Lawyers. They’re prevalent everywhere in this society. Want to open a business? There’s a lawyer for that. Buy a house? There’s a lawyer for that. Heck, look at the receipt of your most recent go-fast purchase. Most likely, a lawyer wrote the disclaimer on that. Newport Beach, CA, residents should be familiar with a certain guitar-strumming Balboa Island ferry boat captain, surf bum and lawyer. While living in Japan, amongst the ski resorts of Nagano, I befriended yet another former lawyer turned ski bum. Add to the list David Vespremi, the owner of the MR2 gracing these pages.
David swore off the practice after falling in love with and modifying this SW21 (the normally aspirated version of the MR2 that shared the 4-cylinder Camry’s 135hp 5SFE engine). Suffice to say, this Mister changed his life. “Here I was in a job I hated, living a double life, driving this obnoxious car, and the partners were nudging me to get a normal car like a BMW 5 series,” David says. The year was 1999 and he had what many considered the most sought-after law career at the time: a job as an IP lawyer.
Many wise (and perhaps broke) men will tell you to take the road less traveled, and that opportunity showed its ugly arse when the dot.com bubble crashed the following year. By this time, he was spending more time with the Mister than the missus would have liked. The unemployment situation only added more fuel to the fire. All of his fellow dot-bomb casualties were car/computer geeks anyway. They collaboratively decided, “If we’re gonna go broke in this recession, we might as well have fun doing it!” Thus they started their own Internet-based marketing firm catering to the automotive world: Boosted Group.
Right around that time, the first HIN shows were gaining traction and David caught wind of the very first container of Gen III 3SGTE engines coming into Los Angeles Harbor. To the uninitiated, one might think there are no differences between one 3SGTE and another 3SGTE. But when the JDM honchos axed the USDM MR2, the zen bastards continued production in the motherland with a beefed-up version until 1999. The ’96+ JDM MR2 achieved 45 more horsepower than previous generations via improved cooling, better CFM, a MAP sensor (versus the older MAF) and a slightly larger CT-20B ceramic turbo similar to that of a Celica rally car. >>
However, the installation of the improved 3SGTE presented its own challenges. Lower U.S. octane levels and tuning on Apex Power FC were now supporting 250 hp on an engine accustomed to 96 octane — the fear was detonation, heat and the like. Enter Aquamist. The makers of the European Group A Rally water injection system are now commonplace in today’s high-performance market, but back then they were curiously looking at the burgeoning U.S. market. At this point, Boosted Group had a booth at HIN, thus David scored himself some Aquamist and his first client.
More importantly, David’s MR2 was beginning to gain the attention of tuner-type magazines. Jared Holstein (Sport Compact Car) was assigned to write about his car, and the publicity was certainly well received, but this meeting of the minds turned into one of those life-altering friendships. Not only did Jared introduce David to many crucial industry people but he helped influence David to remove any doubt about his career path being in the automotive world.
In 2002 bigger things came in the form of a former Dinan (BMW aftermarket) engineer, Pete Kang. Pete had sourced himself a crashed JDM Lancer EVO VII and was looking to develop parts for the soon-to-be released EVO VIII with some first-to-market exhaust, suspension and (later) ECU components. Kang’s gamble paid dividends when it was learned that the first ever USDM EVO VIII was indeed 90 percent a JDM EVO VII. Although a talented engineer, Kang was no hype man. David’s prowess in marketing and his highly tuned MR2 landed him the gig, and WORKS’ Tuning was formed.