105. DAZA Platform, Origins, High Build Quality, and Competing w / Rada Race Lab

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, and I'm here with my co-host, Mr. Gunnick Raj.

Yep, I'm here.

Today we are at Rada Race Lab. I keep getting adding labs at the end for some reason.

Yeah, we went back and forth on that when we were starting the business on exactly which one to go with. I was non-plural, he was plural, and it kind of bit us in the a** to a certain extent because everyone wants to put an S on the end of it.

Right.

It's just a weird thing that we did do. We made our choice.

It was to the point where I think we were doing our LLC paperwork and I screwed up, and I put it as labs, and then we got our paperwork back. But then all of our other stuff said lab on it, and then we were like, what the f***?

We had to change it, yeah. That's the fun stuff of owning a business.

No, you're good. Yeah, you're past the first minute.

I just didn't know.

Oh yeah, that's the thing.

Swearing and hands and... Yeah, but we are Rada Race Lab.

So Rada stands for what? You said razzle dazzle? Is that officially it?

Ultimately, that's where it came from.

We can cut that.

No, no, no. The people need to know because it's such an oddball name. How did it come up? Rick, you want to tell the story? You want me to tell the story?

You go first.

So back in our AMS days, I was fabricating a charge pipe for an Evo Evo 8, and I had to make a bracket for it. But then I also had to make a bracket to hold something else. And after I made it, I was so proud of myself in front of Rick and a couple of other techs, that I was like, razzle dazzle, I'm done. I went to go close the hood, and the hood just popped right back up, because it got blocked by the bracket I made, and everybody kind of started laughing at me. So then they call me, you know, razzle dazzle, when everything kind of went to s***.

And so, when we start working together on the cars, you know, the race cars and stuff, we ultimately worked really well together. So we kind of adopted that for our term, you know, given the old razzle dazzle. And that's ultimately what the name stands for. It's shortened, shortened versions of that. But everyone thinks it's our, you know, our initials Ricky, Dom, and then some other stuff in between. So a lot of times we'll make it up, you know, Ricky and Dom are awesome, you know, that's R-A-D-A, or you know what have you, so.

He's the razzle on the dazzle.

Like shake and bake?

Yeah, pretty much.

I'll tell you, you gotta get a big, like, mural right here in the lobby. It just says razzle dazzle.

We've always had aspirations to do, like, we want to do, like, a collage of just random pictures. He mentioned jet skis earlier, you know, that's how we know we made it as business owners, and we could buy some brand new jet skis. So we've always wanted to do a picture collage of, like, jet skis and dolphins and us, like, with explosions behind us. So that's probably going to happen at some point.

We already have a couple of really good pictures. We have that picture from the July 4th party.

Oh, yeah.

Just in our swimsuits with a hose and a three-wheeler. Don't ask, it's cool. Once we make it, we'll share it, but it's pretty fun.

But okay, so you guys are no strangers to obviously doing fast car stuff. You know, from your days at AMS to now, obviously doing a lot of stuff with DASA. I saw a GTR in the back, just a little bit of everything. What's your main specialty? Is it the DASA platform, then?

Yeah, right now, we are pretty focused on the five-cylinder stuff. That's what our product line is geared toward. So we try to make everything for those cars that we see fit and see a necessity in the industry. We'll kind of not miss or, you know, we like to do the eyeball stuff, like safety equipment is a really big one for us. So we, you know, we develop fire extinguisher, fire systems, stuff like that. Intercooler that he developed, the big boy intercooler, we do a 1300 horsepower intercooler, which, you know, takes some trimming and stuff for the car. And I think a lot of other people probably didn't see it feasible as a product because of that, but it's a necessity is when these cars get to this high horsepower level, air to water, something like that. We like to slot in where we feel necessary, where other people can air shoot it, stuff like that. Our main focus is these five cylinder cars. There's a lot of people doing it, but we feel that there's not a lot of people seriously doing it.

Well, and there's got to be, the DASA market is a weird one, right? Because you only have two cars, right? The TTRS and what's called the RS3, right? Whereas when you look at like the B58, it's in literally every car in the BMW platforms. So do you find it difficult to make products for that market? Or do you think you're getting enough market share with the stuff you're developing?

I think, yeah, I think there's definitely enough to go around, especially like when you look at us who were really about quality rather than, you know, the quantity and stuff like that. So I think there's always a market for that kind of aspect of it where the higher end stuff, you're always going to find those customers and plenty of people to go around and it works out for us that way. The B58 stuff, S58 stuff, we looked into it. He was going to do a turbo kit for it, but soon as those cars came out, there was already four to five people doing single turbos, big manifold turbo kits, stuff like that. So we can't compete in those markets because it kind of ends up being a race to the bottom where people are either undercutting each other, trying to get cheaper just to get that market share, and we don't like to compete in that because it kind of waters down what we're trying to do.

No, absolutely, 100% agree. You can't, because ultimately you want to sell more units when you get down to production and a value like that. You're trying to sell more units to make more money, but at the same time, who's going to pick your kid versus somebody else's kid if their kid is 100 bucks cheaper? So now, the other company competing with that company is 100 bucks cheaper. And so to kind of bring up exactly what Ricky was saying, it's a race to the bottom. And I kind of feel like that's already kind of happened to the GTR market. It's starting to happen to the Huracan market. Dozer market, kind of the same thing. We generally just stick to our own path of what we know works really well and the quality of our products. We take more time to build it and manufacture and make sure that it's the highest stuff you could essentially buy in the market right now. And everything's hand made. It's made in-house. Our whole fabrication team takes care of it, which is just me. So, but that's kind of the really cool thing about it is essentially I control what it is, what it looks like, how it leaves this facility instead of worrying about somebody else taking that initiative. Eventually as a business owner, we do want to get to that point where we do have a production run where, like I said earlier, that we do have a couple of guys knocking this stuff out. But at the same time, you start getting into the quantity over quality, and that's not what we're about. We're essentially about giving you the best possible thing you can get. And that's hands down, that's it.

The way I always look at it when I'm shopping for car parts, and I look at big price differences on stuff, right? I always figure there's usually not gouging going on, right? So, I'm like, why would this one be $1,500 cheaper? Where did the corners get cut, right? Because somewhere it's either thinner metal, or it was slammed together in a factory somewhere, and just so they can kick out thousands of kits a month.

It's not cheaper for no reason.

Right, exactly. That's what I'm getting at. There's a reason why.

A lot of people assume it's just where, you know, we and other shops that do charge a premium are just price gouging. You know, they call it like a GTR tax or an R8 tax or, you know, whatever. And it's to a certain extent, I guess you can call that true because there are less of those cars. So the price point of entry is way higher, but you kind of have to kind of pass that on through your product. So that's why that is. It's not gouging. You know, obviously there are some people out there that probably do do that. But ultimately, you got to make up for lower quantity, lower quantity cars with price rates, especially to cover R&D for something like that.

You had a car that they only, you know, import 1,000 of or something in the States. Your exhaust, if you make an exhaust for it, you need to get your hands on that car. You need to, you know, jig it up. You need to do a bunch of stuff and invest. Whereas you do make a product, somebody's, the wrong person gets their hands on it, they jig it, then they send it overseas to get done for pennies on the dollar, you know. So essentially, that's the big battle with, I think, the whole industry as a whole. That's the big problem with it, you know. There's less and less people that are taking initiative and building stuff in house, which, from a business aspect, makes sense, because obviously, you do want to make money. We're in this business, you know, ultimately, to provide for our families and buy wave runners, you know, that's the goal. But we don't necessarily want anything to do with that aspect of making more money off a lesser product, if that makes any sense.

No, that made sense, yeah.

So we're going to punish ourselves as much as we can to make sure you get a really good product and some of that was built by these hands and made to that kind of quality. A lot of our kits that we make make a lot of power. So to have the right structure of all the parts and work that they're not going to vibrate apart or break welds or tacks because somebody forgot to wrap a bracket.

We're going to hide it behind something. Yeah. But the race to the bottom, ultimately isn't a terrible thing. We get it. It's understandable. And I think where our customer base is with guys like Tyler with his TPRS, I think it's going to allow those customers to kind of come out of the woodwork, the guys that are really truly serious about racing and making their cars fast. And I'm not saying all customers aren't quality because they're not that guy, but we love those customers that are truly serious about it and want to push the platform and help us do our thing while we help them do their thing. So that allows us to shine better once all those cheap turbo kits and cheap parts are on the market, that allows our race car stuff and our big dog stuff to shine through even more so.

So touch on that quality a little bit. So obviously when you're building a car of this caliber, which again, you guys are running what, low weights at this point?

Yeah, this car went 8.0. That's the fastest one we have. It's fourth in the world right now. But yeah, most of these street cars that we build are around 890s, 880s.

Which is nothing to scoff at either.

No, sounds slow nowadays, but yeah.

But nonetheless, obviously when you're trying to do that, especially at a reliable level, part selection goes into it. So is there any particular turbo brand you guys try to stick with?

Yeah, we're always going to Garrett. Garrett Company, you know.

Always been Garrett. And for the sheer fact that we've seen the data, we've seen the testing when we did stuff while we were still at AMS, and the whole line of Garrett products that we've, like with our own hands, I mean, we've seen it with our own eyes. We've seen the stuff on the Dyno, we've seen what it does. The biggest thing is Ricky's, you give props to precision. You love precision.

Oh, absolutely, there's turbos out there that make a ton of power, you know, it's great. For what we're doing, Garrett just makes sense because they're an OEM turbo manufacturer, so you get that quality passed down through the performance stuff, right? So, nothing against precision at all.

They're doing some pretty awesome stuff too, as well. These next gen turbos are-

They're good.

They're making power and everything. For us, these motors, the turbo sits behind them. They're pretty heavily packaged back behind that motor. Yeah, it's hot back there. Stuff like that. So, we like a water-cooled turbo in general. And that's kind of ultimately what comes down to it. It's just OEM quality, water cooling on the Garretts. Zona's great too. And Guy Rose uses Zona in his kit, so it's kind of one of those things as well.

Yeah, we can't come out with a kit running Zona's and compete with Hanke, but we're really close with Hanke too, so.

It's hard to argue with, because they aren't on a lot, you said OEM manufacturer, right? A lot of diesel trucks. I've got a truck with 250,000 miles on it running a Garrett Turbo. It's been on there since it was built. I mean, you're talking Turbos that have millions and millions of miles on them, collectively out there.

Yeah, it's hard to deny that fact about that brand, and that's why we ultimately stick with them. And just the experience in the past of them, we've used them for a long time and through our other places of employment and stuff like that.

Well, one thing that Aaron from Enthimoto brought up on Episode 98 was talking about how gear provides flow maps and all this stuff. Does that help you guys in your selection as well?

To a certain extent, yeah. Obviously, it helps with turbo-choicing, but a lot of times we're pretty well above that anyway.

It varies. It varies.

When you see a shaft speed limit, most turbos really aren't making it full power.

Those are suggested maps. Those are suggested maps. Let's be real.

But it definitely helps, too. I don't think precision provides that. I don't think they ever have. It is what it is, right? You can always throw a turbo on a car and see if it works out to what you want it to do. You know that route with it. There's so much data just in general on the Internet. It's so accessible that you pretty much figure anything out with or without that stuff.

Do you guys do your own tuning?

Some of it, yes. So I'll tune, like these cars are on Cybex, I've been starting to tune those in house more so. Hank has tuned a couple for us, but recently, we're big supporter of the more that we can control, the better off a product is going to be.

