There is a somewhat symbiotic effect between the car modification community and a lot of media about cars, racing and tinkering.
In Japan, two of the country’s biggest entertainment franchises are based around the infamous street racing team Mid Night and former race driver Keiichi Tsuchiya’s mountain driving skills respectively.
However, in the late 1990s, an entire car culture was formed on the back of one relatively obscure article in a magazine that focused primarily on hip-hop and R&B music.
Speed Racers
The 1990s was a time of considerable change when it came to street racing, as moral panics surrounding joyriding and irresponsible street racing had led to many governments orchestrating crackdowns, mirroring what had happened on the Shuto Expressway in Japan.
This forced a lot of racers underground, finding makeshift routes further away from the eyes of the police, and sometimes booking time at drag strips to have time trial runs.
Because it was underground, there were always rumours surrounding its connection to criminal rings and car theft, which is where journalist Kenneth Li enters the story.
Assigned to explore the underground car scene of Queens to dig up information on organised car crime, he cancelled the story once he was introduced to Rafael Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights.
For Mr Li, the real story was this racing culture and the unique and diverse characters and mindset that push drivers to modify very normal and conventional cars to become ludicrously fast speed demons, betting thousands of dollars on the outcomes of street races.
This led to the article Racer X, published in May 1998 and highlighted a different type of car culture to that seen in the pages of Max Power in the UK.
The article generated some interest, most notably from Rob Cohen, then best known as the director of the 1996 movie Dragonheart and the man who found the script The Sting.
He had a reputation for somewhat unconventional stories and eventually convinced Universal Pictures to option the rights to the article for the film.
Originally set to have Mr Li write the screenplay and be more faithful to the original article under the working title of Redline, this allegedly ended when Mr Li asked if the producers had read the script in response to a question about what the story was.
After passing through the hands of three other writers, including Training Day’s David Ayer and Split Second’s Gary Scott Thompson, the story was finally moved forward after two years of constant modification.
The original story about Mr Estevez’s quest to build a car that can race a particular drag strip in less than ten seconds and the toll it placed financially, physically and emotionally in car-unfriendly New York was replaced with a very different story based in Los Angeles.
It somewhat ironically became far closer to the story Mr Li was going to write, a Point Break-inspired action movie about a car theft ring, right down to having almost identical endings.
It was not expected to be made and when was produced with relatively unknown actors Paul Walker and Vin Diesel in the lead roles, it was expected to bomb at the box office releasing within a year of the very similar Nicolas Cage vehicle Gone In 60 Seconds.
However, whilst the star-laden latter film was critically panned and lost $90m at the box office, The Fast and the Furious was a sleeper hit that made back five times its original budget and spawned one of the longest-running film franchises of the 21st century.
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