Jack Boulware

Two stories about the nation’s obsession with souped-up “Fast and the Furious” import cars.

Hot Import Nights—A showcase of all things car, including parts, babes and racing
(photo by Christie Ward)

The shiny black Acura MDX SUV looks like a motionless diva on a dance floor, ablaze in strobe lights, enveloped in pumping bass music. A crowd of gawkers gathers around, pointing and taking photos. The vehicle is customized to an outrageous degree: extra-large chrome wheels, custom upholstery, a DVD player with TV screens installed throughout. Steven, the owner, says he’s spent $55,000 on aftermarket goodies.

“It cost more than the vehicle,” Steven shouts over the music. “If you look at the interior, it’s all Gucci: silk, black leather, suede headlinings. You like toys, this is my toy.”

Steven has driven his Gucci Acura from Fremont for tonight’s car show, Hot Import Nights, a noisy bazaar of import car-related everything—audio and video systems, nitrous-oxide tanks, tires, coil-over kits, ram-air intakes, decals, pinup babes, hip-hop DJs and hundreds of customized cars from import clubs throughout California. As 20,000 people bustle in and out of the San Mateo Expo Center, Steven’s SUV is clearly one of the highlights.

He hasn’t done much to the engine, but the electronics are something else entirely: “I had a different system in it last year—it didn’t turn out so good, so I got a new one in there,” he admits. “Last time, I had four TVs and three JL 15-inch subwoofers. Now I got 10 TVs and six 12-inchers, 5,000 watts. I’m thinking maybe three more TVs—satellite TV, so if you’re watching “Friends” at home, you can watch it in the car, too.”

I ask about his wheels, super-chromed 22-inch Sprewells with an extra outer rim that spins even if the vehicle is stopped. We kneel down, and Steven gives one a twirl. It’s fun to watch other drivers check him out at stoplights, he says. “When the light’s red, and they’re just lookin’ around, they look at the rims, and they’re still spinning. They don’t pay attention to the light, so they lose track and go on a red light!” he says with a laugh.

Souped-up import cars have been around for years, spawned from the young generation’s perpetual need for speed and a glut of affordable Japanese cars on the market. But the scene really caught fire after a magazine article on street racing inspired the 2001 film “The Fast and the Furious,” and suddenly suburban kids were spending after-school income and racking up credit card debts to hot-rod their Hondas. Sales of aftermarket parts soared, magazines and Web sites sprouted up, associations invented import-car shows and racing circuits and streets filled with Japanese vehicles painted candy pink and electric green. Today, there’s an import-car event nearly every single weekend somewhere in the country. This billion-dollar industry will take an even bigger jump after the “Fast and the Furious” sequel is released in June.

The California import scene mirrors the melting pot of the West Coast—a big, loud, over-the-top multiculti rainbow coalition consisting primarily of Asians but also including Latinos, African Americans, whites, hapas (mixed-race Asians) and anyone else who appreciates a seamless installation of a Toyota Supra taillight into a Honda Civic hatchback or a Subaru WRX sedan rigged with Corbeau seat-belt harnesses and a front-mount intercooler. Add to this the relatively prosperous economy of the Bay Area, where affluent families often buy their teenagers brand-new cars, and the result is a Northern California freeway system choked with souped-up imports, many of which are here in the parking lot tonight.

Steven and his SUV are from Team Blur, a California import-car club with several cars on the exhibit floor, all featuring team decals on the windows. Another Team Blur member, Mike from San Jose, explains to me that domestic cars are more difficult to customize because they require welding. Import cars, on the other hand, are easier because parts, such as a trunk-mounted metal spoiler, just bolt on and off.

According to Mike, being a member of a car club doesn’t mean you’re part of a gang. “Our club is mostly like a family,” he says. “It’s like everyone kicks it together. It’s not all about the cars. It’s like friendship.”

There’s Money to Be Made

Looking about the Expo Center buildings, one realizes that like the car clubs represented, Hot Import Nights isn’t just about cars, it’s also a circus tent for any products vaguely related, from stickers to steering wheels, tires, gear-shift knobs and CDs of “Phat Jamz.” At the exhibit for Polk Audio sound and speaker systems, two blonds in gold Lycra are delicately working with sponges, applying temporary tattoos of the Polk Audio logo to the exposed necks of trembling teenage boys, who then receive a free T-shirt in return. “I love this stuff,” says salesman John Yohanna. “They can get it on their neck, or their face, or their cheek, or the forehead. We like to have them walking around with our name on ‘em.” He shrugs at the obvious marketing use of babes. “Nobody would get in line to have me put a tattoo on ‘em.”

