Car Stories with Sung Kang and Emelia HartfordSung and Emelia talk with racing legend Stephan Papadakis. Stephan shares how his pursuit of knowledge shaped his journey through the automotive world, moving from drag racing to drifting and earning not only numerous records but an unmatched level of respect among the racing community.
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Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Car Stories with.
Sun King and Amelia Hartford. And today we have a legend in the racing world.
When people bring up his name, they talk about this guy as like a real life, fast, fierce.
Character, starting from street racing to professionally building and racing in the drag racing world, to then transitioning to Formula drift and having so many wins and worlds, firsts, you.
Know, all the ogs. When they bring up this dude's name, they talk about first how amazing he was, and actually how smart he was. He would take all the knowledge and actually constantly innovate totally.
I don't think you can talk about the history of automotive and the future it is today without his name coming up in conversation.
Without further Ado Stephan Papadochius originally Stephan. You're from New York, I read somewhere.
Born in New York. My mom's family's from New York, but I was just basically born there.
And you grew up pretty much in Huntington Beach.
Yeah, my dad is Greek from Greece, and he actually when my parents got divorced, moved back there. So in Greece.
In Greece, Wow, yeah, I mean, Papa Doccas is a pretty dope name.
Yeah it is.
It's like, what is that name, Papa Doocus.
It wasn't that fun growing up with that one. But at the time there was a show called Webster where the football dad was Papadopolis.
Oh he was.
That's right, you're a staple name in this industry.
Yeah i am. I've come from the world of experience, but I only have some college I don't have an actual engineering degree. But when I find things that I don't know about and I want to learn about, I'll just go on eBay and find a used textbook that's an edition or too old that you can for twenty dollars. Then I'll start reading through the chapters that I want to know. And you've combined that with YouTube videos and even some lectures that are on YouTube. You can really get a good base understanding enough for me to have a good conversation with an actual engineer and then end up with some good solutions that we can use in the race cars.
Anytime Stephan's name comes up in the OG world, right, they always go He's like the smartest person in the room. Right, So he takes the information that makes it better, and it adapts it and he just keeps growing, you know. And I don't know if you know that they talked about you like that, but that is your reputation. That's flattering. Yeah, okay, yeah, man. And I think that kind of ethos and that perspective on life is what kind of brought you into the forefront of where you are in your career today. You know.
Yeah, that helps. I mean it's being realistic of where I'm at and what I know and where I'm trying to get to, and then understanding that gap and then trying to build a bridge to get to the goals. What do you call the seeing the force through the trees? I guess that's one of my attributes. Yeah.
Were you always into cars?
Totally?
Yeah, since the day you're born.
My mom said, I liked little cars when I was growing up. I remember building legos when I was really young and crashing them into each other and putting them back together, and then building little model cars, and then originally getting into radio controlled cars and so RC cars from you know, when I was you know, eight or ten years old, I was really into it. Dressed in and then in my round thirteen or fourteen, I really got into the off road RC car scene, which was, you know, there was a bit of a scene here in southern California, and I said, I want to be a professional RC car driver. And I actually there was a scene of RC car drivers here in something California, because that's where they were manufacturing the cars and testing them at the local RC track, And so I was actually around professional RC car drivers and engineers. And I remember specifically my mom telling me, I don't know what kind of social life you'll have if you do that. And I didn't understand that until years later. But once I realized around fifteen that you can modify real cars and change the suspect and do these different things engine upgrades, and then enjoy driving them and be in the car, I totally got out of the RC thing and went straight into the real cars.
So nobody in your family actually planted the seat for cars in your life.
Not at all. It's crazy. Nope, And I don't know if that's a benefit or not, but for whatever reason, I just went that way.
Well, you're talking about learning off of YouTube and buying textbooks and whatnot, But when you started sure textbooks around, but there was no YouTube. This was before social media. How did you start learning about modifying cars?
So when I was sixteen, I got my first car and it was a nineteen ninety one Honda Civic SI. And the reason I chose that one was, you know, I wanted a Mustang or a Camaro or something with a bunch of horsepower, but I wasn't going to get that in my family. And I actually had some friends that had to see YOURX and Civic and they were modifying and lowering it and putting exhaust, and I was like, oh, this is something that you can have fun with an modify, but at the same time, it looks responsible enough for you know, my family to get me that car. And the day I turned sixteen, that morning I went to the DMV and took my driving test, got my license, and then that afternoon drove the car to my buddy's house where we took the suspension off, cut the springs, lowered it, and you know, went cruising around. And so I had this you cut the springs on it, Yeah, that's how we would do it.
