118. MAPerformance Origins, Chasing 8's, Selling Car Parts at Scale w/ Kyle Nelson

So then we decide to back half, we're gonna back half this car. Never back half anything in my life. And I'm like, I can weld, I can fabricate. I mean, how hard can it be? Really hard is the answer. I don't want us to ruin our environment. There's no question. But if I look at the car and its overlying carbon output, how much it's doing and how much emissions it's emitting, how many EVOs do you guys know with 200,000 miles on them?

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 Ford loving co-host, Dan. Yep. Mr. Gunnit Garage. Yep. And today we are here with somebody who has managed quite a number of people that we've had on this podcast. Mr. Kyle Nelson of MAPerformance. MAPPerformance, you pick whichever name you prefer. Kind of tell people a little bit about who you are, right? Because MAPerformance was a huge staple here in the Minnesota community prior to being bought up and moving and all that fun stuff. You guys have done some really cool stuff over the years, and obviously you're a linchpin for that. Perhaps maybe the linchpin. You're showing us some of the cool projects around here. So before we get started, I want to say thank you to all the people that suggested to get you on, but also Kurt Thomas was probably the latest one. That dude's a trip, man. That guy's a, he's fun. But yeah, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, MAPerformance, and kind of where we're at today.

Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of MAPerformance. I started the company with my friend in 2006 as, I mean, basically a joke. We started out the company, and we were just, I'll try not to say it. We, I was working on my dad's garage. I actually worked at a company called Quick Precision Racing. They don't exist anymore. I learned a lot of stuff from him, and I was actually building Chris Carey's car, which is the other founder of MAPerformance, MAP Performance, Modern Automotive. And so, and I was building his car, and that company dissolved, and we, I picked up his car, because I was the one working there. I actually quit a good dealership job to work at that. I wanted to learn more of that side of it. I've been into my whole life. And then me and him, I was working at my dad's garage, building his race car. We hit the highest horsepower of second gen Eclipse ever at the time. I know it doesn't seem that impressive, but it was 687 horsepower, which 2000, I want to say two. So we're the highest horsepower Mitsubishi ever. I mean, we might have been the highest four cylinder horsepower. I would not, maybe not the highest, but at the time, it was unheard of to get into almost the 700 wheel horsepower range in those cars. So I was working on his car, and I was doing all the work that I picked up from the other shop, and I was doing it on everyone's car. And then one day, he was working at the University of Minnesota. He started to make a business name. He made a business club called Modern Automotive. It was like a club. And then me and him joked to each other. I was like, hey, what if we just bought a shop and bought a dyno? And we're like, yeah, ha ha. And then we drove around the cities looking for places that would allow us to have a dyno. And the next thing you know, we're in a 2,500 square foot, and his mom loaned us the money on a credit card. I got 30,000 on a loan on a credit card to buy the stuff to start the shop. I had all the tools. Chris didn't even work there. I was the only one answering the phones, dealing with customers, and fixing cars, because we had to do whatever we could take to make it so we could make money to support the shop.

All this that started as a joke.

As a joke, yeah. Me and him, we didn't think that somebody's gonna let us start a shop, me and him. And as soon as we signed a lease, we're like, I guess we're doing this. He still works full-time selling cell phones. That's what his background was, was selling cell phones. He had a house to pay for. So I was only, I was 21 at the time. So I was like, all right, I know how to work. I can work. So, and we worked on a bunch of race cars and we kept pursuing going fast. Like we just like wanted to be the fast Mitsubishi guys. We just, I'm a VA guy from my heart. Like I love V8s. I started out with V8s, but, and then I seen Chris had a second gen and it made like 400 horsepower back in the day. And it was like, you gotta ride in that car. That car was fast. 400 horsepower. That was fast. That was fast in most of the V8s. And you're like, well, that maybe we have something here. It's not exploding every five minutes. I mean, 2Gs do explode a lot, but for the time, it was very, very, a very fast car at the time. And that's how it kind of bit me with like, it'd be really cool to make a bunch of four cylinders are faster than all the V8s around. Let's go for that. Cause I always liked that underdog side of things. You know, people never see it coming. And that's kind of my favorite thing. And then as we went through, we ended up starting that shop. And then probably the first year or two, we just basically did whatever job we could get. You know, if I need to wire your C10, I need to fix it. A lot of Mitsubishis come to you all taken apart. That's a pretty common Mitsubishi thing. The time belt breaks, and these, a bunch of cake pan trays in the back of their car. And they go, hey, put this back together. So you learn how everywhere every bolt goes, you learn every little thing, you never get a car, you never get to take a car apart that's together. Like somebody brings you a car, Mitsubishi, they're all taking apart. The guys get way over their head and go, I can't put this back together. Can you fix this? So we did that for a number of years, and then we finally, the whole time we're trying to sell parts. And then we started getting a little bit of traction. We started setting up with vendors, started getting a little bit of traction with selling parts, and then we kept selling parts. And then as we sold parts, we started building more people's cars, and more people heard about us. And then we also went racing. We decided, I had a blue Eagle Talon back in the day, and I started out, and my nickname was eBay, which is kind of a funny name, because I didn't have any money. I built everything by hand. I didn't have any money to build a car, so I had to build everything in a budget. But I made a very fast car on a budget.

When you say very fast.

For the time, we ran 990s at 149 in a street car. Like I say, this is probably right when we started our business, so 2006.

Oh, s***. OK.

And on the street, on a cold night, because when we were at the track, we actually couldn't launch the car. We just kept breaking axles. So we basically had to just roll out of the turbo spool. The turbo didn't fully spool until the 330, and we still went 149 when we were in 990s. So if you're at night, we used to do a lot of street racing, and it was untouchable. I could break boosts and make 40 pounds. I had a little bit of nitrous to help spool the turbo because it was the first... This is so old ago. We had the first Billet Precision Turbo they ever made. It was a 71 GTQ. It was the very first Billet Compressor Wheel Turbo Charger that was ever made by Precision. They've came a long way since then. So it was 71 millimeter turbo, and that car was like, it's never gonna spool back in that day. That wasn't a turbo you'd run around, but we made it work. And that car, when we street raced, I think the only thing I ever lost to was a guy named Franny. He had a 850 quarter mile Hayabusa, ran 850s at 165 miles an hour, and he barely beat me. And it was also nitrous powered, built motor, 1400 CC, and then he had 130 kind of nitrous on it. And he didn't think he had to spray it, he had to spray the crap out of it because I was beating him. And they finally came around me at the very end, and we were probably going upper 190 mile an hour, 200 mile an hour racing. And because I wanted to beat this bike, that was like, I don't want to lose. And that car kind of got a lot of interest in Mitsubishi. These guys, at the time, we were one of the fastest. I mean, there's Buscher Racing. They were racing like more like a pro mod car. They had a pro mod class, and they had a lot of interest in there. But we were basically his competitor. We were racing, going fast. At the same time, he was going fast. He was a little bit more, he was very the very first one in the Mitsubishis. So we had a little bit of clientele there. But basically, our online presence started because, I don't know if any of the consumers are familiar with this, this is back in the day, it's a company called Slowboy Racing. And they were the biggest Mitsubishi people in that time. And you'd buy a part and they'd mess it up. You'd call them like, hey, my part's messed up. They'd just go like, I don't care. And they'd hang up the phone on you. And me and Chris dealt the locks. That's where we bought our Mitsubishi parts from. That's the only person selling them. And we got to the point where we're like, what if we just answered the phone and treated people with kindness and took care of the customer problems and have a really good customer experience? So they call us, we return stuff, we help them with tech, because we know it. And that really built the foundation for our business. And then we just took that and multiplied. We'll just answer the phone, we'll take care of returns. We'll be good to people, treat people as you want to be treated. And don't screw people over.

What a novel idea.

Obviously, this is like the Internet. Internet websites weren't huge. I mean, this is newer. I mean, not saying that there was stuff on the Internet, but not like it is today.

Yeah, nowhere near.

Well, this has to be like a perfect storm timing wise too, because I believe in the early 2000s, this is Fast and Furious days too. And they were pushing Mitsubishi's crazy on there. And I remember, I've always been a Ford guy, but I was like, I kind of want an Evo from watching that movie. They made them look like they were some bad a** machines, you know?

I think that really helped our business. Absolutely.

Did you hear that backhand, by the way? They made them look like they were fast machines.

Well, I'm going off of what they... You know how the cinematography was on those early movies, where you're shifting 42 times in a race?

They still do it. That's the new 20 speed training that's coming out.

Well, I know what the Gone in 60 Second movie, the new one, did for the classic Mustangs, you know? It just... Because we had a couple 69 Mach 1s at the time, and my dad picked one up, I think, for five grand, and we ended up selling it for almost 30 after the movie came out, because that pop culture has a huge play on a lot of that stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Sport compact cars really weren't known as being cool cars, and then there was a really cool movie about sport compact cars, and all the people were like, yeah, I do that too. And then that just got everybody into that, and we happened to just, it's timing. Sometimes you get lucky, and we got lucky with timing, because we also started a business in 2006. It went through 2008, the recession. We had the worst economy ever, and we were growing like wildfire. So it's crazy to think about, like, hey, I'm going to start a business right after COVID. You know what I mean? I obviously know that's way worse, but if you think about, we were starting the business in one of the worst economies, and people are buying stuff. This isn't, I'm not driving that to work. This is my play car. So this is all extra money I have to have. I have to have something I can haul my family. You're not hauling it. I mean, people do use them as their daily drivers. But anybody that owns a Mitsubishi and drives a daily driver in high horsepower, they quickly learn that it gets real expensive really fast. And if it's almost, you can do it. I mean, you could definitely do it, but if you really want to go fast in a four cylinder car, you can't daily drive them. You can, but it's very, you need a lot of-

It'd be as glussing for punishment.

Yes, and a guy that really knows how to work on cars, you can't be an average enthusiast and be like, yeah, I'm taking my, placing my head gasket like the third time in the last month. That's not a thing you can do on a, you want to do as a weekend as a regular guy. Hardcore people do it, but it's not, that's not the reality of it.

The most hardcore guy I've seen up close in person, it has to be Gus. When we watched him rebuild that, or do like the top part-

Did the head gasket, yeah.

Yeah, when he was just working at Power Cruise, he's like, yeah, yeah, we're good, man. Just ready to go. We gotta get that dude on, man. That dude's a riot. All right, so you guys are kind of like in this, you're starting a business. So 2006, is that kind of like when you guys got that first 25 by 40 shop?

Yeah.

Okay, so that's when that happened. So it was you and Chris at first, right?

Yeah, me and Chris Carey, yep.

So then-

Chris Carey didn't even work there for the first six, eight months.

Okay.

Because he had his other job and he just would come after work.

Okay.

Do the books, invoice people, order some parts while I was doing the work and answering the phone.

So then at what point do you guys get a third person?

I want to say, so actually our third employee was a guy named Alex Wollner. He ended up at MAP as our head engine builder until obviously the business changed, and now he works at, he's a manager at Caterpillar Engines.

Oh, cool.

So he was able to transfer right into that position based on his experience. So that's what he's doing these days. So that was our third employee, and he was very fresh. He was out of Universal Technical Institute, or it was Wiotech, one of the two. I think it was Wiotech who was fresh. I mean, he kind of knew how to work on cars, but he was enthusiastic and he wanted to figure it out, and he definitely had knowledge, but he never did it professionally or did it for a living. So me and him just kind of like, maybe as a mentorship, I learned a lot too. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've learned so much over the years by just doing it, being involved in the process of building cars.

Well, that's got to be most of it, right? So do you have any like, what's your background then? Because you say you started the business at what, 21? Something like that. So I'm guessing you don't have any sort of professional schooling behind that then, right?

No, the only thing I really did for schooling is in our high school, we had a program called 916, which you go to Century College for half your day during the first year. Basically, your whole senior, three years of high school. So basically half the day for three years, essentially, I went to, I did auto body welding because I wanted to learn how to weld. I didn't care about the auto body, I just wanted to learn how to weld, and you had to learn how to weld by taking the auto body class. So as soon as I learned how to weld and got done with the welding in that class, that's the first, and then I moved into diesel tech because that was the only place you could build engines. And then I brought all my own engines in and build it. And then the store we talked about off camera that 350 swapped S10. This wasn't a stock S10, this was a 500 horsepower small block. And keep in mind that was back in the day, I would say, let's see here, 99. So my buddy bought a truck, he got a loan from his mom. This is the same mom that helped us start.

That's the best mom ever, by the way.

Mary Beth, yeah, she's passed, but she's one of the greatest people. I love her to death. We all miss her. But yeah, super great lady, raised some awesome boys. So we were building this small block. I actually built that small block Chevy in that class. Everyone else is like rebuilding the stock, whereas I'm like, oh, I'm going to put some aftermarket rods, piston, some AFR heads. And then we started up in the shop because I was part of the curriculum and everyone from all the other, the auto body and everyone all came over. What's going on over there? You hear a huge V8 rumble.

This high school kid in there.

Yeah. You know, this is a serious build. I mean, we actually, this is so old that we had a parts catalog. It's called PAW warehouse. There's a parts catalog. It's like a phone book. It was all black and white. That's how you'd catalog order parts. That's how long it was ago. You'd open it up like, I want that piston. Then you'd write on the back. You have a little mail in thing. You'd write the part numbers. You'd mail it in and then you'd mail it with a check and they would send you parts. Like, that's so wild to say these days because it's so easy. But if you've been in the industry, that's where it came from. That's crazy to see how it is now. You can almost, you can order anything. Pre-made, pre-built, pre-fixtured. So it's insane where it's come from. Yeah, so I just wanted to touch on that because that's kind of the backstory of building that. That's my only real formal education. Besides the mentorship that I got from a guy in Quick Precision Racing that I quit a dealer job for, the guy was actually dying of cystic fibrosis, but he was only supposed to live till he was like 35, and he was like 45. But he was, I just think when you live, knowing you have an expiration date, you take things more seriously. So he was very, very good at welding and fabrication and building. And he was a huge Mitsubishi guy. And I don't know if you guys are familiar with a company called LSE. It went out of business. They were also building Mitsubishis at the same time. They actually also stemmed off Quick Precision Racing. Josh Schwandberg. I'm trying to think of the others. Two other guys. I'm really bad with names. I've got so many names rolling on my head from all the employees we've had. I can't remember all their names. But I remember Josh, and there's a couple other guys. They had a shop. They also compete with us. We tried to make, they had a 3000 GT twin turbo, and they were trying to race us, and who has a faster car? And they would always, and they were more of like finance, get big money, and try to build these really fast cars. And we had these guys like, hey, how cheap can we build this car? And we just built it all of ourself. And then, I mean, our car is better.

Two very different ideologies there.

Yeah, both work, but I think when you really have to learn how to do things yourself, you're much more proficient. And I think that's part of our success of MAP is learning all the things we did. We didn't get trained how to do anything. We just go, we need this machine. We're going to buy it and learn. And that's been our fundamental. I think even all the employees that we've had over the years, I have a very strong emphasis on doing things the right way, which is always the hard way, the long way. And you build that into a huge structure of people and set the standard high, and then bring everybody up with you, and then people learn that standard. It's unrelenting. And then what you do is you get a very professional business building very, very cool stuff, and people have a really hard time competing with you because of the skill set and the mentality you set upon everyone in your business. We all grew together. We all started out, and we all learned together how to build some crazy stuff. And it wasn't by learning. It wasn't us going to school. It wasn't us having people show us how to do it. We learned, hey, we need to learn how to weld better. We had a, I don't want to jump ahead, but when we had at one point, we had 15 fabricators full time. And there was a point when we first started fabricating where I started the fab department, because I'm the mechanical guy. So MAP, there's, Chris is the business guy. He's the guy setting up the deals. He's the one negotiating shipping prices. He's the one making all of that, getting all the financing and getting the capital to buy more parts and the SBA loans, to do all these things. And I'm the guy that made it all work. I'm the guy that, if we needed, for instance, we need to put a dino cell in, I did it. You know what I mean? I need to put a lift in, I did it. We need some shop electrical wiring for three phase. I learned how to do it. It's not the right way to do things, but when you don't have any money and you need to build stuff, you can't call an electrician and spend $8,000 on wiring a machine in. It's not a realistic thing. So you just learn it. I never had a problem with it, and we've done it all that way for a long time, until we got to a scale where it's like, okay, we're corporate, we really can't be doing three phase wiring by ourselves. Even though we never had a problem with it, but it's like you have insurance, and it becomes a lot different when you get big. But I'm the guy in the background making that happen. I mean, you don't trust me, you don't want Chris Carey building a race car. But like I say, contributing skills, I think me and him happened to work together where he had a set of skills and I had a set of skills, and we mesh perfectly together. I don't think either one of us could have done it by ourselves. But since we both had adjacent skills, we made it work. He noticed that, and he had the ambition. I was not a guy that I'm like, yeah, I want to have 130 employees, and I want to have this mega business. You know, not mega, but a fairly large business. That was never my goal. I like racing cars. I like going fast. I like making cool stuff. That's what I do. Even to this day, that's what I do. I love cars. It's in my DNA. I can't get it out. I go to sleep thinking about what next I'm going to build.

