The word supercar has never really meant
anything
It's closer to an emotion
than any kind of specific word, definition or number.
And in the late 1980s, Supercar meant two things
Ferrari and Lamborghini
Testarossa.
328
Countach
even the Jalpa
Sure.
The Countach was a neck breaker.
It looked like nothing else, but it drove like a tractor.
Its windows didn't open.
You couldn't see out of it.
And as an owner, you knew every truck driver within 100
miles by name you baked them cookies for Christmas.
What I'm saying is they never ran Ferrari's weren't much better
Their 328 took muscle and clenched teeth just to shift into gear.
No power steering, weird pedal placement.
It wasn't a car you drove every day supercars for pretty much their entire
existence up until 1990 were fast first,
stylish second, and reliable...
Well let's just say the Italians don't have a word for that.
That all changed in 1990
when the smallest, cutest, most humble car company.
Absolutely broke the definition of supercar
A new standard of performance cars
reliable, practical, affordable,
all while being fast enough to leave that Lambo in the rearview mirror.
A car that let every Italian manufacturer know that they were lazy,
they were uninspired, they were asleep at the wheel in 1990.
The word itself had a new meaning.
This was the NSX, the Japanese sports car
that broke supercars
rewind.
Its 1983
Honda back
then was just a plucky little economy car brand.
CR-X,
Prelude, civic, front wheel drive cars
meant to be as reliable, cheap and efficient as humanly possible,
while still being just fun enough to not put the driver to sleep.
But behind the boring city car brand was actually a team
of dedicated racing engineers conquering Formula two in the early eighties.
They had an engine that won in 81 83 and 84.
They just needed a car to show the world what they were capable of.
But what the hell does Honda know of designing fancy
Mid-engined Supercars?
Well, nothing really.
They hadn't even made a proper sports car yet.
They had no experience making midship cars
without even an inkling of how to start, so late at night.
Or at least assume it's late at night.
And supported by a few cans of Sapporo.
Honda engineers started tinkering with engine placements and drive types.
Up till now, they only made front engined front wheel drive cars
so they took a Honda City...
Yes, Honda City, one of the least sporty cars ever,
and slapped an engine in the back and took it for a spin around the parking lot.
The engineers were immediately blown away.
The handling of this weird Frankenstein econo box was actually tight,
dynamic and exciting.
Honda's team were ecstatic.
They had tasted what it was like to build something special.
Seriously, the NSX, you know and love Today
owes everything to bored engineers and a Honda City.
It's pretty wild.
Meanwhile, Honda Corporate was prepping the Acura brand for us Americans.
They needed a Halo car, something to show the Yanks
that they came to win, that this wasn't just another Honda.
Honestly, 1980s Honda was out of their freaking minds.
They could have taken one of their cars made it rear wheel drive,
got a team of engineers to make a tuning division,
and released a pretty decent little sports car.
But they said, fook it.
The clapped out Honda City in the parking lot is our muse.
We're building a freaking supercar.
We don't want to beat Nissan.
Forget BMW and Mercedes.
We want to take down Ferrari.
The Project Lead,Shigero Uehara told them to create a car
that could outperform the Ferrari 328, but make it a Honda.
Honda didn't make difficult cars.
They made reliable, respectable and easy to drive
cars, and the same should apply to their sports cars.
The Honda Supercar should be able to spend a day at a racetrack
and drive home in one piece.
You should be able to park it on the street. See out of it.
Survive an accident in it. The Honda Supercar
Should be an actual good car.
What a revolutionary concept.
But in the 1980s, that is not what Italy was making.
Honda's vision of the NSX may seem tame now, but in 1985
they were making history just in a very, very Honda way.
They set out to change the world of sports cars with a piece of graph paper
Uehara and his team plotted
out every competitive sports car on a graph comparing power to weight
and vehicle weight and wheelbase and oddly the competition
all fit into sort of a band on the graph that they ended up calling the Milky Way.
Then they plotted the current Formula One car
There it stood way out there.
They had their target.
The NSX would push as close
as it could to the Formula One balance of power, weight and dimensions.
And thus it would go
beyond what every other sports car and supercar of the time was doing.
It would stand alone. now to create a car like no one else had before.
Honda needed to do what no one else had done before.
Look, if you know Honda, they don't solve things.
The American or Italian way.
Just throw more horsepower or cylinders at it until it's fast.
So they have to be clever, and the task they set for themselves
was not an easy one.
They struggled to balance the car's weight and power
the team traveled back and forth between the Honda R&D centers
in Japan on the bullet trains, and suddenly it hit them
There they were, riding back and forth, trying to figure out
how to make the fastest car they could, riding on the fastest trains
in Japan, which were made of aluminum.
Up to this point, no one had made an all aluminum monocoque production car before.
This was it,
the secret ingredient to make a car with reliable power and low weight.
The perfect balance their "trainspiration" shaves 200 pounds off the car
and more importantly,
revolutionized the use of aluminum in the entire automotive industry.
And this is where Honda almost drops the ball completely.
You see, once they have the chassis designed
and all the bits ironed out, they put a single cam accord engine in it.
Yeah.
The original concept for the NSX was just to put a parts bin
engine in it, out of the accord.
You make an entirely revolutionary new way to manufacture a sports car chassis,
launching a whole new luxury brand in the United States with
This is your Halo car and you give it a gutless sedan engine.
So it's set to debut at the 1989 Chicago Auto Show and the president of Honda,
Tadashi Kume, gets ready to show the world Honda's new prototype flagship supercar.
