Senna's Acura NSX headed for the auction block

Long before McLaren named a limited run hypercar after him, there was only one road car you'd associate with the great Ayrton Senna: the Honda NSX. 

Senna and Honda had a strong relationship. He raced with the brand's engines for six seasons across spells at Lotus and McLaren, and took all three of his F1 championships with Honda power.
At that time, Honda was developing its first supercar for the road in a bid to match the performance of Ferrari's entry-level offerings but at a lower price and with better reliability and usability. 

During the NSX’s development, Senna's former Lotus teammate Satoru Nakajima carried out a lot of the on-track development work at Suzuka, as did Honda development driver Motoharu Kurosawa. Senna, however, had a couple of opportunities to get in the car, but deemed it "a little fragile", persuading Honda to stiffen the chassis. 

Kurosawa had also noticed it during testing at the Nürburgring, where the mule car was hastily strengthened while feedback was sent to Japan where it would go on to improve the production aluminum monocoque. Eventually the car was stiffened by over 50% but weight was only increased minimally.

As a token of gratitude to Senna for his input and his two – at the time – F1 titles, the company gifted him three NSXs in early 1991. Two black cars and one red one were given to him and the red one, chassis T000233, resided in Portugal, being kept in Lisbon and delivered to Senna whenever he was in the county. 

In 1991, he used his car to commute from his home in Quinta do Lago to the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril where he qualified third and finished second. A year later Senna and the car appeared in the documentary 'Ayrton Senna: Racing Is In My Blood', but perhaps most famously, Senna was pictured washing the car, giving the car its nickname of “the hosepipe car”.

After Senna's death in 1994, it was registered in Lisbon by Laboa Etablissement, and by 1997 it was under the care of Honda dealership Nipomotor by September 1997. The owner of MSCAR Comércio de Automóveis SA purchased the car in 2009, before a Brit by the name of Robert McFagan purchased it in 2013 and had it registered for road use in the UK three years later. 

On the 25th anniversary of Senna's death in 2019, it was driven round Imola by Giancarlo Minardi before it returned to Japan in 2024 by the current owner. However, it is now temporarily back in the UK to be sold once again at RM Sotheby's London Auction on October 31, with a pre-auction estimate of £500,000-£800,000. Included in the sale will be a warranty book, Portuguese ownership history documentation, and a copy of the Honda fax confirming the car’s Senna provenance.