Yeah. Did you pick that quote up, by the way? So when we had Max Odegaard on, he said things exactly the same way you just said it. It's like, oh yeah, I'd rather take the more expensive route, learn how to do it, and just do it that way. Do it right. Build it myself. Rather than buy it.

Well, let's talk about that a little bit on a corporate structure, because that is the golden standard for how things should be done, right? But as companies grow, what does that temptation look like to want to outsource, or you're starting to get too big for your britches, things like that? Did that start to happen at all? Or do you guys, what does that temptation look like?

So, if you look in, like look back of our history, I've always been a guy that, if you can control what's happening, and you have a say in it, you can keep the quality high. Anytime you're like, I'm having this guy build engines, this guy's doing my manifold fab, and you move all that stuff out, to get that all that come to coalesce together and make it work is very, very difficult.

Yep.

And I've always, I'm a strong point where I wanna make as much things we can. I'm a US guy. I wanna make stuff here. I wanna show that we can manufacture parts here. We don't have to outsource. Don't get me wrong, we had to do some outsourcing. They don't do castings here. It's impossible. Not impossible, but the rate you wanna do stainless steel castings, they won't do in the United States. We went to a shop to shop to shop. We wanna make this in the USA. And you just get flat out told, unless you're doing 10,000 units to start, we're not gonna do it. Because they're doing automotive castings, so they have nothing to do unless there's 10,000 of them. And in any performance shop, you're not doing 10,000 of anything. So even at scale, we still struggle with that. So we did have to outsource some of that stuff.

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Because it's just not economical to do the United States. You just got to find the merge of the two. We really, our thing with our business, we built engines at house and we fully built engines. I mean, to a level of detail that they do like a NASCAR level, using profilometers on cylinders, doing RAs on the decks, fully blueprinted. I mean, a high level we built engines at MAP, because we had to make them reliable. When you're selling 100, I mean, I think at our highest, we did like 120 engines a year. You know, so in order to keep them from getting warrantied out and breaking, you have to make sure that you put that together perfectly, and it's going to work and really work with the customers to get them running right in the cars, because warranties kill you. I mean, it hurts your, and a lot of times the warranties aren't your fault. It's just a customer's, you know, if they don't know how to build a motor, they certainly shouldn't be building, like, you can't build a short block, you certainly shouldn't be putting a long block together. Yeah. That's just my feeling. Mitsubishi's like, and LS or something, they're very simple, but like a Mitsubishi delivery cam, there's a lot of parts, a lot of bolts, and they all have to be tightened, they have to put together right, otherwise it's not going to work. And a lot of guys will blow their motors up and then put all their oil cooler and their oil pan off the blown motor back on, and their valve covers that got sandblasted, and all the medias in the valve cover, they put them on their built motor, like, yeah, my car is a Rodinock. Well, it's because there's sand in the oil, there's bearing debris from your last engine.

Is that an actual warranty you guys had to deal with?

All the time.

Really, stuff, holy s***.

You would be amazed on the things that you would have to go through. But you see, we're also customer-focused. We cared about our customers. We genuinely cared in our sales guys. We made sure that we instilled, like, we genuinely cared about people building cool cars. That is our bread and butter. People buy an engine, they buy all the other parts from us. They want to build it all together. And if we can, and everyone that's ever built a car knows that your first time and you're learning, you're going to make some missteps. And people can choose to bend customers over backwards or we would go, you know what, dude, you messed up, we'll fix that cost for you. Yeah, true. You know what I mean? It wasn't even our fault, but we'll help you out. We'll help you with shipping, we'll help you out. We'll do the best we can without really eating curl, because it's not really our responsibility.

There's that too.

Things that you did wrong. But also, I don't want you to be jaded. I want you to have a cool car. I don't want your experience building a car to suck.

Yeah, and you never do it again.

Yeah, because it's long term. You think about the customers. You think about further out, you're thinking about that customer. What about his next car? He's going to buy the parts from us the next time. And if you make it so he doesn't have a good experience the first time, he's definitely not coming back to the second time. Even if it was his fault, people a lot are in their own way. And don't be wrong, we've made mistakes. Anytime you're building that quantity, you make mistakes whether you learn how to not make that mistake again. That's the key is that you make a mistake, you learn how not to make it again. And that's why the standard gets so high. You're building these fully blueprinted engines that are very, very detailed and very... We put a lot of time, a lot more time. It wasn't hugely profitable. It wasn't like, oh, we're making lots of money, but I think our engines... When the company purchased us, acquired our company, they looked at our engines and they looked at all the money like, oh, well, maybe we shouldn't build engines because it's not that profitable compared to the other sectors of our business. But what they didn't know is that all of those engine builds create all the other sales. Yeah, so they sell wheels and tires, and they don't understand necessarily. I'm not saying they don't understand, but they're not deeply aware of it like we are. We've done this from day one, and we know that that guy that buys all of his parts, he's buying $15,000 worth of turbo kits, manifolds, injectors, everything else that goes on his engine. And if he doesn't buy the engine from you, he's gonna go buy it from somebody else, and he's gonna buy all those parts from him, the other company. Most people want to get a bulk discount. You're spending that much money with the company, you can leverage that to get yourself a better deal.

That's a cool philosophy. Dude, so you're thinking about the lifetime value of a customer there. You're not thinking about that first purchase. You're just like, I want this person to be with us forever. I literally told Tooned by Sean the same thing yesterday, by the way. I'm like, dude, you should just be the Haltech guy. People come to you for everything, but now you're saying, why would we leave the door open for somebody else to get a lifetime customer? That makes sense.

It helps just to keep everything straight. As I'm doing, literally ordering parts here right before we got started here, it's like if I can keep it all in one cart or all in one invoice and all in one email when I get everything. So I had the engine, but now I'm like, well, s***, I need the fuel system and all this stuff. If I can have that all in one deal, not only just a bulk discount, but it helps me keep it all straight in my head too. Then being like, what did I order from here and here and here?

If you have a problem with the part, you gotta figure out who you ordered from. And that's even, when you order a lot of parts, it gets difficult. Yes, it does. Especially because people don't keep the invoice, you have to save it in your email. That's things you have to do. I think that unknowing to us, like I say, it comes with customer service. If you want to take care of customers, you have to think like that. I think it's just built into your strategies. We had companies come in and teach us lean, like lean manufacturing, and they definitely had insight for us, but they didn't have to be able to go, oh, you guys are doing all this stuff. We were pretty lean people. In order to survive in the business that we were in, it's a low-margin business, in order to survive, you have to be lean. There is no room for excess. Everything we bought, we bought used, or we found the best deal on it for machinery. And then we figured out how to make it work, and we fixed it. We did mando bending, which I would not recommend to anybody. I mean, Brian Hayes went on his own and did it, but he learned from us. Yeah. And it's one of the most difficult things that I mean, I'm talking CNC designing using a roamer or ferro arms, backwards engineering, CNC doing all that CAD modeling, all stuff. By far, mando bending is harder. And it seems crazy because most people are just like, it's not that you're just bending pipe, it's actually technically your flowing pipe. So you have so many parameters. Stainless is really hard. In order not to get wrinkles in a bend, you have to bend it at the right speed. You have speed. You have to make sure it doesn't overbend it, and there's temperature of the tube gains. Every time you bend something, make some heat. So you have to combat the heat and get the wrinkles out and keep it round all at the same time. And it's not. It's one of the most difficult things. You can set your machine up the exact same time, and you'll get wrinkles in your bend.

Really? Okay.

So it's never like, you could set your, there's no like auto set up the machine. You have to set the, there's a color wipe die that sits in the mandrel, and that wiper shoe, if that can be set up exactly the same, and it'll wrinkle the inside of the bends. And then you have to mess with like five, six settings to get that to not bend. And then sometimes you'll bend like five things a lot, like you'll have like an assembly where you're bending exhaust tubes. We've been in a lot of exhausts, and like you'll bend the first five bends right, and the last bend will have wrinkles in it. And now that whole part is scrap. Cause we're not, we didn't sell anything to our consumers with wrinkles in it. That was one of our, we're making high quality stuff. That's what we do here. And if it's got wrinkles, it gets blamed. We would sell our blames, like hey fabricators, do you want to come buy it? You know, we'd sell our tube at our cost. Here's a bunch of useful bends you can build, you know, custom exhausts out of, but we can't use it in our production work. So we learned how to do that. It was like we bought the machines, we bought a little mando bender, kind of figured it out. We got a little training on it. That one was too small for our productions, so we bought these huge CNC ones, and we just learned how to do it. And it was painful. We broke the machine many, many times.

That's not cheap, I bet.

Oh, not cheap at all. And then you don't have anybody you can call. Like, you know, like a Haas CNC machine, you break it, you call Haas, and they'll send a guy out. Mando benders, there's no one you can call. They go, yeah, that machine's old. Unless you buy a brand new one, we might help you fix it. But that's only in a brand new machine. And brand new machines, you know, what they call a CNC or bender, not, you know, not a manual bender. They're talking about, you're talking about a million dollars, five hundred grand of an entry. And no one can really, I mean, not saying no one, but you don't enter into the Mando bending game, I'm buying a million dollar machine. I'm sure some people do, and they have acquisitions, and they do it that way, but that's not how we did it. We bought the machine, we replaced all the hydraulic hoses, we go, oh, the solenoid's broken, we go and search the part numbers and find a solenoid and replace it ourselves.

That's crazy.

And we learned how to do it. And that's why Brian, that's another reason, I mean, Brian's a very ambitious guy, but I think he was experienced and involved in that. And you learn a lot of stuff like, oh, this isn't that hard now, because now I've learned the only way you can do this is by doing it all myself. And we put our employees, which is very nice, because when we did, they did dissolve or move our business, a lot of our employees were able to find quality of work. They're all highly skilled, highly valuable people that could easily find a job that paid them, if not what we paid, or better in the industries they're in.

It's huge.

Which is very cool.

The amount of talent that got dispersed is incredible. Everybody that we've had on the podcast that ended up somewhere else, I mean, it's been nothing but just awesome experiences for most of them, I'd say.

It's made up, what, about 15% of the show?

Like 10 or 15% of the show has been MAP people.

Yeah, it's funny how that works.

Yeah, it's crazy, dude. But we've had so many good people on this show. Like it has been fun, that's for sure. So I'm really happy for Brian, though, because, again, he's a sponsor to show. So be sure to check out Hayes Performance, of course. But hayesperf.com. But like it was cool when we had him on because he was explaining how that is such a difficult market to get into as well. Like that there's only a handful of people in the states that really do it at the level that he does as well. Does that pretty much sum it up?

Yeah, I mean, so a lot of the industry bends 409 stainless steel, Magnaflow, all the builder kits you see, even AWE, they're using 409s. Not all of their stuff is 409, but a lot of it's 409. And the reason they use 409 and a lot of exhaust is it can be MIG welded. So it's a speed of production thing. You can MIG weld 304 stainless. It doesn't look very nice, and it's harder to do. So a lot of companies use 409. It's cheaper, there's less chrome unit, less nickel in the material, but it rusts. It's surface rust doesn't look as nice, but it does hold up better than a steel exhaust. Most OEM exhausts are made of 409 stainless. So they'll never really rust out. At least in modern cars, they won't really rust out, but they'll just get tarnished on the outside. What we did is we were only using 304, and we're using American-made tubing. With mandrel bending, the consistency of the hardness of the tube and the consistency of the quality of the roundness of the tube really matters. And the ordering Chinese tubing and bending it is not something you do, because your tools that you use are like a wipe die and a mandrel set can cost you $7,000. So you're not going to put a bunch of crappy tube and you can mess them up, and now you're out seven grand because you use a cheap pipe.

Yeah, he did mention a tooling was not a cheap thing.

Yeah, and he started out, he's got a very basic machine, but it works very good for him because he knows how to do it. He's got an NC bender, which is just a manual bender. It's not a CNC. The CNC's get a whole much more complicated. There's a lot more things and they move fast, and they're just kind of dirty gross. It's a dirty job to mandrel bend, but I like his position and I like what he's doing. I think he's got the right idea. We, when we started mandrel bending, we did it as a necessity to fabricate our products, and then you have a bunch of marketing guys that are like, what if we can sell all this stuff? I see everyone selling all these on Amazon. Can we make these and sell these on Amazon? And I'm like, you're competing with Chinese mandrel bend tubing, and we have a high quality, no wrinkle, 304 stainless American made stainless steel.

Yeah, good luck.

And you're trying to compete with. But we didn't make a ton of money doing it, but I think that it's like, I don't think people understand that sometimes in marketing, you got to be a loss leader. You got to figure a way to get people to look at you and go, hey, they make this stuff, they do this stuff. And like, what else do they sell? So I think there's a lot of like, that's a point of entry. We didn't make a bunch of money on it, but it's important. But then we found ways to bundle kits where you bundle a bunch of bends together and you'd save on the shipping. And it actually, the margin was okay. So it was, it's a very difficult, but you get a lot of guys that, marketing guys that don't necessarily understand that that Amazon Chinese, you know, chemically polish, not even 304 stainless tubing is not, it's like 309, it's softer. That's not the same thing you're getting when you buy the stuff from us. It's not like if you ask an actual fabricator, he's going to tell you, he goes, I prefer the US made round tubing you cut in the middle. It's all oblonged. You know, the two that's actually bent properly and done nicely, you know, because it's expensive to do. Yeah. And we worked our way on, you know, we started out way back in the day. Stainless steel was like $12 a foot, which is, you know, and it's gone back up there, you know, these days. But we at one point, we got our stainless steel under like $4 a foot in bulk, which is crazy because that's where all your margins made. If you can get your stainless steel cost down by buying it in bulk and figuring out ways to get it shipped to you in bulk and pre-cut and do lots of things like that, you can really reduce your cost. And that's like the mentality of MAPerformance. How can we make things in the United States by American-made people, TIG welding, making things, and make it so people can afford it and compete with the people that are selling NVIDIAs and exhausts that's all made in China? It's not bad stuff. It's just not the same thing. These are hand TIG welders.

Different markets, too.

Yeah. And we try to be competitive with those types of consumers. You can't get necessarily all the options they can get, but if you find efficient ways to make things, you can compete. And that was always our goal. I've always been a guy, I want to do it in-house, I want to control how we do it. Because if you start getting all the outsource, the chaos is immense. Because we've tried to outsource things and we've worked with companies, and it's always ended in chaos because it's so hard to manage an outside partner.

Well, all the delays and stuff too every time something is messed up, I'm sure it goes down the line.

Yeah, a lot of language is lost because things are complicated. I mean, even for our fabrication things like costing things like, we used to do 3D, like you have a flange, you have a wastegate entry that comes into a flange, and it has to be profiled. So basically, instead of taking a flange and making it all CNC, like one piece of solid stainless and machining and all, we'd actually have them water jet cut, and then we would come back and stick it in our CNC machine and only do the profile of the tapering on that wastegate side with the CNC machine. So the only thing we're actually machining is that taper. So the flange is cut super fast, relatively cheap on the laser cutter, or, sorry, we had to use laser on things we did in the machine and then water jet on things you do in the machine because there's a hard edge and it ruins tooling, it's a cost of tooling versus, and we would do that and that would reduce our cost. We're still getting the same, you know, basically outcome. The customer wants a stainless steel flange and he wants it 3D contoured, but we're doing it in a way where we're not fully CNC-ing that whole flange, we're only CNC-ing the part that needs, which gravely reduces the cost on the part. And then each little individual thing like that you do, you can extrapolate that and make affordable parts. It's a very, it's a lot of learning you have to do to get down there because we started out some very crude stuff and then worked our way up. But I'm very proud of the people we have worked for us and like the quality, a lot of the guys, like Chance, I can't remember his, or Chase. The other fabricator, I mean, Dave Rasmund didn't do many fabricators, but he learned a lot, he picked up our shop. He was out there take welding in the back and having guys help show our process. And if you're there, you pick up on it. You're watching it every day, you pick up on what people are doing. So there's been a lot, and then obviously Max Olgaard is a perfect example. He's a phenomenal fabricator. He was our R&D guy at our shop. He was an R&D fabricator. So me and him worked very close together, even to the end, because I was the head of new product development. That's kind of position that I chose to take instead of, I used to be all of fab and all of R&D. We never had the divided departments. And then it got so big and so chaotic that you couldn't do that as one person, do all the R&D, be the head of R&D and be the head of fabrication. So we had to have a very hard conversation to separate that. And I was very apprehensive and even argumentative because you don't want to let that go. It's your baby. It built it from nothing. But then we did part of being corporate structure. You have to, sometimes less is more. You have to focus on things more intently.

