Nik Romano possesses a unique talent. He knows how to drive at high speed, he knows how to explain how to drive at high speed, and most importantly, he can do both at the same time. He is joining us to host several videos on The Drive’s YouTube channel this fall, dedicated to high-performance driving techniques. Here’s a look at his background. His consuming passion for cars and driving led him from a simple mechanical enthusiast to running his own high-level driving school.
If you haven’t seen his first video with us, which demystifies the idea of sudden oversteer, watch it on YouTube. His next video will be live on our channel on September 30th.
Romano and I spoke for about half an hour via video call, from which I will paraphrase and quote a few excerpts. To break the ice, I asked him to tell me about his personal car collection. Currently, he owns nine vehicles.
“Everything is always a work in progress,” he admits. “…generally, there’s at least one vehicle that’s drivable. Often more than one, but yeah, everything is a bit of a project. A 2007 Mustang is the newest thing I own. And it’s currently up on jack stands in my driveway. That tells you.” Naturally, I felt deeply understood. He also cited a 2004 Suburban and a 2003 M5 as his most used “newer” cars.
I also asked him which drivetrain layouts he prefers.
“Just classic rear-wheel drive, front-engine. But I really appreciate all the different ones… I just love cars. I like everything. Each one has something to offer. Even if it’s just a modest, economical front-wheel-drive city car. As long as it has three pedals, I can almost always find something to appreciate. … A car I’ve never owned and is on my list is a golden-era Honda. The Civic EG is my favorite.”
An Eclectic Motorsport Résumé
Romano’s motorsport résumé includes driving Dirt Sprint cars, Pavement Midgets, Modifieds, Late Models, Formula Ford, sports cars, endurance, Time Attack, karts, rallycross, and drift. He quickly cited sports cars as his favorite category to date.
“Sports cars have always been what interested me the most, even when I was racing on ovals. There’s maybe a tangent in the grassroots style, or at the grassroots level, of road racing if you follow the circuit path. It’s a tough path because there’s no money. It’s much harder to find any sponsorship. Nobody’s watching, and that’s part of the problem. The people at the track are the ones driving, their friends, the team, etc. But that’s not the case with grassroots oval racing. You can go to almost any local small track, a quarter-mile, 3/8 mile, and the stands are full. There are plenty of people who aren’t part of a team. They’re there because they just want to watch the race. It’s a really different experience.”
“That’s what I grew up in. But even doing that, the cars weren’t as interesting to me as sports cars, even though the racing was objectively better at the level I was at. I’ve always had a love for sports cars and their competition. And so, eventually, I migrated in that direction. GT cars, endurance cars, all that. And… as much as I love the driving aspect, I really love the tinkering and building aspect. So anything that lets you do a bit of building and tuning yourself, have your own ideas. Being able to be creative in how you build the car, reading between the lines of the rulebook, not cheating, but using the gray areas, all of that is super interesting to me.”
The Origins of a Passion
Now that you know what Romano drives and what interests him today, let’s rewind a bit on his history. He credits (or blames) his parents and family for steering him towards cars. As a child, he was drawn to Speed Racer VHS tapes from Blockbuster, and watching his father shift gears in his manual BMW 5 Series. By age nine, he was kart racing with his parents’ encouragement. “You could take two paths,” he told me. “Either it was just ‘a fun activity we do’, or it was ‘no, this is my entire existence’. And for me, it was the latter.”
From there, Romano “tried to only work jobs that were in some way related to cars or racing. Performance or racing, I should say, not just cars in general.”
“It’s pretty tough because, especially in motorsport and racing, it’s really hard to make a good living. So I struggled a lot for a very long time,” he added. Romano joked that he was stubborn and “too dumb to do anything else,” but it seemed clear to me that he was simply singularly focused. Focused, but with a broad enough vision to gain an exceptionally deep perspective on the motorsport scene. The wide variety of car experiences he ended up having is, I think, the real key to his ultimate success.
“I worked for a while at a suspension tuning company. So I got to learn about shocks, the subtleties of tuning them and the impact on the car. I worked at a race car rental shop where I did more mechanical work and learned the business of motorsport, and how to satisfy the customers who actually bring the money into racing. I also did coaching and got to learn more about Porsches. It was specific to Porsches. It was really cool. It was at that job that I first drove a cup car. I also worked at an independent Porsche specialty shop. So I got deeper into the mechanics, the basics, that kind of thing.”
The Birth of Fast Sideways
Later, Romano got an instructor position at the Skip Barber Racing School, where he realized he was particularly good at teaching car control. “…for whatever reason, I found a way to get through to the most difficult students, specifically on the skid pad. And so that became my specialty.”
He recalls telling students: “‘Hey, you should go to a skid pad. It would be a great next step to learn better car control and thus become faster.’ Because I can’t keep pushing you to go faster if you don’t have that fundamental ability to manage tire slip. And usually, they’d say: ‘Great, let’s go. How do I do that?’ And I didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t a place specialized in that. So, eventually, I thought: ‘Alright, well, fine. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to do it myself.'” This was the genesis of Fast Sideways, Romano’s driving school that focuses on vehicle mastery rather than pure racing strategy.
“You can come and toss a car around, slide it, do donuts and drifts. It’s just fun. Any person even remotely interested in cars can understand that. And on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve had an LMP2 race winner come because he saw the value in broadening his driving repertoire and adding new skills to his game.”
A Passion for Video Production
Finally, the last piece of the puzzle explaining how Nik Romano came to us is content creation. He talked about watching Chris Harris and his team on The Drive in the early days of YouTube and always wanting to make that kind of video himself. “My two lifelong passions have always been racing and race cars, and video production, film production. I’m a huge geek for that kind of stuff. I love Corridor Crew. I watch all their videos. Even before I had any idea of getting involved with The Drive, during COVID, that’s what I did. I dove into YouTube and making videos, even going a bit further into visual effects. There’s one video in particular where, just for a five-second gag, I had a shot where my hands—it’s a first-person shot—my hands are in front of the keyboard, in front of the computer, and I made them disappear like in *Avengers Endgame* for a joke about some comments on a previous video… but it took me 15 hours of research, trial and error, filming, and making myself a green screen by taping green construction paper to my knees.”
Our producer, Joey Rassool, knew Romano from track days and racing. And when our editor-in-chief Kyle Cheromcha wanted an experienced driver for serious driving videos, Romano’s combination of driving experience, teaching ability, and appreciation for video production made him the perfect person to join the adventure.
You’ll see Nik Romano in a few more videos on The Drive’s YouTube channel this year. And if you watch them, we can keep him around even longer!
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