There's an
old adage that tells us that fast, cheap and reliable are incompatible
in the automotive realm. According to this wisdom, you can have two of
them, but always at the cost of the third. Applying that paradigm to
racing, to be fast and reliable is to be expensive. And in case you
didn't already know, building a fast and reliable race car generally is
expensive. The adage can also be applied to the race car driver. To
become a fast and reliable (consistent) driver generally requires a lot
of track time, which isn't cheap, either.
We're glad nobody
bothered to offer Andrie Hartanto that nugget of folk wisdom though, as
he's gone ahead and done the impossible by building this
competition-crushing 1999 Honda Civic Si race car for around $25,000
(which is a pittance in the racing world). It's seriously fast, and
reliability, you ask? It's a Honda, `nuff said.
Hartanto even
learned to be a fast and consistent driver without spending a dime to
go to the track. He and his Civic are a glaring exception to this
particular piece of collective knowledge that tells us a racer on a
budget can't have their cake and eat it too. The car and driver have
the titles to back it up too; Hartanto was the 2004 Northern California
and 2005 Southern California Honda Challenge H1 Champion.
But the
race car is only part of the equation when it comes to racing, and even
the most intellectually-challenged among us know that one of the surest
bets to becoming a great driver is to start at an early age. Which is
just what Hartanto did.
While the rich kids in
were carting around their miniature circuits in karts, honing their
driving and racing skills in overpriced miniature race cars, Hartanto
was racing real cars in Indonesia. At age 11, he drove his first car,
and by age 12 he was street racing and canyon carving with his friends
on the weekends. Hartanto is quick to add that street racing in
Indonesia isn't drag racing, but literally racing through traffic.
This
isn't an option for kids here in the United States, though, for which
Hartanto can vouch. He says his days of street racing ended when he got
to the U.S. for college. In his first year here, he got seven speeding
tickets. Because he was a broke 18-year-old college student at the
time, he says he switched to snowboarding to get his adrenaline fix. It
wasn't until his junior year of college that he got bitten by the road
racing bug. While working part-time in a speed shop, he was introduced
to NASA and HPDE and was hooked. He participated in HPDE until 2002,
when he came across a 1989 BMW M3 that tickled his fancy. He bought it
and turned it into a race car.
Unfortunately for BMW owners, the
aforementioned adage does hold true. Hartanto quickly realized that
racing BMWs was too expensive for a self-described working man like
himself. It was at this point that the civil engineer for the
California Department of Transportation was introduced to what he
described as the strange but nimble Honda, and quickly switched gears.
He says he'd never considered racing front-wheel-drive cars before, but
once he raced a Honda, he decided to build his own to dominate the
Honda racing world.