Yeah, who taught you how to do that?
I had RC car buddies who had performance cars. They had a Sera ax A Civic, and they knew how to work on cars because they knew how to work on their RC car, and then so they also knew how to work on the real car, and so I wanted to hang out with them as much as possible to learn how to do that.
The only car I've ever cut springs on was on a Honda Prelude, and it destroyed the ride quality entirely. But it lowered the car, and if done incorrectly, can be very sketchy. But that's so fascinating to hear that that's what you guys did the day you bought your first car.
Yeah, And it was one of those situations where you lowered it and it looks so cool and you drive around and it's bouncing. I'm like, this is fun. I'm old now and one of the good gride quality and everything, but like, it was sort of like this exciting car that you drive around and sometimes you go around turns and it would bounce around, or you'd have to slow down for driveways and all these different things. It was super low, but that was part of the experience.
What was the next mod after that? You're like all right, I got this bouncy suspension. My car's low. I feel cool? Was it speed? Next?
Yep? So the next was HKS Powerflow air filter. So it's this green air filter that you replace the airbox with NNGK blue spark plugs, wires and plugs. So those are the next two. And then later I got an HKS exhaust for the car, and then later a header for it.
For the people out there listening that don't know anything about cars, why would you do something like that?
Because you wanted to make more power. So the theory was, you know, each one of these mods might give you another two to five horsepower. In my car made one hundred and eight horse power originally, and so you do some calculations. Well, if I've got my exhaust and the header and whatever, and then now I'm up to one hundred and twenty five horse power. So when I go out and try to raise these guys, I'm going to be quicker. And they also make a cool sound because that was part of the scene.
Right, So at what point did your reliable daily not become your reliable daily anymore?
It took a few years, so you know, I eventually went to this place called Dynamic Autosport in Irvine and got a different performance camshaft installed in the engine that opens the valves more to get some more horse power. I then put nitrous on the car and hid that so when we'd go to the Stree races and stuff, you could, you know, get that extra fifty or sixty horse power shot of nitrous.
And this is early nineties, right.
This would have been mid nineties.
Mid nineties, So I'm assuming you're talking around three hundred horsepower.
No, no, no, we're talking one hundred and okay horsepower car that maybe makes now one hundred and sixty.
Yeah, because back then, like these are, this was kind of like groundbreaking. Like sure, like some of the muscle guys had done it, but with these tuner cars in that era, not a lot of people were modifying them. Not a lot of people were going fast, and there'd be like stories like, oh well there's this guy here who's got this modified car, and oh well this Civic S size got this much horse power.
And that's a front wheel car.
Yeah right, yeah, back then, with these one point six liter Honda engines, they were still trying to break two hundred or two hundred fifty horse power. That was sort of like the upper limit of the guys rebuilding the engines and putting turbo chargers and stuff. The understanding I had to make power out of these small four cylinders for the automotive aftermarket that we were in was minimal. It was it was just beginning. But in the scene that I was in where we were going to the street races and trying to earn some called street cred or whatever and just having a string credit, Yeah, it was about in my perspective, was trying to be as sleeper as you could. So you show up, you pop the hood. It looks very simple and unmodified, and then you would set up the race. Right you'd say, okay, well you've got more modifications. Why don't you let me start ahead of you? Set me out a little bit.
As you have that nitrous bottle hidden in a bag in the backseats, no one can see it.
Yeah, So we had all these different strategies. Or you'd say, you give me the move, so instead of using like a flagger with a person you know is there with his hands up and then he drops his hands and both cars take off at the same time. There's a thing called the move. So if you've got the faster car and the maybe negotiate to where the slower you're racing the slower car, you would say, all right, when you move, then I move. That's called the move. So they get like a head start. Oh and handicap a handicap. So there's these ways that you would negotiate different handicaps to try to make it a better race, to try to get them to race. And then there might be some wagers there, but usually pretty small, under twenty dollars most of the time, and then some of the bigger one might be fifty or a hundred dollars. But you got to remember these are kids from sixteen to twenty two years old and spending most of our money on the mods for the cars, so we didn't have much to try to bet. It was almost like just a reason to have the race, just to make it more interesting, right. So then I eventually started racing the car on the track, Like there was a track here in Long Beach called Terminal Island that was run by a guy named Big Willie, and it was ten bucks to enter, and they had an open Friday night Saturday nights. And I eventually turned with the nitrous too much and burned one of my valves in the engine, and that's when the car started becoming less reliable. I had to rebuild the engine and it kind of snowballed from there. But that's another story. And how that thing turned into a race car?
