In 1989, Kristofer Olson saw an artist's rendition of the yet-unreleased Acura NSX and immediately knew he had to have one. A few months later, he had a chance encounter with a guy who had purchased one of the first cars in the area.
"He offered me a ride, which I thought would be a quick drive around the block," says Olson. "Boy, was I wrong. Within three minutes of sitting in the passenger seat, windows down, we were doing 168 mph!" After that, Olson knew an NSX was in his future, but he had a problem. At the time, Olson was making $6 an hour.
Despite making a bit more money now, it took 13 years for Olson to get his dream ride. Having started a business, married, purchased a house and had kids, Olson finally got this 1991 NSX in 2003. He bought the stone stock car from a gentleman in Oregon with a mere 9,696 original miles on the clock and immediately began to take the car to a whole new level. Comptech USA, having developed the NSX into a field-dominating IMSA Camel GT Light racecar, was the clear choice for building this dream machine.
Aside from the mint factory red paint, the only external hints of this car's performance are the 18x8-inch and 19x10-inch HRE 543s wrapped in 225/35ZR-18 and 285/30ZR-19 Bridgestone Pole Positions. That is, unless it's a track day, which is pretty frequent. At the track, the Acura wears 17x8-inch and 18x10-inch Technomagnesio Formula Sixes with 245/40R-17 and 285/35R-18 Yokohama racing slicks.
It takes a lot of brake to put a tire like that to use. Comptech selected Brembo's Indy Billet caliper over the more standard Lotus-style cast caliper for its significantly higher strength and reduced flex. The Indy also uses a slightly larger pad, in this case sourced from Pagid, to squeeze 13-inch drilled rotors front and rear. The rotors are full floaters, which mount to custom hats, allowing 0.007-0.008 inches of clearance between the two. During the rigors of track driving, this clearance ensures no brake drag or misalignment. Small supplemental calipers are used in the rear to provide a parking brake. Despite the racy nature of the brake setup, the calipers include dust seals and the braided brake lines use factory fittings, keeping the whole package DOT approved and street legal.
Since sticky tires coupled with soft suspensions tend to put cars on their lids, Comptech reached back to its Camel Light days to keep the rubber side down. A coil-over suspension was developed with ex-IMSA driver Parker Johnstone to balance that fine NSX line of performance and civility. Kni 3012 monotube racing dampers are custom valved to control 1,000-lb/in. front springs and 600-lb/in. rears. Independent external adjustment for compression and rebound allow fine-tuning for any track condition.
Despite those aggressive spring rates, ride quality remains livable due to the digressive damping of the Knis and the supple Bridgestone sidewalls. Further aiding roll control are a set of Comptech 22mm adjustable anti-roll bars dialed to their intermediate setting. The front bar, which is solid, increases roll stiffness 167 percent over the stock 18.3mm hollow bar. A 220-percent gain beyond the OEM 19.1mm unit is had with the hollow rear bar.
A significant effort by Honda to keep Noise-Vibration-and-Harshness (NVH) to an absolute minimum resulted in the car's fantastically rigid aluminum chassis. The downside of this, however, was the excessive use of rubber bushings and isolators throughout the suspension. To keep the car from feeling sloppy and vague, Yokohama produced a special tire for the NSX, the A022H, which has a casing that actually preloads the suspension while driving to eliminate bushing slop. These magic tires wore pretty fast, however; fast enough that NSX owners filed and won a class action lawsuit against Honda calling for a free replacement of the tires.
What Honda should have done is simply replace all the bushings like Comptech does. The rear of Olson's car received a noncompliance rear beam kit (subframe bushings), toe-link kit and shock tower brace. According to Shad Huntley of Comptech, these are probably the most important mods an NSX owner can perform on the car. Up front, a Competition noncompliance clamp was installed to limit bushing deflection in the suspension, which would normally cause caster loss and toe change under braking. Chassis bracing from the NSX-R was fitted under the bonnet.