Rhys Millen uncut - exclusive interview NZ Performance car

Building and racing top-notch drift cars is any kids dream; especially when that racing comes in the form of America’s premier drift event – Formula D, the infamous Pikes Peak hill climb, road racing events and even movie stunt sequences. But that’s the life that ex-pat Kiwi Rhys Millen – son of racing legend Rod Millen – lives. We tracked Rhys down in his Huntington Beach, California-based Rhys Millen Racing workshop to grab some of his time for an exclusive interview about how Rhys Millen came to fame in the US for New Zealand readers.

Due to space restrictions, we couldn’t give you the full run down of what was discussed in issue #150 of New Zealand Performance Car magazine, so we’re now offering it exclusively online for you all to enjoy. So… enjoy!

For those who don’t know about your Kiwi connection, tell us about your history in New Zealand.
I grew up on the North Shore of Auckland; actually born and raised in Browns Bay. I went to Rangitoto College there, and then at 17 I left for the US and came to College over here and started working for my Dad part-time – at that point sweeping floors.

Why the shift to the States?
My Dad lived in the US since I was six years old, and once a year for our summer break I would come and visit him. And at an older age, with him recognising more opportunities for me to be more active in the US, he offered for me to move over there and get a better education and go to school. And with my familiarity with the scene and everything over here, I really didn’t think twice about it.

You started racing bikes aged eight; when did you take up motorsport?
I rode my bike to college, rode my bike from college to his work, and rode my bike from college back to his home, and I didn’t even have an interest in cars! I started crewing for him and it wasn’t until I got my licence at 18 that speed and cars grasped hold of me. At 19 I took one of his old rally cars that wasn’t finished, and finished the cage and suspension and bits and pieces and started racing.

So would you say that your Dad was quite a big influence in your racing career?
Obviously his establishment helped me – I got his take-off tyres, and was able to have access to his shop; but his influence came through words of advice, not cheques and handfuls of cash (laughs). He was of the structure that if you wanted it bad enough, you’d work for it. That consequently probably took me twice as long as it could have to establish myself working for him for a year, racing for a year, taking a year off and working for him and so forth for probably six to eight years.

Before you started drifting, what other forms of motorsport were you involved with?
From 1992 (my first active year in motorsport, that being rallying, hillclimbing and Pikes peak) till 1999 I ran as a privateer doing select events that I could afford that were going to give me good exposure, and that would produce positive results to gain identity and a name for myself for funding support and sponsorship. In 2000 I ended up getting my first motorsport contract by myself and picked up a deal with Mitsubishi Motors America (MMA), and we started rallying the US Rally programme against the likes of Ford, Hyundai and Subaru. I held that for two years as a team owner and driver. And in 2003, unfortunately Mark Lovell, a British rally champion, and his co-driver, were killed over here in the Oregon Rally and all the manufacturers pulled out of rallying in 2003. And that kind of segued into drift. The style of driving was the same, the passion for car control was the same, and we just had to try and re-group.

Why drift?
I used to have a 2JZ Toyota Supra that I raced up Pikes Peak. In 1996, the Drift King came to the US to do a video and I got exposed to it then but really thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until 2003 that it kind of formatted into more of a sanctioned sport. We entered our first event then back in the old rally car, the Evo VII. They really didn’t know what to do with us, as they’d never had a four-wheel-drive car enter. We qualified number one, but opted to not do the finals – which was a Japanese driver chasing and then leading – as I really didn’t understand this whole tandem thing. But we dusted off the cobwebs with the Supra, went out to the next event and won that overall, and kind of took those results [and] started talking to people [at GM] in Detroit, and then booked an airline ticket to Detroit.

Was it just fun for you initially? Or did you know from the start this is where you wanted your motorsport career to head?
At 21, I started my own company Rhys Millen Racing, which was based on selling aftermarket performance products. And the profit that we made from those products supported our racing, and in turn our racing was a marketing tool to more product sales. The thing I liked about the drifting was the immediate crowd reaction and respect for the drivers control and ability, and how the fans got involved in it. It was a sport similar to rallying, but it was in a confined area where you could sell and promote your product. It was probably more from the business side of things than the personal excitement side of things that drew me into the sport.