You have to start delegating and all that.

Yeah, and that's one of the hardest things to do, is delegate. From my perspective, I've always done all my own stuff. To this day, I still do my own stuff. I'm very, very specific, and my intent is always longevity and quality. We have a lifetime warranty on our products too. So that's another whole other ball game of, it's crazy what you see over time for lifetime warranties. The stuff that people do to stuff, and you gotta get warranty, like you have guys with lowered cars that will rub the bottom exhaust in the car, and it rips the flex off. Like, yeah, can I get this warranty? It's like, dude, you can't hit things with the bottom of your car, and it'll rip your flex apart, and expect me to fix that for free. But most of the time, we did. It's not something that we always did, but I'm saying the customers are giving us our time, like, you know what, we'll just send you a new downpipe, because it's the right thing to do. And we knew that in the long term, you'll probably buy more parts from us if we help them out. Versus making a detractor by saying, hey, this is your fault. We're not helping out. Not saying that never happened, but I'm saying more cases than not, this is my good customer, the sales guy come, this is my good guy. He's got his customer messed up. He says he's got a warranty. There's all that stress with the people installing it, and it's like, we'll get you a new one made. We made him send it back a lot, or we make them destroy it so they don't sell it secondhand. They were warranting it a second time.

I know a guy that does that with TVs he gets from Amazon.

Yeah.

Not me. Not me.

No, no, no, no. Don't worry about it.

No, but I'm thinking my mind goes to Jay right away of somebody who wants to work the free return system.

Yeah, like you haven't.

Who hasn't? That's as much as Jay. He rents everything he has because he returns it.

Yeah. Well, we'll get back to that part of the whole corporate side of things and all that. What about, like, again, after the recession, early 2010s? So where's the business at at this point? Right. So you have your third guy. Now you guys are expanding. You're doing some more racing, I'm sure.

Yeah. So we really got more into the racing. We decided that, you know, me and Chris were just kind of like, what car would get people excited? What would be something that hasn't been done at the time that would get attention to us? And I don't even know why neither one of us are Mazda people. We're not RX-7 people. And some reason where it's like we bounced a ton of ideas around, and there was like, what? We were going to originally rear wheel drive a second gen Eclipse, make it rear wheel drive. And there was like, you know, what if we just, you know, what is a super light? We asked ourselves, what's a super light chassis? What's light that we go fast? Because weight's always the killer of anything. If you can make something light, you can go faster with less horsepower. That's how you do it. So we're like, what's the only light chassis out there? And we looked around like, well, you know, FDRX7 is a really light chassis. And what if we put a 4D6 to it and got rid of the roadies? We're not rotary guys. I mean, sorry to the people that are. It's just not our jam. They are very, there's some really fast roadies. I got to, you know, they're crazy. There's some crazy, some of the fastest import cars are our roadies. So I mean, there's obviously something there, but when it comes to reliability, they're not that reliable. Everybody that knows that owns one, they're not that reliable.

It's some black magic too, dude. Some of those fast guys, yeah, it's black magic.

Yeah, it's like the guy that buys it or the guy that builds it. There's a vastly different, like a tuner's car will always be faster than a customer's car. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's the same concept. He's going to push it right to the edge because he knows what to listen for. You can't do that with the customer because they'll explode.

It's hard to teach the customer to do what you do.

Yeah, exactly. So the tuner's cars are always the fastest.

Imagine for a second, you have to tell your loved ones an incredibly sad story. Story goes like this. You got all the parts you needed for your race car. You have put in all the necessary work to have it ready for the upcoming season. But you forgot the most important component of them all. You forgot to get an ECU. From tunebyshawn.com using code Minnoxide for 5% off site wide on all Haltech goodies needed to have you ready for 2025. That's tunebyshawn.com.

Let's get back to the show. So we got into that and then we like, well, what do we do to it? And we're like, we'll swap in a 4G64 at the time.

And remind me again, which car is the 64 out of? Like the 4G64.

4G64, so the newer, there's two different versions. There's basically a six bolt, and there's three versions. But there's basically an early one, like an EVO style engine, and there's like a DSM first generation style engine.

Gotcha, okay.

So what we originally pulled out is Mitsubishi Expos, Plymouth Colt Vistas.

Okay.

So like basically Mitsubishi minivans. And then some of the, we pulled some crankshafts out of Mitsubishi MightyMax trucks. Okay. But those ones have a wide, the block's different in the back, has a wide pattern, doesn't bolt to the Mitsubishi. So these, you can take a van and block in a 100 mil stroke crank, and you can bolt it to a Mitsubishi transmission. Okay. So it's just something that it's been known, it's basically, you add displacement, you add 0.4 of a liter, which is pretty big when you only got two liters. So we were always, the two forks were always like, we want to make big, big power. It's gone full circle, but at the time, more displacement, bigger turbo, spool's bigger, turbo faster, in the very simplest way, makes more power. And all the parts from a dual-over cam will interchange on that. So basically, you're using the block, and then you put all the 1G DSM things on there. So we start out with a 2.4 liter stock 100 mil stroke crank. The cranks are super, like they're one of the strongest OEM cranks that has ever existed, in my opinion. They take so much abuse. In the 6-bolt versions. And we ran those, but ported the head. Trying to get the head gasket was the hardest part. But yeah, then we started, we built the car, we back-capped it. Which is, hey, I'm going to back-capped the car. I've never done it before. I'm not even a chassis shop. I don't know how to fabricate. But when I originally back-capped this car, I had a cutting torch, sawzall, and cutting wheels. It's not like I had fancy tools by any means. But I knew how to do it. I was a good fabricator, and I was a good MIG welder at the time. We were actually MIG welding downpipes together at this time. We were just crazy. Make it aluminized steel and MIG welding. That's how our fabrication department started. We were competing with other companies doing very similar things. You want to make it cheap, you can't make it a three or four, it's just total on its foot. You can't make it inexpensive. When we first started, we'd buy the bends and we'd weld them together. Like how normal people fabricate stuff is how we did it originally before we got more advanced. So then we back half this car and our intent goal was, I want to go fast. Our goal was to run eights. That was our first goal, run eights. So we originally swapped the car without doing the back half, and we got it to like nine thirties in the quarter mile. And this is like, I want to say, you know, 2000, around 2010, 2008, 2010 era. I can't remember exactly, it was a long time ago. And we got the car going really, really fast. And we had an 83 millimeter turbo, which was like unheard of for turbo size in that day, to have an 83 millimeter turbo. And we were using a weird automatic transmission. So these days, they make transmissions that can go very high RPM. Back in that time, you couldn't, not that you couldn't, they didn't make parts for a turbo 400 or a power glide that would rev to 10,000 RPMs. Like transmissions explode from the, because your planetaries are always two to one on the speed. So if you're at 20,000 RPM on a planetary in a transmission, it's going to explode unless they made a billet or an exotic material, light weight stuff. Well, they didn't make that. So we talked to a company called FB Transmissions out in New York, and they were doing these weird Ford AODs. So it's like a F-150 transmission, a four-speed. And they would take out the overdrive and run them as three speeds, but their drums are a lot smaller diameter. So they could add lots of clutches to their drums, and they're a smaller diameter. So when you're revving that high, it's a smaller diameter, so obviously the force is less. So we actually ran a modified Ford AOD with an adapter to a Chevy and then to a Chevy bellhousing adapter to the engine. It's very complicated, very tough to get it lined right, because when you're making that kind of horsepower, a four-cylinder is obviously they're firing, they don't fire like a V8. They're firing every 40, you know, V8's firing at 45 degrees, and then it's every 90 degrees with a four-cylinder. Right. So all that creates vibration, and vibration is crazy. And when you have like a crank adapter and a flex plate and a torque converter and all these adapters, basically, and you also have that higher RPM so everything grows, the converters, to spin a converter that fast, the converter grows, so you have a lot of things working against you. And we had to figure out how to make them not fall off, because what had happened is the vibration would actually start micro welding the crank and adapters to the back of the crankshafts, and you would basically break the flywheel bolts. It would just, every four passes, we'd break flywheel bolts. You had to go back there, file the back of the crank off, clean it up, you know.

Well, you didn't figure this out. Like, you're kind of summarizing this in like 25 seconds, but this is probably a ton of learning and a ton of money at a time, just figuring it out on the fly, I bet, too, right?

Yo, yeah, breaking it and trying to figure out how do we make it not happen again? And then, like I said, this comes to the evolution of us building engines. We built engines for customers' cars since day one. Mitsubishi, you build an engine, no matter what. Like, you want to go fast in Mitsubishi, you got to put some rods in it, bare minimum. You're going to break the rods, and then you're going to ruin your $2,500 block. So, pistons and rods are way more advantageous because if you had to spend extra $2,500 on top of your $5,000 short block, you'd rather just put pistons and rods in your block, your original block, because Mitsubishi's weren't bad at the time to find blocks. They made a lot of, Mitsubishi, DSM specifically, they made a lot of those cars. There was a lot made, but the thing is, at the time, you only really used the first early generations. You used 89 to 92.5 was a 6-bolt, and then up to 94 were 7-bolts, and those ones are known for the crank walk, what everyone talks about. They're known for crank walk for a multitude of reasons, but those ones, nobody ever built those because they pretty much are guaranteed to crank walk, especially the heavy clutch on it. So everyone, so you basically, even in the 2Gs and 1Gs, you all did these three, basically three years or two and a half years of engine block in crankshaft that you could use. All the other parts are, besides the oil burner, changeable oil pans. But that's the blocks that everyone has to use. So they got, everyone raced them and ruined them. Then you ran out of them. But at least Mitsubishi made a lot of like, EVOs are impossible to find. They only made it in EVO. There was no base car. So the reason we raced two fours, too, is because the blocks are more affordable, too. At the time, six bolt blocks. Now they're hard to find, so they went back up in price. But they're very hard to find. And we raced a lot of two fours for the displacement, spooling the big turbos and trying to go fast. So we ended up running mid-nine seconds, and then we go windy more grip. The tires, we can't pick enough tires on here. It's spinning to half-crack. We're making horsepower. We're making mid-900 wheel.

Right, which for the time.

Through an auto, too. I mean, so an auto doesn't really register, especially the huge loose stall.

We're on a car that light, too.

Yeah, what did a car weigh? Did you guys ever weigh?

So in our King Street class, towards the end, we were in King Street class, we had to weigh 3,100 pounds. So that's the rule. So we basically, we would have, we had extra weight in the car to try to make it. You're still using iron blocks. It's not the same thing as some of the cars these days. I mean, they are light cars, but you have an iron block, you have a huge, heavy turbo. You have all of this fuel system, a huge intercooler. Everything's very heavy to make that kind of performance in these things. But yeah, even with the IRS, I think we were right around that 2,900 pound weight range. We probably had to add 200 pounds to the car, just for safety stuff. You know, real caged seats, parachutes, you know, all those types of things. You have to add scatter shields. So then we decided to back half. We're going to back half this car. I've never back half to anything in my life. And I'm like, I can weld, I can fabricate. I mean, how hard can it be? Really hard is the answer. I didn't have a casting table. I could do it on a lift, and I didn't even use a laser level. I just used tape measures, and I'm very good at the tape measure. So we got the chassis very square and put it on jack stands and started hacking away at it until we got it back halfed and all put all this Pro Series 4 link in it and built the whole back half of this car and went out. And I think some of our first pass, we like almost off the trail, we went like eight nineties, like right off the bat, which was very, very cool because we got this fresh car that we just put together and we were running nine thirties. We took four tents off.

Yeah, holy s***, yeah. When you think about it that way, it's a big jump.

And I think one of our first outings was, this was not a good idea at the time. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. Looking back, not a good idea. We went out to E-Town, maybe when they still had the racetrack, and it was like 105 degrees, people were getting heat stroke on the day, so it was like the track was worthless. And that's one of our first times, that's the first debut of this car being backtapped, and we're like, oh, let's see if we can, we're the number one qualifier, which is crazy. We're going against shops like ETS, and we're going against AMS, those type of companies. And we go there at one of the bigger Mitsubishi events, or huge, you know, and it was called the Showdown to E-Town or something, and like I said, we qualified number one, and I actually think we were the fastest car that day. We were at 880s in the mid 160s, but it was spinning at 1,000 foot, like at the top end of the track, you'd add boost to it, and it'd just spin, because it was hot and greasy. But that was a very cool account, to go out in the public. It's one thing to rent a track. I mean, lots of companies do this, and it drives me mad. Like, they rent a track, like, look at the time I ran. Oh, I'm so awesome. Like, go do that in an actual racetrack where people are racing, because you can back up and reduce it, but you can keep having the guy add the traction compound, and you know what I mean? And you get to get it at night time when the air is cold, and the DA is perfect. It's not the same thing as setting a record. A real record is set at a racetrack with people. I'll die on that hill. Because so many people that rent tracks, and you watch them go to all-wheel drive motorsports. I don't want to call them up, but this is back in the day, all-wheel drive motorsports. They would only rent tracks, and every time they'd come to an event, they would always run four tenths slower at the event. So it's like, your car really isn't an 890 car, because it had the first eight second Evo. It's a 920 car. But you want to claim, because you rented the track and got the prep absolutely perfect, and broke six rear ends and five sets of your axles. Spent all day here, broke a bunch of transfer cases, and now you're the man on the internet, even though you really can't do that in an environment that's competitive. So that was always interesting to me, because it's a facade of what people do, and what they actually do is vastly different, but it's all about perception for people. And I'm always the guy, honest, I'm going to do it in an honest manner. We're really going to try it. We never rented a track. We can afford it. So we did make some deals with Brainerd where we could, during our events, they would prep the track. We had a pretty good dealing with Brainerd for a long time because we built Proving Grounds from nothing. I mean, now it's kind of gone back the other way, but that's the nature of anything. But I mean, Proving Grounds is a huge event for them. It was their biggest event besides Nationals. And that's crazy to think that some shops, hey, everyone come up here and race and built this more compact racing thing in the Midwest. And it was the tracks. That's a fairly large track. That's their second biggest event. That's crazy.

Yeah. No, I've always heard stories and never made it out to when it was Proving Grounds, but yeah, I've heard it was pretty epic out there. Yeah. Who's doing all of your tuning at this point? Are you doing the tuning or?

So I know how to do, when it comes to cars, I almost know how to do everything. There's one thing I can tune. I've done tuning on my old Talon back in the day, so it's very simple. I think with anything that you do, if somebody does it every day, they're always going to be inherently better than somebody that does it on occasion. And I have a, my personal thing is, if I get involved in something, I'm going all of the way. I'll consume me, and that'll be my focus. And I'm at an age where I'm wise enough to realize that I can't let everything like that consume me because then I can't focus on what I want to do. Because I thought about being a tuner, but I don't like the other side of tuning is all the questions from people, the constant, my car's doing this, and everywhere you go, you go to the racetrack. I mean, Carl Thomas is one of my friends. He owns a performance shop in...

Yeah, TCP.

TCP.

Yeah, we're trying to get him on. I should plug this back out.

He's a great guy. He's got lots of stories. He's an awesome guy. Me and I have been friends for years. He used to rent our dyno, and we just always have been like minded. He tunes most of my cars, almost every single one of my cars exclusively, unless it's a sport compact thing. Then I'll use Brian May or my old friend back in the day, Jordan Schreier, which he used to tune for us. And now that Kyle Larkin has learned a lot, he's grown a lot as a tuner. I think he's going to be my next tune. I really like Kyle.

He got a little spicy with me yesterday because I told him that you're coming on. He's like, what the f***? I was just at lunch with him. He didn't tell me.

Oh yeah, we were at, yeah, we just were.

