The Honde Carlo driven by Dan Stein Jr. may have melded two cars, but it also melded the hearts of two people. Those two being Stein and his girlfriend, Bri Jarzyk.
Prior to meeting each other, Jarzyk was a car show enthusiast, Stein a dirt racer.
“I posted on Facebook that I back into parking spaces and he responded,” Jarzyk said.
“She had me right there,” said Stein, of East Norton, Pennsylvania. “Then I found out she went to the races at New Egypt and Bridgeport [in New Jersey]. It got better and better.”
Stein told Jarzyk that he wanted to build a 1999 Honda Prelude fitted with Monte Carlo body parts. He had a version that he raced last year, but it didn’t do well. So, Stein decided to strip it down to the bare chassis and rebuild it the right way, with Jarzyk’s help.
“I wanted to build a nice car — a fun car — and an attention getter,” Stein said. “The four-cylinder class struggles to get respect. People ask, ‘Where’s the demolition derby?’ when they see a four-cylinder car. I wanted my four-cylinder to look like a race car instead of a street car with the headlights pulled out.”
Jarzyk, a designer for a construction company, was used to putting together plans for remodels and rebuilds.
“A car would be something different for me to design,” said Jarzyk. “I found that my artistic side would still come into play.”
The new couple embarked on the project, which took four months.
“It was a lot of fun building the Honde Carlo,” Jarzyk said. “I’m not used to taking pieces from different cars and putting them together. We were taking things on and off the car 100 times and testing them in between. We had 95% fun, but couples being couples we did disagree on a few things.”
Dan Stein Jr. debuted the Honde Carlo this season. This past Saturday, he won with it in the Pro4 Racing Club’s feature at Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania. Outside of Grandview, Stein also has four wins at Bridgeport Motorsports Park in New Jersey. The changes he and Jarzyk made seemed to have worked well.
“Bri made the car pretty; I made it fast,” said Stein. “We built it from bare chassis up. We bonded. There is nothing better to share a common interest with your best friend.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
Photographers
The Outside Groove contributor from Macungie, Pennsylvania, has covered the sport since 2012. Sabo serves as the official track photographer of Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania. Photography is a family ordeal for Sabo. He shoots with his daughter, Abby, at Shellhammer Dirt Track in Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania. At Grandview and other venues Sabo travels to, he and his father, Stephen “Poppa Pepper” Sabo Sr., capture the night’s action with their cameras.
