126. LS/LT Aftermarket, Building C8 Corvettes, Platform Development w/ Lingenfelter

The highest, loudest, screech noise is a supercharger that's not running through the engine.

The position of the engine actually allows for better packaging of everything. You're not as constrained. You don't have to go through the control arms, even on the rear mount turbos, like you are able to have a nice packaging for the whole setup.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris, a.k.a. Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, and I'm here with my Ford-loving co-host.

Oh, this is very, very bad for me today, but yeah.

This is as enemy territory as it gets. I mean, we've been in the trenches stuff before, but today we are at Lingenfelter Performance Engineering. Nailed that intro. Nailed it. We did not do that three times. We are here with Brandon Baker, which I believe you're a VP here now, right?

I'm VP of Sales and Marketing.

Okay. Got it. Then we're here with Chris Saint as well. We touched on a little bit beforehand, but why don't you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves, what your roles are here, and then we'll go from there.

I've been with the company now for, I'll be going on 12 years. I eventually started on Ken's personal car collection side, and now I've worked my way over to the performance side. I've always been a performance background myself, so it's pretty natural for me to come over here. I came to this side of the business roughly seven years ago, and I came in on a salesman side, and I've worked in the background with Chris and other engineers here on performance upgrades, new packages, new product development, and just, you know, we're rolling into a new role here with me, and we're just, you know, in the ground running and tackling what we do best, and it's the GM platform.

Okay. And you as well.

My name is Chris Saint. I lead the calibration department here. I dabble quite a bit on the engineering side too. I come from Puerto Rico. I have my shop there before coming basically here. I've been with the company for about nine years almost. And we basically, I basically do all final testing, tuning on pretty much all the cars that we push out.

Okay. So then you can't touch a little bit on your history with this company just there in that intro. How did you come over here then? Or how did that whole kind of transition happen? What made you want to come to Lingenfelter?

Well, it all started with a YouTube video actually. From an Eagle Tulum racing a C5. I believe it was a Twin Turbo C5. Very old video. And from that moment on, it kind of kickstarted the whole journey here. And the opportunity came from a late friend, Brent Malone, that pretty much gave me the opportunity to come here. And the rest has been one year at a time, one year at a time.

How long ago was that? What was? When you made the transition, what?

That was nine years ago.

Nine years ago? Okay.

2016, I believe it was.

So one of the things we were talking about before we kicked off this episode is, you guys are obviously having a heavy emphasis on the C8 platform. Not because it's the newest thing. Everybody wants to focus on what's new. I definitely want to talk about the e-rays, by the way. That's gotten a lot of extra attention recently, not just with you guys, but in general. But you guys also do a lot of stuff with the C6, C7 platform. And then there's also that C5 we were talking about off camera, which we will bring up as well. So do you guys want to touch on what's currently in development and what you guys are doing in the Corvette world currently?

Yeah. So currently, and for the past three and a half years, we've really, I'd say, pioneered the market and the supercharged side for the C8 platform. We've had a lot of advancements on that. One of them was the world's first supercharged e-ray. That car is getting some more work done to it that we can't talk about right now. But that will be a teaser for some people that follow that car. But we are going back into our grassroots days of the C4, C5s and C6s where we did twin turbo systems. We did stray away from that, from the C7 platform. And the C8 is literally the perfect platform for this opportunity. And we're going back into that side of the market. And we're just starting back on that here in PRI 24. We just unveiled a 427 twin-turbo system. And the car is currently down at the auto show right now. So we'll have that car back here in about a week. And we'll be in here playing and testing with it. The good old Michigan weather puts a little choke hold on us right now for making some polls and actually really, really testing it. But we'll be hitting the dyno here pretty soon and be looking to make some healthy power numbers. And a big thing that we do on these platforms is everything's OEM-esque, drivability. We're not going in, we're not cutting out the trunk line or anything. We're not intrusive into those areas. No auxiliary fuel systems or anything. We do stay on the DI side. We just want factory drivability and factory appearance style packages where we strive at.

Well, I have a feeling you're going to jump in with a similar thing. There's always a faster guy, right? There's always somebody that's willing to sacrifice the AC, sacrifice the radio there. There's so many sacrifices you can do. It's like you guys are trying to cater more to the street car market or the guy that wants a fun, really fun Sunday driver sort of deal. Does that touch on that or is there more to it?

The highway warrior is what I would call it.

Okay.

The guy that just likes to drive the car, especially and just hit it about, on and about and have fun with the car every single weekend.

Both of you guys hit the nail on the head there pretty well. We want that street side, but we're still not afraid for the guy that does want to give up those creature comforts. We can still cater to him, but we generally like to cater to the guys that they want to hop in, either turn the key or nowadays hit that push start button or still use the remote start and get up and just drive their car and not have to worry about methanol or any other additional components.

Especially that they have no diagnostics and you just can't know when it is it working, not working.

Oops.

Yeah. Remote start, that's cute. Us German car drivers don't get remote start for some reason. Yeah.

You don't?

No. I think there's maybe like one of them, but I don't think there's any German cars that have remote start, maybe like via the app, but not like on a key or whatever.

Most people don't want to put them on those either because a bunch of nightmares I've heard.

You want to talk about, we're going to step away for a second here. This car has been nothing but just a gremlin lately. So I got this just at the end of last year, and the other day we left Greg Banish's place from doing a podcast with him. And my lights, the GTIs have all the haptic stuff. I don't know if you saw in the articles about that. So my light is just going on off, on off every time we breathe. Because every time we breathe, the cold air, because I didn't get to remote start, would turn the lights on and off. So if that gives you any insight into what we want from an OEM, it's not that.

Well, I'll give you an example of that truck that I just modified the remote start to work for 40 plus minutes. And as many times as I want to.

Oh, yeah.

So that way, when my wife gets in that truck, it's just going to be completely warm and ready and slightly comfy.

Whoever decided it needed to be 15 minutes doesn't live in anywhere in the North.

The previous ones were 10.

Really?

The previous ones were 10 and literally two times. And in 20 minutes, it will not get warm if the temperature is 22, 23 like it is now.

Right.

Harris goes, 10 minutes, man, I could use that.

Yeah, no, that's ridiculous. So one of the things you touched on there is the C8's kind of like the perfect platform to go after like the twin turbo stuff. Can you kind of elaborate on that a little bit?

So the position of the engine actually allows for better packaging of everything and not be, for instance, on the previous C6, C5 generations, you have to go over the control arms and to actually get to the intercoolers and then come back up. I mean, it's doable, but it's not as nice to install and it's not a pretty project. And it's actually prone to a lot of complications, like pop-up hoses popping off and that kind of stuff, or you have to have very, very, very flexible hosing. And that makes the packaging a little more challenging. In this case, just because the motor is on the back, then you're not as constrained. You don't have to go through the control lines. Even on the rear mount turbos, you are able to have a nice packaging for the whole setup. And it's actually much, much simpler. The tubes are way shorter, so it improves even response for the vehicle. So it makes for a much nicer package in that regard.

I was going to ask that what is between the C6, C7, and C8, if there was one? Because it seems like that should be crammed in there, right? But I've seen like a C7 with the hood open. It looks like there's a huge hood there, but it comes down to such a point. And then you've got the wheel wells and all that stuff kind of up in there, and that car sits so low, you probably don't have as much room in one of those as you do in one of these, or?

Well, the C7, at least, if you decide to do a single turbo on the front, you can actually package it somewhat decently. But it's not gonna be a pretty setup, it's not gonna be an OEM looking setup, it's gonna be pretty much a race style setup. Because you have such a constraint between the bellhousing and the tonal of the car, then fitment of the exhaust is a challenge. That's why typically those setups, yeah, you can make them fit well, but the exhaust is gonna be through the hood.

That is not a sweet start.

And then you run into heat restraints and stuff in there too. We have everything right there in front of it up by the radiator. You know, on the C8 platform, it's nice that everything will be tucked in the back and we keep the radiators and everything up front. And even our door cove heat exchanger is still in front of all this system. And generally at speed too, you're pushing the airflow over it, so it's not coming over the turbo. The front mount stuff is always fun and I have a front mount car myself, but on these, it is nice having a rear mount set up on them.

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I personally like the E-Ray. Okay.

What makes it likable?

Well, number one, it's a first-of-all-wheel-drive car. And even in this kind of weather, you can actually launch the car and feel the power of the car.

You called for somebody to bring winter tires over by the way, right? We're going to go take it for a test run? Yes.

I'm telling you, it's been a game changer. I honestly think that that's one of the best car GMs ever done. And it'll prove that kind of combination, it's going to lead into other vehicles with great success. And the other side of it is like you get instant torque or instant horsepower in this case all the time. So there's a lot of instances, especially low RPM, low driving, that you will have more power coming from the front wheels than it is from the rear engine. And that changes the whole dynamic on the car. And like for instance, like I tend to drive them a lot in manual mode because it is faster just to not let it downshift and let both motors just pull you around the car or whatever you want to do with it instantly and makes a very enjoyable vehicle to drive.

So, I was going to ask that question because as soon as you, I saw your video of you guys supercharging one, I thought, okay, so you've got these two separate systems that work together. Once you add more power to the other system, do you have to do anything to the electrical system in order to get things to kind of jive? Now that you're pushing more from the back, does that affect anything up front or how does that work out?

Honestly, GM was very, very nice to actually leave that part totally independent. I mean, it is still the main, it's still the rear engine and the way the rear engine is reacting will influence what kind of work it's going to be requested from the engine, but for the most part, I'd say it's completely independent, allowing you to do pretty much whatever you want on the rear engine and then the front just does what it wants to do. It's not intrusive at all.

Okay. Well, that's different from what we've heard when it comes to, let's say, the Acura NSX. That's a pain in the butt, and it's such a low production car to where nobody really wants to attack it to take it to that next level. Then there's also the SF90, which is what the GM is going after. It's like that car, I don't know if you've ever seen any of the issues with the SF90, but it literally turns into a brick sometimes because the electric system is not talking to the engine or whatever.

But that will happen with any car. If you have such a failure on one of the systems, now if the electric side has an issue, the rear engine will still power you and take you wherever you want to go, which is one of the things we do when we put them on the two-wheel drive dyno. We just disable the front electric motor and basically what we do is remove power coming out of the battery and lets you run the system like normal. So you won't be constrained about any issues on the front side with the rear side. The whole purpose of the car is also not just race, it's to take you from point A to B. So if you don't have a fail-safe mode, that is actually going to leave you stranded in the middle of the... and it becomes not doing its main purpose. So honestly, I thank GM, the engineers, for developing such a system in such a way. They could have made it very difficult for us, if not impossible to actually have enjoyed such a car and such a platform for us to build on.

I hope Stellantis is listening.