As you should be, right?

Yeah. So I've been taking some of that on as far as the five cylinder stuff. But yeah, anything else that comes in. I'm a big VR6 guy, do a lot of VR6 B5 cars. And I will do like the random, like I'll tune a lot of Haltechs here and then some megasquirt stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of it coming in. But for the most part, the factory ECU stuff, if we sub out to a guy named Darren Dicara, double D tuning in Florida, he does really well. He tuned Tyler's car, he's tuned the father's stock ECU cars. There's really no one better for that. I just don't have the time to learn a stock ECU right now.

Right, you just know enough to be dangerous.

Right, yeah.

And then V10 stuff, we'll usually have Jake Miles, Martin, guys from AMS, especially when it's a MoTeC car, they'll take care of that. And they work, they work really good.

Yeah, they figured that all out. They have their own strategies and everything for all that. So, it's kind of like we were speaking about before, before the actual podcast. How we, if we're not gonna, if we know that we can't do it perfect on your car the first time, we have to learn on your car, we're gonna find someone else that knows it and knows the ins and outs of it already. That way you have a good experience, we have a good experience. And that's, you know, for the V10 stuff, like Dom said, Motek and Martin and Jake and Miles over at AMS are, there's no one better than that, so.

Well, it's awesome that you have that relationship. So I guess this is a question I've started asking more and more on the podcast. Who are some shops that you kind of respect or work with, or just kind of want to give a shout out to? It doesn't have to necessarily be shops either, just products in general.

I mean, we're close to AMS.

Who's your man crush?

Oh, my man crush. Tony, Tony, Tony Palo, if you're watching. He knows. He knows it. I know it. Tony, Tony, at T1, that dude's, whenever we used to meet up, while we were still with AMS at the events, it was awesome. The dude, dude's just a great all-around dude. He's a dude's dude, you know what I'm saying? And he's very smart, and his whole team builds amazing stuff. Obviously, Martin and the guys at AMS were still really, really close with those guys. That's where we did our dynasty. That's where we ran sixes for the first time. We have a lot of good memories at AMS.

A lot of love for those guys. Learned a lot, had a lot of fun.

Hank, obviously, big shout out. Without him, we wouldn't have somebody to chase, I guess. If we ever do get around to trying to go for a record.

Obviously, Enth, we talked about him earlier with you guys. They're great guys over there, and they're on top of their game as far as quality, which we respect a lot. They always do great stuff over there.

Hefner, obviously, Hefner in Florida. He's awesome. I mean, shops are shops. Real recognizes real.

You do notice that a lot as well in this scene, by the way. You could tell who's on top.

You probably hear a lot of the same names all the time, right?

Yeah, T1 comes across everybody's list. Even Aaron is tipping a hat to those guys over there.

How can you not?

Yeah, I agree.

The group of guys that's over there between Terrence, Jackson, Wade, Tony, Mitch, all those guys.

That's my biggest thing with them. And what I look up to them the most about is they have a such a tight knit team over there that works so well together. And I think I asked at least one or two of their guys every time we see them, like, man, you guys just have it going for you guys seem like you enjoy what you do every single day, enjoy each other, you know, have fun. And that's kind of what it's all about. It's hard to find that.

Imagine Fast and Furious, you know, where they're at the end of the whole first one, they're all chilling in Dom's backyard, like drinking beers and hanging out. Like that's, that's their whole crew. Like I'll see posts, I'll open stuff up. They're like, they're at a rave, like all of them. On a Friday.

So that's, that's the dream right there.

So there's definitely guys to look up to and those would be them. There needs to be more shops like that. I feel like, and there's a lot of good shops, but there's a lot of s***** shops too.

And that's a part of it. I get this bad boy a little bit closer by the way, on your end. So when it comes to being like serious, right? Like, where do you guys stand, right? Cause there's a lot of people that go out there, just have a good time, just have a fun time. They want to build fast cars, right? You guys are over here trying to build up, from what it seems, a really serious operation, from production to just honestly innovating. And we can get into innovations here at some point as well. Is that kind of like what you're kind of gunning for us to kind of be like the go-to in this platform or any?

Yeah, we just want our name. We tell everyone is the most important thing to us. We feel if we preserve our name and our reputation, the money and the whatever business will come with that.

So the hundreds of dollars.

Yeah, the hundreds of dollars.

We're making the hundreds of dollars now. Hopefully we're making thousands of dollars. That's the goal, is to go from hundreds to thousands.

But that's the biggest thing for us. And ultimately, that kind of transfers through to everything that we do. And it sounds cliche, but we're not going to do a product. We're not going to design a product. We're not going to have a product if we know that it's not 110%. It's one of those things. And like I said, it is a little cliche, but yeah, that's ultimately our goal, is to not even just with this five cylinder platform, but eventually when we branch off into other platforms, our name being hand in hand with the high quality, most top tier stuff you can buy and service as well. And customer service is a huge thing, as he mentioned earlier, but that first 4.9 star review is going to kill us.

Oh, f***.

I noticed that when I was looking at some of these shops are going to, they're all holding a five star review, by the way.

Oh, and not everyone we've had on here.

Well, not just saying this trip down here. Oh, yeah, yeah. What would you say is your second biggest platform you guys are working on here?

That's tough, actually.

I mean, it's everything else other than the Daza.

Yeah, I think the five cylinder stuff is, you know, our production platform right now. But then pretty much anything that, you know, kind of is in the realm of drag racing, like we built a few Mustangs for our friends and some customers. You know, we built some ZR1 Corvette, stuff like that. So anyone that wants to, you know, eighth mile, quarter mile race, that's kind of our next focus right there is just doing the quality work for those guys, guys that have like true race cars, that want a shop that can handle that.

So, OK, do you do any road course stuff then?

We have. So there's a Evo 10 back here that Dom just did the cage in, a full FIA certified cage, if you want to touch on that car.

Yeah, so it's one of our friends. It's kind of been a long, long term project. We started on that before we actually started the business. It started off just being small. My buddy wanted a turbo kit and an air cooler and just a harness bar. And then it kind of spiraled into a full FIA spec rally cage, which I had to get started for and do a bunch of stuff. So it's one of those things where there's no real rush. It's like whenever there's an opening or time to kind of continue working on it, we do. And then we're almost at the finishing stages. Cage is in, I mean, motor is done, fabrication is done, and needs to get painted. He's got a really gnarly all-carbon fiber front bumper with a lip.

Obviously, the small wing on the back. That's the biggest wing I've seen in my life, and I've been around vipers. That's massive.

Yeah, we look at it now and we see it every day, so it kind of looks smaller, but yeah, it's huge.

No, that's a CCA Global Time Attack build. Eventually, it will get finished, and we can't wait because it's going to be a killer. So it's kind of a love project, you know what I mean? The majority of the time, do we do that? In terms of fabrication, whatever anybody brings here and they want quality stuff done, or they need me to fabricate something, whether it's a drag car, a road course car, a street car, whatever, I'll do it. Biggest thing though is obviously custom fabrication comes with a cost. It's not as simple as like, hey, I want you to build me an exhaust, or we get the emails, I have car. How much for exhaust? And it's like, well, what kind of car? What kind of exhaust? What do you want it made out of? That's kind of the heartbreaker for a lot of people. They want custom cool stuff. But when you give them that sticker shock of, okay, well, I'm gonna estimate that this exhaust is gonna take 10 hours. 10 hours at 195 an hour, like right there, you could buy six exhausts for your car off eBay. Like, does it matter to you? Are you trying to shed weight? What are you doing?

So, that's a huge misconception is that a lot of, it's weird. And I think it's because we're in the industry, so we know, but I think a lot of people that aren't super into cars or super into this custom stuff, they assume that if someone's doing it, custom from scratch, that it's cheaper than a pre-made product, which we get it a lot. Like I said, to us, it's crazy, but I guess it's more common than you'd think. And we have to explain to people that this is why it isn't that way. Like he said, if 10-hour exhaust, that's a pretty simple exhaust. Most of the time, in 10 hours, we charge straight labor for it. It is what it is, plus material.

Start with downpipes and a tune, then go from there.

Yeah, exactly, right?

Yeah, you want to get into go fast stuff, it's not a cheap endeavor. You have to enjoy lighting money on fire, and then you can get into this. But if the smile that it gives you when you hit that skinny pedal on the right is...

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

You should start by not touching your car. You should just leave it alone. That's literally the number one...

I don't even... What you said doesn't make any sense to me. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah, that's impossible.

Yeah, right?

Oh, whatever, dude. You're 500 stock. You're like, I don't want to touch it. I enjoy it so much.

There is a pile of parts sitting there at home. It's going under the knife this winter. So I just bought more stuff. It just keeps collecting.

I'm so excited for that. That's going to be a... Dude, it's going to be fun. How close is it going to be to... We're going to have our own...

What is it?

Absolutely.

You say 500, what is it? Like...

GT 500.

Oh, GT 500.

Yeah, the current gen, the S550. Right, okay. My goal is around 900 wheel. I'm not going like... I don't want to go nuts with it.

Oh, you're not catching up to Mark, okay.

No, I want to be... I want it to still be reliable. I road course the car, so, you know, 1300 wheel isn't like... That's just dumb for doing that kind of stuff.

Even 900 wheel is pretty...

We'll touch base on reliability in 900 horsepower.

It's reliable. Pretty reliable.

I mean, we built a couple, like, what, we did VMP blower, S550s, and then...

Well, the Coyote is the GTR motor, minus two cylinders, right? Yeah, that's what they're saying, right?

But yeah, let's touch base on reliability and high horsepower, because I think that's the biggest misconception, is a lot of people, you know, they'll spend the money to make their car 1,000 horse, and they're like, oh, it's reliable, right? Is 1,000 horse power reliable? Is it really though? Like, what's your term of reliability? Is it every red light to do launch control, and, you know, launch out, or do back to back to back to back, you know, highway poles? Like, that's a very loose term. You know, it'll be reliable if it sits in your garage and you take it out to, you know, for a fun little run on a Sunday, once in a blue moon, you know.

A lot of our customers will start the conversation by an email that they shot. I have an RS3, I want it 1200 wheel horsepower. And our first email back is why?

Yeah, why?

You know? And it's not saying that you don't need it, but a lot of people see, you know, the highlight reels on the internet and the dyno sheets and the draggies and stuff like that. And they just say, I want that, you know, without actually thinking what they're gonna actually use the car for. So we're really goal oriented here. So then we, you know, follow up with, you know, so what exactly do you want out of the car? How are you gonna use the car? You know, this and that. And then we tailor builds to that specific usage. And a lot of times it comes in three or 400 horsepower less than they think they want, you know, so. And 100% of the time, they're happy at the end of the day, you know, with that decision. They didn't spend a whole bunch of extra money for a number, what have you, and they truly enjoy the car.

Yeah, it's, reliability of four figures right at that mark or just around it is not like it used to be. I mean, sure, if you're doing it in a Subaru, maybe not so reliable. But I mean, there's some platforms out there that are, this S58, the Daza stuff, the Coyote stuff, I mean, you can, it's pretty good. But yeah, people have to understand that it's not.

It's still a thousand horsepower, and especially these cars, a small 2.5 liter. Like, it seems so easy to do. And ultimately, it is pretty easy to make a thousand horsepower on these cars, but still, it's a thousand horsepower in an engine. And one bad day on an injector that is flowing five or 10% less for some reason or another, that might end your motor.

I lost a pump on a little pump setup. Smoked a motor, so it happens. With a $170 fuel pump, took out a $10,000, $15,000 motor.

