The beautiful fail

About the Work Honda is considered a serious manufacturer but produces boring bikes. The race, ‘24 Hours of Le Mans’ is the most prestigious endurance motorcycle race and considered as the place of re-enchantment for the brand, where it restores its image. It was very important to be able to reaffirm the sporting dimension of the brand and to beat the other manufacturers. The 2022 edition had a high stake for our client Honda. If they won, they would become the most successful manufacturer in history. Unfortunately, the team finished in third place. Having watched Honda Moto lose at the doors of eternal recognition, we remembered a quote from Soichiro Honda: “Failing, is the only way to learn how not to fail”. Keeping that deeply in mind, we chose meaningful photos from the 24h du Mans race which highlights key moments of the race and, for some, could even explain the failure. Our works showed the failure… to avoid failing again. We took more than 4500 pictures during the 24 hours race to transcribe the tension of the 24 hours race as well as possible. Then, we collected the engine oil from the bike that participated in the race. We used this oil as ink to write our story. We screen-printed 24 images transcribing the joys, the doubts, the disappointments of the Honda team. We developed our own process with a specialized screen-print laboratory to be able to use our engine oil as ink. Tests after tests, fails after fails, we made sure to find the right composition to create our unique screen-prints with this oil. The screen-prints (60 x 80 cm) were exposed at the motorcycle show in Lyon.