What Kind of Business Is Behind These "Wild" Car Races? | 100 Entrepreneurs

Its proper name is "drag racing." To a lot of people, it is still a fairly unfamiliar thing.

On March 5, on the straight at the Shanghai International Circuit, a modified gray BYD Tang lined up alongside a white BMW M3 Coupe, ready to go head-to-head.

Yellow and green lights alternated, a hand dropped, the engines roared, the noise broke over the crowd — into gear, foot flat to the floor, a 400-meter sprint.

13.038 seconds. Before anyone could make out who crossed the line first, the modified BYD Tang had beaten the BMW M3 by half a second. The race was over before the spectators could see it happen.

Only afterward, reading the numbers closely, did they understand why the more powerful BMW M3 had lost to the BYD Tang.

The recorded terminal speed at 400 meters tells the story. However quick the BYD Tang's electric motor was off the line, it could only reach 169.25 km/h at the end of the run, against 182.27 km/h for the BMW M3. But it had rained the night before, the track was slick, and the M3 — which should have had the advantage at the start — spun its rear wheels because its launch was too violent.

The BYD Tang, which looks like nothing that should be fast, used its four-wheel drive to bite into the pavement and won by a hair.

That was one heat in the qualifying rounds of a drag race. Over that weekend, 150 modified cars took part in an event called Fast4ward.

Fast4ward is not "professional." Set beside a series like Formula 1, it differs in two big ways. First, there is no full lap of a circuit: a Fast4ward drag race is one 400-meter straight, start to finish. Second, instead of a field of cars fighting for position, every heat is a one-on-one duel.

But the real difference lies in the cars and the drivers.

The race cars are all production models you can buy off a dealer's lot. Some have been modified so heavily that they can no longer be driven legally on the road; some have had nothing changed but their wheels and tires; some are entirely stock.

The drivers — perhaps we should call them "amateur car owners." Enthusiasts, certainly, but with no professional training.

Fast4ward's CEO is Zhong Kailin, and this is her second year running car races.

The company now has more than 30 full-time employees and has held Fast4ward races in seven cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, and Tianjin, at an average of one a month. This year it plans to pick up the pace and stage one of these "wild" drag races every two weeks.

Last year Zhong Kailin also closed a 50-million-yuan funding round, which she plans to spend on building the company's own track and producing racing video shows in China, hoping to pull more people toward motorsport.

A Low-Barrier Race Built on Showing Off

"A 0-400-meter race is a fairly pure form of drag racing, and the rules are simple. Precisely because it is simple, anyone can take part," Zhong Kailin said in an earlier interview.

The format Fast4ward uses — the quarter-mile drag race — comes mainly from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, where owners of performance cars gather and race to show off what they have built.

Drag racing is a contest about the car. The rules are simple and the course is a straight line, so the driver's skill counts for relatively little. What the car is, and whether its performance is impressive enough, is the heart of the thing.

In the United States, drag racing goes back decades and has been pushed to extremes. An entrant may look like an ordinary car from the outside while being, underneath, a hand-built machine for speed. When these things launch, flames shoot from the exhaust, the front wheels lift off the ground, and some finish the entire run on their two rear wheels.

In China, races like this for amateur car owners were, until recently, simply absent.

That was the opening Zhong Kailin saw.

The business she came from had nothing to do with racing. After graduating from the business administration department at Fudan University, she worked mostly in management jobs at traditional companies, among them Walden International and Zhongyuanwei Pharmaceutical.

Off the clock, though, she was a racing fan through and through. Plenty of her friends raced; some worked at tuning shops. She thought China's racing market was far from mature, but as a fan she liked its chances.

"A lot of my friends know cars and play with cars, so we did this project together." In July 2015, Zhong Kailin held the first Fast4ward drag race.

She told QDaily that about 35 percent of the cars now entered are factory high-performance models — BMW M, Audi RS, Mercedes-AMG — and the rest are modified: some family cars with light work done, and some in the unlimited-modification class, with heavy engine builds.

Every month, Fast4ward recruits drivers through WeChat. The barrier is low: in theory anyone with a car and a license can enter. A race needs a straight, so they are usually held at disused airports on the edges of cities.

Sign-ups have been strong. For the March 5 race, the format capped the field at 150 cars, and registration filled within eight minutes of opening on WeChat. Of the drivers, 80 percent are men, and most are between 20 and 30.

As Zhong Kailin sees it, what the drivers get out of bringing their own cars is, above all, the chance to show off.

The showing off takes many forms, much of it playing out only inside a driver's head. Take the display of cars before the race:

Or a small rivalry over nothing but performance. Between two Ford Mustangs, the 5.0-liter V8 Mustang GT is far quicker than the 2.3-liter four-cylinder. "The owner of that GT might be thinking: only the V8 is a real Mustang — the 2.3 four-cylinder is all show."

Registration is free, but drivers still spend their own money to race. Cars entering a drag race usually get track tires such as the Yokohama AD08R or the Bridgestone RE-11, and the more fastidious will change the oil and have the car serviced. So unless you finish in the top two of your class, a weekend at a drag race costs an individual driver anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand yuan.

Safety is another large problem. The more powerful the car, the harder it is to race. At the March 5 race in Shanghai, a Porsche 911 Turbo S lost grip at the launch, ran off the track, and wrecked its rear end against the barrier, ending its day.

Zhong Kailin said her team runs safety checks and safety briefings for drivers before each race. With 5,000 spectators on site, there are also dedicated security staff.

