Lamm bought his 1964 Honda S600 roadster in Phoenix, Arizona, sight unseen. He paid $8,000 for it (about $9,800 in today’s dollars). Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012
I very much wanted to love my little Honda S600. It looked so cute and cuddly. And on paper, it had all the qualifications and specifications of a mechanical marvel. It was strictly my fault, but I ended up…well, not exactly hating the car – that’s too strong a word – but the S600 and I definitely didn’t see eye to eye.
Why? Because I dreaded driving it. It’s as simple as that. The Honda S600 was a pain both in town and on the highway, and that became the main reason I sold the car six months after I bought it. More about the driving experience in a moment.
I bought the car after a flight back to California from the East Coast. This was in 2001. I had a layover in Phoenix, so I plunked myself down in the waiting area and, from the next seat, picked up an abandoned copy of the Arizona Republic. First thing I turned to, naturally, was the classified section, and there, under Collector Cars, was an ad for a 1964 Honda S600 roadster. The owner was asking $8,000, which seemed reasonable enough. I took down his phone number and, when I got home, called him.
He turned out to be a mechanic at a Phoenix Honda dealership, and he’d bought the S600 several years earlier as a project. I asked him what condition the car was in when he got it, and he said the body, chrome and interior were fine, but the windshield had a big crack in it.
The S600 had been owned by a professional Honda mechanic, who’d gone through every major component with loving care and expertise. The car ran beautifully and looked nearly new when Mike got it.
This being the hobby project of a dedicated Honda mechanic, he’d decided to go through all the major components and overhaul or fine-tune whatever needed it: engine, carburetors, transmission, brakes, and the two chain drives that propelled the rear wheels. He said he’d put an awful lot of time into the car. He wasn’t expecting to get paid for that, but he did want his investment back. His investment included several large wooden crates full of of spare parts, and those would come with the car.
The guy sounded totally honest, and I asked him to send me pictures, which he did. I’d seen only one other Honda roadster in person before, and I’ve always liked these cars’ styling and size. It’s a lot harder to design a good-looking small car than a big one, and I thought whoever came up with this design had done a tremendous job. For a Honda, it looked very British, and nicely so.
Ultimately, I decided to buy the car sight unseen – something I’d done only once before and not with sterling success. A few days later, I mailed the owner a check, and he sent me the Honda’s Arizona registration. I arranged for Pacific Towing here in Stockton to pick up the car, and they charged me $375. The car arrived in good condition, and everything the previous owner said was true. The only defect I could see was the cracked windshield he’d mentioned.
From Bikes to Cars
Mr. Soichiro Honda, of course, made his reputation and most of his money with motorcycles. In the early 1960s, he decided to try building small trucks and sports cars, and in October 1962, the company introduced the first of Honda’s S-Series roadsters, the S360. From 360cc, the engine grew to 500cc and then, in March 1964, 600cc. These cars were all basically the same except for engine size. Honda’s idea was to make the S-Series competitive in international racing classes.
The S600′s alloy engine displaced 606cc and delivered 57 horses at 8,500 RPM. That’s equivalent to nearly 100 bhp per liter, virtually unheard of in a 1964 production car. On the other hand, torque was weak and the engine’s screamingly high RPM at highway speeds made Mike cringe. He says he didn’t at all enjoy driving the car.
Honda’s entire S-Series was a marvel of engineering, much of it borrowed from motorcycle technology. The S600 used an inline, four-cylinder, water-cooled, all-aluminum engine with twin overhead cams and hemispherical combustion chambers. Compression ratio was 9.5:1. The crankshaft rode on needle bearings (!), and each cylinder had its own little Keihin carburetor. The entire engine tilted toward the left to help lower the hood.
Unorthodox rear suspension used roller chains from the fixed differential to the rear wheels. It’s said that the cast-aluminum chain cases would twist under hard cornering, then snap back suddenly and unexpectedly, causing the rear wheels to hop up off the road surface.
Steering was rack and pinion. Front suspension used independent upper and lower arms and torsion-bar springing. Rear suspension was also independent but much more radical. The differential was bolted low and solid just behind the seats, and from there double roller chains drove each rear wheel. Sealed, oil-filled, cast-aluminum chain cases doubled as trailing arms, each with its own tubular shock encased in a long coil spring.
