123. OEM vs Aftermarket, Tuning vs Calibration, Emissions w/ Greg Banish

How much do we really have access to in the aftermarket?

You open HP tuners, for example, and you might see 200 things that you could adjust. A modern ECU is something on the order of 16,000 of those. They tested a deleted diesel in the lab, and they're like, it's not like 20% worse. It's 317 times worse. It is so much worse, it's not even funny. These injectors are great. I made a thousand horsepower of them. Congratulations. What is easy?

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 more loving co-host, Dan. Got a garage.

That's me sitting underneath the corvette right now.

I know, it just keeps happening to you. I came around behind you last week. What was the week before? I can't even remember at this point. We don't go that far back, but nonetheless-

After this weekend, I can't remember much.

Yeah, I'm surprised you're alive and still here. But nonetheless, today we are here with Greg Banish, an individual who we met at PRI actually, which is another off-camera story, but similar to how we met Schwartz Performance as well. That's an inside joke. It's okay. We're going to cut that. Don't worry about it. It doesn't exist. But nonetheless, owner of Calibrated Success and tuner of many things. Does that describe you somewhat adequately, or do you want to just-

Sure, I'll own it. Yeah, it's funny because we talk tuning, and then there's tuning and there's calibration, right?

Okay.

And so, they're starting to become more of this division in the industry, and a lot of people are kind of glommed on, like, oh, the new buzzword is I calibrate instead of I tune, right? And we talk about calibration in the engineering community, because that's my background. When you calibrate an instrument, you're bringing a measurement precisely in line with another measurement, right? So you calibrate, if you had a tuning fork and you were tuning a piano, and you went right to 632 Hertz, right? That would be a number, right? You dial it in so that it's not 632.1, it's 632 with a zero. Okay, that is precisely where we want to put it. We do the same thing on air-fuel ratios, spark advance, torque, whatever, right? Put your thing in there, and that's what you get. So I've been in calibration for a long time, but I've tuned many performance cars, right? So it gets used almost interchangeably, but yeah, there are tuners. And a good friend of mine, he was very active in the BMW community, and he's actually the guy who made the original shark chips in the shark injector. And really cool guy to hang out with and have a glass of whiskey. Former Navy guy, he was a Navy guy in the 80s. He wasn't sealed, but he was EOD. So he's embedded with the seals. Got to go a lot of places he's not allowed to talk about. So, neat guy to have a glass of whiskey with. But we were talking about this, and he appreciates the engineering backside of it. We started talking about tuning, and it became tuning with two O's, like cartoons, Saturday morning, right? And it's tuning, not calibrating, because he also has this pet peeve of people who get in there and they have a laptop, and all of a sudden, oh, I can do the same thing as so-and-so, right? Okay, sure, have a shot at it. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah.

Only everything.

Yeah. And sometimes we do miss, and sometimes we break stuff when we're trying to go fast, right? And I think you guys have covered that before. You can't go fast without occasionally breaking stuff.

Right.

But the record is decidedly very positive, right? If we're calibrating, we have a certain methodology, which is what I've been trying to spread the word on for 20 plus years. When I wrote my first book, it was all that stuff like, oh man, I wish somebody would have just told me that. So I wrote it down and I'm just trying to spread that word. And now there's a lot of people repeating.

Well, let me pause you right there real quick. I probably should have mentioned that in the intro, but you are also an author as well. You literally wrote the book on tuning. I think that says on your website as well, by the way, in that phrasing, literally wrote the book on tuning.

Three of them.

Yeah.

So I might be working on a fourth.

But can you give us a little bit of a breakdown, right? Because you don't have something that's traditional in this industry. You've had a career at the OEMs and now you've had, what, a handful of businesses now?

Really only owned three corporations, legally speaking. Okay. So rolling way back. In high school, I wasn't even into cars.

Okay.

I was more interested in car stereo than car engines, right? And so speakers are a separate thing. We could go off the rails on talking about speakers and physics and tuning, those things. And to me, there was a lot of overlap in my brain. But I went to a good engineering school because it turns out I was good at math as a kid. So you get sent to a good school, you go do things like, I'm in Detroit, I want to work on cars. Where's the best place to go work, to learn how to work on cars? I'll go to GMI. And I got in GMI. And I did well. I was like a solid B student there. I wasn't setting the curve, but you're setting, you're on a curve against the top 3% in the nation. Right?

It was a good point.

So a B student at GMI, I learned the material. I didn't ace tests, but holy crap, Dr. Berg taught me heat transfer. Right? And Dr. Kowalski was in charge of picking dampers and springs on Corvettes and Buicks for decades before he went to teach at GMI. Right? He had some cool stories that made them very relatable for us students. And I try and do the same thing now when I talk to younger students. I try and find something relatable. And like, you know, if we do a live class or an event, I try and make sure that people, I speak in a language that they can understand. And things like eigenvalues are intense for the math. But the concept is really simple, right? He broke it all the way down. I've had tons of suspension classes because it's part of the automotive program. But he's like, oh, you kids, you want to feel the road, you know, so your eigenvalue is X and that gives you a bounce mode. But as old guys, we want to sit in our rocking chair. And so that's pitch mode. And so that's the difference between a Corvette and a Buick. Oh, now I understand, eigenvalues. Okay, cool, right? So, you know, I try to do that same thing for air-fuel ratio or spark, cylinder pressure and torque, whatever it is, right, going forward. So that was kind of cool. I had professors who cared. They didn't need to be a professor. They liked teaching this stuff, and it kind of stuck on me, right? So I do that more now. So fast forward, I graduated college slightly before you were born. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever since I've been in the auto industry one way or another. So I had co-op jobs while I was in college. So GMI was a unique program. We would go back and forth between classroom and work every three months. And I did 180 credit hours and wrote a thesis, which is technically my first book, I guess.

Okay.

Even before the other one. And then you go get yourself a job in industry, which I did. Now, I was pretty bored with what I was doing, so I started wrenching on cars, because, of course, going to engineering school, you get exposed to other people who think cars are cool. That's where I learned, oh, you can make a Mustang faster than a Porsche. I started reading, you know, Muscle Mustangs and Fast Forwards or Super Ford magazine or whatever. Like, oh, yeah, I could do that. I could do that. Oh, yeah. And it really started to jive with stuff I was learning in class, right. So I had thermodynamics, I had engine design, advanced power systems, combustion systems. I had the classes on this stuff. I'm like, oh, yeah, why would you not choose a turbocharger? That's wasted heat energy. I want the enthalpy. Yeah. You get nerd out on this, right? So and then you get your job and it's soul crushing because you're responsible for something super exciting, like 80% of the pulleys going into Ford Motor Company. They're stampings.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know all about formed metal pulleys because I did that for a while.

Right?

And so with my extra bandwidth as a young aggressive first, I started a shop, as is the tradition, right? And I didn't know nearly enough about the business end of it, sorely undercapitalized, but man, I was motivated. And so I started a shop and I bought a dyno and I got tuning software and wow, I know what degrees before top dead center mean, I know what cylinder pressure is, right? I can do this as good as anybody. And there were some things that I did better and there's some other things that I didn't do as well. And there were a lot of hard lessons and like things that just didn't make sense until finally I had the right customer who happened to be an OEM guy and he explained, oh, we do this to do that.

Oh.

And so, you know, those things kind of jive. So I had the speed shop and that was the stuff you saw on the wall there. Like we were, we were amongst the first of the shops doing turbos on streetcars that weren't Buick Grand Nationals.

Okay.

Or a DSM.

What around, what time frame was this, roughly?

Like 99, 2000.

99, 2000, still? Okay.

Yeah, like the first, like, so when I graduated college, my graduation gift to myself was an Incon Twin Turbo Kit for my five-liter Mustang.

Okay.

And I put that on my car and I went out the Telegraph Road at night, on Saturday night, racing dudes with their mom's Trans Am. And they got a hundred shot on their Trans Am and they cannot figure out how this dude in that stock Mustang is kicking their a**. And all you got to have a bottle. They try and run me out of bottle. I'd step on their dick all night long. We go a second round, well, my intercooler is already cold.

Let's keep moving.

And that car was a riot. That thing was probably 400 wheel. But at the time, pretty good. And that could be an impressive street car at the time. And that thing was a riot. And so I had my shop, and I was doing work for friends, and then friends of friends, and they tell people who told people. And so it kind of grew. It was cool. And I eventually sold that business, worked for people I sold to for a while, then stuff happened, and I went back to the OEM site. Okay. And so I went back to being a calibration engineer at one of the ECU suppliers. And they were a European, and they were a German company, but they were supplying one of the American Car Company programs. So I was working on that, and I'm doing fun things like oil temp modeling and exhaust gas temp modeling. Although I learned how the ECU reacts to exhaust temp, right? And how do they know the cat is hot? Well, some jerk has to sit there and spend endless hours on a dyno creating this model of all these different factors and see how they go in, and you have to populate it and make it work right.

All right.

So, yes, a German supplier, you see a German supplier.

So I was working for one of the German ECU suppliers, working on an American turbocharged four-cylinder, right? So I had to model the exhaust temp at every path, every point in the path along the way. So as it enters the turbo, as it comes out of the turbo, as it goes into the brick, the temperature of the brick, temperature of the skin, temperature coming out, right? Once you get a robust heat transfer model, which is very much like you had in your 300-level, 400-level class at college, it's using those exact equations. But you have these tables in the ECU and you're like, you just move the number until it's the right convective coefficient or whatever to make the model work. And son of a gun, if it didn't work. Like, oh, this makes sense. All right, cool. And so we did that. And then I was the lead after that on a direct injection program at Ford. We did a prototype. Now, mind you, this is the timeframe where 3 liter, 3.5, 3.6 EcoBoost wasn't a thing yet, right? 2 liter EcoBoost was even further out. The first Ford EcoBoost was the V6, and that was a Bosch project. And our project at my company was a V8. So they built three engines and one truck as a demonstrator. And on paper, it sounds really awesome until we get into the details. We had an aluminum 5.4 liter, so they had a GT supercar engine block, with three valve heads drilled for DI, and a sheet metal intake, and twin turbos, and an air to water intercooler. I'm like, oh crap, and it's going into F150. Like, this is going to be a new lightning. This is going to be awesome. Now, the whole point of this was to make diesel torque without the diesel after treatment cost, because after treatment is crazy expensive on diesel. So like, look, you can put a lot of stuff on a gasoline engine, we're still money ahead. So we did that, and that engine got built at Roush, and we shipped it because of our international companies, politics or whatever. The group that got the win for which dyno we're going to put it on to test it was in Toulouse, France. So I got to go live in France for a while, while we dynoed this engine. And occasionally I had to schedule a meeting at the home office in Regensburg, which is right down the road from Munchen, which is where Octoberfest is.

Okay. Somebody had a good time. So that was a good time.

That's where Greg discovered good beer.

Yeah.

So, but at any rate...

Touch on that real quick, though. So why did you have to... Like when you hear dyno, right? You think, you know, a day or two into dyno, traditionally, you know, you're over there for a prolonged period. What does that sort of look like? We'll keep disclosing, I guess. It sucked.

I didn't enjoy it. Because je ne parle pas français bien.

Okay.

You've heard about 70% of my French I know right now. I did not learn French in school. I learned Spanish. Okay. I was conversational in Spanish. But that was it. And I was starting to learn German just on my own because I had a lot of German colleagues. Right. So all of a sudden, I'm the Cal lead on the program. And the program's in France. You're going. And it's Toulouse. It's not Le Mans, right? Le Mans is way up north. Toulouse is darn near Spain. It's way south. It's not a touristy area. So when you go to this town, the only thing in Toulouse basically is this engineering company in SpaceX. Okay. ESA, sorry. The European Space Agency is in Toulouse. So you're either in aerospace or you're working for this supplier or something like that. And it's not a touristy area, and they're not super excited to have tourists. And I'm not super French. So it was tough. It was interesting. I mean, you know, and I lived there for at least a month.

Okay.

What year was this?

Oh, five-ish?

Okay. You're saying five, four, three valves. I'm thinking, I'm kind of guessing when era this is, but that's...

Yeah.

And so, I mean, but the work that we have to do, like, if you think of all the possible areas that an engine could run at, and we run them all basically steady state to make sure that, you know, if we just held it there, it would be the right number for air-fuel ratio, spark, cam angle, torque, throttle blade, EGR, you know, wastegate duty cycle, you name it. It's a lot of stuff. And even though a lot of it is quasi-automated at the time, it's not as automated as it is now, it's still a lot of stuff. And then the program was still in flux. We weren't really sure. There were a couple other changes that we'd have to make along the way. Well, what if they want to try a different camshaft? Then you re-grid it and you redo everything. And so you keep going until you've got it, right? Until it's good enough that all the steady states and the simple like stair step transients, so if I went from 20% throttle up to 40% and stayed, right? We can do that on the dyno and capture what happens on a moving transient like that. And the more of that I can get done, the easier time I'm going to have when I get into the vehicle later. So we just had to grid all that stuff. And towards the end of that month, a couple guys from Ford came over and they checked it out, right? It's a little bit of a dog and pony show at this point because we've got it mostly sign stout, like here's what your engine does. And then, okay, now it's ready to put the other engine into a truck over at Roush. And so right at that same building that Shawn Day was working in, my truck was in one of those bays in the back of that building.

So is SVT involved in this?

Not SVT. So SVT, there's Building 57 down in Allen Park. Half of it is like Ford SVT, half of it is Roush. And even like later on, fast forward my career, I was the Calibration and Certification Manager for Roush Performance Parts. And so I had a purview over All Things Calibration by RPP. Well, RPP made the supercharged 5-liter Mustang and supercharged 5-liter truck. Well, that was done by a team of guys who reported to me who worked down in Building 57, same building that Shawn was in. So that building has both Roush people and Ford people, and in some cases, they're intertwined on the same projects. There's just a lot of that going on there. It's very blended. And the garage is shared.

I didn't know if any of this was also part development for you. You mentioned something about, oh, this could be a new lightning, because right in this era, we're now leaving the Terminator days, and we're getting close now to where we're launching. We're getting back in bed with Shelby here.

Yeah, I don't know anything about the Shelby end of it, because that was not this project. But this, as it turned out, it was, you know, we internally said, oh, cool, it's going to be like a lightning, except their thought was torque.

Right.

And so they wanted to make diesel torque, so we had to make like 700 new meters of torque, which is by today's standard a laughable amount. But at the time, pretty good amount, with a gasoline engine, with spark plugs.

Okay, cool.

And we were putting it through the 5R110, which is really a six-speed transmission, which is the lightning trans, which is also at the time was one of the diesel option trans. So that's what we were doing with it, but it was again, it was a steel body truck, not the new aluminum truck. So the truck was heavy, you know, they gave us a quad cab. It was a big heavy truck.

Well, that's what they're going to sell most of, right?

So and well, this was not a sales thing. It was literally an R&D demonstrator to prove out the technology. And so to do it, we took the ECU and all the controls and sensors that were on a Porsche Cayenne twin turbo. And we put them on the Ford vehicle. And because we owned the ECU, we could just do the can output layer to make our Porsche style controls talk to a Ford dashboard and a Ford body control module and a Ford transmission because we have people for that. So we just make it talk, no problem. And Ford gives us the info. And so we're not trying to crack it like HP tuners. We're on the inside. We tell you what it's going to be.

You're not some guy in a garage trying to re-pin a harness hoping to figure it out.

That wasn't me. That's software guys. I'm Calibration. So software guys figure it out. By the time it gets to me, it already works. Cool. So it was cool. But even the initial program, the initial discussion with the guys at Ford, this gets interesting because again, they wanted low RPM, high torque. And so they wanted this 5.4 to make all the torque very early. And so my assistant here, they wanted to make like full boost below 1500 RPM. And they were all worried about turbo lag. And even though they had a six-speed transmission, although they were only using five of the gears, they wanted right now torque response. And so in order to get that, they sized the turbos such that they would spool very rapidly. You can kind of see where this is going now. So what should have been a pair of GT30s on this thing, were now GT20s.

I'm like, ooh, you're gonna run out.

It's not gonna breathe well up top. Well, it's gotta make low end torque. We have to make the torque right away. I'm like, can't we just shift? Can't we unlock the torque converter? And I'll give you axle torque. That's what you really want. You accelerate the vehicle. Axle torque is the only thing that matters, not flywheel torque. Like, let me shift it. No, no, no, no, we need to lock it up in, so if you're on the freeway and you tipped in, they didn't want downshift. They just wanted the torque right away. I'm like, well, that's a weird requirement, but hey, okay. So now we're forced into small turbos, very responsive, super, super responsive. Guess where it goes at the end of the project, right? And then, okay, well, what about compression ratio? Oh, well, we're gonna have to drop the ratio.

I'm like, why?

And it keep me, mind you, by this point, I'd worked in the aftermarket a ton. I've tuned hundreds and hundreds of supercharged Mustangs, 462 valve, 464 valve, 463 valve. They were already out. We were already putting blowers on them. And I got into a discussion with a PhD at Ford, and he told me how wrong I was, that there was no possible way you can supercharge this engine without dropping the compression ratio. Oh, knock, knock, knock, knock. I said, I beg to differ. I said, let me take a shot. I'm pretty sure I can make it work. I might have done this before.

