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If you really want to know why I'm a grizzled, mouthy asshole I'll be super candid if you want to read it. I'll even poke fun at myself, as if you need incentive. It's a wall of text but what else would you expect from me? Stillen.
Anyway, I've been like this since Stillen burned me and my friends. Not a lot of people have made that connection to my very old posts (before Z1) but I hinted at it earlier in this thread. Hell, it's been nine years and while I forgive, I don't forget. I was a die-hard Stillen supporter...just plain hardcore...with a Z car full of their parts. I was up bright and early to get the first spot at their Stillen Z Day shows, I had my car in ads and magazines (albeit small ones), I pitched their products and I bullshitted with some of their employees. Mind you, some great people did work there. Then I started to see some ugliness. And you know, EVERY business has their fair share of it but with Stillen it grew and grew. First I'd just hear about it, then friends of mine like Glenn, Steve, Dean and Jomo were repeatedly fucked over and told to go to hell and finally it was my turn under the knife. It was like this slow wave that I saw coming but did nothing about and it washed over all of us. What the hell could I do anyway? About the only thing I had going was a small reputation on this site. I was a storyteller, a jovial goofy idiot with no one to hate in the world but I turned bitter over time. Stillen had no real presence on this site except for a rare post every few months so I couldn't just randomly post "Stillen sucks". But when others began to post misery after misery, especially Glenn with his StillenSucks site and Jomo's criminal (settled out of court) case, I became vocal. I have a big Italian mouth I got from my mother and boy did I use it. What people don't know, or forget, is that I was very vocal about more than just Z1 and Stillen. Even Kyle@SGP back then felt my wrath when they dealt with the Wesman fiasco. I gave them shit all the time but Kyle righted that ship and became a good friend of mine, in that order. I knew people could change and he did. .......fast forward to the last few years....... Now imagine a new company called Z1 Motorsports coming onto the scene (Ash as well). They suffered from the very same wide range of customer issues that Stillen and SGP did except they had an immense presence on this site...which means there was a very easy way to influence them to do better by all of us. Once again I watched friends of mine get fucked, some repeatedly, some coming to me (as a veteran and moderator) and there was nothing I could do again. That is, except to be a talky bastard, and I was. I couldn't always go public with the things I knew or saw, especially being a moderator, so I let it out in other ways. Good or bad, it made me what I am today. So is it my responsibility at the end of the day? No, but I'm a quick typer with a big mouth that wears his history on his sleeve. I've seen a lot and become a grizzled asshole because of it and if that doesn't give me at least some right to comment on things, I don't know what does. Z1 is continually my target because they are continually doing things other sponsors here would never do. They have never come close to righting their ship. Every time we hear something improving we get another horror story (either public or private) that gets some of us vets worked up. Admittedly, Z1 has improved customer service over the years but now we're getting fucked in a less obvious way with the bullying and copying. Make no mistake, that's not the only complaint and you guys need to stop picking just one. A lot of it is private and the private ones are the most damaging as they don't usually come out public for a while, but they will. Just you wait a few days for more to come out and remember my long-winded diatribe =) The sponsors that are left deserve their spot and with the exclusion of Z1, are made up of companies that offer quality over quantity. Or at the very least don't have complaints once a week, nearly every week, for 210 weeks (~4 years). /whew
 
Boycott AMS Products - Killing Z32 product innovations, one quickly copied Chinese part at a time.
www.SoCalZCrew.com - Come find out how we do it in the West!
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