Was that your first engine rebuild?
I didn't do the rebuild, but I went to a place called JG Engine Dynamics and they did the build for me, and I would hang out there as much as I could to try to learn because, like you said, there wasn't YouTube or there wasn't much information on how to modify these cars back then, so you had to surround yourself with people that knew more than you and that would help, that would maybe share that information. So I'd go there during the summer and try to hang out at that engine building place. And then right when I got high school, right when I graduated high school, I would start going there every day and I literally just was sweeping the floor, doing enough so they wouldn't kick me out. And eventually they're like, we might as well just hire this kid.
You got a job there.
Yeah, So I ended up getting a job there for you know, minimum wage whatever. I didn'tven care. They could have not paid me. I was just wanted to be there and learn what they were doing with these engines. And one of the perks was I was able to bring my car there and start working on it at the facility.
Wow.
What a great mentorship to have at that age too.
Yeah, So what I learned was a combination of working at that location and the mutual friends that were building drag racing hondas and modifying them, and just within that scene everything was these cars. And so I'd get done with work and then go to this shop called Pitcrew Motorsports, and then we'd hang out while our buddy Charles and some of the guys were finishing were up work, and then we'd go to dinner together and then talk more about cars. Like it was a full immersion into the scene.
Do you feel like with EV cars coming, it's just kind of killing this community.
I think that's a big question in my experience. The EV car works well for commuting and sitting on traffic on the freeway, and I think it does that well. But as far as performance goes, I would a much rather a lower number, like a slower accelerating car. But that sounds cool and has that feeling with a manual transmission and just the whole experience in it, because I think that the numbers of the accelerations and everything are so out in the stratosphere that I can't actually enjoy that on the street anymore without potentially getting pulled over and getting handcuffed and taken away for such crazy speeds. So now I've kind of gone towards the older cars more of an enjoyment sort of aspect of the performance and the feel of it, and my friends in the industry, and I think maybe you can speak to that for you for your experience, But the enthusiast friends I've had, it's not about going as fast as you can on the free where it's racing people in the street. It's about having an enjoyment in the drive. Yeah.
And also the process, like a process of building a car gives you know, people a reason to come together and have community and break bread and talk shit, you know, tell old stories, you know. So I love when I meet guys from your era because they have all these war stories, you know, and it's like we were talking earlier, Like a lot of it seems like, you know, the movies like Fast and Fears has taken bits and pieces of your guys's life and your experiences and put them into the movie. And I think, you know, people always ask this question, is like, you know, how come the franchise has been able to go so long. It's like because it was rooted in something that was real, you know, and it is pretty amazing that you get to actually meet these like living legends, you know, like meeting you in person like this and sitting down, it's like it is like kind of my like Elvis Presley moment, because I hear all these stories about you, you know, and it's it's like I wish I could. I wish there was a time machine where I could go back and be like a fly on the wall and be at these street races. You know. I know we don't like to promote it, but it is fascinating for people that weren't able to experience that era because it was, like, you know, it was an amazing time from what I hear.
You know, you were the first to in a front wheel drive to break one fifty miles part or one sixty one seventy one eighty, Like you were kind of the front runner to the forward the front wheel drive drag cars. I guess I'm just thinking if drag racing in general of you know, what it was in the nineties compared to what it is today, it's a lot higher price tag to get involved.
Yeah, it is, but I think it's a bit relative because I remember I remember being at Battle the Imports in could be nineteen ninety seven and watching these guys doing thirteen or twelve second quarter miles, which at the time where the front will drive quarter mile records globally.
Did you believe people would be going sixes at some point at that time? Would you believe it if someone told.
You no, even nines? Yeah or tensre was like yeah, they said, well, there were long term drag racer guys that had these theories, Well, you're going to be limited with this front will drive configuration at twelve second quarter mile because what's going to happen is as you accelerate quicker, the weight's going to come off the front tire and then you won't have traction and then there's literally a wall that you're just not going to be able to get past. And they couldn't be more wrong, right, because yeah, that's.
So interesting to hear that as an argument back then.
Yeah, and for someone that doesn't understand, you know, physics well or just listening to this old guy with experience, you might believe it. But at the same time we're like, this old guy doesn't know what he's talking about, and you just kind of keep going down what your path that you're on. And I think that's what was an advantage for a lot of us that came up in that alternative motorsport scene was we weren't we didn't have these guardrails, we didn't know what we didn't know, so we just said, this is the direction we're going. We're just going to keep going faster, and we're just going to keep putting more power and keep putting a bigger tire. And we just kind of learned what that meant on the track and then started developing this front will drive type of drag racing where we were trailblazing like there was nobody else that knew how to do it because no one had done that before, right, And that was what was so exciting, and it taught us a lot on how to build cars.
