Ayrton Senna's Legendary Honda NSX Just Set An Auction Record: $1.17 Million
RM Sotheby's London sale saw the 1991 NSX with Senna's Portuguese history eclipse estimates.
Ayrton Senna's personal Honda NSX just became the most expensive example of the model ever sold. The 1991 coupe crossed the block at RM Sotheby's London sale on October 31, 2026, hammering for £871,250 (about $1,169,000) and setting a new world auction record for the NSX.
The three-time Formula 1 champion used the car during his time in Portugal. That history is a big part of why bidders treated it differently from a standard NSX.
Ayrton Senna's Honda NSX Sold For $1.17 Million
Pre-sale coverage from specialist outlets, citing RM Sotheby's documentation, reported an estimate of between $682,000–$1.1 million for the coupe. The final price cleared the upper end of that range by $70,000.
The sale narrowly beat the previous NSX record, held by a Type R model that sold for roughly €1.04 million ($1,164,000).
Gallery: Aryton Senna 1991 Honda NSX For Sale
Honda Automobil de Portugal imported the car, chassis T000233. Manufacturer records reproduced in auction materials state it was first registered as SX-25-59 on March 22, 1991. A certificate of records from the Lisbon Automobile Registry Office then lists the car as registered in the capital by Laboa Etablissement in February 1995, marking the start of its documented post-Senna ownership chain.
The NSX wore Formula Red paint with a black roof and black leather interior, a combination Honda built in limited numbers even by NSX standards. It made its way back to Japan in 2024, two years before crossing the auction block in London.
That single lot also helped push the broader sale to a record of its own. The two-day auction grossed £36,550,950 with an 87.5 percent sell-through rate, a total RM Sotheby's calls the highest-grossing collector car auction ever held in the UK, and one highlight was the Ferrari Daytona SP3's result, which sold for £8,161,250 (about $10,936,000).
The 'Hosepipe' Honda NSX's Senna Provenance
Ayrton Senna washing his Honda NSX
Collectors and historians know this specific car by a nickname: the "Hosepipe" NSX. It comes from photographs of Senna washing the coupe in his own driveway, images that circulated for years before the car ever reached an auction house.
Senna also drove this exact NSX during the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix weekend at Estoril. That ties the car to a specific race, not just a general ownership claim.
Honda built the NSX as an everyday supercar, not a garage queen reserved for the famous, which makes provenance like this rare. Most surviving examples carry no documented link to a specific driver, let alone an F1 champion of Senna's stature.
More NSX:
Source: RM Sotheby's
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