Is A Car From Acura's Past The Key To Its Future?

Is a car from Acura's past the key to its feature?

Acura is a brand in transition.Or at least that’s what Dave Marek, Acura’s global creative director, said at last year’s Detroit auto show. He had just unveiled the Precision concept, a design study meant to show where Acura is heading. And yet Marek also recognized that Acura’s past is also part of its way forward, as he promised a “renewed focus on our roots.”

But which roots is he talking about, exactly? Honda launched its luxury brand in 1986, and the first few decades of Acura’s existence saw a range of hits and misses, from the show-stopping NSX that changed the supercar landscape to the slow-selling SLX that was nothing more than a warmed-over Isuzu Trooper. In our April 2016 30th anniversary issue, we wrote about the first-generation 1986 Integra, a seminal model for Acura that helped create the contemporary sport-compact car enthusiast culture. Though that first Integra was certainly important to developing the brand, we think there are some even better roots from the past to dredge up: the 1992-’93 Acura Integra GS-R.

When it arrived in 1990, the second-generation Integra was hardly a monumental leap forward. It still shared its underpinnings with the Honda Civic, and though it was light, tossable, and fun, it didn’t get our hearts pumping too quickly.

“Might be more at home in a Honda showroom,” we said after a Four Seasons test of a 1991 Integra. But we quickly changed our tune in 1992 when Acura rolled out the Integra GS-R, powered by the now-legendary B17A1 engine.