At the time you unveiled it, the GTO was considered one of the best drift cars in America, wasn’t it?
Yeah, definitely. We’d kind of surpassed then what was a standard drift car. We’d gone with elements of aerodynamics, changing some of the weight placement, and lightening some components. It wasn’t your average street kind of drift car, it was kind of a race car / drift car. And it kind of set the tone for how all drift cars are now. We were also the first people to use a hydraulic handbrake, and to use a secondary set of callipers to override the brake bias set on the brake pedal.

What did it mean to you to take the GTO to the 2005 Formula D title?
You know, that was fantastic. Although we knew how to slide a car, I didn’t quite understand what the judges were looking for. My handbrake pulling experience was kind of a first gear routine. Now I was being asked to sometimes pull it in the top of fourth, and that is just NOT something you do naturally in any form of motorsport outside of drifting. So the year was spent kind of progressing development of the car to the driving ability of the sport, and kind of understanding the judging. And we progressed to winning the final round of 2004, and then leading into the championship-winning year in 2005 we qualified first, won the season opener and then led the championship all the way.

Why did you make the switch from the GTO to the Solstice when you did?
At that point, our programme was only supposed to be a couple of years long with GM, and they saw that they were definitely getting a lot of buzz about the Pontiac brand in the sport, but it wasn’t really a motorsport programme per se as it was more of a marketing programme in that they weren’t in drifting to drift, they were in drifting to market cars. The GTO was only available in the US in 2005/2006, and subsequently with the new platform, the Solstice, being introduced, that was going to be their flagship sports car for the Pontiac brand.

Tell us a bit about RMR. How do you think it has helped your drifting career? Without it, do you think you would have been able to achieve what you have in motorsport?I think they’ve both complemented one another. For those eight years or so I built the foundation of the company, and without the infrastructure my staff and I put in place I don’t think we would have been viewed as a serious contender to get a motorsport programme from a large manufacturer. When they viewed our company as someone to invest into, they sent their people out and made sure we had the correct machinery and the space to operate this programme and that we were a legitimate company and not someone working out of a garage. So that needed to be in place to get that programme, but in turn, as I mentioned, having that programme enabled us to develop the car aesthetically in a way that we started selling those bodykits to street customers. So the two have paralleled each other and worked quite well.

We guess the support from sponsors like Red Bull hasn’t hurt matters, either.
Red Bull is a great company to have in your pocket. It’s kind of horsepower when you’ve got no gas in the tank. I worked on them for about a year and a half, penetrating their company, and they finally saw the value to invest in us. We are one of few unique teams in the world that they don’t actually own. We are a full branded team but privately owned. So it’s a unique situation, and any time that one sponsor leaves and you’re throwing out to approach a new sponsor, to have Red Bull in your back pocket is very, very valuable. They bring a lot of credibility obviously as a brand, and definitely in the situation of moving to Hyundai with a new car and new promotions. They made the Pontiac cool, and I think that their association with Hyundai and the new Genesis Coupe will make that cool.

Talk us through your two Red Bull Experiments. We know the first one didn’t end well. Were these a concept of yours that you put to Red Bull, or something the company approached you about?
They’re actually ideas that I put forward. … I was informed about their new programme they were going to do called Red Bull Experiment. And they asked me if I had any ideas to put forward. Kind of jokingly I said, “Well, Travis just did the double back-flip on a bike, why don’t we try and do a single back-flip in a car?” I really didn’t know what they were thinking about it and what I was throwing out there (laughs). They called me the following week and asked if I was serious, so I said: “Give me a week and let me get back to you”.

So I ran down to the local hobby store and bought nitro-powered and battery-powered 4WD and 2WD cars, and started playing with them. Once I changed ramp angles and figured out that I needed some sort of kicker device on the top, I put together a proposal and said: “Hey, are you guys willing to back this at phase one? Let’s see if we can devise the system that will help the truck rotate.” At that point it wasn’t about really doing the jump, because the jump was f**king scary. It was more about the science behind it and figuring it all out, and that kind of parallels my whole life as far as designing, building and developing race cars. You get given an opportunity and challenges, and how do you figure them out? You take a race car on course and if it’s understeering or oversteering you play with tyre sizes and pressures, spring rates and shock settings and swaybars and you move elements of the car around to try and balance it; and the ramp was just an extension of that. It was again playing with speeds, ramp angles, hinge points of movement, nitrogen pressures, offset spring rates on the front of the truck, knowing when to lift and when to give full throttle, and all of that to help the rotation or reduce the inertia rotation. It was something that became kind of an addiction. You’d do one jump, make a change, do another jump, see the outcome, make a change and you kept progressing from landing 180 degrees upside down to keeping the rotation going until you did a full rotation.