What's the draw for the foks that are into drag racing. You know when I go to these events, like I see it in their eyes, like there's this fire burning. You know, it's like they have to keep breaking these records. Do you think it's a way like the human being leaves their legacy or their mark on this earth, Like you know for the people out there that have never been to drag race events, you know, the energy is like I don't even know how to describe it. It's like this, like it looks from half the people look intoxicated.
They probably are, it's.
Right, and it was like nothing else matters, nothing. I mean, they put all their money into these cars to like break the next record. Where does that come from?
Yeah? I think it's, Uh, there's parallel there with addiction, right where you're addicted to I love working on this car and then getting it running and then trying to get it to go faster, and then thinking about what it is that I can do to attain the like this next goal and so whatever it is, like it's this part that I need or I've got to put this time into it, and like I can see it's like chasing the dragon. It's like, oh my god, it was so good, Like it went down the track and it had this fast quarter mile time and all my friends saw it and they gave me props for it. And it's like, no, but I know I can go a little bit quicker or this other guy that's faster than me, but I have an idea of how I can make more horsepower and then build the engine that way and then get back to the track and beat him.
I think addiction is a good way to put it.
Yeah, you can call it a hobby, and I think if it goes maybe in an unhealthy way, that can be, you know, a bad addiction. But man, thinking about my motivation, just I loved building cars and you would prove that you were really good at it by what it did on the track, and that was a way of justifying the time and effort put into it, or like a street cred kind of thing, and like showing other people, like look at what I can do, and there's this Some people just have that competition competitive spirit built within them and that's the way that you know it comes out.
Can I just read some of your accomplishments out loud, because this is so freaking impressive. First Honda's in the Nines, first front wheel drive, in the eights World's fastest sport compact, first drag Honda to break two hundred miles per hour rule drive, First Honda in the seven's reel drive, First Honda in the six is reel drive, World's quickest Honda rual drive. Like, this is freaking incredible. You were such a trail you are a trailblazer, and to really focus on the Honda platform. What made you take the shift from front wheel drive to rule drive? Was it a limitation of speed performance? Was it just a new passion in a different space.
I wanted more competition. I wanted to do something more.
Difficult because there's such a gigster and you're winning everything.
Yeah, yes, yeah, So I'm looking at your resume right now.
I can see it and.
The guys that were racing the pro Import with those engines, I was like, that looks really challenging. It was a chassis. I didn't understand the engines made more power. We would use an engine platform that people hadn't developed yet. It just looked like something really difficult to do. And I realized over the years that's what I like to do, was go, you know, develop new things that are difficult and hopefully have success at it. And I kind of was looking forward within the series, the NHA series, and I said, you know what, I think the future for me and sponsorship and keeping this thing going would be at the highest fastest class within this sport compact NHA series, and that was the rear wheel drive sixteen hundred horse power. And I said, I think it needed to make a transition from the front whee drive to the real wal drive to be the fastest car within our series at the track.
And what kind of horse party did you have in the front whel drive car before you made that transition to shooting for sixteen hundred.
About eight hundred and fifty, that's wild. Yeah, So we were in the front wheel drives. We were running a four cylinder turbocharge engine with alcohol fuel methanol.
Methanol, yeah, methanol for those listening, it's actually very dangerous because it burns clear and if you're on fire, I don't know, if you guys put an additive in the car, you can't really see it.
Yeah, And I've had that happen, really caught on fire in the engine bay. And so we had built this new rearal drive tube chassis drag racing car for the top Pro Import class and we were still working it out, but the goal was sixteen hundred horsepower.
Wow.
And we're just doing some initial shakedowns of this new car, all built, and we go to the Irwindale Speedway here, which has a drag strip and eighth mile drag strip, and literally like one of the first times we've run this car, and I'm out, I do a burnout and the car stalls and then all of a sudden, I feel like this heat and I'm in the driving seat right and I'm in my helmet and strapped and everything. Feel this heat coming through like the windshield almost and then.
Was it PLEXI glass? Could you see it melting?
Yeah? I started seeing the hood start bubbling, and I'm like, oh, I think there's a fire. And so I hit the fire extinguisher and as a built in fire extinguisher with a little pull lever that you pull and then you know, five pounds of fire extinguisher goes out on the engine and inside the driver's compartment, and all of a sudden, I feel like like the wind getting knocked out of me and I can't breathe anymore. And so like there's a fire. I feel like the like there's no oxygen. I just get the wind knocked out of me, and just like I'm on the brakes, I start pulling my seat belt off. I pulled the windownt down. I popped the door open, and I jump out and I was totally safe. It came over with some fire extinguishers and realized what was going on and put out the fire. But there was no flames.
