You know this car. It's graced the pages of SCC and proven its speed as both a USCC contender and the first official American Touge Monster by Keiichi Tsuchia himself. But it's better now. It's a race car.
Before we get into it, a little history lesson is needed. Having already owned a '00 NSX, Kip Olson has been an NSX fanatic ever since the very first artist renderings of the car back in 1989. But as so many owners learn, only after having their first car, the newer T-top OBD-II NSX was missing the soul and racing spirit of the original NSX. Olsen finally found the answer when he located this pristine Formula Red '91 model with only 9,696 miles on it, in Oregon of all places. He promptly sold his '00 for a nine-year-older car and started on the downward spiral of tuning like all of us.
On the next working day, Olsen delivered the car to Comptech, the same guys who built race engines and supported the Speed World Challenge Real Time Acura NSX race car. Two months later, Olsen had his weekend warrior with upgraded suspension, the then prototype Comptech Supercharger, different gears, Technomagnesio wheels, and a harness bar. But it's never that simple. Bad things happen to your wallet when you become friends with the people tuning your car, and soon Shad Huntley and his crew at Comptech had Olsen upgrading and adding an undertray, a vented hood, wings, and seats. Again Olsen foolishly thought it would be enough. By now this car was already well known as the Comptech car, tricked out with race-derived technology from one of the top U.S. tuners. Best Motoring International further validated this car when they shipped an entire Japanese crew out, along with Drift King Tsuchia to ultimately claim the Comptech NSX as the new American Touge Monster. This was the car that started making the Japanese think twice about American tuners.
But times weren't always good and we eventually saw the demise of Comptech. The old company was splintered into two parts and the talent that built this car went their separate ways. It wasn't until just this year that the talent popped back up in the form of CT Engineering, who is now re-continuing production on many of the old Comptech parts, and Driving Ambition, the service end of the old Comptech. Under the leadership of Huntley (the guy on those American Touge videos), Driving Ambition reassembled much of the old Comptech engineers and fabricators to build and service top-notch street and race cars. It only made sense for Olsen to go back to the same crew when he finally decided to take the plunge and turn the Comptech car into a no-nonsense race car.
The old NSX was completely stripped down to the bare aluminum and glass beaded to remove any remnants of OEM sound deadener and goop. From there, the Driving Ambitions crew began stitch welding critical joints throughout the aluminum chassis structure to increase its overall strength and stiffness. All the floor pan holes normally filled with plastic plugs were also patched with aluminum. With the aluminum sorted out, it was time to move onto an SCCA-approved steel rollcage that had to tie into the aluminum chassis. Unlike building a cage for a steel-bodied streetcar, a rollcage, which is made of steel or chromoly, can't be welded to aluminum. Most fabricators will simply drill holes in the aluminum and bolt the cage down and support it with sandwich plates. Unfortunately this doesn't always work since aluminum is so much softer than steel. In an accident, the steel portions of the cage typically just sheer out of the aluminum, leaving a mangled mess.
By Jay Chen
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