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.