FuelTech burst onto the North American racing scene in 2012, bringing its strong engineering and customer service background with it, aligning itself with some of the top racers, tuners, and engine builders in the industry. It has, in the decade-plus since, taken the sport by storm, developing a series of ever-more advanced new ECU’s and expanding its product offerings to ignition systems, injectors and injector controllers, O2 and EGT conditioners, and much more. Its customers, likewise, have pushed the brand to the forefront through their own endeavors, setting records and winning innumerable races and world championships with FuelTech components onboard.

The company, however, already had an established presence well before its entrance into the North American market. Founder Anderson Dick laid the foundation for FuelTech in 1999 when his passion for racing and interest in technology led him to design and hand-build an electronic fuel injection system for turbocharged vehicles, which he called the “TurboPRO-1F.” Anderson spent several years perfecting the design before he began building and selling the TurboPro-1F to the public out of his 80 square-foot college housing.

By 2003, demand for the TurboPRO-1F had exceeded what Anderson could build in his apartment, leading him to officially register FuelTech as a company on April 23, 2003. The company quickly expanded elsewhere into South America, and within four years amassed a 70-percent marketshare in the region. Not content to sit back and enjoy the success he had already amassed, and strongly of the belief the technology his business had developed could change the sport, Anderson set his sights on a new challenge: expanding into the U.S. market.

Anderson and his team spent two years learning the needs of the U.S. racing industry, and the result of that market research and R&D was the famed FT500 ECU — a product intended for Pro Modified racers that remains a game-changer a decade on.

The rest, of course, is history.

Today, the company’s success can be seen on full display in the city of Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil, where the ribbon was recently cut on its stunning new 80,000 square-foot world headquarters. The new facility, as architecturally and technologically advanced as its products, is 1,000 times larger than the space Anderson started the business in 25 years ago, and is home to more than 200 employees, 40 of whom are engineers. It houses cutting-edge research and development labs, testing facilities, a dedicated training center, and a brand-new manufacturing facility large enough to scale production to five times its current level.

While FuelTech U.S.A. calls Ball Ground, Georgia home, its roots will forever remain in Brazil, and its new facility, arguably one of the finest in the automotive enthusiast world, stands as a true rags-to-riches success story in the racing business.