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Nik Romano has a unique combination of talents. He can drive fast, he can explain how to drive fast, and most critically, he can do both of those things at once. He’s joining us to host a few videos on The Drive’s YouTube channel about high-performance driving techniques and concepts this fall, so here’s a quick download on his backstory. His lifetime focus on cars and driving has brought him from being just another enthusiastic gearhead to running his own high-tier car control school.
If you haven’t seen his first video with us, mythbusting the idea of snap oversteer, check it out on YouTube. His next video will be up on our channel on September 30.
Romano and I spent about half an hour on a video chat, of which I’ll do some paraphrasing and quoting. By way of small talk, I asked about his personal car fleet. Right now, he has nine vehicles.
“Everything is a project all the time,” he confessed. “… usually, there’s at least one vehicle that is drivable. Usually more than one, but, yeah, everything’s kind of a little bit of a project. [An] ’07 Mustang is the newest thing I own. And it’s currently on jackstands in my driveway. Go figure.” Naturally, I found that deeply relatable. He also called out an ’04 Suburban and ’03 M5 as his “newer” cars that get the most use.
I asked him what drivetrain layouts he likes, too.
“Just the classic FR [front engine, rear-wheel drive]. But I really do enjoy all different … I just love cars. I love everything. Everything’s got something to offer. And like, even if it’s just a boring econo box, front-wheel drive. As long as it has three pedals, like I can pretty much find something to enjoy about it. …. [one car] I’ve never owned on my bucket list is, like, a golden era Honda. Like EG [the ’92-’95 Civic] is my favorite.”
Romano’s motorsport resume includes time driving Dirt Sprint cars, Pavement Midgets, Modifieds, and Late Models, Formula Fords, Sports Cars, Endurance Racing, Time Attack, Karts, Rallycross, and Drifting. He was quick to call Sports Cars his favorite so far.
“Sports Cars have always just been what I’m most interested in, even while I was doing oval racing. So there’s maybe a tangent in the grassroots style, or grassroots level, of racing if you go the road racing path. It’s a difficult path because there’s there’s no money in it. It’s much more difficult to find any kind of sponsorship. Nobody’s watching it, and that’s kind of the problem. The people at the track are the people that are driving and their friends, and crew, and whatever. But that’s not actually the case with grassroots oval racing. You go you can go to like almost any, you know, town track, um, quarter mile, 3/8 mile, and the stands are full. There’s a bunch of people there who are not part of a team. They’re there because they just want to go watch the racing. So, it’s a really different experience.”
“So that’s what I grew up doing. But even while doing that, like the cars weren’t as interesting to me as the sports cars, even though the racing was arguably better for the level that I was at. I just have always had a love for sports cars and sports car racing. And so eventually I sort of gravitated over into that direction. And, yeah, GT cars, endurance cars, any stuff like that. And … as much as I love the driving aspect, I also really love the tinkering and the building aspect. So anything that lets you do some of your own building and tuning and your own ideas. If you can be creative about the way you build the car, about the way that you can, like, read between the lines of the rules, not cheat, but like use gray areas, like that’s all super super interesting to me.”
Now that you know what Romano drives and what he’s into these days, we’ll back up a little and speedrun through his origin story. He credits (or blames) his parents and family for pointing him towards cars in the first place. As a kid, he got reeled in by Speed Racer VHS tapes from Blockbuster, and watching his dad run through the gears in his manual BMW 5 Series. At age nine, he was racing go-karts with his parents’ encouragement. “You could go kind of two ways with this,” he told me. “It could just be, like, ‘here’s a fun thing we go do,’ or, it could be like ‘no, this is my entire existence.’ And it ended up being the latter for me.”
Since that point, Romano “tried to only work jobs that were somehow related to cars or racing. Performance or racing, I should say, not just cars in general.”
“It’s kind of tough because, especially in motorsports and in racing, it’s really hard to make a decent living. So I struggled a lot for a really long time,” he added. Romano made some jokes about being stubborn and “too dumb to do anything else,” but it seemed pretty clear to me that he was just singularly focused. Focused, but with a wide enough lens to capture a uniquely deep perspective of the motorsports scene. The wide range of vehicular experiences he ended up having, I think, is the real key to his ultimate success.
“I worked at a suspension tuning company for a while. So, I got to learn about shock absorbers and the intricacies of tuning shocks and how that impacts the car. I worked at an arrive-and-drive race car shop where I did much more mechanical work and learned about the business of motorsports, and like, how to cater to the people who were actually bringing the money into into racing. And did some coaching and got to learn more about Porsches. They were Porsches specific. So that was really cool. That was my first time driving a cup car actually was was at that job. I also worked at just an independent Porsche repair shop. So I learned more about again the mechanics, the basics, um that sort of stuff.”
Later, Romano got a coaching gig at Skip Barber Racing School, where he ended up realizing he was particularly good at teaching car control. “…for whatever reason, I figured out, like, a way to get through to some of the more challenging students, specifically on the skid pad. And so that just sort of became my niche.”
He recalled telling studends, “‘Hey, you should get yourself to a skippad. That would be a great way for your next step to learn how to control your car better, to be able to get get faster.’ Because like I can’t keep pushing you to go faster when you don’t have the this fundamental ability to steal a tire slip. And usually they’d be like, ‘Great, let’s do it. How do I do it?’ And I wouldn’t have an answer for it because there wasn’t a place that specialized in that. So, eventually I was like, ‘All right, well, screw it. I guess I’ll figure out how to do this myself.’” That was the genesis of Fast Sideways, Romano’s high-performance driving school that focuses on car control rather than racecraft.
“You get to go and and chuck a car around, slide it around, do some some donuts and drifts and everything. That’s just fun. Anybody who’s a little bit interested in cars can see that. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve had an LMP2 driver, racewinning LMP2 driver come because he saw the value in expanding his driving repertoire and adding new skills to what he was doing.”
Finally, the last piece of the puzzle about how Nik Romano found his way to us is content creation. He talked about watching Chris Harris and company on The Drive in YouTube’s early days and always wanting to do something like those videos himself. “My two interests my entire life have always been racing and race cars and video production, film production. I’m a super nerd for that kind of stuff. I love Corridor Crew [a YouTube channel all about video effects]. I watch all their videos. Even before I had any inkling of being involved with The Drive, like during COVID, that’s what I did. I dove into YouTubing and and making videos and and even going a little bit further down the path of like VFX. Like, there was one video in particular where, just as like a a 5-second gag, I had a shot where where my hands, you know, it’s like a POV shot, and my hands are in front of the keyboard, in front of the computer, and I have them disappear like Avengers Endgame as like a gag about some of the comments on a previous video … but that took me like 15 hours of research, and trial and error, and getting the shot, and making myself a green screen by taping green construction paper together and putting it on my lap.”
Our producer, Joey Rassool (also a car nut, naturally), knew Romano through track days and racing. And when our Editor In Chief Kyle Cheromcha wanted to get a hot shoe on camera for some serious driving videos, Romano’s combo of driving experience, teaching experience, and appreciation for video production made him the perfect person to get in the mix.
Look for Nik Romano in a few more videos on The Drive’s YouTube channel this year. And if you guys watch them, we’ll be able to keep him around even longer!
Got a story tip? Drop us a line at tips@thedrive.com.
Automotive journalist since 2013, Andrew primarily coordinates features, sponsored content, and multi-departmental initiatives at The Drive.
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