That's ultimately what we deal with too. A lot of people offer warranties and guarantees and this and that. And it's so hard to do in this industry. Sure, you can try and do it. There's a lot of fine print involved in a lot of those. But when you're building a car, you're talking about thousands of components from sometimes, 50 different companies, 50 different suppliers, 50 different manufacturers, you're dealing with OEM, you're dealing with fuel pump suppliers who are partially OEM sometimes. If you want to really break it down, you're talking about your bolts out of your bolt bin in the shop. That makes a difference to some extent, stuff like that. So it's really hard to guarantee anything as far as making power or even not making power, stock car, right?

So I don't think it's such a weird word.

Yeah, it is in the race car community, especially.

I didn't mean reliability as like, nothing's reliable. Sure, you have reliable for, if you're somebody that's used to this, we're in the industry or you have had a bunch of horsepower cars, you know what reliable is, right?

Yeah.

To somebody new coming off the street, they want a thousand horsepower car. It's a totally different thing. Whereas, most people will, oh yeah, 1300 horsepower, you can beat the s*** out of this car, you can do whatever you want, it's going to be rock solid. That's b******* because the only platform, I think, is very close to that is what, like the Goldilocks own for GTRs is what? 12, 1300 horsepower.

But even then, even if we built a 1200 horsepower GTR, I'm not going to tell the customer, this thing is going to be perfect for the rest of your life. Like that's it. It's just a dumb. You got to set expectations is what it is.

There's different platforms that will sustain that power level for longer, better. You can have a 1200 horsepower Daza that goes years. You can have a 1200 horsepower Daza that lasts four passes. But is that the fault of engine assembly, or is it fault of a OEM component that failed randomly because it just slipped through the cracks of OEM manufacturers or whatever. So when somebody suggests that there's a full engine warranty, you have a package warranty, things of that nature, sure. their parts are covered, right? But not the labor to remove the engine.

Yeah, a lot of times.

And then to reinstall the engine with all the machine components or everything you had to fix again. So the experience for a lot of the customers, it's hard to say that we've been almost like the, what are we? We've been like the second saving grace for a lot of people that have already been kind of screwed over by other companies.

We've played cleanup crew quite often.

And that kind of stems from that misinformation of their customer. You got a guy that's super overzealous to spend a ton of money, they'll sell him the moon and the stars, everything you can, without telling them or educating them of what this thing is and what to expect from it and what to prepare for and plan for. Like I said before, you put 100 grand into a build that's making 1,300 horsepower, be prepared to have 30, $40,000 in a separate account for that year.

If you want to commission the car and race it and have fun with it, you know, just in case.

You're more aggressive on the street and you're doing digs and you're doing grudge racing or road racing, like something can happen with the trans, something can happen with the driveshaft, axles, I mean, you name it, things are going to happen. And what sucks and the hardest part is seeing somebody that saves up the money, they do the grind, they save up as much as they can. And they work so hard for this thing, and then something stupid happens, and now the car sits for a whole year in the garage because the guy can't afford to fix it. So now he's screwed, he can't fix it, and he can't sell it because it's not fixed.

Right.

So, and it's the worst kind of story that we keep seeing over and over again in this industry with kind of how some companies are talking to their customers and how they're baiting people in to get these builds done and things of that nature. So, I feel like we're 100% different from your traditional kind of speed shop is where...

Terrible businessmen.

Terrible businessmen. I mean, we don't like to take your money. Like that's a bad thing, unless you want to give it to us for wave runners, because then we'll f****** take it. So, but...

Yeah, we're just really goal oriented, like I said earlier, and a lot of times that means...

Wave runners.

That's the goal.

I'm going to buy an RS3, I'm going to put a hitch on it, I'm going to buy a wave runner, I'm going to hook it to the back, I'm going to drive it in here, and when it's a thousand wheel, you can keep the wave runner.

Okay, done.

It's on camera, right there.

But yeah, we're brutally honest sometimes, and a lot of times it hurts us, but I feel like hurting us isn't, the customer doesn't appreciate it, it's just we lost a sale because of it. We don't want to be those guys that, yeah, yeah, bring it in, let's do this, let's do that, let's do this, and then they get the car back and it breaks because we oversold and under delivered something that now they can't use, like you said, and it just, it doesn't help anyone in that situation.

It's so harder to backpedal that too.

Right.

Or way harder.

It helps your bank count in the moment, but down the road now he's not going to send his friends to you guys, he's not going to tell his colleagues that, oh, I had a great experience with these guys, they were awesome to me, you know, they really laid it out there for me. He's like, no, they just sold me a bunch of stuff and left me out to dry, right? So that's another thing is, I'm sure you guys notice, we're not really out there on social media and advertising. We don't do a ton of stuff with that. We try where we can, but we really like the organic growth from our customers. And so far, it's working out well for us. We obviously could be making a lot more money and having a lot more customers if we did go out there and heavily market and do that sort of thing. But we don't want that, because our name is, like I said before, the most important thing for us. So if we have people that are coming in and like, hey, I heard from my buddy that got his ex-horsepower car built by you guys, that was the best experience of all time. And that's why I'm here. We love that. We love being friends with our customers. We love having the time where me and him can take an hour or two out of the day to hang out with a customer and chat with them or potential customer and just be there for them. And that's where we differ, I feel, from a lot of companies.

Just makes it that much more intimate when you have a referral from somebody you already did work for and became friends with. They come in and they're like, is this shop going to try to screw me over? And then you're looking at them like, is this customer going to try to kind of screw me over?

You know, it's like that Spider-Man meme.

Yeah, that's a whole tuning and tech and the location thing too, like the Spider-Man meme.

That comes down to the warranties.

Yeah.

I got was your tuner.

But the natural, the natural kind of...

We see shops play that sometimes too.

Yeah, that's the worst. It's tough.

Natural fluidity of kind of how we operate is good. It works for us, it works for our customers. You know, what Ricky touched base on, we don't do any marketing, like we'll make a post here and there on social media. What's really been cool is one of our customers, StealthRS3, he's been nonstop, like just promoting the crap out of us and his car and his brand and everything. And that's brought awareness to, you know, Tik Tok and a lot of people. Yeah. Which, you know, a lot of people think you have somebody with a few million views, followers, you know, keep shouting you out and you think that's going to translate to business, whereas...

Oh, it never does.

Well, it's not as much as you'd think.

I was terrified at first when we were talking to Charlie, and he's like, oh, I'm going to blast everything. And I'm like, oh, s***, like, I don't want a hundred phone calls every hour and people getting pissed that we can't bring their car in because it may just overload. But at the same time, social media influencers and things of that nature, a lot of the people that are watching his stuff, a lot of them are really, really big people in the RS3 stuff that they have the same cars, but a majority of them are people that don't own an RS3, don't work on RS3s, don't race RS3s, they're just watching it because of content. And that could always bring back bias towards what the relationship between social marketing and your actual business venue is. So it's awesome to get shot out and be out there. He's doing the work for us. The guy is, Charlie's awesome. His car is a total monster. He's been racing people in Mexico and all that kind of stuff, so he puts in work.

He's a good abuse tester for us.

Oh my God, yeah. Arizona heat or Mexico heat at what, like 150?

I think I went to Texas with that really bad heatwave they had last year, like 120 something, like actual temperature. And he lives in Arizona for most of the time out of the year, so he's always driving the car when it's 100 and something degrees and he's...

That's a good test.

He loves the rolling anti-lag in that car and that whole thing, so.

It's not good for us, because we're sitting here s******* our pants every time we see a reel or something of him just doing rips, you know.

But that also comes down to, like, obviously he understands, like, if you're, you know, hitting anti-lag constantly, you're wearing components out.

Yeah, yeah, useful understanding of that, definitely.

Well, the best is the bang and pop maps. We get emails and tone phone calls, like, bangs and pop tunes are not good for your car, so please, for the love of God, stop doing it to your poor car.

I've gotten quite a few million views about people saying, nuh-uh.

Yeah.

They're fine. What about my OEM car that pops and bangs? Well, actually, that's because of the transition and all.

Right.

People don't understand that there's a reason that an OEM car.

There's a cut that happens during shift.

We're also just being goal-oriented, and we're not going to do anything that's even remotely bad for the car. So we'll get people that-

That's what we plan for. Because drag racing is already horrible for the car.

Exactly.

1,300 horsepower isn't good for the engine.

I guess we won't do anything that's bad for the car that has no benefit.

Unnecessary.

So yeah, we get emails all the time. Or even when we are tuning a car, like, oh, can we do a Bangs and Pops map? We're like, absolutely not. That's not us, unfortunately. We understand if you'd like to go somewhere else for that. But that's just not us. Sorry.

We're not going to do an unintentional wear on just...

Right.

It's cool. We get it. We're not hating. Yeah, I'm...

Completely understand.

I've been a total f****** myself with giant wings on GTRs and obnoxious stuff. I love it as much as the next guy. We just can't do it from a business perspective, because we're just doing additional damage to your car. That's something that's feasible.

You ever build a car for a customer thinking, I'm going to see this on Co-part in a month, smash into a guardrail?

Yeah.

That's the other thing people don't realize, too. You can drive a car around in its stock form is pretty fast. You're going to start doubling the horsepower. You're in for a whole other ballgame, even adding two, 300 horsepower. It's a different animal.

Luckily, these cars, I mean, a lot of the newer cars, these cars, GTRs, they do really well with power.

They drive themselves, man.

I come from the Mustang world where you don't have all-wheel drive.

You guys already have a bad rap.

Yeah, exactly.

No, that's not, that's the throttle delay with you guys. That's why you guys are the crowd killers, man. That's why we see you're still in the gas.

Don't make up excuses.

We already know that Dodge and the Takeover has already killed more crowds than any Mustang, so we're fine.

I'm just saying.

If I see another guy holding a cell phone get booted into the crowd from the a** of a freaking challenger.

Well, side shows, those are, like, I only watch those just to people get wrecked. Like, that's the last part of it.

dirty pleasure, it's a weird thing, but.

It's just awesome watching someone turn into a flying starfish.

Yeah.

I mean, but it's the same thing that goes. Like, you can't hate on, you know, as stupid as it is, like, those people, it gives them something to do. Like, yeah, sure, let's shut down a whole street and do f****** donuts and get hit by cars, but hell, you know, it's better than doing worse s***, I guess, you know.

Sometimes, I guess.

I like watching it, especially when they get just, yeah, that's Darwinism, it's fine. Exactly. It's f****** awesome.

I saw that one recently. But yeah, like I said, these cars are, you know, they handle speed pretty well. There has been a few guys where we built cars where it's like, oh, I've never driven anything over like 300 horsepower. And it's like, okay, this is going to be an experience for you. But it's never like worrisome, you know? Yeah. I'm sure like, and in their earlier days, where, you know, when they, before they had the awesome traction control, and MoTec and stuff, like Vipers are not for giving cars. So when you start adding power to those, I'm sure they have more stories like with that. But yeah, we get off pretty easy on these cars, you know. The worst thing that we have to worry about is making sure a lot of these guys like to do the small brakes on us that fit smaller wheels, bigger tires. So we have to make sure that they understand what that means. You know, they're putting brakes that are designed for a Miata or a Honda Civic on a car that, you know, they're small cars, they're still weigh 3,500 pounds, 3,400 pounds. It's a lot of weight for a brake like that. So.

