129. Tuning MoTec, Grudge Racing, Netflix's Fastest Car w/ Accelerated Racing Solutions

The 8-speed, yes, we could tune it, yes, it will live, yes, you could have fun with it, but it will not be as fast as a Turbo 400, as consistent as a Turbo 400. I hear it all the time, people are like, oh, I don't want to put a MoTec on my car, it's not a race car. I'm like, even more of a reason to put it on your car, because you're not treating it like a race car.

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

I knew that was coming this time. You didn't pull that out earlier this week, but...

Dan, Mr. Gunner Garage.

I don't think I've ever been more stared down in enemy territory than I am right now. I'm looking at all these Camaros staring over my shoulder right now.

There's a Ford right there. We're all right.

Yeah. His heart ripped out, but that's fine.

Yeah, Ford exclamation mark, or no, what was it? Quotation marks. That's okay. Swing and a miss. And today we are at, I'm going to read the sign, Accelerated Racing Solutions, here with Brandon Weber and Tiana Weber. Hi, guys. Hi. So I wanted to quickly give a shout out to Justin and Eric Simpson for getting us all connected because we're looking for folks to do podcasts down here in Texas, and obviously we did our Cobb one, and it's great that we get to meet you. And then I pieced it together that you guys run a Netflix show back in 18, but 2019, so Fastest Car. You guys do a lot of cool stuff here. Honestly, I'm just going to let you guys introduce yourselves. We'll kick it off from there and see where it goes. So tell us a little bit about yourselves.

Man, I don't even know where to start. So we met in high school, the two of us, at a car show. I had a 94 5.0 Mustang, and she had a 6.9 Camaro. And prior to that, her dad dropped her off in the 6.9 Camaro, and the real thought was like, I'm going to marry this chick. Like all the way back then, like she had the coolest car back then. Dated through high school. After that, I went to UTI, learned about cars, is really where I started professionally. I worked at like Sears and Oil Change Place. While I was going to school, I'd go sleep at her house for like the one hour of time I had between school and that. And then I moved into BMW for about 12 years. I worked with BMW. And then from there, pretty much was breaking my back on commuting from Ranch Cucamonga to Glendale every day and kind of pushed us into opening our own shop. We did a lot of stuff in the garage. So when we opened the shop in 2016, everybody was like, oh, thank God. Like you finally are opening something, you know. We opened the shop in 2016 and...

We were racing. So like that's what put us together. Like even in high school, like we would compete, like who's faster? Am I faster? Is he faster? And then we'd compete with that. So then when someone introduced us to Irwindale and we didn't stop going, we would go every Thursday. So everybody knew us from that. You know, we would be...

Building our own cars in the garage basically back then and just racing them, breaking them every week. Like repeat, you know, race was a build, race, brake, repeat constantly. She had a GT Mustang back then too, so we came...

And it was an actual Ford Mustang.

It was actually a Ford motor.

It was a two valve, sadly. That was a mistake, but you know, I learned from those mistakes. I, you know, I went with a really popular engine builder then. I don't even want to say it. Yeah. And I paid a lot of money for a lot of f***** up s***.

First time we maxed out credit cards for race cars.

Yeah, but one thing that made us open up our shop from these experiences is they would sell me on basic stuff like a plenum spacer, a throttle body, an intake, and they knew I was a drag racer. All they had to give me was like a torque converter, right? Something with drag racing that would make me go faster, not all this throttle body plenum spacer that literally does nothing, right? People like to say what parts they have rather than like what can it do for them. Like if they can list off more parts, even if it doesn't gain them any power.

Or gives you 7 horsepower total.

Right? And which a torque converter can give you any power, it will knock off over like a half a second in an eighth mile or a second in a quarter. So it's like that's what when we open up our business, I was like, I don't want to sell people fluff, right? So it's like I want to sell people what they want their car for, whether if they're just wanting it louder or if they're wanting to go faster in a drag strip, how can I get away with all this thermostat or just like little things that just aren't necessary.

And back then we were building them in the garage. Like I would, I swapped a Nissan 240 with an LS7. I had an LS1 car and we were going to other tuners. And back then I had to rely on people for tuning. And that was kind of gave us the itch to learn the tuning. We put torque converters and stuff. I've blown cars up, traded them into CarMax. Like I did all the dumb s*** when I was younger. And we used to spray cars like 150 shot in no tune. Or you had the Granatelli tuner where you could just add one or two degrees, like it barely did anything.

Well, I knew when he was wanting to do this, I was like, you were smart enough, not only mechanically, but you know how the engine works and what it needs. You can tune it too. So that's where I really pushed him. Like, hey, tune your own stuff. Let's buy the most obnoxious things, put it together and you make it work.

And back then, like that Chevy SS was like a super unique car. Like, we didn't even know what it was even when we bought it. It was an LS3 four-door car back in 2016. Put a huge cam in it, huge torque converter in it. E85 wasn't really big back then. Like, people were doing it, but not like it is today. So we learned how to do all that. We just beat the s*** out of our own car. We went to the track every week with it and we started getting customers slowly, a little bit through that. At that time, I was still working with BMW, full time job, making really good money, but I was commuting so much back and forth.

He was killing himself.

Yeah, I fell asleep driving, woke up in the back of other people's cars. I was making good money, but in California, it was really expensive to live there and then you had half the money gone in taxes, so you're just beating yourself to nothing. So we slowly just kind of ramped up the shop real slow and there was like a breaking point with BMW at some point where I was like, all right, we're done, we have enough work where we could stay full time. It was kind of a scary moment. Like we had spent, I had a Cush job, 401k, huge paycheck, just steady, like I could have still been working there today. And we just went full time at our shop and it was scary. You know, we didn't know where the next paycheck was coming from. And the businesses grew itself. And we really back then strived on a lot of the shops maybe we had dealt with or, you know, as growing up in the car community, cars would sit for months, three, four months. So we really took pride in only bringing in cars even back then when we were ready to work on them, when we had the parts. Like we didn't take pride on filling our car, our shop with cars. We have a lot of stuff here today, but everything has a reason on why it's here and what we're waiting for. I don't bring... Back then, we didn't bring cars in too soon. So we really took care of the customer. We did a lot of track support and worked our way up through there. We're at that Irwindale track every Thursday racing. So we're very present in the racing community.

The first question that comes to mind here, right? Because we often have listeners that are trying to make that jump from working their day jobs to, when do I become a full-time owner? What was that kind of threshold that's like, all right, maybe it's time to do this full-time? Because giving up a job, especially when it pays decently, it's like that's scary.

Well, then to open a business in California, I'm sure is extra not.

Yeah, it's not like you're a s*** can like me. It's like you're choosing to leave something.

No, when I had left at that time, I was making like 350 grand a year, like really good career. And you paid half in taxes. So when you filed your taxes, you're like, well, this f****** sucks. And then you're driving and spending three, four hours a day on the road. And that was kind of the breaking point right there is just how much time I was spending away from the house. I would leave at 4.30 in the morning, get back at seven o'clock at night. And then we had the shop kind of as a fun on the side kind of thing. Like it wasn't like a real full time job. It was kind of like our own.

I was just promoting it. Like it was my full time job. Yeah, kind of because I wanted it to work, right? I was the one like we need a shop.

How long ago were you guys together at this point?

So that we, the shop's been open for nine years in April, this coming April.

So that was the full time switch was in 17, 2017. And we got together in 2000. We knew each other from 2000. We were officially a couple in 2004. We got married in like 2010. So we had known each other. Yeah, from high from freshman year high school on.

So it took us a year to like really make it a full time. So that's him coming home at night after his full time job, working on it nights and weekends. And for a year for him to, for me to tell him, okay, we have enough work that you can quit your job. Is this all right?

I think the actual push was falling asleep and waking up in the back of someone's car.

Really?

Like on the freeway, just woke up and I was in a car accident. But it was from that many hours. And even if you put the shop aside and you didn't have the shop, just commuting three to four hours a day in LA.

Is that what it was?

Yeah. Easy three hours every single day. So you leave-

It's like an hour and a half each way sort of?

Yeah. And sometimes-

I'm not a city girl.

Yeah.

So I didn't want to live in a city.

Middle of Glendale, like it would have been 1.2 million for a house that was built in the 20s. And this was back in like 16. Now it's like 2 million. But you just had no interest in it. And it wasn't a passion. Like I liked what I did. I've always been in cars. I'd worked my way up.

I did like what you did.

I did. I was a mechanic, then I was a service rider and service manager. And then I pretty much ran the dealership, just under the owner, like general manager position, split up. It was great. I loved it, but it wasn't a passion like this stuff. So this stuff was always a passion.

The push, like what you asked, like what would push someone to do that? It's like, is this something you really enjoy? Whether it's, if you love scuba diving, do you want to be a scuba instructor? You'll make it work. You'll make it profitable, right? If you really like what you're doing. So I was able to help him like do what he likes, and he enjoys doing it. And we have to regulate that so I don't burn him out. Right. Because that could be easy.

Well, having that support structure probably helps too, right?

The two of us are, I mean, we're boiling our bloods. We love this. Her dad, you know, raised her in a garage, like not my side so much, her side actually more than mine. I got into it as a passion and we met through it.

So I probably pushed him more. Yeah. Yeah.

Did you have a job that you were working then at that time too or?

So a couple maybe, a couple of different ones. I'm like a gypsy. I like, I was an esthetician, a makeup artist for 13 years. I did sales, accounting. I'll just go with the flow. Yeah. But something in our heads popped up like, let's just get a building, let's get a lift and a dino, and let's just build our own two cars. And then it was like, well, we should make a name. So we started drawing out the name and I'm like-

I still have that picture. We're sitting in Glendale. I just worked a full day.

I was like, it has to be an A because it needs to be the first thing that someone sees is A, right? You don't want to be the last on the list.

Yeah, back when a phone book was a thing, right? Yeah.

So you want to be the first one that comes down.

Just out of my spacer. Yeah.

I drew out the logo because I just wanted to put a name to the place where we were building our own cars. Then it came like, oh wait, you have a shop, will you do my car? We're like, well, s***.

I'll never forget the first customer that brought 25 grand to build heads, cam, converter, Chevy SS, and I was like, wait, someone just brought me money to do this and click there. Even back then, I didn't know how these businesses survived. I had a job that was paying really well, that actually paid for that business to start. I had no clue how you made money in this industry. I come, I was like, this is just breaking even by the time we were doing it. It slowly grew and we had two employees back then, up to three at one time. It worked, great dudes. The end result was the same as what I did by myself after we moved here, but we really stressed the quality back then too. Now, with these cars like this, the quality is so scary on how fa- 1,000 horsepower back then, when it started, was like, you had to have a really built car. You could buy this ZL1, almost all stock engine, heads cam blower, some fuel, and they make 1,000 horsepower. It's crazy how much that had changed.

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We started just slowly taking on customers with what we could take. We had a 2,200 square foot shop back then, and then we took it from 2,200 to 4,400, but it was in 2, like across the street from each other.

Okay.

And these poor people that were doing woodworking next door, and the dyno was back. Imagine a dyno room backed into a room with no ventilation, like 2,200 square foot dyno backed in. I've lost so many years off my life from that. Then we finally moved the dyno to another building, and then we opened the walls between it. One time then we had three little shops that were mended together. Always been big into the racing, and out there, racing was just dying in California. Like Irwindale actually just got crushed today.

I thought I saw something.

Yeah, so that's gone, but that was like she couldn't have a job on a Thursday unless she was off Thursdays. I had to get off at 3 o'clock to try to make it to the track by 5.

Serious guys, it was serious.

Yeah. Real quick, I do want to give a shout out to the Go Hard Podcast, because you guys really went into depth. Yeah, we were there every Thursday.

Yes, legit.

For what, 19 years or something like that?

No. Well, yeah.

Probably from high school on.

2004 to 2018.

We raised a quarter mile. Quarter mile was huge, and then I learned what eighth mile was, and then it was non-stop there. We were there every Thursday. We took our engagement pictures there. If we went there today, well, it's not there today, but if I was still there and I went there, everybody would still know us there. That was our home track. And then we moved here and I can't get away from racing, like every freaking weekend. Like it will burn you out and you will break your s***.

Three to four days a week.

Three to four days a week, you're at different tracks and you can do nothing.

So we can't even keep up. Like everyone in here in Texas is so spoiled with how much racing that they have. So that's a whole nother deal.

So touch on that real quick. So, okay, so Irwindale is gone now. So what's left over there?

California Speedway is gone too.

Bakersfield, Bakersfield, Bakersfield, that's pretty much it. They got Chuck Walla. So that's like a no-prop.

You gotta go to Vegas if you wanna do the strip, that Ford, so that really you're close. Is Sacramento even still open? Maybe free.

I think so, but they do minimal.

So you're talking about what, doing a four or five hour drive? Do you wanna drag race now?