Yeah, you can't see.
It was just it was pretty intense.
And that was the first time driving the car.
That was first time driving the car. Yeah. We made a mistake on the fuel pressure regulator that wasn't large enough, huh, and the fuel pressure spiked and it blew some fuel injectors, basically the fuel rail off of the fuel injectors, and there was raw fuel spring in the engine bay and I got onto like the hot exhaust and that's ignited it right right.
So how far did you guys get with this new Reual Drive chassis.
Yeah, within within three years, we had several wins within the NHRA Sport Compact Series, second in the championship the third year, and eventually ran the quarter mile in six point five to two seconds. At two hundred and fifteen miles an hour.
How long ago was this?
That was in two thousand and five.
That's insane, that's fast. Two thousand and five you also won Rookie of the Year for Formula Drift.
Yeah. So all I can say is I was kind of fast moving and always kind of looking forward on the next kind of adventure that I was going to attempt. And so it went from front walll drive drag racing to reel drive drag racing. And after a little bit, I was like, I don't know if this Ntra Sport Compact series is really going to have longevity. Sure, but I want to keep racing. I want to keep you know, having fun at the track, and I don't want to die with the series. And at that same time, I had been drag racing now for you know, over a decade. I was traveling to these really remote areas of America where these drag racing tracks existed in like the areas of Kentucky and Florida and stuff like that, to where you'd fly in, you go to the hotel, you go to the racetrack, you go back to the hotel, and you fly back home. Yeah, and once in a while, would we go out and have some fun. But every time I traveled to this new location, it was another quarter mile drag strip that was straight made out of concrete or asphalt, with a giant parking lot, you know for all of our stuff, and it just became a bit redundant. And at this point I had probably a false sense of my driving ability and thought, oh, well, I should be able to parlay this into something more difficult. I should go road racing.
Or did you personally pilot the car into the sixes?
I did, Yeah, So I'd been driving the car, you know, through all of this, and then also helping to develop it as well. And there was a lot of partners that we had with in that program that made it successful. AM Electronics developed the engine program initially when we built the rear WORL drive car in around two thousand and three. They said, hey, we love sponsoring you, but we'd love to have more of our engineering expertise in your car, not just a sticker on it, some of our products. And I said that sounds great. Because the founder of AEM was a gentleman called John Concialdi, and he was a mechanical engineer with tons of experience with everything from car raiders to fuel injection to building engines, and he had a personal and a company interest in building this sixteen hundred horsepower turbochard to be six engine. So yeah, they were there, were and still are an excellent partner with the program that we have today.
You know, when I talked to the ogs, they always talk about how John was one of those folks that was so open to the kids that were from the streets, like you know, street racing, to allow them to come into the garage and support them. Without people like John and AEM, I don't think a lot of these guys from the street racing scene would have been able to go into the pro circuit. I mean, anytime somebody brings up like John from Am, they speak of him as like a you know, like a godfather, as like an uncle. So I just want to make sure we give John from Am some props.
Yeah. And as a sidebar here, you know, my parents got divorced when I was when I was young, you know, five years old, and he moved My father moved back to Greece where he was from. So I grew up pretty much in a single mother household and no one was in the cars in my family, which we talked about. Uh so I'd find these kind of father figures. There was Javier, the guy that owned JG ended at Dynamics, the place that I got my first job out of high school. We've got John Concialte that was the founder of AM and then so, you know, not having a father around, I kind of looked around at these different men that were older that knew a lot more than me, and I kind of picked like this thing that I really liked about him, Like John was very intelligent or still as very intelligent and a mentor as far as the technical side. And so I had these different, you know, kind of mentors over the years, and it was definitely one of them.
I do want to hear about the formula drift stuff. So you start seeing the shift and you want to transition into drifting to get you know, a fresh taste of a different category in sports, and you start building drift cars.
So in two thousand and four, I got the itch to do some drifting because I was trying to, you know, what else can I do other than drag racing. They had the one of the first D one drift events here in Los Angeles where they brought a bunch of competition drifters from Japan, which their main series out there was D one and I was kind of like rolling my eyes out and when I watched, I was like, oh my gosh, this is pretty impressive what they're doing with the cars and what the drivers are doing, and it was very engaging show. And I was like, oh, man, I think that's a better show than what we're doing with the drag racing. And I was looking for something, you know, different to do, and I was like, Okay, this could be something I should look at. Had some friends that were into it and talked to them and it turned out the easy Ford car to build was a Nissan two forty SX. Yeah, and coincidentally, that was a car that my mom had in the in the mid nineties. She had a nineteen eighty nine to forty SX automatic.