Well, especially when you're talking about smaller brakes, like for example, our buddy Caleb who's selling his ZR1, actually probably right now, right now, he went to a smaller, a car made like 1,100 or whatever, and he's like, yeah, I could probably do only two hits in Mexico. And then it's like, all right, we got to let these things cool off a little bit. Because they're just such tiny brakes.

So ultimately, so we had a car that we built with, so this is where we come in with our development and our parts, you know, what we deem is necessary, right? So we had a car that, there's already small brake kits out for these cars, there's a few of them. We installed one of the off-the-shelf kits. You know, we're really good about checking parts normally, as anyone should be. Because even if it says it comes with one thing and it's probably wrong or it might be wrong, just always check it, especially brakes. So we got provided a kit that was for the car and everything. They had the complete lower end of the spectrum as far as pads sent with that kit at one point. So I went and I was doing some testing in a car and got into the brakes after like 140 pull or whatever, got into the brakes and the pads literally melted off the backing immediately. And that was the biggest, oh s*** moment I've had in my life. I actually had a, you know, on the racetrack, I didn't go through two cars on a two lane, you know. I would just did one of these, close my eyes, and I went to pull the parachute. The pin was still in it, unfortunately, because it was on the street. So ultimately, that led us, I don't know if you can see it on our race car over there, as a small carbon-carbon setup. That was something we designed out of pure necessity for safety of our customers. If they want a small brake kit, we tell them, this is very expensive, but that will not fade. That will get better with heat, and you're not gonna have one of those moments if you really need your brakes.

Yeah, and that's another product we make all the hundreds of dollars on.

Welcome back, Maldivator.

The tens of dollars on, actually on the brake kit, it's like tens of dollars, right? Somewhere. We're more focused on providing that for guys that want to run that rather than kind of making money off of it.

Well, brake, that's an expensive kit. It's a small brake kit.

Well, you'd rather see them have brakes than go over the price, right?

So anytime we sold that kit, it's been at cost, and we're happy to do it just because we know that we're solving that problem and could possibly save someone's life with it.

Right.

So the safety aspect on even when we do cut some fab for cages, things of that nature, like we have an R8 here, the blue one you guys saw in the back, that's getting a full, full cage. And that car's probably going to be around 2600, 2700 horsepower. So from my point of view, safety is paramount, especially because I'm the guy building it, designing it. And at the end of the day, if something ever happens to that car or the guy inside the car, I have to live with that. So I think any one of our products that have to do with safety are our brakes or fire suppression, our parachute kit.

Anything really we do. There's always safety.

There's always safety. Even our kits, the amount of power they make and things of that nature, at the end of the day, if the person loses control, something terrible happens, of course. It's something that we don't want to think about.

But it is part of the game.

It's customer retention. You need them when they wreck it, and you need them to come back and build another one.

Oh, but we're not a body shop.

No, that's horrible. Generally, yeah, if you break your car, the turnaround for the customer to come back and do it is great, right? You get to do it all over again. But at the same time, that's how I said, we're not your typical kind of shop, or we look forward to that kind of stuff. Once we build, do a build, like a full build, I don't want to see that car ever again because of something or an issue.

Unless they're like, I'm having so much fun with this. I want more power. We want to go to the next level. That's great, obviously.

Or for service and maintenance, when they bring the car back. I don't think we've had cars come back because of issues with kits and things of that nature. Unless they come back with another car, which has happened a couple of times. They're like, all right, cool. You built this one, I'll build this one. And we're like, awesome. That's a whole new challenge, whole new project, different platform, everything like that. My biggest hitch right now is obviously, we really, I've been fiending to, like ever since we ran Sixes and Giddy's car, like I've been chasing that high, so I really want to build a fast GTR. The problem is to build something that's capable, you have to find the right clientele, obviously somebody that understands the game and knows how much money that it takes to build a car like that.

But yeah, that's tough trying to tell someone, hey, the build itself is going to be $300, $400,000 to build a car that's capable of this.

And then to campaign it.

Yeah, and then on top of that, you need a trailer that has two, three of everything. If you really want to be competitive and commission the car consistently, not saying that something's going to happen every time you go out with it, but if something does happen, you don't want to be waiting, you don't want to be waiting three, four months for your motor to get repaired and you want to have that thing back in and ready to go the next week for the next race. So it's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people that don't understand that right off the bat. So it's really hard to find someone that does and truly understands that you're just throwing away money at that point. There's no benefit monetarily, there's no benefit at all. Aside from you having fun maybe, and even then you might not have fun with it.

Yeah. Do you guys do machine work for Engines in House or do you assemble Engines in House?

We have one engine guy that we have worked with for a long time, his name is Scott, at St. Charles Garage locally here. He actually was at AMS with us back when we were doing the GTR stuff. He ran the engine program there, so ultimately it was an easy transition for us to use him. He does all of our big dog motors, so our sleeve stuff, our CNC head stuff, anything that's a thousand plus horsepower. Any of what we call our stage one motors, pistons, rods, studs, stuff like that, we'll do here.

I know, they used the word stage. Oh my god, the internet's on fire.

It's a Sherman thing, right?

That's how the Audi community likes to do a lot of things.

Stage one motor, 8.0.

Oh, yeah, that's funny because that one was pistons, rods, stock size head studs, stock head, completely stock head motor that went 8.0.

We tried to kill it.

Yeah, we tried to kill it at the track last year at the end of the season, so now we get calls. I want Tyler's old set up exactly the same as it was. We're like, absolutely not. You can't have that because it's not going to last. It's not sustainable in a car, right? So that's a funny one.

So it's still doing all right then?

The motor was still alive. I mean, we cracked three of the cylinder walls last outing, but actually it was the second.

Well, back up, say the full story because I think people need to understand the gravity of how this car on three cracked cylinders.

Well, let's go over Tyler real quick in general as our customer. So he came in the first year we were in business and he started off as wanting just a basic, what they call hybrid build, you know, your standard stock manifold, you know, hogged out housing, throw a turbo in it. Bob's your uncle. So he wanted that. And then I think it was like, you're already done with the motor, which was just pistons, rods, off the shelf stuff, studs. And he's like, oh, you know, I'd rather it's go full frame right off the bat, you know, a big turbo kit. So we sold them our, at the time, our R900, which is a G35 900 kit, Garrett Turbo. And you know, they're pretty quick cars at that level. But I think it was the day that we got it running with everything in the car. He's like, all right, I'm going to come pick it up. I'm like, Tyler, like, we normally, we never do it like this. Like we normally drive a car for a week or two, put two, 300 miles on at the very least.

Just log, make sure everything's good, healthy, happy.

He's like, I'm on my way. We're like, okay, well, I think I got two and a half miles on the car. Come completely, the build was done for two and a half miles. That was it. He came and picked it up.

Because he had a grudge race that day.

Yeah, I think he was, he's a big.

Let me remind you, it wasn't just to come pick it up to go screw around. He legit, either that night or the next night.

He's like, I need to do some testing tonight. So he went out and did some testing. And that's when we knew that the rest was history with Tyler. He's our people, you know? So he picked up the car and I reiterated 10, 20 times. I'm like, man, we're good at what we do, but we usually like to see this through for at least a few more miles than this. He's like, I get it, man. He's like, anything that happens, it's not going to be on you. He's like, I know I put this on you guys really hard. So he did that. And I think that season, he won 23 races in the Los Zero in that car. And he's out there every, he's one of those guys that's out there every weekend doing the thing. So he's been really good for us testing wise and seeing what our turbo kits can do. So that end of that season, he went up to our 1050 kit, which is not much of a bigger turbo. It's a, you know, G35 1050. So this is ultimately, we used to offer the 900 kit. We got rid of that off our menu because the 1050 and 900 spools similarly. The 1050 makes more power, so we just kind of just absorbed that into the 1050 kit. So he went out, and pretty much the same story the next year. He, I think at the end of the year, because he drags every pass he does, I think at the end of that season, he had 200 and something passes on the car that season.

So what's the maintenance look like at that level then?

For Tyler?

For 200 passes.

I don't know, we didn't see him for a year. So it's like, he did oil changes, and that was about it. I think he came back, we put our rear drag strut kit on it, just to help out with some of the launches and stuff. But this car is, we call it the unicorn. It's been absolutely rock solid ever since. And then, after that season again, he came back and put our 1150 kit on it, which you saw upstairs, that one that's on the motor mocked up. So he put that kit on it, and that year was, this car was fast that year. That was last year. It was consistently doing 850s, 860s on the street and an 18 inch tire. 60 to 130 was in the low threes. It was just a car that no one wanted to race at this point, so now he's racing 275 guys, guys that are absolutely destroying him. So he actually lost a lot of races with a faster car.

Every single race. Just because nobody in his weight class would want to do it anymore. So he's out of his weight class trying to race these guys. And plus, the biggest problem, I think, is too, he was giving guys the hit.

He just didn't want to race them, so he just wanted to race at that point. He wanted to go out there and have fun with the car, and to do that, he had to start giving concessions to people.

But you're in a DCT car, you're already giving the f****** hit to everybody that's on a trans break.

And he was racing some serious cars. They weren't slow cars. So he ultimately lost a lot of races that year, and it makes sense, right? But he was, by the end of the year, we were pushing the car at 50, 52 pounds on the street, a boost, and this was a lot of times on pump ethanol, like stuff you shouldn't be doing, right? And we're like, this thing will just not die. So at the end of the year, last year, we, and the car was full interior the whole time, AC was full weight completely. There was nothing taken out of the car aside from small breaks, and he had a dump on it instead of an exhaust. So at the end of the year, we're like, Tyler, I don't think it's gonna last another season like this. You want to try and kill it at the track, right? So he was like, yeah, absolutely. So we didn't take a ton of weight out. We took the rear interior out of it. We took a couple of small things, like the wipers and stuff, but the car's still fairly heavy. Still had AC, still had front interior. Still had one seat in it, had a race seat in it, but we did that. We asked the tuner, Darren, we're like, hey, man, we want this thing, as much as the turbo will do, man. We know it's probably not doing it any good, but as much as the turbo will do. And then we're like, we're gonna throw a small shot of nitrous on it too. So we did that. The day, it was actually pretty small to start.

It was a 50?

We started with a 50, yeah.

Itty bitty, then.

Little guy.

So yeah, we got that all set up, and the day before we were gonna go to the track, I was testing the wide open throttle nitrous relay box, because we have to use it in the stock ECU. It doesn't have native nitrous control, obviously. So we went through two boxes off the shelf, and they were both bad out of the box. So don't trust parts, I guess, even if you think you should, always test them. So by the end of the day, I'm like, screw it, I'm gonna put this thing on a button. I just had it on a button. I had this button, and it wasn't even like an actual button. It was like the old school wide open throttle switch that has the long lever on it. I had that taped to the steering wheel, you know? And Darren the tuner, he's like, man, that's a bad idea. He's like, don't hold this thing through the shifts and stuff like that. I'm like, yeah, okay. So ultimately, like the car went fast without nitrous. I think we were in the 820s. I think we got in the 18s a couple of times at 170, I think it was 170, 172. And then, you know, I'm like, screw it, let's just start spraying. And so then I think we did like four or five like low 8.1s, and then I'm like, man, this thing just keeps chugging along, right? And Darren's like, oh, where are the logs at by that time? Like my laptop had ended up in the trunk of the car because I just had it sitting on like the floorboard. So I'm like, screw it, I'm not even taking logs anymore. Like we're trying to kill this car. And finally, I think it was nearing the end of the day. We were just trying to better the ET, and we were having issues with, the car would hit pretty hard, and the front tires would actually pop off the ground a little bit, and then the front tires would start chattering. So we were having issues with that, just suspension limitations, so we were trying to deal with that all day. Then I think it was like the last pass of the day, or the last couple of passes, it started smoking a little bit. So I'm like, yeah, we're like, okay, something's going on. So by the one time I drove it down the return road, came back, we had it in the pits, just sitting, I went to start it, and the car just started billowing white smoke. I'm like, okay, we either screwed up a head gasket or cracked the boards. Cracking the boards is the most likely thing because now you're shutting the car off. The coolant's actually pushing into the cylinders after you shut the car off. So we're like, oh, we'll try, do one more pass, whatever.