Yeah.

Wow. They're not gonna be happy till they chase that entire industry out of that state anyway.

It doesn't matter.

It's so bad. At this point, I don't know why people even think they can try, let's just pretend that state doesn't exist and we'll just-

A lot of the cars on the other side-

I think people are traveling to Arizona to race from California.

People leave their cars here, like I have a buddy's C6 over there, like he has no intention to bring it back to California because there's nothing to do with it here. So that car will probably sell here, but they fly out here to race. And a lot of the California guys come out here to do all the small tire racing out here, Jake's race and all the radio roundup stuff like that. Everybody travels here now. Most of them have homes here now and all their trailers and cars stay here unless they're going home. Wow.

That's how dedicated it is, right?

I would say over half the racers are over here most of the time. When they bring them home, they maintenance them while it's cold here and they come back for the springtime and race.

So do you still have friends back in California, I assume?

Yeah.

Do you think there's been an uptick in any street racing? Or would you not be able to?

From when we were street racing, I think that was Prime, Compton, Christmas, everybody out, Bridge, all those. Now, I think it's, I don't see it as much online, you know, social media. Yeah, Anna is where they raced, but they, they, you would think social media, everybody ruins racing with social media, right?

Yes.

Anywhere you go. It's not as big as it was when we left there, like early ages of us growing up in street racing. So I don't know if it's uptick. I think there's all the cars are out here, maybe.

We haven't followed a lot of it.

Yeah, I don't follow it, so it's kind of hard to answer that.

We haven't followed it as much as we should.

But there was more street racing back then. I don't know, it would have been like 2010 maybe. After high school, that was a good time. That was a good time. Christmas came, it was Christmas morning, in Compton, parking lots filled with cars, and that was pretty cool.

I mean, we focus on the street racing here in Texas, and that's alive and well. Yeah.

Everything's better in Texas.

That's alive and well.

It was single-digit one night, they were out racing here.

It was like nine. It was nine.

We were out there.

Heated everything. Everybody's jackets were just glowing with the battery packs and everything.

How are you even getting traction at that?

I had to turn it down.

You're on chip seal, like asphalt.

I don't even know what the drags were on that street.

It's still dry, right? Yeah. The dew point wasn't high, so it's dry, it's just cold.

Yeah, but the tire compound too, that gets to me.

Yeah, huge burnouts, but yeah.

So, can you explain this to me, right? Because I'm a novice in this scene in many regards. So, what's the appeal to eighth mile over quarter mile? This is where I'm completely overstepping my bounds here. I have no idea on that whole scene.

I'll tell you my, oops, I'll tell you my thought on it. You could race your car for a lot longer, depending on your caliber of vehicle, right? It's like something like this. You know, let's say a 2500 horsepower car. You're not going to race this. Well, I don't. I don't race this with grudge racing quarter mile. Quarter mile grudge scene isn't really alive.

That's not here.

Right? Eight mile grudge racing, whole another level. When it comes to like the late model stuff, quarter mile is bigger. That's what we do, right? For our customers.

I think power takes over. I think eighth mile is like driver's race. There is not enough real estate to close the gap. Quarter mile horsepower is going to take over. Just running out the back. Yeah, you could lay it in really hard out back and maybe beat somebody. Number one, there's more eighth mile tracks here. We got Texas Motorplex is our most local quarter mile event. They're not as open as long as Yellow Belly is XRP, which is all eighth mile, but I think the grudge scene, small tire radial racing is real big in the eighth mile stuff here. It's just a driver's game. Like it comes down to reaction time. And if you can't get the car to 60 foot, there's not enough real estate to get it done. Like you could be pretty quick. And if that guy out reacts you, you're not going to get to them by the end of there.

So, so it's a different crowd of people. So you've got eighth mile grudge racers, radial racers, pro mods, you know, and then you've got NHRA, which is what thousand feet now. Then you got the late model stuff. Those are really the two that focus on the quarter mile.

Yeah, you don't, radial racing, unless we do small tire stuff, there's no quarter mile stuff.

Well, the cars have gotten more powerful now too, right? So that's one of the reasons they had, I think they, that's when I think they first are really dialing it back to eighth mile stuff.

Yeah, I just, this is not a big scene. Maybe it's a Texas thing where it's more eighth mile. I grew up in quarter mile. We did street raced quarter mile. Like that was like a thing.

We did street race quarter mile. Now they only do eighths.

Well, that was, what were the cars then? 10, nine seconds?

Yeah, back in the 90s.

Now we're talking six, seven, like that's a whole other ball game.

Easy to throw turbos on something, have a seven second car, you know? Yeah. It's changed a lot. So yeah, cars have gotten faster.

Two totally different breeds.

Yeah, different people in those two, like your quarter mile racers or your time slip racers usually, like no one's real happy to post an eighth mile slip, right? Compared to like the quarter mile guy who wants to show that seven, six, whatever it may be.

Well, it was a standard for so long, right? Like quarter mile, like that was like, this is a quarter mile, Fast and Furious. So I need a 10 second car. That's a standard.

State first state for sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, OEMs too, right? That's one of the things that like the new ZR1, it's like, all right, here's our top speed, here's our quarter mile, here's our zero to 60. Those are the three, that's all marketing, right? It's marketing.

And I think that Fast and Furious scene is what started most of us in it. Like I was getting into cars when that movie came out and that was the quarter mile number, you know? So yeah, it's just changed, it's evolved, I think.

Well, these kids didn't sell all your Mustangs and go buy tuner cars then.

Yeah, yeah.

No, hey, we almost bought SRT4s. We're at the dealership buying two SRT4s and I think they treated us like s***. They disrespected us and didn't think we were going to be able to afford back then was like a $30,000 car.

Yeah, well, now who looks at who owns that market? A bunch of kids?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I haven't even seen one of those things in forever.

Those things are still pretty cool though, like SRT4s. We had one that was on a road rally with us, that was making like what 450 or 500 wheel, which like that is a tin can.

Will break everything.

Yeah, definitely have those issues too. So touch on these cars a little bit, right? Because when we came in here, you started pointing out MoTec, MoTec, MoTec, MoTec. You don't see Camaros on MoTec often, do you?

I do.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

Stupid question, Harris.

Yeah, I'm just going to go back to Minnesota. It's fine.

I mean, the MoTec thing, the first time I probably ever heard MoTec was Fast and Furious.

Hold on, I turned off your mic here and say, okay.

But you know, like a MoTec exhaust or whatever, like it's always been like cream of the crop, right? So Holley was real big, like there's all these other ECUs and nothing is as capable as a MoTec, but we started getting into it when the port injection started coming into the Camaros. Basically, we run out of fuel, right, on a direct injected car, so we either got to get it from methanol or another set of injectors. So at the time we were getting into the port injection stuff, methanol was the first thing we did instead of port injection. You're literally spraying methanol out of like an RV pump, like the same pump that is in your RV as a water pump, you're trusting your whole car on that and melting the damn thing down.

Savage.

Yeah, and we linked up with somebody that we met back in California that started teaching us MoTec back then, and we just got really, we learned a lot about it, a lot about it, and we started pushing it into these cars.

Well, we implemented it on a vehicle, and he's actual a racer, so no prep, it went from prep to no prep. So he was able to actually R&D and...

That was the first MoTec we put, it was Dan's 6th Gen. That car had an eight-speed in it, we switched its turbo 400 and added port injection to put the MoTec in that car. That was the first one we did. It was in like...

2020, 2021?

2020, 2021 we did it. And port injection should be controlled by all different computers, right? But the MoTec in particular, the way we do it, it takes over the ignition. So if I could take the ignition and the fueling, I can implement traction control, launch control, different strategies into it. So we learned a lot about it then, and we wanna provide like the best products possible that we have done a bunch of research on and used a bunch. So we started putting those in all these cars and in here right now, there's nine or 10 of them that are on MoTec. At different stages of how big the system is, like the one back there, just behind you guys has an M182 in it. The red one up there has an M182 in it. That's a full standalone, completely removes the factory computer. Plug in an M182, you hit the key, everything starts like factory, dashes factory, pulls all the data from the can, so it could pull wheel speed sensors, it could pull G meter, it could pull steering position. If someone's like, oh, the car pulled left, I'm like, oh, your steering wheel is pointing left. Like, you could see it tattletales on everything. So we just really stand behind that product on how well it works with these cars, and it plays really nice. Like, you could get it in a car that has MoTec, you would never even know it's got it. Daily drive it. You can implement a bunch of safeties in some of the other computer systems we worked with. You couldn't set a safety for like low fuel pressure to alert the driver to drop the RPM or pull the throttle back. MoTec will do any of the safeties that I want to do it.

The drive modes.

Yeah, and then you could switch between, on a Camaro you go track, sport, tour, like just little knob in the middle of the car. You could change boost settings with that on the fly. You could change tracks control strategies on the fly. So as a driver, they could see the car spin in front of them and click it down. All right, let's kill the boost a little bit for the first 60 feet.

Ice tank.

Yeah, you could control the ice tanks on it. I just did a video on that where you got an ice tank in a car and you're pulling up to the pits, just idling for 20 minutes. It doesn't run the ice tank until you put it into a race mode.

It makes it easy.

Yeah, it's just a really good product and it just does everything. It's a pricey product compared to the other stuff. But at each price point, there's a reason why you would go with each computer, right?

Yeah. Do you want to touch on that as well? Because I know that there's various tiers to MoTec. I can't remember. I think AJ's Calvo has an M130 or something like that. Can you kind of differentiate what happens every time you spend more on a MoTec?

The M130 is probably our most standard package we put on. It's the entry-level ECU. It still takes over ignition. It still takes over the port fueling. It still gets all the cam capability, wide bands, all that stuff. Very good ECU. That ECU we've been on our Camaro's, Dan's car and this yellow car have gone like 830s. No control over the direct injection though. So it's only controlling the port and the ignition. And then you switch to an M182 and that's the full stand-alone. So that's the two tiers we use the most.

There's some more in between probably.

M150 we use in other applications.

Yeah. M150 has more inputs and outputs. I've put them in Camaro's before too. At one point this yellow one had an M150. If I want more inputs and output, it's like a middle tier to get more stuff in there. Then M182 is basically cream of the crop for what we're doing on these. Then from there, you might even need to expand it with a PDM to get more inputs, depending on how crazy you want to get.

That's what we're doing on this turbo one.

That one's going to need twin dump. The white one? Yeah. That one's going to be like twin dump valves, air shifter, trans coolers, ice tanks. You run out of inputs and outputs because the M182 allocates all those pins. You even have to expand it past an M182.

It was to simplify it like with M130 on these GM applications, we're adding port injection and also timing control, spark control. M182 also controls the direct injection, so we're able to control more fueling with it too. That breaks it down. If you have, let's say you're doing a lot of no prep stuff, the M130 probably won't be your best bet. M182 is going to be more sufficient.

You could do it.

We've done it.

Yeah, like Dan's car, we no prep that car all the time, and the M130 is capable of it. M182 is more capable of dropping cylinders where the M130, you're not going to want to drop full cylinders like a full standalone. And having the control of the ignition is just building timing ramps and boost ramps and all that stuff. The software is really similar between the two on what you can do. It's just how much stuff you want to control.

It's customizable, so that's what's different from other ECUs that are out there. We're able to customize it however we want.

Like FuelTech is like, trends break. Do it. It's very straight to the point. MoTec may be an auxiliary output that's triggered by this, that these thresholds to see. So MoTec is a lot more complex in building what you want the car to do, but once you get it all figured out on what you're doing, it's very user-friendly once it's all set up for the first time. And then the loggers are all built in. So these guys, any of these guys could go out and race. We always upgrade our loggers to the advanced loggers, go do whatever they want for the night, pull over and just pull the log and send it to me. Or, you know, when they get home, if it's not too far, it's always logging, send it to me. I can make changes. It's super easy to do all that too. The logging features are really good.

Do you think that you don't see it in the GM world as much because you're typical person who's building a Camaro and not to downplay it or to say that it's cheap to build.

Let's talk about Mustang guys too. Same category.

There's not a lot of MoTec stuff in the Mustang world either though.

We can do it with Mustangs too.

Right, but it's not your Calvo and Enth Moto Viper builds, right? We're not talking. I mean, you can get into six figures, I'm sure, but it's not.

What do you think the price is for an M130 with the harness and sensors and wide bands and everything? What do you think it is?

It's got to be like $15, $20?

I was going to say $10.

It's $6,600.

That's a problem right there. So everybody says it like, oh man.

It's expensive. No, it's not. It's actually not that bad.

So there's other systems in variation of cost.

It's double what like a Haltech or something would be though, right?

