Revell’s 1/24
Acura NSX

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

History

The Acura NSX took the world by surprise, given Honda’s history of building low-cost family-style vehicles. The NSX is a high performance sports car on par with the Corvette GT-1 and Porsche 911. Making extensive use of aluminum, the NSX boasts of a 3.2-liter V-6 engine capable of cranking out 290 horsepower and 224 foot pounds of torque, propelling the NSX from 0 to 60mph in 5.3 seconds.

Speed isn’t everything, though, and in addition to a top speed of over 150mph the NSX can also corner. Fitted with 16-inch front and 17-inch rear ZR-rated tires, the mid-engined NSX can hold the road snugly at all speeds, making this car a strong contender in the under-$100,000 sports car range.

The Kit

Revell’s kit of the Acura NSX is a welcome addition to the sports car kit collection. Molded in white plastic, the kit features a complete engine and interior, as well as a detailed suspension. Construction is straightforward and typical of just about any mainstream car kit, with the only exception being the mid-engine setup. The engine fits behind the cabin, making for a very cramped assembly. Hopefully all of this will end up fitting together nicely.

The engine is made up of five pieces and the manner of assembly means that you’ll only have to clean up one seam on the bottom. The engine assembly then fits into the rear suspension, which then fits into the chassis. This means that you’ll have to prepaint the chassis, as painting it after the engine is in place will be difficult. But the chassis doesn’t fit very well around the wheel wells when the body is put on, so if you are planning on filling the wheel wells in and smoothing them out, you’re really left in an interesting bind. With some creative juggling, though, I think that you can get everything together without too much trouble, but it will take some test fitting and thought. Or, if you want to build it straight out of the box and forget about the wheel wells, go for it.

The cabin area is very well done and even has the right number of buttons on the radio/tape deck. The seats have all the adjustment buttons molded in, as well as a nice wrinkly leather look to them. The instruments are provided as a decal that fits onto a cluster that fits behind the dash, making it much easier to get a good looking dash. A steering wheel, emergency brake handle, and gear shift finish out the interior.

The one problem area of this kit is the clear parts. For starters, while the other plastic parts were in a bag, the clear parts were not, so they will most likely be scratched. That can be polished out fairly easily, though. The big problem is with the fit. The front windscreen fits pretty well, but the side windows don’t fit at all, resulting in a very odd look at the top of the side windows. Since this is one piece, it will be somewhat difficult to cut them out, but that looks like it will be the only option here.

The kit displays the car in black, with a tan interior, but the Acura NSX does come in other colors, both exterior and interior. For exterior colors you have a choice of Grand Prix White, New Formula Red, Spa Yellow Pearl, Silvertone Metallic, Monaco Blue Pearl, and Berlina Black. Interior colors are either Onyx Black Leather or Camel Leather, with the Camel Leather available only in the white, red, blue and black exterior colors. This should give you plenty of choices for finishing your NSX kit.

Conclusions

While there are a couple shortcomings in this kit, overall it is an excellent reproduction of Honda’s hot sports car and if you’re at all interested in the exotic high performance automobile, don’t hesitate to add this one to your collection.