The Ones Who Started It All

The great ’80s (from the top)” Ron Lee and Mike Quan (top left); the Old Skool rides; Mercucry Capri and Datsun 240Z

No one can pinpoint the birth date or place of import racing. That would be too ambitious and require too many assumptions. That is not what we’re prepared to attempt. What you are about to read (if you choose to do so) isn’t the definitive history of import racing, but a collection of conversations with some of the people who were doing it when others weren’t. Were they a few of the groundbreakers? Maybe, but good ideas have many fathers. But to our defense. Do you remember Mikuni carbs? Do you remember steel wheels with chrome trim rings or 14-inch Hayashis? Do you remember a time when Hondas weren’t the most popular imports on the roads? The guys we talked to (and there were many more of them—getting to them all would’ve taken years) remember all that and much much more. We’re not saying they were the first, but just suggesting: It could’ve started here.

The ’80s: Cars and Carnivals

Jon Kuroyama: It wasn’t that big in 1975. There were a few [imports] around. And, of course, all of the older guys, the ones I looked up to, had Dusters and Novas and Chevelles and Camaros. They cruised around the high school. They were the seniors, and we were the sophomores and juniors. So that was maybe the start of us.

Tod Kaneko: I first met Jon [Kuroyama] on the street racing scene. I never had a problem with anybody. I know there was a lot of cross-town rivalries, but I pretty much hung out with everyone out there. It was pretty cool.

Ron Lee: Tod was four to five years before us. We saw him. We didn’t know who he was, but we knew that there was a Pinto back there that was fast.

Tod Kaneko: It was a 2-liter Pinto that I did my first turbocharged project with. It was turbocharged with nitrous. A European motor that I had put together with Esslinger. And it made about 400 horses on the nitrous. I had it for about three years. Then I sold it to some Chinese guy in Monterey Park. I used to race the Mustangs, the Camaros. We used to meet at Denny’s off of Western and 182nd St., which was the local hangout.

Ron Lee: Tod would always sit in the back at the street races. He wouldn’t say anything. People would come up to him and want to race. He didn’t hit up everybody. He was kind of like the shy type.

Tod Kaneko: My closest race was with a turbocharged 510. We actually raced twice. Out of both instances, it was a draw. It was dead even. This was prior to my turbocharged days. It was naturally aspirated with nitrous. [The 510 was] was turbocharged—a red turbocharged 510. I never got to run him when I went turbo.

Scott Kanemura: It was mostly just Datsuns and Toyotas back then. And there were a few Capris and Pintos. I started in 1985. I grew up in Gardena. And it seems from what I can recall that most of the cars came from the Gardena area, back in the late-’70s and early-’80s. I had an AE74 Toyota Corolla. It had a bored and stroked motor. It had a Japanese head, ported and polished by TRD. And all these trick things that nobody knew you could do to it.

Mike Quan: I had a Celica. It was a fully built 22R with a 20R head. You know, fully built. I got nitrous, gears, the whole setup. Then I was one of the first rotary turbos out there. I had a street port with a turbo in 1987.

Ron Lee: I just had my Celica. We pretty much used my car as a real car. It was a stock motor with a stock everything, but it had nitrous. Back then, nobody knew about nitrous on an import car.

Mike Quan: We hid the nitrous solenoid underneath the siren so you couldn’t see it. We ran it through some plastic conduit so it looked like alarm wiring.

Ron Lee: But it was nitrous, and I had a stock air filter on. I would always pop up my hood, and everyone would just race me. We usually won all the time with my car. We used the money to go eat afterward. Every weekend, they called my car the meal car. Race Ron’s car. We gotta eat. We’re hungry [he laughs]. We wanted to be the kings. Everybody wanted to be the kings out there at the street races…Back then, we didn’t have car shows. We had carnivals that we had to fix up our cars for.

Jon Kuroyama: They were the Japanese carnivals. The Buddhist Church Carnival, the DPI Carnival, which were the local ones. Then you had Nisei Week, which was a big one…

Tod Kaneko:Nisei was kind of like the finale for the year, where everybody tried to get their cars finished for that event. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars.

Scott Kanemura: The whole thing started as an Asian type of thing. There’s older people there. They go out and dance and stuff. And you have the food. Everybody talked about it. They had these gambling games and stuff like that. It was more than just cruising. It was—you got the whole Asian-Japanese thing, I guess.

Jon Kuroyama: We started by racing our parents’ cars down the street. Then we started getting our own cars. That’s when things started getting fixed up.

Ron Lee: It’s like Battle of the Imports for the year. Everybody would save their money to get new rims or build the motor or get new body kits. It was in August. We used to cruise around the street all night, and there used to be thousands of people on the street. Literally packed. There were people on the sidewalks, and you couldn’t walk. It was a moving auto show.

