The red 1991 Honda NSX that Ayrton Senna drove while visiting Portugal changed hands for £871,250 at RM Sotheby's sale in London on Saturday, 31 October, setting a record price for the model. Offered with a pre-sale estimate of £500,000 to £800,000, the car drew a long contest between bidders in the room and on the telephone before finishing comfortably above the top of its expected range.

What carried the price was documentation rather than mere association. The car, chassis T000233, still wears its original Portuguese registration SX-25-59, and the lot included its original warranty book and full paperwork, together with a copy of a Honda fax that the auction house cited as confirming Senna's ownership. Honda routinely delivered this same vehicle to the three-time world champion whenever he was in Portugal, and RM Sotheby's described it as the production car most closely linked to Senna outside Formula 1. Senna also played a part in shaping the NSX itself, testing prototypes and feeding his impressions back to Honda's engineers during the car's development.

After Senna's death in 1994 the car was re-registered ten months later and passed through a succession of private owners before being consigned to the London sale. Its condition and paper trail, rather than celebrity alone, explain why collectors pursued it past the estimate: few road cars can show so direct and provable a connection to a driver of Senna's standing.

The NSX was one of the headline lots in a sale staged ahead of the London-to-Brighton Veteran Run, in which RM Sotheby's offered 58 cars, two buses and a selection of memorabilia with a combined estimate of about £40.4 million; 87 percent of the vehicles found buyers. The most expensive lot of the day was Ferrari's own 2022 Daytona SP3 press car, which made £8.16 million despite bidding that stopped just short of its low estimate, while twelve cars in total reached seven-figure sums in euro terms.