Coming off a downhill back-of-the-track twisty at the rear of Honda’s R&D proving grounds in Tochigi, Japan, I encountered a slight uphill stretch. It was my second lap, so the engineer co-driver riding shotgun had already reached over and engaged the “Boost Mode” button on the tiny steering wheel, but the Honda Super-One still struggled a bit to mount the mound.
I clicked a few times on the wheel’s left paddle. The ersatz seven-speed automatic transmission simulator downshifted several pseudo “gears,” enacting a bit of fake shift shock. The imitation exhaust sound whinnied a bit higher. The synthetic numberless “tach” climbed, nearly bumping off the faux “fuel cutoff” limiter. But there was nothing spurious about the joy I felt as the rectilinear little two-box zipped its way up and around the turn, its behavior every bit as exuberant as it had been on every other part of the course.
