Ayrton Senna’s Personal Honda NSX Heads To RM Sotheby’s London Auction As Rare Piece Of F1 History

As a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, I can’t remember the number of times I have watched the video of my F1 god Ayrton Senna putting a bright red Honda NSX through its paces at the Suzuka Formula 1 circuit in Japan. Honda eventually gave him three units of the NSX for his personal use. Now, one of his three personal cars is up for auction at RM Sotheby’s this October and is expected to fetch anywhere between half a million to 800,000 pounds. That is between Rs. 6.5 crore to over Rs. 10 crore.

So, what’s special about this old Honda? What is its connection to Senna and why would owning this be owning a piece of automotive history? For that, we’d have to wind the clock a bit and go back almost forty years to 1987. Senna was yet to make the shift to McLaren, the team with which he’d win his three F1 titles and the team where his rivalry with team-mate and multiple World Champion Alain Prost would peak. That year he was still with Team Lotus, which had just moved from Renault to Honda to supply the its 1.5-litre turbocharged V6 with approx (no one knows for sure) 1000HP engines. That shift in engine supplier started a relationship between Senna and the Japanese auto giant that only deepened when he made the shift to McLaren.

Senna And The Birth Of The NSX

By 1990, Honda was deep into the development of a mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive supercar codenamed ‘New Sportscar Experimental.’ A somewhat unimaginative name that somehow and somewhat ironically led to the cool NSX moniker. In 1990, Senna won the second of his three world titles for McLaren and Honda, and away from the glitz and glamour of the F1 paddock he was also sharpening the NSX’s abilities in collaboration with Honda engineers. With his help, Honda was able to stiffen the chassis of its Ferrari- and Porsche-rivalling supercar by as much as 50 per cent and also refined the suspension.

For his efforts, Honda gave him access to three NSXs for personal use. A pair of black cars and this specific red one, with the chassis number T000233. It was imported by Honda Automobil de Portugal and registered on 22 March 1991 with the number SX-25-59. The NSX was stored in Lisbon and delivered to Senna every time he arrived in the country.

A Remarkable Ownership History

Ten months after Senna was killed at Imola, according to the accompanying certificate of records issued by the Lisbon Automobile Registry Office, the car was registered in the Portuguese capital city in February 1995 by Laboa Etablissement. A fax from Honda confirming this car’s Senna provenance, which has been reaffirmed by Honda Motor Europe, further notes that the NSX was under the care of its own dealership, Nipomotor, come September 1997. It was next bought by the owner of MSCAR Comércio de Automóveis SA, based in the Algarve city of Faro in November 2009, prior to being purchased by Mr Robert McFagan in 2013. He had the car freighted to the United Kingdom, where it was registered for use on the road in May 2016.

The NSX made a poignant visit to Imola in 2019, marking 25 years since Senna’s fatal crash at the Italian venue, with Minardi F1 team founder and circuit boss Giancarlo Minardi in the driver’s seat. The car subsequently returned to its home country, having been acquired in 2024 by the consigning owner in Nagoya, Japan, but has returned to the UK to be offered for sale by RM Sotheby’s at The London Auction.

“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,” said Sholto Gilbertson, Director of Sales, UK at RM Sotheby’s.