Senna's Hosepipe NSX Sets a World Record

Ayrton Senna never needed a valet. In the most famous picture of him with a road car, he is crouched in jeans and a buttoned-down shirt, hose in hand, washing a red Honda NSX himself. On October 31, that exact car crossed the block as Lot 155 at RM Sotheby's London Auction and sold for £871,250, about $1.17 million. RM Sotheby's calls it a new world auction record for the Honda NSX.

The house had put it at £500,000 to £800,000 before the sale. The room went straight past the top of that.

The car Honda kept in Lisbon

Senna's relationship with Honda started in 1987, when the Japanese company began supplying engines to Team Lotus. By the start of 1991 he already had two world titles and was about to win a third. Under an agreement between Honda Motor Company and the driver, Honda gave him access to NSXs for personal use. There were two black cars, and there was this one: chassis T000233, Formula Red with a black roof over black leather.

It was imported by Honda Automobil de Portugal and registered on March 22, 1991, as SX-25-59. The car was stored in Lisbon and delivered to Senna every time he arrived in the country. He had bought a property at the Quinta do Lago resort, and he used the car through the European leg of that season. He drove it to the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, a race he qualified third for and finished second. The car is in the 1992 documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood, with Senna dumping the clutch and spinning up the rear wheels on camera.

The paper behind the legend

Here is the part that matters to anyone writing a check this size. Senna was the driver, never the titled owner. The car was registered to Honda's Portuguese importer, so the case rests on the paperwork, as Modern Car Collector laid out. It came with its warranty book, its Portuguese ownership history and a copy of a Honda fax confirming the Senna provenance, which RM says Honda Motor Europe has reaffirmed.

The trail after him is plain. Ten months after Senna was killed at Imola, the car was registered in Lisbon by Laboa Etablissement in February 1995. Honda's own dealership, Nipomotor, had it by September 1997. The owner of a Faro dealership bought it in November 2009, and Robert McFagan bought it in 2013, freighted it to the United Kingdom and registered it for the road in May 2016. According to Motor1, it went back to Japan in 2024 before returning to London for the sale.

McFagan also bought a second Senna NSX, a black one, in 2014. Comparing the two cars' service books, he found entries by the same mechanic on consecutive days before the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix, according to RM's editorial as reported by Modern Car Collector. That kind of proof is hard to manufacture after the fact.

A record night in London

The NSX was one of three world records on the night. RM's London sale grossed £36,550,950, the highest total for a collector car auction ever held in the UK, passing the mark Bonhams set at the Goodwood Festival of Speed sale in 2013. The top lot was a 2022 Ferrari Daytona SP3 at £8,161,250. An Aston Martin Valkyrie Coupé set its own model record at £2,761,250.

Those are bigger numbers. This is the one with a face on it. Modern Car Collector reports the car shows about 63,000 kilometres, with a manual gearbox and a specification that is ordinary for an NSX in every way but one. Honda built the NSX to be driven every day, and Senna did exactly that. The one he rinsed off with a garden hose is now the most expensive NSX ever sold at auction.