Yohanna gestures to the exhibit floor. “There’s so much money to be made here,” he says. “The import market has only existed strongly like this in the last couple of years. You see all the people here? Twenty-five dollars a head to get into this thing.”

One large exhibit belongs to Capitol Honda of San Jose. It’s not just a car dealership, it’s the largest Honda-parts dealer in Northern California and the seventh largest in the nation. If you live in the Bay Area and need a stock Honda part, you go to Capitol.

Capitol parts director Tom Faler first saw the spectacle of the import trend at a trade show in 1999, but it was centered in Los Angeles and hadn’t yet migrated up north. “I was absolutely amazed at the kinds of products at the show,” he says. “I realized there’s a market out there we haven’t even tapped yet.”

He’s certainly tapping it now. Capitol Honda’s parts business grows 20 percent each year. The big trend in parts is colors, according to Faler, because Japanese body types are pretty much the same and it’s easy to bolt items on to make a car unique. The concept is more about a killer paint job, exhaust systems, wheels and under-the-hood modifications. Being in his 50s, the native Californian has seen more than his share of car-obsessed gearheads—and he was one of them.

“Back in the ‘60s, we were fixing up ‘55 Chevys because they were cheap—parts were cheap,” he remembers. “There’s nothing today we didn’t do back in the ‘60s, I’ll be honest. It’s the same stuff. They’re just a little fancier now, a little more sophisticated. But back then, you’d get the guys together at the corner drive-in, you might see 20 cars. You’re not gonna see hundreds of them.”

Nationwide, demand for import parts is growing by up to 40 percent a year. According to Michael Meyers, president of NOPI (Number One Parts Inc.), an Atlanta-based auto-parts company, import cars replaced ‘70s muscle cars around the mid-’90s as the object of gearhead desire. And then “The Fast and the Furious” was released with a paper-thin plot but good-looking actors and fantastic action scenes of import cars racing, chasing, flipping and crashing. “When that movie came out, our sales jumped 25 percent that weekend, and stayed there,” says Meyer. “Our whole industry was big and growing anyway. That just catapulted it more to the mainstream.”

NOPI, merging into the momentum, last year signed a deal with Universal Studios to launch an import drag-racing circuit called the Fast and the Furious Racing Series. During competitions, NOPI even erects a giant screen and projects the film as night falls.

“Traditional drag racing hasn’t warmed up to it yet,” says Meyers. “These guys are pioneering this a little bit further. There’s no rules, nothing that can’t be done. Our fastest time, clocked at our last event, was 6.81—203 mph. With a Toyota Solara.”

It’s An Asian Thing

Another element of the import scene that’s immediately striking is the number of female Asian models at the shows. Girls and hot-rod guys have long held mutual fascination for each other, but here at Hot Import Nights, it seems like every third booth is filled with pretty Asian girls signing autographs, surrounded by pimply boys standing a discreet distance away, staring in awe. If an exhibit booth hasn’t hired babes for the occasion, it’s a ghost town—no one bothers.

David Tan knows about babes. For several years, the 28-year-old has toured import-car shows with a group of models.

“We’ve been there since the beginning,” he says. “It’s totally progressed to the point where it’s this huge scene. You got the movies coming out, Playboy’s going to do a feature on import models. It’s like a whole entire culture. Being an import model, it’s not a lot of prestige, but it’s a great way for exposure. If you’re a model in that scene, you have 20,000 people who instantly know who you are.”

Tan agrees the shows are primarily an Asian-flavored phenomenon, and estimates 90 percent of models at West Coast car shows are Asian.

“I’m Asian, and, like, Asian people are always out taking pictures, right?” he says. “And what girl wouldn’t want to get her picture taken? The thing is, with the import scene, anybody can become an import model—somebody’s sister, a friend of a friend. There’s always a demand for cute girls.”

The Asian-babe quotient is just one of many components of the import culture’s Asian identity. The car itself is usually of Japanese design, with a Japanese name and design aesthetics, and it’s an exhilarating idea to take a car from Japan’s crowded landscape and turn it loose on America’s wide-open topography.

There’s also a love of convenience, a fascination with the latest technology. In a world with programmable text-message cell phones and Honda ASIMO personal robots and anime films and Pok�mon pop-culture kitsch, a car is approached with similar enthusiasm. Exterior paint schemes may use five or six colors. Interiors are packed with TVs and laptops and PlayStation controllers. A glove compartment may hold six remote controls.

