Once upon a time, you didn’t have to spend an exorbitant amount of money to own something with a high-revving engine. Today, though, it’s a rarity. There are exactly zero cars priced under $100,000 with an 8,000-rpm redline. What happened? Where did we go wrong? That’s precisely the subject of the latest video over at The Drive’s YouTube channel.
A couple of weeks ago, we were graced with the presence of a Honda S2000 CR, which racer and professional driving coach Nik Romano used to dispel the myth of snap oversteer. But the S2000 is famous for reasons other than being a supposed widowmaker of a sports car; it’s also known for its super-high-revving four-cylinder, which could achieve 9,000 rpm during the initial run of AP1 cars, and a slightly more pedestrian 8,200 rpm for the facelifted AP2 model. The CR, of course, belongs to the latter group.
The evolution of the S2000 itself explains why high-revving engines have faded from the market. The 237 horsepower from its 2.0-liter F20C engine is quite a lot for a naturally aspirated car, and it reaches those heights by revving as quickly as it does.
However, all those revs come at the expense of torque—particularly at the low end—leaving the original S2000 with all of 153 lb-ft. For that reason, Honda lengthened the F20C’s stroke to bump the displacement up to 2.2 liters for the AP2 cars, but it also lowered the fuel cutoff by about 800 rpm. As our man Nik succinctly puts it, “As the engine turns faster and faster, the valves are open for less time. So when you need air the most, you have the least amount of time to get air into and out of cylinders.”
Besides, it’s not merely challenging to build engines up to the task; it’s expensive. High-revving motors need lighter, stiffer parts. Every component has to be up to spec to whip around at 8,000 rpm and beyond. That’s what makes oddities, like the 2005 Toyota Corolla XRS, so fascinating. This was your basic, boring Corolla in every facet, except for its 2ZZ engine, the very same mill Lotus plucked for the Elise and Exige. It was, and is, a riot, as Nik demonstrates.
Ultimately, a more cost-effective way of getting air to go where you want, when you want, in an engine is “to give it a little push,” in our driver’s words. Que the ubiquity of turbocharging in this day and age, which offers a way to blow past the basic limits of power per a given displacement. Yes, forced induction can boost those numbers as well as efficiency, no pun intended. But with a turbo, you lose the spirit of those high-revving cars of yesteryear. Yeah, even if that car happens to be a milquetoast-looking mid-aughts Corolla.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
