F1 legend Ayrton Senna’s Honda NSX supercar heads to auction

Ayrton Senna’s Honda NSX is up for sale… and F1 fans may need up to £1million to buy the legend’s famous sports car

The late, great Formula One World Champion Ayrton Senna’s Honda NSX is up for sale, though only fans with up to £1million to spare are likely to be in the running.

The 1991 sports car, which featured in the 1992 documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood, is being auctioned by RM Sotheby’s in October.

Senna devotees will recognise the Japanese sports car as the personal road vehicle he drove to the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix.

Used regularly by the three-time World Champion, it was personally allocated to Senna by Honda Portugal for his exclusive use in Europe.

It is expected that the two-seater, mid-engined sports car will fetch between £500,000 and £800,000 when it goes under the hammer.

If Ayrton Senna is your hero and you have a sizeable sum of money to spare, get yourself to The Peninsula London on October 31 and place a bid.

At the beginning of 1991, Senna had two World Championships to his name with the McLaren-Honda team and was aiming for a third.

Honda gave Senna three NSXs for personal use as a token of gratitude, and chassis number T000233, the NSX being offered for sale this October, was one of them.

Configured in Formula Red with a contrasting black roof and black leather interior, unlike the other two NSXs, which were black, T000233 was imported by Honda Automobil de Portugal.

Fit for a Formula One champion, the Honda NSX was the first mass-produced car with an aluminium monocoque construction, reducing weight by 30 per cent and increasing the engine’s redline from a theoretical 7,300rpm to a full 8,000rpm.

Registered on 22 March 1991 with the number plate ‘SX-25-59’, it was stored in Lisbon and delivered to Senna whenever he was in Portugal.

Senna owned a property in Quinta do Lago and made good use of the NSX, including driving it to the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, where he qualified third and finished second.

Perhaps most famously, this is the NSX that featured in Senna’s 1992 documentary, with the Brazilian seen dumping the clutch and spinning up the rear wheels on camera.

In another memorable scene, Senna is pictured in jeans and a button-down shirt washing the car with a hosepipe.

Ten months after Senna’s tragic death at Imola, records from the Lisbon Automobile Registry Office show the car was registered in the Portuguese capital in February 1995 by Laboa Etablissement.

A fax from Honda confirming the car’s Senna provenance, which has since been reaffirmed by Honda Motor Europe, confirms that the NSX was in the care of Honda dealership Nipomotor in September 1997.

In November 2009, it was purchased by the owner of MSCAR Comércio de Automóveis SA, based in the Algarve city of Faro, before being bought by Robert McFagan in 2013.

He had the car shipped to the United Kingdom, where it was registered for road use in May 2016.

In 2019, Senna’s NSX returned to Imola to mark 25 years since the three-time World Champion’s fatal crash at the Italian circuit.

Minardi Formula One team founder and circuit boss Giancarlo Minardi drove it during demonstration runs.

T000233 subsequently returned to its home country after being acquired in 2024 by the consigning owner in Nagoya, Japan, but has now returned to the UK to be offered for sale by RM Sotheby’s at The London Auction.

No road car model is more closely associated with the life of Formula One legend Ayrton Senna than the NSX.

Sholto Gilbertson, director of sales at RM Sotheby’s in the UK, said: ‘Senna’s legacy runs far deeper than his three world championships. His style and elegance are everlasting, and when you think of Senna, nonchalantly dressed in jeans, white socks and brown loafers behind the wheel of a road car, you think of an NSX.

‘This is a wonderful opportunity to own a genuine piece of sporting and cultural history.’