Company founder and engineering visionary, Soichiro Honda, in a picture which epitomises his passion for racing.

His obsession embraced improvisation, it conquered failure as he learnt hard lessons on quality control and then it created the most sophisticated design ethos to establish a peerless reputation.

He was a maverick genius who bucked the trend. This was not an organised mind with traditional values, more an eccentric loner who new that his innate talents would take him to where he wanted to be.

It was ironic that such a Ione-off talent should emerge from a culture of conventionalism, reticence and humility!

As two-strokes began to threaten the success of the four-stroke, Soichiro Honda’s imagination took over and, with his engineering team, the Six was created using “miniaturisation” to squeeze the compact six-cylinder power unit into four-cylinder parameters.