There’s a shop that fixes up, say, in New York, Toyota Supras were big, whereas in LA it was more Hondas. You had Puerto Ricans, White people from Queens, it was a little bit more integrated. It would be different in New York where the people fixing up cars weren’t necessarily young Asians. There may have been a lot of Asians in LA, but ultimately it was just guys with cars. “I think it was a lot of scenes,” said Richard Chang, who was editor of Super Street Magazine. There were the guys who went to the car shows and just wanted to convince themselves that making their car cool would attract the ladies, which is pretty normal in any car scene from any time in history, I guess.” And so there were different subcultures within the culture. In another sense, we were totally outsiders of that culture. “ Sport Compact Car was, in some sense, a huge iconic center of that culture. “Everyone’s going to give you a different answer about the culture because it was really, you know, it depends on which circles you were circulating in,” said Dave Coleman, who went from working for a speed parts maker to being a staff member at Sport Compact Car, to his current job as an engineering executive at Mazda, making sure Mazdas are fun to drive. The Scene had evolved to encompass a large number of things. Convention Center and filled them with tuner Civics, live DJs and even, occasionally, “dancers” live on stage. It grew from just drag racing to drag racing and car shows like Hot Import Nights, the Import Showoff and the NOPI Nationals, big shows that rented out venues like the L.A. There were car shows and drag races and illegal drag racing and just like a flurry of activity.” “There was definitely a feeling of this organic, authentic energy of all this enthusiasm. “Oh, man, yeah, there was just a lot happening,” said Jim Liaw, who started out selling ads for a magazine based on the whole Import Scene before going on to co-found Formula Drift. No one can say precisely when it started or where it stopped, but out of it came that one ridiculous movie that, for better or worse, helped define a generation. It was this latter phase of car enthusiasm that became known as The Import Scene. And then after that, somewhere in the late-’80s and early ’90s there came a whole new deal of small, front-wheel drive Honda Civics, Acura Integras, rear-drive Mazda RX-2s, 3s and 7s, Toyota Supras (the original Japanese muscle car), and a host of other cars limited only by the imaginations of those who built them. Then the oil embargo kind of killed things for a while and gave us-what, custom vans?-but also the Bug-Ins of the 1980s, with 10-second turbocharged VW Beetles that weighed about as much as the doors on a Dodge Charger. After that, the muscle car generation rose up and raced everywhere from Van Nuys Boulevard to Woodward Avenue, to strips all up and down the East Coast. Hot-rodding, drag-racing, and time trials on the dry lakes grew out of post-WWII prosperity and involved ’32 Ford roadsters and belly tanks dropped from P-38s. There has been a car scene in almost every generation for the last 75 years. The reality was called The Import Scene and for a brief moment in racing and automotive history it was huge. Given that every F&F movie since the first one got increasingly more ridiculous, with La Familia reuniting for increasingly absurd plot reasons-“There’s a USB drive stuck in a collector car in Brazil!”-and with a few members of La Familia even rising from the dead, it may be difficult to imagine that the first movie, or at least the beginning of the first movie, actually had some scenes that reflected a reality some people fondly remember. Not all of it, not the truck hijackings, the murders of racing rivals, and I never saw any girls in bikinis at real street races, and virtually no DJs. Yes, some of that stuff in the movie used to really happen. So amid all that, it’s interesting to note that the original movie 20 years ago was actually based on a real racing and cultural phenomenon. Look for the Group of Seven to seat Dominic Toretto soon. That places it between (I am not making this up) the Gross Domestic Products of Maldives and Tajikistan on the world economic scale. So far, the series has made almost $7 billion. After much delay, the world finally experienced F9 last June, the Fast & Furious franchise’s ninth ( but by no means last) installment.
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