After over a decade out of the supercar game Honda’s new NSX supercar has just gone on sale, a near-600bhp hybrid-powered torque-vectoring computer with wheels. But that’s not the one we have here today.
Launched in 1990 the original Honda NSX was designed to take on the established supercars from manufacturers such as Ferrari, only at a lower price point, and to upset the supercar order through the virtue of it, well, being a supercar that actually worked.
Honda F1 driver Ayrton Senna helped to tune the handling in the final stages of development, and although the NSX was powered by ‘only’ a transversely mounted naturally aspirated 3.0 V6 making 270bhp (albeit with an 8,000rpm redline), it quickly gained a reputation for being one hell of a drivers’ car.
Lightweight (the NSX was the first mass produced car to be made from aluminium) and beautifully nimble, Honda showed that you didn’t need all-wheel-drive, turbos, or a prancing horse on the hood to build a superb supercar. And unlike pretty much every other supercar at the time the NSX was reliable, because above all else, it was a Honda.
These days something of the original NSX’s simplicity is missing from the latest crop of overpowered, over-assisted supercars – the new NSX included, and arguably the same is true for their Technic equivalents. Packed with Power Functions electric motors, remote control, and bluetooth, we seem to have lost the joy of hands-on mechanics. Luckily for us though, Nico71 has not only recreated one of the finest old-school supercars ever made, he’s done it in a profoundly old-school way too…
This is Nico’s Technic Honda NSX, and it’s as delightfully manual as the real car. An accurate transversely mounted V6 engine is turned by the rear wheels, which are independently suspended along with those at the front. The front wheels also steer by hand, thanks to a connected steering wheel plus a ‘hand-of-God’ connection mounted on the roof. The pop-up headlights are also manually raised and lowered via lever mounted on the dashboard, and the seats can slide fore and aft manually too. Lastly the doors, hood, rear window, engine cover and glovebox all open by hand, and there isn’t a Power Functions motor in sight.
Nico’s Honda NSX is – much like the real car – a triumph of mechanical engineering, and well worth a closer look. Check out the full details at Nico’s discussion topic at the Eurobricks forum, and you can find all the images, a video of the model’s features and instructions (yes, really, so we we won’t be getting the usual ‘Can I have instructions?’ messages for once!) at Nico’s own excellent website – Click here to take a look.
