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.