Rare Ayrton Senna memorabilia sells for eye-watering sum at auction
Ayrton Senna's helmet in action above has received a princely sum at auction.
A used race-winning helmet worn by Ayrton Senna has gone under the hammer, fetching a whopping £500,000 at auction at Silverstone.
The helmet, worn by the then-McLaren driver for the 1992 British, German and Hungarian Grands Prix, fetched more than four times its pre-sale estimate at a Budds auction on Tuesday.
Rare Ayrton Senna helmet sells for £500,000 at auction
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The auction listing detailed ‘extensive signs of race use’, with identifying marks such as stone chips on the Shoei design – which also came with a certificate of authenticity from McLaren itself.
Prior estimates placed its value between £80,000-£120,000, but such was the interest that the price more than quadrupled through the auction process.
While the 1992 season was largely dominated by Nigel Mansell on his way to the Drivers’ Championship, Senna took three victories along the way in Monaco, Italy and Hungary, with the Brazilian having used the newly-auctioned helmet at the Hungaroring.
Despite Senna’s race victory on the day, second place in Budapest was enough for Mansell to finally secure a world title after years of competing at the top of Formula 1, doing so with five races left to spare in 1992.
Another noteworthy feature of the helmet is it having been worn at Hockenheim, which would become the only race in which Mansell, Senna and Michael Schumacher would share the same podium.
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Other Senna-related items at the auction fetched the highest prices of the day, with £17,000 having been paid twice for used Williams gloves from 1994, and a signed pair from his time at Lotus, while a signed pair of Senna’s Williams race boots sold for £14,000.
While a huge sum for a helmet, it does not quite break the all-time record for a Formula 1 helmet at auction.
Gilles Villeneuve’s final race-winning helmet, used at the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix, became the first-ever $1million helmet earlier this year, beating a previous record held by Senna’s 1992 Belgian Grand Prix helmet, which was previously sold for £720,000.
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