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So yeah, ultimately we found out that we did hurt the motor, I say, kind of loosely. Sure, yeah. But-

Yeah, you f****** cracked the cylinders.

Yeah, we cracked three of the cylinder bores. What we ended up doing is we just learned to take the coolant pressure, or the coolant cap off after every run, so we didn't bleed the coolant into the cylinders, and that would be fine for another pass, so we just kept doing it. And then it just got really bad to where the track was like, hey guys, it's smoking really bad after you pull the chute and everything. And they're like, you probably shouldn't run it anymore. I'm like, it's just water, man. It's spitting up a little bit out of the overflow. It's not a big deal. And ultimately, it was just water. We wouldn't put coolant in the car or anything like that. So we ended that for the day, and I'm like, we're done for the season, but we were so close. You know, we're just like, oh, s***. So we got back to the track, and that night, I'm like, I'm like, they do make head gasket sealer, right? So I got it back. I'm like, the car actually runs, dries well still. It's idling. It pulls itself off the trailer. There's really no ill effects to this other than it smokes like a b****. So I got back to the shop. I looked it over. I did some other things, and then poured some head gasket sealer in it and went back to the next day.

Like just some O'Reilly's off the shelf.

Yeah, it was some stuff that we got from Napa or something, and that slowed it down. It didn't completely stop the smoke, but the track was happier with that. It was a slow day at the track. It was October 30th.

It was cold out.

So yeah, we ended up doing a couple more passes, and then the one pass, I came around the pit lane, and everyone was standing there. I'm like, oh s***, I'm like, I'm like, we must have went faster than 8.1 or whatever, like low 8.1s, 8.1.0 or something. And then everyone's like, this close, you know? And I'm like, oh s***. Look at the slip, it was 8.0, 175. So I'm like, this car has it in it. You know? Unfortunately, it started drizzling at the track right after that. The track shut down, and then the next day, we got six inches of snow in October. It was November 1st or something, so we couldn't go back with the car.

Yeah, he was down to put more of that freaking head gasket sealer in and f****** let her eat, dude.

I think we were only on like a 75 shot. The car picked up two, three mile an hour from that, but it wasn't like anything crazy. But yeah, it was right after launch. Sit on the button and stay there until the end of the track. And it was ultimately alive. When we got it back, no bent rods, pistons were in great shape. Like I said, it was a stock head car. We were out at 9,000 RPM, like stock porting. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as a base model build goes, but this car has just had the absolute snap beat out of it for the past three years.

And it just keeps taking it.

Yeah. And it would have taken more, but we had to call it when the snow hit. And now he's got a bad dog race motor in it, so he's getting a little upgrade.

A little upgrade.

OK. Noted. So who holds the record currently, then?

Hank.

Hank Iros, yeah. He has two, maybe three cars now in the sevens.

Wow, OK.

He's got a blue car.

His car, Jeff's car.

Jeff's car.

Did Pat's car go sevens? I don't know. But I know he has two or three cars that are like 79X.

OK.

And then there's a car in Europe from Dutter Racing. They have a TTRS that's a pretty race car, and I think they went seven nines as well. So I think we're four or five.

We're number four on the list.

So what's the methodology, right? Because every shop has their own approach. What is it that they're doing well, and where's somewhere where you're thinking, like, all right, we might have a shot here? Are you chasing the record at some point?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I'm sure everybody is, right?

Yeah. We'd like to chase it harder. It's just like I think we touched on earlier that our customer builds are of most importance to us right now. So it's hard to justify spending a ton of money to do track outings, to break a record, right? When we're, you know, we're busy enough, and we're trying to appease our customers. But yeah, obviously, it pays off for a shop to break the records if you can do it properly without sacrificing, you know, quality and support of your customers or relationships, right? So yeah, we were definitely chasing it. Like I said, we'd love to be able to be in the position where we could chase it every weekend, but we just can't.

Oh, physically can't. We don't have the manpower either.

Yeah.

Because we're, there's four of us in the shop, number one, you know, so.

So what you need is a customer to come in and go, I want the record.

Right.

I mean, that's, yeah, for the most part, I feel like that's the majority of shops, unless you're, you know, a shop that's raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars each month where you can physically hire guys or have guys on payroll to support a shop, race car, and come out every weekend, you know. So, and that's the biggest dilemma too is, you know, people have dreams and aspirations. You could be a privateer kind of guy that's, you know, not a billionaire millionaire and go for a record. You're just going to have a harder time. You're going to have to do a lot more sacrifices versus some of these guys that come in and, you know, do carte blanche like here, Dom Rick, here's half a million dollars. I want to go sevens in a Daza. We're going to be like, okay, well, with that kind of money, we can hire another guy or somebody to head up a project of that magnitude, and that be the main focus, that we are strictly focusing on chassis of the car, lightening it as much as we can, building fabrication, things of that nature, building an actual drag car, utilizing aero technology, things of that nature that we could utilize, and then you proceed to kind of move that in that direction. But as far as a regular company, it's, unless somebody's hard on to do that as a customer, there's-

A hard sell.

It's a hard sell too.

Because every time you go to a track, even if you're going to a local track, it's going to be a $1,500 endeavor. When you talk about fuel, paying someone to be there, at least $1,500, even transporting the car. Sure, if you have your own trailer and stuff, it's great, but it's still $100, $150 to do it yourself. So a lot of people don't take that into account. But to touch base on what you asked about, what do we think that we excel in as far as doing this versus other people. I think we look more into the small details, chassis setup, suspension, how things are actually working, where a lot of people focus more on power and the peak power and the trap speed, stuff like that. So I think you'll find that a lot of our cars will tend to go a little bit faster on lower trap speeds. And I like that aspect of it, because that means you're putting some thought in engineering and time into actually sorting the chassis of the car. So we like to do a lot of that stuff. We do a lot of suspension development, custom stuff that you can't buy off the shelf, and it'll pay off eventually. I go back to the small brake kit. Safety was one of the main concerns with that, but that whole kit is seven pounds a side. Rotors, pads, brackets, hardware lines is seven pounds. So that's a huge thing for the car.

What, like 60 for both?

Yeah.

It's like 30, 30 pounds a side.

It's like 40 some pounds a side, I thought.

So right there, just rotating mass.

Stuff like that, taking weight out of the right spots of the car, a lot of people think, oh, get it as light as possible, it's gonna work better. No, it's not the case. You have to take it out in proper areas. You gotta see how the car works. So we do a lot of that development and testing, and it takes a lot longer, but that's something I think we're proud of as far as a shop.

Well, I don't know, you mentioned that you like to have them for a while and drive around a little bit. I don't know any other shops that are wanting to try and put a couple hundred miles on a car just to make sure it's working right.

I don't feel comfortable unless, after power is made and everything, if we don't put at least 200 miles on a car, like put it up in the air three, four times during that, we'll periodically, you don't have to cut an oil filter open, you just take the cup off. We can periodically check the oil filters regularly through that 200 miles and just make sure everything's looking good for our customer. So we don't want to ever, because if we rush something out the door and in the back of our heads, we know that we didn't do our due diligence on that, like I'm going to stay up at night. I'm not going to feel good about it. So if I don't feel good about it, that's going to translate into, I don't know if you believe in karma or bad luck. I feel like that will translate down the road to that.

I build my own stuff sometimes, and I lay at night, or you're driving the car around, and you're like, what was that noise? What was that noise? Was that there before? You hit little vibrations somewhere? I was like, is that the road? Yeah, no, it's very nerve-racking.

Especially when you change something, and you're now hyper-focused on that. So I like to, especially if we know a car is going to have some nuances or make a little bit of noise here, and you do some suspension stuff on it, or you do an aggressive clutch setup that drives really well, but it does have some things, right? I can at least relay to the customer, like, hey, this is all normal. I drove your car for X amount of miles, and I know these cars well, so that gives them peace of mind. So they're not calling me at two in the morning, like, hey, it did this. I can already explain to them what it's going to do. That's why I like to do that as well.

Where does that ideology come from, especially when it comes to doing the setups of the cars? I mean, it sounds like you have a lot of experience to call on.

Yeah, that comes from, as we said before, that's AMS, hats off to them always. We appreciate everything that we did there. Learned so much. So a lot of that stuff comes from that. They are very, very, Martin, especially, is very, very engineer-oriented.

Oh, he's a nerd. Martin's the biggest nerd we know.

He'll never just guess at something. It's always like, we need to do the testing, we need to do the data, we need to figure this out, so we can make sense of it. So it all comes from that. When we were doing all that stuff with Giddy's car and some of the other cars, it was just developing suspension is one of the hardest things you can do. A lot of people take it for granted. It's kind of, suspension is as important as your tuner, right? You need to have a good set up, a good chassis, you need to have a good car to handle the power you're throwing at else. It's not going to do what it's supposed to do. So he beat that into our heads over and over and over again.

You're talking about a guy that would literally, I would like, I would make, I would fabricate a tube, right? Or I would make a charge pipes for one of the crazy GTR. This dude would finger the tube, the flange. He'd stick his fingers in there and feel if there was a lip or if there was no lip, or if it was totally smooth, you know? And seeing him do that kind of stuff and stay on top of me about that, that's when I'm like, all right, this isn't just for looks. Like, this isn't just for like wild porn. Like, this is legit. Like, the inside needs to look just like the outside, right? Because there's resistance in the tube.

And what helped is the results that came from that. You know, if you had a shop that pushed that all the time, but they never went fast or never, you know, won races and stuff like that, it'd be one thing, you'd kind of take that for granted. But because they were so in-depth with all that stuff, the results show, you know, through and through with them. And that's ultimately, I think, kind of a lot of the reason why we are the way we are with our stuff, so.

Well, it's the six too. I mean, that experience and the fight, the struggle, that we essentially have to live through and deal with for, you know, that whole year, year and a half, a lot of people don't get to experience exactly what it is to chase a record of that kind of magnitude.

But yeah, the car is making 2000 plus horsepower, and there's a lot of stuff that goes into it, and people just don't see the full ins and outs of it, so it looks like a lot of fun for a lot of people. But it's serious, man. It's serious work. It's serious thought. It's everything. I mean, you guys know, it's a job.

Imagine building something that you're super happy and excited about that it's going to finally do, and then it all just goes to s*** the next week, and you have to rebuild a new cooling system in the back, or a new radiator. It's debilitating at times, but very awesome too. So a lot of that pedigree kind of came from us working there, working together with all these kind of big power cars, and especially being lucky enough to experience Martin and all his kind of grand wisdom of engineering, and just kind of knocking in to us, like, you guys need to look at the bigger scope of aero, fluid dynamics, venturi effects, how is this going to react with where the waste gate is on here versus right here, or where the bluff valves are going, or the diameter of tubing, or...

You're just giving away the entire keys to the kingdom here.

It's like, well, no.

