How Acura's ARX-06 Prototype Can Get the Brand Back on Track

• HRC (Honda Racing Corporation) manages Acura's IMSA prototype program.
• Many of Honda/Acura's employees volunteer to support the race teams.
• Acura might yet build a supercar with racing technology.

— Daytona Beach, Florida

The phrase "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" explains why automakers get involved in racing. It's all about selling cars. Well, unless you're Enzo Ferrari, who, in his early days, sold road cars to finance his racing business. Today, every manufacturer that goes racing does so to improve its brand recognition through bragging rights earned from race wins and championship trophies. But Acura — and by extension, Honda — has usually taken a different approach. I recently attended the Rolex 24 at Daytona and had a chance to get a close-up look at Acura's ARX-06 prototype teams and Honda's Civic Type R Touring Car squad and sit down with some of Honda Racing Corporation's (HRC) leadership to find out what they get out of racing.

Quick history

Only four years after the Legend (Acura's first car) debuted, Acura's name was on the side of a big-time race car. Run by Comptech Racing and using a chassis built by Spice Engineering, a race-prepped version of the NSX's 3.0-liter V6 engine provided around 425 horsepower and carried the flag for the brand to race wins, including the 24 Hours of Daytona and three class championships in a row. Acura didn't build the car, but it did supply the engine, and sometimes just seeing the name of a manufacturer on the side of a winning car is enough to impress.

Since then, Acura has been racing sporadically at a high level, with both prototypes (race cars that don't look like road cars) and production-based cars, like the last-generation NSX. As Acura's sportier, enthusiast-based offerings have disappeared, so has its presence in motorsport. But the current ARX-06 prototype that races in the IMSA GTP (Grand Touring Prototype) class has put the spotlight back onto Acura's racing efforts and shown the tenacity and the purpose behind HRC's racing efforts in North America, which include desert racing a Honda Passport too.

Winning isn't everything

I mean, it is, but Honda — more specifically, Soichiro Honda, the founder of the company — thought that racing provided the ideal training ground for its engineers. Not only have engineers found themselves working on Formula 1 engines one year and production engines the next, but strolling through pits at Daytona revealed that the Honda Civic Type R touring car teams are filled with road car engineers moonlighting, or simply volunteering, to prepare the cars for their four-hour endurance race. 

Jon Ikeda, senior vice president of HRC, says, "With racing, everything has to happen very quickly. Racing team culture is agile all the time. Decisions have to be made quickly, and then you have to take the proper risks. In business culture, things take a little longer, but there are a lot of things that we can get from racing, like the culture that we've tried to apply to ourselves."

Obviously, having your employees tackle racing on the weekends and engineer production cars during the week can pay dividends in the sometimes years-long development process of a road car.

When I asked about what Acura can take from racing a prototype with seemingly no connection to road cars, David Salters, president of HRC USA, said, "Everybody's talking about software-defined vehicles. [For the ARX-06 prototype] we use AI and neural networks to develop a traction control system that is, in a sense, self-aware. It's looking forward for the driver, and it's learning. We do that. We write all the code."

And as to how this can be used in a road car, Salters continued, "Honda has a technical forum where the different business divisions bring topics they're working on to discuss. It's very nice. Our traction control systems had the most interest, and it came from the road car guys. Our technology goes back into the system, and it gets incorporated."

So what's next?

At Monterey Car Week last year, Acura rolled out an Integra Type S that showcased a new line of bodywork and mechanical modifications developed by its own race engineers — probably some of whom I saw working in the pits at Daytona. The bodywork is lightweight and was developed in a wind tunnel. The suspension and brakes are similar to what's used on the Integra and Civic Type R touring cars. And the wheels are made by the same company that makes wheels for Acura and Honda race cars. 

"Acura enthusiasts are eager to access this HRC race engineering to augment their driving experience. And everything is functional," Ikeda said. "If it doesn't add to the performance, it isn't on the car."

When I asked about all of this racing technology finding its way into a halo car, like a replacement for the NSX, or something similar to the new GR GT, Ikeda responded, "Ah, so you're going to throw the future product thing on me? I'm a big car guy, so hopefully we can make it translate, but it's a business so we have to think about the totality." That wasn't the enthusiastic "Heck yeah!" I was hoping for, but we can all keep our fingers crossed that Acura can find its way back to the more enthusiast-driven personality and spirit it once had.

If you're interested in keeping up with Acura's ARX-06 prototype or IMSA racing in general, check out the schedule here and do what you can to make it to any part of a race weekend. It's the best racing in the country.