The History and Impact of 1990s Tuner Culture

Aug 28, 2023

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Debate continues about when and where the tuner scene began, but like the hot-rodding and lowriding movements that came before, it's now a deeply ingrained part of the automotive landscape. The culture, largely centered on compact cars, is today catered to by a massive apparatus consisting of automakers, aftermarket parts houses, events companies, and media industries to keep passions burning—and cash flowing. But it wasn't always that way, and it was during the 1990s that tuner culture went from largely underground to far more mainstream.

By the '90s, American consumers had been buying a variety of "imports" (a term now largely passé) and small cars in large numbers for 20 years. That provided an ample stock of affordable used—and easily customized—machines for an enthusiast population increasingly influenced by motorsports, grassroots car shows, and niche magazines that promoted what was then a new lifestyle.

As with muscle cars in decades past, drag racing might have been the match that lit the fire. Hot spots of racing sprung up in the Midwest, along the Eastern seaboard, and most prominently in Southern California, but before 1990 few if any events were officially sanctioned. The streets were the first flexing arenas, with races held late at night and in far-flung places unlikely to be snarled by traffic—or prowled by the police.

In SoCal, street races had a distinct flavor. "You'd see a ton of rotary-swapped or -powered stuff like [Datsun] 510s; [Mazda] RX-2s, -3s, -4s, -7s; [and Nissan] 240Zs," remembered Frank Choi (below left), the visionary behind the seminal Battle of the Imports (BOTI) racing series, in a 2000 Honda Tuning interview. Non-rotaries such as the Toyota Celica Supras and the Z32 300ZX raced, too, but rotary power was preferred because it was less expensive and easier to maintain than piston engines. Plus, rotaries could handle lots of horsepower. One thing he said almost all cars had in common: "Predominantly, it was rear-wheel-drive cars—all old-school."

On the East Coast, a concentration of dragstrips in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland facilitated the fast-rotary agenda (especially popular with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Latin Americans), and the region had its own share of street racing. In Ohio, tuners such as David Buschur championed Diamond Star Motors' (the joint venture between Mitsubishi and Chrysler) AWD compacts with the 4G63 turbo-four: the first- and second-generation Mitsubishi Eclipse and Eagle Talon models, as well as the Plymouth Laser RS Turbo AWD. Ultimately, they and others would move on to one of the pantheon Japanese cars, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.

Japanese car culture has always influenced that on the American West Coast, and Option was a driving force in the pre-internet world. Founded in 1981, the magazine and its offshoot Video Option series established in 1988 provided coverage of modified cars and racing, and the print product brimmed with ads for aftermarket parts. In the U.S., Option was found primarily on newsstands in expatriate communities like those in Los Angeles County's South Bay or passed on via military members stationed abroad.

Option was devoured by tuning fans alongside Best Motoring, Hot Version, and Carboy. These titles educated readers on every aspect of Japanese domestic market (JDM) vehicles, some of which were sold in America and some of which remained forbidden fruit, such as the Nissan Skyline. Americans also absorbed trends through coverage of big events such as the Tokyo Auto Salon, an annual SEMA-style aftermarket expo started in 1983.

By 1990, the tuner scene had gained a toehold, with Choi holding the first Battle of the Imports at Los Angeles County Raceway. Its genesis came after he and his nitrous-boosted, turbocharged Mazda RX-3 were turned away from a domestic-vehicle event. As he told Turbo magazine a decade later: "I had a meeting with officials at the track to see if I could rent it and put on an event specifically for imports. I wanted the satisfaction of turning away a V-8, which I did two or three times for that first race."

Turnout was a modest 60 cars—most of them familiar to the street racing crowd—and roughly 500 spectators, but change was in the air. After the next year's event, when car and spectator counts more than doubled, Choi quit his day job and went all in. BOTI kept growing throughout the '90s.

On the other side of the country, event organizer Javier Ortega—hearing what was happening in California—leveraged Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in New Jersey (which had previously featured an NHRA-sanctioned dragstrip) to host sport compact drag racing in '92. He later developed several large, import-focused racing events at the track and replicated the formula at other ones up and down the East Coast. As the scene matured into the mainstream, Ortega became executive director of the NHRA's sport compact series in the mid-2000s and started DRT Racing in New York with racer Rafael Estevez, the real-life inspiration for the Dominic Toretto character in the Fast & Furious film series.

Import speed shops were sparse in the early '90s. Some specialized in the mechanical side, performing engine swaps, adding forced induction, and modifying electronics. Others were among the few places to order parts—discovered in large part via Option—from Japanese companies. And seeing the burgeoning potential in the American market, a few Japanese tuning companies even set up headquarters in the U.S, including HKS, Greddy, and Apex.

Of course, the most popular models those shops breathed on were commuter-grade Hondas, in particular the Civic and its derivatives. In Japan, enthusiasts repurposed these cars for weekend track days, a trend that spread to Australia and the U.K. But it wasn't until Americans got involved that someone made these front-drive cars truly fast in a straight line, and from 1990 onward, fourth- and fifth-generation Civics, particularly hatchbacks, were scooped up for their attractive combination of low cost, low weight, and easy upgradability. So, too, were both generations of CRX and the second-generation Acura Integra.

