The landing outside the conference room where Honda’s president announced that the company was quitting F1, is rich with clues to how desperately Takeo Fukui wanted to avoid that happening.

Honda has pulled out of F1 in the past, but this time had a detectable air of finality about it: it is a withdrawal that exposes the acute hideousness of the global economic situation, but which now also calls into question the entire raison d’etre of Honda.

It is not just the photographs of great moments from Honda racing history, but the hundreds of other little signs that mark the company out as philosophically different from its peers: the jet engines, the scrambler bikes and the brilliantly articulated limbs of Asimo the robot.

Toyota appears to be in F1 for the prestige and the profile: Honda is there because it has engine oil in the blood.

Fukui too is not your average chief executive. He is a businessman whose daytime job is to run one of the world’s most successful automakers, but whose true love is running motorbikes, cars and aeroplanes at extremely high speeds.

The company founder, Soichiro Honda, once famously said that “the value of life can be measured by how many times your soul has been deeply stirred”.

Fukui, who claims he joined Honda because of its association with Formula One racing, was chosen because he was always going to keep that spirit alive. Today he was a visibly broken man.

Mr Fukui recently told reporters that, if he could, he would spend “a trillion yen” to have Honda’s F1 team win the championship.

In an interview with The Times he once insisted on being photographed not in his boardroom, but on the back of Honda’s most powerful racing motorbike.

On a separate occasion – a gloriously sunny company barbeque at Honda’s own Motegi Circuit north of Tokyo – he ditched the formalities, put on a helmet and went for a high-speed spin around the track on his own.

Mr Fukui, in common with other Honda presidents, has always touted the huge value of the company’s various non-core sidelines as motivators, enticers and sources of competitive innovation.

If the downturn has now changed Honda’s mind about the true value of those sidelines – especially if the pressure has come from shareholders – today’s move could represent a rare gasp of knee-jerk short-termism for a company that has always played the long game.

Even Honda’s lack of recent wins in F1 should not have upset Mr Fukui too much, and certainly not enough to merit a withdrawal of this suddenness – after all, the founder’s other great saying was that “success is 99 per cent failure”.

The robots, the motor sport and even the battle to produce the world’s best lawnmower were all supposedly part of a grand Honda strategy of getting the best engineers in the world to join the company.

All those strange divisions offered an implicit promise to Honda’s people – work hard on designing the next minicar for the Indian housewife, and on your next rotation you can be re-crafting the wing mirrors on Jenson Button’s car, or tweaking the eye sockets on Asimo.

Take that promise away, and you just have a car factory.

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