It sounds like there was a hell of a lot to it!
Yeah, there’s more to it than what people give credit. Unfortunately it didn’t work out on the night, but it was about as close as you were going to get given how defined it has to be for feet per second versus speed and all of that. If you’re off one mile an hour, it completely changes the outcome. There’s a lot more to it than some idiot just driving up and off a ramp, and I don’t think people will ever understand that unless they were part of the build crew or designing the ramp. There’s probably 20 moving parts on the ramp alone with springs and latches and hinges and nuts and bolts just to make it all work. It’s amazing.

Do you have any coming stunts planned?
We have been talking about this stuff. It won’t be as extreme as the back-flip, but we are looking at doing some unique things with Hyundai that will be in a car that have never been done before. And the only thing I can say is that it will be kind of a crossover between other extreme sports that are kind of more skateboard orientated and trying those in a car.

Sounds interesting… When should we expect to see that?
It will be more of a youtube-based piece right now is the vision more so than a world-wide sort of deal.

Part 2 next Post

Rhys Millen Interview Part 2

So far, you’ve had an extensive career involving all kinds of forms of motorsport, extreme stunts and, of course, movie stunt driving. How did you come across this, and in which movies will we have seen your work?I got it funny enough in 1994. I got into the Hollywood scene doing mountain bike stunts. I auditioned for a job where they needed a guy to jump over a camera and do a trick, and then they asked me if I had any driving experience. I said yes, so they brought the director in and he said that I was perfect for on-camera as well. So rather than Ford paying three talent people, they had me be on-camera, do the mountain bike stuff and drive the truck through the sand dunes and jump it and all that stuff. So that was a break with a director that was known. He’s like “is this really your first car driving job?”, and I said “yeah”. He said: “well, you’re my guy to go to from now on”, and I said “alright, cool, well I like this”. So I continued to do that, and up until about five years ago it was more precision sliding and parking 180s for car commercials. I got called from the crowd at Warner Brothers for Dukes of Hazzard, and they actually called me looking for rally cars. They came down to the shop to check some of them out to take pictures back, and I showed them a video of the drifting and they said “is that you driving?”, and I said “yeah”. So they said “well we’re having an audition next week, why don’t you come up to the back lot of Warner Brothers and try out for a spot?” So I went up there with the original driver of the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard TV show and some other top stunt drivers, and they rolled down the door of this trailer and out comes this General Lee, and they’re like “you guys are here to try out for the lead role of driving the General Lee”, and I was like “you’re f**king kidding me!”. So they set up three different driving stunts, and I was pretty much the only one that could pull it off. I got the call the next week, and they said “are you available in a month to fly to New Orleans and drive for two months?”, and I’m like “I’m there”. So that progressed into the feature side of things, and then the same second unit director ended up doing Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and now Fast and Furious, and I worked on those two movies. I was the lead driver for Tokyo Drift, and played a small role driving some of the scenes through the streets in the blue Skyline in FAF. I also drove with that same director for the new Indiana Jones movie, and worked on Herbie Fully Loaded and Redline the movie.

Do you have any big movies coming up that we should look out for?
The hardest thing with motorsport contracts is that you’re contracted to specific dates, and you’ll always have conflicts. There are multiple movies I’ve had to pass on by. A new one with Nicolas Cage that I literally had to pass on last night. They typically film for anywhere from two to four months, and they like to have you on set even if they’re not using you, and they don’t like to release you. So it’s usually just a timing effort, whereas if they’re filming in our off-season of racing you can usually get a movie a year under your belt. So nothing in the near future, no.

Now, we introduced our readers early this year to your new RMR Hyundai Genesis Coupe that had been built for Time Attack purposes. We see things have somewhat changed since we spoke back then. Tell us what’s happened.You know, number one that car was just purely a concept. There were no intentions of really going time attack racing, no intentions of a drift programme, and no intentions of Hyundai and RMR joining forces. But I saw it as a valuable opportunity for every dollar they gave me to build it as a SEMA car that I was going to invest in it with a dollar to try and gain some momentum and some exposure with a new manufacturer to potentially get a programme for 2009. And we obviously proved that point and have that now. That car then, it had double dive planes in the front, had a dry-brake fuel system kind of mock-up in the rear, but funny enough it is the same chassis and the same bodykit that we’re running on the drift car. So a lot of that has transferred over, but also a lot from what we’ve learnt over the past five years in the GTO and the Solstice has transferred over into the chassis products and chassis developments.

