There is a lot of debate around the cars once owned by celebrities, and whether their custodianship really is a driving factor to double, triple, or even quadruple the price of what is almost always an already rather expensive set of wheels, or is it simply used as the ultimate marketing tactic to sell the dream. The answer, of course is entirely subjective, but chassis T000233, a 1991 Honda NSX, is a piece of Ayrton Senna's private life that simply cannot be marked as anything other than historic.
Senna's relationship with this particular NSX wasn't a sponsorship photo-op. He'd been testing Honda's prototype and, with characteristic bluntness, told the engineers the chassis felt "a little fragile", the sort of feedback that led Honda to stiffen the frame by 50 per cent before the car ever reached customers. If someone like Senna gives you advice on how to make what was most likely an already impressive car that little bit better, or in this case, 50 per cent better, you best be sure to take it. Honda then gave Senna personal use of the car in Portugal during 1991, the year he'd go on to claim his third world title, and genuinely used it as intended.
He commuting from his home in Quinta do Lago to the Estoril Grand Prix, famously spinning the rear wheels for the cameras as he went, and, in the image, that's followed this car ever since, washing it himself in jeans and a buttoned shirt with nothing more glamorous than a garden hose. It's the "hosepipe car," and it's a rare glimpse of a man who spent most of his public life in a helmet.
Even after Senna parted ways with the Japanese supercar, its provenance remained an impressive one. It was imported to the United Kingdom in 2016, and then, poignantly made an appearance at Imola in 2019 for the 25th anniversary of Senna's death, driven that day by Minardi's own Giancarlo Minardi. There will be faster NSXs, cleaner NSXs, probably even rarer ones, but there's only one that Senna drove to a Grand Prix in his own time, and only one that he cleaned himself on a quiet afternoon in Portugal, and its estimate of anything upwards of £500,000 is, we predict, more likely a starting figure.
London, 31 Oct
