The NSX, launched in 1990, was remarkable for its low roofline of only 46": a bare six inches taller than the Ford GT40 race car. The GT–R, on the other hand, is a full eight inches taller than the NSX.

Under the aluminum, the difference is even bigger. The GT–R is 850 pounds heavier than the NSX, which weighs in at 2,950 lb: an increase of 22 percent. There is, of course, an even greater increase in power, with the Nissan’s twin-turbo V6 producing almost twice the horsepower of the Honda’s V6 VTEC, with a resulting climb in power to weight from 216 bhp/ton to 277 bhp/ton.

But while the NSX our Wes Siler reviewed for Jalopnik is the balls-out Spoon version with 420 HP, his words about lightness and simplicity are probably true of the original as well:

[The] NSX-R GT doesn’t just feel as good as I expected, but better than I could ever have hoped. Unlike other classic super cars, the passing of time has been kind to the NSX. It suffers from neither high weight nor over complication of modern super cars, but adapts their up-to-date running gear, brakes and tires to give itself modern performance.

The trend is much the same with sporty roadsters. Witness the 1964 Honda S600 versus the 1999 Honda S2000:

Relentless growth in size is not limited to the Japanese car industry. If you were to compare Ferrari’s entry-level car from 1968 to its successor 31 years on, this is what you’d see:

The rather lithe and low Ferrari 360 Modena is practically a battleship when compared to the little Dino 246 GT.

And so on.

Photo Credit: Honda fórum (NSX’s and GT–R), VWvortex Forums (Honda S600 and S2000) and the author (Ferraris)

Defending champion Senna arrived in Japan needing a win to keep his title chances alive against teammate Alain Prost, with whom he had developed a fierce rivalry over the previous two years, driving McLaren’s dominant MP4/4 and MP4/5.

Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau /Allsport

This is Senna’s qualifying lap, which would earn him pole with a time of 1:38.041. There is perhaps no better footage of Formula One racing to demonstrate the sheer speed involved. Television cameras distort and slow down the cars, while modern in-car video—recorded with a wide-angle lens from a vantage point high above the driver—renders the scene with a surreality more in common with videogames than racing.

Here, however, the speed is monstrous, staggering, our perception aided by a regular lens shoved right up against the driver and by a manic Senna, driving his V10-powered McLaren-Honda with fury. You get the sense that there is no single millisecond on his lap where you could control the jittery racer, driven absolutely at the limit.

For a comparison, here’s Alain Prost’s (left) qualifying lap side-by-side with Senna’s (right). Prost was no slouch, but he is simply demolished by Senna here. The finish line would see them 1.730 seconds apart—a difference of 1.8 percent, a huge margin at this level. Over the course of a grand prix, a difference like that will add up to almost a full lap.

In the race, Senna’s advantage would not hold up: Prost beat him off the line and developed a lead. Five laps before the end of the race—which, with Prost in the lead, would have meant Senna losing the world title—Senna made his move, but Prost cut him off. Neither of them would back down and their tangled McLarens came to a stop.

Photo Credit: TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images

While Prost got out of his car, Senna was push-started to rejoin the race, which he promptly won—only to get disqualified, handing the world championship for 1989 to Alain Prost, who left the team to join Ferrari for 1990.

A year later, they’re back in Suzuka for the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix. At the drivers’ press conference, Senna is still upset. He leaves the room after a barely veiled comment by Nelson Piquet.

Note: The video begins in Japanese but becomes English for the choice bits.

Senna would, of course, ram into Prost’s Ferrari right after the start of the 1990 race, taking them both out of the action yet again. This time, it was Senna who walked away with the championship.

Photo Credit: Allsport UK /Allsport

Ten years later, Senna’s scorching pole from 1989 remained an awesome feat. Watch this comparison with Michael Schumacher in 1999, who is driving Ferrari’s constructor’s champhionship-winning F399. Senna, five years dead at this point, is right up there with the German who would come to dominate Formula One in the coming years.

Together, these three men have become world champions eleven times: Senna in 1988, 1990 and 1991, Juan Manuel Fangio in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1957 with Sir Jack Brabham in 1959, 1960 and 1966.

Senna’s manner of taking the 1990 title is why Alain Prost refused to be on the picture. After complaints of his pole position being on the dirty side of the track, Senna rammed Prost’s Ferrari—and his McLaren with it—off the road in the first corner, as seen here from Nigel Mansell’s point of view:

To appreciate the sheer title density of the photograph, consider that it took until Michael Schumacher’s decision on Wednesday to fill in for the injured Felipe Massa for the entire current grid to have as many world titles as the three gentlemen pictured. Schumacher’s seven add to Alonso’s two and Hamilton’s and Räikkönen’s one each to bring the total to eleven.

Photo Credit: DAVID CALLOW/AFP/Getty Images

Sir Francis has not had it easy. He has been in Formula One for an incredible four decades now, starting out with a second-hand Brabham chassis in 1969, and it wasn’t until ten years later that his team scored their first win, with Clay Regazzoni taking the 1979 British Grand Prix.

