The company has a strong racing heritage as Hirotoshi Honda began building his own racing car, in a workshop at his father’s house, shortly before he graduated from Nihon University in 1965. Masao Kimura is a veteran with more than 50 race victories in Honda sports cars and single-seaters and worked for Honda R&D and then Honda Racing Service before he helped Hirotoshi Honda establish Mugen.

The company specializes in tuning Honda engines, beginning with the 1200 cc Honda Civic engine, but has since developed and can now design and build both two-stroke and four-stroke engines and manufacture many of the major components.

Mugen ultimately intends to build its own road cars and the first step towards this was the creation of bodykits for the Honda Ballade CR-X in 1984. Since then, the company has produced a number of body kits for Honda machinery, culminating in 1992 in the Mugen NSX prototype.

Mugen was restructured in late 2003 following Hirotoshi Honda’s tax evasion scandal, and a new company called M-TEC was established shortly in early 2004. M-TEC retained the right to use the Mugen trademark and is based in the current headquarters in Asaka, Saitama, in the northern suburbs of Tokyo and close to the Honda R&D facility at Wako, and will retain the company’s existing staff but will be legally unconnected with the old firm. The newly restructured company is now headed by Mugen board member Shin Nagaosa. Nagaosa was the manager of the engineering division of the company and in recent years has been largely involved with running Mugen’s NSX racing program.