Then you're stacking more stuff on it. So that car in there is on Haltech, and it's not as capable as a MoTec, but I haven't spent as much R&D time into the Haltech as the MoTec, to understand what it would do. That's more of a primitive system compared to what the MoTec is. But yeah, it's the thought process. I hear it all the time. People are like, oh, I don't want to put a MoTec on my car. It's not a race car. Even more of a reason to put it on your car, because you're not treating it like a race car. You're out stoplight to stoplight.

You want it to be nice.

And I can speak to this, because I've ridden in Enth Moto Vipers. They used to be five minutes from my house. You would not be able to tell that car is different from stock, except for the fact that it's louder and it chops like them.

It's super sexy.

For some obvious reasons. But the way it drives, for example, for my buddy, he literally drove his 2,000 horsepower Viper from Minnesota to Oklahoma and beat on it for a week or whatever and drove it back. We're talking about a 3,000 mile road trip and 2,000 horsepower car. And it's on MoTec, right? And anyways, to your point, yeah.

What's the MY82 cost?

13.

Okay.

And that comes with advanced logging.

It's a complete plug-in. It's a full standalone plug-in to the car.

Delete the whole factory computer.

It's still less than what you said, though.

Oh yeah.

I was thinking one minute on that one.

Now you could get it. Now if you start adding shock sensors and going crazy, like anything is going to get expensive. But the blue car is all FuelTech. That's $13,000 into FuelTech stuff alone. Just you know, we're talking coils and like stuff we're not going to have to put on a GM.

We're trying to get MoTec onto this.

But I could switch that over.

Can you still run all the stock gauges and all that s***?

All factory.

Yes. Really?

Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of this stuff maybe had come back when I started tuning stuff. The first computer I ever tuned outside of a factory computer was a Pro EFI. At the time, not a lot of cars had Pro EFI and it was very difficult to learn and stressful for people. So I learned with that on her car and my car. So that was kind of my venture into aftermarket ECU. Like, f***. GM, you got to like trick it into doing what you want. Pro EFI, you tell it to do it and it's going to do it. MoTec, same thing, like you're getting the control you want. So I kind of learned, you know, Pro EFI had all the CAN integration and stuff too, but Pro EFI was not as customizable as a MoTec is. So MoTec, if you could dream it up, it could be written into the firmware for us to do it. You could come up with the wildest s***. It could run a generator. It could run hybrid stuff. I'm sure it's got whatever they want to do with it. You could program a MoTec to do it. So we wanted a computer that could do that.

And it's user-friendly, because everything goes into the cloud, so they don't have to pull out a laptop. They don't have to figure out what buttons to press.

They have to pull it from the ECU, but it's very simple. They just retrieve the log and convert it.

I'm pretty sure toasters are connected to the cloud now. Yeah, everything.

I know our oven back home has one.

They are.

Yeah, it's super easy for like, if I had an HP Tuner car, I'm like, all right, we'll hook it up. Give me a log. HP Tuners got really good with cell phone data logging and stuff, but MoTec, I'm like, go make a pull.

It's easier in MoTec.

Bam, they jump on the laptop, send it over. It's super simple.

That is the coolest thing.

Do you still tune stock ECUs, too?

Yeah, all day long. Okay.

I need you to put down the drink, buddy.

Yeah.

Most of our work is stock ECU, because up to like 650, 700, 800, like those combos, heads, cam, V85.

You would like every car to be MoTec.

If I could put MoTec on every car, I would. But like it's that good and you're getting a lot of value. So there is some lesser cost items and then you have to stack on extra units to make it do it. Where a MoTec is one time cost. And I always tell people like the cost of what your engine's worth and your investment in your car, or I don't care if you make 1200 horsepower, it means nothing to me if you can't put it to the floor. MoTec will put it to the floor.

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Just the drivability itself, like what it can add to you as a driver, I feel like is probably worth it in the end.

The Hennessy car, we're switching it over to a MoTec, we're switching it to a 2650, and the guy just wants to be able to enjoy the car. And I'm like, I don't know how you've enjoyed a car that makes whatever power does on a street tire. Where we're switching it over to something with traction control, with boost control, and it could be used instead of just blow tire off everywhere you go. That's fun too. But it's nice when you put the power down and you can race somebody and use it.

When I first learned about it was when Harris was like, oh, I just rode in this 2000 horsepower Viper. I'm like, okay, who gives a s***, 2000 horsepower? You can't even use that. You're just going to go whir every single time. Like you can't even barely touch the throttle. And he's like, well, actually.

Yeah, it works.

There's something to be said when you can, this is going to set off some people, because I might use draggy numbers. When you would do a three second 60 to 130 in a car on a street, it's like you can't even fathom that as somebody who's used to a 300 horsepower GTI. Like, it's kind of like, she did it like, oh.

I mean, I love GTI.

That's the best reaction to your car I've ever heard in my life.

I'll probably have an R32, but oh.

I love the R32s too, and I'm not a Volkswagen guy.

The black one, this one's Turbo 400 MoTec too, but he races a Yellow Belly, so Yellow Belly is like a super sketch surface.

Okay.

So we raced that car. That car will go right down Yellow Belly because it could control everything.

Well, we learned a lot about No Prep from your crew. We have customers, right? And they want us to come to the track with them, but they did a lot of radial stuff. So for us to have fun, we can't go there with them, right? I can't race when they're racing. So I was like, oh, do No Prep. Well, they're doing prep, so he's able to learn and integrate. Now, people will follow your passion, right? If you love something, someone's going to follow you, right? They're going to feel that. They're going to want to do it too. So we got a lot of customers that do No Prep. Thank you, but.

It's like, just let me be happy.

Yeah.

It's hard.

Like, this car is damn near impossible to take out with other people, right? It's just so demanding on it. So we tried our personal racing, we've always tried to separate it. So we're here and I'm not, my time isn't getting devoted away from my customers because.

That's not fair to them either. I mean, you want to, I mean, it's not fair to you either because you want to have a good time.

Yeah, it's not fair to anybody. Like you have, we have your space and you know.

A lot of them tell, like we met you guys or, you know, you guys are always at the track. Yeah. You know, cause we're out racing an event or something. So we, even this one's a little out of the caliber of what our normal racing is. So if this car is out, it's usually at like a dedicated radio race or something. But the no prep stuff.

So that's how we're able to integrate a lot of, you know, with the MoTec with, you know, the no prep or someone's just ripping on a 2000 horsepower car.

I can't see like no reason not to put a MoTec on a car. There's nothing that you're losing drivability.

Yeah, we get that. It's not a race car. What else?

No, it's a big, like it's associated with high cost in race car. Yes, it is the most expensive port injection system as a whole. You could put on a car, but it's not at the price of what people think.

But it's not obnoxious.

But it's the lack of a better word, the Cadillac of...

Yeah, the Cadillac, yeah. It is.

It's bougie.

Notice how you didn't say Lincoln, by the way.

It doesn't matter. I'm a Ford guy and you still like, that's just the term, right? It's the Cadillac of...

There's like a Family Guy meme, where it was all the ECUs like, and then the Pinky Up was the most popular. They take pride in their stuff though. Like it is by far the most, like the highest quality product I've worked with, installed and tuned, all that stuff.

So this will be a two part question at some point, but you kind of touched on it earlier, like what got you into that? Explain what that dive into MoTec was like. Like how difficult was it to learn? How are you learning? Were you on just like Facebook forums?

You still learn no matter what, but-

He's not on forums.

Yeah, I don't use forums. No Facebook.

He doesn't even have Facebook.

It needed support. Like you don't jump into this stuff and not have a helping hand. So I had a buddy I'd met in California who developed a lot of the firmware and taught us everything. So at first, he'd be like scared, like I don't want to hit that button. What's it going to do? And MoTec is jacked up. Like if you don't have one enable switch set, the whole traction control system is not going to work. So at first it was a bunch of phone calls, a bunch of trial and error. Had I had that car set up sooner, I would have put that car on a MoTec, at least to force my brain to learn it. But Dan's car was the first one we had set up on it. So it was just going to the track.

But we put FuelTech on this one to learn FuelTech. So we're trying to verse ourselves not in just, let's say, a stock ECU. He wants to know everything. We have not done other ECUs because we don't like their quality of product, but the products that we have chosen, we want to be well-versed in them.

Yeah, it was intimidating and you're really relying on someone to help you, but now-

It takes time and you have to implement it. You just can't sit at your computer. You have to go out and do it.

Yeah, and I sit. There's some nights like I'll go sit down after a day of work and just stare at a log from like a month ago and just go over and be like, all right, cool. Well, that strategy didn't work. I need to do this or this didn't work.

Touch on the strategy thing a little bit then.

Different. That's all different stuff.

We get really deep with this.

Yeah, like you could take like any horsepower level, right? Anybody who's going fast or using some sort of power management one way or another. Are you taking timing away? Are you taking boost away? Are you adding fuel, taking away fuel? Are you pulling throttle back? How are you getting the car down the track? Well, what works on this car may not work on this one because of the suspension or something. So, you're constantly working at a tune up. There's none of these cars that are just one and done. Like the silver one, we did pull another system off the car, switch it to a MoTec. The car hadn't gone down the track in a year successfully. We switched it to a MoTec. He ended up in like the semi-finals, like 15 rounds in multiple classes. That shouldn't have happened like that. But that came from years of beating myself up and things not going successful. The first MoTec car we took, Texas 2K, got it all done. He had to have a qualifying pass of whatever the number was. So I took the car out, made the qualifying pass because he was out of town. We went to Texas 2K, went to the burnout box, carton to a burnout. Like stupid s*** like that. And we went back, all right, let's fix this. And all right, let's fix this. And just year after year of trying different things. And then now you know this works and you're going to implement it into a car with similar power and stuff like that. But none of the tunes are the same across all these MoTec cars because everybody's got a different use of it. Like this is a manual transmission M130 car. That one's an automatic eight-speed M130 car, like total different strategies on how we control that car. Like that one.

And that one is so, the manual is so much fun.

That one makes like 1100 wheel.

He was like, because he's got different boost modes because it was on street tires on 18s, right? So he had different boost modes for me and he was having me drive it. And I literally just put it to the highest horsepower mode. But with the traction control, it just, it's nice when something can still just pull and go straight where you're like holding it with your two fingers, but it's still just chugging.

You know what I mean? Like that's cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

We go to Yellow Belly and like, you'll see if you have a X amount of boost level, right? And your timing is going super negative or it's going to the limit of the traction control. Well, you're going to rather, you'd rather trim that boost down and get the timing back up to where it should be. So it just depends on what the surface is and what strategy you're going to use. Now you have launch control, which is a predictive launch ramp I'm going to set controlled by drive shaft speed, any number of things, RPM. And then the next thing that's going to take over, it's going to hand it to the traction control. Now that is active, so it's watching for a problem to happen. So if I could catch it in launch control and the traction controls just to stop the car from losing a race, right? Like you don't want to ride the traction control all the way down the track. You want to hand it off from launch control to traction control with everything, you know, just keeping everything in line and not letting it in happy. Yeah, keep it happy. Okay. Because launch, it's the best way. Launch control is I am setting a predetermined, whether it be boost ramp, RPM ramp, timing, however I want to do it, traction control is already too late. You're losing ET. If it's hitting the traction control, the only thing that's stopping you from doing is losing the race or spinning the tires. It'll keep you going down the track, but you're losing ET.

So many strategies.

I was about to ask the question too. Because when somebody goes to school to learn how to work on a car, you go through a process of learning how to diagnose a car. What's the problem? That's what my next question was going to be.

You start with righty tighty, lefty loosey.

Pretty much. I started with UTI. It was a bunch of kids whose parents made them go to school. They said, f*** it, I like cars. So we started there. So the entire time through that program, to me at the time, it was easy just because I had worked it. I was working at Sears at the time.

Are you selling some washing machines or what's up?

No, he was a mechanic at the automotive.

I do remember Sears. Are you sure?

I was about to pull a like. You probably, well, they used to have auto service centers.

So I worked there, just a piss on tire. I started with that, oil changes, all that stuff. So I exposed myself to that. But then when I went to BMW, I had to go to, I think it's where a lot of like having a clean shop comes from, right? I went to what's called Step, which is like BMW's education.

This is psychotically clean, by the way.

So we used to have to be clean.

There's a f****** mopping machine.

Zamboni, baby.

Yeah.

That puts in more work than anybody here. It's got like, that thing got like 25 hours on it. It's got some work. So I wish I remember what the acronym was, but we had a German teacher. Like you had to be clean cut, clean shaven every morning on time. So a lot of that came from that, but they used to bug cars. So I learned the diagnosis through that. And I think Justin had learned the same thing. He went with GM and we kind of learned the same thing. You learn diagnosis from there and kind of worked your way into this stuff.

Which is not a fun task for anybody.

So then did you take that approach when it came to like, again, diagnosing like how to make a car run better, I guess? Or was that something that you were taught from like your mentor or a combination of both?

Me.

Telling him I am his biggest critic.

