(increasing revving)
- [Interviewer] All right so what got you into cars?
And what did you drive in here today?
- So my name is Mike.
I drive a fully built single turbo '09 370 Z,
which is also known as Zedzilla.
So my passion for cars started at a very young age.
I remember hearing stories of my mom with her boyfriend
at the time, traveling all over the United States.
They were going to pick up 1970 442 Oldsmobiles.
There is a red one, a blue one, and a green one.
They're somewhere in a barn, probably still to this day.
I remember telling my mom growing up
that I'm going to find one of those.
I'm going to restore it and I'm going to give it to her.
So being your typical nineties kid,
I always had hot wheel cars.
With the hot wheel cars came the hot wheel tracks,
running them up and down walls down the stairs, you know,
jumping it over pillows.
I was always the tinkerer.
I always wanted to find something,
pull it apart and put it back together.
Of course I always made it better.
There was always screws, bolts, whatever it was leftover,
but for some reason it always still worked.
And cars was kind of that thing where I kind of
just took off and advanced with.
(upbeat music)
So fast forward into about two thousands.
I saw my first Fast and The Furious movie.
And like any kid that went to that movie theater
and leaving that you just had that adrenaline going.
You're sitting there like I need a car like that in my life.
I saved up all my money from my paper route
that I was doing at the time.
And I cut off the muffler on an '04 Saturn Ion
that was supposed to be a community vehicle
between myself and my brothers.
I can tell you that my brothers and everyone didn't like it.
But I loved it.
It was one those things where you're like,
yes, I can finally be cool like all the other kids
and all the actors you see in the movie.
And I would truthfully say that was my
first modification to a vehicle.
And the sky was the limit at that point.
I never looked back after that.
My current vehicle is my '09 Nissan 370 Z sport.
So I've owned the car for about six years now.
Had to get, you know, the exhaust.
Had to get cold air intakes, full bolt-ons essentially.
I got a little out of hand and a little bit cocky
and I definitely crashed that car.
And honestly, I never thought I would cry
seeing something that happened like that.
It was, it was a pretty tough moment.
I put all my money into a car
to then crash it being stupid.
But thankfully I pulled together, ended up keeping it.
Now we sit where it's at.
At first I wanted to go fast in a straight line.
It was fun for about the first maybe four times
until I was like, okay, well,
this is the same thing over and over again.
It's either you go really fast and you beat the other person
or you go really fast and then look like you're going slow.
I wanna get the car set up for big track events.
I did the auto cross here and there,
but I want to do more of the stuff like grid life.
I want to get into the time attack,
the HPDE stuff like that.
Like the auto cross was fun.
But with the car having more power, those little courses,
it definitely doesn't get its full potential.
I do have a coil overs on the way
that I did order from Fitment Industries.
I got a set of KW variant threes that will help me dial in
and get the car set up for corner balancing.
Get everything so I don't, you know,
sit there and have the wheel shaking like crazy.
As far as anything else for the car, knock on wood,
hopefully nothing motor wise.
But I do understand that, you know, being on it more,
it's definitely one of those things
that's in the back of my head that it could go at any time.
I have a spare motor sitting there ready to build,
that I'm slowly inquiring parts for.
That when unfortunately that time comes,
it will see another stage in it.
At that point, maybe there'll be Zedzilla 2.0, who knows?
(rap music)
- [Interviewer] The name Zedzilla,
you brought that up a couple times as the name of your car.
What is the meaning behind Zedzilla?
- I'm happy that you asked that.
So Zedzilla, the meaning behind that is
so everyone knows the term Godzilla in the car scene.
Everyone knows that's a skyline.
So I wanted to incorporate that somehow into my car
being a Z car.
So everywhere else in the world calls a Z car, a Zed.
So I thought, why not put them both together?
So I did Zedzilla.
Zedzilla King of the monsters.
(rap music)