Ohio's Supercar: the Acura NSX
On one side of the road: cornfields. On the other side: the production facility for one of the most advanced supercars in the world. This is the story of how Ohio came to build a supercar.
In the winter of 1967, a fleet of tiny, foreign cars crept through the snows of the American Midwest. Battered by winds whipping across the flat terrain, they nonetheless struggled onward, each one a seed of ambition looking for fertile ground. The fields lay dormant, frozen by the weather. But spring was coming to the heartland, and with it, a new crop. Something of which to be proud.
The cars were Hondas; N360s pulled from the line in Japan and fitted with 600cc two-cylinder engines. They were thrashy little hot-rod things, cobbled from sand-cast parts and cranking out around 45 hp. They weighed almost nothing.
At the head of the column was Bob Hansen, one of American Honda’s first employees, and a man close enough to Soichiro Honda himself to have talked the company’s founder into developing the ground-breaking, four-cylinder CB750 motorcycle. Hansen’s opinion carried weight with Honda’s Japanese executives, and the decision was made to bring the N600 to America. It was Honda’s first car for the American market and, incredibly, serial number one of these tiny machines still exists.
From that first seed, more than two hundred acres of industrial area were planted in the heart of Ohio. Four million square feet of factory space were built out. Production of engines and transmissions, bodies, and doors. An Accord good enough to be exported back to Japan. And, almost fifty years after those first prototype N600s came crawling across America, Ohio began building its first supercar. Production of that car, the second-generation NSX, is coming to an end.
Honda’s Performance Manufacturing Center, the PMC, sits one mile west of the main Marysville factory, about an hour outside Columbus. Across the road–Honda Parkway–there is, of course, a cornfield. There are a lot of cornfields around here.
The PMC is both factory and showcase. Out front is a special parking spot for NSX owners who have arranged to get an up-close look at how the machines are assembled. Security buzzes visitors into a small foyer that houses a couple of current NSXs, one a cutaway, and one of the rare Zanardi-edition original cars, built to celebrate the racer’s double CART championships.
Behind the Zanardi NSX, frosted sliding doors obscure a view of the factory floor. They are inscribed with the kanji form of “Yume,” meaning “dream.” The intent is to deliver a big, dramatic reveal when the doors slide open to show a cavernous, open-plan space. It’s physically impressive, but the story’s more about the who than the place.
About a hundred people work here, each one wearing the same uniform that all Marysville Honda workers have worn since 1979. The jacket has buttons tucked behind a cloth flap so as not to scratch any paint, and the breast pocket is covered by a patch upon which the worker’s first name is embroidered.
Being Ohio, these names are Chuck, and Kevin, and Jenny, and Vaughn, and Susan. Every one of the hundred people who work here came from American Honda’s other operations, and many are veterans with more than twenty-five years service. The application process sought out highly skilled workers, but also involved a lottery. I asked Jenny Purtee, who has been on the assembly team since the first American-made NSX was built, why she threw her hat in the ring.
“Well, who wouldn’t want to build a super sportscar?” she replies with a laugh.
Purtee is from the town of De Graff, population 1400, about thirty miles from the plant. She’s Ohio born and bred, and says her family has a racing streak. “My son drives a stock car, my grandson’s been into go-karts since he was four.” Because of a unique program at the PMC, she’s taken an NSX home to give her extended family rides. “Gave the whole town of De Graff rides,” jokes another technician in passing.
Most of the staff here has experienced an NSX first-hand, either riding shotgun on a racetrack or on a road route through Ohio mapped out by a couple of PMC workers. Such is not the case elsewhere. In a past interview with a Master Engine Builder from GM’s performance division in Kentucky, the builder in question described getting a ride in a CT5-V, then calling the technician who had actually built the engine. “I told him, you have no idea what we’re building here.”
The PMC’s master technicians do. Purtee says that there’s a sense of pride in her family in knowing that the NSX is built here, by people like her. Being able to share what she builds with them directly lends a sense of ownership to the process.
Acura is proud of its PMC showcase. The place has plenty of high-tech innovations, particularly in the paint department, but the main difference from a higher-production factory is in the amount of manpower and time spent on each car. So yes, there are trick wireless-connected torque wrenches that ensure that each engine-mount bolt is precisely torqued and recorded before assembly, but also the weather sealing is hand-applied. There are multiple checks and rechecks before every NSX leaves the place.
Kevin Joseph–KJ to everyone here–works in the welding section of the PMC, and has thus been hands-on with the underpinnings of every second-generation NSX made. An ex-Navy man, he drove long-haul trucking before coming to work for Honda. “I never thought I’d be working on something like this,” he says.
