With its AirREX air-ride system, 3-piece WORK Meister S1 wheels, wire-tucked bay and Lime Green paint, Jeroen Peerlinck’s stanced Honda S2000 will leave you green, well lime with envy…
It’s pretty well established that limes are a strong source of vitamin C. That’s why drinking gin-and-tonics is good for you. But what happens when you overdose on vitamin C? Well, something like this chlorophyll-fest S2000 arrives to taunt your psyche.
Avoiding clichés, you see, is like not shooting fish in a barrel. There are a lot of car mags out there, and we pride ourselves in setting Fast Car apart from the white noise on the shelves by being a little more discerning, thoughtful, considered – not just bringing you the finest modified cars the world has to offer, but also telling you interesting things about them. Piquing your intrigue. Laying out the facts like a delicious picnic, ready for you to graze with casual abandon; a morsel of horsepower here, a nugget of carbon fibre there, perhaps a soupçon of Alcantara…
But when you’re faced with a car such as this one, it’s hard not to acknowledge the obvious, and there’s only one thought that immediately springs to mind: GREEN. Damn, that’s green. It’s the greenest thing since Kermit and the Hulk felt up a couple of Ninja Turtles in Postman Pat’s home town, thus turning the townspeople a certain envious colour.
So yes, we’ve got the glaringly in-your-face thing out of the way first. This S2000 really is very, very green, and it would be most short-sighted not to mention that. It’s actually a stock-palette Honda colour – named simply Lime Green – rather than some kind of unique House of Kolor candy creation, but the fact that it’s complemented by a pondlife-fabulous cavalcade of Takata-green flocking inside the car just amps the thing into the uber-green stratosphere.
This project is the brainchild of Jeroen Peerlinck, a 29-year-old roofer from Belgium, who presumably likes to divide his time between drinking mint juleps, campaigning for the Green Party and steaming broccoli (er, possibly), and you can’t deny the transformative effects of what his obsession with the snotty hue has achieved. Naturally, of course, this is more than simply a fancy green paint job. So let’s peel off a wrinkle of that alien skin and peer underneath…
“It all started for me back when I was sixteen,” Jeroen explains. “That’s when I first got into the modified car scene, and I’ve always had modded cars; my first was a Yaris VVT-I back in 2007, then there was a limited-edition Honda Civic Type R in Championship White, which I still have, as well as a Mk1 Golf.”
So why an S2000? Bit different to all the hatchbacks he’d had before, no? “The idea had been through my mind for several years,” he shrugs. “The opportunity came up, so I took it! It’s a JDM-spec car, so it’s a little more powerful as standard, and I could see the potential right away: the American scene inspired me for this project, and I wanted this time to get the car out quickly and show that everything is possible in a relatively short space of time – it’s hard to say exactly how long I spent building it, as it was all late nights and weekends, but I started in November last year and was finished by April.”
What Jeroen has done, in spite of the outrageous colour scheme, is to focus on the importance of minimalism. While this may at first glance appear to be a comprehensively modified car, he’s zeroed in on a short list of mods and carried them out properly and with care, rather than simply throwing a whole fashion-forward catalogue of parts into the mix. The bodywork, for example, is largely stock, but it’s been extensively smoothed before being re-shot in the juicy Honda shade; the window frames wear a piano black lacquer to form a barrier between the inner and outer greens.
“Everything was done with a lot of help from friends, with special thanks to Kim Larcher,” he says. “There were some setbacks here and there during construction, but by the courage in it to keep and continue with just one goal in mind, we got it done. The hardest part was the engine bay…”
Yes, it does look like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? You’ll spot that, along with the engine itself being flawlessly clean, the bay has been fully smoothed and painted in a shiny contrasting colour – the motor itself hasn’t actually been modified aside from the addition of one or two bolt-ons but, if you know the F20C, you’ll know that it’s a bonkers screamer of a race car unit with forged pistons and a 9,200rpm redline, so Honda have basically pre-modified it for you.
Jeroen’s task here was to create a sumptuous bed for this jewel-like engine to lie in, something that he’s pulled off with alacrity. “I have to thank the members of LowStatement,” he says. “The full wire tuck, disassembling and cleaning the engine, the polished inlet by Jan Vergote, it was all a lot of work!”
And with an eye-catching exterior, you need the interior to be equally shouty, don’t you? So what Jeroen’s pulled off here is quite clever: yes, he’s taken the well-trodden path of fitting Bride Low Max seats and Takata harnesses, but he’s given the thing a bit of a lime twist.
Chris Van Calster of Takashi Customs has entirely flocked the whole shooting match in the same shade of green as the harnesses, with a massive Takata logo on the dash, while Jeroen got busy dismantling everything and liberally retrimming it all in Bride fabric – the doorcards, the dash, the centre console, the works. It’s almost as if he’s taking the notion that a lot of cars rock the Bride/Takata combo these days, and ironically firing it right back at everyone.
We have to mention the way the thing sits as well, as that’s frankly a masterstroke. The combination of AirREX struts and AccuAir e-Level means that the thing will happily psssh-psssh at will while still riding like a dream, and Jeroen’s put a lot of thought into his wheel widths and offsets. Those staggered WORK rims sit perfectly in the unmodded arches, lending the car a killer stance. Simple (well simple-ish) but effective, right?
“I love that there’s no other S2000 quite like it,” he enthuses. “It’s all my own vision, and I try to take the car to as many meets as possible – mostly in Belgium but also across the border in France, The Netherlands… I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve with it so far, although there are plans still forming, new things I want to try – the future will tell!”
It surely will. Hey, it’s not easy being green, although it does appear to be good for you.
TECH SPEC HONDA S2000
Styling:
Honda Lime Green paint, fully smoothed, rear lip spoiler, smoothed and wire-tucked engine bay in gloss white.
Tuning:
2.0-litre F20C VTEC (JDM 247bhp spec) – fully detailed, SRS straight-through exhaust system.
Chassis:
8.5×19” ET37 (front) and 9.5×19” ET35 (rear) 3-piece WORK Meister S1 wheels, 215/35 (front) and 225/35 (rear) Falken Azenis tyres, StanceNation extended lug nuts, AirREX air-ride system with AccuAir e-Level management.
Interior:
Fully flocked in green, Bride Low Max seats, Takata harnesses, themed Bride and Takata accents throughout, bubble flower gearknob, custom carpets, Broadway mirror, Kode steering wheel, Hertz component speakers.
Words Dan Bevis Photos RonV Photography
