Second chances are a wonderful thing. Whether it’s with that smokin’ hot girlfriend that you let get away before you realized she was way out of your league, or retaking your driver’s license test to prove you can parallel park better than a Mojito-soaked Paris Hilton, we’ve probably all had second chances in life that we’re thankful for.

In Ken Wagan’s case — an emergency room nurse during the week and a wrench-spinning, tire-roasting rotary fanatic on the weekends — his second chance came after an unfortunate incident at the racetrack. But before that, he got his first taste of motorized bad-assery while growing up in the Philippines near a U.S. Naval base, where he watched all sorts of angry-looking military machines roll past his front door. A few years later marked his official indoctrination into the gearhead fraternity when his uncle taught him how to do an oil change on his parent’s Nissan Stanza. From there, Ken turned into one of those kids doodling NSXs, R34 GT-Rs and FD RX-7s in the margins of his notebooks at school, but once he graduated from university and started working, he realized that owning a FD was suddenly within his means.

As Ken explained, “I had to make a decision between a K-swap for my ’02 Civic DX sedan or stepping up to one of my dream cars. At the time, a K-swap was going to cost me way more than a JDM RHD FD imported from Japan, so the decision was an easy one, especially after I found a red R1 model locally that was in mint condition. At this point, I had paid off my student loans, so you could say the car ended up being a gift to myself for graduating and paying off my debt.”



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