He's such a good dude.

Yeah, I'm a very, I don't try to be a private guy, but I just am by nature. It's probably to my detriment. I think I would have a lot more success, and not that I don't have success, I'd have a lot different success if I, I'm just not a braggy person. It's not my, I'd rather just tell you what it is. I don't like to talk it up. It's just not in my nature. I'm very, I like bailing cool stuff. I like inspiring other people, and that's just what I am. I don't like to, I like people to see my bills, but I don't want to talk about it. I don't know. Maybe it's just my, I'm more introverted than extroverted.

Oh no, I get that.

But with this business, I had to be a forced extrovert. I had to learn how to be in the limelight and dealing with structure and corporate stuff, where you're like, you're the guy that has to make the decision. It's very different, because that's not how, I'm a guy that'll sit down for hours and hours and hours and make something in my own head, in my own world, and I'm doing that. That's what I like doing.

So then that must have been pretty difficult then to, at what point did you have to start worrying about marketing and the business as a whole? Like, was that deeper into the 2010s then?

Let me see here. So we moved into a new shop. I'm trying to think of the exact time. We moved into Cottage Grove location, which is our, we basically bought a hollow shell of a building, and then we built out the insides. So we decided we're sick of renting. We were renting at the other shop. We were renting three separate spaces. Okay. Paying rent on three spaces. And it wasn't the right, it was like a triangle corner, and it was like an old industrial park. So it was very, we had to make it work. Our shipping was upstairs. You had to carry all the packages upstairs. And sometimes if we had enough room in the shop, you'd forklift it up to a little mezzanine thing, and you unloaded the forklift. But these guys all day long, our shipping guys were up and downstairs. And it was just, and we had cut the walls down between these spaces. So it's crazy. And then we had to rent another shop for C&Cs across the parking lot for storage for cars. It was so out of hand. And we're like, we're paying, I think at the time, we were paying like 20 grand a month in rent. I don't think people, it sounds like, it's very trivial, but that's a huge expense to try to make money. We just spent 20 grand a month.

Well, how many things you have to sell in order to make that money?

Oh, that's insane.

Oh yeah, it's not like when it's slow, you're not buying as many parts either. That's 20 grand a month, whether you're busy or slow.

Yeah, exactly. So we hit an inflection point, and I want to say, let's see here, I'm gonna say 2013 or 14. I don't remember the year, I guess it doesn't really matter, but we had an inflection point. We got to a $10 million in sales.

Oh, holy s***.

Okay, that's a jump. In inflection point, basically, we hit 10 million and we couldn't really make any money. We're just stuck there. We're at 10 million, we can't grow. We hit a point where we're exhausted our talent in the nicest way possible. We know how to build cool stuff. We know how to make things, but we don't know how to make a more efficient, better running business that makes money, because nobody knows how. Like, you can only get so far at that scale. Because, yeah, it sounds really great. Oh, we did 10 million revenue, but we were spending, we were making very little profit. I mean, almost none.

Right.

You know, we're talking about less than 3% EBITDA. That's nothing. And trying to operate a business, as you get a business that's 3% EBITDA, it's in its death mode. It's dying. You know? So it's not a healthy business. And we, luckily, so Chris, and Chris was, he's more of an entrepreneur. He's got a very entrepreneurial spirit. And he would go and meet with other entrepreneurs, and he would visit with people and go, and you go to meetings every week with people that ran other businesses, and then we basically got caught up, and we go, we need to change. And this was one of the most difficult changes, I think, for all of us in our lives, is that we had to sit down, we had a business coach come in, we paid an exorbitant amount to train us on something called EOS. And basically what it does is it just shows you how to run a business, like structure, it's like have meetings, have, you know, basically every quarter, you have an overview of the whole business, you have, you know, legit numbers, you have stats for every department, you know, how are we doing, you're constantly looking at it, you know, what's measured gets done. So instead of just doing everything freelance, like, yeah, I think we're doing good, or we're making a bunch of stuff, are we making any money? You know, so we got, we basically tightened up our books, we went through this entrepreneur training system, which is one of the most difficult things that I think I've ever done is like basically taking the scrutiny of what you're not good at and putting it out, like out in the world, like, hey, we would have these things where we go into a meeting and be like, what is one thing great you do, what's one thing that you need to change? And to do that with your, like your good friends, like, everyone kind of knows what their friends like, if you stop doing this, you're probably better off. But that's hard conversation to have people that you care about. That's a difficult thing to do in a business. But once you overcome that and you'll be able to have those tough conversations with each other, that's what really makes you grow and it really makes you grow as people, which ultimately makes the business grow. And we had that $10 million inflection point. We got the US, we got these trains, we had these meetings and we kind of went this more corporate structure. And our business, I mean, went wildfire. That was the catalyst.

So how many employees did you have at roughly around that period? Like how many would you have to guess?

I would probably, in the 40s. Oh wow, okay. We had 40 employees. I mean, say we had that brand new building. We actually chosen that. We moved to Cottage Grove and we actually, like a year into, we choose to stop working on cars, which is crazy. That's how we literally fundamentally built our business from ground one is building people's race cars, building people's performance Mitsubishis. And we go, we actually went and dabbled in some, we built a 69 Camaro. We did a full Restomod, and we had, that car was very, very cool. That was our last kind of herodic ride to gain some different business. We couldn't get any more import business at the scale we were at. And then we also had this duality of dealing with people going, my car is not what I want it to be. I'm having problems with my car. So I'm going to bash you online at the end performance. This time you're talking about, you're selling $10 million and stuff, and you have a guy giving you a negative review because he didn't like something they've done to his car that has nothing to do with selling him parts. So it's like that Walmart effect. You get so big, people are going to leverage you against your other assets to get what they want. That's not a good position to be in. And it's not we ever try to screw people over, but I just think you get clientele that goes, hey, my motor blew up in my car. Well, there's a reason your motor blew up. And so usually it's because they didn't do anything else right. It's like their fuel system's wrong. There's so much. You know what I mean? So your built engine is not your problem. It's all the other things. So you basically go get a guy to get his car. I was like, I can't tune your car and make sure what you want until we fix all these things. They're like, well, let's know what I, you guys sold me an engine. You know what I mean? And then your bill's quite a bit more because they had to fix all the problems they have because it's the reason it blew up in the first place. That's a difficult spot to be in. And then also selling all these parts. So we had a hard, hard talk to them because I was not, I'm like, I love building race cars. That's what I love doing. I really don't want it. We had two full-time techs at the time that were just working on cars. And we just go, you know what? We need to focus on our business. We need to manufacture more products. And we need to do more R&D and build more products. We have to give up something in order to grow and move forward. And through this process of learning this EOS system, you kind of cut the fat. What's the thing that's given us the most hassle in providing the least amount of revenue? And we go, cars. So either we divided the business to something else, or we cut it, and we cut it. And it was a very hard decision. At the time, it felt awful because that's what we built our business on. But at the same time, that released us, and it gave us the ability to take that stress off our plates and focus on what was really growing in the background, which is our e-commerce side of it and our fabrication side. I mean, they're both fairly large businesses on their own.

So we kind of made a big jump there, right? From like, what was it, 2007, 2008, where it was just three of you guys to 40. What happened in between then? So what was the first thing to kind of grow there? Was it just adding more people and more skill sets? How do you go from like this 125 by 40 into three scattered shops?

At the time, you can't ever reflect on it and know this is exactly what did it, but I have an idea. So what I think really jumped this long is our cars going fast. People start noticing a unique car in a market. Mitsubishi America was growing and growing at the time, and we had a very fast competitive car. And people came and said, I want whatever engine you got in that thing, I want that one. You know what I mean? Whatever you got in there, I want it. I've seen that thing go, it goes. I want that engine. And so that was the catalyst. As you started going fast, you started tying this in. And right before we actually moved to the other shop, we transitioned from DSMs to EVOs. We did a market transition. We were still big DSM parts, but we need to get into the next market. So EVOs came out in 2003, so people really aren't modding EVOs to anything substantial a couple of years into it. Nobody takes a brand new car. It's like, oh, make 1,000 horsepower. That's not how it works. So you got to think about we're getting to that 2010 range. You know, cars are six, seven years old. Warranties are up, and people are starting to build them. And then we decided with the EVO, we got an EVO. We're like, what's the supply, all the same spirit of how we build things into an EVO? It's no different. It's just an EVO. And then we did it with the stock ECU at the time. We made 1,053 all-wheel horsepower, which was the highest stock ECU horsepower by a long shot. Yeah, jeez. And that was a 2.4 as well. We've always been known for building 2.4s. And it's not like, and I just want to point this out too, is dyno numbers are another thing too. Is you see a guy and you have a dyno chart, and you do one little blip at the end, you'll see a little blip of, you'll hear 1,000, he's like, oh, I made 1,000. And if you actually look, take that blip out of there, it didn't make 1,000. And ours made 1,000 horsepower for 1,800 RPM. For the inside of what really 1,000 horsepower is like the true numbers, because we had another shop that had a Dyno Dynamics Dyno. Shane over at, it was DB Performance, he had tuned a guy, they bought a bunch of the parts, installed them from AMS on an Evo, and they also claimed like, oh yeah, we make 1,000 horsepower tuning. I go, you can come use my Dyno for free? He goes, I'll give you $1,000 if you can make 1,000 horsepower on my Dyno. You're using corrected Dyno Dynamics numbers to my Dyno, like your car doesn't make 1,000 horsepower. I'm willing to bet you can use my Dyno for free. Come prove me wrong. Because they were basically trying to at the same time claim that they were doing the same thing we were doing. It's like, no, you're not. No, you're not. We built everything. We built the engine. We machined the engine and house. We fabricated the turbo kit. We did everything on that car and house. The only thing we didn't do is the roll cage. Once again, I'm a firm believer, if a guy's an expert at doing roll cages, he's gonna do it far better than a guy that dabbles in it. When it comes to safety, I'm not sacrificing my safety at 170 miles an hour.

Roll cages are like those things you hope you never have to use, but when you do, you better hope it's freaking done right.

Use the pros, the ones that have actually had cars that crashed, that have learned. Yeah. Not saying we could, we definitely could have done it, we definitely could have, but you just don't have the experience. Like Richard at RaceCraft, that's where he used to be, I don't know, Mean Street Performance, I can't remember the name, but there's a guy named Richard, he's down in Iowa at RaceCraft, and he did our roll cages, and that dude, don't get me wrong, Patience is the same caliber, they did the roll cage in Mass 10, same caliber, people like, you can put a paper between the A pillar and your roll cage. Our Evo cages are the nicest cage I've ever seen in an Evo, just super tight, because when we built our Evo originally, this is a street car. I was always like, same with the RX-7, these are, it was a King Street car, that's a street car, I can drive that and I can go race people in the street. That was our super, same with Evo, this is a street-driven race car, but you can drive through Taco Bell, you can five deep in that had a back seat. And we made the cage so you could sit in there like five deep. And we did it all the time. I mean, it was way too fast to do and hits with five people in it, but you could. And there's something, there's an essence about that that customers really like. They like that, even though it's really not an obtainable, reasonable thing to do, it's fun for people to watch. It's like that excitement, that's really cool what they're doing, that's awesome. You always see people take their, Greg, which are so popular, they're full-out race cars, but they're driving down the road and they're going through drive-throughs and there's something really cool about that that people really love.

And especially at the car like that, like if you want it to, you can just throw snow tires on it too, if you really want to get crazy with it.

Yeah, in that car, that same car did a bunch of versions. We did some turbo tests. We started building turbo chargers because us and FP Performance, Zona Rotor now, had some just falling out with us selling a bunch of stuff and demanding, our customer was demanding a certain amount of time to get to build and him going, I'm just building these whenever I feel like it, too bad. And then we were trying to provide customer service and we can't provide customer service if a vendor's not supplying. So just like anything else we do, like, oh, why can't we just build turbo chargers? Let's just buy a balancer. We did some pretty good stuff, but I would say it's one of our learning failures. We did make some stuff for a good job, but I think the problem was is that we built things that, you always say this turbo's got this rating. This turbo, let's say this turbo max rating, this turbo 650 wheel horsepower. Every dude's got to turn up to 12. So he's overspinning that turbo. He's like, oh yeah, I only make it 400. You go find it as like a Facebook post or an Instagram post. I mean, maybe not Instagram, but sometimes Facebook posts, this guy make it like 750. And then he's trying to get his turbo warrant. He's like, you're a hundred horsepower over its threshold. The turbo is not durable enough to handle that. I mean, if you want to race it, but you're gonna have to pay to get it rebuilt, don't blow it up and be like, this turbo sucks. You've just outran this turbo. I mean, they're still on factory bearings. They're modified factory bearings, and the turbo's improved, but each turbo size has a certain size of bearing. And as you increase horsepower, it needs more load on everything. So you can't just keep turning it up because it's gonna ruin the bearings. And we basically got to the point where all of our customers wanted to have a fast spooling bolt-on turbo, but they also want to make 700 horsepower. It's not a realistic game in EVOs. Even Force Performance went away from it. All the turbos had to get custom ball-bearing center sections, and they went away from building a lot of those turbos because of the warranty was so heavy, because every dude turbo lights up instantly, and they make a ton of horsepower, but they don't live a long time doing that. And that's always a chaos. We got so much chaos, and then we got turbo warranties, and we got to the point where we're so big again. And then people were like, oh, I'm not going to buy parts. And we started basically hurting our customer experience with our customers, which was one of our staples. We want to make sure we help. So we ended up having to cut that out of our repertoire, too. The same thing, we had supplier issues. Turbo takes a lot of custom components, and we're not using any OEM components. These are custom cast comp covers, bigger ARs, and custom center sections, custom stainless steel divided turbine housings, lost wax castings, very complicated stuff to make. And we're using titanium aluminide turbine. It was just these very exotic, at the time, turbo stuff, and trying to make these reliable turbos. It became such a headache. And we quickly realized we were just not making any money. We were warranting more than we were making money on them. And we just had to make a choice where we found some other turbo suppliers who started building full turbo kits for cars so they're not doing bolt ons. Because it all stemmed from just a relationship with FP. It's not like I get him. He was trying to build very high quality products and takes time to build high quality products. And we're trying to grow a giant growing business that wants to supply people with parts at a reasonable time. And then we ask you for updates and you just basically tell us to pile in sand. It just doesn't work. No. But I think all the market grew at the same time, so it's not like this was not a unique issue. But this was an issue. We were just trying to find a way around that for our customers because ultimately, we had all the customers come to us going, they're not buying from FP., they're buying from us to buy through FP. You know, because they wanted to buy the rest of the parts. Because we had such a good presence. Like, I mean, I'm sure you could ask any of our sales guys how much follow up they have to do with vendors. Say, can you get this vendor a call and see when they get a delivery date? Because it's all about our customer experience. Like, we had to be very focused on our customer experience. And to this date, even if the emphasis is still there, even though prices have changed and gone up, I think it does help when you have customer focused people. You expect loyal people. I mean, a lot of people want to buy cheap, but I think people that get taken care of always go back. That's I fundamentally believe that. But the Internet has changed that. Amazon has changed that.

So what was the biggest thing that kind of grew you guys in towards like before you hit that $10 million a year, right? What were some of the things that you guys were selling that were just kind of like the main bread and butter? Was there anything that comes to mind?

Yeah, we sold the, we made some specialty deals with, there's a lot of things. I mean, there's, because like I say, we would sell a ton of parts because people like, for instance, we made that 1,000 horse with Evo. And all of a sudden, we went from like, not building any Evo engines to having a 20 engine backlog.

Okay, so you're building 20 engines, for example, in that year?

Well, no, not even that year. I'm just saying, like, we went from building no Evo engines to having 20 on the queue to build. And so, because everybody wanted it. I want whatever that motor is. They just think, I want that. You know, so, and that, it seems like every time you make a horse race, you start going faster at racing, and people just really gravitate toward you because you're the guy in the industry doing stuff for their cars. That's the most relevant. And everyone goes in and out of relevancy. There's very few companies that can keep relevancy throughout things, but it's in and out of relevancy, and that's what we were. And that's what really bolstered our growth, because they would buy all, like I say, buy their engines and they buy all the other parts.

Exactly, so what are some of the other parts that would kind of come with that?

