http://www.angelfire.com/va2/ShadowRiders/rrpopsci.html
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This page is made up of a collection of quotes from a Popular Science article and my comments regarding some of the statements made in the article. The original article is titled "Tuning Japanese" by Preston Lerner and can be found here.
Commentary on Tuning Japanese
"Import tuners, once kid brothers to small-block chevys, have grown up."
Shouldn't this say "small-block chevy owners"? Getting into a hobby is great, but it'd be kind of weird to have an engine for your older brother.
"Donate the Deuce Coupe to an auto museum and put the GTO up for sale: The hippest, hottest hot rod in America is now an Asian import with front-wheel drive and a turbocharged four-banger. Humble Honda Civics with stock unibodies and custom everything else have clocked sub-9-second quarter-mile passes, with top speeds approaching 170 mph, and it's not uncommon to find street-legal econorockets fast enough to humiliate a Corvette Z06. Note to outraged Detroit iron loyalists: Deal with it."
Good advice there, sell cars that actually have value in order to get cars that will never have any value. The actual word "hip" is not used in any circles I'm in, unless it's describing a type of music. "Hottest hot rod" sounds bad, and to call these vehicles a hot rod is changing the entire meaning of the term. What Asian imports with front wheel drive, four cylinder engine, and turbocharger can you think of? Eclipse GST...is the WRX front wheel drive? I dunno. So, just so everyone knows, unless you own one of these blazingly fast high 15 second Eclipses you might as well sell or give away your old muscle cars because you're slow and outdated. Have you ever seen a Honda Civic run sub 9's in the quarter? I have. They were certainly not what I call humble. More like bumble. Bumble bees. Ticked off bumble bees with stripped everything, bars in the back to put more weight onto the front tires and hold it there, ridiculously large front tires that stick out from the fenders so far you can't see the car from the front. They are gutted, turbo charged, forged engine, nitrous breathing, high revving, annoying, good for nothing other than racing, four wheeled crotch rockets. The statement about how common it is to find ZO6 killers is an outright lie. It is extremely uncommon to find such cars. I believe the ZO6 runs somewhere in the 11's and is an extremely fast, extremely factory, naturally aspirated car. I am not a Detroit iron loyalist, but I am outraged at this outrageous lie that has been written to do nothing but give every wannabe car enthusiast kid in America the illusion that they too can outrun true performance cars such as the ZO6 with their Mommy and Daddy's Honda Civic, Dodge Neon, or Chevrolet Cavalier using their Mommy and Daddy's credit card to buy aftermarket crap. How much money is the media asking for from aftermarket companies anyway? It's a lot for sure. It is extremely hard to find an 11 second import, and if you do, most likely it will have more money invested into it then you could have bought the factory Vette for. It is impossible to find a naturally aspirated 11 second streetable import. Obviously I'm excluding exotics, which cost far more than the Vette could dream of and do not fall into the same category as those cars which make up the content of this article. Hear that word? F-a-c-t-o-r-y. ZO6's are factory, streetable, 11 second machines. Ever wonder what would happen if the ZO6 owner spent a few thousand on some modifications? Let's make it even, a power adder (which the import would inevitably be using), what would happen? My note to the overgrown rice boy author of this article: Your statement is crock, deal with it.
"So-called rice burners began infiltrating the Los Angeles underground street-racing culture about 10 years ago. By the mid-1990s, slammed Hondas with stainless-steel exhausts were rasping around both coasts, and by decade's end, import car shows and sanctioned drag races were drawing huge crowds. Hollywood came late to the party, but when The Fast and the Furious was released in 2001, its mix of fast cars, babes on parade and enough nitrous oxide to anesthetize the entire city of Pomona brought the import tuner scene to middle America."
This just goes to prove that nothing good ever comes from California. What's so great about slammed Hondas with stainless steel exhaust...my car is lowered...it has aluminum exhaust and stainless steel exhaust tips (tips, not tip)...hm. Rasping? Like a raspy voice, a raspy cough, like something that's about to die? Probably, I've heard some sickly sounding imports without a doubt. I won't even get into the smoking tailpipes resulting from morons who keep their foot in the little economy engines gasping to stay alive.
"Like their predecessors, the new hot rodders have split into show and go camps. The look-fast crowd flocks to mega-decibel Hot Import Nights car shows; picture a street-rod car show by way of the House of Blues. For these guys, the scene is more than a lifestyle; it's their whole life. "They spend all of their disposable income on their cars," says Michael Meyers, president of NOPI, a giant Atlanta-based parts distributor. "They build their personalities around their cars.""