Did you take your mom's cars?
That's awesome. Yeah, So my mom got a new car. I got her old car nineteen eighty nine. It was burgundy color that was S thirteen is it S thirteen yep, which had over two hundred thousand miles on it because she was communing with it all over to these different depositions for her job and pulled the little two point four leader to twelve valve engine out in the automatic transmission and got a JDM SR twenty engine from the importers and basically converted it to a turbocharged, you know, drift car, painted it, put different suspension on it, racing rollcage, and in two thousand and four I had basically my mom's old commuter car turned into a drift car that I was going to go learn in. That is so awesome, and so I started doing some of the local drift events. I was definitely not early into the drifting here. I was the drag racer guy building a drift car. And they're like a lot of the guys were. They were actually pretty easy going, but in some ways it's like you should stay in your lane, you know, know pun intended, but like, you know, you're the drag racing guy. What do you guys? What are you doing over here in the drifting? But they they knew they had they had been driving drift cars enough to they knew this is really difficult. That was really difficult to drift at a competition level. And pretty quickly I learned like, ooh, A lot of the drag racing skills that I had didn't carry over to the drifting, Like we could make the horse power, we could build the car. I wasn't scared of the power. I wasn't scared of the car, but counter steering and all the little tricks with driving. It took a while to try to get up to speed.
So Tanner Faust drove for you on the first championship win with your team. Was it a tough decision to have a driver instead of using the person in the seat?
Yeah. So from me building that two forty and really spending some time trying to learn how to drift, I quickly realized the amount of effort it would and practice I'd have to do to be at a top five level to carry on being a professional driver. But in drift what would have been really challenging and maybe something at twenty seven years old or whatever I was at that time would be hard to do in my mid twenties. And at the same time in two thousand and five, I met, you know, an up and coming driver named Tanner.
Faust, who how do you guys meet?
He was driving a car in Formula drift and we met at the racetrack and he kept having engine problems with the car that he was driving for the team that he was driving with, so he would Tanners and smart guy, he'd start asking around and get some advice. So we kind of hit it off and we saw some synergies there, like he knew I could build a good car, and I knew he was an excellent driver, maybe being held back by the car. And so we made a deal for two thousand and six that we would do a two car drift team where he would be in the A car and I would be in the B car. And so for two thousand and six we retired from drag racing, basically took those sponsorship funds and pivoted over to drift. And for the amount of money we were spending in drag racing, we were able to do a two car drift program. So we built a three point fifty Z Nissan drift car for Tanner, and I was in a two thousand and four ish Honda S two thousand, but I was still learning how and getting up to speed on becoming a you know, a good drift driver. But Tanner was already there. So within the first year we had a couple of wins with Tanner. In two thousand and six. The second year with Tanner, we won the championship. In the third year with Tanner, we won the championship again, and I retired from basically driving at that point where I said, I'm not coming up to speed quick enough as a driver, and really I've got to choose whether I'm a driver or a team, you know, owner manager. And I said, I think I'm better at running the team and building the cars than driving. And I made a conscious decision to say, you know what, I'm just going to retire from driving and I'm going to focus on building cars for Tanner and running the program.
You make me feel like such an underachiever by the way you're doing this at twenty seven.
Yeah, So another sidebar here is is you really you really can't go to school for a lot of this stuff. And so what I learned is sometimes you got to make investments into doing racing. I'm like a doer, like, let's go do this thing. Let's ready fire aim, let's go do it. We're not exactly sure that this is going to pan out, but we're gonna learn a lot doing it. And it's gonna cost us some money, and I'm gonna consider that an investment. And the plan is that whatever we learn in this endeavor, we're gonna take it and apply it to our main focused business and we're gonna get steps ahead where normally we couldn't. And I think that's where one of our advantages is is instead of staying within the bubble of what we do, look around, try some stuff somewhere else, Take what we've learned outside of our main focus, and then apply it to that many focus and take another step ahead, hopefully being on the forefront of technology, speed, whatever it is, and continue to be, you know, a leader in the motorsports and the class that we're at.
That's great advice to reinvest into yourself and to keep growing right, think outside of the bubble.
I was about to ask if that's something you're you feel your mom instilled in you growing up, maybe as a single mother, watching her hard work and driving all that. Do you feel that I had a big impact on your Well.