Even as the e-ray is a bone stock car, it's very impressive. And once we get our hands on it, it really changes the whole game with it. But one instance that I came across earlier this year, Holly Ellis Fest East at Bowling Green, there was an e-ray down there that competed in the autocross section of it. And I think there is 100 odd cars in it. And I think he podiumed in a bone stock e-ray. It may have had tires on it. He's going against 50, 60, 70, $100,000 purpose built cars in an autocross category. And he podiumed. I don't know if it was a second or a third, but he was definitely up there with that car. And that's impressive for a bone stock car coming from a factory showroom.

What do those weigh? Are they above 4,000 or no?

No. Even the convertible is about 3,900 pounds.

Really?

The Coupe is about 3775, I think it is.

That's impressive.

It is not like... When you come think about it, it's like a GTR. A GTR is 3,800 pounds, but the GTR has double-overhead cam, dual clutch, four-wheel drive. So you're more or less on that same level. So every weight of the car actually has a purpose and a function and a benefit, not just the negative of being overweight. And this car just follows suit. Honestly, it is very nice. And it's even softer driving around than the regular C8. And you can put it in race mode and it becomes almost a CO6.

I remember watching, I think it was a video by Throttle House, and they were doing a review on the e-ray. And it's very rare for that channel not to have negative things to say. Like I remember within two minutes of them reviewing the McLaren, whatever their hybrid is, and they're like, it rattles. It just screws loose, like actual screws loose. How do you feel about the overall build quality of the current generation of the C8s? How does it compare to years past?

Well, it's certainly an improvement, and it also shows in the improvement on the price on the car. A lot of people have been wanting a much nicer interior, much creature comfort, and such as also increase the price of the car. So, yes, they have improved considerably, especially since I'd say the C6 in 2008, then they started making marginal improvements throughout the years, and the C8 has been a very big success in the interior-wise. I mean, it's still comparatively to a McLaren's considerably cheaper car, but you get all the creature comforts and nice touch finish. Like, for instance, all the interior parts on this car that you can touch are actual aluminum, including the button, like, not just fake aluminum, not just plastic that looks like aluminum, it's actual aluminum. And it makes a... That tactile feedback actually makes a difference when enjoying a vehicle of this price, caliber, and category, yes.

Well, they're coming down in price now, too, and then you guys dropped a video of a heads and cams set up for them or something like that. Well, is that correct on that?

Yeah, it's a heads cam package for these cars.

Okay, I wasn't sure if there's anything else in there, but yeah.

Which color?

Was it blue? Was it the blue one?

Yes, there were two blue ones. Was it the wide body one or the narrow body one?

I can't remember. It was about a month and a half ago. I watched the video.

Then it's a 427 car that we just dropped, yes.

Okay. Well, actually, no. Here's what happened. So one of my friends back home has a C6 heads cam sort of build, not C7, C6, C6, yeah, whatever. When I was talking to him about potential projects for down the line, I was looking at C8s and I'm like, all right, well, let's see who has a heads and cam set up. Because that's like, I like that. I like doing this podcast, we get to see everything from supercharged builds to turbo builds, and then there's something to be said about just an NA build. Then I found your guys' package and then I saw the 427 after that. So it's really cool, to say the least.

So the NA side is something that we went into after the supercharger side on the C8 platform. Just because the C8, we had a few more restraints on it, and on the calibration side, the dual clutch transmission, and part of it, and a big part of it is you can't go past 67 RPM and have it shift by itself. So that's why we engineered the 427 package and designed a cam specifically for it that keeps us below that number. Yeah, we could build a 427 and spin it to 7,500 RPM on the dyno, but if we can't shift that in the car or have it do it on its own, that's where the restraint there was. And I will be honest, we were a little bit behind a few other shops out there on the heads and cam package just for the cars on the C8 platform, and a big part of that was how we stand behind it on drivability. There was a lot of time, and Chris had plenty of hours into the car itself just to get one of them to drive happy and not be upset by a larger camshaft in there. And we started very early on the C6 cars, and we used to have huge camshafts in them, and our GT21 or GT19 camshaft is very known out there in the industry. And you go on YouTube and type in GT21, you have tons of videos of a car just sitting there and almost rocking itself to death because the cam is so big in it. And right now that would be a limitation on these cars just so we can get the roll out and everything on them to be happy and we're not running into any type of issue like that. We don't want a car that's going to buck yourself to death trying to pull out of a parking spot. It's just not something that we want to go down that path.

And as such, it also limits your power. Those larger, what they call larger camshafts literally have a penalty in the drivability. You just can't avoid it. So that's why we went for the 427 more than the heads and cam package only is just to be able to get more power but still keeping good manners on the vehicle. The main issues that we have or at least that I've seen is our customers tend to still want the factory drivability and the car that drives literally like stock. Once you start going past that and have a little bit of quarks, at least on the CA platform, they are not very happy. So we have to engineer the package to be as compliant for or compatible to our target base. That's always been a constraint in the big power NA stuff.

Well, no, you don't let me get past this heads and cam thing. You know, I got some questions here. So how do you feel about this GM and the single cam and that have been just literally the leg they've been standing on forever? I mean, you guys have the LT7 and the LT5 or dual overhead cam. Seems like everything else has gone that route. You know, worrying about this chop, those things like that, having to make those combinations. Do you wish that GM would adopt more of an overhead cam design or, and also, why do you think they haven't?

Do you wish you had more torque in your vehicles naturally aspirated?

I mean, I drive Coyotes, so they've got pretty good torque, but yeah, it's a...

You still have to wind them up. I mean, the Coyote and the LT6, LT7, for that matter, the motors that like to spin, the dual overhead cam motors, and you have now a much nicer power band. That's for sure, but that's on the full racing side. Now, this is where the single cam comes in, and the e-ray, which allows you to have like four... You have what, 400 horsepower at low rpms and low, without noise, without any kind of weighting on it, and you just get moved by. And as such, it changes the whole feel of the car. You can have a car that's lower on the quarter mile and still feel faster than a car that's actually faster on the quarter mile. And this was the same reason why GM discontinued the LT5. They had the LT4, they picked the LT4 on the same car, same pretty much everything. They told the GM engineers or the executive, the GM engineers put the executives in, they never told which engine was which. They just drove them and they all felt that the LT4 was faster than the LT5 when it was nowhere near close. There's a big change in, it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the feeling and driving enjoyment of the vehicle.

The C8 Z06, it's an awesome platform and I do like driving them personally. One thing where I always feel lackluster is obviously the low end of the cars. In reality, I can say for myself and probably most drivers, 95 percent of the time you're probably driving like Miss Daisy through traffic or you're just cruising down a back road. At that point, you like the low RPM, you like to lug it, but the dual overhead cam stuff, it's very cool for a track-based car or a very aggressive, spirited-based driver. I can say I just am not that, but I definitely see that side and yeah, I love an engine that revs. But once we go back to an older platform like LS7s, we'll spend 8,000, 8,500 out of it if we have to and still see that high RPM. And we can still do that on a mechanical lifter and not have a solid lifter or anything in it. So there's definitely limitations to it. If you put the right parts in there, you can still get the RPMs of a pushrod motor. But yeah, there's definitely that limitation RPM there.

There's also gonna be a trade-off. Once you put the airflow on the high RPM side, you're definitely gonna lose on the low end side. But I'll give you an example. A lot of, I've given test drives for CO6 owners all to the E-Rate, and the CO6 is faster on the quarter mile than the E-Rate. But everybody feels like, man, this is way faster, I'd like this more. Now, there's another component of the E-Rate versus the CO6, which they're kind of comparable because they're closing price. It's the fact that we can modify the E-Rate, but we can not modify the CO6. Now, if we were able to modify the CO6, maybe the story is different, and maybe the popularity of the car actually increases, and we'll see now how the ZR1 feels in that regard, which is a fully modified, pretty much what we cannot do on the aftermarket right now. With the power at 93 passing emissions, and that's going to be a very interesting platform to drive, and it's how it feels like as a low-end torque and as a driver in general.

Yeah. When he told me that number, I did not believe it at first, or I thought it had to have been on E85. That's not real life for the ZR1. That's impressive on pump gas.

It is, and passing emissions also, because the car has to pass emissions, at least for that tier, and it's insane with a warranty. So you're talking about, and they're actually speculating that the car, especially the coupe one, it's probably going to have more power than the convertible, so it's probably going to be more power than the 1,064 that they actually claim or state it. That being said, they have said that the coupe is going to be faster than the, just because of the ram air effect of the winglets like this one has about for going into the turbo, so they're speculating that the coupe is going to be faster than the convertible. So we're talking about 1,100 plus horsepower, which they did achieve at some point in testing, which they had to back down because the convertible was overheating. So it goes to show what the capabilities of the engine are. Now imagine with Race View and Crank It Up.

We know what those turbos are capable of too. That's a pretty large frame turbo on there.

Yeah. 76 is on there, I think.

76 or 74 is what they are, but the nice thing about them is they're probably 10 inches from the engine.

Yeah.

So the manifold design on it's pretty high tech.

Plus the cold side is literally just going into through two throttle bodies and the flow path is very short, so there should be very little lag on that car, even with those big turbos. I'm pretty sure that's the intention of all of it because the size of the tours that we're going into. Also, the special calibration that they put in to manage that turbo for minimal turbo lag. I mean, they really built a race car for the road. It's going to be insane when that car comes out.

Well, the ZR1 has always been a very big contender with a lot of stuff. Even as a Ford guy myself, those cars do impress me quite a bit.

Drove home the other day in two inches of snow and we passed one on the highway. It's a nice thing about being in Michigan and I'm not too far from the approving grounds myself. So as soon as that first intro in those cars or press release came out, I probably saw eight the same day of them just driving around here.

Really?

So I literally just passed one driving home the other day on the highway, just cruising to the snow and he's 10 and two inside. That's still pretty cool.

Actually, at one point we had what, 10 of them in the parking lot?

Yeah. So there.

That did happen too.

Really?

One of every color.

Came out here to this parking lot or?

Not this one.

Okay.

To one of our other facilities.

Okay. Gotcha.

So how does that work? Because you guys have been a big name in the GM space for a long, long time. How does that, your relationship with GM, is that you guys do a lot of trading back and forth, they help you with information. Have you guys ever done anything? Again, I don't follow GM as much, so I don't know this, but you guys ever done anything for the OEM, kind of like a Shelby type thing or a Selene, or has there been like a Lingenfelter edition or anything like that, that you guys have collabed with GM on?

We have collaborated extensively, a while back. We've done a couple projects since I've been here.

All right, Dan, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think your wife loves you?

Oh, it's got to be like an 8, solid 8.

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

Absolutely.

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

But not as much as I would like.

Yeah. It's nice to be in their pocket, right?

Definitely. No doubt about it.

Yeah.

Well, it seems like it's kind of like in Minnesota. Everybody knows everybody. It seems like everybody knows everybody around here.

No, that's definitely true. No, they do help. When we ask for help, but they do help. We had an issue with one with an e-ray actually, and they did pull through and helped us out. So thank you for that.

