is the original steer we all repolished this is a new new old stock item that I found on Yahoo Japan to accidentally bid on and got I wasn't really I was setting my limit which is five hundred dollars and it cost me five dollars just for just for that but it was new old stock in the original bag and not open so that was kind of cool little piece there and then the gauges look at the gauges these are original gauges so beautiful the design Wow like a watch yeah it really is oh my god and even this stuff like what you think oh yeah yeah very cool see the red line 85 turn signal high beam yeah it's kind of like seen in the horn which is right at your hair right yeah it makes a lot of sense it's interesting to me that all of this is in English yeah so this was a 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 was meant for by those codes this actually kind of reminds me of the s2000 also right in that they they had like a panel that hides like all of the yeah yeah yeah 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 motors and so this is the delete plate I guess that it comes with for the if you don't have that option so I kept that in there and just refurbished it that's cool and then you got the choke right there choke wiper lights and then this down here b4 bonnet in the back here it's so cool yes originally an etching luggage the rear was just black carpet that's not wise and I was like we gotta shoot this thing up so let's go fit to 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 I'm the but we put in these legged rails all that kind of stuff to kind of hug him back to the like British Jaguar style design and stuff like these this detail also on the original design yeah that locks it Oh turning the wrong way there there you go yeah okay now you can actually get stuff out of this his trunk Wow but they do 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 with silver I mean I 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 Isabella you know I have to pinch myself every day like this morning we were at Zeke our garage and we were just driving all of their coolest cars there and then not so much later we're here at Daniel was place checking out his car so you have an amazing job not so bad so this is the original frame look at look at this oh my really bad I mean there's it's all over the whole thing and so like when I pulled the body off I was just stared at it for like 20 minutes and went can he fix this like he only exists and I at one point I almost gave up I mean all the wear the body mounts go there's wrestling out there see that rested so this is not even serviceable is there a reason why you're keeping this though no we're we're ready to actually chop it up and send it to recycling it's not usable yeah at all it's actually kind of cool how small it is like you could pretty much pick it oh yeah I picked it up by myself in the middle I just picked it up like a wheel barrel and just wanted it over like everything on the car he 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 a little 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 art of movie Cars uh-huh a lot of people like to say hey you're ruining these cars you're chopping them up whatever mm-hmm I just say you know what they're becoming something greater than what they were stock 9/11 yeah you know it's potentially gonna be someone's pride enjoy that that will keep forever yeah and just something that would just get most of them are you know standard stock 9/11 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 then with taste it's like that's fine and that's kind of the thing with this s800 you've made it something greater than it was you know we it potentially could have just been taken to the junkyard 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 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 s800 it's gonna be really rare to see in good condition like this yeah and that's what I was kind of my proudest moment at SEMA is the fact they're like just watching people come up to it because even like supercar guys a lot of people didn't know what it was and the fact that they were introduced to it and learned something in that moment who've seen that car 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 it was kind of that was the point we're like if we're gonna do something for SEMA let's do something that stands out and it's different from the rest hey I've been going to the SEMA show since 2006 and we now like I never expected it to be like it is now where you could see cars like the s8 hundred or even 240 Z's and also many supras it's just so cool to see where the culture has gone and then you got a certificate yeah they get people like Daniel we'll just dropping the mic on everyone is awesome Honda built so thanks again let's let's actually go for right 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 look at the Headroom the space inside is actually not yeah oh yeah any Cooper's are like that too you get it you know 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 could I can hear myself okay louder if that makes any sense this is so crazy he does sound like a motorcycle also what you heard when it starts up it doesn't have like a kick over it just starts up like a motorcycles I'm done yeah here we go over the Golden Gate Bridge that no my exhaust now is nice this originally I was on YouTube I'm gonna use it all unbelievable unbelievable so cruel

Channel: Hoonigan AutoFocus

Views: 1,177,108

Rating: 4.9472027 out of 5

Keywords: Honda S800, Honda Roadster, vintage honda, vintage JDM, SEMA Honda, Daniel Wu, Daniel Wu car collection, S800 roadster, Larry Chen, Larry Chen Autofocus

Id: A5jUK1EkX_M

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/H2Bdisaster]

this is insane. im in love

[u/thekush]

It’s certainly on the next level.

[u/S2kTi]

He mentioned people F20//22c swap these things!? Can you imagine 240hp in this lol damn.. very cool. Wish there were more of them.

[u/Juicebox_Anonymous]

The passion this guy has for his builds is awesome. They also did one on his 510, which he designed but didn't build and it's also amazing.

[u/bisnexu]

Talk about good looking