It was in this environment via some combination of foresight and fortuitousness that Honda also introduced two landmark FWD performance variants. The first Integra Type R made its Japanese debut in 1995 and arrived in America in slightly altered form in 1997. Japan also got its first Civic Type R hatch in '97. The naturally aspirated inline-four engines in each of these cars became the go-to swaps for a generation.

Midway through the decade, a healthy show scene began to emerge. In the West, DJ, promoter, and BOTI racer Ken Miyoshi founded Import Showoff in '95. Miyoshi sought to create a new "lifestyle" experience, part exhibition, part marketplace, and part nightclub, and his event gave rise to the likes of Hot Import Nights, Extreme Autofest, and others.

In the Southeast, NOPI (which stands for Number One Parts, Inc.) was founded by brothers Mike and Mark Meyers. It was originally an aftermarket parts retailer with a network of brick-and-mortar locations in Georgia. The parts sales moved online, but NOPI continued to stage a series of popular regional events featuring car shows, racing, and more, culminating with the massive NOPI Nationals at Atlanta Motor Speedway every fall.

The cars at NOPI events were less strictly Japanese and more generally compact. Plenty of Civics were present, to be sure, as were Preludes and Accords and DSM cars, but so were European models like the GTI and other Volkswagens and domestics like Ford Mustangs and Chev Camaros. Stylistically, the inspiration for mods in this particular corner of the tuner universe came from the lowrider and mini-truck trends of the previous two decades, which were markedly different from the JDM influences.

It was a somewhat similar story in the Northeast, where events like Waterfest in New Jersey—a Volkswagen- and Audi-centric show and autocross—and others held at the Carlisle Fairgrounds in Pennsylvania drew large crowds. Waterfest was also where many got their first taste of Euro-style elements like shaved engine bays and aggressive wheel fitments. Sound system builds were big, too, regardless of region.

U.S. enthusiast tuner magazines grew in number and page counts throughout the decade. And because most were based in Southern California, they primarily amplified what was local.

The tip of the spear was Kipp Kington's Turbo and High-Tech Performance, founded in Orange County in 1985 and dedicated to explaining advanced engine technology. Originally heavy on domestic cars, it shifted to sport compacts toward the end of the '80s to reflect the growing interest in Japanese and European models and their suitability to tuning.

McMullen Publishing's Sport Compact Car arrived in 1988, and Petersen Publishing's Super Street followed in 1996 (the same year Robert E. Petersen, founder of MotorTrend, sold his publishing empire); these addressed the American tuner audience directly with featured vehicle builds, lifestyle coverage, and technical knowhow. Rodney Wills' Toy Machine Racing, another 1996 debut, offered grassroots coverage and was critical in representing the Southeast and other locales beyond California. As a reaction to Super Street, the Turbo team launched Import Tuner in '98 to overnight success.

Magazine circulations closed out the decade strong while the online sites and forums that would render them obsolete began to emerge. UrbanRacer.com, JTuned.com, Overboost.com, and others presaged today's influencer culture by showcasing individual style and giving everyone a voice. The sheer amount of information was transformational.

And you can't tell any history of tuner culture without mentioning the video games that set imaginations racing, in particular Polyphony Digital's (née Polys Entertainment) Gran Turismo. The sim racing franchise's sensational first installment hit the original Sony PlayStation in 1997 and served the same function as Option magazine nearly two decades prior, but on an interactive and global scale, introducing a vast audience to tuning companies, parts brands, and vehicles and variants they'd likely never heard of before. Fan reaction to the Subaru Impreza WRX and WRX STI and Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution models featured in the game was seemingly a major reason they were eventually offered to American buyers.

Throughout the next two decades, OEMs continued to pump out cars with an eye toward the tuner crowd—the Honda S2000, Nissan 350Z, Acura RSX, and Toyota GR86/Subaru BRZ, for example, as well as new generations of the Civic Type R, WRX, Integra, and Toyota Supra—and in at least one case, created an entire brand (Scion, 2003-2016) that catered to these same buyers. And as the tuner audience aged and financially matured, operations sprung up willing to import the '90s JDM car of Americans' dreams right to their doorsteps.

Motorsports continued to serve as a pillar of inspiration, but tuner-specific drag racing series—there once were four (!)—faded in favor of one-off annual events such as the World Cup Finals, HDay, and Spring/Fall/Pan-American Nationals. Drifting sprung whole cloth from the tuner scene, and an American professional series—Formula D—launched in 2004. Time attack, a Japanese style of road course time trials, became another popular way for participants to prove their builds weren't just for show. As for meets, simpler, more community-based gatherings like ImportAlliance and the Eibach Honda Meet rose in prominence as the popularity of larger traveling festivals like Hot Import Nights and NOPI ebbed.

Tuner culture is now firmly a part of mainstream pop culture, having been romanticized in movies like the Fast & Furious franchise, celebrated in dozens of video games, and featured in long-running toy lines such as Hot Wheels. For the entire scene, the '90s were the ignition for an unstoppable ascent. Indeed, compact car tuning is now a worldwide phenomenon, thriving not only in Asia Pacific but also in the Americas and Europe, where the basic formula and experience extends to brands native to those areas. It may not be your father's car culture or even yours, but it's a cornerstone of today's automotive passions.