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.