That first editor’s column promised “Absolutely no Buicks- ever!” Turned out that “ever” was a lot shorter than expected. But when the first installment of The Fast and the Furious flicks hit the big screen that year, the giant wave crested and flooded the rest of the country with slammed, winged, and boosted Acuras, Hondas, and Mitsubishis.Įven Car and Driver tried to cash in on the craze, introducing Boost magazine in 2004, our Spruce Goose for the tuner industry. In Southern California and a few other pockets throughout the U.S., the trend was already peaking by 2001. Competition in L.A.’s burgeoning street-racing scene was fierce. Those without the money were hacking their Honda Civics and CR-Xs into respectable facsimiles of sports cars a couple hundred bucks at a time. People with the money to tweak new cars were cranking up the boost on the factory-turbocharged engines in Mazda RX-7s and Toyota MR2s and Supras.

And California was getting blasted by the next big car-culture tsunami: import tuning.

As the 1990s segued into the new millennium, the world was busy not ending and the world’s computers were busy not crashing-at least not more than usual.

Need for speed 2015 cars wrx