Honda NSX

Honda didn't build the NSX to join the supercar club; it built it to embarrass the members. The world's first all-aluminium monocoque production car paired a 3.0-litre VTEC V6 — titanium con-rods, 8,000 rpm — with visibility, ergonomics and reliability lifted straight from Civic ownership. Ayrton Senna famously drove a prototype at Suzuka and told the engineers it felt fragile, so they went away and stiffened it. Ferrari's F355 exists because this car exposed the 348. That is the resume.

In JGTC the NSX became furniture: a GT500 front-runner for over a decade, all wing and fury, while a Kunimitsu-run GT2 car took a class win at Le Mans in 1995. On the street it was never a tuner staple — the C30A resists cheap power — so NSX culture skewed toward preservation, track polish and Type R worship. Gran Turismo put an entire generation behind its pop-up headlights and taught them what NA1 meant.

Fewer than 19,000 NSXs were built across fifteen years, and the early NA1 cars — pop-ups, 3.0 litres, five speeds — are the purist's spec. Attrition was low because owners were reverent, which means survivors are genuine but seldom cheap. The analogue-supercar boom did the rest: NSX-R money went vertical, Zanardi editions became auction events, and honest manual coupes roughly doubled inside five years. It remains the rare 1990s hero that drives better than the legend suggests.