Turbo kits, fuel systems, and we make custom packages for all these. And like I say, we also partner with people. We partner with AEM, and we were selling Y bands, and we were using those as loss leaders to get everyone to buy everything else from us. We kept drawing people in by selling these AEMs, basically a race to the bottom, is what you call it. Because you're basically making no money on it. But half your customers probably just buy it to keep the AEM, but then the other half are buying other things from you. So it's getting the attraction of people, people seeing you sell stuff, they keep seeing your name pop up, and you build trust with customers that way. And that's important. And then also, I'm not an SEO guy, but I understand it. Getting index on Google. I mean, working with Google, getting Google rankings, getting reviews. Not my specialty, not something I did. I was definitely having, we all having conversations, meetings about how to do this. And we really dialed that in, and Dan Carey did a lot of that, and Chris Carey, they both, they're very sales marketing type people that really tried to push that. And that's what really started taking off, is the combination of building cars and putting all the videos out, and everybody's seeing it. And then that equals people calling us to order parts, even if they weren't our parts. And then we were making also a lot of our parts, but they went hand in hand. There wasn't a huge jump in sales until we built race cars. So there is a direct correlation with building cool, relevant things, and people buying a ton of parts. Because we also read that with some of the Honda Civic stuff that we did. Because everyone had an argument like, oh, well, we did all this over here. This is why we got it. We built this race car. This is how we got it. And then we used an experiment with the Honda platform, because it was well established when we got into it. Because that's what we've done in the past. We go, what have we done in the past? Let's work. Let's try that again. We went into the Honda market. It was already kind of established. And the reason, a lot of people don't realize this because you're not deeply in the industry. It's like an established platform is way better to go into. Because the first people always seem to fail or not do as well, because they get overran by scale. So when they go into a market, somebody has to build a market in order to market to exist. You know, I use UGR Lambos as an example. No one cared about those type of Lamborghinis besides being a Lamborghini. No one thought those cars were fast or could be fast. And all of a sudden, they're like, well, we just made 2,000 horsepower. True. And now all those Lambos, everyone's like, I'm buying that Lambo because I know it can make 2,000 horsepower. They never would have bought that car if they didn't know it can make 2,000 horsepower. So somebody has to build the market and then other people can capitalize on it by... So we had a lot of people in the PRL not saying that they all make good products. We had a lot of companies working really hard on the Hondas. We're like, we can get the Honda. We have all the same adjacent skills. We can make exhaust intakes, make all these really high quality stainless steel stuff. We're very focused on that. And we built a race car. And we went fairly fast. I mean, that's a 1.5 little tiny engine. We went like bottom 10s in a four door Honda Civic. Or no, a two door Honda Civic Si. You know, 1.5 liter.

Which generation Honda was that, by the way?

10th gen.

10th gen, okay.

Yeah, so they came out. So I mean, we made like almost 600 horsepower on a 1.5. I mean, and these aren't like an architecture of like the old D series, but D series are still a decent size architecture of a block. I mean, D series are still small, like compared to like a B series, like that bore spacing is what I'm referring to. That 1.5 is a tiny engine. That whole engine long block weighs 180 pounds, the long block. So it's more of a size of a motorcycle engine than it's the size of a car engine. So in that respect, if you're dealing with these, I mean, the pistons are just tiny, just hilariously tiny. Like we had to buy a special boring head or a honing head for a machine because the bore was so small. Like it wouldn't go down small enough to machine them. So it's just that, and you learned how to do it. You learned how to, you know, we were the first ones that kept breaking gears, messing with oil pumps, like we were really pushing that platform, and it directly related to selling a ton of parts for them. We became relevant in the Hondas, and we had a pretty good relevancy in the Hondas, and then we got, kept growing and growing, and then we kind of tried to, hey, we need to grow more. We need to build more things. And it's very important, we always tried to like, you have to stay in your niche of vehicle, but you also have to, so you have expertise, so people call you, but you also can't go too wide because you lose the expertise. It's a very, but you also need to scale a corporate business that's growing, you know.

It's a lot of things to juggle.

To juggle all that, to keep them all in cohesion, because no matter as you scale, you're going to diminish some of the expertise. It's impossible, not impossible. In my experience, it's not, you can never do it as well as a small shop can do it, for very specific expertise on a platform, but you can definitely do it pretty well. With the HANs, we did pretty good. We learned a lot, we transferred to our employees, we did employee trainings with our people, and these are all things we learned how to do. It's hard to train people. It's hard to train people that aren't an engine guy or a car builder, and then get them to sell the stuff that you're building with all the features. It's different. It's a very difficult thing, and getting that kind of scale and writing directions and instructions on every little thing, all the key points for selling, it becomes a very cumbersome process.

So at this point, it's the DSMs, the Evos, and the Hondas that are pretty much like your main things.

Well, I also missed that we also did an Evo 10 too, that we made really high horsepower. We've gotten to Evo 10s. This is all the same time we did. The Hondas were later on. I just was using it as an example of just us going back racing and gaining track, because on the Evo 10 platform, we didn't do any racing. Because Evo 10s are the only drag cars, more road race car. I mean, people drag race them, but they're more of a road race, like I want a fast street car. And we sold a metric. We sold the most Evo 10 engines. We sold the most of those. But we never raced that car, which is very odd, but we happened to get in the market right at the right time where people were buying Evo 10 stuff. And like I say, they all blew up. Everyone turned up, I don't make 400 horsepower, break a rod. And then it goes through the block, saws the motor in half, you basically need a new head, new block, new crankshaft, and you're spending a lot of money.

You go to map.com and then...

Yeah, and we were the experts. Honestly, we did it really, really well. We did it at high level engines, and we would, a lot of the companies would go, you can only buy new stuff, and we would go, what we do is we buy rally art engines. So rally art's a lower, the actual physical long block's the same. And you're replacing the cams, valve springs, pistons, rods, anyway. So basically, all you need is a block. So we would go, we'll sell you a used block and head engine, and we'll build you a full motor as a long block, but you don't have to spend the cost of a new block crank and head, because you could buy, let's say, a long block for 2,000 bucks, like a rally art engine, and you'd spend $5,000 on all new stuff, for Mitsubishi's cores are ridiculously expensive. And they go in and out of stock, and it's all over the place. And then, anybody that's an engine builder will know that a season block is far superior when it comes to building than a brand new one, because the metal relaxes. You get heat cycling in it. In NASCAR things, they actually have a vibration table. They put blocks on, they shake the blocks, and it basically messes with the grain structure in the blocks. As you heat cycle, the grains of the block change. And when it's brand new, it's got a lot of tension in it. So you're trying to machine an engine that's got a ton of tension. It's brand new, it's never been ran. And that engine's also, you got to think about it, OEMs, like, well, that makes 270 horsepower, so we can sell off our specs to make 270 horsepower for a long period of time. So that movement in the block and the sleeves and everything moving doesn't matter because it'll still be within the threshold. Now you're taking that same engine, making 1,000 horsepower, everything becomes a lot more relevant on that bore clearance, bore spacing, bore taper. It's a lot more...

It needs to be more precise, for sure.

Way more precise. So I prefer, we always prefer using used blocks. It's a lot more work to clean them. We had to soda blast them. We had to do so much work to get them back to a new block. But we were able to save our customers the money. You could, if you get a quote from a guy saying, I only use brand new stuff, or you get a quote from us that I'll use a used long block, you get the same outcome, but mine's going to be 2,000 miles cheaper. That's just the ways that we went through of trying to find the value for our customers and pass it on. And I think that's attributed to a lot of our success too. With that, cause like I say, the engines, we sold a lot of engines and it drove a lot of the other sales. If you just 86 the engines from our whole program, I bet our revenue would have went down substantially. But it's hard to really quantify and prove it. It's not like we went and really set aside. That's a lot of people's beliefs. We never went through all the books and looked at every single engine sale. We never did that, but we argued about it a lot.

When you stopped doing the customer cars, did you continue to do shop cars though, for R&D and take them to the track? When you did this Honda, you said you never actually took it out to the track?

No, so the Evo X we didn't really bring to the track. We did some road-core stuff with the Evo X. We never really raced the Evo X. And then all the other cars from that point on were bought for R&D and their own cars. And we did all the R&D, all the videos, all the media coverage, all with the cars that we owned. Okay. Towards the end, we probably owned 10 cars as a shop. Because borrowing people's cars is like the most impossible. Give and take with customers, you wreck something on their car, and you gotta replace it. And it's always like, I need my car back. It's going wrong. We've done it. It's nice. I don't think it's worth the, it's not worth the hassle. Because when you have your own car, you have a lot more leeway on things, breaking and dealing with it. And a lot of times our cars, and we try to cycle through cars, we try to like, towards the end, we're trying to have a strategy. Like if we get this new car, we got to sell this car. We have to like kind of keep a balance, like a budget for the cars. So whatever. But you also want to hold on to cars for any future development. You know, if a guy's having a problem with the product, test fitting. A lot of our fabricated stuff, you know, jigs get dropped, things get, you know, you're doing hundreds and hundreds of volume. You know, thousands of products on one jig of volume, they can get misaligned over time. So you got to like verify it. And then we had verification pieces. Basically, we'd build a perfect example of a product and keep it in a box so that we could always go stick that back in our jig and go, does the jig still fit that product over, you know, when you're using it's basically like a verification to make sure your jig and then sometimes you have to like cut something and modify it to move it back into position. But anytime you have a little position moves, you got six feet of pipe and it moves a quarter of an inch. Now you have four inches on the end of that six feet of movement. It's like a big arm, you know what I mean? So it's like difficult processes to do.

And again, that's one of those things where you just kind of had to learn along the way. It's like, oh s***, that's a little different size now.

Yeah. And I know it's probably irrelevant, but it's funny when we first made these jigs, we were making jigs originally, and they're big, heavy pieces of plate, they weigh 200 pounds, we're trying to make it all rigid. And then towards the end, we're having all the pieces like CNC laser cut, and we're welding them together onto a single piece of tubing. They're all lightweight, they all have back purge ports on them. Everything's built, they're all labeled and color coordinated for the car and labeled. And then they all have, before we used to use threaded screws, and they would clamp down, and then to the end of the, we had toggle clamps that would hold all the things in the jigs. The evolution of our jigs is crazy. You go from like, you don't know how to do it, you just make like, it's gotta make something that I can replicate. You don't know what you're doing. There's not a school that you can go to that'll teach you jig building for that type of thing. So you have to learn at the fly. And then the evolution of our company, we have to keep making more, making better, making duplicates. And then we got really good at it. Our welding, I mean, to this day, I will challenge anybody when the welding we have, I mean, MAP is different now. I mean, obviously, a lot of the main people that are, that were there aren't there anymore. The other company absorbed it, and they, I mean, they only took a few employees. They basically took our remote staff, and they took our, like, two of our shop guys, our shipping lead and one of our fab managers. But they don't really have any of our old knowledge. I mean, we tried to teach them the best we could as they moved, but they didn't give us lots of heads up. And I think they're just changing the direction of the business. For what they need works for them. But a lot of that talent was lost. And unfortunately, you know, I think a lot of people can learn, they're definitely going to do better. They're going to learn, they have to relearn some stuff. That's hard. Because when you get something, you have a lot of learned knowledge and then you change it. I don't think that they knew the consequences of their actions in that regard. But they seem to be doing okay. And like I say, I still think they're making good products.

That's going to be a tough one to predict in the long run, right? Because it might be a lagging thing. Because when did the whole acquisition thing happen?

It was in 2020, I believe.

Yes. So we're about to go into 2025 here. And I don't know, man. There could be some long-term changes. Who knows? Who knows what happens in the long run? Because that old guard is gone, like you mentioned. If they only take a handful of people and a lot of the talent here got dispersed, I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Yeah. I mean, we did have people training and people doing and getting and they had all of our jigs and all the stuff was explained. But to start redeveloping things, the time it takes to redevelop things. I mean, they tried to get a lot of us, but it's just like getting a bunch of people to go from Minneapolis, Metro to go to Wrightstown, Wisconsin, is not a thing that people are like, yes, I would love to live in the middle of Wisconsin. It's not the same thing. It's not the same atmosphere.

Well, being like, where was MAP? It was like 15 minutes from St. Paul, right?

Yeah, it was in Tonic Grove, yes. Yeah, and then most of all, all of our employees worked in a thin radius of that.

Yeah, so you lose a lot of anything, really. Like, imagine I had to just shoot the dogs, pack the wagon. It's like, just lost all my friends here, gotta go to a different middle of nowhere town. Is there even a Chipotle there? I don't know, I don't know the city. That's how you know, is there a Starbucks?

Hey, as a fellow Wisconsinite, let's not get too crazy here, all right? It's a pretty cool state.

No, I don't talk, yeah, I forget, yeah.

Well, it'd be, I think it's like the same thing as if we were to take our shop and move it to like, Brainerd. There's lots of people in Brainerd, but Brainerd is not Minneapolis, St. Paul.

It's not Hudson either. I'm technically a suburb of the metro, even though I'm in Wisconsin. Yeah, it's on the other side of the state. It's a completely different animal.

And I get why they did the change. I mean, if you do numbers, and the acquisition they did, they didn't own the building, so they were paying rent on the building. So for them, they had a big enough warehouse, so they built a huge warehouse, so they thought they were gonna expand like crazy. And they had a bunch of leftover warehouse, because obviously after COVID, it was really high, and then it went down to low.

Yeah, things got weird.

They're still doing really, really well, and they're doing awesome in the wheels and tires. Like, they're doing great. And I just think that they made a bigger building and tried to grow into it, and they go, we have some extra space, we can save X amount by moving this, instead of paying rent here, we can do it here, and it's like a million dollars a year. You know what I mean? So for them, I get it. I don't know if it's the... In hindsight, I don't think it was the best choice for the business to keep it what it was, but I think with anything that grows and goes corporate and everything gets sold, it's going to change. I think everybody that's done acquisitions, GrimSpeed, a lot of their companies have done the very same thing. I think it's how everything ends up. It's just the way corporate is. I think corporate people got realized like, hey, these little small support projects are getting pretty big, and they're selling a lot of stuff. How do we get involved in order to make money on that? And I think that you always have the peers that started, and then you always have the people that carry it on. And it's just a different. It's that inflection point between $10 million and then getting the upper revenue that we talked about early off camera. It's just that evolution of things that you have to have structure. You have to have very corporate style meetings and everything.

Yeah, and then they come in and they dangle that carrot in front of you. It's kind of hard to not get you. You want to touch base in a little bit on the acquisition then and how that came about and discussions and things like that. Like, what does that look like? Did they come and approach you guys at that point or?

Because like, you went from being a guy, a couple of guys with a shop, right? You probably didn't even have an exit strategy.

Zero, I mean, we started getting bigger. It definitely, so I'm not, I could have worked there. I liked what I did. I mean, I was basically the director of new product development and I liked that position. Some of the things I don't like about that position is just the complexity that you had to do. If you make things so hard and so complex, I mean, how do you do things quickly? How are you quick on the market? Because these smaller shops can be quick on the market. They're not doing all the things that we have to do, all these really detailed instructions and all these super complicated assemblies, because they're smaller, they're doing smaller scale. But in the same term, you have to be able to go as fast as they can. You shouldn't be held up. It's the crux of anybody that grows. You have to learn how to grow and manage the speed of what you do it with products. And we got very laborious, and we cannot deflect from this path. We need to do all of this. We need to cut some of this. If you want to be fast and agile and get into markets quick, we have to cut some of this fat and then build in as the product takes off, then start building this. Let the product, the product doesn't have to be polished before it's out, but I got a lot of pushback. Then you got acquired by a company at the same time, and they don't know how to make products. I mean, it's not like they, they know how to sell products, and they know how to make wheels and sell wheels, but they're not a performance fabrication shop. It's just a different thing. You know, building things, it's, so it's different in that regard, and I think that the speed to market and how many things you have to make is a lot more difficult and a lot different. They all have their own challenges, but a lot different. And I don't think they had the knowledge to know, hey, they relied on us. That's why they actually kept, like, they didn't layer fire any of our leadership team. They kept us all on. Chris always had a strategy. Chris, I think Chris, you know, to be honest with you, I think he worked with so many other people and watched, and he just, like, felt like this is the time that I want to, like, I'm kind of burnt out. I'm sick and tired of, like, we got into the huge thing with EPA and compliance side of it thing. When Crump took office, what he did is, in my understanding, what he did is he basically goes, EPA, we're not funding you anymore. We're not just giving you guys money to be employed. You've got to earn your money. So you have to go out and find people that are breaking the rules and earn your money. Oh, so in a way, it kind of made it, like, yeah, so we know the whole thing where they all said that, oh, he's defunding the EPA. He's no regulation. Everyone's screaming about it. What he did is he goes, in order for you to gain your wage, you have to go find people that are breaking the rules and go after them. And that's how you get your money. You get your money from settlements, from companies that are breaking the rules. So it's funny because everyone assumes he lacks on the EPA. He did defund them, but they found their funding on criminalizing and going against all the people that are making aftermarket performance parts.

