Daniel Wu Turned His ‘Cute Little Car’ Into a Showstopper
By A.J. Baime | Photographs by Carolyn Fong for The Wall Street Journal June 17, 2023 10:00 am ET Daniel Wu, 48, an actor, producer and director who lives in Los Angeles and currently appears on the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese,” on his 1968 Honda S800, as told to A.J. Baime. In 1988, my dad decided to buy a Porsche 911 as a retirement present. It was weird because he was not a car guy at all and we were a frugal family living in a suburb of Berkeley, Calif. He bestowed on me the opportunity to spec it. I picked out a crazy color and I optioned a whale-tail spoiler. I had always been into cars, but this experience as a kid solidified this passion. I ended up moving to
By
A.J. Baime | Photographs by Carolyn Fong for The Wall Street Journal
Daniel Wu, 48, an actor, producer and director who lives in Los Angeles and currently appears on the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese,” on his 1968 Honda S800, as told to A.J. Baime.
In 1988, my dad decided to buy a Porsche 911 as a retirement present. It was weird because he was not a car guy at all and we were a frugal family living in a suburb of Berkeley, Calif. He bestowed on me the opportunity to spec it. I picked out a crazy color and I optioned a whale-tail spoiler. I had always been into cars, but this experience as a kid solidified this passion.
I ended up moving to Hong Kong for 20 years. Hong Kong is not a good place to be a car fan because there are not a lot of places to really drive, and it is unbearably hot, so it is hard to work on cars. I did have a dream car while I was there: a 1961 Jaguar E-Type. But I sold it when I moved back to the States in 2015. As soon as I got back, I started to build out cars that I had always dreamed about.
I bought a 1970 Datsun 510 as a vintage race car for the track. I also commissioned a Datsun 510 show car to be built and shown at SEMA [the Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show in Las Vegas] in 2017. I was working on a movie at the time, so while I loved how that car turned out, I was disappointed that I did not get to do a lot of wrenching on it myself.
Then something unexpected happened. I had a near-death experience when my appendix burst. I spent 10 days in the hospital, and when I got out, I thought, “I want to do the things that I want to do. I want to build a car.” I texted my best friend from middle school, Ian Urban, with the idea of building a car together. We shared a garage in Berkeley; he did his car projects there and I did mine. Over the next eight months, we built the car you see here.
It started as two Honda S800s—one coupe and one convertible—that we Frankensteined together. The S800 is an interesting car to begin with. In the 1960s, when Honda was new to building cars, the company was, like, “Oh, we are going to make this car. What should it look like?” It has a British sports car flare and other influences, and it is like nothing else in Honda’s later design vocabulary. [Honda was a motorcycle manufacturer that built its first autos in 1963, according to the company’s website.]
We did not want to just rebuild a 1968 S800; we wanted to reimagine it. We took apart an original 791-cubic-centimeter S800 engine and put it back together with racing carburetors and a racing camshaft for more horsepower. We sourced out the interior, reimagining it with this loud leather. A Japanese company made a body kit for us, with fender flares on the sides and a ducktail spoiler. I found a tiny suitcase on eBay that was the exact color as the leather. So now I keep that suitcase in the back; it has a sticker on it that says, “I [heart] Grama.”
As an actor, I think of projects as story lines. For this one, I imagined a gangster getting this car in the 1970s and thinking: “How can I make this cute little car more gangster?” That was the vibe we were going for.
In 2019, we showed the car at SEMA, and ever since I have been driving it around on roads near where I grew up. It is not super powerful, but it is so small that it feels powerful, and the engine revs to 8,500 RPM. It feels and sounds like you’re driving a hornet. So if you hear an angry hornet motoring around in the Berkeley hills, chances are it is me.
The actor, producer and director out on the road in California’s Bay Area.
Write to A.J. Baime at [email protected].
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