This bewinged beast is the Honda NSX GT3

You know the Honda NSX. Now meet its slightly demonic, ginormously winged racing version.

Unveiled this week at the New York motor show, it’s brimming with all the attitude you’d hope for from a car designed for GT3 regulations. Like the air the car will carve through, allow your eyes to be drawn first to the dive planes at the front, before traversing the length of the car to that rear spoiler.

Technically, this is an Acura NSX GT3, the car’s American debut meaning it wears the badges of Honda’s American cousin. And Acura NSXs have quite some racing pedigree from the 1990s.

But for the sake of argument - and our Gran Turismo-bred fantasies - it’s a Honda. It is also being developed in Japan and Europe, too, although it will be built in Ohio alongside the road-going NSX.

Beneath its skin is a 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 engine, just like the road car. But unlike the road car, it’s not supplemented by heavy hybrid gubbins, and it drives its rear wheels only. No word on power, but if it becomes a GT3 car, this will be dictated by a rulebook. Let’s say somewhere around 500bhp.

The gearbox is a six-speed sequential item, some three speeds down on its showroom counterpart. The NSX’s aluminium space-frame structure is carried over, though.

Development is ongoing ahead of a competitive debut in North America in 2017, while this autumn will see it undergo homologation as an FIA GT3 car. So we could see NSXs haring round circuits soon. What chance a return to Le Mans to follow in the footsteps of its ancestor?

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