It's by-the-book, raw-horsepower muscle cars vs. screw-the-rules, high-tech "rice burners." The battle for the soul of the hot rod is on.
Pacoima, California October 2002
Glenoaks Boulevard cuts through the most neglected section of Los Angeles. Taco trucks, shattered glass, and murals from a parallel pop-art universe abut the harsh asphalt. Junkyards line the street. Hulks of luxury coupes, grocery getters, and muscle cars are stacked like pallets to rust in the smog, heaped in their own obsolescence.
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James Chiang Ed Bergenholtz burns rubber in a highly modified Honda CRX; under the hood, an array of sensors feeds into a programmable engine-management computer that regulates spark timing, fuel injection, and turbo boost.
The sun drops; and in a night sky smeared with tar, rottweilers bark and cell phones ring. A gaggle of Nipponese Nissan boys face east and hold down the front end of a ZX, taming the nitrous-assisted, 300-horsepower mechanical steed while the meat in the seat applies both throttle and brake. The front tires chirp like bio-mechanoidal bluebirds. It's a burnout, but unlike the rear-wheel-drive cars of yesteryear, the front tires are smoking, not the back ones. In the fumes, a handful of cholos gather around a Toyota Supra. They – and the car – are also facing east (albeit on the side of the street that flows west) and oblivious to the threat of oncoming traffic.
The young racers sport wife-beaters and military buzz cuts. Flanking them are halter-topped honeys with long, two-tone hair. These are the Slo-Pokes, a front-wheel-drive car club whose members meet after midnight to test the limits of their twin-turbo ZXs, Supras, Civics, and Sentras.
I ask one of the crew why he risks running on the street instead of going to a track. A zero-tolerance street-racing policy means cars can be confiscated. He rattles off a litany of reasons: "'Cuz it's illegal, it's free, and if you're fast you can win some quick dough." His conclusion: "Fuck a legal track."
I ask another Slo-Poke to single out his trickest piece of kit. I figure he'll point to his titanium valve springs or adjustable cam gears. No, he tells me, it's his nitrous oxide system, which he ordered online. "I don't have to open the hood to get dope," he says with a grin. He just has to push the red button on his steering wheel – and hope the burst of thermodynamic energy doesn't melt the pistons.
This is the PlayStation Generation, Gran Turismo-istas huffing exhaust. The drivers stare each other down, and engines rev in anticipation of a quick launch, but suddenly the race is aborted. It's time to vamoose after a rumor circulates on the blinking and squeaking cell phones that the LAPD is rolling close. Kids yell, run to their high-pitched, high-revving cars, and make their getaways. Minutes later, the trebly culture makes a rendezvous at a nearby Denny's and plots another go.
The scene in Pacoima repeats itself most weekends in the industrial outskirts of nearly every burg in the country. The kids are drag racing: marking off a quarter-mile of road and betting on the winner.
It's an American tradition that dates back to the greasers of the '50s.
Today there's a resurgence of interest in this dangerous ritual. The sleeper hit of 2001, The Fast and the Furious made Vin Diesel a hot Hollywood commodity by tapping into the automotive underground. Last summer's Diesel vehicle XXX, the forthcoming Fast and the Furious 2, and the new Torque are further stoking the fresh need for speed. Closer to where the rubber meets the road, the Specialty Equipment Market Association reports that the high-performance aftermarket for street racers is exploding. It's a $2.25 billion industry, up nearly 50 percent from 2001, and 90 percent from 2000.
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James Chiang Bergenholtz (front center) with crew chief Nathan Tasukon, pit boss Darren Masumori, and team manager Ron (his brother). Their cars: the street-smoking '89 CRX, at left, and a 1,000-horsepower 2003 Mazda6.
The National Hot Rod Association, drag racing's de facto governing body, would seem to have the most to gain from this up-from-the-streets car-culture renaissance. The audience for sanctioned drag racing is graying; new blood might attract a whole new demographic. There is one big problem, however: In the name of mechanical purity, the NHRA has essentially outlawed modern automotive technology on its fastest machines. Its 300-mph funny cars have no software, no engine mapping, no rpm sensors, and no variable valve timing (VTEC, in Honda's nomenclature). All this tech is banned at the track, even though it's basic stuff, found on any showroom floor.
