It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Ferrari F40 owners. It all began with a very heavy (and very public) shunt on the A5 just north of London, when what’s claimed to be the world’s highest-mileage F40 ended up on its side after its driver lost control on what appeared to be a treacherously greasy road. A few days later, another F40, apparently owned by F1 driver Lando Norris, spun exiting a corner and slammed backwards into a barrier. The latter at least looks repairable, with only some minor damage to the rear bumper, but the former? Yeah, good luck with that.
We all know that social media videos only tell you so much, and you don’t know what happened seconds before the cameras started rolling, but the drivers in both instances appear to have been caught off guard by the F40 dumping 426lb ft of torque at 4,000rpm. It’s one of the many reasons why the F40 is so revered, because it’s a twin-turbocharged monster that’ll spit you into the hedgerow the moment you take your eye off the ball (or boost gauge). But even the best of us can get caught out by a sudden surge of torque on a greasy day, and that can make the idea of a quick spin in your multi-million-pound classic Ferrari a bit off-putting. So why even both with an F40, when you could spend a tenth of the price on a more approachable Honda NSX?
I know, it’s a bit of a stretch to draw a line between the two, especially as they’re in wildly different classes of price tag, but both are ranked among the best analogue supercars ever made and both will turn head heads with the sort of ferocity most of their modern counterparts can only dream of. Let’s not forget that the NSX came about because Honda wanted to create a very senior mid-engined performance car that could hold a candle to Ferrari’s V8 range, which was pretty preposterous at the time considering that Japanese carmakers had little to no experience in building very senior mid-engined performance cars.
But you’ve got to start somewhere, and boy did Honda nail the recipe. Its all-aluminium monocoque body had never been seen before in the production car world, neither had the titanium alloy connecting rods in its 3.0-litre (later bored out to 3.2 litres) naturally-aspirated V6. The internals needed to be tough, too, as the NSX’s engine was the first performance application of Honda’s VTEC variably valve timing tech, which had it spinning all the way to 7,100rpm for the full 290hp and then onto the limiter some 1,200rpm later.
A raft of changes were introduced for the facelifted NA2 NSX that you see here, most notably the removal of the pop-up headlights (boo) for fixed xenons and a stiffer suspension setup for even crisper handling (yay). Hilariously, the interior was left largely unchanged, meaning it looked like an early '00s supercar from the outside by felt a good ten years older the moment you stepped inside. That does mean it comes with a cassette player, and those are mighty trendy these days. Apparently.
Having never sold in huge numbers when new, the NSX is a bonafide classic these days. Honda’s compact, lightweight and tactile take on the performance car means it’ll remain in vogue for decades to come. Now, you know there’s no such thing as a bargain NSX these days, especially one that looks as box-fresh as this. It’s a 2004 manual car with 41,675 miles on the clock and has been with its previous owner for the last 14 years, so the £107,500 asking price shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. That’s about slap bang in the middle of non-R NSXs here on PH, which does make this one all the more tempting. And unlike an F40, you can give the throttle a squeeze without worrying about where you might end up.
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