This unorthodox rear setup gave lots of suspension travel plus an amazingly comfortable ride on so short a wheelbase (78.7 inches). And with the chains outboard, toward the sides of the car, the rear suspension also allowed for a relatively large trunk.
With the rear suspension components outboard, the trunk was relatively large. Fuel tank held 6.6 gallons, and the S600 could deliver 35 MPG on the highway.
So far so good. With all that truly amazing technology, why couldn’t I warm to the S600? What made this car one of the least endearing I’ve owned?
Simple: To drive it properly – and I never got used to driving it properly – you have to slip the clutch at launch and then keep the engine wound up tight on the road. Horsepower is 57 at 8,500 RPM, amazing figures both. But the S600′s torque is a mere 37.5-lbs.ft. at 5,500 RPM.
I like cars with oodles of low-speed torque. Let’s say I’m at a red light in a Pantera. The car sits there idling at 700 RPM. The light goes green, I release the clutch, and then I step on the gas. The car leaves the launch pad.
With the Honda S600, when stoplights turned green, I’d push the accelerator first, rev the engine to 2,500 RPM, slip the clutch for a couple of seconds, and then, finally, the car moved out. I don’t like doing business that way. It really bothers me to slip a clutch.
And due to the engine’s weak torque and high rev-ability, the S600′s final drive ratio was 6.42:1. That meant that driving on the freeway in high (fourth) gear, the engine was turning 1,000 RPM for every 10 MPH of speed. In other words, at 70 MPH, the tach stood at 7,000 RPM. The engine was already screaming. It sounded like a soprano banshee sustaining high C. I like engines with a tenor or bass voice, not running down the highway singing eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! And that was the main reason I couldn’t cotton to the S600.
As I say, it’s my fault. I don’t blame the car; I blame me. Don Laughton of the Honda Twin Cam Registry very sensibly points out that you have to view any car on its own terms and in its own era. For example, I might have loved driving my VW Beetles in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I doubt that I’d love them as daily drivers today.
The S600 engine redlined at 9,500 RPM. Below about 7,000 RPM, performance tended to be pretty tame…not much action. From 7,000 to 10,000 RPM, though, it did move, and the engine would keep revving to 12,000 without complaint; just a more blood-curdling scream. I never had the heart, though, to push my car that far. Again, my fault, I know, but I cut my teeth on lower-rev, torquier stuff.
Amazingly roomy and comfortable for so small a car, the S600 had a large, easy-to-read instrument cluster and a crisp shifter for the 4-speed.
Lessons Learned
I bought the S600 partly to learn from it. I didn’t learn all that much about working on the car, because there wasn’t anything to fix. The previous owner had already done everything. I did need to find a new windshield, which turned up in nearby Palo Alto, California, for $470. Installation cost another $75.
But what I really learned by owning the S600 was that Soichiro Honda totally misjudged the American car market. Not that the S-Series was ever actually sold in the U.S. My car, I believe, came in through Canada. And I say “misjudged,” because in 1964, Ford introduced the Mustang, an instant and resounding success and, unlike the S600, a very basic, simple car. You could buy a new Mustang that year for around $1,800, approximately what Honda presumably would have charged for the S600 (I don’t know that for sure, but prices in Japan and Europe seem to bear me out).
Imagine that an American car buyer had his choice of a new Mustang or a new S600 at roughly the same price. Which would he or she choose? In my opinion, there’d be no contest. The Mustang would win hands down. Even so, a few people – very few – would opt for the S600 on the merits of its engineering novelty, its size and its styling.
In all, Honda sold 13,084 S600s worldwide from 1964 through 1966. According to Frank Acevedo of the Honda S-Series Registry, the company never made money on any of its early sports cars. In late 1966, Honda announced the S800, which soon switched to a conventional rear axle and suspension. S800 production ended in 1970.
When he bought the car, Mike also received several large wooden boxes filled with spare parts, including two extra heads, a transmission, flywheel, headers and another intake manifold with four carburetors. He sold all these parts separately.
Due to my reluctance to drive it, I kept my S600 for only half a year. I put a for-sale ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, got loads of response, and sold the car for $10,750, turning a profit of $1,266.09. I let the spare parts go separately for $250.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.