The only "computer" allowed on the strip is a pneumatically controlled difference engine that governs how much fuel is routed to the cylinders and how much horsepower is applied to the rear tires. A timer starts when the driver stomps on the throttle, and blasts of compressed air course through a configurable series of mechanical logic gates that vary the fuel/air ratio, spark plug timing, and clutch grip according to a fixed sequence tailored to race conditions. It's binary logic worthy of the Big Bad Wolf: A puff of air is 1, no air is 0.
The rule is that there can be no "closed loop" systems in the cars – neither the fuel nor air curves, nor the spark timing, may be modified by, say, crankshaft speed. An IBM punchcard would be an advance.
On the street, where there are no rules, kids are "chipping" their rides: dropping in off-the-shelf engine control modules that jack up performance. They're installing nitrous oxide systems, a cheater's technology on the track. They prefer Japanese cars – dismissed as "rice burners" by connoisseurs of Detroit iron.
Drag racing is now two distinct and disparate automotive cultures: the V-8 Dinosaurs thundering down the legal tracks and the PS2 Babies staging outlaw rallies on the street.
Yielding to the new paradigm means more than just upgrading a few rules. It means junking the pushrod engine that has dominated drag racing for decades: Mopar's 426-cubic-inch Hemi V-8. Some would suggest this move is long overdue, considering the massive American big block went out of production 30 years ago.
Irwindale, California, July 1973
It's the apex of hot rod culture, and 13,000 high-on-a-summer-night SoCal race fans are partying in the bleachers and cheering for the Chi-Town Hustler. This is the car that defined the era which still defines the sport of drag racing: a '73 Dodge Charger pushed and altered into a creation whose aesthetics and purpose could only have been a collaboration between Timothy Leary and Edward Teller.
In his aluminized getup, the driver looks like Neil Armstrong, but his fire suit isn't to shield him during reentry; it's for protection from the explosive, supercharged, nitromethane-burning V-8 gurgling at his feet.
The Charger creeps forward to nudge the starting line and then stops, squatting on its fat, underinflated rear tires. Idling, this mutant spawn of a napalm bomb howls and cackles like a jackal possessed by Ol' Scratch hisself. Punctuating the roar is an arpeggiating flicker of fire, a chemical reaction from unburnt nitro spitting out of the exhaust and colliding with the air. A young mechanic and future drag racing legend named Austin Coil pours a sticky liquid onto the treads of the massive slicks and gives the thumbs-up.
On cue, the driver hits the throttle thrice WWWHHAMMPPP… WWHHAMMMPPPP… WWWHHHHAAAAAAAAHHHHH and drops the clutch. The fiercest, most acrid and ground-shaking display of man and machinery this side of a moon shot is in full effect. When a nitromethane-burning giga-horsepower funny car blasts off, eyes water, nipples stiffen, and noses run. The fat, stumpy tires contort and go skinny from the sudden jolt of centrifugal force, and the screaming begins: the wheels, the engine, the chicks in the bleachers.
The plastic fantastic lays down a black patch a quarter-mile long. "He's really fryin' the baloneys," one fan mutters as a toxic cloud of fuel and rubber creeps in and gases the assembled stoners and yahoos like a kinder, gentler Agent Orange.
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James Chiang Inside Force's national record-holding funny car, twin magnetos flank a custom-built set-back supercharger. The exact horsepower is unknown: There isn't a dynamometer big enough to measure so much thrust.
The Chi-Town Hustler's spectacular run on this Watergate summer night is a swan song of sorts, as the winds are blowing more than just spent fossil fuel. The oil crisis is imminent. Out in the parking lot, engines and body styles shrink, and mighty dinosaurs like the muscle car go extinct. Passenger cars get smaller – and smarter.
1973 is the year drag racing stopped evolving, technologically if not aesthetically. The sport staggers on, zombie-like, but henceforth on a Gal�pagos of automotive innovation, the island that OPEC forgot.
Pomona, California, November 1998
The NHRA wakes up from its Rip Van Winkle sleep, sees the kids tearing around in their hopped-up econoboxes, and realizes that unless something is done, the sport will lose any hope of a future. So it stages an import-car drag exhibition for the tens of thousands of dyed-in-the-wool race fans here to see John "Brute" Force either win Funny Car or catch fire at 300 mph (or both).