It's just, well, everyone can make, everyone can make 1,000 horsepower of the car, right? It's easy nowadays. Everyone can just be like, all right, it made a ton of power, it's going to go fast.

And Cam's nitrous, five-oh, there you go, right?

It might go fast, but you're not going to be in the upper echelon of that platform unless you put in the work.

It's no longer an enthusiast thing at that point, right? So we've done this walking through the pits at Texas 2K. Nobody's sitting in a lawn chair just hanging out, waiting for the next run. There's computers out, there's cars on jack stands, there's transmissions laying on the ground. There's, I mean, cars are getting tore apart, put back together, things swapped out, there's oil everywhere. It's just a...

Especially Granite 7 camps.

Yeah, right, yeah.

Well, that's the thing, you have all these guys that all year, whether they have their own companies or they're just entrepreneur or whatever.

We're losing you.

They build these, oh, am I losing you?

I keep figuring, let's just change this to my face.

Just trailing off.

You essentially have all these guys that throughout the year, they build a car, right? Or on the side, they build a car of their business. They get to TX UK and everything has to align perfectly. And it's such a stressful environment because your trans goes out first qualifying pass. You have one more day to fix your s*** and go out there and qualify for your class or you're out. So it's cool to see that. And at the same time, it's heartbreaking too, because you have a lot of people that put a lot of love into these cars and maybe not the most foresight for a couple of things they do to oversee what's going to happen when the car's actually on a sticky track and you're trying to throw a thousand horse at it. But that's the coolest thing about the whole thing is you get to wrench on your own shed and you learn from those mistakes. So the next year, these people come back out and now they have more experience, they know what they're doing. They could run these cars.

That's why I think that's why we gravitate towards drag racing a lot too. Everyone, you're gonna get the guys at, oh, road racing is way harder. And sure, at an entry level, road racing is quite a bit harder to get into. I found that going to a road course track, it's a pretty big production just to even race on a road course track. Drag racing is super accessible and up to a certain extent, it's pretty easy, right? I'm talking maybe nines nowadays, you can call it easy to go nines in a car. But when you're talking like 8.0 over 7.80 in a car like this, that's a lot. That's a lot. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of dedication. It takes a lot of, you gotta be a glut for punishment because it's not fun. I mean, I shouldn't say it's not fun, but it gets to a point to where now you're actually in it and you're doing work, your actual work, you're not just smiling. Like, oh, let's throw some more boost at it. It's not bad. It's, so when you get to-

It's exponentially harder.

Yeah, exactly. When you get to that level, it's so interesting how much work is involved and how much time and just thought is involved in just shaving hundredths sometimes off a time. And a lot of people don't understand that portion of drag racing. They just say, oh, you're just, you know, Florida goat, you know, whatever. It's, it's not that at all when you get to the higher levels.

A tenth of a second in two miles an hour. You're like, yes.

And for guys like us that are just ultimately striving to do better all the time, that's so irking to not be able to go a tenth faster. It's easy, right?

It's easy, dude.

I think it's not easy. A lot of people don't understand it. You know, they see cars go eight to three and they're like, oh, that car's got a seven in it. No problem. And it's like, no, these cars have been out for five years now. Five years? Yeah, five years. And there's still only four in the sevens. And it's like, there's thousands of them modded at this point. It's like, oh, that's why we gravitate towards it. Not saying that. And I'm not s******* on road course cars or road racing at all.

I'm gonna cut out that exact five seconds and put it as a highlight, just to make sure that they're like, oh, this f****** guy.

Yeah, no, it's-

The fingering, the charge pipe is gonna be a highlight too, right? That's definitely gonna be one. Oh, absolutely.

Just take all the weird things out.

Yeah, you gotta finger the charge pipes. And I still do that. I still stick my fingers and I finger all my charge pipes.

Yeah.

Like normal. If you don't finger your charge pipes. It's totally weird.

Is there between the TTRS and the RS3, do you have a preference one either way? Or are they different in their own?

Yeah, we like the TTRS just because it is a better starting point. Right.

But the RS3 is a f****** shoebox with wheels.

But the RS3, it's funny because the RS3, three of the top four cars right now are RS3s, which is a funny kind of thing. You automatically, I think it's like a 300 pound weight difference off the bat with the TTRS. So it's a two seater, you know, it's more geared towards racing. It's not a four door. But, you know, when you get down to it, when you're talking about the speeds that they're going, there's, it's kind of negligible on a street car.

Yeah.

Speaking of street cars in Mexico, so these things are doing, again, draggy, some pretty gnarly 60 to 130s.

Right.

They're doing like mid threes.

So we just, we just shipped one yesterday. It went like 367, 6130. It was like 2,700 foot DA. And that was a full weight RS3, stock front seats, full exhaust, 18 inch wheels. Same kit as this car. This car at the track on a slick did a 274, which is quick. It's up there. That one that you saw on back, that car did like a 279 last week, or 379, sorry, last week. And that's another full weight, you know, 18 inch wheel street car. So yeah, they generally hover in the mid to high threes for, you know, you ride 1,100 horsepower. That's pretty common.

People don't understand just how quick that is, right? Like I've been in, you know, six second, I've even been in a three flat car before, and it's ridiculous. Like it's, and to think that you're able to do that with, arguably, it is a lot of horsepower, but also it's not a ton. You know what I mean? To be able to click off a three six, a three seven.

That's what's great about these cars on the street. They just usually work every time. Like it's not, there's not much fuss with them, even at high horsepower. So that's why you'll see them, like, win a lot of these grudge races, you know, these eighth mile grudge races on some of the lower horsepower car, you know, classes.

But they're not letting them in anymore. Like grudge races-

I mean, it's kind of always been all wheel drive.

All wheel drive has never grudge guys, especially with these car races.

Grudge guys stop putting rules on all wheel drive cars because your rear wheel drive cars can launch way better.

And everybody gives you the hit already on a DCT car.

I get s*** for it all the time because all these grudge racer guys, yeah, you guys can bring your cars out, but they have to be on an 18-inch DOT tire. Well, there's no regulation for the Fox body next to us on a slick, which is just b******* in my opinion.

And a trans rig.

It's just like if your car can't work on the street, then set it up better. Sorry, sorry that the car's worked. It is what it is.

Can you explain to us a little bit on the hit and the DCT and where that limitation lies?

So, I mean...

That is... So, some of it can be, I guess, pointed at software, but usually it's... You got to think, the transmission is... It still has mechanical parts, right? And fluid, as solenoids, as all this other stuff that has to work together to make the car launch. So, when you're on launch control, once you let off, you have to allow... The solenoid has to open up for the fluid passage to let the clutch build the pressure. And then eventually the clutch has to get past its slip point and it has to engage. And so, there's always a window of time when that mechanical process is happening. And that's ultimately why the delay is there. A lot of people have tried to fix it with tuning and some other things, but you'll never get around the real world mechanical delays in systems. And that's all it is. And that's why it's never consistent either. You might have it one time where it's almost at half a damn second, where another time it's a tenth of a second. It always is a variable. So this car, Tyler, he always did the grudge racing on the street off a flashlight, which is the worst for these cars. It looks like you're sleeping every damn light, unless you're really good at knowing the future, right?

You just let go of the brake and close your eyes whenever you think it's going to happen, and maybe you'll get lucky.

So the DCT cars do have a disadvantage. Drag racing, especially on a pro tree or something like that, or if you get double balled, which is a s***** thing to do.

Oh, with a big turbo car, that happened to us at a GTR World Cup the first year. We unveiled, truly, yeah, we got double balled for one of the...

They didn't have a rule implemented on the courtesy staging, so we got double balled, and that car has a G42 1450 on it, so it takes a second or two to get up on power, so I almost lost to a nine second GTR.

It's wild. I just asked because I'm noticing that in the GT500 with the DCT in it. I tried to get it nailed down, so we did this power cruise. It's like a roll racing event. We talked about it a little bit before this started. And so under a bridge, there's a cone there, and so you kind of, you punch it at the cones there. So I was trying to figure out, all right, I need to be a little bit more... I was trying to do it without jumping, you know? And so it was, and it did seem like I couldn't time it out just right. It was very random as to when there was a little bit of a delay.

Yeah, and a lot of things have, are factors in them, you know, heat. I mean, I guess you can kind of blame environmental aspects of it too at some point too, but it's just a mechanical thing, you're never gonna be able to get around.

It does once you're up and going though, you fly by them a lot of times because it's just seamless after that.

Yeah, they're great transmissions, but you're not gonna beat a guy on a Transbrake Auto off the line no matter what you do, especially if it comes strictly down to reaction time, because you're always adding a tenth, two tenths of a second with a DCT car no matter what you do.

So you gotta make it up on the back as much as you can.

Yeah, you gotta get the train going on the back end.

Speaking of DCT cars, man, how about those UGR cars that just went, oh, is it the RA did 255 with a DCT in the half mile?

That's crazy.

And I think we talked about it earlier, but I'll never, I'll get crap for it, but I hate airstrip racing.

I've heard that from quite a bit of people.

Yeah, we've seen it enough times to where we've seen some people get really, really lucky. I think Giddy and his blue car winner at AMS went off the track and hit a small light. It was like this big, right? And almost sent the car toppling over, bent the wheel and half broke the suspension. And there's so much stuff like that out on an airstrip. You're talking, there's concrete blocks in the grass on some airstrips. There's a little metal sign that's this big that at 200 miles an hour, a car hits that. And not to mention a lot of, I think they've gotten better recently, but early on, we used to do a lot of them when AMS was commissioning Omega. We used to go to a lot of them to where, they would allow spectators, sure, they're a few hundred feet off to the side, but they'd allow them almost all the way down half track. And a car going 200 and something miles an hour is going to easily cross that 200, 300 foot patch of grass. So I just never had a good taste about that kind of racing.

A lot of momentum.

Yeah. It's very exhilarating going, so I've had mine up north of 180 a little bit, and it is exhilarating, but anything over 150, the smallest dip in the road, there's so many factors that can blow a tire.

Yeah, stupid stuff like a tire blowing, or breaking an axle can send your car.

Well, it also comes down to safety for that, because you would think that, okay, let's say you're doing 255, you got a 25.3 or 25.5 cage somehow in your R8, right? So cool. You think you're safe. You go off track at over 200 miles an hour, you catch an edge and barrel roll. That cage isn't going to, it's not going to matter whether you're caged or not caged. You're scrambled, essentially.

You take all of your internals and just mix them all up.

Which is, it's tough to talk about, because we do build cages and things of that nature, but I'm very clear about when we do that stuff to our customers, that like, there's two ways I put it. This is open casket, closed casket at this speed. It's not going to matter. G-forces don't care if you're caged, and it doesn't matter for your head, for your brain. It's, you know, and that's why roll racing, if they were to implement some sort of, you know, giant barrier on each side, you know, when you're going 255, especially on the big end, where you can't go off and catch an edge of your tires and cartwheel or barrel roll, like, that makes it better, because if you lose control, you hit a wall at 255, right? And the wall kind of, you know, hopefully the whole goal is for it to just keep you in the center of the track, right?

At the very least, keep it contained for spectators and stuff like that, too. I think that sport's getting to a point to where there's gonna have to be some dedicated tracks built for half mile.

Which would be awesome, I think.

For half mile or for roll racing?

For half mile, which also kind of... Yeah, roll racing, half mile. Roll racing a lot of times is done at drag strips, so it's a lot safer, you know.

That's why TX2K is awesome when they do their roll, because it's on the drag strip. So when you're on the big end, if something happens, there's walls. And we've seen that happen.