Okay. So I want to skip past this. So Z06, is there anything? What have you guys done for Z06? Is there anything done to Z06 for anybody out there right now?

We have a motor here. We're working on some avenues for it, but it's not going to be for specifically for in-car. It's more going to be for transplants. And that's sort of the direction we want to go into. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, we'll find out.

Why not mess with them? Are they just kind of volatile? So as soon as you start adding power, doing things they can't have issues with?

We can't calibrate them. So GM's locked us out, and there's just no getting in there.

We generally don't like to sell something that doesn't really add much of a benefit. So there's stuff that we can do to them, but without being able to go into the computer side, it really even limits you even more. And just for our customer base, we've done some exhaust systems and stuff of that nature on them, but there really isn't much for those cars at this time. Hopefully there will be, but I would say it's pretty safe to say that engine's pretty well ringed out for power, and it'd probably be asking the tall tale to ask it for much more. That'd be worthwhile, and once it comes down to ECM unlock cost and what you can actually get out of it for that, is it going to be worth it? We don't know yet, but it's definitely something, if the time does come, we'll definitely explore that avenue, but we're just patiently waiting right now.

Do you guys do a lot of suspension stuff too then? Like if you want something dialed in, track setups, things like that, will you do that kind of work too?

We have done it in the past. One of our biggest limitations being around here, where our facility is, we run into the issues of being able to test a car or test a car thoroughly, and for us to go to a track, it's a few hour trip for us. So we generally, we kind of stray away from that a little bit. We will still do it on some cars, but it's not like we're gonna car in here every day for a suspension setup. We'll do the casual lowering setups and the coil over setups on these cars. But being able to thoroughly test it and getting that feedback directly from the customers, the hard part, where our location's at. One of our other locations, a little bit easier, it's kind of away from the large towns and something like that. You could go out and really test a car, but being here and how close we are to the city kind of definitely limits us on that side of it, and we want to be safe and responsible on what we do. There's other people out there on the roadways, and some people often forget about that, so it's something that we want to take pride in. And the other side of it too is these aren't our cars. We don't really want to go out there and beat on someone's car, and we do have customers that tell us to, and sometimes we do need to know what a car does, a full throttle pull, but we have to be mindful of it and be professional about it. We get guys, we'll post a video here in this January right now, and we'll get a guy to ask us for a 60 to 130 run, and we say, pretty hard to do that right now, it's seven degrees out. We're on pretty summer tires, and anything under 100 right now, the car won't hook up. All the salt Michigan puts on our roads, and us having to dodge all the potholes too doesn't really help us in that aspect of it.

Well, we've noticed you guys have a very unique infrastructure layout on how roads go and stuff too. Sometimes there's weird turn backs and V's and roads crossing roads.

And if you miss one, goodbye 20 minutes.

Yeah, exactly.

That happened our last trip here. I think it was about 15, 20 minutes that took for us to turn around because I missed an exit.

Well, we were on some four-lane thing, and then all of a sudden it went down to two lanes like within no time at all. I'm like, what happened to our highway we were on? It was not fun.

I want to touch on this, right? Because the Z06 and the ZR1 are going to share some similarities, or many similarities. Is that a pretty accurate assessment? Do you think there's going to be any cheap ways to do like aftermarket ZR1 going down the line with the Z06, or is that just so far-fetched at this point?

The only way to more let's get close will be with an A-ray.

Okay.

Which has you have the same close, same wide body like brakes and similar stuff like that, and you can actually modify the rear eyes.

Okay. Got you. Makes sense. Then you guys collaborate with some, like for example, we had Nastrum High Performance on the show, what was it, four months ago now, three months ago, something like that. I always look to you for time details.

I don't even know what date is today, but yeah.

I think it's Thursday, I think. We'll find out. But nonetheless, you guys have some partners in the space as well then. Correct. What do those partnerships look like? How does that collaboration look? Then who leads the charge on what the aftermarket is looking for?

Well, we lead the charge in regards to our customers come to us with a problem, I would say, or a goal that they have, and we try to provide that to them in the most OEM way possible. That's why we have so much electronics to actually circumvent certain limitations that the vehicle has because we just can't control every single part of the vehicle, then you start replacing modules and to be able to control additional pumps, additional injectors, etc.

One part on that side too is everything that we try and do is, we really try and do all the engineering on our own stuff, our own in-house cars. We're not big on trying an engineering project on a customer's car and tying it up from someone for 7, 8 months, you know, something of that nature. So we try and pride ourselves on doing the work on our own cars and working with our partner companies like Nostrum. We have our stage 2, 7 injectors in that car right now from those guys and we'll be doing some work very closely with them in the next couple of weeks of pushing some pretty big boundaries on a DI based fuel car with our twin turbo car. Back in 2015 or probably 2016, we started on some injectors with those guys and we did a twin turbo deal in one of our shops and I think we made 15 maybe or so. We may have dabbled in 1,600 horsepower, DI only. It was on a race gas and E85 would limit you quite a bit there, but we were DI only on that project and the turbos were well, too small of a frame turbo on it and we ran 35, almost 40 pounds of boost through it and the last 10 pounds of boost really made no difference because we were so choked out by the turbo. But we do try and strive on that side of the engineering with our partner companies and keeping it in house so we can return that to a customer base that appreciates that.

One of the things that I managed to chat with another gentleman down at PRI that's of a similar size, maybe a larger size company that one after dinner we went to, and he mentioned something about how larger businesses in the automotive space kind of have to move slower or play by different rules. Can you guys kind of touch on that where somebody who's a mom and pop shop, you know, in the middle of nowhere, doesn't really have to worry about things like, you know, EPA fines or whatever, all these different things to worry about. Can you touch on what sort of rules you guys have to play by at this level? What does that look like?

Well, we try, most of our kits we sell out the door, like we try to have an EPA certified calibration, at least for the United States legal. And we have SEMA Garage here, close by, and then that's been one of our facilities where we try to test these vehicles, like the red towel that you guys saw last time at SEMA Garage. And that's a very important part. Like, we're trying to show that we're not, we're trying to do things the right way, and that's why, like, just like the manufacturer is limited by emissions, and what those standards are, like, we are actually considering ourselves that we're one of the biggest partners, or the biggest players in the aftermarket, especially for the GM side. They're going to be looking to us, or for us to continue that trend. And that's where we try to strive on.

We tend to hold ourselves to the same standard as the manufacturer. So, we just like to be on that side with them, and we just don't like to cut a corner or sacrifice something on these cars, and, you know, all these parts are on here for a reason.

Well, it's a good business model for a longer life, right?

Correct.

If you're messing around and not playing by the rules, you won't be around for very long.

That's basically what the... There will be a point where we're not going to be able to do the calibration, just like it's happening on the 24 Mustangs, I believe, and then you have to go through the OEM. But they may allow you, like Ford is doing, they may allow you to add your modifications, and they will help you out with the calibration, but the testing has to be done. The testing has to be paid by the aftermarket, and then you'll be able to have an aftermarket in that regard. But there may get to a point where we just won't be allowed to do anything, just like the iPhones. There was a jailbreak at one point, now there's not. Yeah. That sort of limits your enjoyment of the vehicle, maybe, but it's up to the manufacturers, and maybe the government to actually allow us to do this.

Yeah.

Yeah, we were talking with someone about that the other day, too, where it is potentially going to get more and more restrictive. How do you navigate those waters? I mean, when you see something that's coming down the pipeline, eventually there will be a C9, right? Hopefully, hopefully it's a step up. What's that going to look like? How are you guys preparing yourselves for a potential future where it gets harder and harder to modify?

Without challenge, you know?

Yes, but you're going to have to be looking into ways of making the ECU do what you want to externally. And that's going to be the only way. That was a big issue in the BMW world for a while. And it's going to get to that point. Actually, the aftermarket started that way. There were a lot of piggybacks. And that's how you tune the old back in the 80s too. And like there were not a plethora of knowledge about the calibration world that did get expanded upon as the years went by. And maybe we'll get back to that. That's going to be the only... Actually, that's how we started in the beginning with the CA. There was no solution to actually get into the ECM. We started with our own system and trying to control the timing on the vehicle and we're still constrained about certain situations where we cannot make the ECM play nice, especially for these supercharged vehicles. Like, we had a full package that worked. We went to the track with it even then, but the four-cylinder mode was a problem and we cannot shut the four-cylinder mode off. That was one of the things, if not the thing that prevented us from releasing that package to the aftermarket without calibration. We were hot and heavy for that and eventually we'll get to that.

So a supercharged engine doesn't like it when you shut half it off? No.

So what happened, correct, because like the number one thing that will happen is that it will increase the vacuum after the, before the rotors and after the throttle body, and then the supercharger wants to close the bypass valve. Now, if you put the solution could have been put the bypass valve on the post rotor, but then it created other sort of torque issues that we were having. So, it was like either you have one or you have the other, and both solutions were unacceptable. And it literally sounded like a canon marvels, like the motor wanted to disassemble itself. So, the solution that we have for the time being was, at least for our car, was drive it in manual mode, and won't go into four-cylinder mode. And we were exploring other avenues to force it into non-OSC-B and V8 mode, but it was still unreliable.

Yeah, and you need to make it easy for your end user, right? Because if you're like, all you gotta do is get in, flip this switch up and down three times, push this button, and then put the visor down, and you'll be fine. That doesn't work for them.

It won't work, and they're gonna complain, and they're not gonna be happy. And in the end, if the customer's not happy, then we're unsuccessful.

Well, again, it goes back to you guys being very different than a smaller shop that's just going to triangle run sevens or eights at the track, right? They know that what they're giving up, there is a compromise, right? No matter which way you cut it, at the end of the day, if you build a 1600 horsepower, 1800 horsepower car, there is compromise there. It's not gonna be as streetable by any means. And then, of course, then you lose the warranty, which I'm sure you guys have a pretty kick-a** warranty on stuff too, right? We do.

Most of our packages are two-year, 24,000 or three-year, 36,000 miles.

That's almost as good as some OEMs. It goes back to that too, right? I got 50,000 on my GTI, and you bet your a** I'm gonna get an extended warranty after the fact, just to say the least. I'm gonna start getting phone calls about that. We want to reach you about your extended warranty.

So you guys obviously work on a lot of vets. What are your ratio to other vehicles, Camaros, Tajos, things like that? And then how do you feel about them discontinuing the Camaro?

So the Tajo and the trucks is still a very large market for us. So in most of these instances where these guys have a C8 car or C7 or C6 or Camaro, most of them have a truck or a Tajo at home. We do supercharge quite a bit of trucks and Tajos. And our reasoning is, and even the guys that don't have these sports cars, they do still have a truck or a Tajo. And some of them may have sacrificed their Camaro, maybe their Mustang, a Challenger for a truck or Tajo. And they still want to have some oomph behind that pedal when they give it gas.

