LONDON (August 21, 2026) – RM Sotheby’s has announced the consignment of a 1991 Honda NSX personally owned by the late Ayrton Senna to its London sale on October 31. The car, chassis T000233, marks the second time in two years that the Brazilian driver’s NSX has come to market, and it arrives with a presale estimate of £500,000–£800,000 ($682,000–$1.1 million).

Senna raced for McLaren for six seasons in Formula 1, winning three World Drivers’ Championships in 1988, 1990, and 1991, each of them powered by Honda — first with a turbocharged 1.5-liter V-6, later with a 3.5-liter V-10. Off the track, Senna’s technical acumen made him an invaluable partner to his engineers, a trait that extended directly into Honda’s development of the NSX road car.

Honda unveiled the “New Sportscar eXperimental” in early 1989, believing it had a genuine world-class supercar on its hands. After Senna drove an early prototype, he told the car’s engineers that it felt fragile and lacked stiffness. Honda’s engineers responded by increasing chassis rigidity by 50 percent and revising the suspension before Senna drove the car again. The resulting NSX has been praised by enthusiasts as a benchmark driver’s car for 35 years.

In recognition of his contribution, Honda gifted Senna three NSXs for personal use — two finished in black, and the car now being offered, finished in Formula Red with a black roof. Senna kept the car in Portugal and used it at his property there, including as personal transportation to the Estoril circuit for the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix. The car also appears in the documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood.

Following Senna’s death at Imola in 1994, the NSX passed through a series of owners. Since its 2024 sale for an undisclosed sum, the car has been located in Japan.

The offering comes amid a sustained rise in NSX values, with average #2 (excellent) condition prices up nearly 250 percent over the past 14 years. Recent results underscore the trend: in April 2025, a 2002 NSX-T sold for a record $377,500, and in May 2025, Broad Arrow sold a Japan-market-only 2003 NSX-R for $1.06 million at its Villa d’Este auction, a record for the model.

While both of those results involved higher-performance NSX variants than Senna’s early, 271-horsepower example, two factors stand to influence bidding for chassis T000233: the car’s well-documented ownership by one of Formula 1’s most influential drivers, and the broader strength of the current collector car market. The 2026 auction season has seen sustained demand in the supercar segment, including record results at this year’s Monterey Car Week sales.

RM Sotheby’s London sale takes place October 31.