1991 Acura NSX - Project Car Adoption

No matter how good a car is mechanically, 18 years of use will inevitably show in places like the interior. So we freshened it up by taking out the original heavy, stock, torn-leather seats and airbag steering wheel and replaced them with Recaro SPG seats on Buddy Club Racing Spec seat rails and a Momo tuner steering wheel. NSX-Rs came with custom-made, carbon-Kevlar seats mounted on electric sliders. These seats are essentially Recaro Pole Position seats with different trim. We went with the higher SPG line since it shares similar dimensions to the Pole Positions (that we knew would fit) and offers more lateral support and a tighter fit. Even with the larger side supports, the SPG will fit snugly into the NSX interior. The Buddy Club seat rails save the trouble and time of going to a fabricator to build a custom seat bracket and rail low enough to give enough headroom to accommodate a helmeted melon.

To complete the look, the stock 16-inch wheels from the NSX were torn off for staggered 17x8-inch (+44et) front and 18x9.5-inch (+35et) rear Type-F wheels from SSR. These two-piece, semi-solid forged wheels are the descendants of the venerable Type-C that have dominated grassroots racing for the past decade. The front and rear wheels weigh 16.1 and 18.7 lbs apiece, respectively. The two-piece wheel is constructed of a Semi-Solid Forged (SSF) face that's welded to a Heat-Treatment Manufacturing (HTM) hoop that, as SSR claims, creates the best combination of strength, resilience and light weight.

For tires we went with a set of 235/40R17 front and 265/35R18 Advan Neova tires from Yokohama. In terms of awesome street tires that offer huge grip in the dry, reasonable wear characteristics and acceptable wet performance, the Neova tops our list. We were careful to select these sizes and widths so as not to upset the oversteer/understeer balance of the car. Since the NSX is a mid-engine platform, it's possible to put too much tire or grip in the front and potentially cause the heavy rear to lose traction first in a turn. The same philosophy also applies to the rear. Too little rubber will cause oversteer while too much tire will make the car hard to balance and rotate in a corner. Since we don't plan to make more than 300 whp at the rear wheels, a 265-width tire offers the best balance between lateral grip and the power available to break rear traction and rotate the car. The Neova also has a great combination of street and track characteristics like a square shoulder profile, a consistent contact patch with limited camber, and limited pattern noise for such a sticky tire.

With all the cosmetics taken care of, we can get down to suspension and setup next time and finally get some performance numbers out of our NSX.