Iconic 1992 Acura NSX in Formula Red

Visal Chum saw a 1992 Acura NSX in Formula Red as a teenager and never let go of the image, even after years of not being able to afford one. Lou Costabile caught up with Chum and the car he eventually tracked down at a Chicago collectors’ show, where the two talked through what it actually took to close a decades-long gap between seeing a dream car and finally owning it. Watch to hear the full story behind the search.

Some people fall in love with a car as teenagers and spend the rest of their lives chasing that first impression. Visal Chum is one of them. He saw a 1992 Acura NSX in Formula Red as a kid, long before he had the means to actually own one, and the image apparently never left him. Decades later, at a car show built around collectors and classic cop cars in Chicago, Lou Costabile caught up with Chum and the NSX he’d finally tracked down — and asked him what it actually took to get there after all those years of waiting.

A Teenage Obsession That Never Faded

Chum’s story follows a familiar arc for enthusiast car ownership — see the car young, spend years unable to afford it, and eventually reach a point in life where the search becomes realistic instead of purely aspirational daydreaming. What separates his story from a lot of similar ones is the specificity of the goal: not just any NSX, but the Formula Red example he’d carried in his memory since adolescence. That kind of patience, chasing one particular version of a childhood dream car rather than settling for whatever comes along first, is exactly the persistence Costabile highlights in their conversation together.

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Why the NSX Still Matters

The NSX earned that kind of devotion honestly. When Honda launched it under the Acura badge in 1990, it was the first mass-produced car to use an all-aluminum monocoque chassis, and it was developed with input from Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, who reportedly helped Honda’s engineers refine the car’s handling on track during development. It offered exotic-car performance and driving feel with Honda reliability, at a fraction of the price and maintenance headache of a contemporary Ferrari — a combination that made it a legitimate giant-killer in period road tests and still makes clean examples desirable decades later among collectors who remember exactly what it meant on arrival.

Finding the Right One, Not Just Any One

Formula Red in particular is one of the NSX’s most recognizable factory colors, and finding a well-preserved example in that specific shade, rather than settling for whatever color happened to be available at the time, adds another layer to how deliberate Chum’s search evidently was throughout the years. Early-’90s NSXs in strong original condition have become increasingly hard to find as more of them get tracked, modified, or simply worn out by decades of daily use, which makes an honest, correctly-colored example like this one a genuine find rather than a routine used-car purchase off a lot somewhere.

A Market That’s Gotten Harder to Break Into

Prices on clean, unmolested first-generation NSXs have climbed steadily as the used-JDM and used-exotic markets have matured, with well-documented Formula Red examples commanding a real premium over more common colors. That appreciation has made cars like Chum’s harder to simply stumble into — what might have been an attainable used sports car fifteen years ago now requires the kind of patient, dedicated search that took him the better part of his adult life to complete.

A Home Built for Cars Like This

The interview happened at Collectors’ Car Garage in Chicago during its Cars & Cops Car Show, a storage facility built specifically around housing and displaying enthusiast vehicles rather than just parking them between drives. That setting matters — cars like this NSX tend to end up in facilities built by people who understand why an owner would spend years chasing one specific red example instead of just buying the first NSX for sale nearby, and it’s part of why Lou Costabile’s My Car Story series keeps finding its way into garages exactly like this one, where the cars all seem to have a story behind how they got there.

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