For nearly 35 years, Richey Watanabe was a fixture on the import race, rally, and tuning scenes. Unassuming and unflappable, he could be found at circuits from Sebring to Laguna Seca, from the Baja 1000 to a World Rally Championship round in Australia. Working out of various shops in Southern California, Richey and his older brother, Howard, built, modified, and prepped cars too numerous to catalog here. Richey himself was also a championship-winning rally driver (with Howard serving as his co-driver). Not that you ever would have learned that from Richey. He was far too modest and soft-spoken, despite all that he had to brag about.
Richey Watanabe—devoted son, loving brother and uncle, loyal friend and godsend to countless racers—was born on July 30, 1954, in Sendai, Japan. His father, Shinichi, was a Japanese-American who’d lived in Seattle as a young man. But after being interned at the notorious Tule Lake Relocation Center during World War II, he moved to Japan. There, he found his future his wife, Takako, and took a job with Coca-Cola that required him to move frequently around the country. With his parents and brother, Richey moved 17 times before the boys attended high school and technical college in Tokyo.
In both their personal and professional lives, the Watanabe brothers were nearly inse-parable. “In our whole lives,” Howard recalls, “we never spent more than a month apart.” So when they decided to go racing, it was only fitting that they chose to compete in rally rac-ing—the one form of motorsport that requires two people in the car at the same time. Richey assumed driving duties while Howard served as co-driver. They began racing in Japan in ro-tary-powered Mazdas, but eventually put their rally careers on hold in 1977 when they de-cided to move to the United States.
After briefly studying English and attending vocational school, the Watanabe brothers found full-time jobs; Howard working for a local gas company and Richey for body shops, first in North Hollywood and later in Pasadena. Meanwhile, they attended their first American rally in Bakersfield, and agreed to get back into racing. “We gotta do it,” Richey told Howard. The following year, they entered their first U.S. rally, racing a Corolla at Bakersfield.
Although Howard and Richey were working full time, they managed to prepare their car with all the attention to detail of a professional race shop. “Even after the races,” Howard says, “we made sure it was beautiful.” Their craftsmanship put them on the radar screen of Toyota Racing Development, where they were hired in 1984; Howard to work on race motors while Richey prepped race chassis. They made it a point to request to be given time off to compete in SCCA Pro Rally events, which were contested all over the country. The two of them pulled an open trailer with a Chevy van. “In three days,” Howard recalls with a grin, “we could get anywhere in the United States.”
Richey, humble to a fault, rarely talked about his exploits and downplayed his ability. Howard, from his position in the right seat, remembers the crashes more vividly than the vic-tories. But the record reflects that Richey knew how to pedal a car. He won back-to-back California Rally Championships in 1983 and 1984 and then a Pro Rally Group A champion-ship in a Corolla GTS. Still, much as they loved rallying, they grew bored at TRD and wanted to create something of their own. So in 1988, they opened their first shop: HMR America, and before long the two were so busy working on other people’s cars that they no longer had time to go racing themselves.