Honda Collection Hall museum – Part 3

Continuing on with the third segment of our Honda Collection Hall coverage, we bring you more of the rare machines on display in this Honda-only car museum. Located on the grounds of Twin Ring Motegi in Tochigi Japan, the Honda Collection Hall slots in with Motegi’s racetrack, kart track, grandstands and a new technology display center.

The Honda Collection Hall lobby is full of concepts and design examples

Besides cars and sport bikes, Honda has a healthy powersports and garden equipment line-up. No, the lawnmowers don’t have VTEC

For visitors who have a few hours downtime between a Super GT or IRL race at Motegi, the Honda Collection Hall is a great stop. Even if you don’t like Hondas obsessively, the museum has enough motorcycles and racing machines to keep any gearhead interested.

The very first mass produced car ever from Honda - the 44hp S500

The next production car from Honda was this, the 57hp S600. Besides the coupe version pictured here, a convertible roadster was also sold

It’s also blessed with a sort of dry Japanese efficiency and cleanliness. The walls are drab and gray, accented with the occasional crimson red title poster. The gray carpet and fluorescent lighting only further the feeling that you’re inside a display laboratory. In the Honda Collection Hall, the emphasis is definitely on the machines, not some chintzed up decor.

The 1967 Honda RA273 Formula One racecar, driven by John Surtees

An example of our favorite iteration of the Super GT/JGTC Honda NSX racecar, before it went turbo and before it went dramatically serodynamic

The cars on display are not to be touched and yet we didn’t see a single one separated by a velvet rope or fence. This would never fly in an American car museum. We could have jumped right into Senna’s McLaren-Honda and probably only been faced with a polite request to get out. You gotta love it. Everybody is respectful of the cars and the rules, making it possible to have unobstructed views of all the cars. With so many rare Formula One cars on display in plain view, you can’t miss the Honda Collection Hall.

Source
Honda Worldwide
world.honda.com/collection-hall

An entire row of classic F1 cars, all Honda powered

The 1984 European Formula 2 Champion Ralt-Honda RH-6-84. Using a 2-liter V6, the car produced almost 330hp at 10,500RPM

Driven by Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, Sr. at Williams in 1986, the FW11 was one of the monster cars in F1 history. Using just 1.5-liters of displacement, the twin-turbocharged V6 produced over 1,000hp with nearly a 1:1 power-to-weight ratio

The greatest F1 car of all time, in our opinion, the McLaren-Honda MP4/4 won 15 out of 16 races in 1988 between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. It’s classic shape and Marlboro livery are unlikely to ever surface again but it has aged well. Also using a 1.5-liter twin-turbo V6, the MP4/4 “only” produced about 600hp

One of the most popular F1 drivers of all time, Ayrton Senna enjoys a very fanatical fan base in Japan. Although he drove with Honda power for a number of years and helped develop the NSX, he seems to be famous in Japan mostly for his personality

Now known as Force India after a few ownership sales, Jordan Grand Prix fielded this EJ12 F1 car in 2002. They didn’t do particularly well but it’s on display because Japanese F1 driver Takuma Sato drove this chassis to a 5th place finish at the season ending Japan GP. With a 3-liter V10 engine out back, the EJ12 makes over 800hp

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