If you can't just slide it in, get it to fit right, or it bends a little bit funny, it's time to get some proper mandrel bends. Whether you are a weekend warrior or a shop owner, Haze Performance has what you need to get your charge piping or exhaust dialed. From flex couplers to T-Bolt clamps, if you want to lay down some pipe, go to Bluetooth, I mean, hazeperf.com and use Minnoxide 5 to get 5% off any Haze Performance products. That's hazeperf.com. Let's get back to the show.

No, no way, no way. So they took almost a full point of compression out of this engine, which the guys who race modulus are all going, right? That's where all the efficiency is. In fact, that's why Coyote is even better, right? It's because they could get away with the compression. And the combustion system got remarkably better on Coyote, and every generation of Coyote has gotten better. But 3 valve was one of those, like, it got a lot better at 3 valve than comparing to 2 valve, certainly. And so they took all the compression away, and they put these little tiny turbos on. So it's soggy without the compression, but yet they want all the boost down low. So now we have to make even more boost down low at a low RPM. And so we very faithfully gridded all it, made it do exactly what it's... We got all done with the project, put it in an F-150 that's pretty heavy, and the thing was out of breath by 4500. Like, congratulations, we made a diesel. I mean, it had the exact same workable RPM range as a diesel. It was the same, you know, just without the noisy startup, I guess. But I mean, that engine was a work of art. Holy crap, we had that aluminum, six bolt main, right? Forged everything underneath it. We had dry sump oiling on it. And then we had another Gimler belt running the six piston DI pump. Like it had all the DI fuel available. It was kind of cool. We had a lot of fuel available in that thing. And we ran it pretty rich up top because we had to do cooling because those turbines get hot when they're kind of restrictive.

Well, I understand they're... I can see what they're trying to do here. Because this is right when the diesels are really getting like... It's getting bad. They're getting cracked down on. The 6.0 wasn't exactly, you know, being known for reliability at this point. And so I could see what you're saying. It's dollars.

It's pure as it has nothing to do with engineering. Is the accountants came to us and said, find a way to not buy $12,000 of after-treatment per vehicle? We'll buy DI. We'll buy turbos. Whatever. Like, turbos in the OEM side are cheap. They're cheap. And, you know, if you're tooling manifolds already, it costs the same to tool a turbo manifold versus an NA manifold. It's kind of the same. So the turbochargers themselves are hundreds of dollars. And, you know, an SCR system or DPF. At the time when they're brand new, they were proud of them.

All for just us guys again. I'm gonna throw them in the garbage.

Oh, man. You know, the diesel guys, the diesel performance guys, unfortunately, they're the ones who are ruining it for a lot of other people in the industry, right? They, I mean, because they've got this obvious emissions violation, right? You can see the emissions from the tailpipe when these guys start rolling coal. It is ridiculous when they do this stuff, right? And yet there are other people who make tons of power, diesel, very clean.

So you look at Gale Banks, his stuff. Yeah. Yes.

Now Gale's an engineer.

In fact, he used to teach at GMI. Weird.

I saw, I met Gale at SEMA one time. And again, I'd done all this twin turbo V8 stuff, right? And they had one of their twin turbo systems on a Chevy small block in the booth at the time still.

They still had a few of the gasoline things in the booth.

And I was talking about it, and Gale came over and we're talking.

And he's like, where did you go to school?

Like, you know, how do you know how to say that, right? I must have said a bad word to him. And yeah, I went to GMI. He's like, I used to teach there. And Gale was all like, yeah. So next thing you know, I got Gale Banks' phone number. Like, okay, cool. That's cool. I don't abuse it. He's a cool guy. He's smart.

Yeah.

And you know, so if you want to look at how to do diesels, right? He's got, you know, he's got it dialed in. There are other people that make more power than him, but his stuff does not break.

No.

And if he says it makes X horsepower, it makes X or X plus one. So he's pretty good at what he does.

Yeah. No, I have deleted trucks that don't smoke. If they're tuned properly, then it's not really, I mean, I can get it to do it if I do the right pedal movements and certain things on it and off and back on it again real quick, but.

Well, the funny thing is it's obvious on diesels because it's really easy to get there.

Yep.

Direct injection can do the same thing. So it's a new and interesting way for us to screw up combustion, right? Injectors used to run great with carburetors, and then we came in and fixed them. We put fuel injection on it. And if we screw up the fuel injection, then we can screw up the fuel distribution, right? Carburetors do a really good job of getting fuel to mix with air, which is a requirement before we can burn it. Yeah. So diesel? Yeah. So diesel combustion, although it's fundamentally different than gasoline combustion. So like I've sat in class with Dr. Haywood from MIT. He teaches a class that Ford would bring him in to teach us. And when I was a Calibrator at Ford, I got to sit in on that class, even though I didn't need the class. I'm like, oh, Dr. Haywood's teaching. Can I go to this class? My supervisor let me go. I went and I got to sit in three days of class with Dr. Haywood, the guy who wrote the 900 page book on Introduction to Internal Combustion Engines. It's this book that every university uses to teach their engine course.

Oh, really?

Right. So Dr. Haywood is well known. He ran the Sloan Lab at MIT, and I got to go spend a couple of days with him. In Dearborn, I went, sign me up. It was cool, because I got to ask him questions now based on my experience. So I had some smarter questions. There were people there learning, suck, squish, bang, blow. That's cool. And I don't think they understood who they were learning from. And he gives us all a copy of the book at the class.

I'm like, can you sign?

I was all nerdy. So in that class, Dr. Haywood was really smart about both diesel and gasoline, because it's just combustion. And combustion is my background anyway. So diesel is what we call a diffusion flame. It's like a candle. So the fuel comes in the center and really the shell burns. Gasoline is a pre-mixed flame. So the air and fuel all kind of go into what we call homogeneous or evenly mixed thing. And then we have an ignition point that travels through that mixture. But the balance of air and fuel is already even throughout the space. Whereas in diesel, there's always richer stuff in the center of the jet and leaner stuff on the outside of the flame.

Right?

And so trying to balance that in diesel is different than how we balance it on gasoline. So how do you make more power in diesel?

Just shove more fuel in.

Right.

And in gasoline, on direct injection, we could do the same thing. Well, either way, if you put fuel into the cylinder and it doesn't get time to evaporate and mix evenly with the oxygens around it, and it's not pure oxygen around it, it's atmospheric air. So only 20% of it's oxygen. If you don't evenly mix that stuff, the bits of fuel start to clump together into little chunks, and they become the things that go out the tailpipe that we see.

Right.

So we can get that on DI, and we can get that on diesel very obviously, right? So it's easy to see it on diesel. But there are DI cars where you see them accelerate right from the stoplight, and there's black smoke coming out the tailpipe.

Yep.

And so they start regulating us. And so the EPA and ARB and EU and China and whoever else wants to impose a sanction now says, okay, the regulation is now you must have particulate matter below certain standards. All of a sudden, particulate matter gets lumped right in there with carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons and oxides and nitrogen and all the normal stuff that we, calibration engineers have to make sure it doesn't go out the tailpipe. So it's another thing, a new and interesting thing. So the onion just got one more layer. Yep, right.

Well, especially like so after our episode of Sam Barrows, episode 110, last time we were here in Detroit, I went down a huge EPA rabbit hole, learning about every iteration of new rules and such. I think the last one was like 2014, the next one's like 2027, something like that.

It's always evolving. It's a moving target.

Yep. And it's interesting to see how the goalpost keeps moving. And I guess what's kind of in your experience with that goalpost moving? I mean, how much more difficult does it get from an engineering perspective?

It sucks.

It's job security.

Yeah.

But I think we are now at the point of diminishing returns.

Yep.

So the tailpipe standard, even at level three, now we're getting to level four.

So, I mean, these things don't get looser, right?

Even level three, and one could argue even level two, is cleaner than the background sample in many big cities.

Really?

When you look at oxides and nitrogen, what's allowed to come out the tailpipe, if you were in downtown LA or New York City or Houston or London, right? Beijing, right? You know, and there's probably lots of other, you know, urban centers around the world where lots of things are going on, it's not super clean, right? Our tailpipe is cleaner after we burn stuff. It's cleaner than what people are just walking around breathing in that atmosphere, right?

That's crazy.

So, in your opinion, the particulate filter itself, because us diesel guys can talk all day long, yeah, with the plastic jugs, all the stuff that cuts your engine life in half, all that kind of stuff. In your opinion, is it more efficient still to have, I mean, where do we draw the line at here? Now you're buying a new truck once your DPF goes out, you know, they're very expensive to work on and fix. You're finding DEF jugs just sitting in piles at gas stations because they don't fit in the trashcan. Like where are we, you know?

So a couple of good topics there, each individually, right? So let's hit them one at a time. Number one, the combustion chambers and the combustion systems got way more efficient. They're way better at turning grams of fuel into joules of energy on the crankshaft. Way better at that now. So like it or not, all of this stuff forced them to sharpen their pencils and make the combustion. Now, that alone makes our world better. Efficient combustion systems are what we like, right? We like efficient engines, which is like big engines that are efficient, not little engines that are efficient, right? So, you know, nobody, you know, it's like the Honda guys, we make more horsepower per liter. Nobody cares when you're talking to a dude with a Viper.

Yeah.

He's got a tractor motor and he, it's terribly inefficient, but he's got so much of it, it doesn't matter. But now you look at a modern LSLT, coyote, whatever, right? It's, they're really good.

Yep.

Right. And diesels are the same way. Like the new crop of diesels, everything makes a thousand foot pounds now, right? Despite all the emission stuff thrown at them, right? The thousand foot pounds doesn't get there on accident. So they're able to deliver that pretty consistently somehow. So they're pretty smart about that. I love that part. The fact that LS1 engine, when it first came out, the whole reason it got there was because GM had to sharpen their pencils on emissions. Lev2 was coming. And so to meet Lev2, they're looking at the old Gen2 LT1, LT4, and they almost went to a thing called Venture V8. And then there was LS, and there were two camps of the GM, and eventually LS Camp 1. Thank God. But that combustion system was designed so that we had better mixing and motion and even combustion without knock. It turns out it makes a lot of horsepower. And then they went through generations from there of making it even better. So, hallelujah, right? Coyote, same thing, right? You know, 462 valves sucked. Sorry. Yeah. And they had the modular Mafia in Ford. There was a long time in Ford where if you said anything negative about the the Romeo and Windsor engines, you could be put on the list and you were probably not going to be very successful in your career.

Really?

So you had to be kind of smart about, you know, how bad you feel like being critical of something. Because, look, my buddy Dave taught me, and I wish I had learned this lesson earlier in life, but sometimes when a man comes in to your shopping, he wants a red suit, you sell him a red suit. Sometimes it just ain't worth arguing. Yeah. And that was one of those cases. And I have this problem with honesty. I tend to just overshare my, well, why would you do that? Like my poker face is gone as an engineer. As an engineer in engineering school, they don't teach you poker face. They don't teach you diplomatic answer. They teach you numbers. We get really good at numbers. Like, well, clearly this is the answer. And we live in a world of blacks and whites. Yeah. Right. There's no shades of gray. It's this and it's career limiting sometimes. I wish I knew more about that when I was younger. So, but the now you go on to like the plastic jugs. Yeah. The idea that you can do selective catalytic reduction and inject urea into an exhaust stream, and you can pull oxides and nitrogen and get them to re-bond and turn into other things in the presence of other stuff. And so that your tailpipe thing is more closely resembling CO2 and water with less bad stuff going out the tailpipe. Cool. But the delivery system sucks, right? Buying plastic jugs of something at a truck stop, and plastic jugs wrapped in cardboard is dumb. Why don't they just have a pump for death?

They do it at a lot of the diesel places now. At the big truck stop, right?

Yeah. So you go to a loves or a pilot or something. You go, okay. But you go to Shell, they ain't got that at Exxon.

No.

Right.

So, bummer.

You know, that's a miss, right? That's a miss. And I really wish they were better about that. But again, diesels are not necessarily my world. I know enough to be dangerous, but you won't see me on the internet proclaiming to be a diesel expert. I understand it. When people talk, I can listen to Gale Banks talk about what he's done to diesels.

And I go, yep.

Well, if we edit this and chop it up right, we can make you say you're a diesel expert on the internet.

I already got the highlight in my head.

Yeah.

Through AI, right?

We're going to deep bake.

Yeah.

Those things are crazy nowadays. Yeah.

They're all 1000 foot pounds, right? That's normal. And that's just what it is.

That's cool.

I wish the trucks weren't so heavy. Every new model that comes out seems to be heavier than the one that replaces. The only people who are doing a good job of that are Mazda. So the ND Miata when it came out was like 400 pounds lighter than the NC Miata.

Like, holy smokes.

The OEMs here could learn a thing or two from that.

Yeah, we had a rant about that a few months ago when we were chatting with Schwartz. There's really no American cars that are light and high horsepower anymore. I mean, granted the Corvette, like then we go back to like the C6 or the C5 Corvette, it was like perfect. It was super like low.

C5's good.

Yeah, but it was super light, high power.

C5Z, you can get them under three.

It's getting it done.

Yep.

Yeah. So it's, I hope ROEMs learn from that. Yeah.

I mean, but I mean, and then you get into EVs, right? EVs are inherently heavier because batteries, it turns out, are heavy. Copper is heavy. Magnets are heavy, right? And weight breeds weight. So as soon as you have weight, well, you need bigger brakes because you can't count on the regenerative all the times. You have to have a foundation brake system, even if the regen failed. Otherwise you can't stop this brick. You need bigger springs, you need bigger shocks, you need bigger crumple zones, you need stiffer chassis, right? So the Chevy Hummer, the GM Hummer is proof that an EV doesn't have to be good for the environment.

So that's another time we've heard that. Yeah.

Where does all that lithium and cobalt come from? That, my friends, is an inconvenient truth, as our former vice president used to say. Right? It's, man, you know, there's an absolutely used case for EVs, right? So if you live in an urban center and you have short trips, you have a means of charging, hallelujah. But a lot of America is based on commuting. And the longer the distance becomes, the less that EV proposition seems to work, right? Over-the-road trucking is the worst case for it. Yes. Right. You know, that's where diesel works really well, because you want something to just continuously deliver the power, turn the energy in here, storing liquid energy and fuels. Pretty efficient. And our engines are pretty efficient nowadays. And we turn that in to work on an axle. Cool. Now, the regen is hard to ignore, right? So we get to the supercars. Filling the hole and capturing regen, like, that's the only way you're really gonna get there on the current crop of supercars, right? To be super, super awesome. And managing the traction control down to milliseconds, nanoseconds, whatever it is these days. You know, electric machinery is far more precise at that than gasoline, but yet the sheer volume of thrust still comes from gasoline, right? So, you know, you look at the mega supercars today, right? They're a thousand horsepower and some sort of electrification.

Okay, cool.

Some sort of hybridization for normal drivers, absolutely to be expected. I think it's going to be just the norm. Even if it's just a mild hybridization, you can't ignore the idea of recovering energy on diesel. It's free beer. Yeah. Otherwise, your brakes turn into heat and waste it. Heat is where energy goes to die.

Right.

So, if we can recover even 20% of that and use that to offset a little bit of gasoline or diesel on the next acceleration event, well, then we used a little bit less fuel. It's cool. But all EV? You know, there's somewhere where these lines cross, right?

Yeah.

At the risk of triggering a very deep topic, what are your thoughts on the new ram charger?

The EV truck?

The EV that's powered by the 3.6 Pennistar?

I don't want to get too deep into that one.

That's... We could...

No, I'm going to have to take the fifth on that one. I was too close to home on that. Okay, fair enough.

Well, then, let's kind of jump back to...

Nope.

Let's jump back to, I guess, kind of back to the career side of things. So, we covered a France part, we covered... What did we touch on after that? Well, let's...

So, what happened with this... Let's get to the end of this 5.4 3-valve twin-turbo.

Oh, I mean, we made the truck and it was brutally good acceleration until about 4,000 rpm in every year, right? Except the truck was heavy. So, I mean, had we put this in a lighter vehicle, it would have been even quicker. But the goal was not to make a quarter-mile machine, right? That was never the goal on the outset. The goal was to do truck things, have towing capacity, have torque. So, yes, this thing could have toed your house. Absolutely.

Yeah. Check.

Done. And that was it. And they just want to see what the combustion system would do with direct injection, right? So, they took up what was a PFI engine, but the three-valve head was originally, in its very first design, was package protected to put a DI injector through a certain passage there. And so, we just merely drilled that out. And the Roush guys did that and put an injector in and built the engine around it, right? Cool, and then they give to some schlepp who has to go sit there at the dyno and spend a month making it run, and then get in the truck and spend another month or so making the truck drive nice after you get the... Because you got like, on the OEM side, there are two camps of calibrators too, right? You have your core or base engine calibrators who sit there on an engine dyno and get every corner of the map that they can on the engine dyno. They do positive, negative torques, whatever. The dynos that they use at the OEMs are really stinking cool. They're million-dollar sells. It's not a super flow. And then they hand it off to a driveability or driveability emissions team. And those are the guys in the vehicle. Those are the guys that have to, we were kind of talking about this before, like the four corners. Make sure the vehicle works at hot, cold, high, and low altitude. So, you have a hot high altitude, you have a hot low altitude. You have a cold high altitude and a cold low altitude. So, right now in Detroit, we're at cold, low altitude, generally speaking. We're 900 feet, but it's low enough. And you know, you guys are Minnesota, same, right? And all the OEMs have some place up north to test where it's about minus 20, pretty consistently. And then they'll refrigerate the cars to minus 40. And they have to check the box where it actually starts at minus 40. Usually assisted. So you might have a battery charger or a block warmer or something, but it's got to start, right? Because the expectation is Karen gets in and pushes the button and the car just starts.

