Tonight coming home from a combination quick dinner out and food shopping we came across two vehicles that caused us to burst out laughing at one driver and a thumbs up nod to the driver in front of him a bit.
The first driver we approached from behind was driving the usual ricer (random image), minus the fake airfoil. This Gen Yer or so was groovin’ to some crap called music these days on his sterero and enjoyed revin’ the engine at each stoplight. Well if you call the ringy-dingy, two-stroke sort of a tinny pipsqueak sound a rev these days. Think sharp pains in the ears.
He had to be oblivious to the Baby Boomer several cars ahead of him driving what can best described as something like this (random image). At each red light, the low, deep and throaty V-fucking-8 idle was music to the ears. You know it. You can feel it all across your body. About as good warm chocolate dripping across her breast on a hot summer, sweaty evening. But I digress.
As the light turned green at every intersection the ricer sound was akin to 12-inch chainsaw rev on its last legs. On the other hand that V-fucking-8 rumbled every so slowly, probably because he had straight pipes. Yet when he had to accelerate a bit, we’re talking deep throat hard pops that said pure muscle.
Kids these days have no idea what a real car is all about.
Good thing I’ve largely gotten out of the scene, or I would be insulted. For every 5 douchebags who put a giant exhaust tip on their automatic Civic, there’s one guy who has taken the time, the money, and the effort to make a genuinely fast car.
Of course, working on the “ricers” does require some knowledge of computers, which the knuckle dragging 8-baller who roars up and down a strip in his $1000 worth of chrome and primer paint smog exempt monster while trying to relive his teenage years and the last time he was cool would know nothing about.
Someone took a Honda Integra at full pelt down the Glenshane pass, when I was at a petrol station at the bottom. Quite irresponsible driving, but the well tuned engine sounded great at full revs.
Besides, don’t most of those classics struggle to outpace a Honda Accord these days?
Our neighbors across the streets have a driveway full of rice-mobiles complete with coffee can muffler tips and go-fast stickers. I have no idea if they can actually go fast, but in the driveway, they sound wretched. This morning, they were giving one of the cars what we used to call a “Polish tune-up” - rapidly alternating between revving the engine hard and at idle. Floating the valves? Check. Backfires? Check.
Like** Santo Rugger,** I just show them a little kick to the throttle when I start up the Hemi.
ETA: Oh, as for outpacing, I’d like to see an Accord get up to 60 MPH in under 20 seconds pulling a 6500-pound trailer.
However, you should look up rally racing before slamming the whole style of car. Sure the cars would lose at a straight run 0-60. But they’ll kick the Corvette’s ass at stopping, turning, keeping control on dirt or gravel, and going a long ways before running out of gas. They’re modern versions of Gran Turismo cars like the Porsche Carrera or Ford GT40 (which was remade as a muscle car for some reason…)
Actually I think the rally cars could smash a big blocker 0-60, remeber they have lower gearing than the track cars, and all wheel drive, and torque distribution, and they don’t carry the weight.
It does have to be said of course that there are plenty of BMWs, Mercs, and other manufacturers in both these race series, but I guess they probably conform to the OPs rather blinkered image of a ‘ricer’.
Wonder why we don’t see any American cars in GT, WTC, WRC, F1, F2. I have seen events where even the support vehicles could blow the types of cars so beloved of the OP right into the weeds.
Oh I forgot, the answer is that the Americans are always world champions in stuff that the rest of the world does not give a flying fig for.
I guess its a perception, but I personally think that the term ‘ricer’ is actually getting very close to being racist - because its a stereotype that is based around an ill informed individuals perception of the type of car that is produced by a certain nationality - otherwise why would you use the term in the first place.
Around here it refers to white kids whose parents purchased for them a fuel efficient Japanese import and who have added 800 pounds of plastic shit and stickers to the outside of it such that it becomes a gaudy monstrosity.
The Japanese make good cars. Suburban white boys with too much of mommy and daddy’s money turn them into ridiculous hunks of bee-hive sounding crap.
This is just the latest in the Horsepower vs Handling wars. It’s been going on since the first Triumph got brought back to the US after WWII, and it’ll never end. Some people live their lives in ten to twelve second increments, and some people think that the real measure of a car is what happens going into and coming out of corners.
Sports Car vs Hot Rod. Sports Car vs Muscle Car. Ricer vs Muscle Car.
