Ayrton Senna Honda NSX auction in London ends at £871,000, above estimate of £500,000 to £800,000 By Luís Henrique Costa
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A 1991 Honda NSX that Ayrton Senna used in Portugal sold for £871,000 at an auction in London on Saturday, October 31, 2026. The price was above the £800,000 top of the estimate published by RM Sotheby’s, and it equals about R$ 6.3 million at the conversion reported in Brazil.
The car was offered at The London Auction, held at The Peninsula London hotel, as lot 155. When he announced the offer, Sholto Gilbertson, the house’s UK sales director, praised the car’s link to the three-time world champion. “This is a wonderful opportunity to own a genuine piece of sporting and cultural history,” he said.
Papers and specifications behind the lot 155 sale
The lot includes the original papers that document the car’s origin. They include the warranty book, the Japanese export certificate, Portuguese registration records and a copy of a fax from Honda that confirms the direct link with Senna.
- Lot: 155 in The London Auction 2026, organized by RM Sotheby’s
- Estimate: £500,000 to £800,000, about R$ 3.5 million to R$ 5.6 million
- Chassis and Portuguese plate: JHMNA11500T000233 and SX-25-59
- Engine and transmission: 3.0-litre naturally aspirated V6 of about 270 hp (271 hp), five-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
- Finish: Formula Red paint, black roof and black leather interior
Daily life with the NSX in Portugal and at Estoril
Honda Automóvel de Portugal imported the car and registered it on Friday, March 22, 1991. The NSX was stored in Lisbon and handed to Senna whenever he arrived in Portugal, where he lived at the Quinta do Lago resort in the Algarve region. The red car became famous through photographs of Senna in jeans and a shirt washing its bodywork with a garden hose, and it appears in the documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood, released in 1992.
Senna also drove the car to the Estoril circuit on Sunday, September 22, 1991, for the Portuguese Grand Prix. He started third on the grid and crossed the finish line in second place, in the season in which he won his third world title.
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How Senna’s feedback made Honda stiffen the NSX chassis
Senna’s comments shaped the car before it went on sale. During development tests of the prototype in early 1989, he told Honda engineers that the chassis felt fragile and lacked firmness. Honda responded by raising the structural stiffness of the car by 50% and refining the suspension.
Under an agreement with Honda Motor Company, linked to his years with McLaren-Honda, Senna received three NSX units for personal use. The team won world titles with him in 1988, 1990 and 1991. Besides the red car kept in Portugal, he had two black units, and one of them was kept in Brazil with a plate starting with the letters BSS, a reference to his family nickname, Beco Senna da Silva.
Owners who held the NSX after Senna’s 1994 death
After Senna died at Imola, Italy, in May 1994, the car stayed in Portugal for almost two decades and changed hands several times. It was registered in the name of Laboa Etablissement in Lisbon in February 1995, was in the care of the Honda dealer Nipomotor until September 1997, and passed to MSCAR Comércio de Automóveis, in Faro, in November 2009.
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British collector Robert McFagan bought the car in 2013 and took it to the United Kingdom, where it was registered for road use in May 2016. In 2019, the NSX went to the Imola circuit for the 25th anniversary of Senna’s death, and Giancarlo Minardi, founder and former head of the Minardi Formula 1 team, drove it on track. In 2024, a collector from Nagoya, Japan, acquired the car.
What the buyer must do about UK import tax
The collector from Nagoya has not been identified by the auction house. RM Sotheby’s technical listing gives the odometer reading as about 63,000 km.
The car entered the UK under a temporary import regime for the sale. The winning bidder must either export the NSX from the United Kingdom after the auction or pay the import duties and VAT (Value Added Tax) if they want to keep it registered in the country.
