Open on a darkened garage, slow cuts of tools neatly arranged on walls, lights begin to flash. Cut to closeups of racecar lines, an engine roars to life; it’s the Honda NSX Concept-GT racecar…and it’s boiling tea?
Rube Goldberg would be proud of Honda’s advert. It may not make any sense – nor is it the most direct way of showing the raw power underneath the NSX’s sweeping carbon fiber body. But it is cool.
It appears that Honda didn’t just take its advertising cues from Mr. Goldberg, because the powertrain on this car is downright baroque in its complexity.
Its heart is a mid-mounted turbocharged 2.0 liter four-cylinder engine. No specific specs are to be found, but, from the noise, I am guessing it gets to one or maybe two million revolutions per minute.
From there, power is sent to the back wheels by way of a seven-speed dual-clutch manual transmission, which probably took as many man hours to design and build as the Apollo Command Module.
That’s not all though, because this speed machine, designed to compete in Japan’s Super GT race series, is a hybrid. Supplementing the four-banger are electric motors at all four corners. It’s almost as if the two drivetrains are competing against each other in this car, but maybe Honda just thinks its gas engines need some motivation.
Even with all of this engineering necromancy, you don’t normally see racecars get their own advertisements. That’s because the Concept-GT is going to form the basis for the all-new NSX set to be released in 2015.
The new NSX has been highly anticipated because the last attempt blew up on the launch pad. A replacement for the venerable first generation NSX nearly made it into production before the project came apart at the seams and the market for supercars plunged along with the stock market in 2008.
That may just have been a good thing though, because as Audi and others are showing; the way forward for supercars might just be as hybrids. Now Honda can start from the ground up to get in on this market, and it looks like they might just have one of the better candidates out there in the new NSX.
