Darrell Vittone became a VW enthusiast at the tender age of 10 when his father, Joe Vittone, brought a shiny new beetle home in 1954. Not only did he buy the car, he also obtained a VW & Porsche franchise and started Economotors in Riverside, California.
Two years later the legendary VW accessory and tuning firm EMPI was formed by Joe. EMPI developed & produced arguably the best parts & accessories ever made for the air cooled VW's. Today the parts are collector items with some selling at 30 times the original prices. Even the catalogs and literature are worth an amazing amount of money.
Darrell's first duty at EMPI was packaging "Okrasa" kits. Okrasa was the name used by Herr Oettinger for his special cylinder heads and dual carb kits for the 36 hp VW air cooled engine. By 1963 Darrell was competing at the local drag strips with his '56 bug. He found out quickly that just bolting on a bunch of speed equipment doesn't always give the best results. However EMPI had just bought something that eliminated the guesswork. This device was an engine dynamometer.
This started Darrell's love affair with dyno testing. Darrell used to remove the engine to run dyno tests on the weekend and reinstall it for getting back and forth to work during the week. This went on for months at a time. Eventually the car was modified to the point it was no longer streetable and later became world famous as the EMPI "Inch Pincher" drag sedan. In 1971 EMPI was sold to a large conglomerate and Darrell left to head up a small tuning firm called "The Raceshop".
Pine wrote: ↑Wed Apr 29, 2020 9:00 pm
In 1971 EMPI was sold to a large conglomerate and Darrell left to head up a small tuning firm called "The Raceshop"
I guess this is where they stopped making quality products?