Taking that original car, what have you improved on the setup to make it into a championship contending setup? The SEMA show car was really just exterior correct, plus it had a roll cage in it. None of the drivetrain had been touched whatsoever. The radiator, the ABS system, stock transmission, all the stock rubber bushing and stock differential – all of that was still in there. So I think it was the third week in January that we kind of got the go ahead to start developing this car into a real race car, and we knew that they had the two options then of the 3.8 V6 and the 2.0-litre turbocharged, and we kind of decided to go for a turbocharged V6. We machined up a new bellhousing adaptor, and included an HKS sequential transmission that we’d been running. We also upgraded the rear end because there was no limited slip available for it as an internal item, so we went with a speedway/sprint car style rear end from a company called Winters, which is also a quick change rear end. And with the different sports we’re going to do, we can re-gear the car for Pikes Peak, for any drift course or any road race course, and that was again the focus point of what we were trying to do. The proposal that the marketing guy and I kind of came up with in that let’s show the diversity of this chassis and the same car to do three completely different kinds of motorsport, and try to market it and promote that point that there’s likes and dislikes in human beings, but here’s one car that can cater to your tastes if you’re an autocrosser, a drifter, a road racer or a hill climber, and what we’re doing with this programme.

We understand that you’ve built two cars, actually – one for show, and one for competition duties. What are the differences between the two?Yeah, that’s correct. The car that’s been circulating is just an exterior correct show car. It has full interior, radio, CD player, leather seats, A/C, heater, carpet, no roll cage – it just had tinted windows. That car was primarily to kick off the programme and then we were already in the build phase of the race car which is now out in circulation.

Now that you’ve got the car out, in what ways have you really improved the car from the Solstice for drifting?Uhm, if you look at drifting, it’s really dependent on what the judges want to see that year. A couple of years ago it was all about speed, then it progressed to angle, and now it’s kind of anyone who builds a fast car (such as we do), they’re always going to manipulate the rules to even it out to other drivers. So now it’s kind of about speed and show this year. Even though in our first time out with the new car we were the fastest, they weren’t giving us any credit on that. We’re kind of just taking what we’ve learnt in the past five years. The car can sustain the angle of the GTO, but it has the speed of the Solstice. You know, once the judges cut us a break and we get more than three days of testing under our belt, which we’re back on the dyno tomorrow and out testing Friday and Saturday, I really think the car’s going to be a strong contender here in the next couple of events. I’m going to say its 600lbs lighter than the factory car, and there’s not one rubber bushing; it’s all mono-ball or jointed. The suspension and springs and everything are working fantastic – the forward grip is amazing. And a lot of that has to be attributed to the new Toyo Tires as well.

You rose to take the inaugural Red Bull Drifting World Championship crown last year. What was it like to win such a prestigious event as that?
Outside of Long Beach last year where we blew three motors leading up to the first round, we probably had one of our best seasons ever in the sport. Out of six events that we contended, I think we were on the podium for four of them, and only missed one of them by one spot off the podium. So we had a lot of momentum going all year long, and leading into the Red Bull Drifting World Championships we were confident that we were going to be competitive, but only against the US competitors. And any situation where you’re running against new drivers, you need to rapidly learn the game. So I had two of my guys sitting in the stands in the practice runs getting radar speeds on everyone, videoing everyone, and I always make up a cheat sheet of every driver so I know ‘this guy initiates early, he initiates late, he has this mile an hour entry, this mile an hour exit etc’. So my spotter when I line up against those individuals feeds me all of that information, and I think that’s probably one of the valuable points to the team – we do have a lot of experience, and we do take this very seriously. We enjoy the sport, and we want to win every opportunity we can. And Red Bull was great – anytime you’re a World Rally car driver, or a drift driver or whatever your discipline is, if on that given day you can be the best in the world there’s no better feeling.

