Sport compact "tuner" car culture -- a la "The Fast and the Furious" -- emerged in the mid-'90s when a generation of new drivers began fixing up their beloved first cars, mostly used Honda Civics, Preludes and Accords. These cars, while exceptionally sound mechanically, were about as sexy as corrective headgear.
Kids wanting to invest these grotty hand-me-downs with some style and performance had to rely on their ingenuity, for the most part. High school auto shop classes became crowded with kids laying up their own fiberglass air dams, welding megaphonic extensions to tailpipes and taking cutting torches to springs.
In this respect, sport-compact tuning materialized out of the same ether as hot rodding in the 1940s and '50s. Both were grass-roots, anarchic, existentially D.I.Y. Both began as eyeball engineering, where if something looked fast, then it was fast.
And both movements quickly aroused vast, highly specialized industries to support them. By the late 1960s, hot rodders could draw from a pornocopia of high-performance goods found in the back pages of Hot Rod magazine or Hemmings Motor News; brands like Edlebrock, Hurst, Holley, Rochester and Flowmaster have become bits of gear-head Americana.
Likewise, current issues of Sport Compact Car magazine -- what Guns and Ammo is to the rifle-in-the-tower set -- are crowded with ads shilling everything from screaming "Stage III" turbochargers to carbon-fiber rear spoilers the size of blackjack tables. Some aftermarket companies are familiar, blue-chip firms like AP Racing, Eibach, Neuspeed and Momo. Some evolved out of racing, such as CompTech and NOS. Others are purely creatures of the tuner phenomenon, like Greddy, APC and Wings West. The sport-compact aftermarket is now worth more than $3.2-billion a year.
The limiting factor to all this rampant prosperity is that relatively few people have the tools or know-how to properly modify modern cars. This is a key difference between hot rodding and tuning: Most tuning is not D.I.Y., but D.I.F.M., "do it for me." Bad things happen when inexperienced hobbyists stuff leaf-blower turbochargers, lumpy cams and Taiwanese electronic control modules under the hood. Such monstrosities often detonate in festive clouds of carbon-fiber shrapnel.
You may ask why anyone beyond a hormone-sotted teenager should care. It's because the aftermarket is heading your way.
