The first event
In the summer of 2016 I took a particular interest in the local custom car scene. I had just gotten into photography, and cars were my subject of choice. Car culture was something I'd always been interested in, but I didn't have the money or the know-how to build a car for myself. I knew absolutely nothing, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. My friend Kyle, on the other hand, knew a lot of very specific facts about cars and had probably watched every car video on YouTube at the time.
My grand idea was to combine his knowledge of cars with my newly blossoming photography skills. Boom: Tuned Authority was born. It was originally going to be called "Kyle's Car Blog," but yeah, Kyle didn't like that name. For the next few weeks we went to every car show we could within 50 miles of our hometown. We were going to Cars and Coffee back when it was still small enough to fit on top of the parking garage at the Greene in Beavercreek, Ohio.
After a few weeks of mostly shooting cars at car shows, plus a few we spotted in the wild, I got a call from Kyle.
"Would you like to go watch drifting this weekend?"
Little did I know that question would change my life forever. All I knew about drifting at the time was what I'd seen in Tokyo Drift. I had no idea it was anything more than something people did on public roads late at night in the mountains of Japan.
So there we were, standing at the gates of Kil-Kare in Xenia, Ohio. Completely green, holding a shitty DSLR, and I had the balls to ask, "Can I shoot some photos today?" The lady at the gate looked at both of us, Kyle and me, for a good long second before radioing for someone to come down. I didn't know it at the time, but we were standing in front of Nick Swan when I repeated the question: "Can we shoot some photos?" Looking back, I know Nick knew we weren't prepared to shoot anything that day, but he just smiled and walked us over to their head media guy, Nick Quigley. I will never forget his answer the third time we asked:
"Fuck it."
That serendipitous series of events left me standing in the grass of a small circle track in the Midwest, completely dumbstruck. The smell of tires being torn to shreds by these powerful, purpose-built machines. The roar of a cheap truck LS pegged to its absolute limit. The speed at which these modern-day chariot racers threw their cars into such close proximity to each other, staying in control in what looked like impossible circumstances. Especially to a guy who'd only ever gone fast in a straight line.
It was magic.
So much happened at that one event. One, we quickly learned the dos and don'ts of shooting photos at an event. Two, I got to chase a gopher off the track in front of the entire crowd. Three, we saw Matt Lynch launch his car off the wall.
Don't worry, he was okay, and a week or two later he took second at a Turismo Drift event. That's a story I witnessed and will never forget.
It's safe to say we were both hooked: fans for life after just one grassroots event.
We also met Hooman at that event, which leads me to the next chapter of this journey.
Shooting for Hooman at Formula Drift
One of the coolest opportunities I had as a photographer was shooting personal media for Hooman Rahimi at Formula Drift. During a trip to a tiny figure-eight track in Clarksville, Tennessee, Hooman asked me to shoot for him during the upcoming Formula Drift season.
I moved heaven and earth to make it happen, but honestly, I was underprepared. Somehow I got zero usable photos of Hooman on track. Either I'd miss practice because of work and travel, or I'd just be in the wrong place, taking a break right when it was his run. It was the height of my career as a drift photographer, and I fumbled it.
One of my biggest fumbles came right at the start, after my second event, FD Atlanta. I'd taken a photo of a Tuerck fan holding a funny sign, and it got picked up and posted on Ryan's official Instagram page, except my name wasn't on it.
SOOOO, I commented on it.
What I said was something to the effect of "where's my name?" My tone was supposed to be nudge nudge, haha.
It landed as "WHERE'S MY FUCKING NAME, RYAN," and his community just lit… me… up. I thought I was going to have to legally change my name. I mean, here's literally one of my top three drift heroes of all time, and I'd just introduced myself as the asshole of the internet.
Sorry, Ryan. I really enjoyed your last full season in FD, and thank you for inspiring us to learn how to drive ourselves.
And sorry, Hooman. I wanted to do so much more for you that season, but I couldn't balance everything I was doing with work, and the burnout was starting to kick in. It was still an amazing experience, and I hope you know how grateful I still am that you invited me to be a part of it.
Burning out
For two years I chased drifting all over the East Coast: New Jersey, Virginia, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida. It seemed like every weekend I was on my way somewhere in my base-model 5-speed Civic, chasing the guys I envied. Watching them, I'd think, "I don't think I could ever drive like that." Maybe I was just protecting myself, because I never thought I'd have the knowledge or the money to get into the sport myself.
After a while of chasing these guys around with a camera, I started to burn out. Tuned Authority was getting real grassroots support, and the idea was to build our own media platform that could stand alongside the more popular outlets of the time.
That did not happen.
Instead, on top of a growing case of burnout, I found myself $15,000 in credit card debt from camera lenses, travel, and everything else that comes with trying to build a media outlet. I had to walk away, and it was a hard transition.
What finally broke me was losing my grandmother. Traveling every weekend left very little time for family, and I missed the final weeks I could have spent with one of the people most responsible for what little success I've managed in my 35 years on this planet.
To everyone I made promises to about Tuned Authority: I'm sorry. I had every intention of following through, and nothing we did was meant to seem fraudulent. I was one guy trying to juggle travel, editing, and building a brand I hoped would pay for most, if not all, of the travel. Instead I found myself overworked, stressed, drinking a lot more, and honestly wondering how I was ever going to pay back the debt.
We tried to bounce back with a series about building our own drift car, and that's really where the story of us getting into drifting ourselves picks back up.