We know a guy like that.

So we do that side of the market as well. And we definitely strive. And I can say as of right now, we are the only platform or outfit that can modify and supercharge the 25-based pickup truck on the GM platform or SUV. We're the only ones out there on that market. And we work very closely with one of our partners with that. And it's definitely going to be a successful platform for those. The Camaro, discontinuing, Chris had one himself. He loved that platform. He likes that car. I don't know if it was just a marketing side on that car, but they definitely diminished in sales. And I believe GM saw that. It's hard for them to continue something that's diminishing on sales. They had this platform coming out. And to be honest, compared to other manufacturers, GM has a lot of cars in their categories. The other day, I was kind of dumbfounded when I realized Chrysler only has one car. It's the Pacifica. That's the only car, Chrysler.

They just killed off the 300 two years ago, one year ago, and they ran that nameplate into the ground. I mean, that's how they operate and run something for 20 years.

So with the Camaro being gone, do we know if it's going to be gone forever?

Probably not.

I don't know. I believe that we'll make a comeback, but only time will tell on that side of it. But the trucks and tows are a big side of it, and very early on on the LT platform, a lot of our engineering was done on a truck platform to prepare us for the C7. So that was another inside that we did for that platform was on the pickup trucks. So we're always, we're keen to that side of the market as well, and we're not going to shun those people out just because they had drive something with four-wheel drive.

Right.

Not only that, it's like the tacho on the truck platform is a much cleaner emissions tier standard, and if we are able to pass those, then it umbrellas the rest of the corvettes and everything. So it's a much harder thing to do, so if you get it done, then it's easier on...

A dirtier platform.

Yes, correct. Okay. Well, the C8 is a dirtier platform. The truck is not, and the truck is held to a much tighter standard, and that's also why the development starts typically on the trucks. Also, the trucks tend to have the first motor of the generation oftentimes, with the exception sometimes of the corvette in that regard, but I believe the new small blocks can show up first on the trucks before it does on the corvette.

Work out the bugs on that sort of deal? Okay.

Well, when I talked to Shelby America and when I was down there last year for SEMA, I think, or they had Gary Patterson at an event I was at and he was talking, and I think that 90% of what they do is trucks between their Shelby F-150s and all that stuff, so they don't really do as many cars and Mustangs as somebody might.

It is a much nicer platform. Like, you can fit seven people on the truck, and we'll use it every day. And right now, trucks, especially the SUVs, have very similar driving characteristics. They turn very, very well, even though they're that heavy. And once you put power into them, like, it makes for a very nice, enjoyable vehicle to do and run every day with the whole family.

I think I just heard the other day, GM beat out Ford this year for truck sales.

Oh, really?

So, generally, it's built Ford tough.

Yeah. The F-150 has held quite a ground there for a long, long time.

F-150 is sweating a little bit right now with all the GM trucks out there, but they do a very good job.

So, right, they're making up for it on the street.

Yeah, that's true.

The F-150 single cab, they call it the American GTR.

Yeah, they're very, very cool trucks.

It's impressive what they do.

It is.

So, now you see why there's much more space on the platform. It's easier to fit anything, and you're not constrained about a lot of things. You still have all wheel drive, the overhead cam, and those goodies and amenities you need to just launch to be able to launch anytime, any conditions.

And even if GM did have a regular cab short bed truck, there's no competing with those Coyote short bed trucks. It's not even going to be a competition.

Just to say.

It's tough.

You got an inside line on something?

No, but definitely if GM made one, our supercharged package on a truck runs 12.6, 12.7, at 110, 112 miles an hour. Like very capable vehicles. Now imagine being able to have that on a much lighter weight and then all the space in the world to do whatever you want. There's so much space on the trucks that there's no limitation really.

And those numbers are blower only too. That's slapping a blower on, calling it a day. We're not putting a supercharged cam in it and actually putting some nice rods and pistons in it and really going after a number. So those numbers there is just a simple bolt-on and a calibration deal. And it's very intuitive with the factory driving with it too. It's nothing that's a buck on you or you send your wife out to or go pick up the kids from Zeiger in it.

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This is a full weight street car and a suede lined roll cage in it, but it's heavy. We never took out the AC seats in it. So there's those creatures.

No, you're good.

That's fine.

Yeah. No, this, what's it called? This one's got like all the, it's a really nice roll cage in here. Like, yeah, it's cushy. Like you can really just keep hitting your head on it and you won't hurt yourself.

So yeah, I looked at the seats and they say Recaro on them, but they do not resemble a Recaro seat. They are very blush.

Yeah, very bougie. Yeah, so we just, we're just chatting a little bit about kind of like some of the different motor sports. Yeah, race series and all that. And I was asking if they would, if you guys would go to like grid life and such or, so what kind of like, who's your audience, right? Like, are you talking about, you know, somebody like me might start entering into that market where I can afford a car like this, right? But typically it's probably like, what, 30 plus is kind of like your demographic, 40 plus. Where is that demographic? Why?

How many pairs of New Balance shoes do you see? Is that included in your package? I was waiting for that. You probably heard that joke a thousand times.

Oh, yeah. I've seen plenty of those shoes in my days here. We generally carry a higher demographic and we could be in the 50s and above that point. And, you know, it's pretty synonymous with our name. But the C8 platform and these trucks and SUVs are bringing that age gap down. I'm seeing guys come in here in their late 20s and 30s doing stuff with us on these cars and on the truck side. We did stuff with the Chevy Colorado's.

I was going to say, it's all Colorado out there. What are you doing with that one?

Yeah, that one, that was one of our first engineering cars with the Magnuson for a supercharge package of those trucks. So we supercharged the V6s in the platform. The latest platform right now is a four-cylinder turbo deal, but the platform before, we're supercharging. We're seeing 400 horsepower out of a little V6, the blower on it, and it wakes those trucks up pretty good. Those trucks were pretty well-plagued with transmission issues and a transmission shutter, and a lot of it was a low-speed lugging, where it's lugging in the gear, going down the highway or pulling the trailer, and adding a supercharger really helps alleviate that, the issue. It doesn't make it go away. We can do some tuning on our side that helps it, but having that other, a little bit more displacement on top of the motor with the blower, we get a little torque down low, and the transmissions, they're not hunting for a gear going down the highway, and it helps those trucks pretty well. But going back to the age demographic, we get younger guys with those trucks come in, and we have guys with pickup trucks, 5.3s, 6.2s, and we're supercharging the 6.6-liter trucks nowadays. We have a client that's getting rid of all his diesel trucks because they're breaking down all the time, and we're supercharging his fleet of 6.6-liters, and we're getting good numbers out of those, and high torque numbers, and he's pulling 15, 17, 18,000-pound loads with them. There's always going to be a little inefficiency on torque side from it, being a gas motor, but he's plenty happy with how those trucks drive and how the maintenance is on them. He's going, I'm going 40,000 miles on this truck, and I've just changed oil on it. My diesel over here, I'm replacing the DPF filter, and I'm replacing this, and I've gone through four tanks of de-fluid in the last two months, and it adds up. So that's the nice thing on the gas side of it.

Yes, one of our development trucks that we had, had 190,000 miles with the supercharger on it. And that's the truck that we used to go pretty much anywhere, and we'll still get 20 plus miles to get on the highway.

And the three things we ever did to that thing maintenance-wise was a belt, a set of plugs, the plugs probably did like 120,000 miles. We recommend doing it sooner than that. Yeah. And we changed the AC compressor on it. The AC compressor failed at like 150,000 miles, and that was nothing related to us, but that was a very tried and true workhorse of one of our engineering vehicles. We go out and we drive the vehicles that we build on the engineering side and test them. That's a big thing that what we do, and we're not going to send someone out untested. You know, we may have done that in the past, and it's very, you know, uncommon for us to do that, but sometimes a customer does want something that's one of a kind, and we set out some ground rules with the customer, and they agree with it, and we'll do it. But 99% of the time, all the engineering and stuff is done in-house on our own vehicles, and, you know, we take pride in that.

What's the portion of your business? Because you guys make some parts and some specific stuff that you guys provide out to the scene. Is it you're doing more builds or selling more parts, or is there one that you prefer over the other, or?

It's time of year based. In the winter, we still get guys that come in here for builds for the winter months. We get those guys, they'll drop off their car, and at this time frame, or late December, they want it back in the month, and we get back to them before spring. We get the guys that bring it in, and beginning of March, and they want first day of spring, and in Michigan, we don't know when the first day of spring is. But we get cars from all over the country that come up here, but we do sell a lot of our businesses on the parts side. Cylinder head porting, camshafts, we specialize in our own line of electronic boxes, timing controllers, launch controllers, two steps, nitrous controllers. We do specialize in that side of the business as well. Almost everything we would sell there would be LS based. Our nitrous controllers, you can throw on anything really, and not have any issues with it. We get plenty of drag racers that love our nitrous controllers, and some of those are the thousand cubic inch guys running one of those. And they love it, but a big portion of our business is part sales. And another thing that we do very well and we take pride in is our technical side. We sell you these parts and we will help you on the technical side. We're never going to leave you high and dry with one of our parts that we sell you. And we like to have that for the customer, and we provide instructions on all the parts that we use and sell. And we don't like selling something to someone and just telling them, figure it out. Good luck.

Yeah.

That's the worst thing you could do in this business or in any business. The faith that your customer base would have on you, if you just tell them to figure it out on their own, they're not going to come back to you. So that's why we take the time, we do the extra steps, and in our eyes, we do it right.

Do you guys offer remote tuning too?

Very select partners.

Yeah, that makes sense.

We have a dealer network, and depending on the package that we actually sell, we do, otherwise, no.

Okay. But if I bought, let's say I bought a heads and cams kit from you, could I get that separate, I put it on, would I be able to get tunes?

No.

We can work something out, we definitely do, but it's going to be, if the package is fully 100% yours, what we sell, yes, we can sell you an outdoor calibration for sure, yes.

You specifically would be yes.

You be good.

But the hard side on that, and I'm sure a lot of guys that do remote tuning will agree, you don't know what someone's putting on the car. Yeah. In a lot of instances, they'll slip something in and you're not slipping anything past him. He'll know pretty quickly if you're slipping something in. Another thing we do here, we don't tune any cars that we don't build in-house. We've had too many instances where a car comes in and, oh, it's ready for dyno. In reality, it needs eight more hours with the work done to it before it can even ever see the dyno. We had an instance where we straight away, and we brought in a car, we felt for a guy, and his harmonic balancer blew up on the dyno. He tried blaming us. I'm like, well, the car never made it past 3,000 RPM, and the balancer came apart. We never touched this. So it's definitely something that we stay out of and stay away from for instances like that. It's stuff that you can't control because you don't know who torqued the bolt on it and who actually did it.

