In 2001 I went to the movies with some friends to see the summer’s hot film. It was an action movie, but not like anything that I’d seen before. It was a heist movie, but the film didn’t center around planning and executing the heist—it centered are cars.
I’d grown up around cars my entire life, but I’d never experienced cars as part of pop culture like this before. Not even NASCAR—one of the most popular sports in the world—had the kind of mass appeal as The Fast and the Furious.
It was a cultural phenomenon. All of a sudden, there were teenagers and young adults driving small, front wheel drive cars with body kits, wings, and decals stuck all over them. Local “racing teams” sprouted up everywhere there was a group of kids with cars. Drag strips were no longer the realm of middle-aged men with muscle cars anymore, kids with Hondas and Toyotas were making their way into the staging lanes.
The Fast and the Furious was based on an article written by Kenneth Li for Vibe back in 1999 about street racers in New York. It follows a driver, Rafael Estevez, as he goes from street racing to trying to break the Honda quarter-mile speed record and become a professional. From an article in a magazine to a major motion picture—import car culture was thrown head-long into popular culture.
The world of cars got turned upside-down almost overnight.
Car Culture after The Fast and the Furious
People from all over jumped headlong into the tuning scene. There was a boom in buying performance parts, 4-cylinder imports, and flashy paint jobs and body kits. Car shows were no longer the realm of the grey-haired man with his “T-Bucket” or ’39 Ford wrapped around a Corvette engine and drivetrain. Now, show cars had ground effects, neon lights, sound systems, and turbos.
A new generation of car lovers was born, and their love of cars was built around cars from arguably the most bland period of cars in the 20th century—the 90’s.
For 90’s cars, there was more to tuning than boring cylinders or putting in a “hotter” cam, mostly because four-cylinder engines had limited capabilities in their natural forms. There were fuel maps, injector flow rates, air-fuel ratios, computer programs, boost controllers, and the addition of turbos and superchargers. Now, to tune a car, you needed a course in computer programming in addition to understanding the basics of engine building.
Even so, this opened the door to a generation of young car lovers to buying, repairing, and modding cars using makes and models that they could not only afford, but were built in numbers that allowed for easy sourcing of parts and a thriving aftermarket—sometimes only available from Japan where a majority of these cars were designed and manufactured. With the increasing need for parts, it wasn’t long before the aftermarket found a home in the US and parts became even more affordable and easier to get.
Rather than replacing American car culture wholesale, tuning culture grew in and around the existing culture, much to the annoyance of the “old guard”. Using the pejorative term “rice burner” to refer to these cars, they grumbled on about car culture dying out.
Having grown up around American muscle cars, I too had trouble seeing the appeal of a compact import relying on turbos and nitrous to be fast. Through the intervening years, though, my feelings about cars and car cultures grew and evolved into appreciation and enjoyment of imports, small engines, and forced induction.
Car Culture Today
Even though the boom has slowed down some in the 16 years since The Fast and the Furious came out, enough die-hard “car guys” were left behind to lay the groundwork for the vibrant and diverse car culture we have today.
Car culture has always been diverse and full of interesting characters. But, The Fast and the Furious brought people into car culture that hadn’t given it a thought or couldn’t afford it and they helped to build on and improve the vast and plentiful aftermarket that us “car guys” rely on to help take the cars we love to the next level.
That’s the effect that The Fast and the Furious had on car culture: its more diverse and approachable than it may have ever been.