Yeah, my 6.7 truck will probably need to be plugged in. My wife's 7.3 truck, below 10 degrees, I need to have it plugged in.

Well, so yes, I mean, you're smart to plug it in. Yeah. The minus 40 is an assisted start for us. There's no emissions concern at minus 40. In fact, the emissions world ends at 20 Fahrenheit or minus 7C, right? Plus or minus the tolerance band. So the emissions guys might go a few degrees colder than that just in case the EPA were to audit something and they're on the far end. But even then, you're talking like, you know, 17 Fahrenheit. It's not, you know, it's not cold, cold. Like you guys, the below zero stuff just has to run. The nice thing is you can pollute all you want as long as it runs. Oh, really? Yeah. Now the reality is it's not that bad, right? Because the catalysts are there. Look, after a minute, that cat's pretty toasty and it's working. And the tailpipe is pretty clean. And there's no reason to be anywhere other than stoic. It's, you know, that fur, but most of the emissions happen right at cold start, right? So just getting it to fire up, we do a lot of cold start enrichment, which is not super good for emissions, but we're in it and we're out of it very quickly. And so that's, you know, the drivability and emissions guys are in charge of that, not the core engine guys. And then they'll go do the same thing up in Colorado. So they'll have to do that at 8,000 feet of altitude. And it has to just start there. And then they'll come back to, they'll go to Death Valley in the summer or Las Vegas, right, or Phoenix, right? And they'll test there in the middle of summer. And if we go out there as a dev team, and if it's not 112 or hotter, we wasted the trip.

Really?

Yeah. I'm kind of bummed. Like, I get 100 degrees here at home.

Yeah.

And only be 10 degrees hotter than that. Why did I get a plane ticket? Why would I ship cars halfway across the country to go do that? You know, we want 120 degree ambience. We want to see what's really crappy. Does this thing still work when we push it way out there? Because again, the expectation is cars just work. And it doesn't matter if it's a Ford Focus or if it's a Corvette ZR1. They all go out there all the time. And so there's five photographers are out there. They know where people stay. And it's funny because like the Calibrators from different OEMs, when we go to the same venues to do the same tests, we stay at the same hotel some of the time. So it's like that Looney Tunes episode, you know, like morning Sam, morning Ralph. Well, you guys are working out of the day. Ah, I can't tell. Yeah, us either. Okay, cool.

Have fun.

We'll see at the bar later.

Yeah.

And Calibrated are pretty cool with each other. I mean, even the Ford versus Chevy, there's some rivalry, but everyone's cool. It's like the race track you guys were talking about before. Like somebody's broken, we'll help you. Yeah. If you're in Death Valley and your prototype failed, yeah, we're going to help you, right? At least let you get back to wherever your support team is or whatever. You're riding parts, you need a jack, whatever. You need something to drink.

Yeah.

You take mine, man.

You're good.

Because we've been there. Do this long enough. But we got to do all these different conditions. And then finally go on some management ride to San Diego up the coast at sea level and 72 degrees.

And like, oh, isn't this nice?

Yeah. That part's easy, right?

What's the most difficult part about calibrating a car? I remember, again, I always like to bring it back to Sam. It's kind of like that, what was it? Warm idle was the hardest part to calibrate?

For the injector, it is. That's the smallest fuel mass, right? So like you see the injector machine behind me. Born out of necessity, because as an aftermarket calibrator, I needed the data on the injectors, and the data does not end at flow rate. Oh, these are 42-pound-per-hour injectors, yeah? And the offset is a huge thing, because the offset is a big percentage of the on time when you're at idle or cruise, right? So driving down the road, you can actually be at a lighter load than you are at idle. So you can be driving 30 mile an hour in third, fourth gear, whatever, just really light throttle. And it's a very small amount of air charge in the cylinder, which needs a very small amount of fuel charge to be balanced. And so you're balancing small numbers, right? And that's tricky. You will not get there if your injector data was not right. So we, for a long time, like I used to teach the SCT Advanced Dealer Training course. I took over from Jerry. Jerry was an OEM Calibrator. I learned some stuff from Jerry. And then Jerry didn't want to do that class anymore. I said, hey, do you mind? They asked me if I would teach it, do you mind? Okay, cool. Thank you, Jerry. You know, so I went down, I go down to Florida to SCT and teach the dealers. Here's how you do. Listen up, guys. Here's what's really going on inside there. We had to talk about torque-based throttle control. But one of the really cool things, SCT is one of the first ones to do this in scale, was they had those value files that would, you could take the Ford Motorsport injectors and put them on any Ford ECU and just drop all the data in. It was high slope, low slope, brake point, offsets versus voltage and all the multipliers. It's like seven tables and like four or five other scalars. That is a complete injector characterization. And at least now you've got the average for what that part number should be, because there are Lucas 42s and there are Ford Racing Bosch 42s at the time.

Which do you use?

I don't know. Well, the offsets are different. And then we go to 60s, right? In the old school, before that, we used to just take, if we had a five liter and we went from 19s to 42s, we just did everything 42 over 19.

It must be fine.

We didn't touch the offsets and we didn't touch the break point.

Well, you had to switch out your MAF to match the detectors, right?

Oh, yeah. Have you talked to Nick at PMAF yet? Nick and I are good friends. But yeah, so we would get a MAF calibrated for 42s, which the MAF would just output 19 over 42 to make up for your fuel being delivered at 42 over 19. Okay. So the MAF would tell it there's less air charge, so hopefully it would give you less pulse width and you would just deliver more fuel because the injector was physically larger. And it kind of got you there. That was the dark ages of tuning before we knew any better. That was pre-SCT days. That was autologic chip master stuff that we didn't know any better. Nobody came in and told us how the injector model worked. And so in the aftermarket, we were the have-nots on the knowledge. We were like, we just did that. We were making cars go fast like that. We didn't know any better. And it's okay. Sometimes we drove a little weird in traffic. I don't know the best I can do. Yeah. Right. And finally, we realized, oh, okay, when you start getting all the Ford data on this injector, we really take all the data from a Lightning and put it into a Mustang ECU. And then you just do a face value calibration in the mass airflow sensor. All of a sudden, everything works way better. The weather changes and it's not rich all of a sudden. And the weather changes again, it's not lean, right? You could have a car that races and qualifies in the afternoon and races for the trophy at night, you don't need to retune it. Revolutionary. Oh my gosh, right? Because it works like a normal OEM car at this point, because you're not lying to it anymore. So we needed that data. And so there are precious few injectors in the market that came with the data. And when I did my first training classes and DVDs, what I did, I went through and did what I called the Injector Rosetta Stone. I made a sheet that took all the Ford Racing stuff and regressed it back to units of time and mass based on how the Ford model works. And then I took that time and mass and regressed it back to it. And I changed the pressure, corrected the mass for the pressure difference, and then put that in GM units. And then gave people, here's the Ford Racing 42s and the Deca 60s and the Deca 80s. Here's, you can put this into a Corvette or a Camaro now. All of a sudden, now we can do Camaros and Corvettes to run right.

Oh, so much easier.

But it was true, right? Because if you have an error in the fuel part of air-fuel ratio, and you grab your wideband, and you go make a change to the MAF curve or the VE surface, whatever you're doing for air charge, to try and bring air-fuel ratio in line. Well, if you thought you gave it 10 milligrams of fuel, and you really gave it 12, because the offset was wrong, you're going to put that error into your air-fuel side. And on the older systems, it kind of doesn't matter. It's close enough. New stuff, especially torque-based stuff, so anything 4 to 05 and newer, so not really that new. But like GM, when we get into the new torque-based everythings, especially when transmissions are torque-based, and it's estimating the torque based on the air charge, which is estimating in your air fuel error, which is estimating based on your fuel delivery model. So if you get it wrong at Jump Street, five steps later, all of a sudden, the transmission is not shifting right. Well, because you lied to it about torque. And by the way, you lied to it about air charge. And we go in root cause, and all of a sudden, we start looking at it. So when I do a forensic, and I start looking at somebody's CAL file, and they say, what's wrong with this thing? I start with the absolute basics every time. Well, what injectors are on it? I don't know. Well, how'd you tune it? Oh, well, we got these blah, blah, blah 80s. Like, well, what's the data on them?

I don't know. Well, how'd you tune it?

Well, we just used X. And like Paul gets really mad. Paul at ID gets really mad when people use ID data on non-ID injectors. Cause I've tested them. They're not the same, right? There are thousands and there are thousands, right? But they're not all ID 1000s, they're all ID 1050Xs. Now, in the infancy of this program, when I did this, Paul and I used to be on really good terms. I don't know why we don't talk anymore, but whatever. He, I would test his injectors and we'd come out within a couple percent of each other. And I can still do that today. I've still run 1050s or 1300s or 1700s on these benches. I get within a few percent difference. He's got a slightly different testing method. They use a different fluid at a different temperature. Okay. But we're close. Yeah. I mean, plus or minus a couple percent gets you an A in every engineering class I ever took. And I even told this story to one of my professors when I was back lecturing at Kettering. And I'm like, hey, Dr. Davis, you get within 3%. That's an A, right? He's like, yeah, absolutely.

So would that be, I just had a car tuned by Lund. All right. Gen 2 Coyote car, Gen 4 Whipple, and I had injector development injectors on it. I reached out to them and they were like, we only tune fuel injector clinic or IDs. So I had to buy another $1,000 set of injectors to go ID 1050s to put in it.

So you made the smart decision because the ID, their data is right.

Okay, so that why? Because they have the rock solid data from injector development already? Or I...

I, let me say this correctly. I don't know where development or clinic get their data.

Okay.

I will in full disclosure tell you, I know exactly where the fuel injector connection data comes from because I know the guy that did it.

Okay.

All of their data has a Calibrated Success logo on it because it came off of that bench right there.

Really?

Yeah.

So I still have those injectors.

You have connection injectors? I'll find the picture.

We'll talk.

And now, I'll preface this.

Fuel injector development.

I don't know what the...

Okay, okay, okay.

In many cases, all these guys are reselling the same Bosch motor sport injectors.

Yep.

Now, here's the problem. Injectors also have variability. So, even if all 8-of-year injectors are within 2% of each other, which would be exceptionally good match, in production on the OEM side, if you go to Ford, GM, whatever, and they buy injectors from Bosch. Now, they buy millions, right? They got a little bit of leverage.

Yeah.

They say, hey, Bosch, give us the good ones first.

Bosch goes, okay, cool.

We'll give you the good ones. They will accept anything plus or minus 6% in production. Now, in practice, it's usually 4% or less, but you could theoretically have a plus 4 injector next to a minus 4 injector on the same engine, even on the same bank or one on opposite banks, right? That's why fuel trims are never zero, right? They're even on average, right? Over time, you got clothes moving around, whatever, but in production, there's always tolerances on anything, just like camshafts being ground, just like pistons being machined. And machining, if you look at a blueprint, there's always a dimension and tolerances. And injectors are no different. They're precision instruments. So there's a flow rate and a tolerance. There's an offset and a tolerance, right? There's a curve, and there's a tolerance band that they will accept. And they say, hey, if you get close enough, we'll put them on. And if we're just building F-150s, close enough. Fuel trims will sort it out. And I can tell you firsthand, as a Ford Calibrator, there are some cases where as a calibrator, I'm running the car and I'm driving down the road up in Denver at some weird oddball high-elevation combination, and the fuel trims were larger than I would have thought. I called my base engine guy, I'm like, what's this?

He's like, as close as we can get. Live with it.

Now, race car world, we want more precision, right? Problem is, if you just buy generic Bosch motorsport injectors, that plus minus six goes to plus minus eight. So now you could have a 15, 16% difference between any two samples.

Or, all right, Dan, on a scale of one to ten, how much do you think your wife loves you?

Oh, it's got to be like an eight, solid eight.

So by my math, she should get to this episode by like Valentine's Day, right? I think she should go get you a Haltech ECU for that 2JZ Swap Bronco you're doing.

Yeah, I would agree.

So I think it would be great if she used your credit card to go to tunebyshawn, shawn.com to get you a Haltech ECU for 5% off using carbon monoxide. Is that math out?

Absolutely.

I don't think we tell her about this ad until it runs though.

You could have 8 precisely matched because somebody bought a crate of a thousand injectors and got, they sorted them to highs, mediums, and lows. And so now you got a set of, they might be lows, they might be highs, but they're all within a couple percent of each other. But they could all be 6-8 percent away from the mean. And you won't know. Now you'll bake that into your MAFCR, or your background air charge model, and your torque models, and everything else, and it'll run okay, but then, oh, it's a little weird on idle. Well, yeah, because you're 8 percent off on your air charge, and you're trying to do idle area in just a few square millimeters of change, and your airflow is corrected based on your error from your fuel flow. Okay, so this snowballs, okay, so small errors up front. And so when I've tested, because I have tested some other people's injectors, and I looked at their model, I'm like, where'd they get that number? And so then I turned their numbers into a mass versus time curve, because that's all that really matters for the injector. And we look at the actual measurement, because I get the raw measurement, and I've got a precision flow instrument on here. So I'm pretty happy with the accuracy of this thing.

It's less than 1%.

And I look at what they're claiming, and as we got lower and lower into the fuel mass, the error went like this. Now they're up at watt, no problem. So the guys are like, anytime somebody says, oh, well, these injectors are great, I made a thousand horsepower with them. Congratulations. Watt is easy. Watt is so easy that trained monkeys can do it. There's like two knobs, fuel and spark, basically, or maybe a third if you're moving the cam. Doing watt is not that hard. Calibrating for emissions is way harder. And doing correct torque-based throttle control at idle and off idle, way harder. And it's all based on this foundation that you build from. So the fuel injector model is super, super important. And I got so mad at not having the stuff that I made a bench that could get the stuff. So this bench runs these injectors from below the point where they'll ever even open, and takes a bunch of data right as the injector just starts to open, and then gets into the linear range. And then I get a bunch of another couple thousand points in the linear range to say, yep, that's a straight line. And they fit with like a.9999 something, right? Okay, okay, that's the straight line. But what it does down here is the thing just starts to open. When I teach a class, I'm like, you ever wash your car in the driveway, put your thumb over the hose, and you take your thumb off the hose, what does the stream of water do?

It goes limp.

Well, what happens when you first take your thumb off the hose? It sprays further, and then it relaxes into some static flow rate.

Yep.

Same thing happens every single time when a fuel injector fires.

Oh, that makes sense.

Your thumb is the needle, right? So you get this momentarily higher flow rate that relaxes into a static flow rate or a linear flow rate more appropriately, right? And so characterizing that, if you're going to exist down in that range where the injector is just barely opening, you better get that stuff right. Now some injectors are linear almost all the way down to zero. Awesome. Makes our life easier. And then that stuff matters even less. Some injectors are not.

What would be the difference between those types of injectors? Would it be just the size of them or what goes into that, I guess?

Well, generally speaking, the newer designs, so like the Bosch EV14s are way better than the old big fat body EV1s, right? So if you get an old push rod 5-liter Lightning or whatever, those are EV1s. Things are this big around.

I have hundreds of them around my shop.

60 millimeters tall and they're like a prescription pill bottle, right?

Yeah, they're different colors for stuff.

And the new ones are like a little stubby pencil, right?

Right.

Okay.

So big magnets and big heavy needle things, right? So they've gone to small things.

Gotcha. Okay.

Right. And small things are machined more precisely. So by the time you get to like an LS3, LS7 injector and anything newer, they're really pretty good. Now, as we go to really high flow rate, here's the problem. The more an injector can flow on the top end, Sam kind of talked about this, right? Dynamic range is the hard thing to do. So if you have enough injector that supports tons of power up here, tons of fuel flow rate up here, how do you take a sip from the fire hose down here? You take your thumb off the hose every single time, right? And how do you meter that? Because even if you metered the fuel mass perfectly, you would still have all that mass delivered in a tiny little narrow shot, really dense slug of fuel that enters the engine at idle with minimum port velocity and minimum mixing.

Okay.

Kind of sucks. Not super good for combustion. All right. So that's why we always want you to run the smallest injector you can get away with.

Right.

OEM is not going to put thousand pound injectors on the car, even though they could buy them from Bosch.

Bosch has them.

Right.

Right. They don't need them. All right. So the biggest stuff you see from OEMs might be 60, 80 pounds, right? Because they don't really need anything more than that. Like GT500 has got some of the biggest OEM injectors on it.

Because all of this comes just parked up.

Yeah.

Well, cause all the fuel comes, and funny thing is those injectors are pretty sloppy.

Yeah.

And they're hard to control down low.

I have a set of ID 1050s that go in mine.

And it probably runs better with the 1050s than it did with stock injectors.

I'll let you know when I get them in there.

Well, I bet you a nickel it drives ill probably because the IDs are far more linear further down. I've tested those GT 500 injectors. They're pretty messy. I don't like them. I will run almost anything but. And proof is that a lot of those GT 500s failed emissions. Yeah. There's a lot of cars in the fleet out there in the world where companies have brought the SEMA garage. They say, hey, we want to make a cold air kit for this car. And they failed emissions.

Huh.

All we did was change the filter. Well, then they take it off. They put stock airbags back on. Car fails.

