The newly revived Prelude has barely been out a month, but Honda just revealed a racing version. Set to enter competition next year, the Prelude-GT is Honda’s new challenger for the top-level GT500 class of Japan’s Super GT series. It may look like the new Prelude, but this is a very different beast underneath.
Like all current GT500 cars, the Prelude-GT is built around a carbon-fiber monocoque, with sports carbon bodywork that resembles its road car counterpart. Per regulations, the Prelude-GT uses a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine making around 650 horsepower, which is routed to the rear wheels via a six-speed sequential transmission. So, quite different from the 200-horse production model.
The Prelude-GT will race against the Toyota GR Supra GT500 and the Nissan Z Nismo GT500. It replaces Honda’s previous Super GT machine, the Civic Type R-GT, whose four-door bodywork wasn’t conducive to making a competitive race car.
As our colleagues at Motorsport.com note, the Civic Type R-GT has so far managed just one victory in its two years of competition. This year, it hasn’t finished better than 2nd, with Toyota dominating the field.
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Source: Honda
“[W]e see potential to achieve a higher level than the Civic Type R-GT by applying the knowledge gained over these past two years to the development of a Prelude-based Super GT machine,” said Honda Racing’s Masahiro Saeki. Next year, Super GT will also lift aerodynamic restrictions, so competition should get even fiercer.
As Motorsport.com notes, it’s unusual for a constructor to replace a Super GT car so quickly as Honda has with the Civic—the old NSX-GT ran from 2017 to 2023—but such is the nature of the competition in the series. Super GT is one of the most important racing series in Japan, and Honda can’t keep being shown up by its fiercest rivals.
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