The Mugen NSX RR Was The Road-Ready Super GT Racer We Always Wanted

‘Race car for the road’ is a phrase that gets batted around quite frequently, and is often quite exaggerated. It’s rare that any manufacturer actually makes a real race car for the road, but when it does happen, the results are often spectacular. Had Mugen greenlit one particular project, this Honda NSX could’ve been up there with the best of them all.

The NSX finished production in 2005, ending with the limited-run NSX-R GT designed to homologate a heavily modified version of the then-ageing Super GT race car. It would live on for a while longer on the track, though, with 2009 being the final year the car competed in Japan’s premier sportscar series.

To celebrate that fact, and as one last swansong, Mugen decided to show it could turn one of those Super GT chassis into a road-going supercar – leading to the Mugen RR Concept, revealed at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show.

It was a very literal interpretation of ‘race car for the road’, with the top-class GT500 platform a spare racer with no relation to the actual road-going NSX at all. This was composed of an aluminium centre with two subframes welded on each end.

The bodywork strapped onto it was a near-exact replica of the carbon fibre bodywork used on the race cars too, albeit with a front bumper designed to be slightly higher off the ground and with fewer canards. The rear wing was also a bit smaller – albeit itself not exactly tiny – with the rear bumper narrower too.

Under the skin, it utilised a fully adjustable double wishbone, with gigantic six-piston brakes on the front axle and four-piston at the rear. A set of Michelin Pilot Sport tyres were wrapped around Mugen's own-brand wheels. That’s a little more impressive than, say, Lidl cola.

Where the RR had some relation to the road car was the engine. Rather than using the SuperGT-spec 3.5-litre variant of the NSX’s C32B V6, it reworked the 3.2-litre unit found in the production version - albeit mounted longitudinally rather than transversely. It never published a power figure but, with Mugen headers and a set of ITBs, it was surely pushing some way over the factory-quoted 276bhp.

The interior is a bit of a strange mish-mash of then-current Honda parts, rather than using original NSX bits or anything from the race car. It was absolutely laden in red Alcanatara and weirdly utilised the steering wheel from the JDM FD2 Civic Type R, plus controls from various other models.

Did the Mugen NSX RR Concept really ever have a chance of production? Not really, sadly. In fact, the concept wasn’t even a working car as it had no gearbox. If we had a time machine though, we’d surely be making a stop to 2009 and shaking Honda and Mugen execs angrily until they built it…