Huh.

So Ford was riding that razor's edge of passing or failing emissions.

Right.

On their own. And a lot of that boils down to how precisely you can meter air and fuel all the time and always keep it right near lambda one with no excess because any little excess, I mean, the catalyst tries to clean it up, but the standards are so tight now. And we got five or five point two liters of engines. You know, a little bit error is a lot compared to like a two liter engine.

Right.

So you're two and a half times the error that you would have on a on a four cylinder right away on the same percentage of air fuel ratio error.

So can I put the 1050s on there without having tuning?

No.

Okay.

No, no, absolutely not.

Yeah.

No, you put the, you put the injectors on and you change the injector data in the ECU at the same exact time.

Okay.

Now my Corvette, I've been through multiple sets of injectors. It was an LS3 car. When I did the twin turbo kit, I went to a set of Deca 60s right away. Put the Deca 60 data in, car fired right up.

Awesome.

And then later on, I started running ethanol. I'm like, okay, it runs great on ethanol, up to a limit of what I can deliver with the Deca 60s. And I got to the point, like, okay, I want to try and have a little more headroom and be able to make some more power with this car. And I went and got the new Bosch Motorsport 1060, and I flowed them here, and I took that data, and I plugged it in my ECU with no change to the MAF curve, no change to the speed density tables, no other changes anywhere else. And I poked the button, the car started. And fuel terms were 5%.

So can you also, tuning my orange car, Gentoo Coyote.

Oh, it's orange? It'll never work.

Yeah.

That's right.

It's only blazed orange. Very obnoxious.

Very rare.

Yeah.

I owned a Go Mango Daytona 392 for a while.

I used to do those all the time.

Subtle.

What'd you think of that car?

Oh, I loved it.

It was a fun car.

It was a cool car. I'm so glad it didn't get stolen while I owned it.

Yeah.

But it was cool.

It was just fast enough to make it interesting, right? 485 horse, rear-wheel drive, sounds awesome as delivered. I didn't touch anything on the powertrain. That was my daily. I put a nice stereo on it, blacked out the windows, and nothing else.

It's a flying couch. My first time in one of those, it was a SRT 392. It was destroyer gray, and I was like, when destroyer gray was becoming, like just coming out.

Ooh, fun story. So the 392, the 64.

Yep.

Let's fast forward to Greg's career. I am the manager of rear-wheel drive, pass car, torque control, and trans shift. I had 30 some odd engineers working for me. So I had multiple groups with multiple supervisors, including the SRT group. And we are responsible for torque control, which is basically pedal progression. How does the car feel to the driver? Is this smooth? And then also the trans shifting. What gear should I be in? And should the converter be locked or not? Which again, is feel. So it was all kind of that group. And I had this Daytona 392. That's kind of cool. And I sold my Trailblazer SS, and I'm like, I want to be the company man and have Chrysler Carwells. Right. So I sold the Trailblazer before the transmission died. And which I love that truck though. And I got a Daytona 392, and my kid picked the color, so it was orange. So, super touchy throttle. And like almost undrivable, especially if it's wet, or God forbid if it was, you drive it year round in snow. Now I put snow tires in the car in the winter, otherwise it's, even on the all seasons, it's undrivable. Snow tires made it okay. So get your right tires, kids.

I have all seasons on my car right now. I feel the difference.

The all seasons are no seasons in some cases, right?

It was rough a few days ago.

Yeah.

And so like a good set of Blizzacs transforms the car and totally worth it. You get them, you're like, I can't believe I didn't do this sooner, right? But at any rate, for some reason, they decided that the throttle should be super, super responsive on 6.4. And as it turns out, the 6.4 was more touchy on pedal angle change to actual flywheel meters increased than the Hellcat. Now, Hellcat makes a couple hundred extra horsepower. You would think that that would be the more responsive thing. Like how on earth did this happen? I got talking to one of my engineers who had been around for a while, and they're like, oh yeah, well, a while ago, a couple of years ago, they had this clinic out at Chelsea, the Proving Grounds. They brought customers in, they test drove Mustangs and Challengers and Camaros. And so based on this small focus group of people who just got to go drive around on an autocross parking lot kind of thing for one afternoon, they said, oh, we like this. Well, of course, that's fun. You know, it's like putting a pedal commander on it, right? Yeah. Except there was no such thing as 2% anymore. It was like, you know, and God bless the guys who did the exhaust tuning because it sounded awesome.

Yeah.

Fast forward. I'm the manager. I'm driving to work and I work. I don't even work at CTC because the cool group's over at a place called Freck. So, Ferris Stone Road Engineering Center. And so I'm driving over from here to through Pontiac, and I'm going through Pontiac, and it's a little, a little raining out, and I'm turning on the Woodward right next to a Sheriff's Deputy.

And it broke loose.

F****** sideways.

Yeah.

And it sounds like a 392 doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

Wroooom. Michigan Cateel, Bissell, Lysandola, and da da da da da. So I go into work in a fantastic mood. And as luck would have it, I had a meeting with the SRT group that day. I'm like, let's talk about Petal Map on 64. Oh no, we're not changing it. I'm like, we're changing it. I'm like, raise your hand if you've been pulled over driving one of these things today. Like, why is the 64 more aggressive than the Hellcat? On what planet does it need to be more aggressive than its bigger brother? Come on, guys. If I want full throttle, I'll just push harder into the pedal. I know there's more available. You gotta give me some modulation below 5%. And this was a big project. You couldn't just do it because it had so much interaction the way they built the tables and everything between the engine and the trans and the torque converter. There was actually quite the tear up. So, and this was in 20, like early 20, late 19, early 20 or something like that. And so, I'm like, you know, I want it like now. Let's have a ServiceX. Let's TSB this thing. And we'll still give them all of it. You know, we're never going to take power away from the customer, but it's just not, it's not drivable. It's too aggressive. And so finally, I got to push through, like with much resistance in like 21 model year. Finally, like the next model year coming, we kind of slid it in on one of the releases. And all we did was we put it at exactly Hellcat levels.

Right.

So there is no difference below 40% pedal between a 6.4 and a Hellcat. They're the same.

And that's right around when the widebody started coming out.

Yeah, it's the same.

Yeah.

But it didn't matter. Like it would still overwhelm the wider tires.

Yeah.

I had so much fun driving the 392 Challenger widebody when it came out. That was a fun car.

Yeah. Did you get a chance to drive, have you driven a Hellcat with a manual versus a Hellcat with the auto?

I haven't.

No.

Absolutely opposite cars.

Really?

Same engine, same chassis.

Okay.

I hate the manual.

Really?

And I love a manual trans car, right? I grew up stick shift. And I think you guys had this conversation with Shawn, right?

Yeah.

ZF Trans wins every time, without a doubt, because they, same thing as the other one, right? The first gear is so tall that they wanted to be able to do zero to 60 in first gear.

Because of Porsche.

Not because of Porsche, because the stupid magazine drivers don't know how to shift. And so they do the zero to 60 test. And so magazine drivers are so ham-fisted that they can't be trusted to do an upshift without screwing up the zero to 60 time. Otherwise they would claim that the manufacturer's time is not real, and here's the real number, because they don't know how to move a lever and push a clutch pedal. So they went to one clutch dump and you hit 60 right before you bang the rev limiter. So first gear is super, super tall and lazy. Meanwhile, first gear in a 8HP90 is like a 430 or something like that ratio. And it executes shifts faster than you could move the lever. It does 200 millisecond upshifts. Power on upshifts that are harvesting rotational stored energy in the crankshaft. The car accelerates during the shift. That's how fast the shift happens, right? So there's, I mean, it's way better. And again, learning what goes into the trans shift logic, it's not just a simple table of speed versus shift points like it was in the old days. This is not a power glide. This is not a 4L60, right? These are 8 speed clutch to clutch, and there's all kinds of other modifiers. So I think Shawn was talking about this too. You're going around a corner, and all of a sudden it shifts different in your corner. Yeah, because it knows when you're cornering, the last thing you want to do is upset the amount of torque going to the rear axle. So it will hold a gear in a corner, because it knows steering angle, right? And it knows they learn loading. So if you're heavier or you're towing a trailer, because we did trucks too, right? Then it knows to extend the shift points a little bit more, right? Because it says I should be accelerating at a certain rate with this much pedal or torque applied, and I'm going a little bit slower, so I must be highly loaded. And so I'm going to bias towards these highly loaded maps. And then they learn driver aggressiveness. So after driving the car for a few days, car learns you and says, ah, this driver likes to go fast. Let me give him fast. You know, and if you go back to driving nice and gentle like grandma, it goes back to giving you grandma shifts. So it's kind of cool. I mean, there's a lot going on there. That's why it's somebody's full-time job to do shift maps on one of these modern transmissions.

Well, I'm sure the teams for all of that just have to be huge.

They're smaller than you think.

Really?

So the transmission usually has two guys. One guy does the shifting. That was my group. Or the shift selection. Let me rephrase that. So when should I shift and should the converter be locked or not? There's another guy who did what we called shift execution, which is clutch pressures. And again, based on the engine team feeding them the right number for torque.

Okay.

So if you lie to the transmission about torque, the transmission drives like a bag of hammers. That's your fault on the engine side. It's not the transmission's fault. Trans is actually really good at this. So 90% of the tuners in the aftermarket who have shifting issues need to go back and polish their engine cal before they start touching clutch pressures and clutch fill times and force motor currents and all this other crap that they shouldn't be touching because the transmission is probably fine. It's just doing what it's doing based on the torque number you told it. The tolerances are pretty narrow for torque error. And even worse is if you have torque errors that are sometimes high and sometimes low. So if all torque errors are in one direction, the adapts keep generally pushing this way. But if you push the adapts this way sometimes and that way sometimes, it doesn't know which to remember last when you get into the next shift event. And all of a sudden, it drives really weird. So Mr. Miyagi say, best block no be there. So you just don't lie to it. Give it the right number for torque all the time. Well, where does the torque model come from? Well, that comes from air charge per cylinder, which is the airflow model. And how did we build that? Well, based on our wideband, based on the injector data.

There's that snowball again.

We're back to that again. So it's like this injector bench makes people's transmissions drive nicer, right? So getting the right data. And again, back to the earlier point of, well, we're testing these injectors, and you might have eight that are matched, but they're plus 5% or plus 8% from the mean of what you thought the number really was. So if we can give them the real number, then all of a sudden the air charge is right, and all of a sudden the torque is right, and all of a sudden the transmission drives nice.

So is this, since we're back to injector data, this is what I got with my injectors. I'll give this, is this the kind of data that you want? And I'll send this to Harris so he can pop it up if he needs to.

Nope.

No? That's all just nonsense? Here. I'll send it to you too.

Oh, he's got that hanging up.

Got a little, I hate a little printout.

All right.

This, okay, is what the injector actually does. So that's mass versus time curve. See all those little tiny dots all over, the thousands and thousands of data points? Okay. That's how many measurements I take.

Okay.

To draw that curve. So this is one of the many outputs from the machine. And then if you are a Ford guy, you want data that looks like...

I've been accused of that once in a place.

This, if you were to go on Ford racing, it's pretty good. You buy one of their injectors, they'll give you the data, right?

Yeah.

And if you had HP tuners, SCT, Diablo, whatever, a binary editor, you're in there, and you're editing the injector data, you should fill in almost every single cell in there, right? So if you were to open it, these are the tables you would see. And that is what complete injector data looks like.

I have Ford racing injectors in my wife's car, with a pro charger on it.

But they give you high slope, low slope, break point, offset, mid PW, and then they give you all those multiplier tables. But without all of those, something's going to be wrong. You're guessing. This is the standard for what complete injector data looks like. If your injector supplier does not give you all of these table values, they are blowing sunshine up your crack.

Okay.

And they have given you incomplete and I would argue useless data. Because if you're a calibrator at Ford, this is what data looks like.

So you need that data or you need injectors and one of these machines to get the data?

Yeah. I can do it on demand. You can send me a set of injectors and I'll turn around in a day or two and I'll email you this.

Okay.

Here, this is what your... And the cool part is now I know what your set of eight do. So let's say you have aftermarket Bosch Motorsport injectors, and all eight of them are close to each other. But are they minus five from the standard, right on the standard, or maybe plus six, right? And so I can take that last five or six percent of error out of everything and just say, no, this is precisely the amount of fuel you're putting in your engine based on our measurements. So we do it with the right machine, with the right fluid, in the right conditions, and then we do the right math on the backside to turn it into those numbers.

Okay.

Easier said than done. That was a 10-year project for me, but now it works pretty well.

That's good to know you summed it up there at about 10 seconds.

Well, because I had to, right?

Right.

Because my job is make a car run, but I get really mad when it's not going. If I go and make a 10% change in the math curve, and the air-fuel ratio doesn't move by 10%, am I really in charge? What's going on? That's not calibrating anymore. Calibrating, like I said before, the tuning fork, right? It's an exact number. And 10% is 10%. If I make a 20% change and it only moves by 5%, my spidey sense is already up, right? What's going on here? And that's plenty of tuners going, I don't know, just give me more cowbell. And eventually you'll make it run today, but when the weather changes, then what? Right, because you kind of bake this error in.

Every once in a while, my wife's car gets a little bit of a chug to it, almost like a miss, and it's usually right in that, not at watt, but in somewhere in between, just idling and up there.

So watt is easy, right? So you'll see this stuff in the drivability, in short pulse area. And if you watch injector pulse with while you're driving around, when is it shortest? Shortest at a warmed up idle, like Sam was saying. And the other one is cruising down the road at light throttle because you'll actually be at elevated RPM, but lower, the airflow is more than idle airflow, but because of the RPM, it's less air per cylinder event. And the air per cylinder is the magic number. When I teach the classes, the secrets of EFI calibration course, the number one secret I tell people is the most important number that the ECU does ever. The whole thing is air per cylinder because so much other stuff is built off of that number. That is the A number one thing that's important. Unfortunately, we're solving for that. We don't get to know that right. Now, if you're on one of these million dollar development dino cells, yeah, we know the number from the dino. Dino measures air flow and we've got fuel flow meters on the wall. They're way more accurate than this fuel flow meter. They got Coriolis meters. They're like $12,000, $16,000 a meter. It's fine. Love having toys. They got cylinder pressure transducers on every cylinder. It's like cheating, right? So what we do in the aftermarket is caveman s*** by comparison.

Well, hold on, because we made it back to the spot again, which is where I was going to ask a question before you guys went on some weird Dodge tangent. We'll be back. Yeah. Orange car, mass air flow, no speed density. My GT500, speed density. I can't even put a cold air intake on the orange car without a tune. The GT500, I can put a cold air intake on. What's the difference between mass air speed density, some have both, some has one, some has the other?

So Ford as a company embraced more of the speed density stuff going forward, especially for boosted systems, because it does a better job of anticipating air charge on the upcoming cycle, which is how you get emissions tight, and how you get drivability tight. Because you have to kind of shoot skeet a little bit, you got to aim ahead of it. And so you got to know how much air charge is going to be in there when you're starting to add that fuel. And so a mass air, there's a mechanical time delay between what happens at the sensor, and what goes down that zip tube through the throttle by fills the intake manifold, then goes down a runner, and then gets passive valve and then into the cylinder.

Okay.

Versus measuring pressure in the manifold, well, now you just got a runner and valve. It's a much more direct measurement. Now there's some other assumptions baked in there, very dangerous. But it is quicker to react during a transient. Now steady state, the mass air wins. And as a Ford calibration engineer, I can tell you to a certainty, like I did EcoBoost Ford torque control calibration in Dearborn. I was on a program, and it was a speed density program. So it was using the new speed density logic, same logic that runs your GT 500. And there were dev cars that we put mass airflow sensors on, just so we could see driving down the road, what the steady state number was. Now on the dyno, they have it, but on the dev vehicles, we had a few. But knowing full-welded by the time production goes in, it goes into production, the mass has gone. It's all there for anticipation and how fast can the system figure out where it's gonna be. That's to get the emissions tighter. That's the driving force for it. So the mass airflow sensor is the old logic, the new stuff's all speed density.

Okay, it did. When I went from not boosted mass airflow to a boosted, I had to put in a pigtail that went from my mass airflow sensor to a, what I think is a temperature sensor or some sort of other sensor in the intake.

