[CHASING CARS] Nigel Boothman’s Market headliners
Lightweight and rare-groove NSX could could sell for quadruple standard model
Values of Honda’s NSX have never quite reflected the efforts the company put into developing this everyday supercar, nor the respect with which it’s viewed.
Take Gordon Murray, whose regard for the model was quoted in a Japanese publication in 2016, ‘The moment I drove the Honda NSX, all the benchmark cars – Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini – I had been using as references in the development of my car vanished from my mind. Of course, the car we would create, the McLaren F1, needed to be faster than the NSX, but the Honda’s ride quality and handling would become our new design target.’
Not a bad claim to fame, and one backed up by Murray’s long-term ownership of an NSX. Yet a typical NSX in nice condition struggles to break £50,000 at auction, especially with an automatic gearbox. A mystifying number of NSXs were optioned with a self-shifter, which for such a famed drivers’ car is baffling. But you won’t find that transmission in a Type R NSX (NSX-R).
This was a track-focused lightweight special, pared down to as little as 1230kg if the customer didn’t mind dispensing with sound deadening material. There were carbon-kevlar seats, lightly skinned in foam and Alcantara, the latter extending to the dash where it was usually optioned with contrasting stitching, giving a huge lift over the standard car’s acreage of plain black plastic. While there was no stated power hike, the engine for the NSX-R was described as ‘blueprinted and balanced’, presumably with even greater precision than Honda’s usual approach.
Stiffer springs, and firmer damping and suspension bushes gave the NSX-R a track-ready poise at the expense of some ride comfort, but just as importantly, Honda played with the handling balance. The standard car is stiffer at the rear than the front, promoting an oversteer characteristic than makes it lively and challenging through corners at road-legal speeds, but for the NSX-R, the front anti-roll bar was increased in stiffness to exceed that of the rear, providing the stability for cornering at three-figure race track speeds. None of these exciting machines was ever sold outside Japan, so all 483 built between 1992 and 1996 have become icons of the JDM scene.
This one was ordered by a British banker working in Tokyo, who specified the unusual Charlotte Pearl Green over a black Alcantara interior. The roof is also body colour, unlike the normal NSX look of an all-black cabin exterior, that reflects the designer’s F-16 fighter jet inspiration. Almost all NSX-Rs were white but the special-order seven-spoke alloys are the only places that colour appears on this example. This 1994 car returned with its owner to the UK in 1998, finding its current custodian in 2011. Estimated at £230k-£290k at RM Sotheby’s London sale on 2 November, this is consistent with international NSX-R results: $368k (£281k) for a white car at Broad Arrow’s Monterey Jet Centre sale earlier this year; a startling $632k (£483k) for a 7000km example at the same sale a year before; one in Japan in 2019 at £248k. With the Type R, the NSX finally gets the adulation it’s surely owed.
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