Well, that and also Sam Barrows said it on his episode, that they're going after like chicken fryers or something as well. It's something weird, like other ways to...

It's such nonsense. It drives me insane because they do all these things about emissions. And real guys that are bracing the cars, Ace Evos, they're being tuned, they're running on e-fuels. When you make more horsepower, more cylinder pressure, you have more cylinder pressure, you have more efficient clean burn. You're burning more of the fuel that's in that cylinder more efficiently. So you're going to be leasing less hydrocarbons, you'll be releasing less emissions. And you're not driving these cars every day. So actually, the lifespan of that car is leasing so much less emissions. But what they did is they go, look at all these diesel guys blowing black smoke all over everything. And in California, it's a huge issue, like every dude's got to delete a diesel, and everywhere you go, all these guys with bros with trucks, and it's all they're doing is rolling coal everywhere. And people go, we don't want that. And to a degree, I don't want that either, because there's ways you can do without rolling coal.

Yeah, a properly tuned diesel actually doesn't roll coal.

That's my whole point, but I'm saying, so these guys have deleted a lot of stuff, so they came after the diesel, and they treated the diesels the same as they treated everyone else. So they assume that we're doing the exact same thing. They don't know enough about cars, they slumped us all in this giant group. You guys are all breaking the rules. And we did strategically, it's like, okay, we're the biggest tree in the forest. The biggest trees are always the ones that hammer first, because it's the easiest and most obvious. So if you're at scale, you gotta look at it from their perspective. If I go after 10 small companies, I'm gonna get a little bit of return. If I go after one big company, I'm gonna get a big return. Basically, you're gonna have to lawyer up, you're gonna have to argue in court, because this is all interpreted rules with the Clean Air Act. It's interpreted. It's the worst thing ever, because it's nothing specific. It's not like you do this, you do this. It's all an interpretation of the Clean Air Act. It's just very vague and it's all made up. And the people that are arguing the points don't know anything about anything. They don't know anything about cars or emissions. They just look at what they see and their perception of it and then they can find you an egregious amount upon that. And we got to that emission stuff and we were doing intent to get in plies, we're making sure that we're using like trying to use 50 state legal cats, we stopped selling to California, any exhaust products besides capex because they're legal. But anything that could scrutinize permission took all the things that could potentially be up for scrutiny off our website, which was a huge like, you lose revenue at the top, just cut it and then you always small shops going, oh yeah, we still make all this. So that's just part of just being a corporate business, if you have to insulate yourself from that level of scrutiny.

Well, we're still in the first things to go.

As weird as it is, like Mitsubishi even makes factory EGR block off plates, and we had to delete all those, they're from different cars, but those like TGV deletes, catless downpipes, that was the hugest for us. Like everything we ever built has to add on everything. That's part of the intent to comply. We intend to comply with the rules. And people were like, well, why don't you just get it carved? Why don't you just take all your products, get them carved? It's 10,000 or 12,000 dollars a product. Yeah.

Okay.

You know what I mean? I mean, that's not every version. That's not just one part, it's every version of the product. So if you make four different variations of downpipes, you're testing all four. So one product line, Aaron takes all this to get it carb approved. I mean, you got a hundred grand tied up. And it's unrealistic to get something carb that you don't know is going to sell well until it sells well.

Yeah. Holy s***. That multiplies really quick.

Yeah. So obviously I'm sure that if you did a vault, if you, I would imagine if you got really involved in, you use Cima Garage, you use things like that.

I was going to say, have you guys ever used Cima Garage?

We had lots of talks, lots of conversation, but you have to, it's not here. We can't, we have to go there. With all our stuff.

Cause they only had the California one at the time, right?

You have to go there. And so, it's just not going there, transporting the cars, flying people down there, like to do the testing and change out the parts. This is not a small scale thing. And when you're a big OEM, it's no big deal. It's just part of building a car. Cause you're going to sell 100,000 of those cars. You know what I mean? You have that built in, and they have built in emissions equipment testing in their buildings, which is-

Millions and millions and millions of dollars.

I don't know if you've ever talked to Dalen, but Dalen, he was in charge, like, hey, how much would it cost for us to build an emissions compliance? We thought like, hey, what if we figure out a way to have an emissions compliance facility built into our facility, and we can use that to build all of our products emissions compliant, and also rent it to other people as a strategy? That was very, very expensive. They were talking like four or five million dollars just to build a basic one. Yeah. And so that compliance, and the craziest thing is like we always write laws down, we have very clear, you can argue the point. This is all people's beliefs. There's no written laws that say, if you do this, this equals this. It's like we interpreted this defeated emissions, and now we're going to fine you for every product you sold. Every single one. Not one time, every product you sold has a fine. So if you sold $10,000 products, you're getting 10,000 fines. Holy s***. So it's not, I get what they're trying to do. I get there, I care about the environment. I care about, I don't want us to ruin our environment. There's no question. But if I look at the car and it's overlying carbon output, how much it's doing and how much emissions it's polluting, there's no, how many EVOs do you guys know with 200,000 miles on them? I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'm saying in the grand scheme, there isn't, they don't. So if you look at the basis of that car for its longevity, it's gonna lose this much emissions from running this long. They'll never run that long. So even if it was polluting more with more performance, it will never have the actual overall pollution of its life expectancy of that car because it's never driven as much. And now any person that's reasonable could go make some consensus on this and go, this isn't a problem. But like I say, then we got into this game where it's just this level of nonsense that we had in five years.

Well, again, our Detroit trip was a very, we learned a lot on that one, but it's like, especially when it comes to emissions, we got to see two different facilities regarding that. We did go to SEMA Garage and we'd chat with them and see what that insists. But there's so many of these weird little things they try to get people on. It's like, all right, well, it has this much emissions within the first 10 seconds of startup, and how long does it take to do that? It's ridiculous. Or even if you go between port and direct injection, it's like they have their own different trade-offs, and it's like, you can never win.

And right towards the end, this is how crazy we got towards the end. So newer cars, they have, so basically you shut your car off, you have evaporative emissions. So basically emissions will leak out. If you ever pull your intake tube off your throttle body and you close your car, you'll see a little bit like a puff of smoke come out of it. That's just like leftover combustion that's coming out of the intake manifold. Well, all new cars come, not all, but most new cars come with a charcoal filter in the air intake box. So it's got activated charcoal. It looks like a flat sheet of white paper with black charcoal inside of it that basically goes underneath the air filter. So you have air filter, that charcoal filter, then it goes to your engine. So basically when the car shuts off, that evaporative emissions, that charcoal filter catches it. So we actually worked with a bunch of like, I think it was a PPF, like a filter company, and we actually designed an engineer to filter that was charcoal activated air filter that could be compliant. Because theoretically by EPA standards, if I deleted that charcoal filter to make it an air intake, I'm not compliant. So then we had to work with the filter company to build a filter structure that could be activated charcoal that would help that evaporative emissions. But then we got to the point where we had to get it tested to prove it.

So that probably wasn't cheap.

We ended up, the business changed, we didn't get there, but that was one of the last things that we were working on, because all the new Subaru's, all these new things had these things. And we could just, everyone else is putting out in here and takes this, deleting it. But once again, the size of scale we're at, we want to play the safer side of that. And we want to make sure that we're not up for any litigation, because they get you for every product. It's not a fun place to be trying to make really cool things that perform well. And then have to deal with the craziness of emissions. And you're almost getting to an OEM compliance standard, which is almost impossible for any shop of our size to do, even our size. It's just not a thing that's legitimate. And you can't just say this car is for race use only. They don't do that.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? And you think they would go on the person that uses it on the street? They go after the seller.

Yeah.

So they stop going after the individuals because they can't get like, ultimately, this is my opinion. They can't get the money out of the individuals. They can get the money out of the company. I mean, Jags has been sued multiple times. I mean, Grimm Accessport, they've gotten hit multiple times. Actually, recently just got hit again.

Well.

Because they did that downstream O2 sensor. Light, you could just, it was never off. These two still read it. It allowed you to turn the check engine light off because on Subarus, if the check engine light comes on, the cruise control doesn't work.

Oh, really?

So that's like, Subarus does that on purpose. So basically, if you have an issue, you get inconvenience by your cruise control not working. So they go, well, that sucks for customers. We're just going to make it so the light's still active in the system. We're just going to make it so the light is not on in your dash. And they got busted for that, too. So it's like it's a never ending revolving door of this stuff. And I'm hoping that people start realizing that that's not our biggest problem with emissions. You know, how about all shipping stuff from China, everything we get in ships that run bunker oil?

Oh, yeah, that's a whole thing. We actually ended up getting a professor from Mankato State on our flight down to SEMA. And he knows a ton about emissions. And I will not say any of the things he said, but it was really interesting to see, like, all right, why are we going after cars? Look at all these other things that are just ridiculous. I'll tell you off camera something.

Yeah, even obsolescence. So like, these days, you buy a toaster. Like, it breaks, you buy a new one, you throw that one away. And you think about how many times that happens because they make them so crappy. I think of how much emissions that takes to make that toaster every single time. Unless you just make one good toaster and didn't ship it all the way from China on a ship running bunker oil. Like, nobody, the real emissions is not created by cars. It's not even the issue. And it's like a fallacy that they go after. But at the end of the day, what can you do about it? They're gonna come after you, there's nothing you can do about it. And you can try to elect representatives, which is not really a real thing. I mean, SEMA has their own lobbyist that lobbies for them, that basically primarily focuses on emissions, because they know how big the industry performance aftermarket is. I mean, look at the size of SEMA, look at the size of the vendors.

Yeah, the performance aftermarket, or not performance, but the aftermarket in general. What did you say the number was? Like 383 billion a year or something?

Yeah, it's crazy. And what is it, 80% of it is trucks?

Yeah. Well, yeah, and that's what I'm saying. You get in that compliance side. And the thing is too, it's crazy, and I'm not going to shout anybody out, but these days, I still see people deleting their diesels. All they did is change where they get their tunes from. A lot of guys, they get their tunes from Canada. I've heard that. You know what I mean? And I'm not trying to call anybody out, but I don't know these shops. I'm just saying, no matter what you do, the people are doing it will certainly navigate you. You just know people are going to be like, yeah, because you want these little trucks, you delete. I mean, I think I say this is my experience. You take off the DEF system and the EGR and the filters. You gain five miles a gallon.

That and you double the life of your engine.

So yeah, not only that, you gain five miles a gallon. Look at the, that truck has made you last 350,000 miles. Five more miles per gallon over that extrapolated time. How much less barrels of oil do you burn? And then you go on top of that, how much more carbon is less released? If you actually look at the overall average of really what the vehicle runs, you're doing better. You're not hauling DEF around in a plastic jug with some of my trucks having manufactured. It's nonsense. That is ultimate nonsense. And it's because people that get involved in it, they go, that sounds really good. And I've seen some piece of paper, some good numbers on it. And I don't understand any of it, but I feel good about it. And now we're basing our laws on feelings.

It's all about the stories you tell.

And that's exactly it. And it's a dangerous place to be in because it's really anti-productive in the realm of doing anything cool. People love cars, people love building cars. We had arguments in our shop saying, everyone thinks they're going to switch to electric. And I was like, I go, and tell all the people that heard a really good sounding engine die, good luck. I know that you guys can sit in here and you guys sell parts and you guys are like, you drive kind of performance cars, but you don't really care. Trust me, the guys that care, Teslas are cool, Tesla plaids are cool. They're definitely a cheat now too. There's a niche for them and they have their own place, but by any means is it going to take over? No. Batteries pollute a lot to make. You know what I mean? And it's not, I hate when they say like, EVs are zero emissions cars. What about that battery? What about like, I mean, the amount of hydrocarbons that non-emissions front-end loaders, you know, mining for lithium and the excavators, you know what I mean? Like in different countries and they say like non-emissions. Okay. Are you sure about that? Since the battery, so the battery doesn't count, but I always like, I'm, I'm, I, I, I have the ability to think, you know, think about things intelligently. What's the overall this car takes to make? How much, you know, carbon does it put out to make this? That's the emissions. It's not just what it makes out of the tailpipe. It's like what it makes out of the whole thing, and no one looks at that big picture.

Well, the big thing that, well, I shouldn't say big thing, but one of the things we touched on, on the Sam episode again is like, he's like, I think GM made the Hummer just to see, just to prove that not all EVs are environmentally friendly, because we're talking about almost 10,000 pound truck here, that's 1,000 horsepower. But the other thing that they're about to start chasing, I can't remember where I saw this, but basically they're gonna start going after brake and tire wear, because that also is really bad, technically. So now what causes the most brake dust and tire wear? A car being heavy. So now the EVs are probably gonna get smacked in the next five, 10 years or whatever, so it's just interesting to see how this is gonna come full circle.

It's the low-hanging fruit is what they're, that's easy industry for them to pluck it out of.

Well, and this is the craziest thing, and I don't know why they don't do it. I don't want to get it, but like, for instance, Teslas, they're very efficient motors. They actually have a different magnetic winding in the motor. The actual structure of the magnets inside the motor is unique to them. So basically, when a motor spins up, it has, I don't know the type, I'm not like an expert, but it creates interference. So as the motor, there's a resistance, and the faster you spin the electric motor, the more resistance it has. So they found a way with coils to make less resistance, so their motors are super efficient. So if they took that same motor and made it a generator, and then put like a two-cylinder direct-injected engine on the generator and then put it in the car, their cars get 300 miles a gallon, and they can go anywhere they wanted. Holy s***. So, I mean, they won't do it because it's, because I actually honestly think that when you make things too efficient, it kills the market. Oil market is a big market. You know, and the fact that, you know, it's a huge market. I don't think people really grasp, it's like the number one commodity of all time. Everything we make, everything is plastic, every cup you drink, everything is made out of petroleum. Every, your whole car, they do EVs, it's all made out of petroleum products. Like, and it's hilarious, they say like, or get rid of oil, well, what about your seats and your plastic and all the things your car's made of? What are you gonna make it out of? Hemp? What are you gonna make it out of? You wanna make it out of wood? You know what I'm saying? It's not, it's hilarious when you see that, you see those tags on tests that say like, no oil, and it's like, are you sure? Like, you sound really dumb right now, to me. Cause I understand that that's the reality, it's everything's made out of petroleum.

That is a good point.

Well, I always thought this, when they started pushing all that stuff, I'm like, has nobody ever driven a Volkswagen TDI? Those things get like 40 miles of the gallon. I was like, the fact that this is more efficient than that, I think is b*******. Cause there were cars out there that could do all that stuff.

I truly believe that if Tesla, I think Tesla's marketing is like, I'm a hardcore electric company, we make electric cars, and this is what we do. They have no desire to build a hybrid. I think if they made a hybrid, it would be so efficient that it would literally kill, it would be a bad for the economy, cause it'd probably kill you. It would hurt the oil industry cause people would buy their cars because they're so efficient. Cause you take Tesla and you add range to it, they're not that bad of cars, they're nice cars. Self-driving, it sounds great. I think it's great for like taxis, I think it's gonna displace a lot of jobs, but I would love, they have those self-driving taxis, you can call it in like Austin has them, California, LA County has them.

Yeah, you haven't been here about those.

Yeah, they're basically a self-driving car. You can call an Uber and it just shows up, you hop in and it just drives you there. You know, it's pretty, I mean, that's some pretty cool technologies. There's nobody you have to talk to, there's no weird conversation, you have to talk to some weird guy in the driver's seat. You just get in the car and it just takes you where you need to go. And I think there's a huge, a lot of people want to live like that. I mean, I love driving cars, not necessarily in traffic, but I love driving cars. There's a soul to it, there's a feeling to it, and mechanical things, you know. Some of the new cars are too nice. Like it takes all that feeling away. Like my V is definitely violently fast for a street car, but I way rather enjoy my burnout S10 because it's 750 wheel horsepower, six speed, everything's manual, it's raw. Like you row gears and it's painting lines at 100 miles an hour. So it's like, because it's not made to hook up, but the fun of driving that chaos is really fun. It's not refined, it's all chaos. And there's something that I'll, they'll always have that in me until the day I die. I think maybe kids these days will get generationed out of it. Like, oh, we always just got, took an Uber everywhere. We don't even have to learn how to drive. I hope that's not the case, because cars are a huge thing of everybody. Everybody loves cars.

