My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Wed Apr 21, 1999

The Special NSX is not good, but the Special RX-7 seems excellent

Well, my slight misgivings about the Honda/Acura NSX-R LM GT2, the Cr500,000 model offered by Honda/Acura turned into fully realized fears. In early practice for the Grand Valley 300, I realized that the suspension was just too harshly tuned for the twisty, occasionally bumpy, track. Perhaps a good driver could get very good times, but I found the problem was that if you hit a minor obstacle, recovering from rebound action meant you suffered several seconds.

I did soften the suspension considerably, and this made the car quite driveable, but I could not overcome its poor power to weight ratio. Testing was so difficult I never did get in my usual twelve lap run to verify tire wear; only during the race did I discover that this car seems to need five pitstops, not just four. (Strategy note: if you think a car will last eleven laps, but definitely not twelve, then come in at ten laps anyway. Pit stops every eleven costs you the same time as pit stops every ten, plus the extra time lost driving on the worse tires).

Anyway, driving this car in this event left me with no good impressions. So here are the gorey details.

red NSX-R LM GT2 Grand Valley 300km Endurance Race

q6th 1:46.614

Results:

I had a lot of minor disasters. I got Cr50,000 for fifth place.

Time was 1-44:20.6; at least this was more than two minutes better than I had managed with the Eclipse. Note that the game still contrived to make me finish fifth, not fourth. Of course, one could legitimately interpret this as a slightly stronger field than the Eclipse had faced.

Oh well. The next contender should fare better. It is the Mazda special model RX7 LM. I was surprised how well it did in UKvsJP, with little practice.

This won the series, 45 to 28, and won a Cerbera . Green, of course.

Clearly this RX7 can always give a Cerbera LM a good run for its money, and occasionally, if not frequently, beat it.