Motorsports programs exist to drive innovation in road vehicles, and that’s precisely what’s happening at
Honda.
Acura NSX development boss Nick Robinson told
Autocar that the company’s work on the GT3 racing variant is directly informing future development on the road car.
“In North America, we’ve just unveiled the GT3 version of the car, and the development team of the street car has had some involvement in its development,” Robinson said. “What works well on the track will inform future iterations and updates of the street car and vice versa.”
But Honda is a big company that does more than build cars. Robinson paid tribute to the impact his employer’s well-known
motorcycle program had on the NSX. Apparently, building stuff like the CBR helped Honda with the NSX’s complicated packaging.
“For many years our motorcycle development teams have strived to ensure the optimum centralization of mass, ensuring the lowest possible center of gravity,” Robinson told
Autocar. “This leads to the best possible yaw response.”
Is this all a sign that a
long-rumored lighter, faster
NSX, potentially wearing the vaunted Type R badge, will be especially track-focused? Maybe. Robinson’s comments indicate that the company is doing something with the mountains of data it collects running a GT3 program. While a pure road-focused NSX-R successor seems like it’d be a waste of that data, an NSX-based rival to the
Porsche 911 GT3 RS might make a lot more sense.
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