![]() He found a white example with 85,000 miles. I changed the timing belt on Tony Lisa’s Honda while high on painkillers,” he laughs.įacing an empty spot in his garage, Ravi decided to give an Acura NSX a try in the winter of 2009. Somehow the next day I ended up at the race track anyway, high on valium and morphine–a buddy took me to the track. Unfortunately, the Mazda was totaled on the street en route to a track event around Thanksgiving of 2009. “I got an FD RX-7 after that, extensively modified it: twin turbo, suspension, tires, brakes, I really enjoyed that car,” he says. He experimented with an R33 Nissan Skyline GTS-T Nismo, but he never clicked with the heavier car. ![]() The Integra served Ravi well for years, but eventually he sought something faster. “Once after a car accident, the other I was out of town.” I think I’ve missed two track days with NASA since 2009,” he says. When Tage Evanson took over for NASA-AZ, Ravi kept on volunteering and rose through the ranks to serve as an instructor and HPDE group leader. Ravi met up with Jason Boles of Club Racing Arizona–which later became part of the NASA family–and he volunteered his time as a corner worker to bank credit for eventual track day use. I was building engines with 400 horsepower reliably, and I started to track them.” “That one did blow up as expected, but by 2006 I had done a bunch more research and became more literate in the field. “By 2005 I had turbocharged my engine as well,” he explains. ![]() He started hanging out with other tuners in the area, and once the switch had flipped, he never turned back. He had randomly picked as his first car one of the most popular chassis in the day’s import scene. #Skins acura nsx project cars plusSuddenly armed with a car that once again ran, plus the firsthand knowledge that he could work on it successfully, Ravi was soon wrenching on his Integra in search of more performance. I had to go buy a shop manual, I didn’t have any money, and I had to fix it on the side of the road on I-17 by myself. The car blew a head gasket in the first two weeks of owning it. “I had $3000 to buy a car,” Ravi remembers. back in 2003 he undertook that classic 18-year-old rite of passage, turning his meager available funds into something to drive around his new hometown near Phoenix, Arizona. Ravi Tomerlin is now in his early 30s, but when he moved to the U.S. It was a halo car, a someday-I’d-love-to-own-one dream. ![]() Given the popularity of Honda and Acura cars in the tuner and amateur motorsports scenes during those years, many enthusiasts spent their formative years holding the NSX in high regard. ![]() The original NSX was sold on our shores for 15 long years, with a significant performance bump to 3.2 liters and 290 horsepower in 1997, and a facelift in 2002 that traded the pop-up lights for fixed xenon HIDs. It’s been argued that the NSX heralded a new age of mechanical reliability in low-volume exotic sports cars, as the rest of the world had to compete at this new level. The high-revving, 270-horsepower VTEC V6 wasn’t the most powerful engine in its class, but the electrifying zing of revs just inches behind the driver’s seat only added to the experience behind the wheel. The use of five different aluminum alloys shed a reported 440 pounds from the final product without sacrificing stiffness–in fact, the car was apparently made more rigid in the final development stages based on Senna’s driving input. Here was a supercar you could use everyday without becoming best friends with the tow truck driver. Automotive journalists of the time were duly impressed by the final result, which successfully married daily drivability with exotic looks and performance. Wisely, they used Senna’s input in developing the NSX, granting the car an instant dose of sporting credibility with racing fans. Honda had already demonstrated ample racing spirit in high-profile motorsports, most notably with the Formula 1 engines that carried the legendary Ayrton Senna to his three World Driver’s Championship titles. Could Japan build a supercar to compete with the likes of Ferrari, Lotus and Porsche? Was Honda inspired or foolish to use aluminum throughout the car? And were Honda reliability and sports car soul mutually exclusive? When Honda’s U.S. luxury division debuted the NS-X concept in Chicago in 1989, it raised plenty of questions. ![]()
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