So, where it really started is when she had a faster car than me and then I had to build a faster car than her and it went back and forth. So, that pushed you to learn things about cars, right?

I will tell him every f*** up he makes.

Yeah, or she's the driver. Every car, like she's like, no, that's not right. Like she'll go drive all the cars and make sure everything meets that.

Because we drive completely different, which the customer drives completely different.

So, I saw you on Netflix with, you know, launch, you're driving a manual, which is already harder, right? There's no MoTec, there was no MoTec in that car that time, right? No, no, no. Are you just as good at stick, too?

Hell no.

No?

No.

Well, on the show, you were just like, my s***, like that's basically what you said.

Well, the first stick car she bought, we had to call my little brother for him.

It was a Mazda Speed 3.

Him to drive her car home. She bought a stick car and never drove a stick car.

So, I was like, I'm buying this car. I don't know how to drive a stick, but I'm going to learn. And so, I had his brother drive home because we had to go up hills, right? So, I was like, I'm not driving to burn up the clubs first day. And then, I learned how to drive in a Mazda Speed 3, which is not the easiest stick to learn in. And then, every car after that, all the BMWs, which is the easiest car to learn to stick in.

Any Grudge Race we have.

But I would pick, even to this day, I would pick a manual car over an auto. To this day, still, I don't care if I'm drag racing or not. I will still pick a stick.

It is more fun.

I will still pick a stick.

That's why you got DCT, right, Dan?

Well, again, I spent my, how I learned to drive a stick, my dad gave me like a rough, like we went out a little bit. We had a 90 Beretta, Indianapolis 500 pace car, Teal. And it was great. It was cool. I really loved that car. But anyway, my dad, one day, he had a, we were a GM family at one point in time. He had like a 90s Cutlass Supreme, right? 3100, whatever. It had to go to the shop for something. And he was like, I need you to come get me. I was like, the only car here is the Beretta. And he's like, and I'm like, it's a stick. And he's like, so f****** what? And he hangs up the phone. And I'm like, I guess I better go get him.

So, yeah, I can top you on that one. I was like 13. My dad had an 86 Corvette and we lived on the mountains, right? Yeah, he just parked this Corvette on the hill, mountain like this and was like, no hill assist. Yeah, no hill assist. He was like, go. And I'm like, yeah, I failed immensely. Started to cry, didn't drive stick till I bought that Mazda speeder.

If we set up a Grudge Race anywhere though, right? The first question people ask, who's driving? Always, it's the same s***. And they'll take the bet if I'm driving, she's driving, they're like, I'm gonna think twice about this one.

That's awesome. That's legit.

I have daughters and my 14 year old is very much into all of this. She's actually gonna be racing snowmobiles next weekend.

Oh, cool.

She's 14. I just bought an 88 turbo coupe, two, three turbo, five speed. That's what she's gonna learn how to drive stick on.

She will get hooked from that. She won't turn back.

Oh, she's already hooked. She goes to Texas 2K.

Yeah, she went to Cash Nails with us last year.

You'll meet her in a month when we're back here.

We'll be there all week.

She's awesome.

You guys said you're going to Texas 2K?

We'll be there all week.

Yeah, we're going with this car and then-

Come by, we might have a stripper pole, who knows?

Which car? The yellow one is going.

Sounds good to me.

Then, right now, our buddy's finished not finishing. We're just starting a twin turbo kit, and we're planning on making that with Tex 2K with an M182 in it. All new, turbo 400, a whole new car. We're going to go learn it at Tex 2K.

Yeah.

The world stage of- We got a few days.

It's the best place to learn, right?

Yeah.

We got five days of testing, so I'm hoping that at least I could get it on the trans break before we-

There's people that go there with months of testing, and I still see them tore apart in the pit.

Yeah.

So it's like, it happens.

That'll be me at three in the morning trying to get s*** figured out. We'll make it.

Be in the bag, we'll be the loud ones.

Yeah.

We watched, was it Trans Am Driver completely tear apart a car and rebuild it while we were at Road America?

I wish I got photo or video of this thing because literally I think it was like midnight.

We went to bed about 1230 and it was in a lot of pieces. All there was was a cage. The sun comes up and we're like, f*** yeah.

Is that the challenger that got first place?

Yeah, he won that day.

Well, that's cool.

Luckily, it's a 16 year old driver by the way.

Luckily at Texas 2K, enough GTRs break. We have plenty of f****** time in between the race. So you don't even, that is the biggest hurry up and wait. Like if you took a shot every time a GTR broke something, that was our game last year. Yeah, one of the years we did that. But you have plenty of time, they're like in between for whole track well downs. But yeah.

So real quick, so you said you're basically completely redoing this car?

This car is pretty much ready to go. We're going to play with some tire sizes.

This one's ready to go.

The one that's in the fab shop right now, barely has exhaust manifolds on it. That's getting twin turbo kit on it.

So it's got a twin turbo kit. You said a TH400 as well?

It's got it in there already. I just got to switch it to a different gear set.

An M180.

And I got to switch it from an M130 to an M182.

Oh my God, I forgot about the trains.

Yeah, that one's coming too. Yeah, we're changing it to like a more custom gear ratio. Yeah, it's literally less than a month to be out there for that.

Well, in the fashion of jumping around kind of like what we're doing here, can we talk a little bit about the TH400s and stuff like that then?

Well, before we jump into that, because we are going to stay on this topic real quick. So, if you wanted to do the whole M182, I mean, this is strong, it's strong.

M182.

Somebody say Coyote. Got it. Because I didn't want to ask this for the last 10 minutes. So, let's say you get a car and you want to do a M182 right out of the gate. How long does it take you to do that? What's the to-do list? What does it cost? If you want to go full MoTec.

This is a perfect example of it because it was dropped off to us.

If he says Monday, I'm going to lose it.

No, like that car got done in a weekend. Like full drop. I'll give it three days. But it just came down to the scheduling, right? He called me, we talked. He's like, we talked about all the different versions of MoTec. We ordered it. That took like six to eight weeks to order it. It came in, not even a whole week until we were at the track. I'm talking from on, tuned, dinoed at the track, and it went those 15 rounds into... He signed up for like three classes. And I was like, this is either going to go really good for us or really bad. And it just went really well. And what stopped us is it broke a belt. Like that was the last thing that...

No, an axle.

Oh no, sorry. We broke a nine inch axle.

I was like, we replaced the belt.

It's an independent suspension, so it's not like a real nine inch. It's kind of a center section, but we broke an axle on it is the only reason we stopped. But I think that car turned in like three days.

Yeah, three days.

The harnesses are all on the Camaro.

I don't like cars in here for long. I don't like dust. I don't want to rewash that.

I don't like dust.

So it was quick. So like some of these cars are waiting on motors or blower ports. Like every one of these cars in here, the most extensive builds, the turbo one, that one was dropped off. Like he had spent like three years kind of picking out, doing little things, and he was dropped off, said, finish this. So that one's the biggest job to finish, but like I don't want to keep cars in here that long, but like a full MoTec set up, like no more than a week. Really.

All right, so ports Kong or Jokers.

We work with Kong. We back from the day we started our business, we worked with Kong. We had one of the first 3100s on her ZR1 motor Mustang. So we had that. So my relationship-

He's awesome to work with.

We're real big on relationships, right? Like LME, we use everything engine. We've used them since the day we've opened.

I don't care what people claim. I don't like their fake claims.

No, that's it. I'm a very loyal person like that too. Until you screw me, then we need to die.

I don't care about that. It's all b*******.

Our relationship is like text message based with Greg. Anything. We have questions with stuff. We are indeed blower ports before. So our relationships, really anybody we've used is pretty much since day one, we've used them. And Kong was- I had his shirt on on the Netflix show. Like he was the one. He did that. And then like Monster had sponsored the clutch on that car. And like we-

our relationship- We're working with Steve with Monster. Like we do Monster on every stick car here.

To Kong.

It's a 50-50 answer every time we ask it.

So he's good. He's got a good program going.

Yeah.

Okay, go ahead.

No, I can go. I had to shut you down for a second. We don't really get into transmissions a lot. And I listened to a little bit of the go hard one. And so like why the TH400? You know, I've got a car with a 6R80. I've got a TR6060. I've got a DCT.

Sounds expensive.

Yeah.

That's why, money.

Yeah, really. I looked him up quick. While I was listening, he was trying to sleep and I was driving and I literally Googled like $2,500 bucks like for a TH400 is what I was seeing online.

Money is a good reason why. It's just us two.

I don't want.

Take the Corvette out of the equation, right? It's incredibly difficult to do a Turbo 400. That's expensive. I haven't even, I've done power glides on very few race cars. So let's take it down to a Camaro, right? Very cost effective and it's just consistency. The transmission will go years, no changes to it.

Four years.

Yeah, that car, that transmission has never been out of that car. And that's a stock first gear, stock case. I don't even know if it has an ultra bell on it. And that car has not, the transmission has not been out since 2020.

And it goes out all the time.

It's just the gear ratio when paired right with the rear end is just super consistent.

Well, they usually dumb into a four, nine inch, right? So, yeah. Yeah. Everybody has their home run that they hit with the OEs, right? Like, yeah.

So the, that setup, like if you're going to race the car competitively, consistency, you know, the trucks that when I first started hearing about like the cost of 10 speeds, these dudes were grudge racing these trucks and like 10 passes having to redo the transmissions or it missed a shift and they got 20 grand on the line.

They're inconsistent.

They're just inconsistent. The eight speed, yes, we could tune it. Yes, it will live. Yes, you could have fun with it, but it will not be as fast as a turbo 400 as consistent as a turbo 400. Yes, is there somebody who's done a glory pass and holds the record, micro record or whatever it may be, four and eight speed, 10 speed, six speed, whatever it is? Yeah. Cool. You did it. Awesome. Props. I'm still going to have the same transmission in my car. We haven't had problems with it. You could refresh it with clutches and stuff for under a grand, if you have to go through it after a whole couple of years of racing. So consistent, you ain't going to hurt it. You just keep having fun with it. You get a trans break. I think it's a way more competitive transmission across the-

People work with what they know, right? So like stock ECUs, they're going to work with stock transmissions, because that's what they know. To venture out into transmission swaps, to standalone ECUs, that's branching out.

Yeah.

It's out of the box.

You got to find the right customer, too. But like you're not going to... Can you drive a Turbo 400 on the street, on the freeway at 60 miles? Yes. Can you daily it? Would I drive it every single day? Probably not. Could you?

Yeah. Yeah, of course. People do it all the time.

Yeah. I drove one, like the other weekend.

I drove with a 69 Camaro. I was like, yes.

Yeah, it could be driven. It's just... People think they're chopping up their car, and if you look in that car or his car, they look stock. Like the M&M shifters in there, they look very nice. If you're going to grudge race and race competitively, I think that transmission is superior. That's why a lot of the classes today, to race in a late model class, you got to fill out a mortgage application to fit into the class. There's like nine steps, and all of them are kicking out the Turbo 400s. There's rumors that Tex2K was kicking out Turbo 400s.

Streetcar takeover.

Streetcar takeover took out Turbo 400s. So it's like they're trying to level the playing field, but obviously there's a known superiority to a Turbo 400 if every one of these promoters is knocking out the race.

It gets weird when you start doing regulations like that, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, like Becca was talking about that, like with...

Or put it in its own class, I guess, if you really want to do it.

Don't get rid of it.

Most, not all some, most are not even leaving in the first gear of the trans ratio. So you take an eight-speed, if they're leaving second or a 10-speed, you're leaving in second, and they're not getting to their overdrive gears. So what's the 10-speed flex or the eight-speed flex when you're not even using those gears that you're treating it like a turbo 400?

Because they could drive it to their grocery store just like they did from factory.

Well, we were talking about that with your T56 that you were doing. I was like, you probably only made it to third or whatever anyway when you were making that hit.

And I went through multiple clutches. Like it was a pain in the a** of how much we were beating up on it. I put a power...

Well, stick shift's a whole nother level of problems.

I put a power glide in it, problem solved.

Like nothing, there's no problems. I think that's more costly than an automatic situation.

You have to be baller. I've heard Bugetti talk about that on his podcast. Those people are just a glutton for punishment.

That's it. Yeah, that's it, man. We came to the point, I was like, I can't afford being a stick shift racer. Can't afford it, don't want to do it.

And I guess you might get known for that, right? Like I did a bunch of Turbo 400s, so then you get known for it, and then I get more people who want to do it and swap them.

You're not getting the tip of the cap as much as you used to, right? It used to be like, oh, you're a stick shift, like, you know, bravo to you, and that's not, that's getting, that's way more outplayed now than it used to be.

It's rare with stick shifts.

It is, I mean, nothing in here is stick that one. And that car made three passes and broke the diff. Like, if you don't, if your driving style doesn't, you know, if your driving style can't control power like that, it'll break some s***.

