Oscar Jackson
Jackson Racing / www.jacksonracing.com
Responsible for: developing the first CARB-legal supercharger for the Honda Civic; racing Hondas before most of your parents even met
Owning the fastest Honda in '90 meant 13-seconds at nearly 100 mph-this was even faster than the car built by HKS for the first company heads-up drag race at Battle against Oscar Jackson, the man behind Jackson Racing. "It's funny," recalls Oscar, "My son was only 18 months at the time and I had him strapped into a baby chair while I made that pass. Back then the rules weren't as strict." However, Oscar's story goes back further than the import scene as we know it. After dropping out of law school in 1973, he found employment at a Honda dealership as a mechanic and worked day and night, developing cam and header packages for the early model Civics and CRXs. Over the course of the next decade, Oscar put his work to the test on the track and won several endurance races before switching gears so he could release the first CARB-legal supercharger for a Honda engine while most companies were hard up for turbocharging. "I've always marched to my own beat, so to speak," he says. "Most people get into [tuning Hondas] because it's the popular thing. Well, I do it because I love Hondas and I made it the popular thing. When I decided that I was going to sell a supercharger it was because most of the cars that were using turbochargers were blowing up. You were limited by not having fuel management, things like that. The companies selling them weren't offering warranties, and I wanted to sell a product that was reliable and had a two-year back-up." The instant boost in power was a much-welcomed and instant success, so much so that it became a hot modification for budget minded enthusiasts. Moss Motors licensed the name a few years later and Oscar Jackson nearly disappeared from the limelight. But if you think Jackson Racing is out of the game, think again-Oscar recently took back control over the company and this fall a new division of JR will unveil a supercharger for what Oscar calls "the next generation of Honda's small super cars," the Fit. He's back, Mortimer!
Kipp Kington
KTC Media Group / www.ktcmediagroup.com
Responsible for: creating Turbo - the first magazine to cater to aftermarket performance for sport compact vehicles
The year was 1985. Michael J. Fox was raking it in as a time traveling doofus and Kipp Kington was enjoying driving a turbocharged Nissan 300ZX during his stint as a partner at a Phoenix-based publishing company. Dissatisfied with the power the Z came with, he and his partner's son got to talking about performance and how they could get their cars to go even faster, and, with roughly a million turbocharged cars being sold that year, they figured other people might want to know about how they could go faster too. Hence, Turbo magazine was born. Its reader base started slowly and it took Sai Akimoto (RS Akimoto) and a trip to the '90 Compton street races to convince Kipp that the rise of import performance was about to hit hard. "I was with my wife and started to do a smoky burnout when cops surrounded us," he laughs. "I told him we were just out looking for business property when we ran into these kids. He almost let us off until he saw the entire rear quarter panel covered in rubber." These same kids at the street races eventually became the front cover news, and Turbo suddenly was the "it" magazine on the newsstand (Until we came along (we kid, we kid) - Staff). Turbo's popularity eventually spawned Import Tuner and both magazines were sold to Primedia. Kipp now serves as an advertising consultant with KTC Media Group, creating ads for companies like GReddy, AEM and ACT.
Jon Kuroyama
HKS USA, formerly Fastrax / www.hksusa.com
Responsible for: supplying the early drag racers with race-proven turbos
If you were drag racing an import back in the early '90s and were going really fast while doing so, chances were you had a Fastrax turbo hanging out in your engine bay. Already a local legend of sorts, Jon Kuroyama had turbocharging science down right, selecting the proper turbos for everyone's race car, including Abel Ibarra, Adam Saruwatari, the Bergenholtz brothers, Stephan Papadakis and Lisa Kubo-they all went with Jon's turbos. "Turbos weren't always popular," Jon reminisces. "I mean, I had a turbo on my car, but as far as the technology to support it, like fuel management, it just wasn't there. It had been a few years that I'd been working with turbos before everyone started getting into them." And there was no secret to Jon's magic, either: "It's a matter of matching the turbo correctly to your engine," he says. "Rather than picking something off the shelf, I'll find out what type of management, engine size, how it's being used and the size of the turbo according to their power band." Can't argue with his logic.