Ayrton Senna Wants You To Just Move It

While the world tends to idealize Ayrton Senna nearly 20 years after his death, we shouldn't forget that he was a big racing star with big sponsorship deals. Sometimes those sponsors would just straight up give him a new family. And sometimes those sponsors would saddle him with an old Honda Prelude.

Not to say that the Prelude was a particularly bad car, but it's no McLaren MP4/6, the car Senna drove for the 1991 Formula One season. Powered by a Honda V12, it propelled Senna to his third world championship.

The Prelude heralded an era of big front-wheel drive coupes that we haven't really seen from the Japanese manufacturers over the past few years. Save for the Nissan Altima coupe, they've been a bit rare these days, and you may see a base Prelude trolling the grungier parts of town. It's in that odd period of way-too-old-to-be-cool and way-too-young-to-be-a-classic. The top of the line VTEC model did sport 190 horsepower, though, so there's that.

I'm not really sure what Ayrton Senna is rambling on about in this commercial for the Japanese market, though it might not have mattered. When the fourth-generation Prelude debuted in 1992, Senna was at the top of his game, and he could prattle on about "seeing clearly" and "safety and excitement" while a wheezy four-cylinder barely revs in the background.

You don't really see commercials like this starring today's biggest F1 stars, though. Sure, you might see Kimi Raikkonen hawking a Breitling watch on a poster somewhere, but Sebastian Vettel extolling the driving dynamics of the fat little Infiniti QX60?

Now that I'd want to see.