Thursday, 10 June 2021

Car of the Week — Week 138: Honda RAYBRIG NSX CONCEPT-GT '16

Having adopted DTM rules wholesale in 2014, Super GT's premier class of GT500 has turned from exciting clashes of different ideologies and methodologies from the best of Japan's top three manufacturers into a one-make race with only different drivers, tyres, and body shapes. Under the barely recogniseable bodies of the Nissan and Toyota's flagship performance cars are all the same turbocharged Inline 4s sending power to the rear. It doesn't even take leaving the paddock to ascertain this: an R35 GT-R would make the exact same startup and engine noises as an RC F, and if you lined them up on a standing start with traction control engaged, they'd all similarly bog. At this point, you might as well be watching a Mazda Roadster Cup. There's no dirty air to destroy the racing there, and you can even walk into a showroom and buy a car that largely resembles what you're seeing on screen, instead of just the top three automotive giants of Japan duking it out in a hollow condom measuring contest.


Hidden somewhere in the middle of that drab chaos of GT500 however, lurks a car that, while singing the same turbocharged Inline 4 tune, has its heart in a different place. Replacing the HSV-10 as Honda's representative in GT500, the NSX Concept-GT is not only a mid-engined car in a category that stipulates that only FR cars may compete, but it's also hybrid assisted too! As the name and model year of the car may have already given away, the NSX Concept-GT was fielded even before the road going car's design was even finalised, much less put up for sale to the general public, bending yet another rule of GT500 which states that the racing cars must be based on a production version the public can buy. With the NSX's many special exceptions to the rules, about a third of the field in GT500 breaks the rules of GT500. God GT500 is stupid. Just go watch GT300- *cough* oh sorry, we're here to review a car, not the category it's in. It's just really difficult to divorce criticism against a car from the category it's built to race in, you know? Especially when said category is simply a thinly veiled one make race with different body styles.


As far back as GT500's inception in the Japan Grand Touring Car (JGTC) days back in the mid nineties, NSXes were subject to mass, aerodynamic, and air intake restrictions unique to them just for being mid-engined, and that tradition continues with the NC1. Immediately obvious is the mass of the NC1 when compared to its contemporaries; at 1,049kg (2,313lbs), it's 29 kilos (64lbs) heavier than the rest of the field set to 1,020kg (2,249lbs). Also, happily for the programmers over at Polyphony Digital I suspect, the car we have in Gran Turismo Sport, the #100 RAYBRIG car driven by Izawa Takuya and Yamamoto Naoki, made do without the hybrid system due to supplier shortage, leaving propulsion of the silhouette car solely to the mandated 2 Litre Inline 4 producing 603HP (450kW) and 614.9N⋅m (452.1lbf⋅ft) from high octane racing fuel. And so what we end up with is a GT500 car that is, when all is said and done, only slightly different from its competition in that it's mid-engined, but weighs 29 kilos more. Is slinging the engine behind the cockpit worth the extra mass of a small child in said cockpit, though?


Not if you're serious about winning a race, no. Even with its original specifications unmolested by Balance of Performance currently, the 2016 NSX has never been top dog in Gr.2, shared with the MOTUL AUTECH GT-R and the au TOM'S RC F of the same year, also with their specifications untouched currently. Gr.2 races are just a shortened way of saying, "bring the 2016 RC F or GT-R, whichever one you have the better looking livery for", with nary a NSX to be seen in either qualifying leaderboards or in the actual races. Why is that, though?


In actuality, I find that the NSX doesn't lag very far behind its FR competition in a hot lap scenario. We're talking like maybe a tenth or two per two minute lap or so, even in my very unprofessional hands. What really dooms the NSX I think is the fact that online races involving Gr.2 always has accelerated tyre wear and fuel use, which makes its extra 29 kilos sting exponentially more when it comes to race longevity in addition to not having the hot lap pace of its FR competition. Perhaps it's because MR racing cars are all horrendously represented in this game (see: the 458 GT3 and Huracán GT3), but I find the NSX Concept-GT to be overly crippled relative to the other two cars in Gr.2. It should at least have equal hot lap pace with the FR cars, if not better in exchange for a hit in longevity, right? That's how the vastly more varied Gr.3 cars seem to be balanced, at least. While the viability of individual race cars tend to vary in this game with changing BoP, history thus far has shown us that Gr.2 is seemingly centred around these 2016 GT500 machines, and the NC1 has always had this mass handicap relative to its FR brethren, with no sign of bucking the trend in the foreseeable future according to my murky crystal ball.


Granted, I'm not very good with these high downforce racing cars, and so I think you might want to take my subjective opinions on the car with a grain of salt, or seek out a second opinion. I personally find it a little difficult to put weight over the front tyres. Initial turn in is good, as with any MR car, but I do struggle to get it to bite into deeper apexes, and corner exits can be a similarly hairy affair, especially out of tight hairpins such as that of Suzuka's, due to the Inline 4 having to make 300HP per litre of displacement, which can only be achieved by turbocharging the nuts off the engine up to an asphyxiating 3.5 Bar (50.7psi) (according to an uncited Wikipedia claim...) — which the game's HUD can't even properly display — resulting in a fiendishly peaky and moody engine whose personality can flip on you in an instant like a switch. Its mind boggling aero may let it clear 130R flat out on even worn tyres, but it destroys racing more often than not, and its suspension has to be set up stiff as bricks to withstand the competition-crushing downforce, meaning the car will skip and slide like a fish out of water on anything but the flattest, prettiest and neatest of paved racetracks. In fact, even the wide open, fictitious racetracks of Gran Turismo Sport, seemingly built to facilitate racing across varying classes of cars, make the GT500 cars feel precariously out of their comfort zones, a predicament that seems to hit the NSX harder because the MR car is already markedly more twitchy than its peers to begin with. Tracks like Dragon Trail and Maggiore for example, where the rumble strips are as much a part of the track as the paved asphalt, will greatly upset and unsettle the NSX. To keep it pointing in the direction the driver intends to head towards then, requires unreal reaction times that can only be provided by steering feedback telepathy, the fidelity of which is completely beyond my 6 year old Logitech G29's and/or the game. That's my racing driver excuse, anyway. It utterly baffles me how everyone else is making these things go round a racetrack without incident, much less having a race, because I never know what the hell the front tyres are doing or going through. If the car isn't turning as much as I need it to, does it need more speed for more downforce? Should I be backing off the throttle to let the front end bite like a normal car? Are my wheels even in contact with the road or in the air? How and when do I transition with trail braking into a corner? I genuinely have no idea until the tyres let go and they scream bloody murder, which happens all too quickly with little to no warning or buildup. And if a rear wheel dips over grass or the kitty litter, the chassis of the car will very quickly match the rotational speeds of its engine as well.


Again, it's very difficult to divorce criticism against the RAYBRIG NSX from the category that mandates it so tightly. A lot of what I said about the RAYBRIG NSX Concept-GT applies to the MOTUL AUTECH GT-R and au TOM'S RC F as well. As a racing car in such a drab category then, the only measure of whether it is good or bad is simply down to whether it's competitive or not, and it simply isn't. There are endless videos and streams of top tier Gr.2 races devoid of the NSX in the 3 year and counting lifespan of the category to attest to that, nor does it have the iconic looks, intoxicating howl, and blistering authenticity of its 2008 Epson counterpart to compensate for being utterly useless. Unfortunately for the NC1 GT500 NSX, where it resembles the road car strongly is that it simply isn't any good on a racetrack, seemingly destined to play second fiddle to the GT-R, and no amount of tasteless flared fenders, tacky aero bits, or fancy Itasha liveries can hide that fact.

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