One Percent Motors
If you find yourself craning your neck as you pass One Percent Motorsports, it’s probably to ogle the fleet of exotic sports cars parked around the premises.
The Edmond establishment, located at 20 West Fourth Street, maintains and makes performance modifications on high-end sports cars like Dodge Vipers, Ford GTs, BMWs and Italian cars like Maseratis. “There’s just no other sound like a twelve cylinder Italian car; it’s pretty neat and exotic,” says owner Andy Nelson. “I’ve been obsessed with cars since I was little. I used to spend all my allowance on Hot Wheels. As soon as I could read, I was reading car magazines.”
He says the speed and power are what draw him to cars. “They’re works of art that you don’t have to sit there and just look at. You can get out and drive them.”
Nelson and owner Graycen Mashburn opened One Percent Motorsports in April 2010. Parked on the lot is a 1,000 horsepower Twin Turbo Ford GT with red and white stripes and a yellow Lamborghini Murcielago. The shop specializes in BMW work. “One of our main mechanics is a BMW specialist,” Nelson says. “He’s good with anything having to do with BMWs.”
Nelson has a thing for Dodge Vipers – he’s owned nine. His pride and joy is a 2002 Twin Turbo Viper, a sleek gray machine that boasts 1,300 horsepower. He bought the car from a fellow car admirer in Texas. “The car community, even nationwide, is pretty small,” Nelson says. He’s known the original owner for years and asked to buy it from him about six months ago. Since then, Nelson has done tuning and headwork on it and rebuilt
the transmission.
It takes a lot of care to keep an exotic car turning heads and hugging highway curves. His Viper’s mileage can be as low as four miles per gallon, but can get up to 20 miles per gallon on highways. “You’ve got to pay to play, but it is well worth it. Whenever you’re making two to three times the horsepower that came from the factory, you have to pay close attention to everything,” he says.
Special gauges in the car monitor things casual drivers never think about, like air/fuel ratio, turbo boost, exhaust gas temperature and fuel pressure. Nelson advises any potential exotic car owner to prepare to be a dedicated steward. “Understand the fact that it’s not just a Chevy truck,” he warns. “You don’t just get in and drive it. You have to pay close attention to it and be mentally prepared for it to cost an arm and a leg sometimes and be okay with that. Otherwise, you’ll hate it. It’s an expensive hobby, but it’s got great dividends. It’s like nothing else. It’s
really indescribable.”
His 2002 Viper has been tested at 230 miles per hour, but he says it could probably go faster than that. Events like the Texas Mile in Goliad, Texas, give exotic car owners a chance to find their cars’ limits with a white-knuckled burn down a long stretch of pavement.
Nelson is tempted to showcase his 2002 Viper, and probably will, though he admits car shows aren’t the reason he buys. “I’m not as into car shows as I am about performance,” he explains. “[Vipers] make more power on 91 Octane than any other car on the market that you can buy, period.”
Nelson recently purchased a 2008 Viper, and it probably won’t be his last. Driving Vipers also helps set Nelson apart from other car fanatics. There are plenty of enviable cars crisscrossing Edmond intersections, so it takes owning a special car to remain distinct. “I like exclusivity – something you don’t see every day,” he says. “Vipers you rarely see on the road.”
When Nelson pulls up to a red light and motorists beside him notice his car, he is usually met with a “thumbs up” or people ask him to do a burnout or rev it up. When Nelson was younger, sometimes people were negative, assuming someone else bought the car for him. “I’ve always paid for my own stuff. I started out cutting grass when I was 12 years old to buy my first car, and I’ve been a car fanatic since,” he says.
That first car was a 1989 Chevy Camaro RS. Drivers with high-end tastes but thin wallets can always start small. For those serious about owning and maintaining exotic cars, a myriad of options and modifications are available.
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