Honda S660 (JW5)

When he went home in the S2000 he bought as his first car after getting a job, his friends back home were stunned and asked, "What happened to you?" People of his generation had lost interest in sports cars. Then came a product-planning competition for Honda R&D's 50th anniversary. Mukumoto proposed not a sports car that had become too expensive and too fast, but a life-size sports car that even he could master, because he believed he was not the only one who felt that way.

Once the project started, many young developers inside R&D who shared the same idea gathered. The definition of a sports car differs from person to person: high power, lightness and good looks can all make a sports car. The team set out to work out thoroughly why sports cars are fun, and even without a charismatic sports-car figure, they thought it through together and drove it again and again to check that it was becoming what they were aiming for.

The S2000 that Mukumoto bought some time after joining the company was more than he could handle, and he rarely felt he was truly mastering it. What he entered in a new-product proposal competition held around then, which became the prototype of the later S660, was not a serious sports car like the Type R but a "yuru-supo" (easygoing sports car) that anyone could casually enjoy driving. What he pictured was an evolved Beat and the 50cc Monkey. In high school he had ridden a Cub with the same engine to school, and he liked the feeling of riding flat out and of the rider making up for what the machine lacked.