Ride With the Devil

Cars, sex and urban Kiwi culture in the suburbs of Auckland city. Ride with the Devil is an edgy new drama series from the director of Outrageous Fortune and producer of The Market that realistically tells the story of a young man from Shanghai who finds himself drawn into the underworld of Auckland’s modified car scene.

Lin Jin (Andy Wong) is newly arrived from Shanghai and the story builds around the unlikely friendship that grows between him and Kurt Williams (Xavier Horan), a testosterone-fuelled Kiwi guy from the suburbs of Auckland.

Lin is new to everything in New Zealand fresh from conservative China; Kurt is street smart and runs his own custom car business. Lin has plenty of money from a wealthy but absent family; Kurt has no money and way more family than he wants – his twin sister Kyla is a cop (the sworn enemy). Lin is cool, ambitious and reserved; Kurt is a hothead who likes to get crazy with his mates.

The one thing they have in common is their first love – cars. High-performance Japanese imports – the iconic Silvias, Lancers and Evos coveted by every red-blooded teenager with a drivers licence. To the young men who spend every spare dollar on customising and upgrading them, these cars represent freedom, risk… and obsession. For Lin the cars mean the outward displays of status and cred denied him in his homeland under a controlling, conservative father. Kurt loves the masculine and dangerous power they produce and revels in the culture of macho competition and female attention. When these two meet in the midnight world of illegal drags, they form a friendship based on need; Kurt needs Lin’s money, and Lin needs Kurts skills and society. Between them, they represent the changing face of race relations in New Zealand – and the driving passions that bridge the cultural divide between two very different people from two very different worlds.

While in Auckland, Lin is living with his father’s sister in Te Atatu. Their New asian family unit seems typical - Wendy Chung (Lynette Forday, Shortland Street) is not as conservative as her brother back in China though still fiercely protective of her only daughter Amy (Caleigh Cheung). But Amy is living a double life – the perfect demure Chinese girl who gets straight A’s by day, slick, cutthroat girl racer by night. When her cousin Lin finds out about her secret night-life in the car scene, he sees the dreams he had in conservative China can now become reality in this new land of freedom.

But as Lin moves into Amy’s world of high performance cars, late nights and girls, he dips out of his studies and becomes more focused on his friendship with Kurt. Like many young Newasians, his lifestyle is paid for with his father’s money. But it only goes so far and as he and Kurt get deeper and deeper into the scene they want to conquer, the risks start to outweigh the rewards…