Every car club has a beautifully designed Web site, the URL of which is plastered across member’s windshields. On these sites, photo galleries go for page after page, hundreds of archived thumbnailed digital snapshots from previous car shows.

According to Tan, this enthusiasm isn’t just obsessive, it’s also cultural. “Asians are really into that whole thing of developing a car, pouring all their money into the cars,” he says. “And Asians are so tech savvy. If you go on the Web sites, the best [car-]model Web sites are [those with] Asian models.”

“If you’re dealing with Asian-male masculinity issues relative to a larger dominant culture, cars, whether it’s racing or customizing, are an equalizer,” says Curtis Rooks, assistant professor of Asian American studies at San Jose State University. “It’s not the basis of height or weight. The car levels the playing field. It allows them to use a whole variety of other skills, from design to what they know about car mechanics.”

To Rooks, the aesthetics of import-car designs remind him of Bruce Lee. “That’s half tongue-in-cheek, but it almost makes sense,” he says. “Like Lee, the cars are compact, streamlined, powerful, but yet there’s a subtlety. A subtlety in a martial art allows the martial artist to go up against odds that are far beyond. If you are versant in Asian culture, it’s the subtlety that separates what’s really going on as to what appears to be going on.”

Got Car? Let’s Race

Out in the courtyard of the Expo Center, the pavement is lined with bumper-to-bumper cars representing more clubs: Team Fuzion, Team Demented, Team Lightspeed, Team Hokori. Members sit in folding chairs, eating burgers and watching spectators check out their creations. Some cars are obviously stock on the outside, with mods under hoods and trunks. One must look closer for subtleties like a six-inch exhaust pipe, or rear seats replaced by subwoofers and nitrous-oxide tanks. Others are more overt, covered with stickers and bolt-on items, doors and trunks reconfigured to open sideways or hinged to pop straight up. Two guys ogle a low-slung orange vehicle from San Jose’s Team Apokalypse, admiring the impeccable white upholstery. One leans in with his videocam: “That’s so clean. Look at that, dude.” The fine print on the rearview mirror reads, “Objects in mirror are losing.”

Some have higher profiles. Team Transport features Ritche Bautista and his 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS, seen on-screen in the upcoming “Fast and the Furious” sequel. Team Nemesis displays drag-racing photos of and trophies won by Izzy Covita and his ‘94 Honda Civic. A sign leans against the driver’s door: “Driven daily.”

Clandestine drag racing is still common. Kids still meet up at a fast-food joint, drive to a prearranged location such as an empty street or a paved industrial area and drag race each other. Several cars in the Expo parking lot have tell-tale dings and scrapes, and the cool air smells of burnt rubber. According to Ryan, who’s come to the car show from San Jose, drivers can’t help themselves.

“If you think about it, from this area, it’s kind of far to go to Sears Point,” where amateurs can race each other, says the 18-year-old. “There’s no close-by thing, and some people are just so antsy to try their car out, you know? When the movie first came out, there’s a lot of people who wanted to street race. All the time. San Jose, Fremont, all around the Bay Area. Not anymore. It’s died down because of the cops. The smart people do it on an off night, not a Friday or Saturday night.”

Ryan should know. He was pulled over in his Celica by Milpitas police on suspicion of street racing. Ryan had raced, but not that night, and so he sued the city of Milpitas and won $4,000.

“I got off easy,” he says, standing in front of a friend’s car. “It’s stupid to do it. Getting caught right now—street racing—is 30 days impound, plus, if you’re underage you might go to juvie jail. If you are 18 or above, you might go to jail for the night.”

It’s not just the racing that’s now illegal. Gov. Gray Davis signed S.B. 1489 into law last September, authorizing law enforcement to seize cars used in street racing, but the law also prohibits activities such as burning rubber, spinning donuts or making high-speed turns. Ryan says impound fees for a mandatory 30 days adds up to $12,000. Especially when you’re still a teenager, that’s a lot of money.

“To me, I think of it as a hobby right now,” Ryan says. “I don’t think of it as, ‘I’m going to be doing this forever.’” A group of kids start asking him questions about the engine, and Ryan hands out a business card and says, “Come by the shop, talk to Al.”
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Fast Females—Two kinds of women abound in import car culture; the car girl and the babe

It’s a warm, sunny Sonoma afternoon at Infineon Raceway, an hour north of San Francisco. The air is filled with the stench of fuel and the whine of motorcycles racing around the track. Behind the grandstand sprawls the Extreme Auto Fest, one of several touring shows devoted to Japanese import cars. Opened hoods and trunks expose the endless variations of tricked-out engines and tanks of nitrous oxide.

