Ayrton Senna's Honda NSX returns to auction at its 2024 asking price
Honda built the NSX to beat Ferrari, then handed one to Ayrton Senna
Ayrton Senna's personal 1991 Honda NSX will be sold by RM Sotheby's in London on 31 October, carrying an estimate of £500,000 to £800,000, roughly €580,000 to €930,000. It is chassis T000233, the red car with the black roof that Honda kept in Portugal for the three-time world champion. What makes the estimate worth reading twice is that the same car was publicly advertised at £500,000 two years ago.
Honda registered chassis T000233 in Portugal on 22 March 1991
Honda supplied the car, Senna did not go out and buy it. He kept a house at Quinta do Lago in the Algarve, so Honda imported an NSX to Portugal and registered it on 22 March 1991 on plate SX-25-59, waiting for him whenever he flew in. He used it properly rather than storing it. He drove it to the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril that September, where he finished second behind Riccardo Patrese, and it appears in the documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is In My Blood with its rear tyres smoking. The photographs of him washing it in jeans with a garden hose are among the best-known images of Senna away from a circuit.
Motoharu Kurosawa, not Senna, was Honda's NSX development driver
The car is priced on a story that is only partly true. Honda's development driver on the NSX was Motoharu Kurosawa, known as Gan-san, who pushed for the Nürburgring Nordschleife as the programme's base. His method was slow and physical: drive a lap, tell the engineers exactly where the chassis flexed, wait while they hand-welded aluminium braces into the suspect area, then go out and do it again. The findings went to a Cray supercomputer in Japan and came back as reinforcements in the production monocoque. Satoru Nakajima covered much of the endurance running at Suzuka. Senna rode in the development car a handful of times.
Senna's contribution was one verdict on chassis stiffness at Suzuka
What Senna did do was tell Honda, after testing at Suzuka, that the structure was not stiff enough, and Honda acted on it, stiffening the chassis and reworking the suspension before production. That is a real contribution to a genuinely significant car. The NSX was the first production model built around an all-aluminium semi-monocoque, its 3.0-litre V6 ran titanium connecting rods to an 8,300 rpm redline for 274 hp, and the aluminium body alone saved close to 200 kg over steel. Honda's benchmark was the Ferrari 348, which it wanted to match on pace and beat on reliability, and the shape has aged well enough that a naturally aspirated NSX restomod arrived earlier this year.
The £500,000 low estimate matches an April 2024 Auto Trader listing
The estimate has a history. In April 2024 this same NSX was advertised in the United Kingdom on Auto Trader at £500,000, showing 39,100 miles, about 62,900 km. Its owner then was Robert McFagan, who had found it in the Algarve in 2013 and kept it at his home in East Sussex. The car went to Japan later that year, and its current owner has brought it back to Britain for this sale. RM Sotheby's has set the lower estimate at precisely that 2024 asking price, which means the house is opening where the last public number sat rather than above it.
RM Sotheby's sells it in London on 31 October 2026
The sale is RM Sotheby's London auction on 31 October, and the car turns up with paperwork rather than folklore: registration documents and written confirmations from Honda support the provenance. It has stayed visible since Senna's death at Imola in 1994, most publicly in 2019, when Giancarlo Minardi drove it at the same circuit to mark 25 years. Senna's name is one of the few in motorsport that reliably adds a zero, which is why the spread is so wide. There is £300,000 of daylight between the two ends of the estimate, and that gap is the auction house admitting it does not know what the legend is worth.
AutoNext Take
The number to watch on 31 October is not the hammer price, it is whether the car clears £500,000 at all. That figure was already public two years ago and did not produce a headline sale, and RM Sotheby's has now made it the floor rather than the bottom of a climb. An estimate that opens exactly where the last advertised price sat is a house protecting itself, not a house expecting a record. The optimism all lives at the £800,000 end.
Strip the name off and this is a 63,000 km 1991 Honda with an unusually complete file. Motoharu Kurosawa spent months at the Nordschleife deciding how the NSX would drive and carries no auction premium whatsoever. Senna rode along a few times at Suzuka, delivered one verdict on chassis stiffness, and the car he was lent is the one with the seven-figure ceiling. That is simply how provenance works, and celebrity ownership has been rewriting model price ceilings all year. A buyer at £800,000 should just be clear they are paying for the photographs and not for the engineering.