This is also false. It's something more along the lines of those who are fast, those who look good, and those who wanna look fast. The look fast group is huge, the look good group is very small, and the actually fast group is so minute it's almost not noticeable when looking at the whole. Obviously these people spend their entire income on their cars, they have no life, they have no money, and the aftermarket is great for charging incredibly ridiculous amounts of money for "performance" junk that ricers are willing to give everything for if it means attempting to get an actual personality.
"For go-fast types, it's all about straight-line, quarter-mile performance, largely because drag strips -- unlike twisty road-race circuits -- are accessible to all comers. "You can drive up to Palmdale (home of the Los Angeles County Raceway) on a Friday night, pay 15 bucks and you're on the track," says Craig Lieberman, technical advisor to The Fast and the Furious, who also runs one of the four professional import drag racing series inaugurated in recent years."
Autocrossing and road racing, not unlike bracket and heads up drag racing, are extremely easy to get involved in and follow a grassroots style accessibility.
"The import tuner crowd couldn't care less about road racing, but that hasn't stopped them from appropriating its trappings, from superwide wheels to rear wings the size of coffee tables. Many of these components are pricey Japanese-spec imports. Japanese domestic market (JDM) devotees will spend $500 to $1,000 for J-spec headlights. Raymond Fong, general manager of VeilSide USA, had a customer who dropped $14,000 on a body kit. "And to install it," Fong says, "he had to pull out the gas tank and put in a fuel cell.""
If ricers don't care about road racing then why do they insist on bringing up how well their little cars handle (which is a fallacy in itself) so often? Not only do superwide wheels and rear wings the size of coffee tables not make you go any faster or handle better in any way, but they plain old just look stupid. We like to call these cars disco biscuits. Since when do headlights make you go any faster or handle better? $14,000 on a body kit?! That doesn't make you go any faster or handle any better either. You could probably add the money you paid for the kit to the money you paid for your car and buy the car you're trying to copy the looks of anyway. Replacing the gas tank with a fuel cell to make a kit fit does not sound like a kit worth paying $14,000 for. To the person that this is talking about, you are a complete idiot.
"The ultimate JDM icon is the Nissan Skyline GT-R, a budget supercar that developed a cult following in the States through the Gran Turismo 3 PlayStation 2 game. Under its rather bland bodywork beats a turbocharged engine that can be tweaked to produce nearly 450 hp without any heavy breathing. "In Japan, it's known as Godzilla," says Ken Takahashi, sales manager of MotoRex, a firm in Los Angeles that imports the right-hand-drive beasts."
No, seriously, somebody please, exaplain to me the word "budget". Is this car even available in the US? I'm sure it's a very nice car in the game, keep your stock Civic at home and play some games then instead of vibrating your way around town embarrassing yourself. This is real life. You do not own a Nissan Skyline GT-R, and chances are you never will. What kind of car making only 450hp deserves the name supercar? None. It even takes a turbocharger to get it there. Oh I see, this guy in Los Angeles can import one for you. Quick everyone! Maybe he'll take your Nissan 240 SX on trade!
"Another bit of import tuner exotica is the sport of drifting. Ever power-slide around a snow-covered parking lot? Imagine doing it on a racetrack -- for style points. That's drifting, and there's a professional series devoted to it in Japan. Tommy Chen, whose SpeedTrialUSA organization occasionally runs drifting sessions in Southern California, now calls them "car control" events. "One track owner tried to throw us out when he heard we were drifting," he explains. Then again, it wasn't that long ago that imports weren't welcome at drag strips either."
This is fair enough, sounds cool. Other than one thing. Imports still aren't welcome at drag strips. We just put up with them because they're easy to sandbag and make money off of. Cam II for your ZC anyone?
"Nobody's calling Asian hot rods rice burners anymore. Car companies are clawing for a piece of the compact car performance market -- a $2 billion industry served by dozens of magazines, hundreds of speed shops and countless suppliers. Factory hot rods such as the Mazdaspeed Protegé, Dodge SRT-4 and Ford Focus SVT cater to customers who want their quasi-customization to come with a manufacturer's warranty. But as the cars on these pages show, factory hot rods barely scratch the surface of the technological sophistication and obsessive attention to detail that characterize hard-core import tuners."
