Sensorless control of an axial flux permanent magnet motor drive is proposed and tested. The motor is not purposely designed for sensorless control and shows a very small inherent saliency. This significantly affects the saliency-based position estimation in the low speed region. Other non-idealities, such as the non-sinusoidal back-EMF waveforms and possible misalignment between stator and rotor make the control more challenging. A robust sensorless control scheme is proposed, able to deal with these non-idealities with a rather simple implementation. The position estimation is based on a closed loop hybrid observer of the permanent magnet flux linkage. Experimental results report torque and speed sensorless control.