The Honda Prelude Is Already Going Racing. And It's Ridiculously Highly effective

The newly revived Prelude has barely been out a month, however Honda simply revealed a racing model. Set to enter competitors subsequent yr, the Prelude-GT is Honda’s new challenger for the top-level GT500 class of Japan’s Tremendous GT sequence. It might appear like the brand new Prelude, however it is a very completely different beast beneath.

Like all present GT500 automobiles, the Prelude-GT is constructed round a carbon-fiber monocoque, with sports activities carbon bodywork that resembles its highway automobile counterpart. Per rules, the Prelude-GT makes use of a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine making round 650 horsepower, which is routed to the rear wheels by way of a six-speed sequential transmission. So, fairly completely different from the 200-horse manufacturing mannequin.

The Prelude-GT will race towards the Toyota GR Supra GT500 and the Nissan Z Nismo GT500. It replaces Honda’s earlier Tremendous GT machine, the Civic Sort R-GT, whose four-door bodywork wasn’t conducive to creating a aggressive race automobile.

As our colleagues at Motorsport.com be aware, the Civic Sort R-GT has to this point managed only one victory in its two years of competitors. This yr, it hasn’t completed higher than 2nd, with Toyota dominating the sphere. 

“[W]e see potential to attain a better degree than the Civic Sort R-GT by making use of the information gained over these previous two years to the event of a Prelude-based Tremendous GT machine,” mentioned Honda Racing’s Masahiro Saeki. Subsequent yr, Tremendous GT may also raise aerodynamic restrictions, so competitors ought to get even fiercer.

As Motorsport.com notes, it’s uncommon for a constructor to exchange a Tremendous GT automobile so rapidly as Honda has with the Civic—the previous NSX-GT ran from 2017 to 2023—however such is the character of the competitors within the sequence. Tremendous GT is among the most essential racing sequence in Japan, and Honda can’t preserve being proven up by its fiercest rivals.