What kind of power is that one making, by the way?

1100.

Oh, that's fun.

Yeah, and it's 2650, so it's making all its torque at 3000 RPM.

And we had it at 7 pounds?

No, it was probably somewhere in there too. Yeah, probably 14 pounds or something.

Dump the clutch, and it's like...

And there was no stronger stubs for that. It happens, you know, it's part of having a stick car. Yeah. But it was on like an 18 inch rear wheel, so it's a real hard tire that just that driveline shock just pissed it off, I think.

You get anybody in here who wants a road course build?

I was literally thinking that looking at this car like 30 seconds ago.

What's crazy is you could hear, there's a road course like G2 is right here, like it's super loud all weekend.

A mile and a half away.

Like a mile away, but there's another Corvette shop down the street that I think has that clientele pretty much done.

Like I want to be able to knowledge, like talk about it with knowledge, you know, like I don't know much.

Like outside of putting like mensters on a car, like for drag racing, I don't know much about like, you know, we put 15-inch conversion, 9-inch for 400.

I can build you a really nice road course or autocross cam. Like we've done that before. We've done that. I understand the needs, right? We could totally build it.

I've done like some cool LS7 road course stuff that's still around. I've done some ZL11LE stuff.

People are opinionated on the LS7. You got any thoughts on it?

Oh, I love it.

Yeah, that's probably, that's to me, like that's one of the, like minus the LS9 between those two are like this, as far as naturally.

I have a FitGen Z28, that's like my dream car.

As far as naturally aspirated, like that was a killer car.

So much fun. And what the thing about road course or autocross, some classes are limited by horsepower, right? So they have to meet what, 460?

Yeah, I was like, I had to tune it down to 450 or something, like it was something.

450. So it's like, that's fun. Like I find that really cool.

But the LT almost mimics like an LS7, like these cars make power on like a naturally aspirated heads cam makes similar power to an LS7. LS7 had better intake valve, like there's some different things in there, but it's very similar. There's nothing like a 7,500 RPM rev in LS7. It's just a cool car. And the chop of the cam, like that's.

We've got a friend of ours that he calls it Baby Girl, and I don't think he, I think he'll be buried in it. And he just bought and sold a C8 Z06. I bet he'll have a ZR1 on order. He has the means to get basically whatever he wants, but he's like, this car is a 5th gen Z28, right?

Yeah.

He's like.

That's another level. That's like my dream car, mine, other than what I already have. That's my dream car, but for the one that I don't have, that's my other one.

You don't see a lot of LS7 stuff?

I mean, we still do C6s. It's just now like the C7 is just more popular.

Well, it's all become, I don't want to say affordable, but it's a lot more accessible, especially like this generation of Camaros as well.

The Z06 with the carbon surround, that was $110,000, $115,000 car.

You have like 60 or 70 now?

Yeah, it's got to be like half that, but it was crazy when that car came out, that was untouchable. Now, you see a lot more of them, but I can't imagine that being a $120,000 car with all the carbon. Holy cow.

These cars are getting crazy expensive anyway, now to get something new and cool.

Yeah, like we were talking with Calvo today, like this freaking Toyota TRD, what is it, Tacoma? It's like it probably starts at like 60.

Yeah.

It's like everything's just expensive.

You know, the Sequoias were going for like 90 grand. I was like, I could get a Land Rover for that.

Toyota lasts you forever though.

What does your clientele look like? Is it all eighth mile, quarter mile? You mentioned you don't do really much of anything on the road course. What do people come to you for?

Daily drivers.

Daily drivers.

So I would say a very-

I got a great Toyota out there for daily drivers.

I'm sorry, a very small-

I'll put a Maggie on that.

Yeah, we will. We actually do Toyotas.

I do Maggie's on Toyotas and Tundras.

I don't post that.

Random little thing. We're a dealer for Magnusson.

We're a dealer for Magnusson.

So you just run a Magnusson tune then or do you just-

Straight to it. I've done a lot of them.

But honestly, about 95, maybe 97% of our clientele is just the one that sits in his garage or it's his daily driver. The 19 to 25-year-old may be still living at home, just wants to modify his car, just wants it to sound cool, be faster than his friend.

She's talking about me, by the way.

Not racing, right? They have to always say, I don't race it. But I say, so when you say not racing, does that mean like you don't gas it? No, I'll gas it, I'll, you know, gas it from, then you're racing it, okay? If you're stretching its legs out, you're racing it.

Yeah, maybe the word racing throws people off, but yeah.

But it's like they think that if they're not on a racetrack or drag strip, that they don't race. And that's not the case. Like you, if you're gassing it from light to light to light, you're probably putting more stress than an average race car.

Like your ZL1 customer, it's not uncommon for somebody to say, I want a thousand horsepower. That's like the staple of one of those. With a stock blower, it could be done spinning it to moon, but like a 2650 on a stock bottom end, port injection, thousand horsepower, that's a pretty common build to do those, stock motor.

They don't do nothing with it.

Yeah, they might not race it. And then you got some, like this car, he races it any chance he could get in it.

That's a small percentage of racer that we have.

Very small percentage like that will race it constantly.

But I'll get your guy that wants to make a thousand horsepower on stock street tires, and he'll bring it in for an oil change, and it's got 93 octane in it.

Yeah, when I see him come in on 93, I'm like.

I'm like, what are you doing? Like, why did you pay me to build you a thousand horsepower car, and you've got 93 octane in it? You know, well, it just sits, okay.

Yeah, it's a lot.

They like to say what's done to it. They want to say they've got more things done to it, maybe to their friends, maybe to themselves. I don't care why you want to say what you have done to it, you know?

I mean, the competition keeps the industry alive too, the friends that are faster and well, this one did this, I want to do that. So whatever keeps the industry going, I'm good with it.

We know shops that are building cars for like neighbors or like friends and they want, like they're keeping it secret from each one, right? Like either one doesn't know that their same cars are at the same shop. It's such a crazy.

We'll treat it like that. Sometimes I won't let people in the shop. Like I do treat it like a doctor's office. You got to watch it. Sometimes cars get sold and like, give me all the information on this car. Well, is this guy just trying to scope out what's done to that car? Like we've always from day one, we keep it like, Grudge Racing is big here. Like that's why you don't see us posting time slips, anything like that. But we treat it like a doctor's office as far as confidentiality between what people are doing. And there's some that want to put everything out there and they're happy to-

I have a majority of people that don't want to say what's done to their builds.

Yeah, I'm one of those guys. Yeah, don't talk about it. Like when I got my Whipple, it came with all these stickers to put on the car and I'm like, nope.

And so that's why people come to us because they know we're quiet about it. We're not going to talk about it.

California, there was no such thing as turning the boards off. Your times were lit every time. That was a new concept like when we had left, that they finally stopped turning off the boards. Here we moved to Texas, no boards are lit. It's just that's how this scene is. It makes it a lot more challenging if you're going to talk s*** to that guy. If you have no clue what that car runs, you're going to be a little more humble because you're going to take your money. Or vice versa.

It's gambling. It's all gambling on you.

So it's just who crosses the line first then.

Line up and see what happens. Whatever staging games happen.

Don't have to be a faster car.

Yeah. A little bit of the California stuff was we never raced side by side. The lanes went into each other at the end of the track, so we didn't get a lot of exposure to staging games and everything that goes on at the tree.

That sounded super sketchy, by the way. When I was listening to your episode on Go Hard, I'm like-

It is super sketchy.

They run cars together, but the one lane merges.

The circle track would come in, so you had two lanes, and then the circle track would come into this lane at the end, so they would have to merge. So you'd have to be very nice to the man next to you to let them in.

You'd be magic on a hunter.

It's just like Yellow Belly. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it cuts in just the same way. But something we're familiar with, so we're not discouraged by it. But we like race tracks that are like obstacle courses.

She does, I'm good. When we moved here, I had another Mustang small tire, SN95. Had a real motor in it though, not one of them Ford motors. I swapped that one too. And the first track we went to is Yellow Belly. And my car at that time was pristine. I was like, oh my gosh, what'd we move to? This is where I'm gonna race this car? And then I went to XRP and I was like, all right, good. But she went to Yellow Belly and was like, I'm good. This is where I wanna race. But I liked XRP. It was just a really clean track and your car didn't get dusty. Yellow Belly, you're parking in wherever. It could be rocks, grass, dirt, whatever's going on there.

But yeah, so majority of our customers is just the average guy or lady that wants just more, whether it's sound, whether it's, they could tell their friends who makes this much horsepower, whether they could list off the amount of parts that they have, whatever.

Let's take it down to one thing like E85 conversion. That's like if you had to pick the number one thing I'm doing to most cars is E85 conversion and like cams.

Wait, you mean not everybody's making 1,000 horsepower like the Internet says?

The one I just finished today made 420. That's all over the place.

Calm down.

447.

I was going to say that sounds like a VW GTI numbers.

Yeah, I know the Internet's really made it hard for us. Like people's expectations of making, you know, they think that they're going to pay for a tune to make a thousand. And then they see 447 and they're just like, how do these people get to a thousand? Right? Money.

Yeah.

Money.

There's nothing reliable, nothing 100% reliable about a thousand horsepower.

No.

You could safeguard everything you can, but there is nothing reliable, especially like a ZL1, it's expected to make a thousand wheel on a stock bottom end. That motor has main bearing issues from the factory. The main bearing is built into three pieces that comes apart. If you are a bad luck owner in general, bad luck in life and you bought a ZL1, you might be one of the ones that wins that lottery and it takes out the main bearing.

You know, those coyotes live at a thousand for a good long life.

They do.

What's your shot, sir? Yeah.

What is the recipe on three turbo kit, thousand wheel, go seven, put a power glide in it, turbo four hundred.

Have fun.

They stink. You lock your cams out.

Mustangs?

No. Don't lock the cams out.

I don't know.

See, that's how much I know. You get a little higher than that than you could.

Oil pump gears. You got to do those.

Yeah.

See, depending who you ask for it.

I know my Ford.

We got away from Mustangs in 2018.

Yeah, just like we tuned Coyote, we did Dodge, Ford and GM. It's just you can't be everything to everybody.

You can't be best at everything.

No, didn't work out.

So I picked GM and I just had a history with it. We stayed with it.

We like the clientele.

And then we're diving into the MoTecs. We're picking our niche and trying to stay with what we know really well and do that.

So when it comes to 1,000 horsepower, there's the cheap way and then there's the best way to make 1,000 horsepower. I will hear like, well, hold on, it's not that much. You can make 1,000 horsepower with this setup and this setup. Let's take the Zeal one as an example. What's the best way, not the cheapest way to make 1,000 on it?

So you want to keep a stock motor or we want to do-

No, let's do the best way. The best, most efficient way, 2650 for triple system heads cam port injection.

Okay.

That's the easiest way. On the stock bottom end. You're going to have to touch the motor.

And now the cheap way.

What's the cheap way?

So the cheap way is more of an auxiliary fuel pump, right?

Methanol and we don't even do methanol anymore. I don't install methanol.

Somebody else can do, but you're not going to make- Yeah, I guess you do it with methanol. Methanol, you're not going to do port injection. You're not going to do the triple pump in the- So it's like we build something that, okay, you're going to make 1,000 and then that's it. You can't grow from here or you can make 1,000 and you can have space. It's like, do you want to just be at the very limit of it or do you want to be able to grow after you build the motor and add more boost?

It's like 1,000.

There's two ways of building it. That's how I sell it. It's like, is that all you're going to want to do because you're going to come up to me in six months. I'm like, I want to make 1,200 and I'll be like, well, guess what? Everything you just did because you wanted a budget to only make that 1,000, now we have to redo it now to make that 1,200.

I think the medical term is u******** it.

Yes.

And all this s***. So like 1,000 wheel, we just did a C7 to go 1,000 wheel the right way with MoTec, high quality parts, 2,650 heads cam, triple fuel system. It's like $60,000. Smooth boost, expansion tanks, like that's the right way.

Inner chiller, like this is cooling.

Yeah, everything.

Only thing it didn't include is driveline. Yeah.

So that's your price point. Like heads cam on one of these cars with exhaust, I think is with 25,000, with the blower, the 2,650 on it.

Not even.

Okay. You see, that's why I'm just a janitor.

Yeah, he's just a janitor.

You guys like those inner chillers?

I love them.

Really? It's such a cool concept to me. I was going to do that on my car.

So it's such a cool concept, right? So why did you stray away from that?

I can't remember why I did it. I think it was, I didn't do anything super crazy. I added, I'm doing another intercooler pump and I just went with a bigger core and a bigger heat exchanger. I'm just, I'm upgrading a lot of stuff. I'm not saying that I won't go to the bench. I didn't do anything crazy. I think it was, at that point it was, I didn't want to pay for it and then I had heard stories about it dripping and stuff onto the track, is that, so they can frost up or they condensate.