My rule of thumb is that if my Matrix could shut you down, you weren’t trying hard enough in either department.
Though, these days, it’s as much Displacement vs RPM, as well. I’d like to see that Hemi handle 9,000 RPM without melting.
You do of course realize that your WRX, or the average ricer bears about as much resemblance to real rally car as me riding a bike resembles Lance Armstrong. My bike has two wheels, and is built by Trek. Lance’s bike also has two wheels and is built by Trek. End of similarity. Ain’t nobody going to confuse me with Lance. Don’t confuse a ricer, even a highly modded ricer for a real race car.
No discussion of The rice culture would be complete without a link to how to get 50 free horsepower from a coffee can. (Sound!) Check out some of their other mods here.
But Duckster, back in the good old days of '69 Camaros and Hemi 'Cudas, there were plenty of wanna-bes as well.
How many stock, otherwise unmodified (is that redundant?) cars do ya’ll remember seeing with traction bars added to the rear axle? Often-times, the car wouldn’t even produce enough torque to snub them up to the frame.
Nothing said “Singer Sewing Machine” like a custom dual exhaust on a 4-cylinder or 6-cylinder pickup.
I remember when Starksy and Hutch was a hit on TV, some teenagers down the road wanted their rustbucket (I think it was a Falcon) to looked cool and jacked-up, so they inserted some bricks as lift blocks between the axle and the spring shackle.
Holley would have went out of business if people only bought the carburetors that were suitable for their engines. So would half of the camshaft makers.
Heck, even I was guilty of it to a degree. I built a stroked 350 Chevy small block out of spare parts with no other mods expect a better cam, an out-of-the-box Holley four-barrel, and some headers. I dropped it into half-ton Chevy pickup in place of a six-cylinder. I installed a junk-yard TH400 with a shift kit and went drag racing. I thought I was bad-ass when I took the pipes off and ran open headers.
[radio voice] “At Green Valley Raceway! Super-Chevy Sunday, Sunday, Sunnnndayyy …” [/radio voice]
You might want to check out this rather definitive site which goes into the whole riceboy phenomenon in detail. Go ahead, take a good look at some of those cars and then come back and tell me how we’re being all mean by getting derogatory about those POS cars. As the disclaimer from the “What is Rice-Boy” section of that site reads:
Really, it appears to me that the only ill informed person in this thread would be you. If you aren’t familiar with the whole “ricer” phenomenon as it manifests in the US you could just ask a few questions instead of making a bunch of unwarranted assumptions. Rice cars are not all Japanese/Korean made cars, they are Japanese/Korean made cars which have been modified stupidly by wanna-be racers–hence “ricers.”
So what you are acknowledging then is that cars that have been modified qualify for the title based on the part of the world in which they were manufactured.
If an American car is modified in such a poor manner, this would not be a ‘ricer’.
So what we have is a stereotype, derogatory and designed to include only vehicles by certain national stereotypes, ie, Those little yellow people from around a particular zone.
As for lots of folk around the world eating rice, oh yeah, get a little bit honest there, its meant to be derogatory, and its applied almost, but not quite, exclusively to asian cars.
Just because you quote a website that is an apologist for this kind of slur, which uses a little bit of semantics to dodge the general inferance, it still doesn’t get the term ‘ricer’ off the hook.
I’m not saying that the phenomenon of badly modifying cars is good, it is amusing for all the wrong reasons, I can also get that its probably folk of a certain intellectual capacity, or any number of other things.
What seems to me to be a slur is that it seems based upon a racial slur, when one thinks of car manufacture and ‘ricers’ there is only one nationality that crops up in the mind, and with just a second thought you might argue that its about young white Americans doing it, but the reality is that the term ‘ricer’ conjures up that image of Asians.
Is this a terrible slur, nope, it is, as I first stated, getting toward racist, its a term that is headed in that direction, and its not one I’d use.
Just because you may feel that it describes accurately something that you have not the intellectual capacity to desribe in any other way, this does not justify the use of the term.
To me it smacks of limited imagination if you have no way to referance what is meant by the term ‘ricer’ in a less controversial manner.
Quick, easy, convenient still does not cut it, how about teeny boy car, or something else, I’m sure with just a small amount of exercise to the grey matter a suitable term could be conjured up.
