Using the words "cheap" and "NSX" in the same sentence may seem ridiculous, if not downright sacrilegious to the Honda faithful, because this legendary mid-engine supercar was hand-built by a small team of highly trained technicians in a special plant in Tochigi, Japan, throughout its 14-year run. With build quality equal to or better than all of the high-end sports cars of this era from Italy and Germany (in 1991, Motor Trend named it the best sports car ever built), this aluminum-body masterpiece was certainly not cheaply built, but with a price tag of just $65,000 in 1990, the Acura NSX was a serious bargain in the exotic two-seater sports car category.
But Marc Richmond, a former executive with one of the big car audio companies, was never really into Japanese cars. He'd always had German sports sedans like the Audi S4, but while on a business trip to Mississippi in 2002, a client of his mentioned that nobody seemed to be able to successfully turbocharge an NSX. Marc, being a real car guy and speed freak, thought this was a ridiculous claim, so he challenged his client to find him an NSX for $20,000 or less, which he'd buy and turbocharge to prove that it can be done. The next day, Marc flew home to Phoenix and found an email in his inbox about a $20K NSX for sale.
A man of his word, Marc suddenly found himself the owner of the $20K NSX. Not exactly pocket change, but still a heck of a bargain for a very exclusive supercar (only 8,733 NSXs were ever sold in America), especially when you compare it to the price of a Ferrari or Lamborghini of the same vintage. That's when Marc's journey into NSX tuning took an even more interesting turn. Having spotted a '93 on www.nsxprime.com that had been built as a race car, Marc noticed that the thread was full of posts by ignorant NSX wannabe owners who were slamming the car as being "riced out," failing to recognize all the high-quality performance parts that had been bolted to it. Marc was smart enough to see this as an opportunity, so he quickly e-sniped this race-prepared NSX on eBay for just $28,000. Better still, when he went to Dallas to pick it up, the owner loaded the back of Marc's truck up with a ton of spare parts (see sidebar for a fairly complete list) at no extra cost.
Once he got home, Marc did what any enterprising go-fast junky would do-he assembled a list of all the spare parts and parts off the race car he didn't plan to keep and posted them for sale on eBay. Before he knew it, all the parts were gone and he'd raised $26,000, virtually covering the entire cost of the race car. Next, he unloaded the original NSX he'd bought, which he sold to a local buyer for $25,000 (which was still a great deal given the work Marc had already put into it). Just like that, Marc had an almost free NSX in his garage and a solid budget to build it the way he wanted to, including a serious turbo setup.
Given its race car roots, the "free" NSX had already been lightened and had all the usual bolt-on power-adders. Converting it back to a street car, Marc decided to build on the stock engine block, since he wanted to see how much power the factory pistons and rods could handle. Building a custom turbo kit with a Turbonetics T62 turbocharger and small-diameter intercooler piping for faster spool up, Marc took it to the dyno for some tuning, but the AEM base map the tuner used made full boost so quickly that it unexpectedly leaned out the air/fuel mixture. This sudden lean condition caused detonation severe enough to kill the ring lands on four out of six cylinders. Ouch.
By David Pratte
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