She was definitely out of box thinker, driving a too.
Fo she was secretly driven, honest.
So she grew up in a household where education was first, and you followed all of the rules and you have a successful professional career after that. And she looked around at at maybe her family or herself and said, uh, this is not necessarily there about to happiness. You need to follow a passion. You have to have some fundamental you know, education and ethics and things like that, of course, but follow your passion and you know, hopefully that leads you in a place where you enjoy your life because getting things on what you might say, Okay, I'm going to go to school and I'm going to kick butt and I'm going to become a doctor, and now I'm going to you know, live my life you know, on call, and you know that's not necessarily where you're going to be the happiest. And she let me follow my passion of motorsport. She helped fund an initial business that I started where we were performance business, you know, in my early twenties, and you know, it all panned out in a good way. But I've used that as a as a north star, you know, my whole life now, which is is this direction that I'm going going to lead me somewhere that I'm going to enjoy waking up and look forward to going into the office or the shop or whatever it is that I'm doing that day, because at the end of the day, that's what's going to give me and the people that are close to me enjoyment in life. And that's the misconception that I found where I want to make a bunch of money because the idea of I want to get a job that I make a bunch of money so that I can go spend that money on things that I enjoy. I've seen people get in that trap where they end up working so much for that money and for that payday that they don't actually get to enjoy the payday. They find that the ratio is off where I'm spending most of my week making the money is a little bit of my week actually doing the things that I love. So I'd rather just make enough to get by, but really enjoy waking up enjoying my life.
You know, in a way, passing the baton off to Tanner as the driver and you being the builder. You know, it's pretty impressive to me because it sounds like, you know, you grew up and you're a hyper competitive and you probably still are, and to be able to give up the steering wall to another driver and to be behind the scenes says a lot about a person, you know, and I'm sure that was hard, Stephan.
There was some there. I mean I was still racing in the background. But the reality is my focus was on I really enjoy building successful, competitive, winning race cars and having a winning, competitive team, and the guys that we work with on the team also enjoy that, and I'm not going to sacrifice that if I'm not the best tool or the best driver for that. We knew that Tanner was. And at the end of the day, it's a team sport. I like cars and I like building them. And if my place, you know, isn't driving, then yeah, and Tanner was so much better than me, and I couldn't. I felt that I couldn't get to that level like this is where we needed to be. I don't know, it just seemed like a natural.
That's awesome. I mean that's a rare trait too. Speaking of Tanner, you being a driver and then you seeing him being a better driver. What made him a better driver? What were those traits?
So there's a thing called getting into the zone, and it would take me a day or two sometimes to get into the zone, and driving like I'm really there and I'm ahead of the car. I want the car to do a certain thing, and it just sort of happens naturally. I'm not having to think about how much throttle I'm giving it or what gear I'm in. You know. I was never really becoming one with the car, and eventually I could, but it didn't work well with the format of drifting where you're sitting at the starting line and it's like, Okay, perform and you come back, and like you had to perform immediately each time, and I wasn't consistent enough doing that, and I didn't feel like I had the mentality to be able to get in that focused zone. And Tanner just could. You'd put him there in a very high stressful situation and said perform and then he could drive the car to the highest level. And he had this not just knew how to drive the car, but he could feel what the car was doing. I need more front grip because the car is understeering, it's over rotating, and it's over spinning, so we needed to make a change to this suspension. He just was really good at not only driving it, but giving feedback as well.
Not a lot of drivers can give feedback like that. Either that's a big trait to have, yep.
And then that synergy that that combination of him having that driving skill and that feedback for the car and then me listening to it, and then our team being able to then make changes to the car to give him what he wanted was very very competitive combination. And it's rare when you can have a team that's you know, at the top of their game building cars and then a driver that's at the top of his game driving them. It's an almost unbeatable combination when that comes together.
Yeah. And then for folks that have him met Hannah in person, he's like the sweetest dude, like the nicest guy who will ever meet.
You know, him and Frederick Osbo, I'd also say, are two incredible people who, along with you and so many others, are great influences on this industry.
Yeah, And that's what allows us to be a professional team, right is at the end of the day, we work with great partners and you know, companies like Toyota, Rock Share and any drink, you know, Nato Tire, like these different companies work with for years that they want to work with us because they say these folks. They're passionate, they're competitive, and they have similar values to what we have in our company. And so, you know, I guess you could say remarketable, right having a professional team or professional business or whatever it is, you really want to check all those boxes.
Yeah, shout out to Nato Tires their vice tire sponsor too.
