From the outside looking in, I'm a 26-year-old import racer from Pennsylvania. From the inside looking out, I'm a guy who has done a good job selling my team, my sponsors, and myself.
My general philosophy is "sell, sell, sell." That may not sound profound, but salesmanship is what it takes to accomplish what our team has accomplished. As the driver, I'm the public face of the team and therefore the chief salesman too. If I don't sell myself, I can't recruit good people to our team. If I don't sell the team, I can't bring good sponsors to it. If I don't sell our sponsors, they get no value for their money and won't stick around very long. Whether it's import drag racing, NASCAR, Formula One or some guy bashing an old Pinto around some dirt track in Iowa, being a winning racer means first being a successful seller.
I bought my first Integra on July 23, 1993. It was the first GS-R sold on the East Coast, so I was styling. I just started college and wanted to make it fast. Back then Drag Turbo was the sweet ticket, so I hooked up one of its systems to my car. I was getting like 270 or 300 hp and running 13.50. About a month later, I deep-fried a couple of pistons. The car sat.
In early '95, I decided to build a 450-hp Integra engine. People thought I was nuts. I was calling all over the United States trying to put some parts together to make this dream of mine a reality. After about a year of dealing with shops that would say "Yeah, we can help you," but really couldn't, somehow I connected with Rob Smith from RPS.
Smith is very conservative, but very good at what he does. He doesn't want to break engines. He built an engine that was making like 550 hp, but I didn't have the right car to put it in. I had this dream of a 450-hp street car, but to Smith there's no such thing - it had to be either a racecar or it would be a B.S. street car. So we were making a racecar.
When we first got the car to the track, it would go 11.30s, 11.40s and, on occasion, 11.20s. When I took it out to Battle of the Imports in '98 (the first one I'd ever driven in), we qualified third or fourth at a really surprising 11.0-the best the car had ever run. We made some modifications, built some wheelie bars for it, and took it to Maplegrove, our local track. Suddenly the car was running 10.80, then 10.70. By the time we retired this car, it was running 10.0s at Pomona.
That's when I knew we had to get serious. We decided to build a monster.
With Ken's Kustom Chassis, the team and I built a machine we thought would force everyone else to respond. We took the car to the Battle of the Imports in Virginia; once on the track, it immediately lit-off like a firecracker. After I launched the car, it took a hard right for the wall. When I corrected, it almost went over the centerline. Then I almost crashed after I passed through the traps. But I never saw the car I was running against. Never.
Convinced the car was hurt in some way, I pulled off the turnaround. When my friend Jojo Callos made it down there he was freakin'. "Man," he said. "You ran, like, 9.50 at almost 160 mph." I almost lost it.
Since then, we've been winning and performing. And that's what keeps selling us. In 1999, I was one of the first people to win a Wally Parks NHRA trophy at an import event. In 2000, we went undefeated in NIRA competition and finished as runner-up in points and on June 3, we ran a 9.52 at 157 mph. Last year, we became the first front-wheel-drive unibody to hit 160 in the quarter at Gainesville in May. And on June 3, we became the first unibody front-driver in the 8s with a 8.91 at 159.85 mph performance, putting my boy Stephan (Big Poppa) on the trailer for the first time.
I strive to sell in every way possible. But nothing sells better than winning and performing.