Well, this country especially.

Yeah, we love it.

I'm doing my part to change that cycle with my children.

Yeah, for sure. My kid's to be a car guy. I hope he's to be a car guy. I think he will. You'll follow. That's how I eat sleep. I love cars. I love making cool things. I mean, I'm into off-roading as well. I'm not just into...

Oh s***, we didn't even touch off-roading. That's right. Kurt told me to ask you about off-roading.

Yeah. I mean, I always like things that are different. You see my repertoire of cars a little different than most because I like building things that people, you don't go to the car shop like, oh, I have the same Camaro, I have the same Mustang. Okay. I like to build things that you don't see very often. Jeeps are great for a lot of things. For the off-roading, what they did for the community, you can build a really capable jeep with all bolt-on parts. You can literally order everything from the catalog and make a very capable jeep, which is really cool. One of the reasons I don't like them, because I'm a hardcore fabricator. I like to make things and do things that other people can't. One day, I was like, I always wanted an H3 Hummer because they're small-bodied, and it's just like a jeep, Ford or Wrangler, whatever, it's kind of what it is. You know, it's all the same features, and they came with V8s. They did make some alpha versions, they come with a factory V8, and I'm like, it's got a V8, it's got an LS, it doesn't mean you can put any one you want in there. And so I decided to build one of those, and it's basically all using OEM parts, and it drives really nice, it has 40s on it, one ton Super Duty axles, all OEM one ton parts, like Super Duty's have really big U-joints in the later years, because they raise their weight capacity. So they have 1550 U-joints, I mean, the U-joint's like this big in the front. So you get like 50 degrees of steering angle. You have 40, 50 degrees of steering with a four wheel drive. So when you're off-roading, anytime you have more steering angle, you can climb up obstacles better, where you can turn your wheels sharper. So this is all like OEM parts. So the whole, and then I got a factory electric locker from a Superduce company, electric lockers. Got a factory one, so it's basically electric locking diff, mechanical locked front diff. And then I used a, I put a six liter in it, because I want to make more torque with the torque cam. And then I put a 6L80 transmission, which is a six speed. And the real key to that is that it has a four to one first gear. So most transmissions, like a 4L80, the other things, they have like a two six to one, two eight to one first gear ratios. This is a four to one. So I can want a single transfer case, and I get it, right now I have a two seven, three to one transfer case with four to one. So that's six, seven, three to one ratio in first gear. So that means I don't have to rear gear the axle, I can use OEM 410 gears. I don't have to run two transfer cases. I can use a relatively inexpensive transfer case. And it all works, and it keeps it short because the truck's very short. Your rear drive shaft's short because the truck's not very long. So, if you can run one transfer case and now you have all the gear reduction, so low range is low, and then I put 40 inch all tires on it, and I have low, low range, and then I can go on the highway 80 miles an hour, and I still have a regular gear ratio. You know, it's really cool if you start, you know, I'm a huge OEM guy, and all the things I build are OEM plus. I take a bunch of the OEM parts and kind of mash them together to make something really cool. Like, I also have a Colorado with, it's got a 416, that was an original V8 truck, which is also a rare 2, and then I put a 6L90 on the same transmission as a CTS-V in there. And that, like, so that's another thing. And that truck's actually, I mean, 4 truck, it's pretty-

Is that the one that's in the garage?

That white one. It ran 118s at 119 at the four door truck. And that was with the old motor, it had a stock LS3 with 75 shot of nitrous. And I mean, 11 seconds, high 11s in the quarter mile at 119, that's not a slow car. And that'll beat a lot of cars off the shelf. I mean, that's right there. I mean, I beat Hellcats with the same speed as a Hellcat. You know, and I have a pickup truck that can run or outrun a Hellcat. You know what I mean? So it's an interesting thing that, I mean, some of the reddits in the high response definitely are faster, but I'm saying like a standard Hellcat, they run normally. You get the guys that run the tracks, like again, once again, they run the number no one can ever do again. Like, oh, this thing will run a 10, 20. No, it won't. It'll run an 11, eight. You know, so that's very cool. That's how I like to build things. And I'm huge in the off-roading. If you guys have ever been off-roading, the community of people are the nicest people. I've dealt with all kinds of racing cars. People get real serious about it. Like, off-roading, you're all doing it for fun. Everyone's so nice. And there's something about that. You go out in the middle of the woods, and you're hanging out with a bunch of friends. Everyone's super nice. You break down and it gives you parts, tries to help you out. Everyone, no one leaves you behind. It's like a community of that. And I've been doing that for a while that I've really fallen in love with that style, like overlanding. And we're planning a trip to go out to the Rubicon in California. I'm going to drive my truck there. I'm with my family, and we're going to off road it to Rubicon. I'm going to drive it home. So I'm a huge guy of reliability. People always ask, like my S10, they always assume that I put like three or four motors in. I see you do rev limiter, you know, 7400 RPM burnouts, and you're on the limiter the whole time, and you're doing it for a minute, a minute and a half straight. You do it endlessly, and you've got to blow it. Still the original motor. Still, I've done nothing to it. The only thing I've ever done was change my spark plugs. And then I had a heat exchanger. ZL1s have a problem with their heat exchangers leaking coolant in the engine. It's a common problem. That's the only real problem I've had with it. I broke my carrier in the rear end just because doing burnouts, dropping the clutch in fourth gear. Yeah, that's kind of the nature of it. But otherwise, I've done nothing to the engine. It runs like it's idle rhythm's perfect. It doesn't smoke out of the vents. It smells good, like very little. I mean, I'm sure there's some wear in it, and it's going to fail me one day. It's just gonna catastrophically saw itself in half. But it owes me nothing. It owes me nothing. But I've done enough LS stuff, and honestly, LS stuff's easy. It's easy, reliable light. I know people hate on it, but if you wanna go fast in a car, you can't do it any cheaper. You honestly can't. And I like to reliably, I'm huge. I wanna build a new, I'm going back to Ford. I was a Ford guy when I grew up. I was talking to him off camera, like old 2.3 turbos, Merck or XR4TIs. But I wanna go back, and the next vehicle I think I'm gonna build for myself, because I just wanna build a fast truck. I'm a truck guy. I don't know why, just how I've always been. I wanna do a regular cab short bed Ranger. You ever seen the edges with the fender flares, the body match fender flares and bumpers, the Ford Edge? And I wanna do one of those. I wanna do all the drive with the new 5 liter 10 speed, twin turbos, 1500 horsepower. So basically like taking all the F150 things they're doing and put it in 1000 pound less chassis.

That will be so nuts, dude.

My goal would be to keep the hood line stock so you can't, there's nothing sticking out of the hood and keep the truck looking like it's just a lowered Ranger. You would never, so unassuming, I like building sleepers, unassuming vehicles that you would never see coming until you're like, I just got destroyed by a Ford Ranger. So that's kind of one of my next things I'm going to do. I'm going to probably do it pretty seriously too, because even that Hummer, I did that very quickly. That's a full frame off. I mean, that's every bracket ground off the frame. I bought a different frame. The original was rusty, and I got to the point where I'm a little bit, I go a little too far. Everything I do, so I ground all the brackets off, and I'm using a DA sander on the frame to sand off the rest of the weld, so you can't even tell there was a weld there. And then a little imperfection, I'd fill with the frame, and then sand back over that. There's no need, because no one can see it. It's an off-road truck. It's going to get smashed on rocks, but that's just how I do things. That's how I build things to look like they're stock. Most people come up to my thing, and they look at it, and they're like, wait a minute, that has eight lugs. Wait, H3s came with eight lugs? I'm confused. Whenever you see the look on people's faces, it looks like it's supposed to be, it looks like it's like a lifted jeep, almost, so people just assume that it came that way, because it looks so OEM. Right. And it's very interesting. You watch people on the trails, because you never see, I actually have it featured in Crawl magazine. I don't know when it's going to come up, but they did shoot it earlier this year. Oh, okay. My other buddy is getting his jeep shot, and he's just like, what is that? And so he came and shot, I just got it done.

Well, it is so different. Like I've never seen like a Hummer build for that purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, they don't just go to the mall and get groceries and...

Yeah. Well, it's crazy.

They usually have spinners, I'm just saying.

They were. I mean, everyone gets H3s and H2s confused. Like H2s are gaudy, ugly, massive, not good trucks. They're not, I'm not a fan. They get really good money. There's eclectic people that will pay, even ones like 200,000 miles or like 25 grand. It's insane how much those things are still worth, because they're just like people. People that like them really like them. I don't, like I said, they're too big. The H3 is small. And that's the thing about anytime you're off road, you have a big body, you're gonna smash it on everything. And the nice thing is like, say you put just one ton of axles on it, the tires stick out far enough to protect the body from getting damaged. Like people, like I don't just wheel, like go up the little core trail. I mean, you can even, we get into it. You know what I mean? We're not, I call my truck an overland truck, but I mean, I have rock rash on my doors from being on the side on a rock, because like we're just going, we're going down the pretty aggressive, the harder core trails. I mean, I'm locked in the front, locked in the rear, and I have a low, low range and big U-joints, so I can really wheel that thing. And it's way more capable than any overland truck, but the whole purpose of making an overland truck so it's reliable, it's got heated seats, air conditioning, it has navigation, it's got a really good sound system from the factory, all of it, everything works. Huge sunroof, like a panoramic sunroof. Like it's a very well optioned, very cool leather seats. Like it's a very nice truck, and you would know that it didn't come like that. And besides obviously sitting high and hard to get into, but like it drives really nice for a truck with 40s on it.

So that or a Cayenne? What's your thoughts on the Cayenne thing?

You know, there's like a part of me, I like the, I think the Cayenne's are very cool. There was a, when they came out, the Turbo S's were very cool cars, and they came out, they were like fast cars when they came out. And I think it's very cool that it's a different, they're not necessarily as capable, but they're definitely, they're definitely, they come with lockers, they come with low range, they definitely come with a lot of stuff. You're always limited by IFS front suspension, there's always just gonna be, especially when you lift it up, because then you put everything a little bit in a bind, and then it gets kind of stiff, and they don't flex very good. But they're definitely capable trucks, and they're cool, because every time we go out with Adam, we go on a trail with Adam, everyone's like, who the hell is off-roading a Porsche? And the looks on people's faces, it's hilarious to see, because they just like, they all assume the truck's like a $50,000 truck, even though you can get it for like $10,000. Yeah.

Dude, you should have seen, one of my most trending highlights, even to this day, is the one with Kurt talking about the Cayenne, and everybody's like, oh yeah, thinking he's like a snob or like some city boy, and I'm like, dude, I don't think you understand it. You can go on Marketplace and get one for $8,000 right now. So it's kind of funny to see people are just disillusioned by thinking it's like a $50,000 truck.

Yeah, because it's such an uncommon sight to see a Porsche out there. Have you guys ever heard of the Ultimate Adventure?

I think so. I've heard a lot of things like that.

Yeah, so they actually changed their names. I think Motor Trend has a copyright in the Ultimate Adventure because they were doing it. Now it's called the Ultimate Ride or something. It's a different name. I don't know the name, but the latest one they do is basically they travel all across the country, all have to be street legal, and they go like 1,000 miles or 2,000 miles of driving. OK. They off-road and they record it all. It's very, very cool. And you get like, so they always choose like very cool vehicles, like very stand out. They don't choose like the standard jeeps. I mean, there's some in there, but like they're always crazier vehicles. Like they have full size four wheel drive vans, like rock crawling, which is entertaining to watch. And they drive all over the place, and that's a really cool thing that people really get involved in. This year, they actually had a guy with a BMW X3 that swapped one ton axles on to it and four link. So it's still running the, I think it has an LS, I'm pretty sure it has an LS, but it looks like a BMW. But it's on one ton axles, and he's wheeling it. It's really cool, because all the stuff in the truck works. Like his shifter, like his factory, council shifter, everything works. So it's like a luxurious BMW in the inside, it's an X5. And he's wheeling it through huge boulders with like 40 inch all tires on it. So I think that people are kind of realizing that you can build whatever you want. You don't have to use like a, you're going to build something custom. Who cares what it starts out as? You're going to make it all like, what's left hummer on my truck is like the body. You know, it's crazy. But everything is all mismatched GM and Ford parts. But if you're going to build something, you can build whatever you want. And why not build something that's comfortable? Like overlanding is a huge thing, like getting off the road, getting out in nature and hanging out there. It's just like, I think people are kind of going back to that. They're so caught up in crazy chaos of city life and being able to go and relax and let it out. I'm a huge, I love state parks. I love traveling like that. Yellowstone is one of the coolest places. I highly recommend anybody go in there. It's one of the coolest places you can ever go. You'll underrate it until you go there. You're like, this is way cooler than I thought. Teton Mountains, it's just, you feel so little, you feel like nothing in your life that you think matters becomes less relevant.

That was us at Pike, or I don't know about Dan, but when we went to Pike's Peak for my first rally out there, dude, cause like we're in Minnesota, there's not a mountain for hundreds of miles.

Mount Lutson.

Yeah, sure does, I stump.

I've been on some mountains, and I had the same thought, and I've also had the same thought, just standing, so at night, go stand on a beach, and just like stare out into the ocean. I mean, it's like, if you really think about the grand scheme of how you're just an insignificant f****** speck on this whole deal is...

Thanks, Mike Tyson. Did you see that interview, by the way?

No.

So do you know what you're interviewing I'm talking about?

I'm not familiar.

So it's like this 12 year old girl.

Oh yeah, I did see that one.

Yeah, and he's just like, we're nothing, we're dust. Just like...

There's no legacy, I'm gonna be dead.

When you're dead, you're dead.

Well, I think, you know, the amount of chaos that you have when you're doing a business and starting a business and the things you have to go through learning-wise is extremely stressful. I have way more gray hair than I should have at my age. I mean, I'm almost 40, but I've lived a full life of that, and that 18 or 19 years of doing that than people do in their whole career is the most experience they have, because it all comes at you so fast. And you get so caught up in like, oh my God, if we don't get these sales, if we don't have this, and then you stop. Like, I didn't live, like most kids got, people got to live their 20s. I had no 20s. There was no, there was nothing. I didn't, I, you know what I did? I worked, I worked 12 hours a day.

You did some cool s*** too, though.

Well, no, but that, all you do is fast forward. I sacrificed my time for to have more time on the other side of it. But at the end of the day, the time is still spent. Yep. And so it, it was a, I never thought it was gonna be like that. I never thought we were ever gonna have an acquisition of our company, never even crossed my mind. Even when you're getting busy, it's like, oh, we're just getting big. We're not making, you know. And then we started making some, you know, making some profit, making some good changes, and making some, you know, good things. But what I've missed the most about MAP, and I, and at every point you're gonna talk, you will contest this or say, agree with me. We had a culture there of people that were like-minded, that worked together as a team, that I is, I've never seen it anywhere else. I've never been involved in it anywhere else. And we had a really good thing going there. We always came from a side of caring about people. And that, you know, I care about the guy's car that's blown up. I care about the guy's family that's working for me. Even when, you know, we kind of downsized, and EE was trying to, the company owned us trying to downsize. Like I took some, I took, instead of laying some of my guys off, I took the choice to take some days off of my week and try to pack into one to reduce the cost on them instead of laying my guys off. Because that, we had such a good culture, and I was hoping we could turn it around before they made more changes, because that's just not, it's my baby too, but it's also Chris's, but I'm saying it's like, I took pride in what we built. And the most thing I took pride in is the employees. We had people that would quit and then come, like quit and then go get another, like that job sucks. They treat us like s***. I'm coming back to work for you guys. You guys care about us. You genuinely care about our wellbeing. And when we started, we couldn't necessarily pay people the going rate of things, because we're growing. But towards the end, we got to a point where we had good coverage of 5%, 4-1K matches. We had good health coverage, good coverage, and we paid people pretty well. And we gave bonuses to people. We did people pretty well when we worked for us. Because I think if my philosophy in life is if you're doing well, the people around you should be doing well, too. There's no like, I'm just on the top, and then everyone else is struggling. That's not how things are done. That's the wrong way to do things. Everyone comes up together. Maybe it's probably the worst corporate idea that you could ever have.

Everybody on Wall Street is just like cringing right now. Uggh, happiness?

