Honda NSX 2017.

Many wonderful and stupendous cars have emerged from Japan since Soichiro Honda’s firm launched the S500 in 1963, but none of them has resonated internationally with the force or sheer mystique of the NSX.

Conceived in the mid-1980s pomp of Honda’s (and Japan’s) supreme confidence that there was nothing being done in Europe that could not be bettered domestically, the ‘New Sportscar eXperimental’ was inspired by the F-16 fighter jet, built to outmatch a Ferrari 348 and underpinned by a chassis breathed on by Ayrton Senna.






When it went on sale in 1990, the NSX’s exotic combination of materials and expertise – the monocoque was aluminium, the engine’s connecting rods were titanium, even the paint job had a 23-step process – was like nothing else on sale and certainly nothing else for the money.

When Gordon Murray drove one while developing the McLaren F1, he said all other benchmark cars vanished from his mind. It was that astonishing.

Which, of course, makes it conspicuously hard to follow up and is one of the reasons Honda hasn’t managed it until now.

A successor was planned for 2010, powered by a V10 engine, but was culled by the same economic downturn that resulted in the company quitting F1.

The job finally fell to a small team in Honda’s US division, bolstered by engineers from Japan who had been involved with the original NSX.

This combination, underwritten by hefty investment from the manufacturer’s US-market luxury vehicle arm Acura, has produced the same result: a contemporary supercar intended to compete on price, performance and usability with anything built in the Old World.

To do that, it is a hybrid in the McLaren P1 sense (there are three electric motors dotted about the place) and uses a newly developed twin-turbo 3.5-litre V6 in the middle of a mixed-material spaceframe.

The car is intended to work just as well on the road in Palm Springs as it is does on a circuit in England – which is about as terrifyingly wide a brief as you can imagine – and it’s all-wheel drive to boot.

It’s also £143,950 on the road.

A super-sports car capable of 3.3sec from rest to 60mph and an 11.4sec standing quarter may not seem exceptional by current class standards, but in the NSX’s case that’s only a hint of the full story.

The NSX’s combined system output of 476lb ft looks, on paper, like it could just as easily have been delivered by any performance car with a healthy turbocharged V8 engine.

But what the raw performance stats and Honda’s specification sheet don’t tell you is that the torque figure isn’t so much a peak as it is an almost permanent provision of pulling power.

Flatten the accelerator pedal with the car locked in gear in manual mode and you can watch the car’s ‘Assist’ gauge rise and fall as those three electric motors ‘torque fill’ through the lower and upper reaches of the rev range.

Beyond 5000rpm, where you expect a car like this to be rabidly quick, it duly is. But below 3500rpm in a low gear, where many modern rivals would be girding their loins before lunging into the distance, the NSX’s instant and considerable grunt never fails to hit you hard between the eyes.

There’s real depth to the character of this powertrain, too, although it doesn’t have, admittedly, the most seductive soundtrack you’ll ever have heard from a mid-engined exotic.

The NSX’s V6 comes across as gravelly and brusque rather than soulful or rich, while overlaying many of its dramatic solos with turbo noise.

But the more you seek to connect with it, the more this combined propulsion system gives back. Honda’s nine-speed paddle-shift gearbox is good in auto mode and quite spectacularly effective in manual, shifting gears so quickly as to almost be seamless.

Brake pedal feel is excellent, allowing you to dive deep into braking zones with confidence. And all the while, the sheer breadth of the car’s range of potency, and the many and varied ways it can feel energetic and exciting, continue to seduce.



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