Meet The Man Who Just Drove His NSX From Key West To The Arctic Circle

What are cars for, if not for driving? Sure, some cars are more valuable than others, and perhaps that one-of-one race car with lots of important history should probably sit in a museum. But most cars, even if they’re old and valuable, should get driven. That’s what John Lange believes.

Lange, who goes by the username nsxplore on Instagram, is an Acura NSX fanatic. He’s owned 14 different examples over the years, and owns three right now. But instead of letting the mid-engine icons sit in his garage and accumulate value, he takes every opportunity to drive them.

The Asheville, North Carolina native is currently on a gargantuan road trip throughout North America. It started in Key West, Florida, the southernmost point in the United States, and has stretched as far North as the Arctic Circle in Alaska. This wasn’t always the plan, Lange says.

“I have an issue with scope creep,” Lange tells me from his campsite in Washington state, where he recently woke up inside a tent next to his Championship White NSX. His original idea was to simply drive to the Tacoma, Washington area for NSXPO, an annual meet-up event for owners. But then his plans spiraled.

“I started thinking, okay, so I’m gonna be in Seattle. [NSXPO is] probably not going to be up here for another 20 years. So I should probably drive into Canada. And then I started thinking, well, if I’m going to drive into Canada, I should probably consider driving to Alaska and to the Arctic Circle. And then I considered, I’m four hours from the coast of South Carolina, so I could just pop down the Atlantic and start on the Atlantic. And then the scope creep continued, and I realized the only real way to do it would be to drive down to Key West to ‘start my trip.'”

So that’s exactly what Lange did. On August 5th, he left his home and hit Key West before turning right around and coming back. “I stopped back in Asheville for nine days,” he says. “I wanted to re-nut-and-bolt the car. One of my axle boots was leaking, so I repaired that, and then had some just general life stuff to kind of tidy up. So I had like nine days where I didn’t drive the car at all.”

Lange eventually got back in the car on August 25th, where he pointed the NSX’s pop-up headlights North. “I basically boogied, you know, not too much dilly-dallying, up to the Arctic Circle,” he told me. “I did spend five days in Bampf, because I’m big into backpacking in the backcountry, so I did a bunch of hiking and exploring around Bampf. So since August 5th, I’ve put over 13,000 miles on the car.”

Sounds Like a Honda To Me

It’s not like this NSX was a garage queen before this. Lange tells me he started this trip with just under 200,000 miles on the clock. As expected with any Honda, it’s never left him in need of a tow. But the car hasn’t been totally immune to the punishments of such a huge journey.

“The first day I was in Canada, I was in Saskatchewan, and because I’m stubborn and don’t like paying for campsites, I was basically trying to find this free campsite,” Lange tells me. “I ended up on the siltest, sandiest road you could possibly imagine for two hours. And the car just got covered, interior, exterior, engine bay, everything in silty sand. From there, on my way up to Calgary, I noticed that the clutch pedal pressure had increased, and I was getting an audible squeak when I pushed the clutch in.”

When it comes to his cars, Lange is the protective type. “I do all my own service work; nobody touches any of my vehicles, except for me,” he says. So to address the problem, he stopped in Fort St John, British Columbia, near the border of Alberta, and asked around at numerous shops, offering to pay for access to a lift to change his oil and address the clutch issue.

“I found one, finally, that took the bait,” Lange told me. “I wanted to take the dust boot off the clutch slave fork and just check the contacts there. When I took the dust boot cover off, it was almost like somebody just coughed dust out of the transmission bell housing. 
So I relubed it with some silicone spray and soaked it all down. [The] pedal pressure got better. The noise went down.”

Despite driving 230 miles up and down Alaska’s famously brutal Dalton Highway, the NSX muscled through without many other issues. Lange says the sway bar end links are trashed, but the aftermarket suspension from KW is still working just fine. The only other damage was cosmetic:

“I was literally off the Dalton Highway for 10 minutes at the most, and my dad called me and I picked up the phone,” Lange told me. “I just broke my concentration, and I hit like the biggest dip pothole and it ripped my front lip off, and I didn’t realize it until I was back at Fairbanks.”

Yes, Even Acuras Can Be A Flex

An Acura NSX isn’t the type of car you’d normally see in Alaska. Naturally, that means lots of attention from the locals. Lange recounts one particularly interesting string of encounters that kicked off while he was sitting in an REI parking lot.

“A guy pulls in in a CRV and starts chatting me up, he runs some local car Facebook group in Alaska, and took a couple of pictures of my car,” he says. “And it just spread like wildfire around Alaska. I was getting friends that used to live there hit me up, saying they saw my post, and then somebody else chimed in and had a video of that they had taken of me driving on the Alcan [Highway] that they put up in that thread.

“When I was in Anchorage, I went to Walmart one morning,” Lange continued. “There [was] a kid pulling in behind me. He said he’d seen the whole post and said, ‘You were just on the Dalton Highway and knew all about me.” So I talked to him for 10, 15 minutes. I leave Walmart, I walk back outside, and there’s a bugeye WRX sitting next to my car. So they were a couple. They saw the story. They wanted to chat. 
So I talked to them for about 10 or 15 minutes.

“I get on the road and I’m heading down to Seward, Alaska,” he says. “I’m literally on the road for 10 or 15 minutes, and a couple flags me down into a gas station. I pull into the gas station to talk to them. 
Same thing. They saw me online. They wanted to chat it up. When I walk into the gas station, the cashier is telling another person in the store, ‘Yeah, I saw that dude on the internet. He drove from Florida all the way to the end of the line and dead horse on the Arctic on the Dalton Highway.’ And I kind of just yelled from across the store, ‘I didn’t make it all the way to Dead Horse. I had to stop at the Arctic Circle, and I turned back around.’ 
Literally, this span of those interactions was 40 minutes between all of those.”

So What’s Next?

Lange plans to drive from Washington, where he is now, down the West Coast to link up with friends. After that, he’ll turn back east and make the journey home. Having done such a gigantic journey, he feels his next adventure will involve shipping the NSX overseas.

“I feel like the only next option for me and the car is to have about a five-year plan to ship it internationally, starting in Europe, and just start working my way where I can go,” Lange told me.
”I’d really like to drive around Europe. I’d really like to drive this car around Asia. It’s going to be more, obviously, financial and logistical hurdles to overcome. But I think that’s where I’m setting the bar; shipping this car out of the country in five years and continuing the adventure.”

I’m not jealous. Not one bit.

Wherever Lange plans to take his NSX, I’m just glad it’s getting driven. There’s nothing worse than seeing a low-mileage car sit and rot. And it seems he agrees.

“There are a lot of friends of mine who have really nice-condition NSXs that they may drive a few hundred miles a year,” Lange tells me. “To me, the joy that this car brings me and the joy I can see it bring others—it makes me not ever want to stop what I’m doing with this car. It’s really special.

“[It sounds] cliché, but buying a 30-year-old Honda like 12 years ago really changed my life. I don’t even know where I’d be if I hadn’t bought an NSX because it’s just opened up so many opportunities, friendships, and adventures. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Top photo: John Lange / @nsxplore on Instagram

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