Well, yeah, you gotta measure temperature somewhere for speed density, right? It's Boyle's gas law, fundamentally. PV equals nRT. You're solving for the n. And it's a divide by t function, which gets really ugly if it's wrong, right? Divide by is really messy when it's wrong. Okay. So you gotta have a temperature for speed density to work. So you can't not have that. Now, it's baked into the mass air flow sensor on many applications. But, you know, they may have a T map is the other option. They're also really the temperature that matters is the temperature as it crosses the valve going into the cylinder, not the temperature in the plenum and certainly not the temperature out by the air filter. So in many cases, they'll have logic that biases the measured temperature over here towards something else to estimate what the final temperature would be going into the cylinder. And there's a model for that, right? So they assume there's a certain amount of heating that will happen. So even on a naturally aspirated engine, if you measure the air temp at the filter, the air is going to be warmer by the time it enters the cylinder because it went through the throttle body, which is a little bit warm, went through a manifold that's a little bit warm, and it went through a cylinder head that is certainly warmer. Now it spends precious little time in the oven there, but it's not a zero. Right? So they have models that take this into account. Even GM does, right? And everybody does. And in fact, if I was tuning a Megasquirt 3 standalone, they have a way to bias the charge temp based on coolant temp. And it's tied roughly to flow. Now they don't do it based on grams per second of flow, but they do it on RPM times map, which sounds a lot like flow, right? Because when you're at high RPM or high map, the flow is higher, right? And so RPM times map, okay? So, you know, at high map times RPM, the influence is very minimal because the air is going through there so fast, it can't heat up. But all this talk about people saying, oh, I have heat soak from my over the radiator inlet or this, that or that. Well, there's a model that takes care of that. And so that's real. I mean, if you were to put a thermal couple right next to the intake valve, you would be shocked. Hey, that's a lot warmer than the air out in the fender. And so these guys using the air at the fender number to estimate the the air charge, which then gets used to estimate the fuel charge. All of a sudden, it's maybe not right. And they start making up science for why it must not be this. And this cold air kit sucks, and that one's wrong, and you got to move the set, or you just make the bottle right. Sorry. So one of the best things you do to like a old Megasquirt is you populate that model with something. And any guess is better than no guess, but just enough that it gets some biasing, because the thing that's trying to heat it is at coolant temperature, right? So it's going to try and pull it towards coolant temperature, which is usually warmer. But it could go the other way, I guess, on a cold start. If you had a cold engine and all of a sudden you rolled it outside in Phoenix, I guess it could work the other direction, and the math would work. But it's almost always the other way, right? So it's a cooler air inlet getting warmed up on its way through. Now, if you have a supercharger and then an intercooler in the equation, where should the temp sensor be?

Probably after the intercooler.

Bingo, right? Because you have an unknown amount of heating, do the compression work in the supercharger, and you have an unknown amount of cooling through the brick in the intercooler. Right? How much? I don't know. We could try model it, but that gets really ugly, really complex, really fast. What if I just measure the temp coming out of the intercooler? That'd be better. And that's pretty close to the temp entering the valve anyway. So that one, you'd have almost no heating model versus one where the air temp sensor was way over here. And so that's, again, the calibrator has to see that and say, okay, did we change from this type of system to that type of system? So you get a whipple for your naturally aspirated Coyote. Of course, they're going to tell it to, you know, let's use a T-map instead of the temperature over here.

Yeah, they're not known as running cool air through anything. They get pretty hot pretty quick.

Yeah, well, all positive displacement superchargers, the whole name of the game in making power or the positive displacement supercharger at reasonable street car levels, charge cooling, that's it. Because they're so, it's such a huge magnifier. You know, it'll be a difference in like eight degrees of spark advance, which could be damn near a hundred horsepower.

Yeah, I can not, I can, the times I can get first time in the morning on the track versus what I get in the hot afternoon can be off by like two, three seconds.

I mean, so the best thing to do for one of those kits is everything you can do to chill that water more. Right, so when I worked at RPP, we were looking at this because we had 2300s on a Gen 2 Coyote. Yep. And we also, by the way, owned the SLP brand and we had a 2300 on a LS3 Camaro. And I started doing some stuff with my team, little skunkworks action. We started playing with that. And we made spacers and made sure that the intercooler brick was actually working and wasn't getting so hot and it wasn't coming out of the intercooler brick and hitting this piece of cast aluminum that was at engine temperature, right? So everything we did to mitigate temperature added power, right? We did a set of spacers that added like 20 rear wheel horsepower without changing the pulley on it and no cal change.

Oh, wow.

Because the temp sensor would read it, and if it's cooler, it'll let you have three more degrees of spark.

Right.

Well, of course, it's going to be faster, right? So the really hot ticket, in my opinion, if you want to drag race, do the thing that it did on the Demon. Go get you one of them AC chiller systems and put some frost on the connectors going in and out of that intercooler.

I almost bought one of those.

Oh, holy crap, do they work?

Yeah. No, I've seen them.

That's scoreboard, man. That wins.

Yeah. But by the way, the mod that I have for the GDI F100, it's a pulley and injectors. Otherwise, everything else is cooling.

Yeah, I remember you talking about that.

Yeah, it's a lot of cooling.

His parts have been sitting on a shelf for the last year and two months.

Yeah. Cooling is the name of the game on a lot of those. Force induction in general, yes. I come from the old days of an A-trim on a 5-liter, right? The hot air blower, centrifugal breathing right into the throttle body, and everything was hot to the touch. And ProChargers was the first to add any form of intercooler, and they had a mediocre compressor with a mediocre cooler at the time. And it worked every bit as good as the best, efficient, non-intercooled centrifugal at the time. Then, you know, Vortech Paxton said, oh, wait a minute, we can make intercoolers too. They put a decent intercooler on a really good compressor, and all of a sudden, their thing is really good. And then ProChargers finally decided, okay, well, we'll start making really good compressors now. All right, so it kind of drew of this like arms race, but the idea was that, you know, yeah, if we chill that air charge, there's a table of spark versus air temp in the ECU, right? And you don't have to be a smart tuner, you just don't touch it. Now, the funny thing is, a lot of tuners see a knob and can't help but turn it, right? And they see that and they're like, oh, it's pulling all the timing from heat soak. Yeah, so it doesn't knock. Yeah. Like when things are already warmed up, it doesn't take much to make them on fire, right? So you don't need to lead it as much. So we take spark advance away when things are hot, but we give it back to you when they cool off. Well, these guys would flatten out the IAT spark adder tables. And then, you know, then you chill the charge and it doesn't get significantly faster. You get a little density boost, but you don't get any more timing. Dude, just leave. I do a lot of forced induction, Cal's, where I leave the IAT comp stock. Don't even touch it. Turns out the guys populating the table, you know how they did that table? Engine dyno. Remember that million dollar engine dyno that could dial up any condition you want? Turns out they can turn a knob and make the air coming in into the engine as hot or as cold as they want. And that's how they populate that table. So, they feed it intentionally hot and intentionally cold air, and they put the IAT table, the IAT spark adder, to match that precisely. So, they bring it right to the NOC limit or MBT, whichever happens first, at every temperature. And that becomes a table. So, if you have not fundamentally changed the combustion system, and by that, I mean like the cylinder head valve geometry piston relationship, chances are that relationship with temperature, probably the same, or really close. So, I see lots of guys going into those tables and flattening them out, because they don't like that it takes timing away. It feels bad when it takes my timing away from my base spark map, or my high octane spark table, or my borderline NOC table. Yeah, it's doing it for a reason. But it will give it right back to you, right? So, you take a properly calibrated force induction system and do nothing other than improve the cooling, car gets faster, a lot faster. And if you logged it, you put a data logger on it, and look at spark advance, I guarantee it's running more spark.

Yeah.

Because it's supposed to, that's what it's there for. And it's entirely appropriate, it's probably not going to knock.

What's your goal as a, again, we're gonna be careful where we choose here, calibrator slash tuner. Are you trying to make a drivable car? Are you trying to, like, some guys are just going for maximum power at all times. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

I really don't care about power.

Okay.

Power is a by-product. Yep. The engine builder decided the horsepower before he gave it to me. Engines are air pumps, airflow is now just a horsepower. It moves the air where it doesn't. So I could screw that up if I give it an egregious error on spark or way too much or way too little fuel. But once I start getting in to the window, and modern controls are really good because their knock sensors will kind of try and force you in line. So they'll almost figure out the timing for you. So the more modern the car is, the easier it gets on that front. But they got to run right for the right reason, right? So I'm back to the fundamentals. The more complex the system, the more I sweat the fundamentals. So I don't care if I'm doing an Excel, DFI, Gen 6, or a Gen 4 Coyote. It's the same. How much air, you know, what's my air flow? What's my fuel flow? What's my air per cylinder? Do I have control? If I ask for Lambda 1, do I get it? If I start getting all that stuff right, and it's based on the actual numbers, so there's not fudge factors baked in. I'm not lying to it about anything. If I do a face value calibration, always my preference, so no scaling or no nothing. Now, it gets weird when we try to make a lot of horsepower and the ECU runs out of fingers and toes to count. We got to keep it under some sort of ceiling, separate sidebar discussion. We'll trade range for resolution. But assuming that my ECU can count that high, I want to tell it face value, what's really going on in a moment. So if I were to data log, I would say, here is the current airflow. This is a real number for airflow, which is also really handy, because I know the relationship between airflow and horsepower. It's roughly a 10 to 1, right? So if you have 100 lb per minute of airflow, you probably got about 1000 horsepower, right? 50 lb per minute, about 500 horsepower, right? Close. It's ballpark, right? Now we can screw it up a little bit with spark efficiency and a few other things, but it's in the ballpark. So to me, again, I put my calibrator head on, on my tuner. Yeah, cars sometimes make power. Sometimes they don't. And I go back and I look and I see, okay, well, it was down on power. What was the airflow? Oh, the airflow was a little low. Okay, well, that makes sense. Why is the airflow low? It's the next thing, right? Did I open the throttle all the way? Throttle's open all the way. Well, then that's kind of what she does. How much boost did it make? Oh, it's making all the boost it's supposed to make. Well, then that's what it does. I might be able to move cams if I'm on a Coyote or something like that. Okay, well, I need a different cam pair to make this thing breed better here. But if I'm on a fixed cam LS, okay, throttle's open and it's making the boost and the boost is not falling off, so it's not slipping a belt or anything, then that's what that car makes. Hilarious, because there's days where my twin turbo car, the turbos are too small now for where I'm at. I'm out of turbine. The hot side of the turbo is too small, and so back pressures, I've instrumented it and back pressure is going up. It's like 24 pounds of back pressure. And I put that in my article I wrote for Hot Rod. Yep. I can do whatever I want to the engine. Turbos are limiting the horsepower right now. Right. So in fact, I got to write another article. Brian Tulley gave me a cam to put in the thing. Which cam? Stage 1, V2. All I need. I had a different cam in there. It was old school thought. It was a rear split, so it was a longer intake, shorter exhaust. When you have lots of exhaust back pressure, that's the last thing you want. So I got a longer exhaust duration with an earlier EVO point. So I captured a blow down, working against the back pressure a little bit better. That's Brian's cam. Brian's cam works for all the right reasons. However, I didn't make any extra horsepower with it at peak. It's not Brian's fault, right? It's my fault. It's the turbocharger's fault. I have a bad match. Problem is I can't just go off the shelf and buy another set of larger T25 internally gated turbines that fit that thing, right? It is 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag. Yeah. So, I mean, I had and I ported those housings. I clipped the wheels 15 degrees. I went to three inch down pipes, right? And I took eight PSI out of back pressure out of this thing. So I went from 32 down to 24.

Okay.

The turbines are limit on the engine, right? Now it picked up some power in the mid-range with Brian's cam, as I expected, but at some point, it kind of merged. It's not the cam that's the problem, right? And so why isn't this thing making more than X horsepower on the dyno? And I looked at the airflow and I know power is exactly what it should be with that airflow. It's an airflow problem. It's not a calibration problem. So me trying to get more power out of that as a calibrator, all I'm going to do is break s***. It makes what it makes. It's not knocking. It's happy. You know, and the funny thing is, you know, this is all happening at like the 660, 680 wheel on a Mustang Dino.

Okay.

On a street tire.

What do you have for a tire? I think Continentals?

Yeah, they're Connie Summer Tires.

Okay.

They're the second best tire out there for street tires. Pilo Sport.

Okay.

Michelin Pilo Sports are the best, but they're significantly more expensive. These were reasonable on price. They're pretty good on grip.

I've seen the article. It's like 80 or 90 percent for like, you know, way better cost or something like that.

Yeah. It's a knee point in the curve on cost.

Yeah.

But the Pilo Sports are better. I'll give them that. Right. So if you don't care about your budget, go get Pilo Sports. They're great. These are pretty darn good, and they're good on track. They're good on a random clover leaf somewhere. Yeah. This car handles...

It's a well-rounded tire.

Yeah. And the car, I won't ruin the car, right? I'm never going to put a drag radial on this car because then you break half shafts, and then you break the diff input, you break the torque tube, you break the clutch.

Back to that snowball thing.

Nope, nope, nope, nope. As a street car, I'm high 600s to the tire on pump gas or E85.

Yeah.

I'm happy.

On a Mustang dyno like that, too.

Yeah. I mean, it's fast enough to make it interesting, right? There's lots of people in Detroit faster than me. I don't care.

Oh, yeah. No, there's always a bigger fish. I mean, it's about fun for you. And also, I guarantee you that cam completely changed it for you as well.

Yeah. Actually, that cam drives better than the other cam.

Okay.

So it's a wider lobe separation.

Okay.

It's an earlier EVO. It sounds a little bit more aggressive because of that, but I can make the chop come and go with Cal. I know how to do that. So that's an idle speed control thing. And what idle speed do you pick? I can make this thing idle at 600 RPM if I wanted to, because I understand how PID loops work. But I don't, it's set at 670 or something like that. So it's really stable. It'll never stall on me. I'm good. I let other people drive the car. I just warn them, make sure it's pointed straight before you step on it. Because this f***** will come around to you. It will reach around and bite your a**. Because they get overconfident. They're like, oh, this thing's just so good. And the traction control works pretty good to a point. And then you're a passenger, right? And then Isaac Newton is driving.

I've never heard of it that way. I like that.

It's true, right? So there's only so much work those four contact patches can do to the earth, right? And if you violate that, nothing else in the car is going to fix that. And it's funny, because on these tires, it can paint stripes all the way through the first three gears.

Okay.

And the top of third gear is 110. Good day to point to know if there's a cop. So it doesn't have an expectation of really good traction, really, until fourth gear, which is go to jail speeds.

Right.

So to make the car really any faster on the street, I would have to sacrifice handling or potentially dry line security.

Right?

The tire is my fuse right now. And I'm happy with that. And I do that for my clients. I don't do a ton of tuning for the public, but this is the general approach I do when I tune somebody else's car. Just make it drive right. Make it, can you parallel park the thing? Can you take the car on date night? So here's a cool one. Just recently, I cross-posted, I did some work for a client, had an LS2-based C6, some sort of really snotty can in the thing. But a stock exhaust, headers, no cats when it came to me, but I put cats on it, stock torque converter. So it drove like a bag of hammers, because who knows what the hell they were doing when they calmed the thing. And oh, and a stock airbox. So I think they had decontented some of the stuff before they sold the car to the guy and put a stock cat bag and a stock airbox. I don't even know what the displacement of the engine is. But I got all done with it. So we put cats on because his argument was, I can't use the car. My girl doesn't want to go out on a date in the car. It stinks. It rides like crap. She hates it.

Oh, f***, that hurts.

So that was an accurate demonstration. We lost our first test.

Yeah, first injury.

He's a whole different person now. It's kind of like that scene from Ted when he gets thrown into a teddy bear movie. Oh, yeah.

He's like, Johnny, I'm a little f***** up.

Yeah, I'm going to need a refill. But anyway, I go through and I do my normal thing. So what injectors are on this car? Let me put the data in for these injectors precisely. Let me dial in the speed density model precisely. Let me dial in the MAF curve precisely. Now we put a new cold air kit, Lingenfeld rail, cold air on it. Okay, cool. And we put cats on it. So if there's any change in pumping efficiency, I got to redo the VE and the MAF anyway. But it's based on real injector data. And I use a decent wideband while I'm tuning. And I go through my normal process, and I just sit there, and I brought it to a load-bearing dyno where I could sit there and hold it steady until I got the number and I make an exact correction. I move it over here. I get the number, I make an exact correction. The wash runs repeat. And I dial it all in, and now the car drives really nice. And at the end of it, I did a watt run just to see where it would go. Need like 500. And I posted it, and these guys, all the experts online are instantly, there's no way your dino's wrong. There's no way an LS2 cam only makes that. I'm like, I didn't say it's cam only. I said, I don't know. It's got some sort of really big cam in it, and I don't know what else is in the car. And then somebody else chimes in, oh, well, you didn't tell us that different intake manifold. Oh, yeah, it's got a fast on it. I don't care. I got to redo all the VE surface anyway. I really don't care at this point, right? I care that the map sensor, you know, key off here is about 97, 98 kPa, and it's reading the right map sensor signal. The temperature is right all the time. These signals are all correct. I'm feeding it right data. Then it does what it does. And I fixed the drivability. And a lot of that was in the engine cal. Some of it was in like delaying shift points on the transmission just so it couldn't be, it couldn't get pulled down to low RPM, high load where it lugs and chugs. So I just kind of shift things over a little bit on the cal. And the watt number is the watt number. Like, yeah, it only took 26 degrees of timing to make peak power. And all the experts are like, it should take 28, 20. I'm like, it takes what it takes. This is what it wanted. If I add more, it doesn't add any more torque or it knocks. That's the number. And the air fuel ratio is where, it's a safe air fuel ratio for the catalyst, so the cat's not going to get melted, and the cat over temp protection is active in the calibration. I don't turn that stuff off because I need to protect the catalyst. I don't want to melt his $1,000 catalysts he just put on. And it made 500. I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. They're like, your dyno's wrong. Like, well, the same dyno said that car only makes like 660. So which way am I wrong? And that's a twin turbo LS3. So either that one's really low or this one's really high, but it's the same dyno. It was like literally like days apart. I'm like, the dyno is what the dyno is. It's just a hammer, dude. It's just a number and taking the drag strip then, you know, go find what mile an hour is. Cause I guarantee you this, like we drove it. And this guy that I did the work for, like, he works down in the city.