We had a customer once that we did like a heads cam supercharged package on our truck, and after almost a month going back and forth, it turned out that they had connected the wideband O2 sensor into the fuel pump fuse, and that was causing a lot of issues with the fuel pressure, some stuff that I just couldn't figure out because it was like everything is correct, and we still got blamed for it.

Yeah, if you're not physically there.

So in the end, after so much work, so much trying to diagnose, investigate, and then I'll be ended up not being our issue, and we still got blamed for it. So is it worth it?

No.

Depends on who and where you're at in your shop's life too. One of the things that comes to mind, so for example, the Audi R8 launched with Ironman in 2007, 2008, whatever it was, and now the people that are my age, maybe a little bit older, are now able to afford those cars. So how does that look like for when you guys are trying to build a customer base or a demographic? Are some people that are, again, 25 to 30 years old looking at C6s or C7s are dirt cheap now, compared to what they used to? Well, it may not be dirt cheap.

C7s are still holding value pretty well.

Yeah, but let's say a Stingray, it's a lot more affordable to somebody who's a couple of years out of college or whatever, they can afford that sort of car. Are you guys still doing a ton of development for those platforms or is that kind of like you already have your offering set in place?

No, we're still definitely doing development on those cars and we don't stray away from them. The C5 is generally a different story and C4 is a whole other story because you just can't get a part for a C4 Corvette. Yeah. We offer a few parts on our website for C4s and one of them is an intake fuel pumps for the ZR1s and on the C4 ZR1s, the LT5 engine back then, dual red cam, very big engineering project for that car. But the fuel pump baskets, they deteriorate in the car. So those things, if you have a better chance of winning the lottery today and finding one of those fuel pump baskets for C4 ZR1, they're just impossible to find.

But that is happening on the C5 and the C6. Like now it could be planned obsolescence if you want, but it is happening. Like one of the things you cannot, for instance, on a C5, you cannot find is your hazard switch. And the hazard switch actually controls your blinkers. So it's not just a relay or a simple thing. It actually is useful for a lot of subsystems in the lighting part. And if that goes away, you're out of luck. If you buy an aftermarket one, it will last you two weeks. You're gonna be forced to look for one that it's used. Same goes for the steering wheel position sensors. They're not made anymore. And depending on the years, or 97, 98, the ABS, there's a lot of things that make that a challenge. And if you start modifying a car without those systems, what else are you gonna find out once you start dealing with the car? And then you're the last person to touch the car. It's your responsibility. And then it becomes the, well, my car didn't do that when I brought it to you, or ever since you touched my car.

It's a can of worms there.

Yeah.

So that is happening on the C5 and starting to happen on the C6 market. That doesn't mean that the C6 is a platform or by any means, there's plenty of business there, but it certainly is, it's dwindled and when the car used to be new. And also like we found out is like if you're a first owner or if it's actually a high profile car that attracts a certain budget, then yeah, we do see those customers. Otherwise, they tend to do them by themselves, try to tune in themselves and that changes the dynamics or demographics of the people that we see.

So I wanted to ask you this because obviously there's a lot of Lingenfelter talk here. What is the kind of... Do you guys do a lot of track days on the side? Are you guys like road course drag racing? I know you're drag racing, it seems, right? Am I right in that one would be? Yeah. And then how about yourself then? Do you do any... Do you have any personal... I think you said you had a Camaro earlier. Was it ZL1 or SS or what was it?

I had an SS. I have a C5, so the half-mile event is what I'm interested in because it's the closest thing to a street race in a safe environment. And I find that to be kind of accelerating.

Okay. So you're going to be pursuing that kind of going forward a little bit? So what does that look like then? So are you going to do it with the C5 then? Or so is that more like a...

C5 or whichever, whoever actually comes along that wants to come for the ride.

Got you. Oh, so you wouldn't be, would you personally be racing in that aspect as well? Okay, gotcha. So in which car would you be building your personal car for those events as well?

Correct.

So then in that case, would it be the C5 that you're going to build for that? Is that going to be like some crazy like twin turbo setup?

No, actually it's an NA build. It's an 8 liter 492 cubic inch build on it with an 8-speed automatic on it.

Oh, okay. Is that like a more modern 8-speed?

Yes, it's from a C7.

Got you. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying.

Yes.

Okay. I'm smelling what you're stepping in. All right.

Sometimes in half mile a lot of it is more to do with gearing and all that than it is with power.

So those cars, it's a CO6, so they came with a manual. I used to have a four-speed automatic. It really improves the race aspect, especially for that kind of racing, but you're still limited by... You can only go to third gear, which is a one-to-one, and you need some extra gears.

And then you, I believe you have the... Was it a Catfish Camaro?

Yep. It's a 98. It's a Mystic Teal Metallic is the color on it. I believe it was the second rarest option in 98 for that color.

Write that color down. We'll have a conversation later about that.

I bought that car senior year of high school.

Okay.

Maybe summer going up to senior year. I've had it ever since and it's seen several different revisions. It started out as a NA 6-liter car and got a turbo system not too long after that. From there, I ran the first turbo system or when I built the first turbo system, went down to Detroit, found a junkyard 6-liter. I think I paid $175 for it as a short block. It was painted Ford blue of all colors. I left it, put it in there, did a 76, 75 turbo on it. I think when we dynoed it here, it made maybe 700 wheel. I thought it was big stuff back then running that. From there, I ran out of a turbo frame size and took out the bearings on it. It was early Turbonetics Turbo, moved on to a Chinese based turbo, went to a VS Racing 80 millimeter. Probably ran up into the 850 wheel category, maybe 900. It was probably a good day. Car probably trapped 150 and maybe 145 on that power set up. A couple of years ago, I went a little bit more race car with it, took out the GM factory computer, and went to a Holley Dominator on-board air. It's 4L80, has a cage in it, but it's not a surded 850 cage or anything. It's just a roll bar really at this point. Today, the car is on an 88 103, a built six liter Dominator, 4L80, and a nine inch in it. Depending on the boost, a nice thing with the Dominator, I can change the boost, but right now, it dabbles between the 1000 wheel and I think the highest I saw on the dyno was 1170, 1180. I had a boost cut on that around 25 pounds and kind of shut it down a little bit early. But on the street, I've been high threes in 61 30s and 100, 150 it's been mid threes. So I consider that to be pretty good and a lot of people will probably hate on me for those numbers, but for being a street car, full interior, it's 3650 without me in it. It's a car that has overdrive. I'll drive it an hour down the highway to Woodward Dream Cruise, sit in traffic for two hours and drive home. It won't overheat. I can still drive it. I wish I still had AC in it, but that doesn't happen. It's just a simplistic car that works. I still got factory front struts, brakes, shocks on it, and it has coilovers in the rear now, but going down the highway, if I lay into it pretty good, it looks like it's trying to do a wheelie down the highway, but it's that weight transfer that I'm relying on for the back end of it to transfer that weight and plant those tires to the ground. But nowadays, it was fun racing, but maybe I've grown up a little bit and it tends to be a little bit harder to find a race these days when you have a parachute hanging off the back of your car. Well, I got to see that and kind of stray away, but that's what really got me into it.

I don't.

I think this summer, I did a poll next to him and he texts me right after and he goes, Holy s***, I think you just did a wheelie almost. Looks like your tires are trying to come off the ground on the highway. I just wanted to transfer, I want that. But the thing that I struggle nowadays is, it's in that range between 1,000, 1,200 wheel, depending on boost settings on the street. Once I really start going past that, I start running into the reliability issues. I'm at a point now where the 1650 injectors that are in it, they're starting to get maxed out and starting to have issues there on pump gas or E85. And I just want something I can hop in and I still use the factory key, starts the car up, I have all my lights, my radio, all the speakers.

He's growing up.

Yeah, I just want a car I can drive, you know. It really kills me when someone says they have a street car but there's no radio in it. As much as we love how the cars sound, I have to have a radio in a street car. I just, for the minimal amount of weight that it does honestly add, with me still having the amp and sub in the car, it adds a little more weight, but I just like to be able to go out on the highway and cruise the radio and be able to talk to someone.

Yeah, listen to the Minnoxide podcast.

I get it.

Without a doubt. There's a few things that, you know, I was willing to give up AC for a big, you know, front mount, 88 mil turbo, but the radio and the other stuff is something that I couldn't give up.

I didn't give up the AC.

I wouldn't either.

Neither the wipers. It's got to have AC and wipers.

Yeah. I still have wipers. They aren't really worth much.

Well, because when are you going to use them?

Yeah, I'm on... They're going to slick. Yeah, I'm on, what is it, ET Pro R radio. And I did get caught in the rain not too long ago. And it was like a 35 mile per hour drive home for about 45 minutes.

Yeah, I've done those.

My wiper still worked, but it wasn't the funnest of drives.

It's kind of crazy the little amount of rain it takes to...

Oh, yeah.

I spun a Fox body around about three or four times on a road. I'm lucky there was nobody coming to the other lane. It was just barely sprinkling out. Brand new road though, it was really nice and flat. And it was kind of, I'm sure it was just puddling up just a little bit. And I felt it go like this and I went, uh-oh, and then it just went.

Yep, right around that.

Is there in this GM world, what do you think the platform is best bang for the buck?

Man, C5 to be frank. You can get C5, C06, you can get those for low 20s. And you still have about 3,000 pound V8 LS with perfect 50-50 distribution. Can't get away from that. I can't get away from that even with stock brakes, brakes very well, corners extremely well. You can take it to the road course and have fun with it and not spend that much money after racing it. Just because parts are cheap for brakes, tires and all that stuff is still relatively cheap compared to the new ones.

The C6, the 06 was a big platform too.

That one's calling my name for some reason.

Before COVID, they were a lot easier on the wallet. Post-COVID.

We all remember those days, yes.

Yeah.

There was the before Craigslist and Internet days where you could see one on the side of the road or you had to find one in a barn or something and things were super cheap. And then there was after COVID. We've had these things skyrocketed.

Before COVID, I think there was a C6Z. I don't remember the color. I think it was just a black car. And it was a fairly higher mileage. It was 40, 50,000. I think I could have scored that car for 25 grand. Oh, wow. Is where it was. I was like, yeah, it's not too bad, but I really don't need it, you know, type deal. Even nowadays, that car is probably still in the middle or high thirties. And I just saw one the other day. It was still 50 or 55 for C6Z.

Yeah, the prices are kind of crazy on those.

Yeah, the C6ZR1 is 80 to 110.

Yeah, for a nice one, yeah.

They're back to basically stock level pricing, even though they're used. And if you find one, like I think I saw one with, I don't know, it was like 100 some miles, it was 150 grand. Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure it sold.

C7ZR1s too, that's...

That's another, yes.

Oh, those are even more ridiculous.

One just sold the other day for $270,000 and bring a trailer. $270,000 for a manual C7ZR1. 143,000 MSRP cars, what that was, or in that range, but almost $300,000 that car is right now.

