Like so many others, it was with a deep sadness that I watched the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan play out in horrific scope and detail. It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about our section of the tuner world that the very underpinnings of our industry have been steeped in Japanese culture and its products since its widespread popularity spanned the Pacific and grabbed hold of the U.S. consumer in the ’80s with cars like Honda’s venerable CR-X Si.
With that in mind, I was humbled when Chris Willson at Phoenix-based ScienceofSpeed asked me to drive its sublime ’92 NSX in this year’s Modified Tuner Shootout competition. After all, in many respects, the NSX is a mark of everything that’s good about the Japanese performance car philosophy, wrapped up in an industry-relevant Honda product. You may remember that I drove this very car for a Modified article (“ScienceofSpeed Acura NSX,” Feb. ’09) and called it one of the best track cars I had driven for the mag.
However, Chris has been busy at SoS, and there were some notable changes made to the NSX that I wasn’t so sure about. To keep ahead of the needs and wants of his clientele, Chris did away with the forced induction of the superb supercharger system that he had used previously, and instead showed up to the competition with a 3.5-liter version of SoS’s normally aspirated stroker kit complete with the company’s individual throttle body system and stunning aluminum intake trumpets.
The look of the ITB system is killer, especially when you remove the custom-made, carbon-fiber airbox, and the resultant immediate throttle response was impressive — a definite improvement over the boosted system. On the other hand, power was down some 70 hp from the boosted version. You can see from the dyno results that the car put down 380 rwhp. While it’s admittedly an excellent output in the NA NSX world, it isn’t really worth writing home about in a competition that featured some seriously powerful machines.
My first time behind the wheel for the competition came at the autocross on Saturday morning. This year, the auto-x was moved down onto the west track area instead of the bumpy pad, and we were able to begin to stretch the legs of several of the cars. We used third gear for much of the course and even considered fourth at one point with speeds approaching 80 mph — fast for an autocross, and a lot of fun as well.
I did notice that the terrific brake feel that was so much a part of the car when I tested it for the mag last year was replaced with a spongy initial brake feel and a vague sense of where lockup was. We ran the car sans ABS, and I smoked the inside front tire a couple times while trailing the brake for a corner. It was hard to even feel that I had gotten lockup; the telltale gray smoke and acrid smell of the Continental slick being my only real indicators.
We also encountered a bit of a mid-corner to corner exit understeer. We made several changes during the autocross competition, and although we made it better, we were never quite able to make it disappear.
Following the autocross, we were given roughly an hour of practice time to set the cars up for the actual time attack portion of the event. The long straight at Firebird is suited to any car that’s making high horsepower, and I suspect that trap speeds at the end of the straight varied wildly. That said, I was hoping that despite our disadvantage in power, I might be able to gain some edge with home track knowledge.