Ayrton Senna - Race of Champions, Kart Nose & Race-Worn Gloves, Bercy 1993

There is one moment in Ayrton Senna's career in which he raced dressed in white: no Marlboro red, no team badge on his chest. It is December 1993, in Paris, and the white tells a precise story. Senna was closing his move from McLaren to Williams, a man suspended between two chapters, and for his last kart race he appeared with his personal sponsors alone — Nacional, TAG Heuer, his own Driven to Perfection mark. This set comes from exactly there: the nose cone of the number 2 kart he drove that day, and the gloves he had on his hands.

The first Elf Masters Karting took place on 19 December 1993 in the indoor arena of the Palais Omnisport de Paris-Bercy, before some 24,000 spectators across two days, on an idea of Philippe Streiff. More than sixty drivers on a 600-metre circuit, more than a dozen Formula 1 men on track together: Prost, Hill, Herbert, de Cesaris, Martini, Panis, Alliot. Bercy was the last duel between Senna and Prost, and the last competitive kart race of Senna's career — one he took seriously enough to have a kart shipped to Brazil to train. In the final he was closing on de Cesaris when his kart failed. Prost won; Senna left Paris with an image that became iconography: white suit, yellow helmet, number 2.

The centrepiece is the fibreglass nose cone of Senna's number 2 kart, white, with the original TAG Heuer graphics and the Senna Driven to Perfection logo applied at the time. It carries the marks of that weekend — abrasions, scuffs and micro-impacts along the lower edge, the same visible in the photographs published from Bercy. It has not been polished for sale: it is the surface as the track left it. Authentication is by photomatch, the point-by-point correspondence between the details of the shell and the race images published at the time, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Completing the set is the pair of OMP gloves worn in the kart, in red fabric and pale leather, certified directly by OMP.

Scarcity here is not a sales argument but a matter of record. Of that number 2 kart there is a single nose cone; objects genuinely used in competition by Senna are few, and those tied to an unrepeatable event — his last kart race, his last confrontation with Prost — almost never appear on the market. What narrows the field further is the livery: the neutral white of the McLaren-Williams transition belongs to a window of a few weeks, impossible to find at any other point in his career. And there is the internal coherence of the lot, nose and gloves coming from the same handful of minutes on track, documented by the same photographs.

Material of this kind leaves the market slowly and does not return: it settles into private collections. The demand side has meanwhile widened, with the thirtieth anniversary of 1994 and the recent biographical series bringing a new audience to verified race-used Senna artifacts.