Franco Ganino has been working at Aliant Insurance for 23 years. Being a car guy, Franco was excited when given the opportunity to work with Bob Corwin to work with SEMA and provide insurance. At the time, Bob was risk advisor for the NHRA and they become instant friends. They worked together to create an insurance product specifically for the SEMA members. They created “The Specialty Equipment Insurance Alliance” (SEIAinsuance.com) with the initial goal of proving manufacturers with product liability insurance. After 10 years, they started to add plans for garage keeper’s insurance. What they came up with would be...

  Gidi Chamdi was born in Israel and immigrated with his family to the US in 1985. He wasn’t really interested in cars until he stumbled upon a magazine showcasing the R35 GTR. He became intrigued and bought one in one in April of 2013. A friend turned him onto a Shift S3ctor event in Willow Springs and got a tour of the track from Jason Huang. At the end of the event, they did an impromptu roll race and Gidi won it. From here on out, he was addicted! He did some research and picked ACG Automotive in San...

Jeremy Powell (aka JP) grew up in Florida and his family couldn’t care less about the car culture. JP spent his early years skating and building ramps. When he graduated high school in 1995, he bought a Honda Civic and started to modify it with an intake and some headers. After feeling zero performance gains, he decided to bolt on a turbo kit which really woke the car up! From here on out, he became addicted to performance. During college, he decided that he wanted to work in the aftermarket automotive industry. He mailed a copy of his resume all...

  Zach Denney started his career in the automotive industry by working at Discount Tire. He also participated in the auto tech program in high school. Zach went off to college for engineering but he couldn’t really get motivated and ended up leaving school. He started working at a shop that bought and sold Supra’s. After that, he began working at ATS Racing working on MR2’s and honed his fabrication and tuning skills. Zach then went back to engineering school at UNT in Denton, TX and became involved with the Formula SAE program. He started building wiring harnesses and became...

  Matt Beenen has always been interested in how things worked and his parents facilitated this fascination. As he grew up, Matt was interested in vehicle technology and pursued this passion by getting a Mechanical Engineering degree in college. He got involved with the SAE Mini Baja team at college. This gave him insight into teamwork, scheduling, and actually manufacturing a race vehicle. After college, Matt got a job at BAE Systems and worked as a systems engineer. On the weekends, he modified and raced his 2006 Subaru STI. This is where he met some of the GrimmSpeed employees. An...