My first car was a Datsun 510. It was 1983 and the Dime was THE hot car to have. It wasn't running when I got it and people were doing the L20 swap, five-speed swaps, JDM wheels, etc. I rebuilt the motor but never finished the project. I was in high school and was pretty distracted. I eventually got another 510 and did it up nice with an L20, paint and a few tricks. That was the first time I ever worked on cars. I had no visions of anything like DRT back then.
I was an avid street racer in the years after high school. I ran a Mitsubishi Starion and a wild 1990 Nissan 300ZX twin turbo. The Starion was my introduction to turbo cars. It was an '88 ESI with the front-mount intercooler. That Starion was a good car, rear drive. Take the wastegate hose off which bumped it to 14 psi and that thing ran like hell. I squeezed nitrous on that car. Made a lot of money with that car.
The 300ZX was a money machine as well. Actually, I lost my first race, for $5,000, but had a good night the rest of the night and made it all back and then some. It was actually good to lose. If you come out a winner people will be afraid to run you or you would have to spot them a bunch of cars. We didn't race a quarter mile, we had a one mile course that we used. When I gave car lengths it is how many cars behind me; not in front. So I would go once the other car came past me and with a mile to go there was more time to close the gap. I had a tremendously strong car. The Z liked the long distance runs. I gave a tremendous amount of cars up to 20 cars, 23 cars a couple of times.
We ran on the Henry Hudson Parkway. It started at the Dyckman St. entrance and ran to the 'Next Exit' sign for the George Washington Bridge it is a perfect flying mile. It wasn't straight; it had a curve to it and it went slightly uphill and slightly downhill. We had to run interference up the highway to block people from coming on the highway. It took some time, the people got pissed off but we didn't care, it was racing.
The Fast & The FuriousIt started as a write-up in Vibe magazine. Actually it started before that when Kenneth Li was working on an earlier story. I have an early draft of the article. We spent a long time, 2 1/2 or three years on it. I would take him to all the race spots in New York and he thought it was cool that everybody knew me. I said, "Hey, this is what I do." He would show up with cameras and recording equipment and I had to explain that it was all cool; he wasn't a cop or anything.
I was the Racer X character in the article and as that first story was coming to a close Ken said he had never gotten a ride in a fast car so I hooked him into my Civic and we made the Hudson run at 130-plus mph. The guy was going all crazy in the car, it was funny, he was all scared.
There were a bunch of different story angles. One had me as the guy everybody wanted to race. The guy you had to beat to make a name for yourself. There was a young up-and-coming type out gunning for me. Then the story was just about me.
It's funny because that line Vin Diesel says in the movie that was a line I used to describe myself. "I live my life a quarter mile at a time.' When I heard that in the theater I laughed hard. Also, the scene where they chase Vin Diesel and he parks in a garage and walks out, that actually happened to me. I told Ken that story. There a lot of things that only he and I knew about that made it into the movie; things that happened to me in real life.
When the movie was ramping up one of the writers came to New York and told me the article was going to become a movie. I didn't believe it and thought 'this guy is nuts.' I grew up in a part of town where nobody's life was interesting; my life wasn't that interesting. Obviously I was wrong because Ken sold the story for pretty good money.