BY AINSLEY JACOBS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICK BELDEN

n a sport where innovation is a necessity for advancement, one area of drag racing that has been surprisingly slow to implement change is that of engine management. Although new products have come on the market over the years, it wasn’ t until Anderson Dick and FuelTech burst onto the scene that exponential advancements started to be made.

Dick, the mastermind owner and founder of FuelTech, has an incredible, intrinsic need to do things differently and to do them better. His attitude of“ don’ t tell me I can’ t do something” is somewhat punk rock in his unapologetically rebellious determination to buck trends, break molds, and find unique, creative solutions to problems. Like Apple’ s Steve Jobs and Tesla’ s Elon Musk, Dick absolutely thrives on challenges and has made it his personal mission to improve not only drag racing, but engine management as a whole.

Growing up in southern Brazil, Dick, now 36, had loved cars ever since he was young. In 1999, when he was 17 years old, he set off to study electrical engineering at UFRGS( Federal University of the RS state of Brazil).“ I had some friends that were installing turbos on cars and modifying them, but the Brazilian market was restrictive and made it almost impossible to get any kind of aftermarket ECU into the country,” he recalls of the initial inspiration for an idea that would eventually spark an industry revolution. He started designing a simplistic product to handle electronic fuel injection on turbocharged vehicles, and it wound up becoming his graduation project.“ It took me a few years from the first prototype, but I presented it and it wound up becoming a commercially available product.”

At the time, Dick was operating a start-up-style company out of his college apartment, and his two-person business didn’ t give him reason to expect big plans for the future. Soon, he realized the need to grow as he had more people interested in his product, aptly named“ TurboPro,” than he could manufacture.“ I was designing the system, buying parts, assembling, cutting wire harnesses, taking phone calls, doing the website, shipping, handling the money … everything,” laughs Dick, who officially registered his company on April 23, 2003.

In 2004, Dick graduated from the university and focused more on his aftermarket performance engine management systems. Interestingly, his ability to innovate and think creatively was uninhibited mostly thanks to the lack of other products available locally.“ We never had competitors’ products around to see how others were doing it, so we designed everything from scratch and without any preconceived notions of how things should work,” Dick explains.

108 | Drag Illustrated | DragIllustrated. com Issue 131