Hello and welcome. If you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled through a wrinkle in time and are now back in the year 1990. All the cool kids carry Walkman cassette players, Chuck E. Cheese is still a thing, and Honda has just released an exciting experimental sports car through their off-shoot division, Acura.
You find yourself in the customer waiting area at your local Acura dealership, and on the coffee table in the middle is a copy of the August issue of Road & Track magazine. Picking up the magazine, you admire the brilliant red car on the front cover.
Interest piqued, you flip through and find the cover story. It begins:
“More than $50,000 for a Japanese sports car? From a country that, a scant quarter-century ago, produced exercises in rolling gingerbread that slogged along with modified forklift engines? And from a company that, until recently, specialized in bread-and-butter sedans and zippy little commuter cars? Well, lo and behold, it’s here, it’s brilliant, it’s ferociously fast, and it’s exotic.
“It goes by the name of Acura NSX, and its fresh, clean-sheet design is about to offer other exotic cars a lesson in civility.”
That sounds like the Road & Track you’re familiar with, although what surprises you as you keep reading the lengthy test-drive review is the depth and detail given to discussing the car. Could it be that when print was still king, auto journalists took more time with their writing? Were they able to give more consideration to the fine tuning and the intricate designs of exotic cars? Or was it just that the NSX was so wild, so brazen, so progressive that it necessitated this level of dissection? As you stroke your chin and turn the page, you wager either explanation is plausible.
To continue reading Road & Track’s Flashback Drive of the 1990 Acura NSX, you follow this link. To enquire about any new Acura for sale, such as the all-new TLX, you can visit us at Leith Acura in Cary.