He's got a few other fast cars.

Him and his friends might do good things with their cars, places, whatever. He knows what effect, he's like, this car is pretty quick. Now, he wasn't expecting a nine second car. That wasn't what we're doing. But for a street car, they can take out on date night. Oh, now we're onto something, right? So for every one of those two, 3000 horsepower cars out there, like we were saying before, there's thousands of these street cars. Make it usable, right? The value in that car is the fact that he can actually drive it. And so if you take all the fun out of driving a car, because it's, then you don't want to drive it. You don't want to use it. So it's a paperweight, right? So we turned his paperweight in to something he can drive. And I'm more proud of that than the fact that, oh, it made some number on the dyno. I really don't care. But these guys on the, you know, on Facebook group were like, oh, you're lying.

You're being deceptive.

Like, you know, you're scamming people. Scamming. I'm like, first of all, I'm not here to sell you anything.

I don't care.

My car runs fine.

We must be in different Facebook groups because everyone I'm in, they're all just nothing but sweethearts and supersupport.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they're just there to put everybody on.

Yeah, it's fun. And tuning is so fun because everybody's an expert. And these guys are arguing with me about how to do the cow on this thing.

Yeah.

All right. Please tell me how I should have done this.

Well, touch on that real quick, right? Because you got the guys that are at OEM level, we're talking about, again, million-dollar sales. And then you got the guys that are street tuning it or just or even somebody that just took a few courses and now they're an expert, right? What are the key differences between someone who's been doing it for 20 years and somebody who just started tuning yesterday?

I mean, I'm still learning.

Well, that's a good thing too.

I told you, like Dr. Haywood came out. I was a senior calibration engineer at Ford Motor Company, and they brought Dr. Haywood in from MIT. I'm like, sign me up. I want to be in that class. Because there's some nugget in there that I'm going to learn from. I talk to other smart people sometimes and I learn something. So I'm never done learning. So the guys who are the nobody can tune like me, I know this platform better than anybody else. That guy's a moron. Sorry. He's dumb for saying that in the first place. And then, give me a little bit of time, I'll figure out your control system and I bet I can make it run just like you. If not better. Because I'm just going to sweat the details. I'm going to come at it with math. And we're just going to take the same approach that that ECU was designed to use in the first place. Not, I always put these, I zero out that damn IET table, I put my number in here. Okay, well, sometimes 27 is not the number. So it's a different world. You know, the braggadocia is funny because this industry is pretty toxic. Everyone's clamoring for attention. And they will do, say, whatever to get the hey, look at me moment, right?

I don't know anything about that.

So, yeah, I'm okay. I don't have to be your tuner. I don't have to be the guy who tunes your car. My car runs fine. I'm not the one asking for help on the internet about it. And if I am, I'm going to ask a very specific question with data behind it. Hey, has anybody seen one of these do this when you do that? Hmm. Okay. Now we're on to something. And sometimes that's what it takes, because I work on things that other guys have worked on before. There are people that I call for help. I don't know it all. There's plenty of guys who tune way more corvettes, especially C8s than me, because I don't have a whole lot of C8s going on in this workshop here. It's not what I do every day. But I just did Lev3 Emissions on a supercharged Mustang. And I passed. Oh, and it's torque secure. Drive-by-wire torque security is safe on that thing that was not when I got it. They were prepared to sell it like that. They only didn't sell it because they didn't pass emissions. I'm like, you cannot let this go.

What does that look like, being somebody who's tuned on that level and somebody who's worked in calibration on the OEM level? Can we talk about these locked ECUs and what it takes to get them unlocked and why they would do that? And do they give some information to... Does the OEM want to do that? Or is that something that somebody is making them do?

Well, before you answer that too as well, I want to say that that question kind of comes from a friend of ours, Justin White, who tunes Corvettes all day long. Maybe you've seen him on a forum or two. But just figured I'd give that a little...

So, SEMA was looking at like, how can we attack this? Because as an industry, and I'm on the ETTN committee at SEMA.

What's that stand for? It's okay.

Emerging Technologies and Trends Network. It's the nerdy group within SEMA. Like they've got all these councils and networks, and we're one of the networks. And so, they got like a wheel, tire, suspension, and brake console. They have the Performance Restylers Organization. And like, I'm on the nerdy side, right? That talks a lot about emissions and sometimes ADOS and other stuff, but super kind of techy things.

Ew, ADOS.

Yeah. And so...

That makes me angry at emissions, by the way. When I had to turn off my front brake assist.

Yeah, yeah. Well, wait till it's required by law.

Yeah, can't wait.

So, yeah, the government and we're here to help you. So, losing the train of thought here. No, no, no, the security layers. So, we wanted to do a thing on cybersecurity because it's the buzzword, right? And I'm in Detroit. I have friends who work at OEMs, right? I'm on speed dial with some people on some really cool programs. Part of that is we don't abuse the privilege, right? So, I will never ask them for things that they're not allowed to share on the outside. And I just casually ask them, like, hey, hey, through SEMA, we want somebody to come in and give us a presentation, a talk on cybersecurity, and, you know, why is this that, the other thing. And I got an off-the-record answer, but I, the official on-the-record answer is nope. Not talking about. It is super, it's Fight Club. We don't talk about. Now, what I can tell you is that there are regulations that drove some of this. So, I don't know if you guys caught, probably at least a decade ago, there was an episode of like 60 minutes or something, where guys were driving down the road, and they hacked into like a Jeep Cherokee or something, driving down the road next to them. And they, through wireless connection, got in through the radio connection, and then were able to see some other data on other, because lots of things in the car were all connected, right? So, once you're on the CAN bus, you could get to anything on the network, right? So, they could start to look at the ABS module, they could look at the body module, they could see wheel speed, they could see brake input. And, you know, like, somebody could do something really nefarious with this, and the crap hit the fan. And all of a sudden, OEMs were like, nope, not on my watch. Security barrier, right? So, now there's a clean side, dirty side. So, you might get in to the radio, so you pair with your phone and whatever. But like, my RAM that I drive out there, I have to have a special security dongle module to allow me to plug in a generic OBD tool to get and scan codes, right? Just to find out what's wrong with it, just to repair my own vehicle if an O2 sensor goes, which is normal maintenance, right? But that's on the other side, so you can't get to that, right? Well, the EU is part of their evolving requirements. One of the new requirements is that cybersecurity must be there, meaning that the ECU has to be locked. And actually, let me rewind. So EPA, Clean Air Act, all of that, thou shalt not make defeat devices and saw parts off the car that keep the thing running clean. And one of the key things that keeps the car running clean is the ECU and the calibration of the ECU. Therefore, it has to be non-user adjustable. It has to be sealed. Hence, some sort of security layer. That started with just the basic C key algorithms. So LT1 and LS1, Gen2, LT1, LS1. There were only a couple of companies, and they could get in through there or whatever. Ford, we'd program through the J3 port on the old EEC-4s. And basic access. So once you kind of figured that C key out, then you were, at least you were in, and you're good. That got more and more complex. Like BMW came out with RSA encrypted keys. So somebody spent time with a super computer to crack the BMW algorithm, right?

That's why it's so expensive to get ECUs.

Yeah.

And so now, fast forward, so the EPA said, you know, it can't be a user-adjustable thing, so they can't get into it, and they can't mess with it, because they're worried about you changing things that would cause the car to pollute, even though like a carburetor, we used to just turn it with a screwdriver, right? Loosen the distributor and twist it, right? Yeah. So now it can't be done with common tools. There's some layer, and that was enough to keep the EPA happy, but EU came in and said, no, no, no, we want more, more security.

And the verbiage, I'm going to get this wrong, and some lawyer is going to be really mad at me. But the gist of the verbiage now, as I understand it, as your non-attorney spokesman, is that if, not only do the manufacturers have to make it non-user adjustable, but if they know of a vulnerability, they have to close the loop, which basically means all the aftermarket tuning tools. They have to make it non-accessible if they're aware of how it's doing, how it's happening. So the HP tuners of the world, and plenty of other companies out there like that, that exist through this interface, they have to basically make them not able to do it. In order to comply with the regulations in the EU, or you don't sell cars in Europe, period. And because these car companies have global software architectures, they don't do a special software for EU versus US versus China, Japan, Australia, whatever. No, they make one software, right? Because they're lazy. Why would we make five different softwares for the same car? That's dumb. So they have one software, and since one part of it requires that level of security, everybody gets the security. Congratulations. Now it sucks. And that's the challenge now, right? So this cat and mouse game just got serious because now there's this requirement that they look for vulnerabilities and fix them. And I am so glad I don't work on the security layer. I don't touch that stuff. It's poison to me. I've had people ask me, and there's been times in my career where certainly, I had those keys on my laptop that I use daily. But I don't look at it. I didn't, you know, keep in mind, I rarely used a production module. I had what's called a development module. So they're different ECU than what we sell the cars with, even though they're running the same software. The security layer is gone on the stuff. In fact, we have a module that plugs into the ECU in between the board of the ECU and the chip. There's a daughter module that goes in between, that captures every bit of traffic in between the two. There is nothing going on that we couldn't see, record, and adjust in real time and switch instantly between pairs of maps, right? That's the level of access we have at the OEM, right? Right. But you, you know, the guy who wrote the software works right down the hall for me. You can just go walk to him and say, hey, I need you to add a table that's X versus Y and adds this to it. Okay, I'll have it to you next week on the on the follow up release. Okay, cool. Thanks. Right. All right. On the aftermarket, we're like, what does this go to?

So actually touch on that real quick. So how much do we really have access to in the aftermarket? I mean, it's got to be like a fraction of the iceberg.

That was Justin's actual question, right? The maps, the tables.

So let's talk parameters. And a parameter could be a single scalar, or it could be a 30 by 30 table. It counts as one, right? Could be a function, a line, whatever. But it counts as one. You open HP tuners, for example, and you might see 200 things that you could adjust. Maybe some are like 400 on new forwards, right? They got a lot of stuff decoded on new forwards, mostly because there's like, there's 27 different versions of everything for all the ordered pairs on how they do the variable cam stuff, right? And then they have to have that for borderline, MBT, and max allowed, right? So it's in triplicate times 27 on everything. And they do it for spark, and then they do it for torques, and they do it for air charges, right? That's just how their multivariate thing works. So you got hundreds of these things. You're like, wow, that's a lot of stuff to adjust.

If you guys are enjoying the show so far, just go ahead and drop a subscribe or a follow if you haven't already, just so you get notified the next time we do an awesome episode like this. Let's get back to the show.

A modern ECU is something on the order of 16,000 of those. Oh my God.

So when you say tip of the iceberg, you really mean the tip.

I'm not joking. Yeah. Dude, they breed the sense of humor right out of us engineers, man.

Yeah. Well, that's got to be a multiple of what, 40. So you get, I have to see 40 times more stuff.

Yeah. Now, most of the stuff is things you would never want to touch.

Right.

You know, there's things about clock speed and whatever. All you can do is go backwards if you mess it up, right?

Right.

I'm cranking coding, things like that. The vast majority of it's diagnostics. Okay. And so double-edged sword there. There are a lot of cases where I'm doing aftermarket work, where I really would need to get into diagnostics because I need to move thresholds around, like on-carb approved programs, right? So I do a lot of work where clients come to me and say, okay, we want to go get our EO. I'm like, I love that work because it's specialized and you got to do everything in the basic level really good. And then you got to whip out the sandpaper. And the last program I did, the difference between pass and fail was in the fourth decimal point. Huh, that was pass versus fail on one of the O2 control tables. Well, that was how fine the adjustment had to be, assuming everything else was right. But there are cases where we've changed something. We had a supercharger where there wasn't one, and now it's failing a map diagnostic because it goes over 105 kPa. Well, yeah, we wanted to, right? But they're checking for in a certain condition, and now we're out of range on that, right? So I don't like just shutting things off. I would like them to validate as correct. And so some of that's in that 16,000, right? And so there are occasionally a case where I'll work with the HP tuners guys. I'm like, I need you to go look for a thing that looks like this. I have no clue what it's really called. I don't know what the address is, but it's got to have map on one axis and blah, blah, blah on the other. See what you can find. And they come back with, you know, is it one of these two or three things? I don't know. Put it in. Let me see. Put it in a beta. Let me look.

So there's a little bit of guesswork involved there.

Yeah. When you're on the outside, 100 percent. When you're on the inside.

You got everything.

Well, not only do I have that, but like they give us the C book. Like when I worked at Ford, all the C code that is the instruction that the ECU runs on, I just had it as a file. I could Ctrl F, search. Where does this parameter shows up? Shows up seven times. Okay. Oh, it's this plus this equals this. Bingo.

Do you have any insight on who's the hardest? I heard somebody mentioned before, it's like it goes, actually might have been Sam as well. It's like BMW, Porsche, and Dodge are the most complex ECUs or whatever. I don't know if I'm asking that question.

It depends on the task. Fair?

Is there an English?

Each kind of ambition does it.

I see that. Yeah, subtle flex.

A lot of the Europeans use the generic Bosch logic, which is, there's a lot of layers to that onion. There's a lot of stuff going on in Bosch, and a lot of companies just use the Bosch logic. It is complex. They have multiple variants that you can do variant coding on. So without a complete remap, you can just configure. You have config bits. They'll change it from one to another thing, and that gets used on a lot of things, not just cars. They use it on like PowerSports now, right? All these PowerSports companies use Bosch for their ECU, but it's fundamentally the Bosch ECU logic. So a CDU or whatever runs the same kind of logic as a Porsche, especially if they're boosted. So Bosch has got some interesting ways to encode that. BMW is close but just slightly different because in some cases, BMW likes to have BMW software, not Bosch software. BMW uses Bosch ECU hardware, but within the ECU, like you've got the ECU and then you've got like the boot block, the code, the data, and a Cal, right? And so this code could be all, you know, 90% Bosch with 10% BMW, and that 10% is enough to make it different than what you see in a Porsche or Audi, right? Because VW, Porsche, Audi are all the same company. They largely use the Bosch stuff. So, and Bosch has a certain way they characterize a fuel injector, and it's just different, right? Than how Chrysler, Ford, and GM, and Mazda, and everybody else does it, right? Everyone's got their, and again, they don't want to step on each other's patents. So, they have to be slightly different. But yet, they have to address the same physics of what's going on in the engine, right? We still have pistons, we still have spark plugs, we still have a gas exchange process, and we have combustion. Largely the same. So, how we do that now? Like, the Dodge speed density model is messy at best.

Okay.

It's, I mean, we're spoiled working on GMs and Fords by comparison.

I've heard from some others.

It's just messy. And that neural network is never going to be perfect, but apparently is good enough to pass emissions. I don't love it, but it works.

All right. So with these locked ECUs and all of this stuff, what does that look like for the aftermarket? Are we going to have to go standalones or are we going to, let's say somebody who has a forced induction, are they going to come with a carb approved calibration that they'll be able to upload to a stock ECU? Or what do you think that looks like for the future?

I'm worried. Modern cars, it's getting almost impossible to put a standalone on and not have massive other sacrifices, right? Too many things are linked, right? So the dashboard speaks over some encrypted CAN network to the ECU. Do you want to lose your dash? Because you put a MoTeC on it. Now, there are some guys putting MoTeCs on some modern cars, some, not all, and they've got that figured out if it is just a CAN messaging thing. But what happens when it's a signed encrypted CAN message, and now you can't, right? You know, and oh, by the way, now that thing's dark and it can't even see the fuel tank level, so you don't know if you're empty or not. You know, are you prepared to rip it out and put your own dash in?

Yeah, no.

Right. They get expensive and ugly, right? I don't like that.

It's not as seamless. It's like if you used to get like an aftermarket like Haltech, whatever.

No. I mean, from the programming side, I hate saying that. I'm almost afraid we pass the golden age. So going forward, the OEMs don't love us in the aftermarket. I mean, as much as we buy new cars from them with the express intent of supercharging them or putting stuff on them, I think it's incredibly short-sighted for Dodge to stop making the Challenger, for GM to stop making the Camaro. Ford wins by default with the Mustang, although great, but even that is hard to get into and do anything with on the 24s, right? They're locked. But there's a Ford slash Whipple option, so you can only buy the house brand. I mean, it's cool. Don't get me wrong. You know, 7, 800 horsepower, whatever it is this week, right? It's way more than the tires will plant. Hallelujah. You know, they're stupid fast.

Yeah, but everybody wants options.

That's the problem. Everyone likes to have a snowflake. Now, you know, it's funny because I deal with a lot of shop owners and I try and coach them, like, stop making snowflakes. Like, if you want to make money in this industry, you can't let customers come in and tell you what cam and what head and what air box they're going to put on their car every stinking time. You got to tell them, here's what we sell. Like, you got to sell them a number three with a Coke, but you got to deliver on it. It's got to be a compelling argument. Right. So you got to have something really cool. Here's our package that adds 100 horsepower, whatever it might be. But a lot of those, whether the ECU is locked or not for street cars, so things that get driven on the street, right? So you can have all your off-road use on the arguments that you want. But let's face it, things are getting driven on the street. It's got a license plate. No, they don't have a state inspection. There are plenty of federal laws that should the alphabet decide to start enforcing these more will make a lot of people's life difficult. So the shops need to make sure that they're being responsible. Like don't saw the cats off the same way you don't saw the DPFs off, right? The yellow box. I mean, but they... I'm working with some of that industry to do testing methods. And the question is how much testing is enough to keep the EPA off your backside? Now, I've met a lot of these EPA guys. I go to conferences. I spoke at the California Resource Board headquarters about modifying cars to an audience of 100, 200 people. Right? It was a big thing.