Mike Quan: There was all this bass. You could hear it from around every corner.

Scott Kanemura: It was like Import Showoff, I guess. It was people cruisin’ up and down the street, like thousands of people out there. People doing burnouts and bumping their stereos. It did have its moments, I guess. It was mostly at the Nisei Carnival, though. It was basically car clubs. And there was that PCR club…

Ron Lee: We kind of wanted to make [PCR] like a Hawaiian type of deal, like Hawaiian Island Creations. That was in ’81 or ’82.

Frank Choi: I grew up knowing about Paradise Creations Racing. At that time, I was like, “When I get a car, I want to be just like them.” ’Cause they always had the cool cars. They always traveled in a group. So whenever they went to a Nisei Carnival or another carnival in a different city, they’d always be there cruising. Everybody would always remember them.

Ron Lee: We wanted to cruise together in one long line. That was the big thing, we had to be together.

Mike Quan: If we got broken up by a signal light, we had to wait. We wanted to represent the club well, and people expected it after that because we all had the nicest cars.

Ron Lee: We hung out all the time, every day, every weekend. We stayed up late all the time. It grew into a good relationship among us 10–15 guys. And we’re still good friends to this day, which is after 20 years.

Mike Quan: A lot of people liked to fix up their cars, but we did it in a way that was slightly different. You either did it all the way or not at all. So we had to have nice stereos, [the car] had to look clean, and it had to be fast. It had to have all three things.

Ron Lee: That’s how we got the respect. We had fast cars, too, so we got the respect there, too.

The Incident

Tod Kaneko: I wasn’t there at that event, but I heard about it. In fact, there were probably a few pretty big accidents during that time. That’s one thing that’s bad about street racing. After the event, the police really started cracking down. And that pretty much stopped everything. Those were the good ol’ days.

Ron Lee: It wasn’t at the Nisei. It was at another [carnival] in Orange County. It was these guys just riding motorcycles back and forth.

Scott Kanemura: There was a signal down at the end of the block. The church was in the middle of the block, I guess. And there were two motorcycles staged up, and there’s two crowds staged at each end of the street. And [the motorcycles] are trying to race down the center of the street, and there was this Japanese couple. They had a baby girl, and the wife was pregnant. They were walking across the street when the bikes took off.

Ron Lee: One guy lost control. He went into the crowd.

Scott Kanemura: And the couple got all confused. They didn’t know which way to go or whatever. I remember the kid flying in the air—like 10 feet in the air. The wife flew out and the whole family flew in the air—it was pretty crazy: The bikes sliding, the guy sliding, hitting his head on the curb.

Ron Lee: After that, the cops kind of cracked down on the cruises. That hurt the scene. Because it actually died out for a while—the import scene. Not too many people were fixing up the cars anymore, until actually Frank [Choi] came out with the Battle. And that kind of brought it back up again.

Scott Kanemura: Nowadays, the Nisei Carnival can’t even keep its business because the main thing that was driving it was all the young people going out there to cruise. Since everybody stopped going, all the carnivals died. It’s kind of sad, actually.

The Street and Its Legends

Ron Lee: Usually, after each carnival, people would go to the spot. The race spot. You had Stadium Way. You had Gardena—the Meiji Market, before it used to be Naugles. It was pretty crazy. I remember Stadium Way, that whole street would be packed.

Scott Kanemura: The thing that was different from Battle was that even if you had a slower car than the other person, you could still win—if you picked a certain street, the quarter-miles were shorter. Sometimes there’s a small downgrade, it’s sloped. If your car doesn’t hook up as well, you’d pick that street. To us, it was kind of a science. That’s why we would pick certain streets. It wasn’t just how fast your car was. It was more like who was smarter.

Mike Quan: When we used to go street racing, everyone respected the fact that we were out there racing.

Ron Lee: A lot of the Asians didn’t want to race for big money back then. The only people who wanted to race for big money back then were the black guys. And so they used to have a lot of fast cars. There was a guy called Beanie Boy. He had one of the fastest 510s around.

Frank Choi: When I was younger, there was this saying, Monterey Park/San Gabriel Valley was known as the East Side. And anything on the other side of the 91 [Freeway] was considered the West Side: Gardena, Torrance, Lomita, Carson. All the people from the East Side had the later-model cars or the hand-me-downs from their parents. So they would have the ’85 and ’86 Celicas and newer, whereas people from the West Side would have the ’70s-model cars. They are the ones that like to wrench on their cars. If there was any type of tension, it would be the fact that the Gardena area actually worked their asses off to work on their car. Everything was hard-earned on their cars. Nothing was a gimme or hand-me-down.

Ron Lee: Back then, we didn’t like any East Side guys. You know everything was given to them. And we had to work for everything.