Employees at the PMC build points as they work, either for catching aberrations in supplied parts, or streamlining workflow, or contributing to the work in any way that’s above and beyond. Build up enough and you can sign out an NSX for a day, and drive it anywhere within Ohio. Chuck Henkel, a senior manager at the PMC, chuckles, “Sometimes you look at the mileage and it’s–how did you manage to do four hundred miles in one day!”
It’s not uncommon for Japanese manufacturers to have established processes for workers to suggest production improvements. The concept is called Monozukuri when employed across the Pacific. Here there’s a certain American feel to the pride taken in workmanship, and the chance to slide behind the wheel of something you had a part in creating.
As we’re speaking, Henkel motions Vaughn Thibault over. He’s been here at the PMC for six years, and has a car signed out for a weekend coming up soon. It’s an anniversary date, and he’s looking forward to his wife finally getting into an NSX. I ask him briefly about the approach required to work here, earn your way towards a spin in a supercar. Thibault talks briefly about suppliers and safety, and then sums things up all too neatly.
“Just wake up and kick ass.”
Four years ago, at the Motegi raceway in Tochigi prefecture in Japan, I watched F1 champion Jenson Button and Japanese Super Formula winner Naoki Yamamoto clinch Japan’s top-tier Super GT racing series championship. Battling against Nissan GT-Rs and Lexus LC500s in the GT500 class, they secured their win in front of cheering Japanese crowds, in the shadow of a multi-story Honda museum that houses the first racecar Soichiro drove.
That car, like all NSXs, was built in Ohio. Further, the NSX is nearing the end of its seven-year production run, but it is still winning races. A Marysville-built NSX GT3 recently won the GTD class at the 25thannual Motul Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta. The team started from the back of the pack owing to wastegate troubles during qualifying, and fought their way to the win past McLarens and Aston-Martins.
Here, in the cornfields surrounding Honda’s factories, the setting sun sparkles in the pearl coat of this 2022 NSX Type-S. In a week or two, the final mid-engine cars will be working their way through the PMC. The factory will continue to produce special editions plucked from the rest of the Acura range, most recently the new TLX Type S PMC Edition.
R&T Deputy Editor Raphael Orlove told me the NSX reminds him of the Oldsmobile Aerotech concepts from the late 1980s. I can see the resemblance: the NSX is high-tech, high-performance, a high-complexity juggernaut compared to the delicate original.
Take a 1960s S600 coupe, the sporting stablemate of the N600, and it’s a lot closer in feel to the fine-grained elegance of the first NSX than this 600-hp twin-turbocharged hybrid. There were also those who felt that the NSX’s laid-back daily-drivability and lack of badge snob appeal showed a lack of focus and weren’t worth the considerable price tag.
It was a Porsche 918 Spyder for Porsche 911 Turbo money, but it came with an Acura badge instead of a Porsche one, and that was that. The NSX sold slowly; much more slowly than Acura hoped. Lamborghini sells more Huracans than Acura did NSXs. Hell, it sold more Aventadors.
To some, that makes the NSX a failure, or at least a missed opportunity. Leaving European comparisons out of it, it was neither as exotic as the Ford GT, nor as bang-for-buck eyeball-peeling as the new Corvette Z06 is.
Hurtling past row after row of corn, this last-of-breed Type-S feels like a car that should have got vastly more credit. It is, of course, screamingly fast, as anything with 600 hp should be. But to appreciate its speed and other talents properly would require more corners, wider roads, and some elevation change.
High above, jets scrape contrail scratches across the blue dome of the sky, while below the combines kick up dust. The NSX rockets past a farmhouse, two young boys playing on a Power Wheels Jeep in the front yard. Their mouths form perfect ovals of awe.
Time will be kind to the NSX in a way the present hasn’t been. It’ll be a secret-handshake car in the enthusiast community; those who know will appreciate that it can clip apexes all day Saturday even if it never gets the spot out front of the nightclub on a Friday night. It has a seriousness of purpose to it. A car you had to want, not one that’s part of some luxury lifestyle. Something with meaning.
And, for the people who built this car in a factory plonked in the middle of corn and soybean fields, the NSX will always have a greater meaning. Pride in what you have made. A close-knit team. A world-class machine developed and built a few miles from where you were born, and/or where you are raising a family. A flagship supercar, built to carry the pride of a Japanese automaker, built in the Buckeye State.
Brendan McAleer Contributing Editor Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
