Porsche leaves cheeky note for Honda

Who’s a cheeky chappie?

In the otherwise stuffy world of motor-engineering development, it is nice to know there is what passes as humour. Competing automakers routinely benchmark their vehicles against others with which they would like to be compared. If you are using any of the Porsche range, then watch out as it will probably find you and when it does, it will leave little humorous messages on the car. This is precisely what happened when Acura picked up the 911 GT3 that it had been using to develop the NSX’s steering, after a recent trip to the Porsche service centre.

Most automakers purchase their competitors' cars anonymously, as Acura did with the 911 GT3 in question, and thereafter have the car serviced in a local service centre, and the rival would have no clue as to what is going on. Things are changing though; with increasing amounts of information being stored in the vehicle’s data box, it does not take a skilled mechanic long to spot a rogue customer. That is precisely what happened in Ohio, where Acura is developing the Honda NSX. When the 911 was sent back for a service, at which time the data box in the vehicle was inspected and the Porsche mechanics were able to figure out that this vehicle was not being used for routine road driving. A note was then written and left under the engine cover; it read:

“Good Luck, Honda. From Porsche. See you on the other side.”

 

 ...which of course passes for humour in the engineering world.

The NSX.

Acura is the luxury arm for Honda and it is currently developing a Hybrid NSX for launch in the US of A; with a list price of US$157,800, it will obviously need to produce a classy product. Thus, Acura also bought itself a McLaren 12C to benchmark against. The McLaren dealer apparently didn’t figure out that Acura was doing this, but according to a senior engineer on the Acura team, the dealer did ask them where they managed to achieve 205mph and whether this was on a road or track.