There's two modes, like you could put it in a race mode, which will only circulate between, it does not circulate into the AC in the car.

Okay, so-

This is forced induction, by the way. I don't know any other brand.

Yeah, no, that's all I have. I only, yeah.

I don't know any other brand.

Well, you guys, where you're from, don't have a lack of ice. Have you ever been to Texas on a summer day trying to go to the track? You stop by Bucky's, you stop by everywhere, no ice. No ice, right?

So, August, sometimes you can't get ice. So, it's like, you're screwed.

You just idle one of those cars.

So, do you have an inner chiller on it? Guess what? You could turn on your AC. And dripping has not been an issue.

You could stick it, like they come with real cool tape. You could tape around stuff. There's even paint. You could paint the tanks with that will hold the condensation. But it does go into race mode. And that's another thing MoTec controls. I could put that into, let's say, their track setting and kick the inner chiller just into race mode. So, you could basically make it not come into the cabin. And that's what's getting dripping is the cabin.

I would say for 99% of people, your inner chiller is going to be the best bet for you. Who wants to put in ice? It goes out in like two minutes. I mean, who does that benefit? Just your hardcore racer that's going to dump ice and fill it, right? But your guy that's roll racing, your driver that's just on the street, just gassing it light to light, somebody that's just driving in the summertime, the inner chiller is going to work for everybody.

Corvette is super tight. Yeah, I could see things going wrong and maybe people get the wrong idea of it. It's tight. It is up against the framerail between the headers. You got to make sure you insulate everything good. There's kits I've seen that look like they were built at Home Depot, but the stuff we build, they gotta make some nice stuff. It's got nice fittings.

When I say price, it was like $1,200 or something for an inner chiller. It wasn't anything crazy, but I road course my car. I don't.

It'd be perfect for that.

Yeah, so I'm not doing it 10 seconds at a time. I'm beating the living s*** out of my car for 30 minutes at a time.

So ice is not an option for you. That's why you're going larger air cooler.

I'm upping the volume, so I did get an ice tank, but not to put ice in. I'm just getting more volume and fluid and all that.

Same thing with the inner chiller. You still have to expand the capacity.

A lot of people don't do that.

And even in a ZL1, it's not the hardest thing, but it's a hard thing to tell a customer, I want you to put a tank in your fender to expand the fluid capacity for the blower. In the customer's head, that's not a dollar for dollar gain in power number. You rip one of these cars down the track and then try to do it again right after, it's going to be down a bunch of power.

60, about 60.

Yeah, well if you ever sat there with a PD blower running and you watch your IATs climb, you're going to go, holy s***.

Same s***, if you at least move two and a half gallons into the fender and keep it as a reservoir when you need it.

That's the hardest thing for me to say, oh, surprisingly, it's just a fender tank for an expansion tank. And that's the hardest thing for me to explain to people.

Like there's air in the blowers.

But that's the most beneficial modification you could do to a PD blower, right? Yep, yep.

What's the cost of something like that?

600 bucks.

Yeah, I don't see why you would not do that.

Because a pulley sounds cooler.

Yeah.

And you can see a pulley.

More boost, right? More boost.

No, I learned early on and expensively learned that cooling is like your number one biggest. And even just when I run, I'll run at Road America in my car and I'll run in the morning when it's nice and cool. And then I'll lose three seconds running in the afternoon because the car isn't running nearly, you're not getting nearly as much power.

And then Inner Chiller would keep it consistent.

And imagine idling this car through the staging lanes with a PD blower for 20 minutes in August.

And they just let it idle. Don't get me wrong. They just let it idle for 10 minutes. And if you have an Inner Chiller, it likes that. So it's more beneficial to you. So it's perfect for the average consumer to get an Inner Chiller rather than an ice tank that basically your only hardcore racer is going to be able to use the ice tank. Not your average consumer.

Data for data, ice tanks are colder. If you could pack-

If you're a racer, like I said, if you're a hardcore racer, I'm an ice girl. I'll do ice, right? That's what I've grown up with. I'm old school. I know what's going in. I could feel it. I could touch it. I know when I'm taking it out, how hot it is or how cold it is. Like I want to touch it. But like if it was just a daily cruiser, like, oh, inner chiller all day.

And it comes down to like the strategy.

This 1400 horsepower Camaro has an inner chiller, like no ice. It works perfectly for him.

One of the other reasons I didn't want to go ice, and if I do add something to my tank, it will be like frozen bottles of water that I'll add in there because also we put our cars away in the winter. I don't have to flush that whole system out and put antifreeze back in.

And that's serious. I consider that a serious racer. Like your average guy is not going to do that.

No. Because if I have to take the water out, otherwise I'm going to get in the winter and it's going to freeze and everything's going to crack and break and then I'm f*****.

Yes, yes.

I learned that one the hard way.

Yeah, me too.

Well, I think once, I remember one of our friends, when we first traveled here, I lived in California my whole f****** life. So we never saw cold weather. And we get here and we traveled through New Mexico and everything in a stacker with two race cars.

It was 19 degrees. It was just me.

And he was like, did you put coolant on those things? I was like, oh f***. And it ended up like popping. It popped like the blower cooler line off or something. Like it froze something. But I was like, oh man, she's going to make it here. I'm going to need two blocks. Like we're done. It never even was a thought that you had to deal with.

New Mexico was cold. It was 19. There was frost all over the stacker, like in the front, like it was like ice frost. I was like, this is bad.

I've seen somebody doing that with a trailer and they had heaters going in the trailer.

Smart.

Yes, we've got that now.

Yeah, Nick, there you go.

Try to start a methanol car on a 20 degree morning of a race. Like every heater in the camp is in people's trailers heating them up. I used to put heaters on. I mean, this car is an oil pan heater. I got now I've gotten a little nicer than putting a space heater under the used Toronto oil pan heater. Toronto oil pan heater will fire up eventually. Little brake cleaner in the blower. It'll be all right.

We upgraded.

I've seen people do that like up north. If you don't have a garage where they just like tarp a tent over the car, then they put one of those kerosene heaters in underneath there so they can work on their truck.

Savage.

No, I'm bougie now. It's probably 68 in here.

Yeah, and our chillers like are really good. I mean, we used to be against it, too, and we don't even know what reason. It's just in our old school minds.

Home Depot, like you went to the plumbing section.

They were bad back in the day.

Oh, s***. Yeah.

They were bad back in the day.

It's changed.

But now they have improved and for the average consumer.

The greatest thing in the world, somebody will find some way to talk s*** about it online. It's like you start reading and you get down this rabbit hole and it's hard.

We look at, we see things in multiples, right? So it's like we're not just looking at one where that person just had their one bad experience.

What about that review from today? What was that review again, Dan, that you were reading?

What was it? Was it a restaurant we were going to go to? What was it?

Oh God, why didn't you call us?

No, it was your supplement thing, right?

Oh yeah, I was getting some supplement stuff. I had a bug before we left, so I was trying to get some prebiotics and I went in and I got this stuff and it had really good reviews and I found one review was like, she's like, I bought this for my boyfriend and he left me. I was like, it's a prebiotic supplement. Like, what are you talking about? It was super weird.

The internet is giving the power to that.

This doesn't have anything to do with the product or anything. Like, all of a sudden, were you making him sick? And all of a sudden, his gut started feeling better. So he's like, what am I doing with this b**** and he left?

Like, I don't know what's going on.

That explains like reviews, big restaurants, anywhere.

It's crazy.

I have to admit, I have a problem and I'll buy things off of Instagram and I'll look at all the comments before I buy it, and they're all good. But then when you buy it and you realize all those comments were bots, and you're just like, no way in hell this was good. You are all on cr-

Same thing with a TikTok shop, which granted I have friends that have made some serious money off of it, but they'll be in groups, like those Discord groups, and it's like, all right, go comment on my new video. Oh my God, this is the greatest product ever.

Yeah, and it's not.

And then they make 10 grand off of the f******. Serious interviewer.

I am a professional.

I am a professional, yes. So obviously, we've been doing this for some time.

Is it the gray hairs?

I know, we got gray hairs now.

You did talk about when you started and how long you guys have been around.

We used to follow a couple around, like we street raced them. They were like the older couple.

Shout out to Jenny and Eric.

Jenny and Eric, they were like the role models. They just like always had cool s***. Like I think we turned into the old people now. Like I'll sit somewhere, I'm like, f*** all you m************ are 20.

People are going to be walking up to you like what's up OG?

I learned bet when I moved to Texas, I know a bet.

I was like, why does this guy just say bet?

Fact.

Thank you, Diego.

Cap'n. But Diego, I never knew what bet was. What the f*** is bet, man?

This guy wants to bet me.

Yeah. Yeah, some of the old people have been doing it.

Sadly, I try to keep up, but when you do get your old age, you get to a point where you're like, I don't give a f***.

That's where I fall. I hang out with a lot of 20-year-olds.

Yeah, he just travels the country with me now, and I'm the older one between the two of us.

Not really though.

Not really. Yeah. So, I'm 25, he's 42.

He gave me a very good comment the other day. Yeah.

See, that's what I sit around with all the time.

I know. He gave me a good comment the other day. He was like, you're 25 when I need you to be, and 40 when I need you to be. So, I do have my moments where I'm an absolute child, and then when we're partying with Justin White in Vegas, I can very much be 25.

Well, we can be 25 at Texas 2K.

Yeah?

Texas 2K a party. Yeah. It's stressful all day, and then it's...

That's what I've noticed. Like everything just chills out. I was like, breathe.

And it ends pretty quick.

When that moment happens, it's just like all the stress.

I think everything ends at sundown.

And then the Roll Racing Day when we don't got s*** to do because I have no Roll Race cars there.

Yeah.

That's a good time. So about us being old.

Can we change the subject? Why did I know that was going to come up?

No, no, no. So what I was getting at there is like, obviously you've been through some experiences doing this, whether it was your old job or you starting your business. What has been the most daunting or scary thing that you've had to learn or adapt to? Because I'm sure that's come along at some point, right?

Moving states.

Yeah.

Moving states.

We moved, officially opened the shop February of 2020 in Texas.

What a great time to open.

Yeah.

So what a great time to open.

That was our first time in a gym, by the way.

Yeah. So we, COVID hit, obviously, and imagine being brand new, no clue where your next dollar was going to come from, opening a brand new shop in a brand new state with brand new people.

What a good state to open in, by the way. You know how f***** you would have been in California. Yes, 100%.

Great state.

I mean, this is a great state.

But the car market blew up with COVID. But the problem was you couldn't get parts. That was the other f****** problem.

So we got screwed with that.

Good thing we're booked out.

I'm not for what they did with the stimulus and how much it f***** up the economy, but guess what was $1,200 at the time? A flex fuel tank. Guess what a lot of $1,200 payments went out to say? If I gave COVID credit for something.

That's actually a really good time for us.

But the only thing that during COVID that was real was our business complex was normal. Life didn't change there and the racetracks didn't change.

So COVID didn't really affect us.

Clyde would get on Instagram live drunk as well, like talking s*** on-

The best social distancing was gapping pools. Yeah. 100%. It was.

Drinking at the bar at XRP.

Do you care for your health? Yeah, well, 20 years ago.

I'm going to keep them away. But the track was like nothing changed. The world stopped everywhere else. The race track was the same. It worked out. It was okay. We expanded our business.

But moving your home and your business to a completely different state was probably the most stressful time of our life. We probably gained 40 pounds from it. Very stressful. Did a lot of drinking.

When you switch, the first huge jump off the cliff was like a W2 job, making good money into self-employed. Then you got to learn all that s***. And then we ran that course for a little bit. And then to go to a whole new state, we knew the product, we knew the market.

I was doing a lot of networking. Like I said, I moved out here six months before he did. So I would go to car meets. I would go to local racetracks. I met everybody that I could that I wanted to talk to.

Netflix probably had a helping hand in that, just because people knew the car. So that broke the ice. And then we both had cars at the time, and we had a stacker, and we were always at the tracks. We sponsored flashlight shootout, which was a pretty cool race. 1320 interviewed us and stuff.

That's cool.

Just a lot of stuff added on, but it was just, we had so much passion. We never worried about it. It was scary, but I think we knew we loved what we did. So the passion really drove that, and everything came with it, because we just were all in it.

I think we really help each other in this. I know Julio, he does this, and he doesn't have, Bailey's awesome, but she has her own job. He's doing that on his own, opening up a shop. But it's like, I feel that we're a little power force in it. And people might hate me, and that's why they might not do business with us, because I'm the person they interact with the most. It's me.

Well, they need somebody to hate.

Right, right, right.

You get the phone call that's like, can I talk to somebody who knows about this? She's like, yeah, can I help you? And then you can tell the tone's already off.

Oh, yeah.

Right off the bat. And you know.

