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When Gerald Davison joined the Honda Motor Company as a young import and distribution manager in 1968, the firm had just withdrawn from all racing activities, despite Mike Hailwood winning the 250 and 350cc world championships for Honda and finishing 2nd in the 500cc class on the big Honda-Four.
Although, as an ex-racer and a great fan of the sport, it didn’t initially trouble Davison that Honda would rest on its laurels, by the early 1970s – when he was the senior manager for Honda in the UK, and responsible for everything bar the sales department – he felt there was something missing and decided to do something about it. He says: “My objective was to make being a Honda owner a truly unique experience, and we were heading for 50% of the two-wheel market in the UK – the highest penetration of any market, and second only in volume terms to the USA. In expanding our operations, I was increasingly frustrated that we had no racing presence at all. You could be a Honda owner, and yet all you could see at a race meeting was Honda circuit advertising.”
While he was a huge fan of racing, Davison was also a shrewd businessman, and knew he would need to get a return for any money spent on the sport. “Although I was a former racer and had followed Honda’s track success race-by-race right through the 1960s,” he says. “I did not see the
