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How A Bunch Of Volunteer Honda Employees Working After Hours Ran An NSX At Daytona

Honda of America Racing Team [HART}. They’re an all-volunteer team of regular Honda employees recruited mostly by word of mouth for one purpose: racing the cars Honda makes. 

HART has competed in endurance races since its inception in 1989, but those early races were little SCCA amateur events. Slowly HART climbed up, steadily moving into ever-more competitive series, then taking a year off in 2017 to simply shadow a more professional team. This year they’re tackling their biggest challenge yet: the North American Endurance Cup, which includes the United States’ four most grueling endurance races. When I met them, they were running an Acura NSX at the 24 Hours of Daytona. They’d come a long way from wheeling Civics around a track.

Because it’s largely a volunteer effort, though, the team operates on a fraction of the budget compared to the others running in their GT Daytona class. Much of HART’s funding comes from Honda itself. HART is actually a department within the administration division of Honda, and a form of Human Relations within the company ultimately allocates their funding. Because this was a bigger than usual effort for HART, some of their funding came from selling off previous parts, cars and tools.

“Even though this isn’t our regular job and we don’t have much experience in this—the reason they give us the funding to do this is, we design and develop the car in Ohio, in the U.S.,” Gilsinger explained. “It’s not just that we’re taking the car and going racing, but we’re taking a car that everybody around [on the team] had something to do in creating it,” he added.

The team is a hell of a perk, despite functioning somewhat as a second job within the company. In fact, the existence of the HART team actually convinced Gilsinger to work at Honda, despite also having a job offer from Ford.

(Jalopnik.com)