WORLD CHAMPION’S HONDA

MULTIPLE World F1 champion, the late Ayrton Senna, helped develop the Honda NSX in the late 1980s; this example belonged to another F1 champion, Jenson Button, who along with Senna also appears in the McLarenHonda roll call.

Button was the number one driver for the eponymous team when the manual NSX, chassis number T200010 was registered by Honda UK for him in April 2004, the same year that Button claimed his first F1 pole position at Imola. Button used the Honda flagship when he was in the UK.

Since Button the Long Beach Blue NSX has had three owners, the most recent acquiring it in 2013 and over the past 14 years it has travelled a mere 3,750 kilometres. Throughout its life it has been superbly maintained and is being sold with a full service history, confirmation of Button being its first steerer, complete tool kit, a complete key set and original sales brochure, that presumably Button never bothered to read.

Created to challenge the likes of Porsche, Ferrari, Jaguar and Lamborghini, the aluminiumbodied, transverse V6 engined Honda NSX set a new benchmark for engineering excellence within Honda. For Honda it was their masterpiece, created by Chief Designer Masahito Nakano, engineered by Shigeru Uehara with the final developmental touches benefitting from Senna's sublime skills.

The NSX accelerated from 0-100km/h in 5.7 seconds on the way to an attention getting 275km/h top speed. It overturned conventional thinking of how a supercar should perform and was as easy to drive as a Civic.

The Honda NSX was a supercar that could be used as a daily driver. Unlike some of its rivals of the day, the NSX was never embedded with, shall we say, characteristics that made almost every journey a lottery as to whether you drove home or arrived on a flat top.