You know, it's like, you're gonna get people that don't wanna work with you, right? Because typically a female's not answering and answering every question for you and building your whole build with you. And then it gets passed off to him, you know, after they've already committed.

But are you also working on the cars as well? No, no, no.

I don't touch cars. Nope, nope. That's not my forte.

But you work so much with him that you have an understanding.

In the beginning, every two seconds, she's like, when we first started, like she always knew cars. Always, right. But she would come out in the shop and ask questions. Now you could put a $60,000 quote together, a full MoTec build and never even say one word to me about anything on that car and know exactly how to do it.

And he would just show up and he's like, what do I got to do? He just reads the list and then he does it, right? Yeah, but it comes from. So it's like, yes, having me as the front face might be a problem, but you know, maybe it might not be.

And both of us at two in the morning, like wake up like, oh f***, so do we order that part? Like we're very all in in this. You leave your nine to five to work five to nine, right? Like we're very all in at all hours 24-7, and we take it home with us like when you shouldn't, like we'll take it home, but we care that much about our business that we're having fun. We're obsessed with it.

Well, somebody has to do that part of the job too, right? Like you can't run every aspect of the business as one individual, either of you, right?

You couldn't, this could not be done with, I could not do this myself 100%, like the time it takes.

And I couldn't do this without him, so.

I was, we were just talking about putting my phone on gray scale and all that stuff and like.

I could tell when some weeks he's like not where he should be. And I'm like, are you on your f****** phone? Yeah, but it's like, what the f***, like you need to get off.

I remote tune a lot of stuff. I have a lot of tuning buddies and we all help each other, but you could end up on a tangent and just devoting your time where it shouldn't be. So I'm very much trying to.

Arguing in the comments on Facebook is one.

You gotta see. People don't have Facebook.

Exactly. You say like 10 hours a week.

Cheese and rice, I can't imagine if you did.

If you're sitting on the dino though, you're loading tunes at two minutes a piece every time you're doing it. So yes, there's a little money collection.

So I see why I like the tuners, cause they're on Facebook, like way too much. And I'm just like, God, don't you guys have work to do? How do you even survive?

But I don't think most shops run, like I could really screw up a day if I'm on my phone all day, like yeah, it's gonna throw a vine.

I don't know how they survive, I really don't. I'm like, shouldn't you be focusing on customer's cars? But yet you're b******* at some kid on a f****** Facebook. It's just like, it's a whole nother level for me.

I can't pick it up and take it. So I have a shop at home, and sometimes my wife will be like, hey, I need you to go pick the kid up at four o'clock. And I'm like, f*** man, if I have to do like three hours here, and then go do something else, and then come back, it f****** sucks, man. Yeah, I want to be able to like turn on the music, and everybody leave me alone, start throwing wrenches at s***, and then, yeah.

Same s***, like I didn't, like the next step in this is I wanted to do a cam, I got to pull the oil pan off, but I stopped because that's like a solid eight hours of that step of the car, and I went to like doing a trans break button over here, and then I got to put a parachute handle, and like I tried to divide up something, I could, you got to get small wins in the day, right? Yeah, you got to be successful on each thing you do, and like that one, I know I'm not going to get that done by the end of the day, so it's a lot of.

Yeah, so that's what helps us is I'm able to schedule, which a lot of shops don't schedule, right? And so I'm like, OK, he's got a week long of, let's say, a C7 with MoTec, a Magnuson, four Innovations fuel system, that one that's come out of the cage.

And then a fitting doesn't come, it f**** the whole thing up. You gotta jump to the next one.

I'll put in a tune, right, to break it up. So it's like, he's not completely stressed by the C7 that's causing him hell. You can, you know, have a win.

You gotta walk away from s*** sometimes.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

You have to. Like, as much as that car needs to go home, it may need a fresh set of eyes where it's just something is fighting.

He'll sleep at night and he'll wake up and you'll be like, oh my God, I know what will fix this. And I'm like, what the f*** did you dream?

You're sitting there and you're f****** trying to start this whole, it's like a thousand times. You're like, what the f***?

And then whatever.

And then I'll get pissed off and I'll like throw it. And my dad will go in and go, thank you. Like f****** a******.

That's a huge success for someone that wants to open up a business. It's like you need to give yourself wins.

You have to.

Because if you don't, you are going to run yourself dry. You're going to drink every night.

I say that all the time, like I need a win. Like something like every in this industry, nothing is predictable. Nothing is on time. Everything does not go as planned. It is not common when something just goes perfect from the get go. Everything is so custom and you start talking this fuel system with this blower, and this manifold, and this set of valve covers, and this breather, and this guy's exhaust. Like nothing goes right. Like it's very difficult to go through that way.

And I don't want to let the customer know that we're having, I don't want to say issues, but you know, more challenges, and I don't, you know, because we will get through it. And so it's like, you don't let them know that.

Well, and that's the other thing too, is right, it's, I actually talked about this again today. It's like, it's difficult because you want to communicate as much as humanly possible, but the problem is if you over communicate, hey, we're having this issue, we can't find this f****** bolt.

You stress them out for no reason.

Then you're stressing them out.

For no reason.

Or making yourself look more incompetent when in reality, this is just how business is.

Sometimes you could like review it at the end, like this car, someone, they may have bought the car, they think it's stuck. I start taking it apart, this whole car has been apart before, whatever it may be. O2 sensors are stuck in something. I could present that to them after the, hey, you needed O2 sensors, they're a hundred bucks. I fixed the problem. Then you might give them that information too soon. Like, oh my gosh. But sometimes if you don't give the information and they don't know that car was modified before, and I go pull a computer out and the flex fuel pin's broken in the ECU because the last guy did it, it's a balance. Just figure out how much to give. You have to communicate it all.

I mean, that's something I will communicate for sure.

I would assume you come out here every once in a while. I have to have my wife help me set the supercharger back on so I don't roll an O-ring or a gasket or something.

She won't come out here when it's cold. Oh, really? She will not come past those doors when it's cold. Now when it's blazing hot in the summertime, she'll come out, but she will not.

What's cold for you guys?

She's, this is f****** cold right here.

If it's 58 in here, I probably won't be out.

Oh, I set my shop to 55.

It's 72 in my house.

I'm moving around, so that's like a good temperature.

Yeah, he can call his dad to come help him. No, I'll help him. I always help him with the exhaust system.

He's used to jumping jacks before.

There's days we don't see each other. We see each other. We have our coffee in the morning. We talk, we go over our day. But there's a day where we, it's five o'clock, and both of us are like, where the hell did we go? Because there's so much going on in here, and she's got so much going on in there, the whole week could go by, and you're like, oh crap, the whole week went by.

It's fun though, I like building cars on paper, and then he makes it come to life.

All the struggles that becoming an entrepreneur and doing this was all worth it though. Whatever s*** we've been through, and opening a business, and moving states, I come to work every morning happy. There's a car I may not want to work on, that she'll take in some jobs.

I know, I'm sorry.

I don't know about that one, but there's-

I am the bill payer, so.

But I truly enjoy this stuff.

Well, touch on that a little bit, right? Because sometimes when somebody starts a business or goes out on their own, they expect, like, all right, now I'm going to be happy every day. I'm doing what I want. When in reality, it's like, there's still s*** days.

There is, but it's worth it. It's better to have our s*** days working for ourselves and have s*** days and working for somebody else.

You're working towards your own goal, right? And your own thing to do. So, yeah, there's- I don't want bad days. I don't know what sets us off. It's somewhat like, you got to drown-

If someone loses a race, I can't sleep, right?

If she's watching races, her hands will be sweaty and we're watching it live on TV.

I will feel for it.

Even if that guy should not be racing that guy and that's way more car than that car, she still don't like it.

So that's the part that gets me heebie-jeebies.

Someone completely irrelevant could say something about your business and you're going to take it to heart, right? You got to drown that out as much as you can and kill them with kindness and you got to drown that out. If anything's difficult, if someone says something-

Yeah, about you, about your personal life, about your business.

Yeah, and you care so much about it. This is our life, right? This is our livelihood. This is our life. This is what affords us to do everything we do and someone does not have all the facts or says, and that hurts, you'll screw up a night's sleep on that one for sure. If you're not obsessed with your business, then it doesn't grow, right? Right. It doesn't.

Yeah, it doesn't succeed either way.

Yeah.

I'd argue the hardest part about, and I'm told to stand sometimes, is like the hardest part about what I do is sometimes I'll put out a highlight, and then sometimes a guest will just get berated. And it's usually just because somebody takes something out of context or even better. Sometimes it's like, all right, you got somebody that's 160 IQ and the average IQ is temperature of this room, so 65, and it turns into the whole thing, right?

Yeah.

But it's like, you got to take the wins where they are, right?

Netflix exposed this to a lot of that, so there's like-

Which I don't get it, right? Because that episode, I'm just like, I don't know what I'm gonna get, a f****** Mustang is gonna win. Like, I forgot the episode, right? It's been a year.

Yeah, I think opposite.

No, we were like, we're f*****.

Yeah, I was competing against a six-second all-wheel drive Honda, and Lyle Burnett-

Was that a six-second Honda? Yes.

Yeah, really?

Now he is, but-

He won seven bores back in 2018.

Really? Yeah. Because that episode portrayed him as a piece of s***.

Well, yeah, they did it on purpose, but there's a whole editing to that, but like, all those- Lyle sort of destroyed us, right? That car was like-

The one that almost hit me.

McLaren, we took that as the slowest one.

I immediately thought that.

Yeah.

F*** that.

Yeah, so there was something.

I'm like 650.

Yeah.

And like Manny, I've been following him for two years too. It's like, he's got some fast folks.

You didn't watch the finale.

I did, but I forgot it.

Yeah.

I didn't know how to go finale.

Screw the first episode.

I mean to meet somebody.

Watch the finale, the finale's the good one.

Yeah, it's been years since I've watched that.

So the front wheel drive Honda, the nitrous one, yes, he's fast for what he is, but it's like the all-wheel drive. I will drive one in the finale, Frustrate EG, like that car is on a whole other level.

Okay.

But to get-

How to rewatch it.

But it's a Honda, right? So I've got a really good percentage that something's going to f*** up. And that's what I was gaining on.

Yeah.

Well, like what's-

Wait, wait, I want to know about this Netflix thing. Take me from step one. Did you guys apply? Did you- No, no.

Somebody don't listen. So actually, they- So I knew, being in the racing world, right? I went to Irlandale every f****** Thursday. So there's not too many Fast Females. There's quite a few. Don't get me wrong. I can name probably five of them that were there. But I had someone, he worked in the movie industry. And so he pushed out my name for season one. I didn't have anything. I did a lot of other filming for other TV shows. They're kind of weird. Yeah. Weird, bro. So when they asked me to film for this, you know, Fastest Car season one, I was like, I'll pass. I watched season one. I was like, wow, this is actually a really good show. Like I f***** up.

Very good production.

Yeah. I f***** up. Like I should have been on it. So season two came around. They called me again. They're like, hey, do you want to be on the show? And I was like, I do, but I don't have a car, but I will build one. So it took us two months. We found one of our-

All that was real. Like there was no b******* in us taking the car the first time.

We found our customer crash his car doing autocross, doing his zero one. He like, I don't know, he skidded out.

We bought that motor and drive on it for 12 grand.

Holy s***.

You can't buy that motor for 20 today.

And then I love Mustang. So I just found a $1,500 Mustang and just plopped it in. And this man worked day and night.

Me and Ryan, like there was no sleep. Like, and they would like every week, they'd be like, we need a video.

We need an idle video. We'd have like another car idling on the side and it like faking that it was the car idling.

They like had to see, like they wanted to not screw up their show. And then like at the end of it all, we're like finding out some people got paid. And we're like, we f***** up.

These people got paid to be honest.

You guys didn't even get paid?

No, it was two days of our time.

But it was like, it was just funny after the fact, but like, all those struggles were like real. And then we really modified the car even more between the two episodes. Like, we skimmed by the first one. It looked like we destroyed everybody.

He wanted me to put an automatic in it. I was not going to put an automatic in it.

Yeah, but we got Smart Last Minute like left in second gear and just laid super soft power and just let it go through. And then the next episode, we thought we won. Like at the end of the filming, we 100% thought we won. And we thought they edited it and screwed us. And like, there's a whole thing with that, but then we watched it. And if you watch the finale, you could see the McLaren just-

You can't see five lanes across from it.

Yeah, so like the angles are weird.

I'm looking right here, right? And then I see Lyle, which you need to watch the finale. In my mirror, I just see a white Mustang spin out and go through all my mirrors. So literally the only thing I'm seeing is this white Mustang about to hit me. And so I'm not looking five lanes across to see this McLaren.

Wait, was Lyle the wrapped McLaren?

Lyle was the wrapped Fox body.

No, but the McLaren, was that the 720? Yeah, and then in that one, I can't remember, was that the season where the surface is also really weird?