As with any car show, it comes with a high babe factor. Several vendor booths feature Asian models signing photos. Two girls in platform shoes go-go dance in front of an exhibit for herbal Viagra. Two others lean against one of the cars, surgical enhancements spilling out of their tiny outfits, surrounded by a swarm of guys with cameras, furiously adjusting their lenses.

Approximately 10 feet away from this scene, Carmen Ubeda stands in front of her 2002 Toyota Celica wearing a denim skirt and a T-shirt that reads “Girlspeed.” But she’s not there for guys to gawk at. The brunet 22-year-old, who lives in Santa Rosa and studies criminal justice at a local junior college, would rather hang around her car and talk about its $5,000 worth of modifications, most of which she’s done herself.

These two types of women, the babes and the car girl, represent an interesting dichotomy within the import-car culture. On one hand, babes have long been a mainstay of the American gearhead aesthetic. They pose for car magazines, plus calendars that hang on the walls of auto shops. They present trophies to winners and are hired as spokesmodels for car products. But Ubeda exemplifies a new kind of girl—one who enjoys the ritual of customizing her own car. This gearhead feminism is the newest subniche in the billion-dollar import-car-parts industry. Within the past few years, girls have launched their own clubs, plus clothing and accessories lines and even a girl-specific national drag-racing series.

Next to Ubeda’s car, underneath a bright blue canopy, Lisa Nathan arranges her display of Girlspeed T-shirts, tank tops and stickers. Girlspeed.org is her baby, an online resource she started three years ago where girls in the scene can communicate through e-mail, ask each other questions and trade information and learn to navigate the heretofore exclusive boys’ club of import cars.

One of the largest in a handful of girl-only car organizations, Girlspeed boasts 75 members around the country, with bio info and photos of each car. Soon after launching the site, Nathan hooked up with a girl in Florida, and the two now organize Girlspeed meets on both coasts, where girls can meet in person and check out each other’s rides. Nathan even asked Angela Proudfoot, a professional drag racer who drives a Honda Civic, to model Girlspeed T-shirts on the Web site.

“I’ve been able to meet girls from all over the U.S., Canada, Hawaii,” says Nathan. “Their first reaction is, ‘Wow, great! I haven’t seen anything like this! How can I be involved?’”

Ubeda says people used to ask her if her car was her boyfriend’s, but no longer. “Once I slapped the Girlspeed stickers on there, no more questions about it,” she says with a laugh.

And the guys? “At the last car show, one guy says, ‘Can I have your autograph?’” says Nathan. “I’m like, ‘Umm, okay.’ I don’t know if he was joking around.”

Nathan adds that the majority of girls enter the import scene initially through association with a boyfriend or a father who has a passion for cars.

“I grew up in a Chevy family,” says the Santa Rosa native. “I was around cars a lot. When I met my boyfriend five years ago, he introduced me to import cars. That’s when it was just starting. It kind of went from there.”

The 23-year-old Nathan is studying to become a teacher at Sonoma State University, but her true passion is taking her car down the quarter-mile track at the drag strip.

Nathan likes drag racing, but she doesn’t want to modify her car so extremely that she can’t drive it every day. “Just fixing it up yourself is fun, and having something different to drive around than everyone else,” she adds. “You get to drive something original.”

Next to the Girlspeed booth is parked her own 1997 Honda Civic hatchback, colored a deep purple and bristling with custom headlights, mirrors, rims and exhaust pipe. She’s been working on it for a year and a half. I ask how much she’s spent so far. “I’ve never added it up,” she says. “I don’t wanna know, cause that ruins it.”

One of the common characteristics of girls such as Nathan, Ubeda and other Girlspeed members is their thirst for knowledge; the site includes a bulletin board where girls go to ask advice on everything from rims to engine mods, or where to find a special logo sticker for the window of an Acura Integra.

“Some girls, when you first meet them, they won’t know as much,” explains Nathan. “You kind of learn as you go. Another thing I want to do with the Web site is do tech articles, so girls can learn themselves and not feel so intimidated.”