His grassroots operation has seen its share of deaths, beginning with Piers Courage at Zandvoort and ending with Ayrton Senna at Imola. Williams himself has been confined to a wheelchair for 23 years since he flipped his rental car in France and crashed his spine into the roof.

None of this, however, has managed to cloud his essential devotion to motor racing:

I love what I do. All the people at Williams love what they do. Patrick [Head, Williams engineering director], my partner, feels exactly the same — he just wants to go racing, winning. We’re very upset with ourselves because we haven’t done any real winning for a very long time. It’s now about 10 years or something. And it’s very embarrassing, but we have to live with that. It’s our own fault, nobody else’s. And we have to get the sun to shine again soon.

That sun may shine on a forlorn landscape: talks between the Formula One Teams Association and Max Mosley’s FIA have broken down a few hours ago, leaving only Force India in Formula One from the current grid, apart from Williams.

Whatever happens, Williams will be at the British Grand Prix this weekend, the stage of their first victory thirty years ago. Barring supreme weirdness, they are not likely to mark the occasion with another win. Brawn GP driver Jenson Button enters his home Grand Prix as the runaway favorite, after winning six of the season’s seven races thus far.

Still, consider the sheer enthusiasm of the man for noisy, fast machinery:

One of the biggest thrills of my life was I went to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and I watched from 50 meters to the right side of the runway, the flight of four F-15c’s at takeoff, two by two, the second just five seconds after the first, and the noise! The ground shook! I was a guest of a colonel in the air force. I said, ‘Will you be using reheat?’ — which you call afterburn — and he said, ‘No, but if you want it, I can tell them.’ And I’ve never forgotten it. The noise! The power! And they got to the end and they went whoosh, it was almost vertical. Fantastic. Speed and noise.

Source: The New York Times, Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images, Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

Stamps, then. The last time I dabbled seriously in stamp culture was in elementary school. I had stamp books aplenty. The family bathroom would be hijacked for hours as I placed slightly wet sponges on letters and postcards my family had received and stashed over the decades. Traveling one square inch at a time. To the Cayman Islands, to Ghana, to Botswana. To wherever.

Formula One back then was epic and brutal battles between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, riding their McLaren–Honda MP4/4’s to victory in 15 out of 16 races, faltering only in the House of Ferrari one month after Enzo’s death at the age of 90. I did not follow Formula One back then. Sauropods and the woodlouse Porcellio scaber were infinitely more interesting.

Nineteen years later, Royal Mail—the postal service of the United Kingdom—issued a set of six stamps commemorating Britain’s Formula One greats. It was the summer of 2007 and Britain had already given the world eight world champions, more than any other nation. Lewis Hamilton would eventually become #9, but not in his rookie year of 2007, oh no. In his rookie year, he was so busy trying not to beat but to bloody vanquish his teammate Fernando Alonso at the penultimate race in Brazil that he handed the championship to Kimi Räikkönen. This was back when, unlikely as it may sound today, Stirling Moss called him a humble young man, reminiscent of his 50s teammate at Mercedes-Benz, five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio.

Sir Stirling, of course, never won the world championship. Still, and in a manner that would be impossible to defend by statistics or rationale, he is the greatest Grand Prix driver the United Kingdom has ever produced. You may wonder why, when British racers who have won world championships include:

1. Graham Hill, who won thrice, and wore the coolest mustache this side of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
2. James Hunt, who has video evidence proving him to be the coolest man who has ever existed. Plus, he used to attend official functions in jeans and sans shoes
3. Jim Clark, who was Luke Skywalker disguised as a sheep farmer
4. Jackie Stewart, who, if mathematically possible, is even cooler than Hunt

And so on.

But then study this photo of Sir Stirling driving the stuff of legend beside Denis Jenkinson in the 1955 Mille Miglia. Study it carefully. Zoom in if necessary:

That’s settled then, isn’t it? As expected, the stamp collection is rather heavy on Moss. Here's what you get when you unfold the complete set:

Six stamps, eight British world champions at the time of publication, plus Moss. So who got the axe? Mike Hawthorn, Le Mans champion and the first Brit to win the Formula One world championship. John Surtees, the only man who have became world champion on both motorcycles and in F1 cars. Oh, and Damon Hill—but then he makes people throw up.

Not exactly slim pickings.

And why? There is no why. At least Royal Mail has no why. Mysterious are the ways of philately.

Photo Credit: Lothar Spurzem (Graham Hill), Daimler Media Services (Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson), Royal Mail and the author. Special thanks to Lili Mesterhazy for the stamps and the postcards.

The horizon already looked gloomy when the field set off to run the planned 56 laps of the Malaysian Grand Prix. Fat tropical rainclouds darkened the horizon, as Jenson Button on the pole was passed by a nimble Nico Rosberg of Williams for the lead. But the real star of the start was sneaky Fernando Alonso in a heavily fueled Renault, who used his Kers button—the gizmo that stores braking energy as a readily available power pop—to great effect and zoomed throught the field up to third. Alonso then proceeded to hold up most of the field behind him in scenes reminiscent of trains on a railroad track.

