Honda has never bettered the original NSX | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

The car came to Autocar the end of 1991, and having risen from being a road test assistant to a road tester and thence to the dizzying heights of deputy road test editor, it was to be that the rather important job of writing the NSX road test was entrusted. By then I’d been allowed to drive fast cars for a while and test important but slow ones – like the similarly fresh and no less remarkable Mazda MX-5, but this was the first supercar verdict I was to hand down. So to the rather young me – I had just turned 25 – it was more than usually important that I got it right.

So pausing only to grab Autocar’s then not-so veteran photographer Stan Papior I headed out to west Wales. The car was a revelation. There was almost nothing about it I didn’t like. Even the interior for which the car is perhaps most marked down seemed fine to my perhaps too uncritical eye. The engine was a wonder, pure and simple, snarling up to 8,000rpm, a crankshaft speed hitherto the domain only Kei cars and motorcycles. The five-speed gearbox was just delicious and the handling balance, so flat, so fast, so reassuring. I was left having a go at the less than perfect the gearing of the unassisted steering just to provide some apparent balance to my otherwise purple prose.

It was a car that just wanted to be driven faster and faster. So I did. Right up to the moment when Stan turned to me and said, ‘look, you have a choice here: either you can slow down, or I’ll do the driving.’

These days, the idea of driving so fast it frightens my passengers, or even makes them a little uncomfortable is abhorrent to me. I am a terrible passenger myself and loathe it when those driving me show off, an all too common occurrence in this line of work. If I’ve got someone in the car with me and unless they are clearly not only happy but eager for me to push a little harder, I just don’t do it.

Back then I was, er, a little different. Which is why I turned to Stan and said, ‘actually there’s another choice. Either you can shut up and let me do my job, or you can get out here and I’ll do it on my own.’

Not good I know. But that’s what the NSX did for you: back in the days when a Porsche 911 was still tricky and a Ferrari 348 actively unpleasant on the limit, the NSX was so easy to drive hard it might appear to a passenger that you were far closer to your and the car’s limits than was actually the case. What I said was still unacceptable, but even from this distance I understand why I said it, even if I mention it now more by way of explanation than excuse. The NSX was just that kind of car.

I did, of course, slow down after that, got back to the office and duly wrote my road test, a glowing review saying the European blue bloods were in for the shock of their lives. But that’s not what reached the printed page. The verdict was a garbled mess: ‘The Italians may well feel aloof, but if the 928 is old hat and the Esprit Turbo not as complete as it should be, the Honda NSX is the car to ram home the message.’ What message? What nonsense. On the rivals page my words were at least clear, but they were even more mealy-mouthed: ‘it is a worthy addition to the hitherto exclusively European ranks of mid-engined supercars.’

Just reading it now makes me angry, angry because a person or persons unknown who may not have even driven the car and certainly had not driven it as far or fast as me decided that he (and yes, it would have been a he) knew better and would doctor my story to suit whatever his agenda may have been. And what still vexes me most is that, and for once, I was right. The NSX was every bit as good as I’d said it was.

There was clearly only one way to ensure something like that never happened again, and that was to progress up one more rung up the ladder and become the road test editor himself. It took me a year, but no one ever rewrote a verdict of mine again.