The $500 E36
Somewhere near the end of my photography days, Kyle and I bought a running 1994 E36 325is for $500. We bought it from a friend with the promise that it came with an M3 front bumper, hood and headlights. Little did we know the hood had been stolen out of storage long before the deal was made. Regardless, we got a hell of a deal on a car that just needed a clutch to be drivable again.
Kyle drove it as a daily for a while, since he had no other working car and needed a way to get to university for his automotive program. We were both in transition: he was in school and I was focusing on my career. I even picked up streaming for a bit, but honestly, that was just me grieving and becoming a bit agoraphobic. The pandemic hit and only reinforced that way of living, because there wasn't a choice. I got married, and that had a rocky start. A year later my son was on the way, and somehow this '94 BMW had become a lawn ornament in my backyard for years.
Let's just say my life changed financially, and suddenly building a drift car didn't seem so far-fetched. The company I worked for was acquired, and with that came a sizable bonus. Soooo, Kyle and I got to work. To be fair, I wish we'd just welded the differential and sent it for some seat time. But Kyle had just finished school and gotten his own shop on the rough side of Dayton.
The drift car was a project Kyle and I took on to learn the skills to build the cars we'd spent years admiring, from up close and from afar. We started by doing the dumbest thing we could: we cut the headliner out. I mean cut it out. Dude, if you're starting a drift build right now, learn from my mistakes and don't fucking hack it. Take things apart properly, and don't rip, cut or set fire to anything that doesn't want to come out easy.
The build series
We documented the build in a series of YouTube videos, meant to revive the Tuned Authority brand by showing the grassroots drift world from our perspective. Everything was going well until about the middle of this year. If you want to watch the build yourself, the videos are below.
Building our first drift car, part 1
Building our first drift car, part 2
Building our first drift car, part 3
Building our first drift car, part 4
E36: the final full build episode and DI Drift Day
If you don't want to watch all of those, here's the timeline:
- Kyle finishes school and opens a shop.
- We pull the E36 out of "storage" (a car cover in my backyard), clean the spiders out, and replace the clutch, getting it running for the first time in years.
- The car runs for about a week before we decide to start tearing it apart.
- We install the cage (and somehow lose all the footage of it), weld the diff, and get the car running.
- We paint the car. It comes out bad because neither of us knew how to properly sand anything.
- We start testing, and like any 30-year-old BMW, it starts breaking left and right.
- We throw a bunch of money at it and get it running well enough to take to our first event.
- Crash.
- We figure out why we crashed and fix it: the tires were rubbing the inner front wheel wells, and correcting the wheel offset solved it.
- We paint the car again, red this time. Better, but still bad.
- The car's running great and I'm having a lot of fun driving it. So naturally, we tear it apart and throw a bunch of money at it for turbo noises.
- The turbo build is a nightmare: no kit, everything pieced together, a lot of fab work to make it fit, new parts that didn't fit so I bought everything twice, and once again 30-year-old parts breaking. First the fuel rail, then my new injectors, and now the wastegate recirculation pipe is literally throwing fire at a leaking head.
There it is: two years of building a car in twelve bullet points. We've also been working on Kyle's car, which has a whole list of issues of its own, and on three more drift cars we've barely announced. My car has been in the spotlight, but we're a team of drivers with different backgrounds and experience. At the time of writing, we've mostly paused the builds while the guys focus on getting our new dyno set up at the shop.
Where we are now
We're in a lull.
We haven't posted on Tuned Authority in a while because we've had nothing but failures. I still intend to document it on YouTube, but honestly, I'm burned out again. The turbo build killed us, and the shop suffered because of it: the project took up a big chunk of the shop's space and everyone's time. I had to make the call to put it away for the season, and I've only just started getting it ready for next season. The head is warped and leaking oil, and the wastegate literally spits fire at the oil leak. It's not a matter of if the car catches fire, just when.
Right now I'm fitting it with a new widebody kit and getting it ready for its fourth coat of paint since I've owned it. This time it's going back to green, its original color. After that, I have all the parts I need to fix the last few issues with the turbo and the head gasket, so it should be ready by next season. Kyle's car should be finished by then too, and hopefully turbocharged. He's had driveshaft issues since switching to a ZF transmission, and his ZF has some fifth-gear problems of its own, so there's work to be done.
As I write this, I'm not even sure what next season is going to look like. Kil-Kare was bought by the IHRA back in 2025 and renamed Darana Raceway, and now the owners are getting out of racing altogether. The track is up for auction, with bids due in November. For all I know, our home track could be a data center by next season.
What I do know
Despite what you may think of me or my friends, let me be the first to set a few things straight.
We're just looking to be a cool hang, build cool cars, and do stupid shit with them. We're not chasing clout; we do it for the love of it. We don't think we're better than anyone. We know when we suck, and we're constantly working to get better at the things we suck at. We'll always fight for custom car culture and stand on the right side of it.
We've also gained a lot of knowledge from our many failures, and we can use it to help others reach their custom car goals the right way, the first time. The shop has really started to stand on its own, and with it we hope to put down roots in the Ohio custom car scene.
If you're in our area and love custom cars, get in touch with us at JK Automotive.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey. We appreciate everything you've done to inspire us and help us find our way.
We're far from done.
The views in this post are my own and don't represent any of my employers, past or present. All trademarks, names, images and other intellectual property mentioned here belong to their respective owners, and all rights are reserved to them. If you're mentioned in this post and would like something revised or removed, just reach out through my contact page.