Wheels With Will

“VTEC just kicked in yo”

The NSX began in 1984 as some design drawings that Honda had commissioned from Pininfarina. Back then Honda’s stunning sales success in America had made it the envy of the automotive industry, and General Motors was so impressed that the Detroit company had decided to reinvent itself with a new, Honda-style car division — Saturn.

For Honda, a mid-engine super car was the logical next step for the luxury division it was planning, Acura.

Yet when the Acura NSX arrived in America in 1990, it found plenty of skepticism. Much of it had to do with prejudice against Japanese cars, since they got the blame for the decline of Detroit in the 1980s. Also the NSX didn’t look that great.

However, the closer you look at the 1991 Acura NSX, the more you realized that its technology broke new ground in every respect.

First of all, there was the all-aluminum chassis, a rigid structure that helped keep the car’s weight at just 3,010 pounds. Then there was the transverse-mounted, all-aluminum, 3.0-liter DOHC V6 with titanium connecting rods, and it included not only variable valve timing but also variable valve lift. The V-6 made 270 hp @ 7,100 rpm and 210 lb-ft of torque @ 5,300 rpm when matched with the five-speed manual transmission (the version matched with the four-speed automatic produced less power), and it would spin to a redline of 8,000 rpm.

A sophisticated limited-slip differential was part of the program, as were aluminum suspension arms and brakes with four-channel ABS. Forged wheels carried 15-inch tires in front and 16-inch tires in the rear. Even better, F1 driving champion Ayrton Senna had spent a day tuning the NSX’s track behavior at the Honda-owned Suzuka Circuit.

The 1991 Acura NSX apparently introduced 20 items of new automotive technology. It made contemporary mid-engine rivals such as the Ferrari 348 and Lamborghini Diablo seem like farm machinery.

Would you own an early NSX?