Honda stopped making its iconic NSX – one of the 20th century’s most important supercars – after 16 years. A nostalgic Andrew Frankel took one out for a farewell thrash
It shouldn't have been like this. This was the last time we would meet, the final fling of an affair 16 years in the making.[/intro] I wanted, needed even, my closing encounter with the NSX to be an epic: how else to do justice to a car that influenced and informed a generation of supercar constructors?
I had it planned to the last detail. We’d go back to the mountain where we’d first met, I’d listen to its V6 whanging off its walls one last time, and find the spot where the photographer had told me to slow down, grow up or find another way home. And we would have a ball.
Except it didn’t work out like that. Indeed the fact that the mountain was shrouded in fog was almost a relief, for this was not the NSX I had come to drive. From the moment I first peered excitedly through its window, it all went wrong. For where there should have been a short and stubby gear-stick – my gateway to heaven – there instead sprouted a grotesque T-bar.
This was the automatic NSX. The NSX that dares not speak its name. The bastard son of the NSX that should be seen but never, ever driven.
The clunking, clip-clawed, four speed slushtronic wretch of an NSX, with its hateful electric power steering and, most cruelly, its detuned engine. I didn’t even want to sit in it. But I have children to feed so I devised a strategy. As I drove this NSX, I would use the familiarity of its environment to rekindle the memories of all those proper NSXs whose sheer genius changed the way fast cars were made. And do you know what? It worked.
Before the NSX, supercars were crap, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. My predecessors never said as much because, until they drove the NSX, they could never have known. But you didn’t need much time in the lightweight, all-aluminium wonder from out East to know it made the likes of Ferrari’s malevolent 348 and the already ageing Lotus Esprit Turbo look pretty sick.
It was at least as quick as the Lotus and not only out-handled the Ferrari (not difficult) but sounded better too (almost unbelievable). But that was just the start: it also possessed the build quality of a 911 and the reliability of, well, a Honda.
It even had a decent boot, for heaven’s sake. In short, it brought the piano lid crashing down on the fingers of the established European supercar constructors and things would never be the same again.
How important was it? Well, I have no doubt for instance that, were it not for the NSX, the Ferrari F430 would not be the paragon of supercar virtue it is. For all the wonderful things it did on the road, perhaps the greatest service the NSX ever did for the true enthusiast was to jolt Ferrari out of the complacency that had brought us such mediocrities as the 348, Testarossa and Mondial.
But the NSX was not perfect. Deep within the warm, inviting folds of ever BSX there lies a shard of ice just where you’d expect to find a heart of gold. It’s there to catch the unwary.
I can remember watching a road tester throw an NSX deep into a field while trying to make it perform for the camera and I can remember others skittering off race tracks when their intrepid pilots have played fast and loose with the traction control button.
I’ve had a fair few of what are known round these parts as ‘NSX moments’ myself. Last year I drove one 4500 miles in five days and forgot about the NSX’s phenomenal appetite for rear tyres until I found myself negotiating a wet right-hand curve on an Italian autostrada on half a turn or more of left-hand lock.
Even the strange, 16-year-old beast pictured here with its two pedals and bigger wheels from the later 3.2-litre version contrived to spit me sideways out of a corner when a rear tyre brushed the dry painted white line at its perimeter.
Back then, back when the NSX was merely the freshest face on the block and mine the spottiest in the office, I knew none of this. I knew only of a car with a redline higher than that of any Ferrari, a driving position I could actually work with and a gear-shift with an action of military-spec precision. I wanted to drive it forever, sell my flat and live in it. I can remember bundling friend after friend into its passenger seat and howling off up the road, simply because I didn’t want them to die without first hearing that noise.
But you could never do full justice to an NSX on any single journey for the sheer sense of occasion offered by a Ferrari over a given distance was always going to make up for its dynamic shortfalls. However good an NSX was to drive, it was always going to be far better to own.
Not, of course, that I ever managed to do that, though I have probably spent more cumulative time at the helms of NSXs in the last 16 years than many who have actually gone out and splurged on one.
Honda may not have sold too many of late but, like James Dean, it’s legend will only truly come alive after its death. And then it will become known as the most influential and important supercar of the late 20th century, the one that helped make all the others better.
Which is why I’m not going to let this toothless NSX end one of the most important chapters of my automotive education. I’m going to find another – I don’t care if it’s a 3.0-litre or a 3.2, whether it has five speeds or sic, so long as it has work for my left foot.
And when I do, believe me, we won’t go out with a whimper, but snarling, howling and shrieking through the gears, hitting 8000rpm in every last one of’em. In an NSX there should be no other way.