I love Nato.
Harry is my guy.
You know, good people, they're passionate, you know. So we're fortunate to have a great group of not just sponsors, but the team guys and everything.
What's the next ten years look like for you? What's the future?
So form of the drift is where we compete right now with Frederick Osbo. Frederick Osbo drives our GR Supra. It's a turbo charged twelve hundred horsepower drifting machine. And we have a second car which is a GR Corolla that Ryan Turk drives. Both that are a sponsor with Toyota and Rockstar Energy Drink and Nato. And then there's a third car that we handle for Jonathan ca Astro, which is a GR eighty six Toyota. And so that's the core of our business is handling all of those drift cars and going to the form of the drift events, and the series is doing really strong their live attendance and also the live stream is really good. So I think we're definitely continuing that road for at least the next you know, two to five plus years beyond that. I really like building things that don't have instructions and no one's built before. I've seen other motorsport teams, like all American Racers that have gone into building in aerospace or you know, very cutting edge R and D projects. Hollywood is big into that right where they'll be a concept and then they'll take it to a builder and he'll turn it into reality something that actually works, like the Batmoom bill.
M That's cool. So that's what you want to be doing.
Yeah, I like doing stuff that's difficult, and I think that building stuff that doesn't have instructions. Like my kid's doing legos right now. He's eight, and it's fun watching him read the instructions and kind of going through that process. But I really want him to take the next step, which is understand the different pieces and understand the different combinations that you can do that are not in the instructions and building his own creations.
How has you becoming a father kind of change your approach to racing.
It's gotten me to be a less one hundred percent focused on the motor support and the team, and yeah, try to turn it off, you know, on the weekends and when I'm doing other things. And it's helped me to become less of a micro manager in the shop and allowing the great people we have, like Sean Andaldo and everybody to actually, you know, let them do their job. Understand that if I was doing something myself, I make mistakes, and allowing the guys to make mistakes learn from that, and you know, like giving up control over certain parts of like the car bills or whatever, heading logistics for the team and just let them do their job without me looking over their shoulder.
It's incredible that you have a team that you can rely on and trust like that, because finding good help is very challenging, especially anyone who is as passionate it as you are.
Yeah, and the guys at the shop, you know, we've been working together for you know, over ten years now, from drag racing to drift, through multiple drivers, through multiple sponsors and everything. So you know, once you work with somebody that is really good at what they do. You do everything you can to retain them. And it's not always with money. It has to do with you know, you're working with people that have similar passions and make sure that you're fulfilling that for them.
Yeah. I always say, at least for myself. If I'm not learning, I'm not having fun. That's so important to continue to challenge yourself instead of just doing the same routine day to day. Do you have anything you want to promote or anything you want to leave the audience with.
If you want to check us out on YouTube, it's our channel's Papadocus Racing. I've got some videos that I post there once in a while, a lot the last few years on some builds. So if you're interested in seeing the guts of how a drift car or one of these engines work, we've built some content around that. If you want to see us competing, that would be in Formula Drift, So you can go to Formula D and I get I think this is important if you've made it this far, and if you're an enthusiast and you want to, you know, have a career in motorsport, or you're interested in how to do kind of what I do. I get this question a lot, to get emails and you know, ask a lot of this track. My best advice is to get hands on a car so you can go to school for some of the stuff, which is good, but go buy a car that's low consequence, not the one that you're driving to work every day. And it could be a maybe an older subru that's unreliable and that breaks a lot.
You'll definitely learn too, I'll tell you that.
And and there's tons of information on the web on how to fix these and work on it and just get some tools and start taking something apart and put it back together, get it running again, and then go a little bit deeper, and go a little bit deeper, and you're eventually gonna end up with more experience. And then when you find the thing that you're passionate about, keep going down that road and learning more. And if you keep your head down, you know, the hope is and the expectation is that you know you're enjoying them, and then you know people can see that and you can hopefully turn that into a career.
Yeah, And also a takeaway from your story is, you know, don't be afraid to go out there and ask for what you want. Like you went into the garage JG Motorworks, right and you were sweeping floors. I mean, And for young folks out there, people want to help. Those who want that are asking for help, right, So don't be afraid to ask for it, and don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, because I mean, those are that's those are winning attributes, you know. And it seems like the younger Stephan was that kid, you know that went after what he wanted, you know, and so somebody to really emulate and you know, kind of use as like a north star if you will. So thank you for sharing. It was a real honor to sit down and be able to talk to you.
Yeah, thanks for coming on and joining us today.
Yeah, thanks for having me guys. It was fun.