Before Organized Racing, There Was Gray-Zone "Street Racing"

Before organized races like this existed, that urge to show off found its outlet in jumping the lights at intersections and in underground street racing.

A few years ago, the Datun Road tunnel in Beijing was one of the favorite underground racing spots for owners of performance cars: the road was quiet and out of sight, and the acoustics were first-rate, making the most of an exhaust note. But underground racing is both dangerous and illegal, and it is one root of the authorities' prejudice against modified cars.

That prejudice is a problem Fast4ward cannot dodge: regulation.

China's car-modification business is illegal in fact and lively in private. Because of underground racing and street racing, police suspicion of modified and performance cars turns up in the news regularly: a club meetup raided, a batch of modified cars hauled away.

To keep its events legal, Zhong Kailin told QDaily, Fast4ward tries to head off inspections over modification by submitting to oversight before anyone asks.

Before a race, she said — especially at a venue that is not a proper circuit, such as Beijing's Pinggu Airport — Fast4ward goes to the local police station itself and files notice of the coming event.

The company also volunteers the fact that it insures every driver and every spectator, Zhong Kailin said, and the authorities treat these races as a way of draining off underground racing: better to have them than not.

Still, the races have run smoothly so far only because the current approach diverts part of the risk.

The illegality of street racing has been dealt with. But under the vehicle-management rules now in force, most of the entrants — modified to one degree or another, and wearing license plates — could in principle be impounded for "illegal modification." The policy risk has not gone away.

The Money Still Comes From Sponsors

Zhong Kailin said Fast4ward's payroll, event operations, and prize money all come from manufacturer sponsorship.

At last weekend's race in Shanghai, the logo of the energy drink brand Monster was everywhere on site, and at the starting line a "Monster girl" in leather waved the cars away.

Monster sponsors many motorsport events worldwide, including the WRC and RallyCross, and the rally driver Ken Block has long been on its books. The largest banner at the Shanghai stop showed that alongside Monster, the year-round title sponsor, the race was co-sponsored by the British sports car brand McLaren.

She has also kept the company as lean as she can. Of the 30-person team, most work in digital media; event operations, traditionally the labor-hungry part, are outsourced. A single race can be run with as few as five full-time staff on hand, and the company roughly breaks even. One race costs between 200,000 and 800,000 yuan, depending on the venue.

Besides the usual racing sponsors — motor oil brands, aftermarket parts brands — carmakers such as McLaren also sponsor Fast4ward, Zhong Kailin said.

Drag racing, she said, gathers car owners with money to spend, and some of them are bound to trade up: the owner of a Golf GTI is a potential buyer of an Audi RS3, and a Porsche owner's next car might be a McLaren.

Audi, McLaren, and Tesla have all sponsored Fast4ward races. Besides cash, these carmakers show their own performance cars on site and run demonstration runs on the track.

The series may expand to one race every two weeks, and the format may grow into a challenge-ladder. The money raised may go toward renting more circuits and airports, or toward building a drag strip of its own.

Alongside private owners driving their own cars, tuning shops bring their work to the races to show it off.

Fist, a tuning shop that won the unlimited-modification class at earlier stops, came to the Shanghai race as well, again with the Nissan GT-R it had built up to 1,000 horsepower.

Fist brought three modified cars. A sales manager told QDaily that they were the shop's best work, brought purely for display and for the brand. Another entrant, the auto-parts e-commerce company PPPcar, normally attends shows built around cosmetic modification rather than drag races like Fast4ward; it came here for the publicity too.

Publicity is one of the reasons Zhong Kailin gives for why drag racing now draws both spectators and tuning shops.

Fast4ward does not go out of its way to serve the shops, she said; they enter like any other car owner. The connections and the deals that form between modified cars and their owners are part of what keeps Fast4ward alive.

How Big Is the Market for Drag Racing?

Zhong Kailin hopes to make a profit of 20 million yuan in 2017.

Right now, car owners race free and spectators get in free at every Fast4ward event. She has not begun making money from the races themselves.

That money is likely to keep coming from sponsors — which is the common problem across China's racing business. It got started only a little over a decade ago, the market and the audience are both thin, and organizers lean too heavily on manufacturer sponsorship.

"Five years ago, a lot of domestic auto racing events were losing money. It is only in the past year or two that they have started to turn a profit," a veteran of the industry we interviewed earlier said. Once the manufacturers pull out, he added, the racing companies themselves cannot survive.

Fast4ward has made some adjustments. Zhong Kailin wants to run car racing more like esports, so that more people can watch online, and to make money eventually from racing merchandise and from the followings that amateur drivers build.

Besides livestreaming every race, Fast4ward has been producing its own video shows since last April. It also wants to package amateur drivers as personalities and make the whole event more of an entertainment product; more of the revenue may come from merchandise and from interactive features like fan predictions.

There is a contradiction in this. Fast4ward's plan makes the spectators important participants in its entertainment system, but that is a marked departure from how esports works: modifying a car is not something a person does alone, and in drag racing the car's performance matters far more than the driver's skill. Put another way, if Fast4ward is to be sold as entertainment, the spectators it draws will have to know cars and want them.

On the Youku channel and the Miaopai account Fast4ward has run for more than a year, the video shows draw only a few thousand to ten thousand views apiece, and Zhong Kailin and her team have not pushed hard to get the races seen a second time. For a competition built on speed and passion, winning a much larger base of fans and users will not be easy.

Cover image provided by the interview subject.