Did you get a lot of booze or what?

You know, it's funny. Well, actually, there were two meeting... There were two conferences that week. First one was in San Diego. Second one was at ARB later in the week. And at the San Diego one earlier, I did a presentation. And a guy from ARB got up. He's like, that's not possible. You can't be doing that. I go, I assure you, there's an $8 billion industry of people doing this. It's quite the going concern. The shields will be quite operational by the time your rival friends arrive. I mean, they got to be responsible, right? And you can be responsible. I've got articles coming on. I'm waiting for Hot Rod to print them. And I called it the elephant in the room. We live in the golden age. Like, it's entirely possible to make cars ridiculously fast without ruining emissions, right? This car right here, twin turbos, flex fuel, catalysts, right? Tailpipe's clean on the thing. And I'm doing a lot of test measurement systems. So a full lab like Ben Kaminsky's lab is like $10 million to set that thing up between the building, the chamber, the measurement equipment, the dyno, all that stuff. Soft $10 million to get that set up. Absolute showstopper for mom and pop speed shop, right? $5,000 per round of testing, pretty expensive, right? Or can I get some sort of kit like this and have some equipment in it that I can get a reasonable measurement? Now, reasonable is arguable of, you know, is the tailpipe egregiously bad? This will, I can assure you, I can find a bad polluting car, like a deleted car with this, no problem. The question is, how close is close enough for, like, Lev 3, Lev 4, right? We're picking fly s*** out of Pepper with how small the allowances are. But if once we get down below some threshold, the car is pretty clean, it's not pretty dirty, right? When car, Evan Belser was the guy who used to work for EPA. He would come to CIMA every year and he'd have this big meeting. And he was the, you are all sinners and you're all near to wells. And I hope you guys all burn. And his justification was like deleted diesels and the measurements, because they tested a deleted diesel in the lab and they're like, it's not like 20% worse. It's 317 times worse. It is so much worse, it's not even funny, right? So don't delete it, right? But if we got it to the point where you're within 10, 20%, that's a pretty clean car, right? So I hope that the aftermarket gets to some point where they have an affordable way to take some sort of measurement that's not down to the eighth decimal point. It's within some allowable range of stock. I mean, even when we do OBD to turn on the mill on the dashboard when something's wrong with the car, it's when it's 150% of the standard. Well, let's start the discussion there, right? Because that's what the car is doing to check on itself. So if I could be within 50% error, the tailpipe is still not that bad yet. And for every one of those cars with the light on, there's the mom in the minivan who's never changed spark plugs and never changed O2 sensors and things pinned plus 20 on the fuel trims, and it's just huffing charcoal out the tailpipe every time it leaves a stoplight, right?

Why is he talking about me?

But I mean, and then we talk about, you know, a guy who's got a supercharged Coyote, but he's got cats, it runs lambda one, it does cat light off, it's pretty clean. You're going to you're going to harsh that guy because he's what, 10% over some ridiculously tight standard versus somebody who's blowing the standard by orders plural of magnitude, right? So, it's not just locked ECU, it's the right to play, right? So, I hope that we have a right to play going forward, but we're going to have to hold up our end of the argument, right? So, we're going to have to prove that we're not those egregious 300 times violators, right? So, this sawing cats off, sawing DPFs off is not going to work on any planet there. It's just not going to work, but we can make a lot of power through a catalyst. I can make more power through cats than I can get tires to plant to the earth. Seems pretty good. I'm actually looking forward. I hope that maybe, because I think the real vulnerable guys are the drag and drive guys. They've got really powerful cars, race cars, and they're driving them from racetrack to racetrack on public roads.

Yeah, you're talking about five, six-second cars just on a jeep tire going track.

And these guys, and this is the same group that's going to try and tell the EPA, off-road use only, you're on the road. You want to fire up the Karens and all of a sudden become the poster child for what's wrong with the planet, right? I mean, whether Bob Lutz was right or not, saying global warming is a crock of s***, we don't want to be an easy target. Don't be an easy target. Don't be dumb. So we can put a cat on that. And these new cats, like these Jesse cats I'm working with, are great. The conversion efficiency is high. The back pressure is really low. The only downside is they cost a few bucks, but they work. And the car doesn't stake. You can take it on date night. Now your wife, girlfriend, mistress, whatever doesn't mind riding in the car. Is that worth something to our community? On the street car, guys, I think it is. I've already had a couple of guys pay me to do that exact job. Put cats on my car and make it run better. Okay. And then when we do an EO, certainly it has to have the cats on it. Certainly they have to be working and functional.

Is this state, do you guys have to do emissions in Michigan or no?

Nothing.

Okay.

They, long time ago, like late 80s, I think, they had an emissions test where it was like idle and high idle. Joke, right?

Yeah.

And they... So most states have gone to the plug-in.

Right.

And so you're relying on the car's OBD system. Hey, I know a guy who wrote a book on that.

No worry, that question's coming.

So the OBD system is looking for a stack up of symptoms that would indicate an emissions problem, right? And so they can read all that data when they plug-in. And it's more than just is the light on or has it passed these eight monitors. There's a lot more data in there. And they can look at how often it ran the monitor and how often it passed. And so they get an in-use performance ratio. And they look at it and they say, oh, your monitor should, you know. For these 2015 Mustangs, sir, our historical data says that the fleet passes at about 87%, but your car is at 12%. Well, my light's not on. Yeah, but yours is at 12%. It's not a violation yet, but we're watching you. Right, we don't want to be there. Right, so I mean, yeah, access to the ECU is critical for this to happen though, right? Because if I'm locked out of the ECU, I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys, right? I have these conversations with EPA guys and ARB guys. I need ECU access to take a dirty car and make it clean. If you lock me out, it becomes 1987 all over again. We're going to have piggyback modules. And guys will find a way to put timing trickers and ninth injectors on things and whatever, and it's going to be ugly. But they're going to go fast and it'll be Mad Max. Yeah. And they're going to be distilling their own fuel in the shed out back.

What are your thoughts on some of these piggyback things? For example, like a JB4 or something?

I'm not familiar with that one. But generally, I don't like a piggyback. I'm an ECU guy, right? So I'm a controls guy. I want to hook my laptop up to it. I want to see engineering units and I want them to match the thing I could measure with my own tool.

Fair enough.

Okay. That's the right way. Now, when we get into DI and how do you add more fuel on a DI system, I think supplemental PFI is awesome.

Okay.

Done properly. And Bosch is doing it on production ECUs. Works awesome. It's on the ZR1, it's on all the Fords now. Right? It works awesome.

Why can GM... So, we have another GM tuner that we talk to a lot, and flex fuel seems to be a pretty common thing on those. Why can't I do that on my Ford? You can. Well, it seems like they don't really have a good system for that, or at least it's not any tuner that I've talked to.

For the GT 500 in particular.

Well, the Coyote platform and the Predator, they're not, they run on the same platform.

The biggest difference between them is that Ford almost universally, a long time ago, switched from physical sensor to virtual sensor. And so, the virtual sensor looks for a series of conditions to infer the amount of alcohol that must have been in your fuel instead of measuring it directly. GM puts a sensor on there. Now, they have virtual sensor on GM stuff too, by the way. So, they can do either or. But when, like I did this car, I put a physical sensor on this car and ran the wire down to pin 40 and plugged in to an otherwise unpopulated pin on the ECU because that same ECU is common to a flexural pickup truck where a sensor is going into that pin. And so, hallelujah for global architecture. If the pickup truck needed it, the Corvette got it for free. It was just turned off in the Cal. So, all I had to do was turn it on, put a physical sensor in there, power it and send the signal to the right pin, and I'm off to the races. I fill up with whatever color handle I feel like this week. And I can go from E0 to E85, whatever. You know, this thing will just measure it and it just works. And I've got enough fuel system, I can eat it. On a Ford, it's virtual. And so, they're looking for you to shut the car off and turn it back on with a different fuel tank level than what it shut off with. And right away, it says, Oh, you added fuel to me. What did you put in there? If you turned it on, right? You got to turn the logic on and turn the diagnostic on and it says, OK, I'm going to start looking at that. And how would I know you changed my fuel? I'm going to look at fuel trims first. So you're going to fire it up. And if all of a sudden the fuel trims start going positive by a bunch, we can correlate fuel trim to alcohol content because you were at this percent before and you went so much and so right away the fuel trims need to go a bunch right after you stopped and added fuel. You must have put something weird in the tank, right?

You have to shut it off to do that though, because I never shut my Lincoln off when I fill it and it's E85 or it can be.

You'll learn a lot slower if you don't shut it off. OK, it's I don't know how I haven't tried that. That's good. I worked on the focus when I did was at Ford was a dual fuel engine. I was on two liter aspirated focus and that was a flex fuel engine. So it was like 12 to 1 compression ratio. So it mattered. Yeah. So it's meant to run 87 octane, but it's 12 to 1 compression. So I knew full well, like, you know, and I was the torque guy. So I wasn't doing fuel or emissions. I was just doing torque. Well, I want the most torque possible. So I put the good fuel in all the time. I don't care what the fuel economy was.

Right.

It's free when you're on a development card. So I'm like, I'm going to put the 100 octane in. So but they look for that that fuel trim swing, and then they go back and correlate it with spark. So if they add some timing in an area that otherwise would have been knock limited and they listen real careful to the knock sensor. If they if you had a positive fuel trim and you can put more timing in without lighting up the knock sensor, then it validates is that must be a higher alcohol content. Okay. So it's virtual. And so through the magic of these things correlating, it says, well, it must be this now.

So if I'm switching between pump to E85 or whatever in my 07 town car, which I don't really give a s*** about, but I probably, if I'm switching fuels, I probably should shut it off and turn it back on.

Well, double check. I mean, it might have a actual, an 07 might have a sensor, might not. I don't remember how they did that. So if it's a physical sensor, then yeah, it wouldn't need anything. It'll just, it'll catch it in real time because it's measuring it.

I just know it's not super common in the coyote world. Like we, there's not really anybody out there running.

There's guys running flex fuel supercharged coyotes. It's a thing, but keep in mind, it's relying on the fuel trims. So everything else face value better be right. So your airflow number from your MAF curve better be a real airflow number. Your fuel flow from your injector model better be a real number. Otherwise, you've baked error in, and now it's going to have that error feeding an error, feeding alcohol content, feeding another error.

So because everyone I talk to wants to give me either, so they want to give me two tunes, a pump gas tune and an E85 tune. And then I'm supposed to test and put in whatever, and I load the map that I'm going to be running.

Yeah, even then, I would, I mean, I would, I would, I mean, all the pump gas tunes now are E10, because our cert fuel is E10 now.

Yeah.

So we just assume that it's there. So if you look at your Cal, if you were to open up and look at it in software, you'd see the stoic point is no longer 14.7. It's like 14.1, maybe 13.9, depending. Yep. So that's like one end of the spectrum now. It's not all the way over to here. Now it's only to here. E10 is as far as it goes. And we don't usually get 85. Like here, my E85 in Michigan in the summer is about 78%. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's good enough, right? Because most of the benefit is there by 50-60%. About 60-65%. There's almost no real benefit to go beyond that because it just taxes the pump harder, and you have to push more stuff through, and it's taking up more space in the cylinder. I mean, you got most of the cooling benefit already, you got most of the octane benefit by the time you're up there. So I chuckle when I see people arguing, you know, oh, we got E85, and oh, down in Florida, we got E90. Congratulations. It doesn't really matter. It's not going to make the car functionally much faster.

I will tell you, on my pump guest, they did tell me it has to have 10% in it.

Well, it's because the strike point is set to, you know, for... But, I mean, keep in mind, the difference between E0 and E10, 4%.

Okay.

So is that enough to lose sleep over, really? I tell you, on the OEM side, no. That's, you know, well, again, I was driving a three-liter Nano in Colorado, right? And I, like, all of a sudden, I had, like, 17% fuel trims at this one point, and my base engine guy said, nah, you're... 17%, guys? Nah. You know, and then after Mark, I'm like, I'm used to, like, bringing stuff down to, like, 3% or less, right? On a sample size of one. Now, when you have a fleet, I know there's going to be variability in the fleet, but I'm like, why is my one car 17% out here? I got another car, it was 15% there. The other one was 14%. I'm like, okay, well, these are all double digits. He's like, yeah, but it's the best we could do. I mean, it was in an area where I wasn't going to hurt anything, but it just sucked, right? And so it turns out they rely pretty heavily on their Y-bands, and they bring it back in with that. So when you go flex on something like that, the base Cal better be right before you go flex. So like this car, before I went flex, I had dialed on 93 octane, really 91, because this car has been on hot rod power two or multiple times. I can drive to Florida and back and fill up at whatever gas station, I'll be okay. So I mean, it's faster on ethanol, but it'll run on 91 just fine.

Okay.

Well, I got one more question for you before Dan pops the usual three, because I don't know how far along we are in episodes anymore. I don't have a timer anymore. So yeah, it could be, I don't even know if it's sunshine out there right now. I want to touch on the book, right? Why write the book on tuning? How did that come to be? Why did you do it? And then the ones that came afterwards, the sequels, are these called book sequels?

The book, yeah, whatever. So you're talking engine management, advanced tuning. That's the first one, not counting the thesis. That's the first one I wrote, and that was me just trying to get everything out of my head that I wish I had known 10 years earlier. Man, I wish somebody would have told me this. The fundamental relationship of how a fuel injector works and how a mass air flow sensor works and how the ECU takes this injector data plus that math curve to get you the air fuel ratio that you asked for. So you could put in a desired ratio and actually get what you want out of it. How does that process work and come together, right? Why? When I put this number into my spark table, I don't get that number, I get this number over here. Well, there's what other things are in play, right? So I wish somebody would have just spelled that out for me. And so that's what I put down. I had it almost completely written before I talked to my publisher. I just sat down. It was when I had gotten out of the aftermarket tuning thing. So I mean, I did like a thousand cars in a year, and then I was pretty burned out.

Yeah.

So I'm doing like three cars a day on average. And a lot of times, they're supercharged two-valve, four-valve, lots of those. So when the Ford PHE argues with me about how that's not going to work, it's funny. To say I've done a few of those is fair. So all that stuff, like I don't want to lose this, so I'm just going to start writing it down in what I think is a logical order to start describing how these things work together. And some of the aha moments where a light bulb came on over my head, I want to document those and put that out there. And so I had mostly written it, and I talked to my publisher at CarTech, and they said, yeah, we're looking to update that area of our catalog. What do you got? And I sent them a sample chapter, and they were like, we'll take it. Okay. And so you get it, it's funny, then they send you a check for $5,000. You're like, woo-hoo. But it took me two years to write it. Yeah. It was my nights and weekends for a while. Well, I went back to daytime engineering job, and when I had time, I'd sit down and I'd start writing. It was before I had a kid. And so I was just trying to get this thoughts from my head onto a hard drive somewhere.

How did it go from hard drive, but notepad scribbles to an actual book at that point? Because I'm sure there was a progression there, right?

Yeah. Every author has got their writing style. For me, I write the outline. I say, what subjects would I have to talk about? And then what order would they make sense to start talk? Because I can't talk about this until I've already talked about that. So I have to discuss this, and then I'll come back to part of that later, after, but I need to walk all the way through the fuel side, then all the way through the air charge side, then all the way through the spark side or something like that. Right. And so you just kind of... I got to take the reader on a little bit of an adventure so that by the time they see this, it's not foreign to them. Because there's a couple concepts that need to be spelled out ahead of time. So like I talked about ECU inputs and then ECU outputs and then ECU strategy. Right. Because you're trying to get a certain output, but really what you're trying to do is get a condition in the engine. Right. So how does it know what the current condition is? What is it? How does it pick that output? Well, it looks at signal from the mass airflow sensor, signal from the crank sensor to find RPM. And it's going to need some sort of indication of load. And it's like we're... I just tried to put this stuff together. And some of it's just universal truths. I really tried to write it so it wasn't a Ford tuning book or a Chevy tuning book. It was like a hot wire mass airflow sensor is a hot wire mass airflow sensor. Turns out they use them on Subarus. So Toyota has used them, right? It's just a sensor. So how does that work? And what principle does that sensor work on? And how do we screw that up? Because we're pretty good at that in the aftermarket, right? So I just want to describe those things, then how would one fix that? Okay, well, that's it. And it hit the market at a time when the market was a little starved for that information. So I got lucky.

What timeframe was that?

2007.

Okay.

That was when, yeah, the thing went to, went to, yeah, 05, I started writing it in 07, it was done and it hit the market. And then it took me another two years to write the second, because like almost immediately, they were selling, and the publisher said, give us another book. I'm like, well, I just gave you the book. They're like, no, we want another one. And so I wrote the other one, and they picked these titles, not me, which is hilarious. So I wanted to call it like Introduction to Engine Calibration. They're like, no, it'll never sell. So that became Engine Management, Advanced Tuning. The second book has an even dumber title, is Designing and Tuning High-Performance Fuel Injection Systems. It's the Speed Density Book.

Okay.