There's a sand pit at the end, there's safety guys there. Not that there aren't at the airstrip events, but I just think it's a lot of times... I know they try their hardest to make it safe and everything. I think a lot of times, in my opinion, and I'll get s*** for it, but I think it's neglectful to even have people out there doing that speed. I get the appeal to it, and I'm sure it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's going to get sketchier and sketchier.

Yeah, these cars are crazy fast.

These are f****** nuts, dude. 3,000 horsepower, V-tons.

Won't find me out there doing it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's fun, but it's just dangerous. And I mean, everybody doing it, they know the inherent risks, and that's all that you could do. Like, I respect it.

But you asked about the cars and the shops, and they're awesome cars, super fast cars, talented shops. I have nothing bad to say about any of that. I just don't like that realm of racing.

Yeah.

So you mostly try to stick to quarter where you can.

Quarter mile, yep. Anything that makes sense.

Yeah, we sit down to pee.

It's just safer and cleaner that way, right?

Yeah, you don't splash or anything like that. No, but yeah, drag racing is kind of our bread and butter.

Love it.

Love it.

What were you guys doing before AMS?

Only fans.

It didn't exist, but actually, did it exist?

I don't know.

It might have been a small...

We were only building fans out of my garage. No, you meant only fans, like the nasty... No, we were building fans. Only fans.

Box fans.

Box fans.

No, we've always been in the cars. We didn't know each other well. We actually grew up in the same town. Unbeknownst to us, he actually grew up with my sister. We went to school with my sister.

Yeah, we party together.

Yeah, but before AMS, we really never crossed paths. I grew up loving cars in general. My parents were gracious enough to give me their garage when I was growing up and put their cars outside. So I was a big Honda guy to start, which I think a lot of, it's kind of funny. You know, you see T1, you see a lot of other guys stem from Hondas, and it makes sense. Like the Honda guys are really about detail too. Well, there are some Honda guys. Back then, it was always about building a car for a magazine and stuff like that. So we did that. And then I saw a B5 S4 for my first time, around when it first came out, and I fell in love with it. I'd always loved Supras, but they were unattainable already at that point. The B5 in my eyes, I was like, oh, that's kind of like a German Supra, all-wheel drive, though, but a twin-turbo six-cylinder.

You really have a German Supra nowadays.

Yeah, right. But so I did all that. It was basically a hobby for me. So I built a couple of cars out of my parents' garage, and just ended up loving it, and just did random jobs as you would as a teenager, and managed a couple of auto zones, grocery store work, stuff like that. But I always loved it, always been into it. So then worked at a, my first automotive job was in a body shop called Auto Works in Northbrook. Shout out to Ron over there. Learned a lot there too. That was fun. He had a cool clientele, so we did a lot of work for the players on the Bears. Devin Hester would come around all the time, Lance Briggs, stuff like that. So that was cool. So I learned a lot of the high performance stuff there because he allowed me to, you know, they'd have vipers and stuff like that, that we do headers and intakes and fun stuff on. So I did that for a couple of years, and then my friend Lance started working at AMS, and he's like, hey man, I know you like to do this stuff. He's like, would you be interested in a job? I'm like, hell yeah, man. That's the dream. I grew up watching AMS do their thing with the EVOs and DSMs, and it's always like, these are the guys, you know, those guys are awesome. So I'm like, hell yeah, man, I'm in. So then, you know, kind of the rest is history after that. So I appreciate him for that.

That's cool. You?

Yeah, I didn't start off in cars. Not at all.

Oh yeah, this is the story.

Yeah, I mean.

Got a picture you can pull up.

Oh, we're going to go.

We got to at least touch on it.

All right. Well, touching on it is a loose thing.

You guys won't believe it, but.

Yeah, no. So obviously through high school and stuff like that, I went to high school with a sister. We were 100, but we didn't know each other at all. We didn't find out. I mean, it's a small world. Like anybody you talk to, anybody you meet, you always, it's just crazy the connections you make. You're like, holy s***. Like it's a very small world. Pretty much after high school, went to college, got out of college, no jobs available for what I wanted to do in college. So started doing, I started dating, who's my wife right now. Moved out to Northern Illinois. She went to Northern Illinois University, so we lived in DeKalb. Started working for a AV company as like an install guy for like Dish Network and s*** like that. Did that for a while, then got into like custom built home theaters and systems for really high end clientele. And that's what I was doing for a while. It got to a point where I was making super good money doing that. Imagine like millionaire houses, home theaters, audio systems. I had some crazy s*** happen in my life that kind of changed my whole perspective on what I want to do with my life and like, is this awesome? Like, sure, I'm getting paid a lot of money, but it's not fulfilling. So I started welding. I bought a welder, like a TIG welder, s***** TIG welder, and in my basement, in my house, just started welding s*** together. So just imagine finding whatever kind of scraps of metal, whether they're covered in paint, powder coat, whatever, you just start welding the s*** together. Got to a point where I got pretty good. Oh, you know, I totally skipped that whole part. So in between from there, you can go back. from high school, I did a bit of male modeling, which is kind of cool.

A bit, it was pretty serious.

It was kind of serious. I mean, but yeah, it was a good time. So like when I joke around, I said I peeked in.

Were you in Sears catalogs or what?

Oh, he was.

No, not Sears.

Calvin Klein?

I did some stuff for those guys. I did some stuff for some other guys and people. Don't want to get too deep in it, but.

We'll send the pictures.

I can't wait. But when I joke around that I kind of peaked in high school, it's a hundred f****** percent positive that I peaked in high school. Like during that time, my junior, senior year, I'd be flying out to New York and London and doing runway and doing campaigns and all this stuff. So essentially, it was like I'd work for like beer money, you know what I mean? And stuff like that. So it was really cool. It was a great experience. And we always joke around about that. We send each other pics and the whole goal for all my friends is to keep trying to, because this is before when the Internet was huge and things of that nature. So there's some really cool pictures out there. If you kind of dig deep enough to find of me. But yeah, that's the kind of funny thing about it, is because I think that the whole experience humbled me out a lot. I got to see a lot of crazy s***, stuff that nobody will ever kind of get to see. But you kind of grow from that, and you're like, holy s***. All right, I've lived some cool stories and some things of that nature. So let's try something else. So male modeling wasn't really my thing. It was fabrication and building race cars. That's what it kind of stemmed into. But all right, so back to the story is essentially I started out of the basement, got a little bit better, and it was one of those things where Gone In 60 Seconds came out, Fast and the Furious came out, and I'm like, yeah, dude, this is cool. So I wanted to build a DSM, and I think one of the coolest comments I ever made was Brian Speckner was the reason I bought a DSM, and Paul Walker is the reason that it's built, right? Because that's essentially like you watch that movie, and everybody was like, holy s***, cars are pretty cool. And I was kind of into cars, but not to the level of what I knew. Like, you pointed stuff in there, and I'm like, I don't know what the f*** that is. Like, you know, the alternator is a turbo. I don't know. Ended up working for a few companies, some big companies, and then somehow the last company I worked for, we weren't seeing eye to eye. And I was like, screw it, I'm gonna go straight to AMS, because I used to send AMS a resume, like, once a month, just trying to b******* my way in, like, fake it till you make it, like, yeah, I'll do whatever, I do accounting, and I'm a fabricator, and this and that. And I just showed up with my box in the back of my car, like, my actual toolbox, that I just quit the other job, and the manager there at the time, I forgot his name, he was awesome, the Silver Fox, dude was cool as hell. He interviewed me, and then like, two days later, he's like, hey, you got a job, come here, and I'm like, holy s***. So then, yeah, kind of the rest of his history, started off just doing production work, and then just being a sponge, too. Because at that point, I already built my DSM, the DSM was like an eight-year project that I started in my garage. So by the time I started with AMS, it was like years. So I already knew s*** about cars, but the same thing, just be a sponge and try to be as good as possible at what you do. And during that time is when Instagram became, started getting big, and like I said, Weld Porn and all these other kind of welding venues that would take your work and repost it. So whenever you do something cool, and that was a whole goal was like, dude, I just want to build crazy, awesome looking fabrication components and things, and take pictures of them. And it was a high, if Weld Porn reposted your s***, your phone's going off, you're like, what is happening? And then it's all like thousands of likes. So then you grow out of that face too. You start realizing that life isn't about likes, and you got to put food on the table, and want to do your own thing too at the same time. So and then when you have influences like him pushing you for stuff too. I used to ask for, what was it? Just almost not recognition, but for acceptance of projects. I'd always come up to the guys at AMS and be like, hey, is this OK? I made this, is this going to be OK for this car?

And then Ricky would be like, don't believe in yourself, man.

Yeah, Ricky would be like, shut the f*** up, just do it. Don't ask anybody about what they think. Just do it how you think, and turn the corner with that. And rest is history. We did stuff there for quite a bit of time. Had a great time, worked awesome. When we left, we were still close. We were still doing little projects here and there together.

And then the race car happened. Kyle, one of our great friends, he had a, what was the generation previous to the G80, the F3, F something, M3, six-cylinder turbo, whatever it was. I don't remember. Yeah, he had one of those. He had one of those.

He had the BMW and we left.

He's like, yeah, I want to do a thousand plus horsepower with this. We're like, how about no?

No.

I'm like, I had just bought my RS3 at the time. I'm like, this is a much better platform to start with. And I took him out for a ride and let him drive it and stuff. He's like, man, I really love this thing. He's like, you really think we could do it? You know, I'm like, yeah, absolutely, no problem. So sold the M3, bought that car. Actually, we bought a car from New York, went and picked it up and drove it all the way back. It was a blue one. And then for some reason, like the check from the credit union bounced. So Kyle had to drive it all the way back to New York and give it back to the guy, which was a funny story. But yeah, he bought that car. And then originally it was just going to be a pretty modest build. And then the reason why that car got its name Truly and Kyle got the name Truly is because we were in his garage, the car was in the lift, whatever. And Kyle, he had a couple of Trulies in him. And at some point, he's like, he's like, man, I just wanna, let's just go crazy with this thing. Let's get the wildest stuff we can on this. Like Kyle, are you sure you wanna go this route? Like, are you sure? You know, 100 times we asked him, it was like a few days of this happening. We're like, we'll do it, man, but.

His drunken state. Kyle, you want Lexan windows? Yeah, f*** it, I have a Jim Foxx. Let's get Lexan windows.

That's how that came about. That car should be our fastest car, but we just, like I said, with the customer cars and everything, we just haven't had time to commission it properly. So we're hoping to get it out end of this year, and then a lot more come spring next year. So we're actually going to build it over the winter time and have it ready for the season instead of trying to build it at the beginning of the season. Our whole schedule has kind of gotten flip-flopped just due to the fact that we do events in Florida in February. We go to DCT World Cup or try to get ready for like Texas 2K. So when your cars are ready for those, then they're usually down during the summertime. If something happens, you need to make improvements, whatever. So our track time up here kind of gets lost when you do those events down there.

Well, not to mention timing. When we finish that car, when we finish that car, when we finish all the cars that we used to take to DCT World Cup, that was in February, right? So we're finishing the car first week of February, or end of January, mid of January. Where are we testing when it's 10 degrees outside and there's snow on the ground? So it was kind of fun and, I mean, not fun, but it was kind of like one of those butt puckering moments is like, we'll get done with Charlie's car, the R8. Cool, we're going, yeah, let's go. And then like, we're testing at the Test and Tune Night on Friday in Sarasota at Branneton, you know, before the day before qualifying. Brand new builds, this is when we're testing them, you know, so that was the crazy thing about all that stuff.