The bunch around Alonso provided for gorgeous, fluid racing in the first dozen laps. Cars hugged each other with inches to spare, then a single mistake by Alonso allowed Räikkönen in his Ferrari to rocket by. He was replaced on Alonso’s heels by Red Bull’s Mark Webber—nicely recovered from his balls-freezing time in the cryo chamber—who got into a great game of cat and mouse with the double World Champion, before Alonso solidified his position in fifth. It was motor racing at its most beautiful.

Lap 18 saw a botched move by Ferrari, as they recalled Kimi Räikkönen into the pits to shoe him in full wets—with still no rain on the circuit, only those looming thunderclouds on the horizon. Räikkönen slowed down and dropped to the back of the field.

A few laps later, the rain did start, and the field dashed for the pits—except for a hypersonic Jenson Button, still on slicks with a very light load of fuel. Over two flying laps, he built up enough of a lead to pit for intermediates and come in to lead the race. Another brilliant move by Ross Brawn, similar to but the inverse of his tactics at last year’s British Grand Prix, where he put Barrichello on full wets before the rain really started to fall, which allowed the Brazilian in his abysmal Honda to zoom through the field and take third.

The zooming this time was done by Toyota’s Timo Glock, who was given a set of intermediates for a track half dry and half soaking. Glock was closing in on Button at something like 8 seconds a lap, going through the field like butter.

The rain eased up for a few laps at this point, and Button came into the pits for the fourth time to change for intermediates. He immediately charged up on Timo Glock—who had changed to full wets—and passed him for the lead.

And it was at this point that the rain clouds went medieval. Cars began aquaplaning and the safety car was followed very shortly by a red flag. The drivers pulled into the grid with rain falling in buckets as everyone ran for their lives. The cars were soon swarmed by team personnel in umbrellas, as a nervous Felipe Massa of Ferrari radioed for a new visor to replace his useless, fogged-in one, and was promptly told “Felipe baby, stay cool”.

This he did, along with the rest of the field. Grabbing snacks and drinks, they waited for the rain to stop to no avail. As a Grand Prix has to conclude within 2 hours of its start, all eyes were on the clock. The rain showed signs of abating, and the drivers got back to their cars and then time ran out and a scruffy Button was told that he had just won back-to-back Grands Prix, with Nick Heidfeld in 2nd and Tim Glock in 3rd place. Trulli was 4th, Button’s teammate Rubens Barrichello 5th, with Webber, Hamilton and Rosberg rounding out the points.

Because the race was stopped with less than 75% of the total distance covered, drivers will get half points, similar to what had happened at the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix—scene of a young Ayrton Senna flexing his rain muscles—where Alain Prost took 4.5 points and ended up losing the World Championship to Niki Lauda by half a point.

For the 70 minutes that the cars were out there racing, it was magnificent stuff. The Brawns are great but not boringly dominant, and a number of young teams are lapping at their heels. The season continues on April 19 in Shanghai.

If the 15 remaining races are half as good as these first two were, 2009 will definitely be a year to remember.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, Paul Gilham/Getty Images, NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

Certainly one of the most talented drivers ever, he won the F1 World Championship in '88, '90, and '91. More importantly, he was a great man respected by everyone who ever met him, and millions of fans who never had the chance. This was the last lap of his life before his fatal accident.

According to the story from The Sydney Morning Herald, Stewart won 27 times—but also saw 57 "close friends, colleagues and competitors" perish on the track. Yeesh. That's hard-core. Makes us appreciate the much-improved safety record F1 has racked up since the last driver lost it all: Ayrton Senna in '94.

Good racing this weekend, gentlemen. Good safe racing. [The Sydney Morning Herald]

We were stoked when reader Barnaby sent us this link to Ayrton Senna running Suzuka in the then-new NSX, a car his input helped shape. Senna? Suzuka? NSX? We're so there. But somehow after having seen the Drift King's recent adventures in an NSX and watching Jeremy Clarkson attempt to beat his Gran Turismo time in one at Laguna Seca, the footage proved to be anticlimactic. Still, it's got a pedal-cam, and we love us some pedal cam.

Ayrton Senna drives Honda NSX at Suzuka [Google Video]

Related:
The Drift King drives the NSX Type-R and the F430! [Internal]

What if you could get Alberto Ascari, Ayrton Senna, Jim Clark and Bruce McLaren 'round the table for a sit-down on the current state of Formula 1? A guy by the name of Parminio did just that on an unofficial McLaren fan site. Mindful that with the exception of the safety of modern F1 cars, the racing seemed to be so much better way back when, Parminio uses the imagined conversation to offer his critique of modern Grand Prix competition. Our favorite line? Ascari on modern cars: "I do not like how the cars these days just shatter like a glass. That I do not like at all."

A ficitious interview with legends of the sport Parts 1 and 2 [McLaren Fans]

Related:
Rindt's Lotus 49 to Race Again [Internal]