Honda NSX Concept
With a price expected to land north of £120,000 in the UK, the Honda NSX is going to seem a world apart in a showroom full of sub-£30,000 family cars and runabouts, but it shows how technology is trickling down. What was once exclusively hypercar tech will eventually be in a Jazz. The NSX is a mid-point stopover.
One rung up is Sport mode, which is for HR-V drivers who have just won the lottery. The steering is very fast but much too light in this mode, and it can become tricky to plot a smooth and accurate course at high speeds. But if you like to take calls on your traffic-laden slog into the office, this is the commuting mode.
For distraught engineers corrected that problem and the rest of the time the NSX revealed itself to be a mid-engined track slayer very much in the Japanese bushido mode of quiet but swift competence. Honda has been out of the sports car arena for some time, so it’s good to see the company back in the game.
All that hardware plus a lithium ion battery pack, magnetorheological suspension and lots of computers are stuffed into an aluminum spaceframe under a bodyshell of purposeful angularity and many heat-exchanger holes.
Switching to Sport-Plus finally brings appropriate steering heft and rotates the virtual rev counter to put the redline closer to high noon. Honda doesn’t give you à la carte control, as you get with Audi’s Individual setting or BMW’s many mode buttons. That’s a pity. The NSX would benefit from customisable settings so drivers can have what they want in any mode.
Track mode is where the NSX fully reveals itself as a McLaren 570S hunter, especially if you’re driving on the optional (but short-lived) Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres. The rabid acceleration out of corners is the most noticeable benefit of the hybrid system, as the front motors help to tug the 1725kg car up to silly speeds. Our car had optional carbon-ceramic brakes; pedal response is firm and the braking force is minutely adjustable.
The lump intruding into the single small boot at the rear of the car is the new nine-speed transmission, developed specifically for the NSX to be as short as possible to centralise the mass. You can shift it manually with paddles, but it’s easy to get lost in the maze of short ratios and the engine spins so energetically to the redline that triggering the limiter is a frequent nuisance.
There are none of the prominent shift lights that you get on a Ferrari. Instead, the revcounter simply flashes red when you’re close to the end, a distinction you can easily miss if your eyes are fixed on the road.
So it’s best to leave the transmission in Drive and let the computer handle it. In Track mode, we never found the programming wanting, the car always in the right gear to make the magic happen. As with so many elements of the NSX, this is a hint of the future, when all transmission control will come down to a couple of buttons.
Honda didn’t want the steering wheel to squirm in your hands, so it has gone for a GT-style approach in which the steering filters out most of the impacts, letting just enough data through to provide a sense of the g-forces. Even so, on the standard Continental ContiSportContact tyres, the understeer is pronounced.
The Ohio-based engineering and test team say some push is deliberate, a nod to the wide range of driving abilities expected. As you go up the mode ladder to Track, the understeer diminishes as the torque vectoring ramps up. In Track, on the optional Michelins and with the hovering stability control turned off, the NSX feels like it’ll run with all the cars in its price class, from a Porsche 911 Turbo to an Audi R8.
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