I wonder what the new ZR1 is going to fetch once the dealer gets their markup.

Hopefully, that doesn't get too crazy to have a markup, but at the end of the day, it's still a bargain. I mean, you can get two of those for the price of a GTD burn.

Yeah. There's some numbers floating around out there for a couple of these cars. I'll probably butcher the name, but the Nuremberg ring for a C8 CR1 that-

Oh, are they out there testing, allegedly?

They've been out there. Now, there's definitely speculations of that, and there is numbers floating around, and if some people knew what that number was, they'd be very, very surprised.

So, to a Ford fan, would it be upsetting?

It'd be very upsetting. It'd be heartbreaking. Pretty bad.

I don't know how much more I want to push on camera. Yeah, we're going to interrogate them after, right? We're going to get the...

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, just waterboard them or something. Okay. So, here's one of the things. You guys are living in one of the, honestly, the motorsports capital of the world. Motorsports, I guess, automotive capitals of the world, right? Like Detroit was the richest city in the world at one point because of everything that Ford, GM, everything has done. I mean, I'm sure, is this just like a job to you guys, or do you guys get to really enjoy everything that, you know, someone like me and Dan, who are just enthusiasts, are you guys able to really enjoy that aspect of it as well? Do you still feel like car enthusiasts working for a corporation?

Yeah, I can definitely say I'm still very much of a car enthusiast, but anyone can tell you a job's a job. You know, we come here to work, you know, and, you know, we make friends in the process, but it is still, it is still a job. You know, everyone, you know, everyone, no matter what you do, it's still a job. Yeah. And there's no arguing that. Even what you guys do, I'm sure you love it, but, you know, sometimes-

I put my head through the wall some days.

You guys may still want to be at home right now rather than talking to us too, but, you know, it's still-

Damn it, he heard me in the bathroom.

It's still a very fun time and, you know, we do very much enjoy it and we appreciate what we're able to do and the rarity of what we do is very rare for the market or the- Do you agree?

Me, as long as I'm in the dyno, I'm enjoying myself.

Yeah, for sure.

Do you guys get to wrench on your own cars here? Do you bring them in here and do any of that stuff?

Sometimes.

If you need to.

Yeah.

Okay. Nice access as well, for sure.

And there's a lot of knowledge that we have that definitely helps us on our own personal cars. So, definitely helps out.

That's one thing we've noticed when we talked to some of the OEM guys. They're like, oh, dude, work is so hard. When we go outside of work to go make these 1200 horsepower cars or whatever, that's easy. That's cake work. Like, it's just so funny how they just talk about it. It's like, yeah, it's whatever. So we have to worry about emissions.

I had a conversation not too long ago this summer with a buddy that tests OEM based cars. And they're out there testing to break them is what they're doing. We're out there to test them to make sure they drive correctly and not break them. So they have the aspect of where they want to do what we do and we sometime have the aspect of we want to do what they do. And we got through the conversation where both of us were like, yeah, it's still Monday through Friday type of deal, nine to five, eight to five, sometimes past that. But we both ended the conversation and said, well, we do still need to pinch ourselves and tell us where we are, understand what we're doing that, you know, a lot of people don't have the privilege or they're not able to do. And that really kind of put me and this guy back into reality at some point. We're definitely grateful for what we do.

Well, it's a different ball game, right? Like when I was graduating college, like what were my options for the big companies back home? You got Target, you got 3M. 3M does some cool stuff, but I'm not an engineer by any means. So like that job is meh. So it's like, here you guys go to college to go to GM, or to go to Ford or whatever. It's different. Maybe you spend 10 years working on a single button or whatever from what it sounds like, doing always the coolest glamorous stuff, but you still get to be more surrounded by that rather than tape.

Adhesive.

Adhesive. You can't walk six feet without being around a 3M product.

I know I've told this story before on the podcast, but when I was out here, I came out here a long time ago with my Mustang, and I took it to the Flat Rock plant. And in the parking lot, they got a big Mustang billboard and all this stuff, and I'm taking pictures of my car and all this stuff, and some guy comes out to his car and he's like, he's like, can I help you? And I was like, no, man, you probably see this all the time. People come to your house and he's like, no, not at all. He goes, we live here, nobody gives a s***. Then he got in his car and he yelled out the window. He's like, have fun, man. We built it like a s*** brick house. And then he left.

It's like, well, I was talking about earlier, the other day, I left here on a Tuesday. I saw a C8 ZR1 driving down the highway in, you know, inch, two inches of snow. And it's just me driving home at this point. I was driving home thinking, what's for dinner? You know, I'm calling the fiance. Like, what are we doing for dinner? Oh, yep, there goes the ZR1. Yep, just right by me. And other people will be freaking out seeing it. You know, there's so many reporters out there that would kill to have that five, 10, 15 seconds of me passing that car and have that video.

Yeah.

Now, I'm just trying to get home. So it's definitely a different atmosphere living by Detroit and having, you know, the big three here by us and seeing it and the GM Proving Grounds is definitely, you know, a very cool place and it's right down the street from us. We would really like a passcode or an entry key there. Anyone is listening for that. We would not mind that, so please reach out to us. But that would be very cool. But at one point, I think early 2012 or maybe 2010, I think GM did an opening of the proving grounds for the Hot Rod Power Tour. The Hot Rod Power Tour is a show that we generally attend every year. We will be attending this year. And it's a big car cruise. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's somewhere to the tune of 3,000 to 5,000 cars that go on this cruise. And it's quite the feat. Sometimes, you get stuck at a stoplight for an hour because you're waiting for 300 cars in front of you to go through it, which does suck, but it's definitely a very cool thing. But one year, years ago, they opened up the proving grounds and they allowed those cars to drive on a portion of one of the tracks. I'm sure they had everything tucked away and hidden. But it would have been a cool deal to go on and see actually what's on that track. I know that place is a no-fly zone, but we can still look at Google Maps and see what's in there. But yeah, it's definitely a no-fly zone around here for aircraft.

That's cool.

So what's next for you guys, either as individuals or as overall as Lingenfelter? What's next?

We need to keep improving the C8 platform. And then get into different options for getting power out of them. Refine them and just put them out there. Honestly, it's that simple.

There's so much to learn on these cars. And anyone that tells you they know everything about the C8 platform, they're straight up lying to you. Every day we learn new stuff on these cars. And we're always open to learn. We'll never close the door on learning. And that's part of an engineering background. You want to learn and there's hurdles we got to get past and get through. And it's a challenge to us. And we don't mind that.

So when it comes to like, how long ago were the ECUs unlocked on the Stingrays? 22. So then, is that like a hurry up and wait game? Or how involved are you guys on that front?

No, actually late 21.

Yes, late 21.

Okay. So is that like a whole, are you guys like hurry up and wait for somebody else to do it?

Yeah, but do you crack it or do you wait for?

We do certain things, but sometimes with the amount of work that we have here, it's just like, we have funds for that.

Okay.

Tri-Fecta being one of them.

Yeah.

Okay.

They are actually at the forefront, especially on the C8 and they're the ones that came up with it first, and luckily, we were part of that team.

That Tri-Fecta group, they're a very good group, and when we say knowledgeable, it's a very knowledgeable group, and they know how to get through the inner workings of the computer, and Christian's hand in hand with their team, and he's very involved, and there's a lot of stuff that we can do, and we're fixing to start to showcase what we can do on this platform, where no one else can do, and what we talked about earlier, being with Tri-Fecta on the 25 model year SUVs and pickup trucks, we're the only ones in that market. Tri-Fecta Unlock is the only one to get into that ECU. There's no one else as of this moment that we can say can get into that system and modify it directly through the factory ECM. Someone could probably try and do a piggyback at some point, but it's not going to be happy with it, and it's not going to drive great or even well.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we take pride in who we work with, and the Tri-Fecta team is definitely one of those groups or outfits that we like working with.

I have to specify that we're in the middle of January 2025, because the last time we dropped an episode a few weeks after, somebody's entire game plan changed. So, I just want to specify that in this moment in time.

This moment.

Well, sometimes it will be like world's fastest, and then by the time the episode goes, somebody went a little faster.

That's happened too.

Yeah.

Today is Thursday, by the way, earlier, when we're talking about the day we met, you know.

No, I knew, I just want to see if Dan knows.

January 25th.

Yeah.

Well, when we talk about partners, how did you guys land on Magnuson? Is that, was that just a mutual business agreement, or did you guys test some other chargers? I mean, they're all pretty great, but like, how did that relationship come to play?

We've always been very close with Magnuson. The C8 platform brought us even closer, where we engineered it directly with them, and we've engineered many systems directly with them. It's just been a good partnership, and we haven't had any, you know, take backs on it. You know, we know their products work, and a big thing back in the day is the reliability of their systems. Their systems worked, they had no issues, and we had no reason to stray away from that. You know, and a big thing about us is reliability, and a lot of their packaging, even in the early days, when we did some of their, was it the MP112s? Is that what they?

Oh, yes, we run a lot of work with those.

We did plenty of those back in the day, but the packaging and stuff just worked. They hold themselves to a high standard, and we hold ourselves to the same. We don't want to sacrifice on a quality. They use the E and base rotor packs and all their other units, and they really do engineer it. And part of their engineering is they have a blower stand here in house with us, and they're testing superchargers. And you want to talk about the highest, loudest, screech noise is a supercharger that's not running through the engine. They run a stand here that does not cram the air through the engine. It just comes out through a 7-inch or 8-inch exhaust stack that goes out to a 15-foot tall muffler on our roof here, and before it hits that muffler in that dyno cell, it has to be one of the loudest things imaginable. They took that stand from here last year. Last year, the year before, it's LS Fest and they ran it in the public, and after about two times running it, I think they were damn close to getting death threats of starting that thing again. It was so ear-piercingly loud that people that were parked next to them would go and move to the other side of the parking lot or the field at LS Fest because it was that loud. You'll have to Google it or on YouTube, there's videos of it, and they actually put a car dealership, where they put that little floaty guy on the blow-up. They put that on it and force-fed that with the blower to make that guy stand up. Still crazy loud and terrible. But yeah, with those guys, they're in house with us and they test here with us. Like we said, they hold themself to a standard that we do too. And it's a big part of our partnerships that we work with. And a lot of these guys, sometimes this industry can be cutthroat and some guys are on each other, and who we work with is not part of that group. We generally stand behind each other and work with each other very well and very efficiently, I'd say.

I bet LS Fest is a pretty big event for you guys, huh?

Without a doubt.

Yeah. We've never been. I've heard, even as a Ford guy, I think I'd like to go check it out. I've heard it's quite an event.

It's even expanded at the Bowling Green Park, where I believe they do a Ford event down there now.

Yeah, there's a Holley Ford Fest.

And there's the Holley Mo Party. There's a Mo Party, too.

Oh, is there really?

It'll take some time. LS Fest has been going for a while.

Right.