That's wrong. See, I'm calling Asian hot rods rice burners. Mostly because Asian hot rod is the dumbest term I've ever heard in my life. Rice burners. The part about the aftermarket is certainly true. Clawing for a piece though? It must be easier than that, what with all the colorful supposedly performance parts on the market now. The magazines-ah yes I've read the magazines. Some of the cars look good, they're hard to see in between all the hot girls though. Hasn't anybody told these ladies yet that you can't have sex in a compact? As far as the writing goes, it's the same as any swimsuit issue. Who really cares. That has to be the attitude of the guys who subscribe to this crap, because if you actually bother to read the material you will realize that the writers are absolute dunder heads. Pedals for better traction?! Are you kidding me? Perhaps if you wore shoes like a normal person instead of sandles with socks in the winter and could drive worth a dime you could keep your feet on the pedals. I know 90 year old women who can peddle themselves around the nursing home in their wheel chairs just fine. I've also found that speed shops have absolutely nothing to do with actual speed. Just a lot of colorful and fake parts that have "performance" somewhere in the name, but what they actually do to help speed or handling is beyond me. That's the stuff that sells though. Who wouldn't want to buy a $20 item that matches your car and your hawaiian shirt and is supposed to make your car as fast as the ones in that movie, the Fake and the Fictitious? The next part really bugs me. I thought this was an article about imports? Now we talk about factory hotrods and they use a Ford, Dodge, and a Mazda as examples? Somebody needs to check on where these cars originate, are built, and where the parts come from. Then check out the stats on them. Go ahead and look up the quarter mile ETs and even the Gs from skidpad tests if you want. Check out the ones for the factory Z 28's and Mustang GT's. These are cheap cars and run well below what the cars mentioned in this article can even after modification. Factory LS1/T56 F-Bodies seem to enjoy the 12 second range. Okay, a 14.3 second SRT4 (Car and Driver) is a factory hot rod but a ZO6 Vette is frequently and seemingly easily humiliated by commonly found imports and sport compacts? Hmmm. I mean I'm no math wiz, but I thought that 11 seconds goes by a lot faster than 14 seconds. Maybe I'm wrong, afterall - it does come with that cool wing.
"TOYOTA SUPRA The Toyota Supra is the Lamborghini Diablo of Japanese sports cars -- oversexed, overbuilt and over the top. Last available in the United States in 1998, the Supra is renowned in aftermarket tuner circles mainly because its stout inline-six is said to need nothing but a few basic performance upgrades to create obscene amounts of power. (Obscene in these circles means up to 900 hp.)"
Can we say "dyno whore"?
"But Keith Ta, who owns the Speed Force Racing tuner shop in San Diego, wanted to push the envelope. He upgraded the pistons, rods and a host of engine internals before installing not one but two massive turbochargers, a twin-core intercooler to cool the air compressed by those turbos, and custom manifolds and tubing. Using a refined sense of overkill, Ta rigged up a nitrous oxide system to further produce a short-lived power spike. With the boost from the turbos cranked up to a whopping 34 psi, Ta says the engine should develop 1,000-plus hp at the wheels -- figure 1,200 at the crank -- while the nitrous fix adds an extra 80."
Have you ever noticed that every import worth mentioning in any "respectable" article is owned and has been built by a professional of some kind in the automotive industry who always owns or runs an actual parts supplier or customizing company or business? They're the ones with the actual know how, money, and parts availability to make anything even appear to be worth writing about. Other than that, nothing too awful here, except for the ungodly amounts of money that were inevitably spent trying to prove some kind of point.
"On the cosmetic front, Ta combined off-the-shelf body kit components with his own custom pieces to produce a uniquely sleek Supra. The car rides on colossal 19-inch wheels, 12.5 inches wide at the rear, a choice made partially for looks and partially because it helps to have a lot of rubber on asphalt with 1,000 hp underfoot. (Ta had to fit smaller-than-stock rear brakes to accommodate his racing tires, steamroller-like 345/35s. He compensated with race-quality 14-inch drilled rotors up front.) Inside, the Supra features a steering wheel fitted with a bright red button to squirt some nitrous. Excess weight, apparently, is not a concern: There's also a mini TV. "I can't watch it on the street," Ta admits, "but it comes in handy when I get bored at car shows.""
