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."