Back in the early 2000s, "drifting" wasn't a word anybody threw around yet. There was no Fast & Furious sequel to blame it on, no hashtag, no scene. There was just a kid in a beat-up, hand-me-down 1981 Honda Prelude, an empty street, and a very simple discovery: if you pulled the e-brake right as you turned, the back end would step out — and it felt incredible.
That Prelude wasn't fast. It wasn't built for this. It was front-wheel drive, it was slow enough to lose a footrace to most things on the road, and it had more character flaws than a used car should legally be allowed to have — an ignition that couldn't reliably tell Park from Reverse, a hood that occasionally decided mid-freeway wasn't a bad time to pop open and float, and a stereo (four 10" subs, two amps) that was louder than the engine could ever hope to be. We used to cruise around blasting "Lowrider" out of it, just because a Honda thumping that song felt like the funniest thing in the world.
It got us out of at least one very close call with a sheriff mid-slide. It once carried seven people all at the same time, two of them holding speaker boxes in their laps because there was nowhere else to put them. It was, by any reasonable safety standard, a terrible car.
It was also the first car that was ever really ours.
So when it came time to give this thing a name, it wasn't complicated: D.I.S. Drive It Sidewayz. Not a competition category. Not a sponsor-ready brand. Just what we were actually doing, written on a photo with a marker, filed away in a binder for twenty-some years.
EST. 2003.
If you ask who founded DIS, the honest answer isn't a person. It's the cars.
Alongside that Prelude was a buddy's 1970 El Camino — small block, automatic, and a whole lot of seat miles logged doing exactly what you'd expect two teenagers with too much time and not enough sense to do. Later, that same El Camino got a serious engine build, a new transmission, fresh exhaust — and about thirty seconds after leaving the shop, it turned a hard pull into a full mechanical detonation. Bellhousing gone. Driveshaft launched a couple hundred feet into a vineyard. A new hole in the floorboard. Somehow, nobody got hurt worse than a face full of debris and a long, confused coast to the shoulder.
We rebuilt it. It ran great after that. And somewhere in the years that followed, life did what life does — new jobs, new people, new directions — and we drifted apart just as slowly as we'd once drifted corners together.
These days it's a small fleet of Mazda B2200s — one with a V8 in it that a friend keeps trying to talk us into turning into a drift truck (jury's still out on that one), one that's the original, hand-rebuilt and turbocharged, and an extended cab whose fate is genuinely undecided — the V8 mounts are already sitting there waiting. None of them started as drift vehicles. That's kind of the point.
Drive It Sidewayz isn't a slogan we came up with for a pitch deck. It's twenty years old, it's got a bulletproof driveshaft and a busted hood latch and a marker-written photo to prove it, and it's still exactly what it always was: not the car you'd expect, doing exactly what it wasn't built to do.
