Iconic 1992 Acura NSX in Formula Red

Visal Chum first saw an Acura NSX as a teenager and didn’t stop thinking about it until he finally tracked down this 1992 Formula Red example decades later. Lou Costabile catches up with him at a Chicago car show to talk about the search, the patience it took, and why he calls the NSX ‘the purest sports car.’ Watch the full conversation above.

Some owners buy the car they can afford. Visal Chum spent years chasing the car that mattered to him specifically — a red 1992 Acura NSX he first saw as a teenager and couldn’t stop thinking about. That’s not an unusual story on its own. What makes it worth watching is how long he waited, how particular he was about which NSX would finally count, and what he says about the entire experience once he finally had the keys.

A Teenage Memory That Never Faded

Visal tells Lou Costabile he first saw an NSX as a teenager, and the impression it left didn’t fade the way most car crushes do. Instead of moving on to whatever came next, he held onto the idea long enough to actually act on it once he had the means — which, by his own account, took years of saving and searching before he found a Formula Red example that met his standard.

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Why Formula Red Specifically

Formula Red is one of the NSX’s most recognizable factory colors from the early 1990s, and its rarity in clean, well-preserved condition is part of what commenters flag when they ask directly about the paint code in the comments. For a car built in relatively low numbers to begin with, finding one in a specific, sought-after factory color adds another layer of scarcity on top of the NSX’s already limited production run.

Honda’s Supercar Built Like a Honda

The NSX launched for 1990 as Honda’s answer to a question nobody expected the brand to ask: could a Japanese manufacturer build a mid-engine supercar that beat Ferrari and Porsche not on raw numbers, but on everyday usability? Developed with input from Ayrton Senna, the NSX delivered aluminum body construction, a high-revving VTEC V6, and — critically — the reliability of a Honda Accord. That combination is exactly what one commenter means calling it “truly the purest sports car”: no compromises bolted on for drama, just a car engineered to do the job well.

Still Contemporary at 25

One of the more pointed comments on the video notes that the NSX was already 25 years old at the time of filming and “still contemporary” — a claim that holds up surprisingly well. The pop-up headlights and early-90s cabin read as period pieces, but the overall proportions, the low beltline, and the driver-focused cockpit layout don’t feel dated the way contemporaries from the same era often do. It’s a design that aged into respect rather than nostalgia.

The Patience Behind the Purchase

What Visal describes isn’t an impulse buy — it’s the opposite. He explicitly credits focus and persistence for eventually landing the right car, which matters more in the NSX market than it does for most classics, because clean, unmodified examples with good service history have become genuinely difficult to find. Waiting for the right one, rather than settling for the first available NSX, is exactly the kind of decision that collectors with more resources than patience often skip — and regret later.

Where This Story Was Filmed

The interview takes place at Collectors’ Car Garage in Chicago during the Cars & Cops Car Show, a storage and event facility that doubles as a meeting point for exactly this kind of enthusiast story. Lou Costabile’s “My Car Story” series is built around finding owners at events like this one and letting them talk, unscripted, about why a specific car matters to them — which is why the NSX segment plays less like a review and more like a conversation between two people who both already understand the appeal.

The Questions Every NSX Owner Gets Asked

The comment section reads like a checklist of questions any NSX owner learns to answer on repeat: the exact paint code, the wheel specification, what exhaust is fitted. That level of granular curiosity is unusual for a car this size of following, but it reflects how deep the NSX community’s knowledge runs — these aren’t casual questions, they’re the kind asked by people who are shopping for their own.

Why the NSX Keeps Gaining Value

Clean, low-mileage NSXs from the early production years have climbed steadily in the collector market over the past decade, driven by exactly the kind of enthusiast who grew up wanting one and finally has the buying power to make it happen. Visal’s story — teenage obsession, years of searching, eventual ownership — is becoming the default origin story for NSX buyers in this market, which says as much about the car’s staying power as any spec sheet could.

How Rare a Clean Early NSX Actually Is

Honda built the NSX in genuinely small numbers throughout its original 1990-2005 production run compared to mainstream sports cars of the era, and the earliest examples — like this 1992 model — carry the added distinction of predating the mid-90s running changes Honda made to the platform. Add in a factory color like Formula Red, and the pool of surviving, unmodified, well-documented examples narrows considerably further. That scarcity is part of why Visal’s search took as long as it did: this isn’t a car where patience just meant checking listings more often, it meant waiting for a specific combination of year, color, and condition to actually exist on the market at the same time he was ready to buy. Collectors chasing a specific factory-color NSX today report similar timelines, which is part of why Visal’s story resonates so directly with the audience asking about paint codes in the comments.

What Makes ‘My Car Story’ Different From a Typical Review

Lou Costabile’s series avoids the format most car content defaults to — specs, 0-60 numbers, a scripted walkaround — in favor of just letting an owner talk about why a car matters to them personally. That choice shapes what viewers actually take away from a segment like this one: not a verdict on whether the NSX is objectively the best sports car of its era, but a specific, human account of one owner’s decades-long path to finally owning it. It’s a format that rewards patience from the audience the same way Visal’s search rewarded his own, and it’s part of why the comment section reads more like a conversation than a typical car review’s reaction thread.

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