I agree with casdave. ‘Ricer’ = ‘rice-burner’ = ‘Jap crap’. It is meant to be derogatory. As a lifelong rider of Japanese motorcycles, I’ve heard ‘rice-burner’ used in a derogatory manner by Harley drivers many, many times.
I think the most hilarious example of the type was when I was in Reno recently. This guy was in a Mitsubishi with six straight pipes sticking straight up out of the engine cover, a wing on the rear deck, a wing on the top of the car, and a wing on the front.
I don’t care what that web site says, and frankly their justification for the term ricer is crazy. There’s no doubt it started as a reference to asian cars driven primarily by young asian drivers. Saying that it’s not racist because lots of people eat rice is a lame justification. If there was a black community auto scene, and people started calling them ‘watermelon cars’, would it really make the term less racist to point out that lots of other people also eat watermelon?
It’s true that ‘ricers’ have expanded to include lots of non-asians, and I’m sure lots of people who use the term today do not intend it to be racist, but there’s no doubt that the term itself defined not just a type of car, but the race of the people who tended to like them.
Well yeah, but the difference between an Sti and a WRC car is large, but there are a lot of common pieces. The motors are pretty close, the body is used almost unmodified other than a roll cage and some stiffening, etc.
But the point is that a stock Sti or Evo X is almost an anti-‘ricer’ vehicle - pretty plain looking on the outside (other than the necessary, functional hood scoop and wing), but they go very, very fast. Faster than almost all the ‘muscle cars’ ever built. An STi off the showroom floor will do 0-60 in under 5 seconds, and on a typical flawed public road will spank just about every other factory car available. A Vette or a Ferrari will beat them on the track, but put them in an environment where their long-throw suspensions and active AWD systems come into play, and these cars are monsters. And they are very easy to modify, and their major components can typically handle a lot more power than the stock levels. You can chip an Sti and get another 50-100 HP out of it with just some minor exhaust changes, without having to worry about breaking the transmission, mounts, suspension, etc. I put a big engine in a stock Camaro, and broke pretty much every piece of the drivetrain. None of it could handle the extra power. I eventually had to beef up the suspension, put a new rear end in it, a new transmission, etc.
And I for one love the sound of a flat four boxer engine. A properly tuned WRX doesn’t sound like a Hemi, but it does sound like a Porsche. That’s good enough for me.
Frankly, I think auto wars are stupid. When I grew up, Chevy boys hated Ford boys. People put stickers of Calvin peeing on Ford emblems on their Chevy trucks. This wasn’t just a casual demarcation - I saw fights break out over it. When I bought a Ford, my own brother was visibly disappointed, because were were supposed to be ‘Chevy people’.
This is just modern tribalism. It’s stupid.
As for stupid car tricks, for every ‘ricer’ out there with a fart can on the back there was a stock Chevelle with a giant hood scoop and jacked up back end. Or 2-wheel chopper with a six foot fork extension that was barely controllable. Or a family sedan with huge air shocks so it could hop up and down. People have been doing stupid things to their vehicles since there have been vehicles.
If you think about the older muscle cars, there was much to disdain about them. They took huge family cars that had poor brakes and suspensions and jammed gigantic motors into them. These are cars that could have 450 HP, driving on skinny bias-ply tires and solid-axle rear ends with leaf springs and drum brakes. They either drove like nose-heavy pigs or rattled your teeth out, and were easily capable of going faster than their chassis and tires were designed for.
The import/tuner way of doing things seems much better to me, and I’m speaking as someone who had a 400+ HP 67 Camaro. They are more likely to treat the car as a whole and spend as much time on suspension as on power. And the cars come set up better to handle the power and speed in the first place.
I’m going to jump in here because… well, because shrill, hand-wringing accusations amuse me.
“Rice Rocket” or “ricer” is a regional slur, not a racial one.
There is a popular Italian racing shell maker out there, and their boats are referred to as “pasta rockets.”
It’s the exact same phrase- is it racist against Italians? Nope.
One of the staple dishes of the region where these cars come from is RICE. There aren’t too many cars like the ones these kids soup up that come from anywhere else?
I suppose you’d call a souped-up Chevy Cobalt a “rice rocket,” but since few in this arena would actually BUY one of those, I guess it’s a topic that will go unaddressed.
But, by all means, go back to ignoring the actual TOPIC of this thread and keep castigating the OP for whatever it is you’re all up in arms about.
