Michimasa Fujino sat up in bed one night in 1997, looked for the nearest piece of blank paper (it was the back of a page in his wall calendar) and drew the HondaJet before he forgot it. The whole 'power of dreams' thing isn't just a marketing campaign. Soichiro Honda was obsessed by them and called the company's first completely self-made scooter 'The Dream'. It's a shame that Fujino was awake when he had the idea for Honda's first aircraft. But at least he was in bed. As a typical Honda lightbulb-moment of engineering creativity, it'll do fine.

I've been obsessed with the HondaJet since I first read about it a decade ago. I don't know much about planes, although I do feel the general warmth that car enthusiasts have for other things that have engines and go fast. But I do like Honda, and like other Honda fans I wonder how a company that got it so right with the Super Cub and the original Civic and the engine in Senna's McLaren could get it so wrong recently with its reporting failures and monumental fines in the US and with the engine in Alonso's McLaren. We can't expect a big corporation to be consistently brilliant, and there have often been times when Honda's standard road car line-up has been uninspiring. Critics might argue that this is one of those times. But the HondaJet's unfettered, clean-sheet design and the story of its genesis make you hope that old Honda is alive and well.