Yeah, but I think that that's the essence of life, and that's the essence of having people that work really hard for you, is people that you give time to. I mean, we have guys like, hey, I have a problem with daycare. It's like, I don't care how busy you are. I would always be like, just take it off, man. I get it. It's tough. There's not much you can do about it. And most people are like, no, you're not taking time out. It's like, who do you think is going to work better and do better for your company? A guy that you tell to bring his pound sand every time he needs something? Or give that guy some bandwidth? He'll always work hard with you. He'll make it up. He'll always do better for you. And if you ask me, it's just human nature. It's super easy to observe this.

It's just the right guys too, though, right?

Yeah, we were very good. We always had this saying, it's like the right seat in the bus. And basically, if you could be the, you graded our employees. I know this sounds really bad, but you have A players, you have A players, B players, C players, and D players. And basically, you'd always be getting rid of your Ds, and you try to bring the Cs up to Bs, and then you had As, but they also had an A, what you call it's a toxic A. So you have people that are so good at their job, but they make everyone around them mad. Like, I hate that guy. Every time I come in, I don't want to look at his face, every, and that's a toxic A, and your job is to, I don't care how much work you do, I don't care how good at your job, if you create chaos with all the other employees and you're consecrate, you're out, you're off the bus. You're not on a bus.

Bringing all the B's down to a D or something.

Yeah, because if you're all, let's say you're on a canoeing, and you got three dudes paddling backwards, and two dudes paddling forward, you're going in circles. So if you get everybody on your bus that's like-minded, and everybody that's on the same goal, and we're all paddling forward, we're going to paddle forward way harder. So that was a fundamental of culture we had in our business. If you're a guy that, it's not that you didn't fit in, but there's people that just create problems, and it's not that they were bad employees, our company wasn't the right fit for them. So it's hard to do, you have to do a lot of grading people. Sometimes people, and it's not like you're like, oh, you had one hiccup and you're out of here. It was like, hey, everyone goes through s***, you're having a hard time, let's work through it. We're always very fair, but at a certain point, I'm talking five times, all right, you gotta write up, you got some, I know it's really corporate talk, but you get corrective action. These things you have to change. And it was rarely like, oh, you need to make more things than the ones we're gonna fire. It's like, no, no, you're disagreeable and you're confrontational with people. Unless you can change that disagreeable or confrontational, we're gonna be out of here. You have to work on this. And we tried to use leadership programs, get people to read books. I'm not a guy that, I'm not even a strong reader. I'm not a huge book guy. I'll listen to every other book. And the model of stuff I've learned by reading books and learning this leadership stuff is, I would never do that normally, but you're putting an atmosphere where you have these professionals that are doing really well and they go, hey, we read this. This is really helping us try it out. And then you read this and you learn so much insight about how people think and how employees think and how people want to be taken care of. It's really not that hard. It's all about being humble and not being a dick. And that's a lot of people, just egos are so far in their own way. And they treat people like trash.

That's not in the handbook.

Well, we've ran into a lot of people, whether we've had them on the show or not, that have worked at MAP, and I don't think I've ever heard a bad word about it. I've never had anybody that has been pissed off or talked to any s***.

And honestly, that's what I'm most proud of.

Yeah.

Cause like, I mean.

I was gonna ask you that question, by the way. What are you most proud of? Would that be it?

Yeah, I mean, I think anybody, I look at this, I always say, Mike has a famous thing, I wanna make sure I don't butcher it here. What talent is is what talent is is all the hard work after all the hard work is done. So that being said, that means that if you put enough time into something, you're going to be good at it. You put $1,000 into something, you're going to be good at it. If you dedicate your $1,000 or something, I don't care what you do or who you are, you will be good at it. So you see all these people, you're like, all these people are so talented. They just put a lot of time into it. Not to all this, everyone has this mystery, like all these, I mean, some people definitely have more natural ability than others. But if you sit down and commit yourself to some time, you'll be good at anything. I believe that I know it, I've seen it firsthand. All the guys that I got, we didn't hire welders, we trained welders. And all those people have awesome jobs being welders and fabricators. And it's all because we have this mentality where you're never done learning, you're never done, I know it all, I've got to figure it out. We work together, we bring our skills up together, and when we had a downside, we'd all work on it to solve the problem. Instead of going, you're the problem, it's your fault.

That's my favorite thing to do, though.

You know, blame, you just don't... We have a problem as a company, and we need to move forward. And I think it worked really, really well for us for a lot of time. I mean, it was stressful. It's, you know, having those conversations up in offices with employees that are butting heads, and nipping it in the butt right away is not something you want to do. You go in the morning like, I do not want to do this, but I have to. And by doing that, it takes less, it's actually makes less stress overall because you nip it in the butt. You get people at the end of saying, we're not doing this, we're not having these, this is not, this is work, we're not doing that here. And then if you can't figure it out, we're going to keep working with you until you can't. But I think that's the way people should work. I think if all businesses work like how MAPerformance, we have a much better country. And I think I do have hope there's a lot of people that are like that and do that. But as these corporate people keep taking over, they're kind of diminishing all of that because everyone seems to keep getting acquired. So then if everyone's acquired, if everything's acquired, then they're all going to be at the mercy of... I mean, shareholders, anything that comes to be shareholded, their obligation is to make money for your shareholders. It's not obligated to make people's work balance better. It's not obligated to treat people better. It's obligated to make profit. And I just think it's a short-term thing that's a long-term consequences. I think ma and pa shops used to exist back in the day when things were more family-friendly and family-oriented. And I think we were in a better time. Granted, I didn't live there that time, but I think it's better, and I think this corporate stuff's not the right way to go. But it's necessary. I don't have all the answers, but I just know that we had something very special, and I think a lot of our guys are better people. I'm better for it, and I think that I'll hold that stuff the day I die. I have these intrinsic knowledge. I've thought about going back into the corporate world. I just, I'm good at it. I know a lot about it. I don't like it.

You'd be better off building something new, if anything.

I mean, I came right back to my own shop here that we're sitting in right now, and I just, I built this up because I, my break time is, if it works really stressful, I just come back and I'll be building cars on the weekends. That's my release for stress. That's what I do, so now I just do it for a living. Which has its own stresses, don't get me wrong, but it's not, it's, I can take a definitely more relaxed approach. I get to eat, you know, I have a small child. I mean, it gives you perspective. I can wake up and I can eat breakfast with my child every day. I can go out and I can go back and then I can eat lunch with him. Like, I think having the opportunity, that is pretty cool.

Yeah.

You know, versus having to work a nine to five or work a corporate thing where I'm never at home. So I think that's very cool.

You want to guess how far in we are?

Probably a long time.

No, so as we start to wind down here, because we clicked over to Two Hour Mark, and I'll have Dan ask the usual three here in a second. But what are some of your favorite memories from MAP? I've heard stories, of course, over the years, right? You know, late nights, you know, dino sessions and all that fun stuff. Anything come to mind?

Um, there's so many times. So I do agree. Some of my fondest memories of MAP in general is us pulling an all nighter to go to the track the next day. And we work on it all week and we're on the dino. It's like a Friday night, like Friday night at two in the morning. And you got the race car on the dino and you've been struggling through all the issues you've been having, little issues. Because it's always a little, you keep narrowing those issues down until you get it dialed. And then we'd make the pass, the car would just, you know, do, it'd work perfectly. And then we're on the trailer. We're sleeping in the truck on the way to the track. And at the time, it seems like it's really stressful and super chaotic. But then you look back and like, that was, that was it. That's where you feel like you're almost fully living. You're doing like, you're not, there's no, in your mind, no holding back. There's no, I'm laying it on the line. I'm trying to do everything I can to do this. And there's something really cool about that, is when you put yourself all the way out there and you're trying everything you can to do something, to achieve a goal. There's something about that, that I don't think anybody that hasn't done it can ever understand it. Because why, I'm sure people ask that, why wouldn't you stay all night? And you know, people, I'm sure people do that, but it's, it's just something really cool about it.

What's your choice of energy drink?

I stopped drinking energy drinks.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

When did you kick that off?

I did that about a year and a half ago. I used to have, I knocked down to one a day. And then I was like, I don't, me and my wife talking about, I want to be healthy for my kid. I'm kind of more on the getting healthier and eating healthier foods, you know, less reading the ingredients list, you know, getting away from things are really bad for you, trying to improve my health. I want to live, live to have my child be raised.

Right.

So I just, I stopped drinking them. I used to like full throttles. They're always been like, okay, it's not as...

Oh, I love those, yeah.

Yeah, the black full throttles was mine for the longest time, but I've given them up and it doesn't really affect me. I'm pretty high energy.

Yeah.

So...

Well, I had to ask, because the all-nighters, right? I'm a white monster kind of guy right now.

Oh, yeah, definitely white monster. Back in the day, we used to be just red bulls, you know what I mean?

Yeah, old school.

Red bulls. And when I was really young, me and my friends, we used to have challenges. Who could drink a BFC? Monsters, you ever seen those 32 ounce monsters?

Oh, yeah.

It's called a BFC.

Yeah.

Yeah, don't do that. My buddy drank two once, I thought he was gonna die.

He was probably vibrating.

Yes, he was. I mean, I don't know, it's probably like 800 milligrams of caffeine or something, or a thousand milligrams of caffeine. Yeah, we used to play video games way back in the day, when we were younger guys, because, you know, play Call of Duty way back in the day when it first came out.

Oh, I miss those days. The first day, when...

When you had to go stand in line at...

Game stop?

Game stop, yeah.

Yeah, and I had to do a digital download, and I don't even own your games. That's the government's trying to do. Anyways, well, sweet. On that note, listen, it's very difficult to get 20 years in a span of two hours. So obviously, to all the MAP people listening, we'll be back, I'm sure, to obviously get some more fun stories and all that. But on that note, Dan, do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah, this is gonna be a fun one. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. You can have, we need a track car, a daily driver, and a show car. I think that's screwing me up, dude. You gotta stop. You have an unlimited budget. You can swap, build, do whatever you want. What are you gonna pick?

Man, so this is tough for me, because I'm not a, so always my first answer for a daily driver, something that I'd want to drive every day. I've never driven one, so I could never speak to wanting to drive it every day. I love Koenigseggs, I know everyone says that, because I have heard a few of you guys, there's like a Koenigsegg, I really love Koenigsegg, I love him as an engineering, I love the way he builds things, his attitude towards it, I love that part of it, but in the grand scheme of things, they probably drive like crap, because they're so high horsepower, and they're probably obnoxious to drive. So I wouldn't say that I wanted to daily driver, but I do really like those. I was gonna say that at first, and I thought about it, I was like, to be honest with you, my experience, I want to do things that I know, my third gen CTS-V is such a great daily driver. It has NPP exhaust. Like I say, it makes 920 wheel horsepower. It's quiet. And I have a car seat in the back of it a lot of the times, hauling my kid around. And it's like, it's silent in the interior. It's got a great audio system. It's just the most comfortable car to drive. Really comfortable seats. For a daily driver, I think my third gen CTS-V is my daily. That's what I really enjoy. I haven't been in a car that I like more than that one. For a daily driver aspect. So then what's the other one? The track car. Oh, see, once again, I always build everything. So with track cars, there would always be something, a hybrid of something. A lot of guys love Porsches. I'm not a Porsche guy at all. I would say for a track car, I would say the new, if I was to build a track car, it would be the new Corvette ZR1.

Oh, okay.

So they're just, they're awesome.

The C8, correct?

The C8, yeah, yeah. New twin-turboed one. I mean, they're just the, you think that Coyotes are crazy on horsepower? That's got a 5.5-inch bore spacing. You have big pistons, so you can get a lot more airflow in that cylinder. Wait until people turn those up. The car makes 1,000 horsepower. Those are gonna be the next, I mean, I don't know this, but I feel like if they can get them to hook up enough, they're gonna be the next UGR-based cars. Ooh, okay. Because I think they can, I think if you can make a motor that makes 1,000, that means they're leaving a lot on the table. And it's like a big bore spacing, because if you're fixing the motor, that affects your cylinder flow, you can get a bigger piston, you get a lot more air flow. And Coyotes can make such a ridiculous horse while being delivered at CAM, and they have a 4.4 inch bore spacing, it's got.9 of an inch bigger bore spacing. So I think you're gonna see some incredible numbers out of those motors. Nobody knows yet, but I'm saying the architecture of it, they should be able to be wild.

It's very impressive. And one of the reasons that they did the turbo, the size they did, is actually for emissions. Which is really interesting to see. There's 76-mil turbos, dude.

There's so many weird things about emissions.

Dude, OEMs are freaky people over there.

They put port fueling on a lot of the DI motors, like the supercharged ones. They put port fueling, it's all for emissions. It has nothing to do with cooling the cattle. It's actually for cooling the cats. The cats get so hot, they spray fuel in the intake charger, cool the cats off. It's very bizarre. That's what Carl, me and Carl have talked about a lot, because I was like, oh, I should get the port fueling supercharger, put it on my car, and he's just like, that's just for emissions. But the cool thing is that they made those ECUs, like I was talking to you earlier, so they can run emissions. They can run emissions, but they also can run port fueling, so it's very cool. Also, then the last car, a show car. And this is a tough one. I'm not a show car guy. I would always like to have an old Ford crew cab lowered, like an old F-series truck, like slammed, like completely done up, as like a really cool tow vehicle slash tow truck.

When you say old, are you talking about the old F-series?

70s, 70s.

Is that after the F-100?

It would still be an F-100. They made F-100s even in the 60s.

It would have to be to get a crew cab. You couldn't go back too far, and even then they're super rare.

They do make really rare, they call it the bump sides, that's the angle that comes. They make a dense side and a bump side. I like the bump side, that's 71 and older. The non-unibody trucks, I know a lot about cars for some odd reason, imagine that. I can tell you about every car, about everything, I just love cars, so that's what I'm dedicating my life to. Yeah, so I think I'd have one of those, this slammed, like a tow vehicle, like a really sweet Cummins or something in there, and like lower, all modern interior. A lot of guys do like super duty frame swaps on them. They make them so it's all modern, but the body's old. That's what I'd probably have as a show car.

Okay. I like that.

Okay.

Well, sweet. On that note, where can people find you? Do you want people to find you?

That's a good question.

I ask that every once in a while too.

I did start a new business. It's called Nelson Automotive. I do general automotive repair because I like doing some stuff easy sometimes, but I do performance, welding, and fabrication. I do a lot of off-roading stuff, and I've been doing that for almost the last 10 months without even advertising. I do have Facebook page made. I do have some business cards. I'm infinitely going to release that pretty soon here. I'm going to do jobs that I want to do and make sure that something is like...

That's what I was going to say next. Yeah.

Yeah, I can be more choosy about what I want to do. And I like building cars, and I like working with people to make really cool things. So I think that that's going to be my avenue moving forward. I don't know what the future has to bring for me, but that's what I'm going to do for now. And I seem to like it. So I've been doing it for quite a while, and I really enjoy the time I get to spend with my family, and I get to work at home, which is really nice because I have a nice shop. I spend most of my time out here.

Is there anything you want to leave the listeners with? Any MAP people that are listening, or just anybody in general? Any final notes?

I just think for the motivation for people, and I want kids and young people to think that you can do anything you want. And I mean that. I'm not a college-educated. I'm not a... I mean, I'm good at lots of things. I put a lot of time in it because I was poor, and I had to figure out how to do it. But you can do it. I mean, people limit themselves by thinking what they can't do. If you get around people that know what they're doing, and you listen to them, you will learn, and you will learn a whole lot. And I know that the car industry is kind of, not necessarily dying, but it's definitely going away, because less people want to work and physically work and things. But I think it's one of the most... You can appreciate, because you can do something, you see the outcome of it, there's something really good about that feeling, and you feel like you're a comical, you feel like you do stuff. So I just say that if I taught myself how to TIG weld, machine engines, mandrel bend, fabricate, it's all self-taught. So I had some mentors, but not really, but I always recommend people find somebody that you feel that knows what they're doing, and just hang out with them. You'll learn a lot, and they'll make you a much more successful person as an adult.

A lot you could do with a case of beer.

Absolutely. Maybe you can't drink too many of them.

Yeah, they look a little funky, but well, sweet. Well, on that note, Dan, where can people find you?

Gunner Garage with Two N's.

Oh, okay.

You're on it today. Just adding it in there now.

Yeah, usually you don't. You're doing good today. Well, sweet. On that note, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Kyle, thank you for coming on the show. This is a long time coming, so I'm glad we were able to make this happen. Dan, thanks for existing, and we'll see y'all next time.