The brief from Honda in May 2000 was 'make us famous and make us some great ads' and we've been trying to do that ever since.

We at Wieden + Kennedy [our agency, which is behind Honda's ads] reckon we've made some pretty good ones over the years. Take 'Cog', for example, that had people dropping jaws and pints in bars all over Europe when it aired.

After that came 'Grr', which had people singing 'hate something, change something, make something better'.

Then at the beginning of the year we were all in Japan shooting 'Yume no chikara', which is the ad with large balloons coming out of people's ears to represent their ideas.

While there, we managed to take a day off from the pre-production meetings and head off to visit Honda's racing track called Twin Ring Motegi. It's a good four-hour drive out of Tokyo to the facilility, but is really worth the trip.

It's perched on top of a mountain and is literally two racing circuits - one is an oval for Indy car racing and the other is for F1 cars - and almost all of each is visible from the stands.

We drove the tracks in the torrential rain in a Honda Step Wagon MPV, which was terrifyingly hysterical.

In the afternoon we trundled off to watch the Asimo show (starring Honda's humanoid robot - if you ever get the chance, you should try to go), then on to The Honda Collection Hall, where we met the somewhat puzzled but very friendly Tony Ikeda. You could see him wondering 'who are these crazy Englishmen?'

He showed us around the amazing collection talking about his favorites and why they were important to Honda like the Richie Ginther RA272, which won Honda's first F1 Grand Prix in Mexico on October 24, 1965 and, of course, Senna's MP4/4, which dominated F1 in 1988 - the car won 15 out of the 16 Grands Prix that year.

I mentioned that I'd seen some of them at Goodwood and enjoyed the noise of the engines being warmed up.

With this, a huge smile broke out over his face and he sent us through a door - presumably marked 'Do Not Enter' but in Japanese - out into his garage area where the original 1961 Isle of Man TT-winning, Mike Hailwood 2RC143 stood.

The engineers (one of whom looked like Elvis) prepped it and then fired it up for us. The sound was ear splittingly incredible; we all stood there like small boys gazing in a state of excited awe at this tiny bike. All grown men with little in common other than being huge Honda fans and total petrolheads.

On the way back to Tokyo - in the rain - we thought, wouldn't it be great if everyone could experience all these fantastic Honda products, why can't we have a Collection Hall in the UK?