Redesigned rear end treatment
Driver's Notebook: New Look, Old Favorite
April 2, 2002
It wasn’t simply the car’s first major styling update since its 1991 debut that had us reaching for our wallets. Getting a firm grip on one’s driver’s license seemed like a sensible precaution for a day of driving Acura’s newest road missile, the 2002 NSX, over the two-lane highways that twist through the redwoods north of Santa Cruz. The possibility of becoming a magnet for Highway Patrol officers was assured by the Spa Yellow Pearl paint job and retina-searing Vivid Yellow leather seats, all the more visible with the removable roof panel stowed below the rear window. Like the car itself, the color scheme is a knockout. The NSX not only looks like it belongs on a racetrack, but its tenacious handling and high-revving V-6 engine goad drivers into thinking that any road is a racetrack. In spirit, the NSX harkens back to the days when all it took to transform a road-racing car into a road car was peeling the tape off the headlights and the numbers off the doors. Increasing layers of safety and emissions regulations in the last 35 years have made the transition impossible for most new cars, but Honda’s research and development staff (read Racing Department) has recaptured the get-in-and-go attitude of the classic era road racers and bundled it with the most advanced contemporary racing technology.
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New headlamps shed last decade's look, and a lot more light. (Click image to enlarge)
Hand-assembled by an elite corps of workers at a special facility within the Honda proving center at Tochigi, Japan, the NSX qualifies as a classic, having debuted as the first user-friendly exotic sports car over a decade ago. The 1991 NSX embodied the latest in Formula One, aerospace and automotive technol-ogy, and their world champion driver, the late Ayrton Senna, carried out some of the car’s testing and development. Even more newsworthy was the fact that, despite its racing pedigree and level of performance, the NSX possessed the everyday drivability of an Accord.
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