Oh boy, cosmetics. Still not too much to complain about here. Using a pushbutton activated nitrous system on a manual car is a big no no, although I'm sure not too many people get to actually drive this car. If they did you'd see what I mean. Well obviously, excess weight shouldn't be a concern with over 1,000hp. I bet this guy watches his mini TV at the shows a lot, because this Supra is probably the only import worth looking at amongst all the rice at any given import show. Just to comment quickly on the list of modifications and the comment about doubling the output of a stock Vipers 8.3L V10 engine : the key word here is stock. Not only is the Supra turbo and nitrous charged, itâs built like mad. Now that weâve spent the value of a Viper in modifications on a car that cost about the same (and they donât bring into the US anymore), letâs take cheap shots at stock American cars. Afterall, thatâs the true âtunerâ way. There is also a stupid comment in parenthesis about launching the car at stoplights. Brilliant comment, brilliant.
The next car mentioned is a Nissan 240SX. Other than that the engine block and head alone cost over $10,000 (and they seemingly brag about how much it cost??) I will not comment on this car as it is strictly customized with parts shipped from overseas. Again, more powerful, influential, and rich people involved in the import industry.
âHONDA CIVIC Eleven years ago, when L.A.'s tuner scene was taking shape, Paul Ho was a punk kid street-racing a crude-but-wicked Honda Civic. Today, at 26, he's in charge of R&D at Injen Technology in Pomona. He still drives a hot-rodded Civic. But now it's the ultimate expression of the import tuner ethic -- fully customized, it's docile enough to drive on the street, powerful enough to blitz a dragstrip in under 11 seconds.â
Crude but wicked? Iâm sure⦠Nevertheless, we have yet another import businessman much different from your average JoeRicer. An 11 second streetable Civic. From the point of view this article was written from earlier, who cares? These arenât uncommon right? From my point of view? Bravo. Letâs take a look.
âThe first step to a fast Civic: Junk the engine. Ho replaced the stock four in his 1994 Si in favor of the more powerful B18C, a 1.8-liter twin-cam VTEC found in the Acura Integra GS-R. This easy swap is so popular that the B18C has emerged as the small-block Chevy of this new generation of hot-rodders (and, dubiously, has also led to Integra theft rates 2.5 times as high as any other vehicle). Ho blueprinted, balanced, ported his engine -- the traditional go-fast hocus-pocus. But the only way to make real power from 1.8 liters is forced induction. Ho's weapon: a giant turbo mated to an exhaust manifold he designed and welded himself. On the track, boost dialed up to 26 psi, the car makes more than 600 hp.â
Ah yes, the old engine swap. Well, have any of you actually tried to find any of these B18Câs? Theyâre not around where I live at all, and even if you find one, itâs much more expensive then any self respecting intake/exhaust rice boy would ever be willing to pay. How many Integra GS-Râs are in your area? I will tell you that I have never seen one in person in my entire lifetime. Iâve seen a few with the badges you can buy from Autozone. They almost would fool you if you were a drunken blindman who knew nothing about cars. There is no go fast hocus pocus, there is no magic to this. I feel it necessary to say that because import âtunersâ have a bad habit of ignoring factual evidence. The only way to go fast is with a power adder! Amen. This article should be titled âAdding Power-adders or Eating Dustâ. For most imports âAdding Power-adders and Eating Dustâ would be much more appropriate. What makes no sense to me at all is the line about it being the small-block Chevy of the new generation â what? This guy has no idea what heâs talking about does he? What the heck does that mean? What does everyone into domestic cars envy a small block chevy (sbc)? Do we all swap them in? I donât get whatâs being said here. All of my cars have come with sbcâs, I didnât have to swap them in⦠I guess we all just gotta have a tree-fiddy sbc right? Canât afford to cut that mullet off because weâre saving up for the tree-fiddy. We all have those too right? Mullets? Just to shed a little bit of light on this guyâs goals. The car does not look stock at all. He wants a sleeper? This is not a sleeper, this is not stock looking. I mean, my Mother would raise an eyebrow at that ugly thing. The oh so hot aftermarket parts have served this baby carraige well. It runs 11 seconds and he is actually seriously considering breaking speed records? The article mentions it, we should assume it is possible right? Well then, the records are a bunch of nothing. What else should you expect from slow economy cars though?
âPreston Lerner, a contributing writer to Automobile and author of the motorsports history Scarab, prefers to race his own Nissan 240SX on tracks with curves.â
Rice boy.
Great Response to Popular Science and their car article.... 
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