Tod Kaneko: I was from Torrance, but I never ran with a group. I kind of did my own thing. Kind of marched to my own tune. But I knew everybody from the East Side, the West Side, and the Torrance/Gardena area.

Frank Choi: Back then, the objective of the street races was to see not only whose car was quicker than the other, but who could con the other person into thinking that your car was slower than theirs. It was seeing who would give who the advantage. Back then, it was almost like a con game. Seeing if the guy you’re going to race is going to give you some space or give you the move…

Tod Kaneko: Frank would be a good negotiator. Back then, there was this Chinese gang out there. They were pretty close friends of mine. They did the talking. They did the money holding. I never had a problem getting the money because of the reputation of these people. I just pretty much built the car, drove the car, and that was it. I was the hired gun.

Frank Choi: Here you come walking along. And we see you. We know you’re going to hit us up to race. And we already know what kind of car you got because we’ve been eyeballing you all night. You say, "Do you want to run tonight?" I’ll act dumb and ask, "Which car is yours?" And you’ll point to it, and I’ll look at it and say, "Oh, OK, what’s in it?"

Ron Lee: Usually I say it’s stock.

Frank Choi: You’ll say it’s a four banger, dual carbs. And I’ll tell you something similar. Either you’ll say something like, "Well, you’ve got bigger tires than I do." Or I’ll say that to you, and I’ll want the advantage right off the bat. You’ll probably want the same thing. That’s when the outsmarting comes in to see who can outsmart who. You’ll bring in things like, "Hey, I got four doors and you got two," "my car is bigger than yours," or "my car is heavier." Eventually, it’s going to come down to a point where I’m like, "All right, do you want to make this a heads-up race?" Then the money will come in…

Ron Lee: You talk about how much you want to race for after that. “How much do you want to race for? $100? $500? $1,000?” Then you negotiate about giving cars out: “I want four cars or I want five cars.” Stuff like that. After all the negotiating, you find a spot where you want to race at. You go to the races and race from there.

Frank Choi: We say something like, “The chase is the race. Anything goes. You break, you break. It’s a done deal.” And go from there.

Scott Kanemura: One race, I raced for $5,000. A lot of times, I raced for $1,500. It’s kind of weird seeing these guys getting sponsored now and getting paid instead of street racing and getting paid.

Ron Lee: The most we ever raced for was over $1,000, about $1,500, all one race. So pretty much, we put in all our money together.

Tod Kaneko: People would pool money, so I didn’t know what the total amount was. After that, I just started building engines for friends. I think I rather enjoyed that a little bit more—building engines for other people—than going out to race.

Scott Kanemura: I remember one time, Mike and Ron were out negotiating a race with some guy, and basically these guys come and knock on my window at 2 o’clock in the morning to wake me up to race.

Mike Quan: I was knocking on his window. “C’mon, man, you gotta come out!” You know, they didn’t want to race the cars that we brought. They were afraid [of our cars]. So we went to Scott’s house at about 3 in the morning, knocked on his window, and he’s sleeping.

Scott Kanemura: So I get up and get out there. And I remember Mike Quan is like, “Let me see how fast your car is.” So I gave him a ride, and I was using a lot of nitrous.

Ron Lee: We wanted to see how fast the car was because we wanted to make sure we could win. He gave Mike a ride and Mike goes, “All right, this is it.”

Mike Quan: Ain’t no problem. Four hundred bucks down, you know. Sure enough, they race, and you can see the hole shot. Scott had his lights off ’cause he’s thinking it would give him more power to the alternator. So you can see it. He just jumped out.

Scott Kanemura: When it was time to race I set the guy out 10 car lengths. And I caught up seven cars in First [gear]. I was like, “I’m going to kick this guy’s butt.”

Ron Lee: Then the car starts popping.

Scott Kanemura: I shifted into Second, and I was pushing the button. I ran out of nitrous. So I ended up losing by three cars. Those guys are still all pissed off at me.

Ron Lee: Oh yeah, we were pissed.

Frank Choi: The most successful thing that I had was out in the West Covina-Walnut area. It’s really weird when it got to the point we couldn’t get any more races, we started venturing off to Gardena-Torrance area. Gardena and Torrance have their own set of people who didn’t really venture out to where we were. So there came a point in time when all of a sudden there were fresh people out there who didn’t know you…

Tod Kaneko: After you get a reputation out there, it’s hard to get races. One of the things I ended up doing was I quit racing.

Scott Kanemura: Tod Kaneko was the man. That was my goal—to hit him up for a race. He was a legend, he had a Pinto. I don’t know how fast it was. Everybody said it was 11 seconds, but I don’t know. I never saw him race. Everybody was too scared to ask him to race.

