In the rolling hills north of Los Angeles, next door to a movie lot, Honda’s American motorsport division HPD has produced some of the most potent engines in US motorsport; powerplants that have claimed 18 IndyCar championships and 15 Indianapolis 500 wins, along with a surfeit of sportscar titles and a trio of overall Daytona 24 Hours victories for its luxury Acura marque.
But Honda is a Japanese company, right? Parent company Honda Motor Co is the multinational conglomerate based out of Tokyo, but the American Honda Motor Company, founded in 1959, has grown into a massive concern in its own right – not bad from an initial staff of three with a start-up budget of just $250,000 to sell motorbikes!
Based out of Torrance, a few miles south of Honda Performance Development’s 123,000-square-foot facility in Santa Clarita, it began building road cars in the US in the 1980s. It is now one of the top-selling automotive OEMs in a humongous market.
Honda began its US motorsport operations in 1993, joining the CART Indycar series as an engine builder (with support from Ilmor) in 1994, and then became a bedrock supplier for the Indy Racing League and IndyCar series, where it currently supplies 15 cars in competition with Chevrolet (which, ironically, now uses Ilmors).
In sportscars, after a Spice-chassised programme in the early 1990s using engines straight from Japan, Acura’s entry into the American Le Mans Series raised its game in 2007 – it featured a first bespoke racing engine built completely in-house – beginning with an LMP2 class win at the 12 Hours of Sebring.
That very car, the Andretti Green Racing-run ARX-01a piloted by Dario Franchitti, Bryan Herta and Tony Kanaan, resides in a back room at HPD. It’s pointed to by company president David Salters as the starting point to its heritage as a true factory sportscar entrant, and that reworked Courage chassis has led to a firm partnership with its spiritual successor, ORECA.
In 2023, Acura’s ARX-06 LMDh cars have made a fast start to the IMSA SportsCar Championship, and you could argue that it’s got the second or third-fastest sportscar prototype on the planet, after the World Endurance Championship’s Toyota and Ferrari. Its winning start at the Daytona 24 Hours followed the three-time championship success of its DPi predecessor and, coupled to its successful NSX GT3 project, Acura has scored over 100 race wins in sportscars.
Source: Autosport