Combine the engine and chassis and you really are left with a car that is capable of remarkable performance.

There’s something not quite right here. I’ve just attacked my favourite piece of B-road faster than I’ve done before in a mid-engined car. I’ve bounced off the limiter, turned in like a pro, and straightened the tightest corners – and yet there was no drama, no sweaty palms, and it all seemed so easy. Had I not been in an NSX, things might have been a lot messier.

But then, what else would you expect of a car created by the world’s most obsessive engineers and finessed by the hyper-sensitive F1 genius Ayrton Senna? The NSX was produced by a company whose ambition was encapsulated beautifully by the words of its founder, Soichiro Honda: ‘We only have one future, and it will be made of our dreams, if we have the courage to challenge convention.’ It was no empty soundbite.

Before the unveiling of the NSX at the 1989 Chicago Auto Show, no-one would have believed that Honda would introduce a car capable of beating Ferrari in a straight fight. Sure, Honda engines powered the McLarens that had dominated Formula One the previous year, and driven Williams to the Championship in ’87, but to produce a road car capable of the same? Improbable at best…

But building a supercar had been an integral part of Honda's plans since the early 1980s. When the company commissioned Pininfarina to produce a mid-engined concept car – which emerged as the HP-X in 1984 – it was as a mission statement of future intent; a preview of what was coming down the line.  
The chance to bestow F1 glamour on the mid-engined supercar was a marketing man’s dream, and the engineers also wanted to apply competition thinking to the new car. That meant a mid-mounted V6 and track-inspired handling; and between 1984 and 1989 the NSX took shape along these lines, with Honda’s boffins formulating their own take on the classic supercar package, so typified by the Ferrari 328GTB.

However, Honda didn’t believe in compromise. It wanted to produce a car as capable and exciting as the established players’ efforts. Why should those flaws that had blighted the mid-engined supercar breed for so long be tolerated? Why put up with poor visibility, a cramped cabin, heavy controls, challenging ergonomics and indifferent build quality? Why shouldn’t a driver used to a Civic be able to jump right in and get on with it? And with these questions posed, it set about answering them one by one, eliminating each of these compromises from the NSX.

As for the power unit, nothing short of excellence would do. Despite being designed in the middle of F1's turbo era, it was always going to be naturally aspirated for the purest throttle response and cleanest power delivery. The all-aluminium power unit had it all: 24 valves, four cams and the recently introduced VTEC variable valve timing system that pushed power to 270bhp at 7300rpm; close to 100bhp/litre.
Fast-forward to 1989 and the aftermath of its first European appearance at the Geneva Motor Show.

The press had been blown away by the appearance of the NSX (although it was called NS-X, with a hyphen, at the time), but remained cautious. They needn’t have worried, because it was the only road car with developmental input from Ayrton Senna.

The great driver was a Suzuka regular, and so when a McLaren testing session coincided with one of Honda’s in February ’89 the road car engineers were keen to get him behind the wheel and see what he thought. After a few laps in the 250bhp Legend-engined prototype, he came back with the feedback: ‘I'm not sure I can really give you appropriate advice on a mass-production car, but I feel it’s a little fragile.’

By that, he meant that the torsional rigidity of the body wasn’t up to par, and although Honda had built a shell as stiff as Ferrari and Porsche’s it still needed beefing-up. Honda went back to the drawing board and re-engineered the hull, making it 50% stiffer – even at this late stage in the NSX’s development Senna had made the difference. Impressed by his input, Honda invited him back to dial-in chassis improvements in the run-up to full production.

When the first journalists got behind the wheel of the same pre-production engineering prototype during the summer, they’d already been briefed that this wasn’t the finished article, but the scribes were blown away anyway. Car magazine’s Gavin Green grasped the significance of the NSX straight away in his first drive piece, entitled ‘Bullseye!’

Summing up, he wrote: ‘Honda has breached the gap between invigorating supercar and friendly sports car. It probably won’t cause Ferrari any worry, for no amount of Senna-Prost one-twos… It will bring a whole category of car into the reach of those who can’t afford Ferraris or Lamborghinis. The Japanese, it seems, have opened the door to Europe’s remaining automotive secret.’

Throughout 1989 and 1990 the NSX did much to raise Honda’s profile in the upper end of the market. This was especially true in the USA, where it proved a suitable flagship for its newly launched Acura sub-marque, Honda’s riposte to Lexus and Infiniti. Senna was given an NSX and generally used one during race weekends; most famously in the UK, where, during the run up to the British Grand Prix, he was pulled for speeding (was it in our car?) – and let off.

Sadly for Honda, all the positivity about the NSX wasn’t enough; the badge on its bonnet was a barrier to sales, just as Car feared it would be. Despite the rave reviews of the pre-production cars, and subsequent glowing reviews of the production version the following year (when it saw off the flawed Ferrari 348), sales were dismal.

During its 16-year production run Honda sold fewer than 20,000 NSXs, despite regular brush-ups and increasingly aggressive performance packages. First there was the TYPE-R in 1992 (again influenced by Senna), the targa-topped NSX-T in 1995, and then the TYPE-S in 1997 – and all were great cars for the Playstation generation. The engineers loved it, too: Gordon Murray benchmarked the NSX during McLaren F1 development, while Ferrari scurried back to the drawing board and transformed the 348 into the F355 as a direct consequence of the Honda’s brilliance.