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By 1922 Honda was working in an auto shop in Tokyo called Art Shokai. Initially he had done menial tasks, but more and more he became a trusted mechanic. He worked on the racing car Art Daimler, then the famous machine born from the marriage of a Curtiss aircraft engine and an American Mitchell chassis. The need to make parts for this monster taught him things that would be invaluable later in life.
When Shinichi Sakibahara raced the car for the first time at Tsurumi, and won the Chairman's Trophy, the young man riding alongside as his mechanic was Soichiro Honda. He was 17 years old.
As customers brought in Mercedes, Lincolns and Daimlers for attention, Honda's experience grew in proportion with his ambition. Four years after that first race he started his own Art Shokai auto shop in Hamamatsu . It opened its doors for business on the day that, thousands of miles away on Daytona Beach , Frank Lockhart crashed to his death trying to break the land speed record. April 25, 1928. The American track star and the Japanese kid lived in different worlds but had much in common besides their willingness to take a risk. Lockhart's mechanical genius had set new standards for record car design, and in the years that followed Soichiro Honda's own technological ideas would similarly revolutionize Japan 's motorcycle and automobile industries.
Yet Honda himself never sought dominance in his homeland. At a time when nationalism was at its peak, he always saw the bigger picture. "I knew that if I could succeed in the world market," he said, "then automatically it would follow that we led in the Japanese market."
Employees in the Art Shokai shop soon came to understand that sloppy workmanship and poor performance would not be tolerated, but while his tool-hurling antics did not always encourage loyalty, those who stayed recognized his total determination to succeed and to establish an engineering business second to none. And Honda was sufficiently aware of his own managerial shortcomings.
