Making of a legend
Brendan McAleer checks out a local man’s classic Acura NSX
Over the years, Marc Millman has owned a series of icons. When he was 18, he had a Triumph TR6. After that, he drove a Datsun 240Z. He once took delivery of a ’78 911 right at the gates of Porsche’s factory in Stuttgart.
But more than two decades ago, he came across a car that just clicked, one that put an end to the sports cars rotating through his driveway.
On a sunny Vancouver day, with the cherry blossoms drifting down gently from the trees, a garage door opens on a quiet side street in the heart of the city. Inside, there’s an Acura NSX.
Millman’s 1991 car is an ideal introduction to what makes this car so special. While obviously well cared-for, it’s no museum piece. The leather seat bolsters show signs of wear. The teeth of the titanium key are smoothed down by use. It’s clean and polished, with plenty of tread on the tires, but there are just under 180,000 kilometres on the odometer.
That’s the entire point of the NSX.
It is a car built to be driven, not to be pampered and tucked away and seldom used.
It’s beautiful without being brittle, effervescent without being ephemeral, exotic without being neurotic. At the time this car was launched, owning an Italian sports car was like owning a muscular stallion with rippling flanks and a touch of leprosy: gorgeous, but sometimes the legs fell off.
The NSX was built to give the same thrills, but without the tendency to wilt like mozzarella in the hot Tuscan sun. Like the steel used to make a katana, the NSX was hammered again and again until Honda’s engineers had beaten out the impurities and created something that was both weaponry and art.
“If you had a deposit down,” Millman says, backing his NSX carefully out of the driveway, “they took you out to Westwood for a demonstration day. That got me hooked, for sure.”
Just behind our seats, the allaluminum 3.0-litre V6 spins up joyfully. Here, it makes 270 horsepower, while later cars got a bump to 290, thanks to a slight increase in displacement. Both engines sound fantastic and are as smooth as silk.
That’s part of the experience, but the main impression is formed by the panoramic view out front. The NSX’s nose drops away quickly, so while you sit low, driver and passenger aren’t hemmed in; it’s like sitting in your own private movie theatre as the road unfolds before you.
“You really need a twisty piece of road,” Millman says. “Like the run down through the Fraser Canyon. I’ve driven it down the coast to San Francisco and back; my daughter got involved in equestrian events, so we travelled together out to Calgary and Red Deer and around, looking at horses.”
The cockpit of the NSX takes inspiration from that of the F-16 Falcon, and in the car’s blackedout roofline, you can see the influence of the single-seater fighter-plane.
Honda commissioned Italian design house Pininfarina to create the first concept that would lead to the NSX. Unveiled at the 1984 Turin auto show, the HP-X (for Honda Pininfarina eXperimental) was a minimalist triumph. However, both the lack of doors and feeble 2.0-litre V6 weren’t production-ready.
Initially, Honda benchmarked the Ferrari 308 for performance targets, and then the later 348. In retrospect, this seems like the height of hubris, but at the time Honda was at the top of its game. Even an ordinary Civic was a fizzy little car to drive — Soichiro Honda was still around, both in body and in spirit.
Aluminum would be the key to the NSX’s success, with the engineers focusing on an obsessive weight-savings plan. The undressed all-aluminum monocoque, a world first for production cars, weighed just 200 kilograms. The forged doublewishbone suspension and body were also aluminum.
The 1989 Chicago Auto Show would see other legends debuting, including the Mazda Miata and the Nissan 300ZX twinturbo. It was the heyday of the Japanese car industry, and the NSX would arguably be the crowning achievement.
Even before it debuted, the car caused a disruption. While Ford was holding a press conference next door, Honda’s PR team quietly ran through a rehearsal of their unveiling, planned for the next day. Tadashi Kume, president of Honda and deeply involved in its F1 program, wandered over to the red NSX standing ready on the display stand. He climbed in. He fired it up.
Before anyone could stop him, he pinned the throttle and sent that jewel of a V6 hurtling toward its 8,000 rpm redline, forged pistons and titanium connecting rods blurring.
The next day, the waiting world found out what all the racket was about. Collectively, the press were stunned, flabbergasted, gobsmacked. However, they hadn’t got their hands on it yet, and that’s a good thing.
What happened next would put a much-needed final edge on Honda’s samurai sword.
The car shown in Chicago was the NS-X for New Sports eXperimental — the hyphen was later dropped. It was sheer luck the car wasn’t called something else because, as with Datsun’s Fairlady/240Z, Honda had another name for the car, something to line up with the Legend, the Vigor, and the Integra. What the alternatives were, no one seems to remember. They might have called it the Raptor — who knows?
But while the car’s name settled into place, Honda’s engineers were still ironing out the details. At the Suzuka circuit in February, right around the same time the sheets were coming off the car in Chicago, F1 legend Ayrton Senna was ripping around the racecourse in an NSX. To Honda’s chagrin, he wasn’t impressed.
“I’m not sure I can really give you appropriate advice on a mass-production car,” the Brazilian prodigy said. “But I feel it’s a little fragile.”
Honda scrambled to make changes. The chassis was stiffened a further 50 per cent and the suspension honed for further balance.
Today, this road is no German race track, but the NSX is relatively composed in traffic and easy to drive. It’s been nothing like as expensive to stable as a horse, and yet provided the same faithful companionship.
“Are you going to buy the new one?” a passing cyclist asks as we stop for pictures at Spanish Banks.
“Oh, I’ve got a deposit down,” Millman answers.
However, while I’ve given him my press kit for the new NSX, that might be as close as it gets for Millman.
Ford, perhaps in retaliation for Kume’s revving 25 years ago, took the wind out of Acura’s new NSX reveal with the launch of the monstrous GT. Kept secret up to its debut, the menacing Ford isn’t a direct competitor to the Acura, but is by far the more surprising of the two cars.
“I want to wait and hear what the verdict is when somebody actually drives one,” Millman says of the new NSX.
Even if the new car is a dream to drive, it’s hard to imagine that it’ll be able to match the lasting impact of its predecessor. Engineered with spirit, perfected by a champion, handmade with precision, the original NSX is something very special indeed.
It’s too bad Acura already made a car called the Legend, because that’s the only other name they could have called it.