Acura celebrates early NSX GT3 success

Acura, Honda Performance Development and Michael Shank Racing left last weekend's IMSA race at Detroit with its first win in the intense GT Daytona class. The trio also left with something bigger – a sense of accomplishment – at an early stage in development with the brand-new NSX GT3 model.

With its WeatherTech SportsCar Champions victory in GTD, Acura became the second of IMSA's three new GT3 models to win this season, following Mercedes-AMG's hat trick of wins from Sebring through COTA, but the big German machine had a solid head start over Acura's mid-engine supercar.

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It makes the NSX's timeline from January's debut at the Rolex 24 at Daytona to spraying champagne in June and celebrating a smart win by Andy Lally and Katherine Legge with the No. 93 MSR Acura even more remarkable.

"Even though Mercedes just showed up here in numbers and strength, they ran all last year in Europe so they aren't so new to running their car," NSX GT3 project leader Lee Niffenegger told RACER. "The nice thing about GT3 is you're put in a pretty defined box, but you have to make it work in the real world, not just on the test track."

Niffenegger and the rest of the HPD team in charge of the Ohio-derived NSX GT3 didn't waste a lot of time celebrating their breakthrough win at Belle Isle.

"We went right back to work because it's been a bit of a learning curve to adapt the cars for racing," he said. "Obviously, we've started out with a decent car, but it wasn't right on the pace immediately and we've learned to adapt the car to a wide range of driving style and tracks. That's what we've been working on – giving the car a wide working range so teams and drivers can use it successfully at every circuit. We've shown some aptitude at street circuits, and we're working on expanding that to the other tracks we'll race at this year."

The two-car program run by MSR has hit its stride sooner than expected, which is important for the long-term plans HPD has put in place.

Meant to serve as a factory-backed effort for one season, HPD's goal has been to develop the NSX GT3 into a versatile winner in 2017 before stepping back and supporting customer-based programs starting next year. Getting the twin-turbo V6-powered car to a place where it can be sold to privateers as a solution that can take on the proven GT3 winners is the mission facing HPD and MSR. Working with IMSA to develop a solid Balance of Performance table for the NSX has also been an important aspect in the car's competitiveness.

"The other manufacturers have a lot of experience, but they're on their second-generation GT3 cars so it makes it possible for new manufacturers to come in and compete and recover some of the time loss through testing and working with the series on BoP," he said. "It's crazy close right now. If you look at Detroit, the fastest GTD laps were all within 0.8s, so they're going a great job with BoP."

Outside of the feel-good elements that came out of Detroit for Acura, Niffenegger took pride in how the GTD race was won. Smart calls in the pits gained crucial track position for Legge, who started the race, and again with Lally, who took the lead after only the left-side Continental tires were changed at the final stop to shorten the time spent on pit lane.

And then Lally withstood immense pressure from defending GTD champions Scuderia Corsa as Alessandro Balzan kept his No. 63 Ferrari 488 GT3 glued to the Acura's bumper all the way to the checkered flag. HPD and MSR raced hard, thought hard, and put together a versatile win.

"Anybody can make a car quick for a few laps on new tires, but having one that's fast the entire run – even when Andy started to lose pace as the tires wore down – when we only put left-side tire on at the last stop, he was able to creep away with a little advantage here and there," he said.

"We were able to keep the car more even across the stint and it was just enough, even with old tires on the right side. Everybody executed, the pit stops were excellent, and everything came together. Everything was perfect. The top eight cars were nose to tail, it was anybody's race, and it all came down to who executed the best.

"Katherine did an amazing job to go from seventh to second, Andy was excellent, and there was a nice personal aspect to the win because it's was Katherine's first since 2005 in Atlantics. Everybody went home happy and everybody isn't satisfied, if that makes sense. It's easier to build off of one win than zero, and we want more than one."