The skilled car salesman has the ability to spot a potential customer from several hundred feet away and hone in on them with precision and accuracy. Like the vulture able to smell its prey from nearly a mile away, the salesman who's mastered his craft possesses similar innate skills used to weed out the window shoppers from the serious buyers.
Unfortunately for those who fail to fit the "serious buyer" mold, due attention is often unpaid to otherwise serious consumers, as was the case with Sacramento resident Kevin Martinez. Martinez had little trouble purchasing his '98 Integra GSR, though. It was when he sought the help from performance shops that he began to feel neglected.
Martinez purchased the DC2 with aspirations of the bolt-on variety: rims, intake and a few other parts yanked from his previous second-gen Teg. The upgrades quenched his desire to modify and Martinez later returned the car to stock.
"I thought I wanted to stock it out, but once I did it I couldn't let it go for any longer," he explains.
With the "stock" urge purged from his system and cash in hand, Martinez went on a mission in search of a JDM front-end conversion and a turbocharger setup. What he found were performance shops staffed by indifferent sales guys that, Martinez says, were less than eager to assist him with his goals.
"It was like Christmas," he explains. "I had my list, I had the money and I was ready to spend it. But nobody wanted to help me."
The scenario played out repeatedly. Martinez would enter a shop; the staff would scope out the '93 Ford Taurus he pulled up in, and then continue on with their routine, oftentimes oblivious to Martinez. The few conversations that he did have with shop representatives were succinct and less than enlightening.
But it was during a visit to one of these less-than-helpful tuner shops that Martinez found aid from an unlikely source, Andre Logan, a fellow customer and stranger to Martinez at the time. Logan happened to overhear his plight and stepped in. In no time, Logan had Martinez on the phone with the folks at D2 Motorsports in nearby Roseville, who ordered up Martinez' sought-after parts.
"I was amazed with Dave at D2," Martinez explains. "I didn't even drop off any money yet and he had most of my parts ordered up."
Although he'd handled the acquisition of parts, the struggles Martinez would undergo building the Integra of his dreams were far from over. With theft on the rise in his apartment community, Martinez postponed the installation of his newfound upgrades until he found a new residence with a garage. The parts piled up and Martinez' bedroom began to resemble nothing short of a JDM Honda shrine.
But no sooner did he relocate to a safer place to store his future masterpiece than health problems did him in. One month later and minus an appendix, Martinez delved into the buildup with fury.
A JDM Integra Type-R front end was fitted to the chassis at nearby Precision Autobody where it was also doused with a two-tone paint scheme. Martinez had long been attracted to the two-color design, but didn't know where he wanted one color to end and the other begin.
"I wasn't sure where the cutoff between the black and the pewter should be," Martinez explains. "I finally realized that there's really no wrong way to do it and we just did it."
From then on, Martinez' DC2 went together effortlessly. The guys at D2 Motorsports fitted the GSR with Type-R suspension components and a GReddy turbocharger kit, the two most extensive performance mods to the Integra thus far.