But something on the Ford side, I'm sure will come around as well. But yeah, they did that. I'm pretty sure it's called the Holley Mo Party. It's all Dodge based products. And even I think that one popped off pretty well last year.

But they probably had like a built-in like intersection, you know?

Yeah. Bowling Green gets pretty wild down there. And a lot of times one of our sponsored drifters, Dirk Stratton, takes his C6 Z06 with one of our 454 Eliminator spec motors down there. He generally does, damn there, wins it a lot of times. He goes down there or he's top three or top two or he wins it. And he goes down there to the drift battles. And that's a fun event. And when we talked about the e-ray earlier, the stock e-ray, it was down at Holley LS Fest where a stock e-ray competed in the autocross category and he was again podium finished. Maybe it was fourth, which isn't podium, really.

Podium-ish.

If you eat first, you're last, but still I give that guy props on what he did and it's very cool. Someone go buy a car and push it to, I'm sure he took out a few cones with it, but some people, you know, they're not afraid.

So you actually, we'll start wrapping up here shortly, but you just raised a really good point there because everybody who has an Instagram account, all of a sudden thinks they need to get sponsored by someone. I'm sure, especially now that you're being on the marketing side of things, do you just get a flood of e-mails of just people asking, give me free parts and you'll get this, this or maybe not even this. Give me a discount code. What is, obviously you sponsor a driver in the drifting side of things. How do you attain that level of a partnership where it's not just, give me money, give me parts, but what does that look like on your guys' end?

So, one, Dirk Stratton, they have a dealership down there. They do sell our parts, they do install the supercharger systems and stuff for us now on the CA platform. But even before that, he was one of those stand up guys that we wanted to be around and he represents us very well. And I get flooded daily of people asking for sponsorships or, hey, I have this car, something BMW, we throw a random LS in it. It's not a 53, it's a 48 of all things. And they may have one of our parts on there that may be $100 and they're asking for a sponsorship. And something these days, a lot of people just look for handouts. And we don't want to be about that. We want people that work with us. Some of our sponsor cars, we do engineering based products with them. One of them was one of the cars in the Optima series, Mike Revere. We tried new stuff with this car and sometime it's a give and take battle, where we try something that doesn't work and we hit the drawing board again from there. So we try and comb through sponsorship, contracts and everything to what works best with us and with the customer. And we want a return from a customer, not on a cash value side, but if it comes down to even engineering a part or testing a part. Sometimes some of the testing that we have to do, we put in the most extreme conditions and that's the racing scene and the racing world. As much as we would want to put in one of our cars and go see a 8,000 RPM limiter all the way home on our 30-minute drive, we can't do that. So a lot of times we ask our sponsors to do that or we build them engines that will allow them to do that and showcase what we do.

I'm also a boat enthusiast, so there's a lot of GM engines and boats out there, a lot of them. Do you guys ever mess around any marine applications?

We had a really big contract at one time with a GM supplier. We did some engine stuff with them, but mainly cylinder head based. We did all the cylinder heads for the Seven Marine Group. Those are LS based, LSAs and outboards that were stood upright. Those are a very cool deal. If you never heard of Seven Marine, definitely look it up. But that company ended up getting bought out by Volvo, or Volvo Pantera. And they came out with a V10 or V12 outboard. And they essentially, what I've read into, and I may be incorrect, but they bought Seven Marine to kill that company. So it wouldn't compete with the V10 or V12 outboard that Volvo did. And it sucks because those are very cool applications. And if you ever see one or never heard of Seven Marine, that is definitely a cool thing to look up and see those outboard engines. The boat side is a bit different. We have dabbled in it in a few other conditions or applications. Something people don't understand is the boat world, they're held to a higher standard in most instances for balance, rotation, weight, all that stuff, because you're running 3, 4, 5, 6,000 rpm constantly with little resistance and you're just cruising at that speed. So that's a big part of the marine industry.

Didn't we do a pontoon boat with two 1,100 horsepower motors?

We did do that. That was an interesting deal. They had two 427s with 2650 superchargers on it that were on the back of a pontoon. There's always someone out there that wants something. We try and cater to it. Some of the boat applications are pretty hard to get into or figure out just because it's a whole different world. It's a whole different market. John Lingenfelter back in the day, they did some big block stuff. A lot of that big block stuff was marine applications. That was a big part of the business in the early 90s, late 90s with John Lingenfelter. So the marine side is definitely a big business. There's a lot of people out there with boats and the guys with the boats, they tend to spend quite a bit of money on them. They want to take care of them. A boat is almost like a plane or a helicopter where they have time cycles and they stick to those cycles. You know, some people with cars, they'll overdo an oil change by 3, 4, 5, 10,000 miles. And the marine guys, they're a lot more persistent on staying on top of that stuff because they don't want to be stranded 10 miles out in the middle of nowhere with a boat.

Oh, we know about that. We've been stranded before.

Yeah.

Brand new boat, his battery went out or whatever. You remember the story.

Alternator went out.

Alternator, whatever. We were stranded. I don't care what went out.

Well, when your alternator goes out, I guess your battery eventually goes out.

Yeah.

So you were not wrong.

It's okay. It was all warrantied. All right. So last question on my end. How difficult is it to be compliant? Do you guys have to, it's a long question, but does it make development harder?

Yes. I mean, especially longer and way more expensive. Like you may think you're done, oh, the car drives great and everything, send it to the lab, does not pass.

The lab being SEMA?

Yes. And does not pass by a long shot. And we had, it took us a couple of tries. And we finally figured out what the issue is and what the test is actually trying to achieve, and what the computer is actually being programmed to achieve from the factory. And then we can replicate that. But that took a while. And no easy feat, to be frank.

What are some of the tests or things that they are looking for? Try to make sure you stay out of trouble over there. Is it like the emissions, like, you know, bags and all that stuff over there or?

Tailpipe emissions probably.

Yes. One of the hardest ones to achieve is the particular matter. And also the cold start. So, actually, the whole plethora of tests is just the next way impossible. So, for instance, one of the things that we need to do right now is figure out a way when we finish the turbo kit to actually get that passed. And one of the main takeaways is the cat warm-up routine. Luckily, the way the turbo that we are using or the packaging that we're using is post-cat. So, that warm-up is not going to be much of a concern. But on the turbos like the OEM that they use before the cats, that is a problem. And it's going to get quite a few people stuck. Because the way that the turbos normally operate does not benefit the cats. And the cats need to warm up very quickly. Otherwise, like, you just increase your NOx and you're just going to fail the test, no matter what you do.

One of the big part of the test was all the readiness monitors and all the stuff for startups that some people don't ever think about or worry about. That's a big part of those tests, you know, is readiness monitors.

Yes, because they are very hard to test. It's just a very specific way to do it. And if you literally missed by a second, it won't set. And you have certain situations where you could take a pull of a lot of drive cycles to actually figure out.

Okay. What's a readiness monitor?

So the computer goes through a list of checklists to actually make sure that the cats are working, the EVAP system, which is the hardest one to pass, is working. The EGR system, which is the cam facing part, is working. And the main response O2 sensors and post catalyst O2 sensors are working. So they go through all those tests and then make sure that they, through a very specific parameters that the EPA has rules about, that they actually pass those and get marked as complete. And like the EVAP test, it's one of those tests where it could take a very long time. Luckily, we learned how to set that one, and it's been to the point where at least with our truck, we got them to pass, we show, we actually helped them pass the test when they were doing the testing, and then they didn't want to deal with it anymore. What do you guys do?

Well, do they randomly pull one, two after, so you get all of your stuff dialed in, you get tested, everything's cool. Are you now had the green light to just go ahead, or do they still pull you randomly in and make you test, even though you've got something that's compliant?

Actually, no, we haven't had that. They could, and it's one of the things that they may decide to do, but we haven't had that situation happen to us yet.

Okay.

What about like when it's like, how quickly do the cats have to warm up? Or what's that whole threshold look like?

It's got to be about 15, 20 seconds. No more than that.

It has to get to a certain temperature?

Yes.

Okay.

Otherwise, the cats are going to be completely ineffective.

Okay. What does ineffective look like?

They're just whatever the motor is producing, it's being passed through.

They get hot and it burns off any of that extra emissions that come out, so if they don't get hot enough, that just passes through.

Right.

That's why the guys that live a mile from work and they never start their car or they never get it up to operating temp, that's why those guys start clogging up cats and stuff. Or on the diesel side, when the guys, if they go somewhere and they let a vehicle run for 10 hours at a time and the cat's not up to temp or the particulate filter, that's when those guys start having issues on that because it's not doing its job, it's not up to temp, but it can actually burn off that.

Yeah, if you're not running far enough to get a regen cycle, things like that, that can be a huge problem, without a doubt.

And in all that particulate matter, is that probably a bigger issue with the DI systems in these now? That's probably the biggest reason?

Considerably, yes.

Okay.

Especially these guys that do not have port injection. Because the port injection does help reduce the particulate matter, and my guess is that's also why GM actually went in the ZR1 with also, I'm pretty sure that was supplemental fueling, but the particulate matter must have been a consideration there.

Yeah. No, it's like we did a highlight with Sam Barros talking about the ZR1 and all the comments like, that's not why they did it. And it's like, well, actually it is. Everybody on the Internet is a genius. You know how that goes. Everybody's got a PhD. Right. What are your thoughts on the positioning for the Z06 and the ZR1? Because they moved where the injector is. Has that been something that you take into consideration when you're developing stuff on that front? Or is that more of like a go back to Nostrum and ask them?

Well, honestly, like that will be more aching if we're able to do some stuff like that. I'm pretty sure it will be a GM question.

Oh, yeah, true. Yeah, that makes sense.

They have the technology that they have. It's just we can only dream of here. But as long as you follow their lead, you're going down the right path.

Makes sense. You want to pop the usual three?

Yeah. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. I need a track car, a daily driver, and a show car. You have an unlimited budget. You can coyote swap it if you want, whatever you want to do.

It has to be compliant. No.

No, it does not. Whatever you want. But yeah, we're going to need that from each one of you.

So what's the three?

Show car, track car, and daily driver.

I think for me personally, a show car having an original GT40 would be a really cool car to have. Second, what's the second stipulation there?

So you said show car, so you have track car and daily driver left.

So a track car, I would say it won't be as much track. I think a Konaseg would be a pretty cool car to have and the engineering that those guys go through.

Which one?

I think the Regueras are pretty cool and I probably butchered that name too, but I think that would be a cool car to have and what Christian von Konaseg does. He does some pretty cool feats over there and I like how they do everything in house and if they don't, they try and get it in house.

They just opened a pre-kick-a** facility. They were just boasting about on their socials worth checking out.