That's what it is. There's one chapter where I walk from PV equals NRT to injection time. So here's what you saw in high school, and your high school chemistry or physics prof made you learn this equation. And you go, I'll never use that in real life. And here's how it turns on your injectors. And so there's, you know, 15, 16 steps to get from A to B. But I explain, you know, every time I move one thing in the equation from here to here, or we get that from here, it became a new line. And we just walk through step by step by step. Here's how it works. You're solving for this. And it gets that from there. Right. And that's, and to me, it was simpler and dumber than the first book. But it was other stuff that also had not been clearly spelled out yet. So I did that one. And so those two were out. The first one now sells all the others by far. For some reason, people just want the Engine Management Book, and that one sells way more. Over its life, it's sold a lot of copies.

Do you have any ballpark of an idea of how many?

Over 70,000.

Holy s***. Yeah.

Now, I don't make a ton, right? I make like a ton.

Do you get like royalties on it still then?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

As long as I'm alive, they got to keep paying me for it.

Okay. I was about to say, they just pay you off like, here's $20, Jimmy.

Well, it was a... So when you write, you get an advance on royalties.

Right. Yep.

So they'll give you a $5,000 check where it sells one copy or a thousand, they don't care. Here's your dollar. Here's your $5,000. And that's them taking a risk on you as an author. Right. Hoping that it sells. Well, six months later, they had already exceeded that, and now they have to keep writing royalty checks at the agreed percentage. And it's a percentage of wholesale, not retail price. And so I don't get rich off the book.

Right.

Buy any stretch.

Not with that contract, yeah.

No. Well, and there's just not a better deal in that space. Right. It's never going to be a New York Times best seller.

It's not like a Harry Potter novel.

Nope.

Not even close.

I can't believe she's worth several billion, by the way. That is insane.

Yeah. Welcome to my castle.

Yeah.

Greg has a three-car garage.

Well, maybe if they ever pick it up for a movie franchise, then he'll be all right.

Yeah.

Just a crackpot professor just, yeah.

Put me in, coach.

I was like Transformers 1 when he's having a breakdown.

Ready to chop one.

Yeah. So Millennial reeled me this. It's 2001. And one day I'm selling nitrous oxide systems. And the next day we sell NOS. The Fast and Furious came out while I was running Detroit Speed Works. Overnight. Different business. I'm like, oh! No, we don't work on 2Js here.

Oh, jeez, that's bad.

The first move, right? The first, the first, I was running a speed shop when that came out.

Yeah.

Oh my God. That's hilarious.

So, no, like Book 2, I did, they asked me for Book 2 like right away because they saw Book 1 was selling a bunch. And it sells far less than the first one. And then fast forward another 10 years plus. And my publisher came to me and said, Hey, we want to replace an aging OBD book. Will you write a diagnostics book for us? I said, I will, but I don't want it to be just another diagnostics book. I don't have all the village wisdom. And here's how to tune your car. And I'm afraid that even if I try and write that book, somebody is going to pick me apart. Lots of people are going to pick me apart because you didn't tell me how to fix my 2003 Honda Accord. Because everyone knows that they have this problem. I'm like, well, I can't put all the village wisdom into a book. Forget it. I can tell you the concept. I mean, here's the fun part. I was the diagnostic calibration engineer on F250, F350 gas. I know how small leak detection works because I was the guy doing it. All right. So I know how EVAP diagnostics work. I know six pattern O2 sensor diagnostic work. I'm familiar. Ford paid me handsomely to be an expert on that subject matter for a while. So I came back and I wrote the diagnostic book as it's an emissions book. And we have diagnostics solely because the OEMs are required to check to see if the emissions are going sideways. And so that's the whole point of the book is it's an emissions book, and then we talk about how we make sure the emissions work. And so they again picked the title. So it's OBD-1 and OBD-2, a complete guide to diagnosis, repair, and emissions.

Say that three times fast.

Right. And I'm like, you guys got this completely backwards. Like the book makes far more, number one, I don't have a whole lot OBD-1 other than a short history lesson on things that I had to go research to write. Because I'm not the walking encyclopedia on that stuff. That predates my career. Yeah. But you read the book, and like even in the foreword, I'm like, this stuff exists because of emissions. So really, if you read the title backwards, it makes more sense. So it's emissions and diagnostics and repair in that order, right? Because the only reason it's there is because EPA forces us to, and ARB forces us to, right? And it has to be a handy way for us to figure out what parts broke it on our car. Because if the O2 sensor takes crap, we'll get a code, we go start looking at O2 sensor and go, oh yeah, the wire is burned. That makes sense. And fix it.

By the way, my Lincoln has a light on, and I'm pretty sure it's an OVD or an oxygen sensor. And it's just going to stay like that, I think. Gross polluter.

Just violating the Clean Air Act of 1970.

I'm the minivan mom.

You know what?

But I'm also the guy with a cat delete pipe.

So careful, Dan.

I know, I know. So if it's big enough, they're going to come after us.

Well, we will edit that out.

The only good news is like, so since I'm like in this habit of writing books now, apparently, I started writing a fourth one, and I really wanted to replace the first one. And maybe this time, maybe they'll let me pick the title. And I think I hooked them. So I said, the new one, I want to call something to the effect of how to tune practically anything.

I like that title. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's, again, these universal truths that don't change, right? So one must know the fuel model. One must know the air charge model, right? Because they all have a fuel model, they all have an air charge model, right? Here's the things that... Here's the physics that it affects whether you should advance or retard the spark in order to get the cylinder pressure peaking at the right point in the cycle to actually push on a piston, right? This stuff doesn't change. So that's where it's kind of going. Yeah, I'll have to throw a couple of practical examples in there, but I don't want it to be an LS tuning book. I don't want it to be a Coyote tuning book. I want it to... And again, you always get the reviews, you want guys out there, this is crap, it didn't tell me how to tune my car. Well, I'm sorry I can't teach you with that. I mean, a single publication that's marketed to everybody.

Try a 15 second highlight reel. Yeah.

Well, it's like when I write for Hot Rod, and like the first article they published was, I wrote a thing about cylinder deactivation, like airflow, AFM, DOD, whatever you want to call it. And should you keep it or not? And really it was like, how does the system work? Why is it there? And I went through and said, you know, here's how it works, and here's why it exists for fuel economy. And it's a real play, and it actually makes a real difference if you drive the way they intend. But if you've got a nervous twitchy foot, then yes, you might be right that, you know, I turned that stuff off and I got better fuel economy. Yeah. You know why? You're a bad driver. Sorry. Own it. You're a twitchy driver. Every time you go in and out of the system, it's got to do this inefficient transition state in between. And that's terrible for fuel economy. If you get in and stay in, it's awesome. If you get out and stay out, it's awesome. But if you can't make up your mind because you're in and out, you're sawing at the throttle all the time, things can get... People read the title of the article and then they comment.

I didn't know I was a s*** driver, Dan. Yeah?

And it's funny because they're like, Oh, get rid of all that s***. I'll warranty this, warranty that. And like, you know how many millions of trucks are out there on the road with this thing? Oh, yeah. So even for you to say there's 10,000 failed systems out there is a laughably small number. Yeah. The GM is not worried about the warranty cost compared to what it saved them, right? In a cafe play on fuel economy, huge dollars to an OEM. Huge dollars. That's so, you know, and God forbid it touches emissions. And it was the, you know, make or break, I'm passing emissions. Then, you know, that would also be like, if you don't pass emissions, you don't have a program.

Right.

We don't sell anything. You guys don't get Mustang superchargers if there's no Mustang. And there is no Mustang. If Mustang doesn't pass LEV 4, they will find a way to clean up that tailpipe. I guarantee it.

Is there something about, I've also heard this thing about like credits for that kind of stuff. So like when the Mustang, the Mach-E, right? It's a hot topic for Mustang guys. Did they do that to balance out the V8s versus EV?

Yeah, there's a fuel economy shell game that they have to play.

Okay.

But on emissions, there are different bins of emissions, basically, how much stuff, how much bad stuff comes out the tailpipe. And so the smaller the number, the less bad stuff, right? So there's a bin 160, 125, right? You get out of bin 70, bin 50, bin 30. Now there's a bin 20. It's incredibly clean. The smaller the number, the cleaner the vehicle is. And they, the EPA sets these standards that the average of the whole fleet has to be this number. And that number is of course decreasing over time. So for every one of these dirty things, they better sell a lot of these clean things for the emissions. And then same thing with fuel economy. Fuel economy is an even bigger shell game on funny money rules on how they do it. You gotta be actively involved in doing the calculations. But emissions is a little more clean cut. The fleet average is this, but nothing can be worse than this.

Interesting.

Here is the standard grams per mile on this test cycle. And thou shalt be under this number, or else, or else. You don't have a program, and it's millions and millions of dollars of fines. And they will pull your certificate of conformity, meaning you cannot sell, you're not legally allowed to sell these things anywhere in the US. Sit them on the lot, recycle them. We don't care. DPA has no emotion on this one. And that the top bins are disappearing over time. Right? So now, as we go to... It used to be average about bin 70, and now they're pushing it to an average of 30. So if the 30 is the average, like GM releases this 1,064-horsepower twin-turbo V8. If it's one of those bins, I haven't seen the COC on it yet. But even then, the dirtiest possible bin, I think it could fit is 125, which is what Mustang GT was in 2020.

Oh, wow.

And more than double the power.

Right?

Dude.

That's how clean that thing is, right? You know, I'm guessing here because I haven't seen the number yet.

But even then, that's still impressive.

And that's one of the dirtiest vehicles they can sell. Now, they get to average in a bunch of EVs, they come in as zeros because they don't count the mining to make the battery and the charging and the DTE power plant burning coal and natural gas to put electricity in the line to send it across the power lines and their losses and the transformers do that.

Is that the reason why some of these, like the e-Ray and the Mach-E exist or why they got that naming? So the Mach-E in particular is wrong because it doesn't resemble a Mustang by very much, right? But did it get that name so it helps that average?

Oh man, I don't know. I think marketing owns the name, right? That's not an engineering discussion.

Yeah, that wouldn't be like a fleet thing.

I couldn't begin to speculate what the... I can tell you, I was at SEMA Garage when Team Mustang came to show us new things, and I was one of the people invited to go to that event, and they split their time in between Dark Horse and Mach-E. And I can tell you without a doubt what people were more interested in. It was not the Mach-E rally.

Somebody's in the other room going, did we tell them the right time?

I mean, everybody in the room is like, so, a question for the guy at Romeo Proving Grounds, when you guys are doing the ride and handling on the Dark Horse, we're like, we'd like to talk about our charging network. So that V8 is the same. It was comical. Now, e-Ray, different thing. Like, e-Ray is a hybrid, right? So, it's got an electric motor on the front end and an LT2 in the back. I've ridden in this car. It is b****** on the street. Holy crap, is that thing quick. I have driven near an e-Ray with this car. Not even close.

Oh, really?

Not even close. I'm solid 700 plus on this thing, right? I got nothing for an e-Ray until fourth gear.

Yeah, so after that, 130.

Yeah.

We got to be going, go to jail speed and the road better be clear for a while before it's even a race. Well, I mean, the e-Ray, interesting data point I heard from one of the drivers is you can be stopped with traffic going this way on pretty much any kind of street. If there's a two-car gap, regardless of how fast they're going, 50 mile an hour, you can make it. You will merge and just be fine. Now the traffic around you will be really excited that you pulled in. You'll make it.

Yeah.

And you'll get used to that and know you can do it. The longer you drive the car, the more you get used to it. It's like, you need one more hit every time. And it'll do it every damn time. And it'll do it twice on Sunday because it doesn't, you don't need to plug it in to recharge. It recharges during decals. Or if you really deplete it, it'll start doing active charge through the road contact. So it drives the engine harder when it's breaking, you know, re-genning on the front. So it can force it to charge the battery a little bit that way. Really cool.

That's cool.

Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, we skipped over the whole middle part of Greg's career where I was the charge balance, really fuel economy calibrator on the Chevy Volt. So Chevy spent a lot of time teaching me how hybrids work.

Yeah.

I'm familiar.

We're definitely gonna have to do a part two. Yeah, we're gonna have to do some more podcasts and books here.

Yeah.

So what's Friday look like for you?

Yeah.

We're gonna need 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Yeah. But yeah, no, I...

We should probably pull the plug, huh?

Yeah. We'll be here all night, guys.

I know.

I appreciate it. No, it's fun. You know, we hang out.

No, this is awesome, dude. And like I told Dan or like we said earlier, it's like, how do you turn a 20-plus year career into a two-hour episode? You don't. It's just not possible, especially when you come to this damn city.

Yeah. And there's, you know, I'm just one dude here, man. There's a lot of this going on around town.

Yeah.

Well, it's like you said too, it's like the people you have on speed dial, it's like when you think about the wealth of knowledge that's in this, within a 20-mile radius here, a five-mile radius of here, at that lake across the street over here, you know, it gets crazy.

Some interesting people around town.

Yeah.

I bet.

Well, on that note, Dan, do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah.

I'm really curious to see where those go. Yeah. I don't say that every episode. Yeah. I don't think I've said that ever.

All right. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to piss, to piss.

Rewind.

Can you edit that out, please? We like to ask our guests.

What do we do to drug testing here?

My company has terrible policies on this.

We like to ask our guests to pick three cars. We need a track car, a show car, and a daily driver. You can have whatever you want. Money is no object.

Yeah. And I thought about this a little bit. I'm like, oh, man. I thought I had an answer to that. I was like, oh, a track car, I'll just get a Radical. I'm like, wait a minute. I don't have a budget. Yeah. I mean, Radicals are cool. They're light, you know. But s***, if you're gonna get a Radical and you don't have a budget, what you get is a Daytona Prototype.

Okay.

You ever watch like, you know, Daytona or Le Mans, see the closing speed of the prototypes versus the normal street car things? Yeah.

You're talking like a Cadillac prototype.

Yeah. Put me in, coach. I feel like you don't even have to be a good driver. You just get in there and just win on power to weight ratio and downforce and, you know, stability and everything. Oh, man, this thing's got to be a riot to drive. It's, you know, show up to any track day and just be, you know, half throttle beat everyone.

Yeah. All right.

Show car and daily.

Show cars are weird for me. Yeah, you see a lot of cool stuff. You know, cars and coffees at various places in Detroit, there's always something interesting. Yeah. I go to SEMA all the time. I go to PRI all the time. I'm numb to the... Oh, and Detroit has Autorama. So the Riddler Award is here. Yeah. Right. So to be a Riddler contender, it's a multi-million dollar car and they pick eight, right? And so you're numb to that end of it. The thing I really love when I go to shows is that the car's got a story or the guy's got sweat equity in it, and he did something cool with it, right? So I love that car right there. That twin turbo C6 is my favorite car I own. I'll take it anywhere. I'll drive it anywhere. I love cars there at shows that actually get driven and get used. That's it. That car's got a story, and I don't care if I win Best in Show. I'm not there to impress everybody with it. It's just cool. It's my car. I like it. Half the time, I'll leave the hood closed. Whatever.

That's your show car.

Yeah, that's fine.

I get it.

Because I got something in it. It's mine. I've been through almost every stitch of that car. So it does lots of things well. It's not too far out of bounds.

I think it's in that sweet spot. For everything you want.

Yeah, it's fun. I can take it on a road trip. It makes more power than the tires can plant. It handles really well. I've had it on track days. It's got a nice stereo. The AC blows cold. My kid loves it. I pick him up from school in it, and he's happier and s***. So that's a nice one. And that borders on the daily driver stuff, I guess. But I actually drive it. If I had to get a daily driver, like I...

He says Bugatti, so help me God.

Nah, nah. It's like, you know, the weather sucks here. So I think it's something that I got to drive even in the winter. So I mean, like, you know...

Well, you write Sam's answer, right? On his episode?

What did he say again? Did he pick it? Is it Chiron or something? Cause it's all wheel drive?

Lifted Chiron, baby. Cause why not?

Because it's $3 million. No, you know what I'd be happy with is like, you know, like a Raptor R.

Ooh, yeah, it's a good one.

You can just drive it anywhere. And I wouldn't have a problem taking it to the mall, right? Take it to the gym, whatever, just like park it anywhere. It's fine. And it'll get you in and out of wherever you need to be. It's cool. And it's got enough power to make it interesting, right?

Like in total race trailer.

Yeah. It's enough to make it interesting, right? It's, you know, another thousand horsepower on top of that. It's not going to make it more interesting. So that's probably my three.

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

calibratedsuccess.com. Okay. I'm not hard to find, man. You can Google me. It'll get you probably to my Amazon author page also. But I mean, I'll sell some. If somebody wants a signed copy of the book, then shoot me an email. I got them. I'll send them to you.

Okay. I'll email you.

But like I'm accessible. Like I do work with shop owners and whatever. Like I'll do one-on-ones with guys.

Okay.

Occasionally, I fly out to, you know, a guy will fly me out to his shop and say, I want to spend a couple of days with you in training. But like I'll do a Zoom session with somebody for an hour or two.

Okay.

Okay. You know, let's, you know, open up laptops and start looking at stuff.

That's awesome.

You know, I'm, I'm, you know, people are surprised that like I'm available. I'm like, yeah, dude, I got bills to pay just like everybody. So ain't nothing going on but the rent.

Yeah.

Well, perfect.

Dan, you can find us at Gunna Garage with two N's. Perfect.

And as for me, you guys made it this far into the show, so you found us. Dan, thanks. Oh no, hold on. We're doing this backwards. Greg, thanks for coming on. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you all next time.