In the Girlspeed community, girls find a camaraderie and a chance to discover for themselves what they need to know about cars. But they don’t have to work that hard to be a part of the scene. This is America, and if there’s a potential for making money, someone is right there to seize the moment and create a market. After the initial import-car explosion following the 2001 film The Fast and the Furious, the number of girls involved grew from basically zero to an estimated 15 percent of the total market. Companies immediately began sprouting up to target the emerging audience of girl gearheads.

“It kinda caught us by surprise how popular it is,” says Michael Meyers, president of NOPI (Number One Parts Inc.), an Atlanta-based auto-parts company that also stages the nation’s largest outdoor compact-car show. NOPI seized the opportunity to create a girl-only brand of clothing and accessories called NOPI Chic. “Our tag line is ‘NOPI Chics Rule.’ We’ve got the spaghetti-strap tanks, little jackets and visors, little bolt-on car accessories, rhinestones that spell out ‘NOPI Chic,’” Meyers adds. “Girls seem to like it because they can have something the guys can’t have. They can call it their own. A guy can’t be a NOPI Chic, but a girl can.”

For 2003, NOPI has extended the idea to include girls-only racing classes of drag racing. At NOPI car shows, a girl driver can compete against another girl, avoiding a mismatch against a guy who has been racing for much longer. The more than 5,000 girls who have registered for NOPI Chic membership on the company’s Web site can log on to a database and see how many other girls are located in their area.

But one element of the NOPI empire may not sit well with all import-car girls—the annual model search, in which the company undertakes a year-long pursuit to find the perfect bikini babe. Most of the car girls interviewed for this article acknowledge that babes are a necessary part of the larger equation. They see them at the shows, and watch the guys salivate at the booths. They won’t really talk much about it, but there seems to be a mutual respect at play and an understanding that there’s room for everyone. However, Lisa Nathan would like to make the point that car babes present a cliché that some people assume is true for everyone in the scene.

“When people think of girls in the import industry, they think of models,” she says. “To me, I respect what they do, and I understand, but half the time I feel like they’re the guy’s stereotypes for all girls. And that’s really frustrating, because not all girls are like that.”

To get another perspective, I track down Cherie Roberts, a.k.a. Kitana Jade, one of the most popular models in the scene. Formerly from the Bay Area and now living in Los Angeles, Roberts has posed for her share of import-car magazines and Web sites and in 2001 even toured car shows as Miss Hot Import Nights. I find her via cell phone on the freeway, where she is driving back to L.A. with her roommate, model Natasha Yi.

“To me, most of the people in the scene look at the models like icons,” says Roberts. “We kind of represent the scene. You get people who have negative opinions every now and then, but, for the most part, they respect what we do, and we respect what they do.”

Outside of starstruck young boys who line up for her autograph, Roberts doesn’t associate much with people actually participating in the import-car scene. “I know one or two girls that modify their cars,” she says. “I think it’s cool. I don’t think it’s like an all-male type of thing. It’s a pretty coed type of scene. From what I know and what I’ve seen, it’s not really sexist.”

Oddly enough, Roberts doesn’t drive an import car herself. Very few models do. “It would be, like, a little bit ridiculous,” she says with a laugh. “How can I drive around town in an import car and then be an import model? It’s gotta be like begging for attention. It’s like plastering my face on the side of a car and driving around, and expecting people not to notice me, you know?”

Even with girls totaling 15 percent of the import-car market, the majority of the culture remains the same as it always has for custom cars—a guy’s world, in which cars exist to impress girls and bikini babes exist to look hot and sell products. Except now there’s also room for groups such as Girlspeed and the girls who are into their cars as much as the guys.

And if they’re at all like Carmen Ubeda, it seems they’re here to stay. Ubeda says she was so excited when she bought her car, she immediately started customizing it. “First thing was the tint,” she says. “Within a day, I tinted all the windows. And then I went onto the headlights and the springs.”

“It’s a really fun thing to be into,” she adds, “but at the same time, it can be like a snowball. You get one thing, you go up to another and another. You say you’re gonna stop, but you never do.”

As for the guys who are aware of Girlspeed and the girl invasion, all of them respond with respect and curiosity, says Lisa Nathan. Well, almost all of them.

“I was in a line getting ready to race,” she says. “And this guy comes over—he was helping out. I rolled down my window, and he goes, “Do you know what you’re doing?” I had raced earlier that day and won my race. And just because I’m a girl, he decided to come to my car and ask me if I knew what I was doing.”

“I told him, ‘I’m fine, I don’t need any help.’”

(Both stories first published at sfgate.com)