There's already some other brand making a presentation on stage
and Kume just fires up the prototype back stage
like a bad ass
The crowd is stunned and intrigued
at what Honda has behind the curtain, but Kume himself is flabbergasted.
Revving up the NSX prototype, he realizes the car doesn't have Honda's
new revolutionary VTEC system, so he presses his engineers who tell him
that VTEC is only planned for four cylinder applications
He screams at them, you idiots!
this is unacceptable!
Or maybe he said something like that
Kume forces the NSX team to develop an entirely new six cylinder VTEC engine.
And thank god he did because the new C30 engine
was Honda's best yet a three liter dual cam v6.
The second Honda engine ever to receive the VTEC technology
and the first time the American audience would ever feel VTEC kick in.
It was a revolution.
It saved the NSX from becoming the Japanese DeLorean.
It propelled the NSX from just being a pretty face
to a full on world beating supercar.
Featuring a variable
volume induction system that gave the car an incredibly broad torque curve.
It had titanium connecting rods.
This allowed the engine to go up to an 8000 RPM redline
in manual transmission trim the NSX employed the power of 270 horses
to propel it to 60 and under 6 seconds.
Top speed over 160 miles per hour
in development.
Honda had its sights set plainly on Ferrari with the 328
being the performance baseline and the NSX absolutely kept pace.
It even hung with the 348 that followed it,
but they weren't done with the vision in place.
An engine breathing
life into the car with their material sorted and performance targets in sight.
Uehara and his team produced a prototype NSX capable of testing in 1989
and with the help of one racing legend, they unlocked the NSX's full potential
The NSX
prototype spent an entire month at Suzuka Circuit
getting pushed to its absolute limits by fate.
The famed Formula One legend, Ayrton
Senna, was in Japan to test out a McLaren which was powered by a Honda.
And look, he ain't no idiot
when the guy who makes your racing engine asks you to come by the racetrack
and do a couple of laps in the new supercar.
You oblige.
After a full month of refining the NSX at Suzuka.
The engineers were confident they'd wow Senna with how the NSX carved an apex
Senna eats a biscuit, drinks a coffee, does a few laps, gets out of the car,
scratches his head and tells them it's a bit fragile.
Engineers were stunned The car was good, but not perfect.
The NSX went back under the knife again and emerged months later.
50% stiffer.
Honda even employed a Cray supercomputer to perfect the aluminum suspension design.
This was maximum effort from Honda.
There were no corners cut, and now because of it, the NSX was a taut
sharp supercar, ready to compete on the world stage,
all thanks to the legend Ayrton Senna, a bullet train and a supercomputer.
With the car properly sorted with 400 patents filed,
an entirely new way of making a production car pioneered.
It was time for the world to see what the nerds at Honda had been making in secret.
Honda's $140 million
project had paid off at around 60 grand brand new.
The NSX broke sports car molds left, right and center.
Magazine journalists praised it as a revelation.
Consumers were stunned to see such a sleek, fast,
elegant machine coming from the economy car brand. Mr.
Ferrari and Captain Lamborghini probably shipped their pants
Here was a car that beat them at their own game on its first
try for half the cost of a mid-level Ferrari.
It was beautiful.
It was fast it was drivable.
It was reliable, and it was cheap.
A supercar for reasonable people.
A Ferrari for the guy who leaves a big tip at the restaurant.
A Lamborghini for people that say thank you.
Yes. On paper,
especially now, the NSX is almost laughable.
It's. It's it's cute.
The V6, no turbos or superchargers under 300 horsepower.
Kind of understated styling, but numbers were never what the NSX was about.
It was a balanced, sharpened knife
in the right hands.
It was as deadly and as fast as anything the likes of Ferrari Porsche
or Lamborghini could even hope to achieve
When you look at the NSX today, it's almost quaint.
But that's because you're looking
through the lens of every supercar and sports car that it made possible.
The reliable drivable supercar changed the auto industry forever.
At least the douchey, overpriced and unreliable part of the industry.
Lamborghinis now looks low class poorly designed, unrefined.
Ferrari is now needed to be faster, more reliable and easier on their owners.
If a Japanese company can come out with a V6 sports
car that costs half as much and performs just as well.
Italy needed to wake the hell up
in multiple reviews stacked up against the Ferrari 348.
The Porsche 911 the lotus esprit
and whatever else the world had to offer, and the NSX stood above.
It was such a revolution.
It helped inspired one of the greatest supercars of all time.
The McLaren F1 Gordon Murray,
the F1 designer, cites the NSX as direct inspiration for the F1.
It was the benchmark that the world's first hypercar was set against.
Today, more than 30 years
since its release, the NSX seems almost boring pedestrian.
If you saw one on the road, you might give it a second glance,
but you might not even notice it passing you.
And for its 15 years of production, the NSX suffered its own success.
You see, the Supercar giant stepped up their game to beat the NSX and won
the McLaren F1 showed the world sports car perfection
The Lamborghini
Diablo changed how expensive cars looked forever.
The Ferrari 355 and 360 cemented
the prancing horse as the defacto fast car
and the NSX remained largely unchanged.
It kind of faded from memory.
So while today the NSX is all but dead.
Let's not talk about that second generation.
You have to imagine that in a few garages in Italy parked among prototype
Ferrari's and Lamborghinis an NA1 NSX sits under wraps.
A stark reminder to those that make fast cars to never rest
on their laurels.
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