The idea seems innocuous enough: Expose the old school to what the new school is doing with modern street machines. Let them see the econoboxes with the big slicks on the front wheels and intake manifolds plumbed for clouds of nitrous. Make them watch as the imports chirp and then zigzag down the strip.
The leading lights of the new school are Ed "Real Genius" Bergenholtz, a brainy Filipino-American car geek with a German name, and Lisa Kubo, an MTV-ready buzz clip of a driver from Rosemead, California. Both are grinding gears in heavily modified Hondas.
Bergenholtz earned his nickname when he and his brother, Ron, reinvented the wheelie bar and then broke the 10-second benchmark in the quarter-mile. Wheelie bars are like car training wheels. They trail behind a dragster, preventing it from tipping over backwards on launch. The Bergenholtz brothers put wheelie bars on their '89 Honda CRX – a front-wheel-drive car, which, by definition, cannot wheelie. On a front-wheel-drive car, the (now slightly misnomered) wheelie bars shift the center of gravity forward. They prevent the rear shocks from compressing at launch. This is, in fact, genius in its simplicity: Gain traction by planting the front end more firmly on the tarmac.
Lisa Kubo, aka the Divine Miss K, is the street racer's pinup girl. Olive-skinned with golden brown hair, a full set of trailer-park-pink nails, and a nose ring, she also drives a Honda and regularly whips the boys in signature x-treme fashion.
So here they are. The PA system squawks with a hype-laden buildup that boils down to three points: 1) Danger lurks on the street, 2) the NHRA should be commended for rehabbing these former scofflaws, and 3) this is the future, baby. Finally, the timing tower goes green and Bergenholtz steps on it, breaking the front axle with the power of the motor. The machine flops onto the starting line, impotent and immobile. The crowd reels, and a flurry of jetsam from the snack bar litters the track. Chants of "No More Rice" and "Buy a Chevy" metastasize, and as the next pair of rice racers flip their ignition switches and begin laying rubber, the jeers overwhelm the screech of the hyper-revved VTEC engines.
The young turks take the race-baiting in stride, with a calculated, almost cryogenic confidence. They grok down to their fire boots that this is all part of an evolution. "You can't force somebody to like something with the slicks on the front," Kubo explains later. "They have their way, we have our way."
The NHRA learns this lesson, too: separate events for separate cultures. Drunken flag-wavers in sweat-stained undershirts heckling the new race car drivers is not the kind of identity crisis that the NHRA wants televised. Funny car fans are spared the Asian invasion, and the street racers get a league of their own: the Sport Compact Series.
Pomona, California, October 2002
The starting line of this season's NHRA Sport Compact World Finals is a groovy tableau of nitrous-addled Asian, Latino, and Caucasian kids geeking out on import power. Team Bergenholtz is here, tweaking the wheelie bars on its CRX. Lisa Kubo is here too, on crutches. She crashed going 166 mph in a qualifying heat two weeks before. Getting in position for a view of the action, I cruise along the safety wall that separates the bleachers from the tarmac and end up between two railbirds, old-timers who come to the track for every NHRA shindig, regardless.
"My dogs hate it," says the first, a wiry and hirsute hippie.
"What?" I can't hear him over the whine and grind of the high-pitched Japanese power plants pulling their drivers down the track.
"They hate it." He points to the parking lot. "The sound. They're in my van howling."
"Do you take them to all the races?"
"Yeah. They actually like the sound of funny cars, but they can't stand the rice burners."
Two Mazdas rev up to the red line on their tachometers and jump through the gate, spluttering and dancing a stiff, disjointed hully-gully down the drag strip.
"It sounds like they're strangling ducks," I tell him.
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James Chiang Lisa Kubo, the world's fastest female import racer, suffered a setback late last year in San Antonio. Her Honda lost traction at 166 mph and crossed the finish line nearly upsode down. She suffered only minor injuries.
"They're on the chip, trying to get turbo boost." There's no mistaking the derision in his voice.
Under the hood, sensors monitoring the rpms are wired to an engine-management computer that regulates the timing of the spark, the volume of fuel going to the combustion chambers, and the boost from the turbocharger. Import racers jack into this computer and reprogram it to pump up performance. It's more of an art than a science, so when the driver swaps pedals at the green light, as often as not the tires shake, the car stutters, two cylinders end up firing at once, and POP, all hell breaks loose in a puff of blue smoke.
