What doesn't quite make sense though is the 3.5-litre V6, which just seems a little too un-Honda-ish for a car that has traditionally been powered by high-revving four-pots.
I'll disagree with respect, perhaps even R3sp3Kt, as you've put a good thread out here.
Given the choice between the peaky, but superb 2.0 four in the current S2000 and the NSX's ancient but also superb V6 in a two-seat open roadster, I'd take the V6.
But matching the spot-on character of the NSX's V-6 could be a challenge.
'Quail may well have donned his rose-tinted glasses, but when the NSX was laid to rest after reaching the ripe old age of 15, the gravestone might well have read, with great gravitas, "Here Was a Sportscar."
It made the Ferrari 328 look like a Indonesian kitcar, and it left in its wake a high-water mark for sportscar purity that may never be bested for somethign a blue-collar petrolhead could aspire to own — and one that goes largely unappreciated to this day, ITQHO — and that brilliant V-tec V-6 was rightly deemed worthy of the brilliant chassis.
(Quail has recommended '90s listening for those reading this post, should they choose:
YouTube - Stone Temple Pilots - Plush)
The Nips bloomed late, as far as sportscars go. Britain, Germany and Italy all, arguably, had their best days behind them when the Japanese sportscar renaissance of the early '90s bloomed. The generation-III RX7 remains a case study in stylistice elegance and minimalism unmatched to this day; the Supra Turbo was so brutal, raw and unapologetic that, sadly, it became a caricature of itself in pop culture, the Nissan 300Z simply oozed suaveness and sophistication in a way that the (admittedly faster and better) 350 can only crudely ape; the Nissan Skyline evolved into the R-34 and became something that, at least in the 'States, was the stuff of legend — the rare and ethereal breed of car that evoked an emotive response, warranted or not, rose to the level of the sublime and the NSX, well, it was the NSX.
(STP may have run its course at this point. Here's continuance:
YouTube - Oasis - Wonderwall)
Think about it. The Japanese sportscar market has, for the true enthusiast, come in the sort of fits and spurts that are (if not hard evidence) the harbingers of twilight years, and we're all the worse off for it.
The "NSX replacement" that Honda keeps threatening to produce are, in comparison with the Chapman-esque purity of the original, abominations: Toyota keeps badging its Supra replacement as a Lexus, inexplicably, which, ISF aside, is a long, tall step in the wrong direction seemingly before a prototype worth mentioning has rolled a wheel; Honda seems to have stolen the same modern sportscar playbook as Toyota; Nissan's 370Z replacement smacks of the sort of "end of model run über-special-edition" thinking that, to this gamebird, indicates that the marque is ready to nix the entire sportscar genre a'la Toyota (and, mind you, Nissan doesn't even have a pie-in-the-sky 21st Century sportscar concept to tout) and if Mazda keeps touting the admittedly capable but nonetheless weak-kneed, ungainly and unworthy RX-8 as the RX-7's successor for another six months, then 'Quail is going to lose patience.
(UCP Longest Sentence and/or Most Commas in a Sentence award winner?)
(If you've run out of music a third time, 'Quail offers this:
YouTube - Chadin Stevens Video Hour #2)
The curtains seem to have drawn on Japanese sportscar boom, after a virtuoso performance — but what else drew to a close with it? The new Nissan GTR would beg to differ, but this tired old gamebird has started to wonder if we're not all tumbling into a worldwide sportscar depression from which we may never emerge in a recognizable state. Gasoline, which courses through my veins as it does many here on UCP (raise your hands if, truthfully, you'd spray it on as a cologne?) has become an enemy of the global future, and its days could be numbered if our scientists and engineers figure out how to make electricity and/or hydrogen without burning fossil fuels or irradiating angry villagers.
Electric cars can be fast, and they can be exciting, but even if 'Quail buys an electric car that accelerates like a 427-engined Chevelle and handles like a Lotus Elan, the magic of internal combustion and that soul-lifting noise — and emotion — will be lost. Utterly lost.
Another American witnessed the end of an era, and he put it better than this tired old 'Quail can ever hope to:
"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
— The Good Doctor, Hunter Thompson; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971.
So, finally, 'Quail's verdict on the rumored S2000 replacement:
'Quail waits and sees.
'Quail waits and sees.