I am into Import Tuning.
For those of you that might not know about it, this is the hobby of taking smaller displacement cars, usually 4-cyl Japanese Imports and modifying them. The intention, of course, is to make them fast… and unique. This gets harder and harder to do as time goes by, because every 17 year old with a copy of “The Fast and the Furious” seems to view this movie as the holy grail of “how to make my car cool”.
You know, I hate that. The cars in that movie are nice to look at (to the Import Tuner aesthetic… sort of) but they are not speed demons.
See kids, the import world is split into two halves, those that go for show, and those that go for go.
A show car, a car that will win awards at the Import Showoff, or Hot Import Nights, or any of the other shows around the country, need things like oddly colored paint, chromed out engine bays, large rims, laser lights, fog machines and a 150db sound system to stand out. Cars like that, ugly as they may be to Joe Veeeight, are what the judges look for in our genre of car scene. Sure many of the mods serve no purpose, but neither did the chromed out engine of the 55 Chevy that grandpa drove when he was a kid, or the Candy Coat paint job that you put on your restored Plymouth Fury. It’s all part of the show, folks. Sure there are those kids who put a Supra wing on their Camry, and a 4" exhaust tip on a stock exhaust… you know what, we make fun of them too. Guys like that give the rest of us a bad name. But the majority of us, at least of the ones I know, try to do things with some taste and style.
The other half, the ones that go for speed, often have really ugly cars, but they are quick. However, just like much of the public, the people that run the race tracks in your neighborhood often won’t let them race their cars. They’re much to busy letting the guys with Mustangs and Camaro’s and other classic cars run. So many of us feel that the only way to test our machines is to race on the street. Being young and foolish isn’t restricted to just us though. Folks come down like a ton of bricks, but don’t seem to recall their own youth, where they did just as foolsih things. Street racing, dangerous as it may be, will never be eliminated.
Personally, I hate it. Street-racing is stupid, and dangerous. All the people in my club agree, and we don’t do it. It’s not worth the risk, nor is it worth the ticket. However, it would be nice to see the cops “crack down” on the domestic guys as much as they harass us. Half the time someone wants to race my friend and I, it’s a camaro that feels he needs to “show up” the Civic Si.
For the record, the 2 times we’ve taken such races, on deserted roads in non-residential, non-developed areas, we’ve won, hands down. Now we don’t do them, because, even in an abandoned street in the middle of nowhere, it’s still not safe.
But what really burns me is ignorant people that don’t know about he Import culture that just rag on us. Making fun of the cars, without knowing anything about them. the cops that bust us because our cars stand out. The track owners that won’t let us run because they’re 60 year old men who don’t think that you can get power out of a 4-cyl. The kid with the Civic VX, with an intake and a muffle who thinks he needs to race to try to prove soemthing.
Erg.
thansk for letting me vent folks. I’ll be here all night. Next show at 4am.