Right. Daily driver is a hard part. I got two dailies, one I just bought and it does have a blue oval with it. I'm generally not too proud to say I drive it, but it's a fun little car and gets good gas mileage. I have a big turbo Fiesta ST and makes close to 300 wheel and I get 35 miles per gallon, cruise 80, 85 down the freeway in it and I have an issue and on the other side of it I have a heads cam turbo Silverado that I can daily drive, leave factory exhaust on it, have the big exhaust dump on it when I want to get rowdy and I can still haul a trailer, haul my race car with it. Both of those are good mix or matches for me, but I need a truck to haul a race car and I need a truck to haul machines and stuff like that. But it is nice having a little itsy bitsy car that handles lights on rails and gets good gas mileage.

That's the board version of what I had. I had a Mark 7 GTI that was making like 340, 390. I know what you're talking about.

Yeah. That's cool.

It's great for cutting people off. It's amazing. So which one are you locking in then?

I'd probably say my truck just for usability for a daily driver, just having a pickup truck. I do rely on that pretty often. Okay.

Fair enough. All right.

Mine's very simple. Track car is the new ZR1.

Okay.

Honestly, I think it offers pretty much everything you want on a track car at that power level and skill set level that you're able to handle and with enough nannies to actually not get you in trouble or learn with the car. As a show car, Carl's old 57 Sherry.

Okay.

You got to check that one out. That was an experiment on how much money they could spend on a car. The seats on our car were crocodile skin, but not any crocodile skin. They were grown in carpet, so they wouldn't scratch their bellies. So that gives you an idea. Yeah, and for a daily driver, an Escalade V.

Nice.

It doesn't get anywhere.

Solid choice.

I do like that. Have you guys done some stuff for those as well?

Yes. We're going to start offering a little bit more on the Escalade side. And we've done a few Escalade that weren't Vs that well out produced horsepower on Escalade V. Okay. That was a fun project to do. Going back to me a little bit on the cars and trying to pick one, it's generally a little bit harder for me, because I've, you know, luckily, you know, in my life, the early portion, I worked at Ken Lingenfelter's car collection and generally ran through 200, 220 cars at a time over there. And of those cars, I probably drove 95% of them, Ferraris, Corvettes, old muscle cars. I can probably say honestly on video, I'm the only person to ever turn away a Ferrari LaFerrari on delivery day. We had the LaFerrari show up after we purchased it. It came in the Ferrari truck, came off the trailer. It came off and me and the other guy running the collection at the time looked at it and saw it was filthy, it was scratched, and I was a big paint correction guy at the time. And we sent back a million and a half dollar car back to the Ferrari dealer. Ken showed up later that day and goes, where's the LaFerrari at? They're supposed to deliver it today. I'm like, unfortunately, we had to send it back. So I could probably say truthfully on camera, I'm the only person to ever have to do that. And I've been in Bugatti's driven LaFerrari, F40, F50, 288 GTOs. I've been in a Ferrari 959.

Okay.

Not Ferrari, a Porsche 959. And I think at the time, there was maybe 6 to 10 in the States. Oh, wow.

Something like that, yeah. I think it was like 6 or something, yeah.

I don't know if there was a 88 or 89, is the year of those.

It's the Bill Gates car, though.

Yes. And there's a few others out there, the Sultana Brunei that has quite a few of those. But that was a very interesting car to drive. And that car was well ahead of the time for late 80s, early 90s. So for me, really pick a car. I've been, I can say honestly, I've been pretty privileged to be around Ken's collection. And a lot of that job over there was driving those cars.

I was going to say, so what is that, when you work for a collection like that, what does that mean? Are you maintaining vehicles, keeping them clean? What does that job look like?

So I was maintaining them, a big part of it's battery maintenance that people don't think about, tire maintenance, rotation of the tire. A lot of cars, when they sit stagnant, seals go bad. So I would go in on a Monday and pick out two or three cars to drive, go drive it 30, 40 miles, put it back, go through a test list on it and put it back in its hole and move to the other one. So when I say I was able to drive quite a bit of cars in my days, it was a big privilege that I was, was and am very thankful for to have that part of my life and understand the value of cars and stuff that's not mine. I was around million-dollar cars when I was 17 years old and they weren't mine and I had 100 percent trust from Ken and other people at the facility to go out, drive these cars or load these cars up and haul them, take them across country or drive them across country. So definitely something I can say I'm thankful for and part of my life that I'll always remember. But there's a lot of cars there and Porsche Carrera GTs, that's a cool car. We had a project that we did years ago, the Falcon F7s. We did some of those. We built the engines here at Lingenfelter and they were twin-turbo LS7s and they were gated six-speed manual cars and their twin-turbo LS7s, 1,100 horsepower. The whole cockpit of the car is carbon fiber and that car had no sound-detoning, no carpet in it. So drive down Michigan Road with the race tires on it, you'd hear every rock come up on that car. Every single rock. So, yeah, it's definitely interesting and at one point, there's a Lamborghini Reventon over there.

Really?

I remember we went to a concourse one morning. I was in a Ford GT, the white with blue stripes. I forget what they call that one. And I remember coming up 96 here, going to the concourse, and I was directly behind Ken in the Ford GT. And I was able to witness the Reventon with the rear flaps open or up on it, drive through the 6:30 a.m. morning fog on the highway, and just watch that fog circle around those vents on that car. I'll never forget it. It's probably one of the coolest things to witness, is seeing that. So, definitely a big part of my life that now transfers over to these cars. You know, we often get asked, how do you contain yourself in something like this? And, you know, a lot of times, Christian and I, we're final say on every car that comes through here. So, we're driving every car when it's done being calibrated, and Christian's calibrating them himself. And, you know, a big part of that's driving the car, but it's the respect that it's someone else's car. They're not your tires that cost $2,000 on the back of one of these, and it's a respect factor. And some people don't have that.

It's not a joyride. We're not taking a joyride. We're not trying to enjoy the car. We're trying to finish a vehicle so the customer can actually enjoy this. Now, if there's issues and the car doesn't shave or doesn't do something, definitely the customer is not going to enjoy it. And my goal is to make sure that the customer enjoys his purchase.

And a big thing on the tuning side, and you may see someone out there with a 700-wheel horsepower car, and you see someone with a 650-wheel horsepower car, but sometimes that 650-wheel horsepower car is beating that 700-wheel car. And sometimes that 700-wheel car is on the ragged edge of living, and we're not about to do that to someone. We want something to where it's a 93-octane car, and they have to one day, they get 91, they're fine. They'll drive it home and they'll drive back cross-country in the car. We're never here to set someone up for failure or get that last 5 horsepower out of a car or 10 horsepower because it simply isn't worth it. A track-based car or a straight-line car, that's all you do with it. Yeah, it'd be worth it to you. But for our customer base and most of the customer base out there on performance cars like that, it's not worth it to those people. And in reality, it shouldn't be because, as I said earlier, 80, 90% of the time, you're driving a car. If you're a controlled mindset and you can retain your right foot, you're driving like Miss Daisy or your 80-year-old grandma that's cruising down the highway. If you're not, you should probably check yourself a little bit and get back into reality. All of us want to have fun, but there's...

Personal attack, it's okay.

There's time and place for that, you know? So some people just don't understand.

Can you give us a ballpark price on what, like your average heads cam supercharger build is?

Depending on the platform, the C8 is the most relevant, so it's easy. A heads cam package on that starts in the $13,000 range. We'd like to have headers and exhausts on that, you know? You get 600 horsepower out of that pretty fairly and pretty easily.

I think that was that crank or wheel on your website?

That would be a flywheel number.

Okay, gotcha.

All the stuff that we will rate is on a flywheel or a crank scale. It's easier to either calculate that or we get those from running the engines on the engine dyno, so we know directly what it is. The C8s, we see a lot of variances in drivetrain loss. Everyone wants to be between 12 and 15 percent or they say that's what it should be. These cars do pretty good on drivetrain loss, but our average on our dyno, and we can call ours a heartbreaker dyno or not, but we see cars at baseline, a bone stock car at 450 wheel, and I have had a C8 come in here as low as 418, 420. We've had a 420 wheel horsepower C8 come in here bone stock. So there's a big variance there, and it changes per year. It changes per model between a coupe and convertible. So that's per car. It changes on time of day. Some people don't realize a car will dyno differently on a Tuesday compared to a Thursday because the atmospheric conditions are well worse on that Thursday when you dyno it the second time, or you dyno a different car, you know. Every car is different. Some people don't understand that. And that's the truth of it. Every car is different. You can engineer a package exactly the same every time. And one car may overachieve by 10 horsepower, 20 wheel horsepower. It's that simple. As far as a supercharged package, we see, we believe we're very competitive on that market, where we opened up and we start the $25,000 range for a supercharger system on a C8 car. That's a plug and play, fully drivable car that you take anywhere, you know. We have customers that live here in Michigan and they're, I believe the term is called Snowbirds. They'll take their car from Michigan and drive it down to Florida, go down there for four, maybe five months, depending on our winter, and they'll drive it back up here. That's a supercharged car and they're seeing mid-20s, 23, 24, 25 on the highway and they're, you know, they're enjoying it. We did some, you know, C7 Z06s that were 1,000, 11, some tickled on the 1,200 horsepower range. And one we sent away was 1,000 horsepower on Pump 93, made 1,100 and some change on E85 for Pump. And that car left here at 93 Octane. He drove 4 hours home into Ohio and he called me at the end of the day, almost freaking out. I'm like, what's wrong? Like, what happened? He goes, I can't believe it. I got 26 miles per gallon driving home in this car and it's over 1,000 horsepower.

That's crazy.

He goes, something's wrong. I go, no, everything's, it's right. He goes, no, you guys must have left some cylinders unplugged or something. I said, no, it's on all eight and it's making every bit of 1,000 flywheel horsepower. I don't know if that car made 900 and some wheel when that car left.

I was like 880.

880 wheel and used 25, 26 miles per gallon going home.

Sounds like a great daily.

And I think he ended up putting, he had 40 or 50,000 miles on that build. We actually recently just refreshed the engine. One of the GM lifters failed in it after that amount of time, which-

That's quite a bit of miles for that much power as well.

For that power, it definitely is. And I can tell you, he drives it pretty hard. But that's part of it where people want you to stand behind your product. And they do, so.

Well, on that note, where can everybody find you guys?

Well, on all of our socials, lingenfelter.com is our website. We're on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok for the time being.

We'll see how that shakes out.

Facebook, really all the media outlets out there and on your guys' podcasts now.

Perfect. Well, thank you very much, guys, for coming on to the show. It was an awesome conversation.

Thank you for having us without a doubt.

Absolutely. It was very cool. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see y'all next time. As always, guys, be sure to check out all of our sponsors. They are what make this show possible. It allows us to travel and have some awesome guests on the show. So, whether it's HP Academy, Tune by Shawn or Haze Performance, all these guys have awesome services, products, everything in between. So be sure to check them out. All the codes are in the show note description or on my Instagram or wherever else I've mentioned it in the show. So be sure to check it out and we'll see you all next time.