Having now driven the new Genesis at its debut event – the opening round of the 2009 Formula D Series – just how much of a competitive force do you believe you’ll be in what’s essentially unchartered territory?
You know, to say it’s competitive or not competitive in drifting…. You could be given the most competitive car and you could drive it to the best of your ability, but if the judges aren’t on your side that day you’re not going to have a sh*t show in winning. To say it’s competitive would be to make a statement such as: if I took that car right now up Pikes Peak, where there’s a clock and a start line and a finish line with no judges, I guarantee you it would be minimum 15 seconds faster than the Solstice. You know, we were told this weekend that our car doesn’t have that much excitement, and it’s too quiet, and that we need to be a bit more exciting. I don’t think in any form of motorsport you’ll ever get told that about your car unless you’re in a drift competition (laughs). We’ll disconnect the wastegate to make it more exciting and hopefully the judges will give us more points. At the end of the day, the car has the development underneath it. We have not started playing with tyres to understand this new tyre, or started playing with brakes. Already in the last couple of days we’ve changed front sway bars, master cylinder sizes for front and rear, and we have the Toyo Tires engineer coming out testing with us for the next few days. We’re poised to take advantage of the next round, and move up – I’m going to hope for a minimum of eight spots. Obviously I wasn’t comfortable with the car, too, and I wasn’t scraping it on the walls like we were at Red Bull – but that car [Solstice] I had two years under my belt and I was very comfortable in it, and this car I had just over two days. And Long Beach is not a place that you want to test it, too – it’s an event you just want to get through.

Additionally to just drifting, we’ll see this car competing in both Time Attack and at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, won’t we? Are you confident on firstly defending your Pikes Peak crown from 2008, and also of placing at the top in Time Attack events now that you know what you’re dealing with?
Yeah, definitely. Although the Genesis is a substantially bigger car going from a wheelbase of 95.5 inches to 111 inches, the car only weighs only 100lbs more than the Solstice. And with the torque of the bigger displacement engine and the grip of the newer tyres, I’d bet money that minus snow and rain on race day that it will be at least a second faster per mile than last year’s time. We’ve witnessed a lot of the time attack events over here, and one of the key features there is reliability. And the way we’ve developed the car to take the abuse of drift, it’s had engineered into it key elements that would make it reliable. In its testing and first race weekend, we fired the car and we shut it down, and it never skipped a beat. And that’s the kind of finish you need to go out to these time attack events. Where other cars are wound really tight and are kind of time bombs, we’ll be able to click off every lap, make every adjustment and capitalise on that track time to hopefully win.

As a driver, how do the skills differ between the different codes? Is it something that’s automatic, or do you need to adapt your driving style?
That will probably reflect back to a lot of my commercial driving, being a key factor in adapting to different conditions, and also Pikes Peak in respect of these days. In the commercial world, you’re driving four-wheel-drive, front-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-drive and you’re driving on grippy conditions and slippery conditions, and you get a lot of seat time experience to develop and hone your skills to different disciplines. And time attack is your traditional road racing; although you can be a little more abusive towards tyre conservation, you need to do all your braking in a straight line and release your pressure smoothly and put your power down smoothly to get a fast lap time. But you also have to be aggressive like a rally driver and like a drift driver to hang it on the line on the power through the corners and not be afraid of the thing stepping out on you. And Pikes Peak nowadays offers all of that. You leave the start line on pavement with guard rails for the first three miles and you’re road racing, and then bang, one corner you’re onto the dirt for four miles and you’re rally driving, and then again back to road racing and then for the final three of four miles back to rallying. So I’m not opposed to the time attack challenges – I have experience in that background, but potentially not as maybe required, but I’m confident enough that going into it that we can adapt like we have in the past.

And finally, are there any final words you want to leave our readers with, or let them as fellow Kiwis in on any insights that you don’t normally share with other followers across the globe?
If you take what I’ve been able to achieve up here, and I’ve had other kiwi drivers come and work for me, and any situation if you’re passionate about what you’re involved in, and you enjoy what you do and you’re willing to sacrifice everything to get what you’re inspiring to, go do it. If it means getting your girlfriend out of the house to save some money from not having to buy her dinners to be able to afford to build a race car or build a race engine then go do it (laughs). America is a fantastic place – it is the land of opportunity, but at the same time, for every hungry person, there’s a thousand others wanting the same spot – so you need to work hard and sacrifice everything to achieve that goal. My father was a great influence as far as someone to look up to who has worked his butt off and achieved everything for himself, and I didn’t have it any easier. The opportunities that were there were open doors, but I had to walk through them and make the next move. So yeah, just dream and go for it.

Cheers for taking the time to talk to us Rhys, and all the best for the coming year.

Interview: Gray Lynskey