Yeah, we hadn't really given ourselves a fair shake with that car over the years, so.

No, it was our testbed too. We learned a lot from that car throughout the last three years of what we've done. A lot of the products that were on there transferred over to what we sell now. You know, the parachute kit, brakes, suspension, all that thing. Like, they were first tested on that car, and it was only once they did good on that car, and we saw the results that we wanted from that, is when everything kind of transpired onto the website or onto sales and things of that nature. So now we're going to give that car a fair shake, where we're not so under stress or, I mean.

Yeah, we were always under the gun on that car just to get it done for something or another, you know.

We finished that car in the garage.

The trailer was waiting outside still, for like two hours.

And we're still doing the final touches before the first time we came out. And then Kyle, Fred did that video on 1320. That was the first time we ever brought that car out, and on the fourth pass, it ran an eight, so which was good, because it was the fourth pass ever on the car.

That's fairly early on with these cars too. It was what, 2020?

Yeah, 2020. It was right before COVID.

That's the story of that one.

Are you guys, is there a wait list right now to get a build in here?

So for a while, since we only, again, it comes down to controlling what we can, is best for our customers. We only have one guy that we trust with our motors, so for a while there, we were pretty backed up on motors. We're actually right at the front of it now, which is great, but generally, we don't like to keep wait lists. We don't like to take people's money if we're not doing work on their car. We don't like to stack cars here.

That's a good way to go about it, by the way. I hear all the time people will take money, and then all of a sudden, where's the money? And they get on a backlog, and it just gets messy really quick.

We hate that feeling in general, and we hate having to deal with the possibility that maybe a car gets damaged while it's sitting here for months waiting on a build. We don't like to take deposits for a build that's going to happen in a year. We'll take a deposit on parts for builds that we know are going to happen. But the way we do it is if someone wants a build, we'll quote them out. If everything's great, we talk all the details out. We take deposit for parts. If we don't have all the parts here, we're not taking the car. We wait for every single part to get here. I don't care if it comes in six months. If it's a small part, we got to wait for that part to come in because we don't know if we're going to be able to get that part in six months even. Things change, stuff like that changes.

You don't have so much space for storage.

Right. It doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help us, doesn't help the customer, it doesn't help employees, it doesn't help just the well-being of anyone mentally either. So we've been in the industry quite a while, and we've kind of seen that, at least we think it's not the way to go about it.

No, when you have all that money in your account, especially from something that's going to go down in six to eight months, it's like-

It's easy to misallocate that.

Money in, money out.

Yeah.

And then when you're finished with the project, at the end of eight months or six months or however long it took, and it's like, okay, cool, well, I paid for all that. And you're like, well, oh s***, now we have nothing to kind of show for it. So it's kind of a mental thing too. And also, I feel like circling back to certain companies and the way they operate is, I've had a lot of customers that were up front, like, I'll pay you for the whole thing. Like, here's all the money. I'm like, dude, no. That's a safeguard for you that when you're satisfied with what we did at the end, you pay us. If there's any problems with it and you already paid us, then what's there to kind of protect you at the end if there is an issue? You know, and that's, like I said, that's been kind of the s***** thing that a lot of people have experienced and I've seen is they're trying to be awesome and good customers by paying up front, that they're gonna get better service, better treatment, where in the end, it's an opposite, you know? You pay the dude the money, he grabs the money, uses that money to pay for the other project, and then now when it's time to ordering your parts, he's grabbing a deposit from another one to get your parts. And at the end, if there's any issues, it's like, well, screw you, I already paid you the money. Here's your car back, sorry.

Car sits for three months, and I catch you guys out on a wave runner on the lake.

Exactly.

Two years in someone's instance.

Yeah, or the guy takes vacations every other week.

Once we get wave runners, we won't be here. I'm still in the company.

We've had our fair share of delays, and to add just five, six more cars sitting dead here on top of the delays we have with current projects, like I said, it never helps anyone.

COVID didn't really...

Didn't affect us till like two years, three years after?

Till last year. Yeah, COVID, we didn't have a big problem getting turbos, intercoolers, things of that nature, until last year, it was engine components for certain things that delayed our whole engine department.

Yeah, what I think happened is a lot of people saw the effects of COVID up front, and then the shops that have the cash flow to do it, once the parts were available, they just buy all of them and kind of sit on them because they knew they needed them, where small guys like us, we don't have the money to do that, right? So it's one of those things where we kind of just had to wait it out and see once the companies started getting their stock back up in their warehouses and stuff, after all that, so it delayed for us. The engine program was pretty heavily delayed for us for a while. I think the one motor took us like six months to get out the door from giving it, and that's not to say that there was any sort of lagging on the project. It was just the way it was, unfortunately. So it was out of our control.

It was like in the Coyote world. I think it was last year, too. You couldn't get pistons. I think that was one of the biggest things. It was motors were just sitting.

And where some shops will just be like, oh, I can't get pistons that we normally use. I'm just going to use these now. We're like, all of our, even our stage one motors, we use a custom piston setup. The big power stuff is proprietary to SCG Scott for pistons and rods too. So all the stuff that he does, like we're not going to stray away from that just to get it out the door faster. Even if a customer's like, hey, I want this fast, I can just do whatever. Like we're not going to put our name on that. So it's unfortunate with delays, but they do happen. We try to be as honest to our customers as possible about it. And that's all you can do, I guess.

Transparency is key.

What about the eight whys? Are you guys doing much of that yet?

We'd love to. The tuning solutions aren't there quite yet. Cyvex has a plug and play format now, which we can definitely do that.

That's not cheap, exactly, I bet.

Yeah, and a lot of people are. I think iRose is doing a whole lot of them now with Cyvex. For us, again, it's one of those things where it comes a hard sell to, hey, your car's gonna have bolt-ons on it, but you need to put a $6,000 ECU on the car in order to run it. So we're just gonna wait until, we use Unitronic for a lot of our flash tuning stuff, for the bolt-ons, stuff like that. So we're just gonna wait till they have a viable solution that we know that's ready to go out of the box, and then we'll start pushing out a little bit more. But ultimately, they're pretty much the same car. They changed the rear diff a little bit, and obviously some of the styling stuff, but they work pretty much the same.

And then as we start to sort of wrap up here, what about when it comes to development? Are you guys doing any 3D modeling in computers or anything for your parts and stuff?

So yeah, for example, our fuel system, the brake stuff, I'll do it all in SolidWorks. We would love to be in a position to have a 3D scanner because we do want to develop a drag wing for these cars. That's going to be a product that people are going to need eventually.

Oh, is nobody doing that yet?

Not to our knowledge. So we have to outsource 3D scanning and stuff like that. But as far as modeling, you know.

We're going to cut that spoiler stuff out because nobody's doing it. We're going to be the first ones to come out with something that's like an actually molded carbon fiber thing for the RS3 and that.

But everything is done pretty much by hand. I wish we had fancier tools, but I measure everything by hand. I model it all in SolidWorks here. Like the cages he designs on, a software called BenTech, right?

Here's our 3D modeling right here.

Yeah, so a lot of the stuff takes us.

Lefty and righty.

Yeah, lefty and righty.

A lot of our stuff takes us a lot longer than, you know, some of the bigger shops out there. It just, frankly, because we're just not there yet as far as our cash flow and what we can afford as far as equipment, so.

Because at that point, you need somebody, you need a dedicated, we can't have him doing tuning, him doing designing, him doing everything. At that point, we would have to buy a ferro arm. We'd have to hire an actual engineer, like somebody to model that stuff, to check it, to verify it with all the different software to see if it's even aerodynamic or if it's going to fit. Scan the whole underside of a car. So that all takes time and money where, you know, the big dogs, they have that stuff because, you know, they're, you know.

20 more years in the business? But, you know, the stuff that we really love to do, we love that part of it. We love the design aspect of it. We love seeing, you know, the hundreds of hours of design work coming out and, you know, like our billet parts of our fuel systems and, you know, like the drag brake billet parts, the, you know, the intercooler end tanks. There's a couple of them over there that we have modeled out of, you know, 3D printing and that's to me, it's seeing like a product, a project that you worked on come to light in a product form that you can, it's a physical thing you can touch and then sell to someone and they're happy with it. Like that's the most rewarding thing out of it all, so.

Sweet. And on that note, Dan, do you want to pop the usual three?

Sure. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guest or guests to pick three cars. You can pick a track car, a daily driver, and a show car. You have an unlimited budget, swap whatever you want. What are you picking?

Track car as far as whatever you want.

Pick a track.

Track car is tough.

I don't think it's that tough.

You want to go first then?

Drag car is definitely going to be a GT2RS.

Are you going road course with it?

You mean like drag car? No, whatever you want. GT2RS for sure. Daily, probably a 2000 or 2001 Honda CR-V with about 200, 300,000 miles on it that I just don't really care about. And then like the nice exotic would be a 458 twin turbo Ferrari.

That's your show car?

That's my show car.

That's an interesting, that'd be a tough one, because there's only a handful of twin turbo 458s in existence.

Yeah.

Because it's not normal.

No, it's not at all. There was a couple people building them for a while, but I don't know if it ever tracked well.

Yeah. They do.

For me, track car is a tough one, because I've always loved the whole, I'd have to go with a fox body, just because it's so much fun and easy to work with. There's parts everywhere for them. I'd have to do that, just to have fun with it. It's something I'd want to enjoy.

It's like a drag car?

Yeah, yeah, a drag car, something like that. Daily driver, I'd have to do one of our builds and like a TTRS or RS3 because it's hands down like one of the better cars you can get on the road. There's not much it's gonna, you're not gonna come across much. It's gonna beat you and it drives really nice.

So which one is it, RS3 or TTRS?

RS3. Okay. I can throw s*** in the back seat easily, tow it around some stuff. And then show car, I'd have to go back to the old hot import night days and do like a 2000 Honda Civic, just make it super period correct, I guess.

Clear taillights.

Yeah, clear taillights, big body kit. Like I have to go back to that, so that'd be fun.

SSR wheels.

Yeah.

Oh my god, yeah.

Sweet. And then where can I find you guys?

radaracelab.com, Instagram, Rada Race Lab, Facebook, Rada Race Lab. TikTok? We have TikTok still?

Yeah, we got TikTok.

It's not much on it, but best way to get at us, since we're only four guys here, is email. We're really responsive with email.

We only do email. We prefer email because we feel like that's the way better kind of track for tracking, communication, just to... Paper trail. Yes.

There's no unsend.

Yeah, so we could, well, there is.

Within the first five seconds.

Yeah, yeah. Just to make sure we don't miss anything, too, in the conversation, because, and I like to say and bring this up, too, to people watching and people dealing with companies, like Messenger is awesome, right? Messenger is great for contacting people, but when you're constantly talking about a project or trying to keep track of stuff, and especially if there's a lot of people doing the same thing, for a company like us, when we have like 30 people trying to contact us and ask us questions and stuff on Messenger, it gets so hard and diluted to keep track of everything and make sure that we take care of our customers properly with that kind of thing. So we always ask everybody to shoot us an email, and if it gets crazy enough where you need to speak to this nerd or me, then we're always there on the phone, so.

Absolutely.

Sweet. Dan?

You can find us at Gunner Garage with two N's.

And if you guys made it this far into the episode, please be sure to share the show if you like these guys. I don't know if you made it this far. I'm sure you do. And yeah, well, thanks, Dan. Thanks for existing, and we'll see y'all next time.

Thank you, guys. Thank you.