Scott Kanemura: 240Z Man owned a shop on Washington Boulevard. in Culver City. That guy was the man. His shop was called Richard’s Z Service or Rich’s Z Service. His car was fast. I remember he raced at the first Battle, and he spanked everybody…I know he ran like low-11s. His car looked like stock almost. He never popped his hood, and he never really had slicks. He had cheater slick street tires. That thing was fast.

Ron Lee: I guess you can say that 240Z Man was a legend. He was one of the guys to have one of the fastest cars.

Tod Kaneko: I never had any encounters with the guy, but I heard about him. That was about the time I was phasing out.

Mike Quan: We raced him several times. We beat him a couple of times.

Scott Kanemura: It was unusual, man, he’d bring his family, like his wife and kids out there.

Frank Choi: Like Tod, [240Z Man] probably developed a reputation he couldn’t race anymore. What Richard started doing was building other peoples’ cars. Those people who had engines built by the Z Man started coming out to the street races after Tod had finished. When I was at the streets was when you saw the Z Man’s engines, like Beanie’s cars.

Battle 1990: The End of the Beginning

Ron Lee: I think [Frank] started Battle because he tried to go to a drag, he stepped out of the car and they wouldn’t let him go on. I think that was part of it.

Frank Choi: I had something going on with Paxton at the time, so we ended up designing a supercharger kit for the RX-3…I needed a place to test my car, so I went up to the racetrack in Palmdale. But the racetrack wouldn’t let me race because there happened to be an organized event, like Super Chevy or something like that. They said turn around and go home, or park it in the pits and pay 10 bucks to go watch. Why would I want to watch? I want to race my car, so I turned around and went home. Then I did it one more time and it happened again. By this time, I was beginning to think: Maybe this guy doesn’t like imports or he’s not familiar with my car. Or maybe he’s not accustomed to seeing 12 Asian kids come up with a car that runs 10s. So all these things are running through my mind because I was only 18 and a half or 19 at the time. I went home and said to myself, “What if I were to have an event at the racetrack, and any V-8 that came up, I’d say, ‘Hey park it and pay your 10 bucks to come in and watch, or turn around and go home?’” So I contacted the owner of the racetrack and set up a meeting and told him what I wanted to do. He said, “Son, this is your dime. If you want to rent out the racetrack to have a picnic, I don’t care as long as the bill gets paid.” So we tried it.

Scott Kanemura: Back then, I wasn’t sure if Battle [of the Imports] was going to do well because people were scared to show their times. The whole thing at the street races was making people think your car is slower than it is. But then you go out to the track and they have the times. At the first couple of Battles, people put no times on the back of the windshield so they couldn’t announce your time. If you sported this, you had “juice.”

Frank Choi: It was really funny, because [the racers] didn’t want their times showing up on the scoreboard. Back at the street races, everybody thinks they have a 9-second car. But when they get to the race track, to them a 9-second and 14-second car probably feels the same. They didn’t know any better. Some of these cars were running 15s. And the fast guys you saw at the street races were doing low 14s, maybe 13s. So that was a big deal. There were also so many side bets going on it was ridiculous. There were a couple of guys who wanted to flag their own race. People had bad reaction times. It was a true quarter-mile, so some guys would run out of gears before the end of the quarter-mile. We had two Hondas. One belonged to HKS and the other to Oscar Jackson. The rest of them were ’70s and early-’80s model imports.

Ron Lee: We didn’t go to the first Battle. We weren’t into cars anymore. We were into cars, but we weren’t into street racing anymore.

Frank Choi: We had about 50 or 60 cars show up [at the first Battle] and about 500 people. And it was weird because all 50 cars I knew. Of the 500 people, maybe 300 I knew. The other 200 were friends of those people. So, it wasn’t really a true event. It was more like a club event. But we wanted to get the manufacturer support. So, fortunately, Scotty was working at TRD at the time. And I knew Oscar Jackson. So I had six, maybe seven, manufacturers come out. Didn’t even charge for booth space. All I asked for was that they give out something, products, as prizes for these people. And sure enough, it went well. The event started at 10 or 11. We were done at 3.

Tod Kaneko: There was a handover period. It started with all these old cars, then you see this new generation come in. I’ve seen a lot. The transition. There was definitely a hand-me-over period right about that time.

Ron Lee: The only companies that had parts for us were HKS and TRD. And then we kind of had to fabricate the domestic parts to fit into our import cars. We didn’t have anyone to support us back then.

Tod Kaneko: The technology itself has changed a lot. Back when we were doing it, we were limited, especially four-cylinder development. There weren’t that many parts to work with. You had to build it yourself. It’s easier to make a car go fast now than it was back then.

Ron Lee: We thought this was just a hobby. If we knew that it was going to be this big, we would’ve started Battle of the Imports. We would’ve started our own shop.