"It's gonna take a while for me to get used to the sound of a chip," I say to my nodding companion. "It grates."
But the graybeard standing on the other side of me just shakes his head.
"I love this stuff," he laughs. "The semi-reliability of their technology and their lack of driving skills keep it interesting. Kinda like the good ol' days – you never know what's gonna happen."
Pomona, California, November 2002
I return to Pomona the following weekend to see the monolithic mastodons of old-school drag racing pound the ground. The Funny Car champ should be, like it has been for the past 10 straight years, the Ford-sponsored team: driver John Force and Austin Coil, the winningest crew chief in the NHRA. The number two qualifier this weekend is Dean Skuza, piloting a replica Dodge.
It's raining. Besotted bleacher bums drink beer and hang on a chain-link fence, oblivious. It's a mood of denial and frustration. Everybody is pretending they're not all wet.
During the downpour, I grab shelter in something called the Castrol GTX Technology Center, a sort of earthbound Enterprise for John Force Racing replete with gratuitous banks of monitors, blinking lights, and a trash bin filled with sundry pieces of hardware: blower rotors, cams, pistons.
Coil, the brains of the operation, indulges me while I ask his opinion of the new generation of hot-rodders, the kids coming up off the Pacoima streets.
"You mean like that movie The Fast and the Frivolous? The fact that somebody was programming his computer during the run," Coil snickers. "It amazes me there was that much time, y'know?"
But the wisecrack is just a cover for his underlying frustration with the NHRA. "I'm hoping for a change in the rules to bring the sport into the 20th century, if not the 21st," he concedes, working a toothpick between his gums. "We're not allowed to be as sophisticated as what we drive to the racetrack."
The next day the weather improves – but not for rival racer Skuza. He loses not only his heat, but also his big-money Mopar sponsorship. He's feeling philosophical. I ask him what he thinks about the new drivers in their rice rockets.
"I'm watching these import cars using 10.5-inch tires run like a bat out of hell, and I'm like, 'Holy fug.' That is scary," he says, waving a cigarette. "Those cars are just not designed to do that. That's why we've seen some hellacious crashes, and injuries and deaths. But I think that one of the reasons my deal with Mopar went away is because, corporate-wise, they are looking at it as the future."
When I suggest the funny car class might want to adopt some of the technologies used by the sport compacts, Skuza stands up for the pneumatic computer. "Air timers can do what electronics can do." Plus, he adds, in an era of declining sponsorship, the teams just can't afford to upgrade to electronic control systems.
Coil, who's clearly bursting to give a rice-burner upgrade to funny cars, skewers that argument with a simple cost assessment: "With today's technology, $10,000 in computer controls could save $100,000 in broken parts."
But to Skuza, that's not the bottom line. "What I don't want," he says, "is the best programmer winning the race."
Commerce, California, November 2002
The next night, import racer Ed Bergenholtz and I are chowing down at a Denny's in an industrial section of East LA. As we talk, fog slinks inland, slowly blanketing the rail yard outside.
Across town, John Force, Austin Coil, Dean Skuza, and the Superstars of Professional Drag Racing are at the NHRA awards ceremony at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre – home of the Academy Awards – accepting trophies and giving televised speeches.
Over meat and potatoes, I hear about Bergenholtz's day job: "Project plans, cost analysis, building infrastructures." He's an IT guy. "Computers pay for my drag racing," he says.
With a nod toward the street racers cruising for outlaw action just outside the restaurant, Bergenholtz says he no longer wants "to support that environment." He tells me about his homeboy, Rob Sapinoso, who hung out at the Bergenholtz brothers' garage in Orange County. "Sap" was a UC Irvine honor student gunned down on the outskirts of Little Saigon by a Vietnamese gang.
"But his CRX lives on," Bergenholtz says into a plateful of mashed spuds. The rubout inspired the brothers' move to legal racing. They campaigned Sap's car and won by remapping its engine management computer to wring out that last tiny margin of horsepower.
"The appeal is in pushing these motors to the edge of breaking," says Bergenholtz, summing up drag racing's central ethos. So what's the new twist, Ed? "Anything you can do with a wrench, I can do with the up key, the down key, and the Enter key."
