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Cody Loveland's Corvette-powered NSX claimed by Pikes Peak

Let there be no doubt - racing automobiles can be very dangerous. This unfortunate fact of life has been proven once again today by Cody Loveland, owner of LoveFab, who crashed his Corvette-powered tube-frame Acura NSX on the second turn of the Pikes Peak hill climb course, apparently after a rear upper control arm failed. Cody hit a wall of boulders at high speed, after which the racecar caught fire.
Cody was able to escape the blaze unhurt - minus some missing hair that was singed off in the fire - but the car appears to be a complete mess, as you can see from the image above. The LoveFab Motorsports team has vowed to do its very best to rebuilt the car in time for the competition, but we'd be awfully surprised (and impressed) if that burnt-up hulk were ready for racing with just a few days to rebuild.
We're happy to hear that Cody got away safely, and here's hoping the rest of the competitors get up the hill without incident, or, like Cody, are at least able to walk away uninjured if they don't.

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura 1.6 EL

Drivers from Mexico or Canada who take their cars across the border into the United States may drive them legally here for one year, after which they must drive back home or go through a registration process that ranges from arduous to impossible, depending on the state. As a result, quite a few Canadian- and Mexican-market cars end up marooned and un-registerable here, and I find some of them during my junkyard travels. Today, we've got a Canada-only Acura that showed up in a Northern California boneyard recently. I'm always looking for junkyard odometers with very high final readings (right now a 631k-mile Volvo 240 holds the record), and at first glance I though I had come across a Civic sedan with nearly 450,000 miles. Then I noticed the metric speedometer and realized that I was looking at a non-US-market car. 448,538 kilometers is 278,709 miles, by the way. A look at the build tag and emissions stickers showed that this car was built and sold in Canada. I'd found a second-generation Acura EL in a Colorado junkyard a few years back, so I knew that I'd just found a first-generation EL. Like its Acura Integra contemporary, the Acura EL was based on the Honda Civic. It replaced the Integra in Canada for 1997 and production continued through 2005. It differed somewhat in appearance from the Civic and had a nicer interior but was mechanically nearly identical to the US-market Civic EX sedan. A version for the Japanese market was built in Canada and exported across the Pacific as the second-generation Honda Domani. The engine is a 1.6-liter SOHC four-banger with VTEC, rated at 127 horsepower and 107 pound-feet. This one appears to be a loaded EL Premium, with the optional four-speed automatic. List price would have been C$22,000, or about $30,676 in 2023 United States dollars (using the exchange rate for June of 1997). The decklid had an EL-only spoiler, so a local Honda expert must have bought it for a Civic sedan. Since this car was old enough to be federally legal under the 25-year rule, it could have been registered legally in some US states… but California's strict emissions regulations would have made the process too difficult to be worth undertaking on a near-300k-mile machine that isn't particularly exotic.

Acura preps ILX for endurance racing challenge

Acura has used the occasion of this year's SEMA show to unveil a 2013 ILX that is remarkably different from the road-going car that we are familiar with. A far distance from the rather mildly performing street car, this ILX Endurance Racer is actually prepped to race at the grueling 25 Hours of Thunderhill in Willows, California.
The ILX racers (Team Honda Research has prepped two of them for the race) have actually each been constructed using two donor ILX sedans: one body-in-white chassis and one full production-spec car that donates powertrain, interior and electronic components. Overall, increasing the performance of the car was done mostly through extensive weight reduction rather than bumps in power. No figures have been given for the output of the ILX's K24Z7 engine, though we are told that a custom intake and exhaust have been fitted, as well as a racing flywheel.
A prominent LED lighting system dominates the front fascia of the ILX, along with a huge front splitter, while a massive wing speaks to the intentions of the car.