First car bought
Ramirez later bought his own car. His dad co-signed and helped him buy a used black 1988 Honda Prelude 2.0Si, with a manual tranny in an effort to top his brother's Accord.
His dad taught him how to drive stick on a well-known steep area, so Ramirez could master it. "My dad took me up La Cienega going up to Sunset Boulevard, it's a steep hill and he said, 'If you don't learn here, forget it,'" he laughs. "I was like, 'Dad, why don't you just take me to San Francisco!'"
Once his Prelude was paid off, Ramirez started racing his brother and friends. One time he raced it on the Pasadena Freeway and lost the Prelude to his competitor who had a Camaro. They raced for pink slips back then and he had to borrow his brother's Accord to compete in another race to get his Prelude back.
"I used my brother's car!" Ramirez says, describing the race with excitement. "We raced from downtown Los Angeles to Fair Oaks in Pasadena. I grew up all over L.A. and one of the neighborhoods was Highland Park and it was right between Pasadena and downtown and my brother and I would always drive the 110 all the time, we were familiar with that. When you're driving and racing there, you've got to make sure that your car's low, you've got really good tires and you've got really good brakes." So he won the Prelude back in the twisties on that freeway.
Ramirez's dad was a mechanic, fixing trucks for Hertz Penske and he taught his son how to fix his own car. "He taught me how to take apart my engine and rebuild it. I had to several times because I used to race my car all the time and I ended up exploding my clutch at one point," he laughs. "Another time my timing belts went off out, I bent all the heads, so we had to take half my engine apart and replace it with new parts. Then I souped up my car -- I put a Flowmaster muffler and I had an air intake."
To this day, his dad's lessons on car mechanics still come in handy. "My dad wanted me to know so if there's any failure, I could listen to the car and ask myself, 'Is it the engine, or electrical, is it the alternator, the belt, the starter?' Now a lot of friends ask me advice when their car seems to fail them," Ramirez says, with a chuckle.