I opened this personal archive series with the Enjuku Racing drag S13, the first feature car I ever shot for a magazine, and I called that one where it all started. As far as my career goes, that’s accurate. It isn’t the story of how Tunerzine came to exist, though. This site traces back to a different shoot entirely, one I did in May 2004 on a widebody Audi A4 that belonged to a guy I had never met before I showed up with a camera. The car has been on Tunerzine once before, but that post never got into why the shoot mattered. This is the archive edition, with a full gallery and the story that should have run with it the first time.
Modified Magazine tasked me with shooting the car for their September 2004 issue, and that assignment is how I ended up meeting Donny Mak. Neither of us had any idea at the time that a routine feature shoot was going to turn into a publication. We shot the car, the feature ran, and we kept in touch afterward.
What Donny had put together was a one-off custom sheet metal DTM style widebody kit, with matching sheet metal side skirts, a modified S4 front bumper, and a custom modified vented hood. The badging was a custom DTM piece, the headlights were Audi S4 xenons, the side markers were Inpro clears, and the mirrors came from Projektzwo. An APR Performance Formula GT carbon fiber wing sat out back, a custom race tow hook up front, and Madico film went on the glass.
Under the hood, the 1.8T ran an Audi Performance Racing Stage 3+ turbo kit with APR ECU tuning, an APR Inconel exhaust manifold, and a Garrett GT25s feeding an APR front mount intercooler. Air came in through an ITG AB65 carbon fiber intake, fuel through Porsche 911 Turbo injectors, and everything exited through a straight pipe with no cat into a Scorpion DTM exhaust system. Charge temperatures were handled by an Aquamist water injection system and a Nitrous Express N-tercooler. The number at the end of all that was 310 whp and 345 lb-ft at 23 psi.
One thing in that parts list needs untangling, because the initials repeat and they aren’t the same company. The engine and drivetrain hardware came from Audi Performance Racing. The Formula GT wing came from APR Performance, the California carbon fiber aero outfit that has been building wings, splitters, and mirrors since 1999. Two different companies, three shared letters, both bolted to the same car.
Behind the engine sat an APR lightened flywheel and eight-puck clutch, a UUC short shifter, and an APR snub mount. Suspension was refreshingly simple for a car with this much done to it, just H&R coilovers and a Neuspeed rear sway bar. Braking came from Porsche 911 Turbo calipers over cross-drilled rotors, tucked behind 18×10-inch HRE 540s wrapped in 265/35R18 Dunlop SP9000s.
Inside, Donny ran Sparco Corsa seats and a Sparco Flash 5 suede wheel, with Schroth Racing four-point harnesses, a custom four-point rollcage, custom red suede trim, and a nylon shift knob. A fabricated vent mount held a VDO boost gauge, with a sequential shift light and a Split Second air/fuel meter alongside it, and an APC fire extinguisher within reach. The audio side ran a Rockford Fosgate RFX9220G head unit, MB Quart 6.5-inch Premium components, MB Quart Reference 12-inch subwoofers, and Lightning Audio amps through a custom trunk install, with a Nitrous Express carbon fiber bottle in the mix.
The sponsor list on the feature ran twenty names deep, which is its own kind of period detail. Fox Marketing, APR Performance, Dunlop, Nitrous Express, MB Quart, Sparco, Schroth, Optima Batteries, Dynamat, Meguiar’s, StreetGlow, Madico, Speedwell, Nextgear, Strictly Foreign, Ignited Performance, Impressive Signs, Exotic Rides, Europrojektz, and Auto Specialty of Longwood, Florida.
Somewhere around September 2004, a few months after the shoot, I got it into my head that I wanted to build a website to showcase car features. I had dabbled in that world already, putting together lsvtec.org and contributing to importspeed-south.com, but what I kept circling back to was that nobody was covering this industry nationwide in one place, let alone worldwide. Knowing Donny was a web developer made him the obvious person to bring it to, and after a few conversations we had a name.
In October 2004, I went out to Southern California to shoot as many cars as I could and meet as many industry people as possible, purely to bank content for a site that did not exist yet. From there I went straight to SEMA for the first time in my life, and that is where we officially launched Tunerzine. The first issue came almost entirely from three people, Donny, Brian Hibbs, and me. It did not stay that way for long, and the contributor list grew quickly after that, but that was the starting roster.
So this car matters to the site in a way the Enjuku S13 doesn’t, even though the S13 is the one that got my name into print and eventually moved me across the country. A magazine assignment put me in the same place as a web developer with a widebody A4, and without that afternoon, Tunerzine never happens. Twenty-two years later, the shoot that created this site finally gets the proper archive treatment it should have had the first time.
Gallery