That was in season one.

That was season one finale.

Season two is-

That was done at the Salt Lake Plains.

Yes, because that was season one.

I'm glad I didn't do season one.

Yeah, that was really goofy. That's why I was like-

No, this was the actual airstrip, military base.

So I think we asked them before we did it where it was going to be, and they said, oh no, it's going to be on an airstrip.

That was our first exposure to real filming. They were pushing us to say things and-

They wanted you to talk s***, bro. They wanted you so bad. Well, did you know what this guy said about you? I'm like, I don't give a f***.

If you win this, does this just ruin your life if you don't win? I was like, bro, no, I'm just having fun. I'm just doing car s*** with people.

You can tell they were trying to build that drama.

You can tell fluffed production. So how much do they want it? Because my dad used to watch the show, the Flip Your House shows and s***, and then it just got to be all about everybody's sob story too. How much of that did they want you to be like, did you have to have some sort of background story too?

So then that's why I asked them. I told them, I was like, I don't have some crazy story. I don't have somebody that died, that that's why I'm racing for. Like we just do this because we're just weirdos.

Chad's wife died of cancer, so this is a whole story. Everybody had some pretty wild s***, and we were just car people.

This was probably the most realistic, like filming production that I have ever encountered. And like I said, I filmed with people before doing other TV shows that never got aired. They're weird. But I really noticed about myself, I hate being on camera. I f****** hate it. And so I had one producer that I was able to talk to. He had to go step out and he had to go answer a phone call. Right. So he left during the middle of filming. And then the director came on and started asking me questions. And I was unable to talk to him. I was like, I buttoned up. Like, I didn't want to talk to him. I'm like, I can't, I have no connection to you.

They tried to push the narrative and you didn't know the narrative because of all the stories they were trying to tie you up.

Whereas the Honda guy did not like females racing, right?

So they kept pushing Honda stuff.

They kept on pushing Hondas on me. Like, how much you hate Hondas? How much do you not like imports in which I f****** hate Hondas, so f*** those things. So it was like, I hate them, right? So they'd push that. Well, in reality, they had a Honda also in the finale. So they're trying to push that, bring us together. I'm a female racing and now I'm racing a Honda. So they collaborate their stories obviously to make a good show, but it was probably the most realistic. Like they didn't fabricate.

Yeah, it was real. The stories were real.

Yeah. It was cool.

I loved when you came on and it's like, yeah, we saw you guys working on this car and we're like, s***, it's f****** happening.

Oh, yeah, he got the spark plugs from us when they had to crack out that spark plug.

Yeah.

M***********, that was true. They had the film of that cracking out the spark plug out of the head, and he got the spark plugs from me.

Yeah.

They didn't show that part, so it's like, huh.

That car is sitting in a barn somewhere now.

Yeah, the CR is staying, sadly.

We raffled that thing, made some good money on it and stuff.

That was a good car. All right.

It went to a friend of ours, which is pretty cool. That's a good car. We raffled it, and then the guy that used to race with us in California, lives in Missouri.

Mississippi.

He won the car in the raffle and then we dropped it, or she dropped it off to him on the way to pick up that car.

That is a good car, man. If you saw it after, I don't know if you saw any following after, people call me the wheelie queen. I just did wheelies and nothing. How I built it, I built it for wheelies. I actually ended up doing that. That's all I did was just drag the bumper wheelies. It's pretty cool.

Tell us a little bit about this car. What's the story with this?

My car, the ZR staying, the one that was in the show, needed some upgrades from wheelies. It comes down, bends everything. Five years of beating the s*** out of it. Finally, four years later, I ended up shooting out a rod.

Well, the new range is still a fox body, whether people want to like-

This is still a fox body. It's the same s***.

I shot out a rod during H-Town. It's all on film, literally my reaction and everything to the rod coming out of the block. Sad, sad day, very, and I was like, okay, well, let's just put another LS9 in it and keep on going. And he's like, well, everything's bent. We want to go faster.

Struct towers are bent, control arms.

We need a fuel system. You need a safer cage. I'm like, that sounds expensive. So my buddy was like, well, if you could get another car today, what would you get? I was like, I'd get probably an 04 Cobra and I would love it to be blue. And he was like, like this one.

Well, first I was like, I want the torque boxes to be upgraded. So this has all aftermarket torque boxes.

So he showed me on Facebook Marketplace, like this one, and it was this car from Bipolar. It was just a roller, right? No engine, no trans, just the rear end, wheels and tires, roller. And I was like, yeah, just like that one.

We're at like a nice dinner, Facebook bomb.

We're at Perry's Steakhouse and I'm staring at my phone and I'm just like, this guy needs to answer. Like, I want to buy this now. And I guess he vetted me to make sure, cause he's a no prep racer and he built the car for no prep. And he was like, I had to stock your Facebook to make sure I wanted to sell it to you. And he did.

But like the full roller, 03, original Cobra, 04, whatever year it is, paint, wheels, tires, suspension, rear end, 25, three cage, full interior was 27 grand. I guess the paint job's 13 grand on that car.

Just an 03, 04 Cobra as a roller, I think is 10 grand.

Plus, and then you add what he, the paint job was brand new. Like they were building it for CNA.

And so I love No Prep. Like I mentioned, and it's just more fun. I find it fast. I find it more fun than going like fast, fast. But we built it for No Prep, but we're learning, right? So this is a whole, I wanted something where he can learn. Like that's what he learned with my car with the supercharger. He learned with his SN95 Turbo. So it was the first turbo car he ever did. This is the first F3 Procharger we ever did. So it's like, I try to build things where he can learn. So it's like, well, you're not really going to learn if you just go on the street. Like how consistent is that going to be? So let's take it to the track. So it's like, we're learning.

Trying to get the data and power management down before I go sticking on a sketchy surface. Number one, the car's too damn pretty. So that was the first mistake. I should have bought something not so nice, like car's gorgeous. So we put radios on it. We've been radio racing it just to get the feel of the FuelTech. I mean, that's a methanol car, makes 40 pounds of boost. Like it's FuelTech. I was new to FuelTech at the time. So I wasn't ready to stick it down No Prep. And then it's just too f****** nice. So we've only radio raced it so far.

I would love to take it No Prep eventually, but we'll get there. But so that's the story with this car. It's just, like I said, I like building him something that he can learn off of. We're not benefiting if we keep on doing the same s***, right? Like no one benefits other than we get really good at what we do, but we've already done that. Now let's start venturing into some other things too.

If you want to make it s*******, I have some parts laying around and we can, I know I have a set of headlights that don't look nearly that nice.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, I like my headlights.

I can help you with your problem. That's what I'm saying.

I have the original dash out of that car, the Cobra Dash. I got no use for it now. It's got a FuelTech dash in it.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, it's a 400 cubic inch F3 Procharged car.

I was going to say there's a lot of LME fun stuff on there.

Yeah, so that's a whole other story.

That's what we're here for, stories.

Yeah. So we have come across a few engine builders and that's probably the hardest thing that you can trust, right?

You don't see the s*** in there till you blow it up on some people. And they've just been since I had a problem with the one in my car. And then we met them and they built me a motor and it made it like 500 passes at 2000 horsepower.

And it looks flawless.

We pulled it apart.

And are you getting it back at a reasonable time? Because I sent one in and it was supposed to be two months. I got it back two years later.

Oh, not familiar.

Oh yeah, no, not familiar.

Yeah, I know. They're good. They're very good.

They go with the timelines.

It depends on the time of year, like obviously taxis and comes and everybody's buying s***.

Their timelines are pretty legit.

But there's nothing taken too long, but they've taken really good care of us since day one. Anything in here is telling me stuff on it.

I don't work with any other engine builders and we haven't since 2016. We have come across, like I said, people that say they put stuff into engines and that's not what it is.

Mine's getting rebuilt again, by the way.

It's hard to trust what's in there. It's just someone-

I know what they say is in there is actually in there. That alone is worth my business.

Yeah.

That alone, and that's sad, but it's just like-

I forgot the air shifter on that once in a tune and went to like 9,500 and LS's don't rev like that. Well, they did. I was like, damn, is it going to shift? I was like, well, the rod stayed in it. We're good.

They know what they're doing.

They're very good. I like them.

They're out of what, Pennsylvania?

No, Houston.

Right here, right down the road.

Oh, s***. That makes sense. Yeah.

They're right down the road.

We go drive them and pick things up from them, drop motors off there if we're going down. My brother lives in Galveston, so if we have to go out there, it's there, but yeah, they're right here.

Even when we were in California, we worked with them.

They'll text me, like, this motor's on a pallet, and the next day, R&L is outside with the motor. They're pretty good.

Yeah. It's like I get, everybody has their niche of engine builder, whether it's because you trust them or let's say it's just because they're a record breaker. Like, that's not why I build engines with them. I build them because they're reliable. They don't rip you off.

They get dyno. They have an in-house dyno. They can dyno them in there. They make all their own building stuff. They communicate.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the simple things you can ask for.

Who would have thought? Or just being like a decent human being and doing what you say.

Oh, you're asking too much, Dan.

Yeah.

No way. The owners are, yeah. So, I respect that.

LME, MoTec, everything. LME, MoTec, LME, MoTec.

You guys got classy taste.

I got a very classic taste for a reason. Yes, it is pricey on all ends, but it is what you are getting dollar for dollar, is what it comes down to.

You get what you pay for.

100%.

You do.

Classic, this is old time.

We had somebody that came in, they quoted me for a cam job on an LT1 Camaro. They went to that cam special shop. Guess what? It failed the first 30 miles he drove, and he had came back to me and had to pay for a whole new cam job. It's just like, the simple things in life.

I can't budget any of this. There is budget, but you can't go cheap on these cars.

And I have budget options. I have budget quality options.

Budget and cheap are two different.

But my budget option does not let you grow.

Right?

It gets what you want. Now, if you want to grow, that's going to be more expensive. If you want to make 1200 horsepower in the future, you have to set yourself up for that.

You're not going to outgrow one of those.

No shot.

You can make that do whatever you want to do. If I want to stack two of them together, if I want a PDM and that, you will not outgrow that.

Well, you can pretend all you want that that's like, no, I'll be fine with this. There's not a car person in the world that is ever fine with it.

No, they're not.

That's an example of it. I've never been on a dyno, but it makes every bit of 2,000, 2,500 horsepower. F*** really. I've driven it, that car feels slow as f***.

It does.

You let off, turn the brake, it'll go four seconds.

But it's the fastest thing we've ever been in.

Yeah.

I'm like, bro, it feels like a Cadillac.

And it's not enough. I tell people that all the time. That's the perfect story of it's not enough. Like we've gone through every progression.

I just want to feel fast.

You want to be scared, right? You want to get out of the car.

I'm still searching for that.

Yeah.

I just want to feel something.

20 freaking years, actually longer than that, probably 35 years, my dad would have a blown truck with tub tires, ripping down the street and I'd never be scared.

There's nothing like that, doing a burnout through a crowd of 300 people at XRP.

With Zoomies.

With Zoomies and just f****** hats blowing. The violence of that car is awesome. I don't even give a s*** if I get like, yes, we want to win and go fast, but just the rolling burnout through a crowd of people.

I just like the idea of racing.

People get used to their stuff. You can have 1,000 horsepower and be used to it. It's just when people are jumping straight to that 1,000, it's hard. The cost for that next 2, 300 horsepower is steep.

Well, we talked about this with TCP too. I was like, you ever hand over the keys and go, f***, I'm going to see that on co-part in a week?

Yeah, sadly. I've built 1,000 horsepower car and it left on street tires. I'm like, bro, and it's a very difficult part of this business to know just because you could ask for 1,000 horsepower because you've read it in group chats or forums doesn't mean you're capable of driving 1,000 horsepower car. There's a very small percentage that is. And it's very manageable. I know exactly when to get off. And I was test driving with the customer. He's like, how'd you know when to let off? I'm like, oh, f***. Like, yeah, when the car was like, as a car person, you know when. So that is a fear. That is a fear that the-

Internet has screwed up with many people.

Yeah, it's just because you want the 1,000 horsepower and you were able to listen to enough people who have it doesn't mean you're capable of driving something like that.

I just did a track day. I think my last one I did before the season ended and it was a small course. My car is not a small course car. It's a 4,200 pound real wheel drive Mustang. This is like a drift course, right? You're supposed to be spinning around. That's cool. We got done and I was with three or four other Mustangs and these guys get done and we're at the awards dinner and all this stuff. Which by the way, I still came in with some smaller cars. I better that I still came in like third or fourth in the whole mix on the deal. The other Mustang guys are like, well, how many times you spin out? I'm like, zero times. And they're like, oh, I mean, they were in the grass. They were around all over the place. And I'm like, I don't know, dude, when it starts to do that, I just don't let it do it. I don't know.

You probably work through the progression, right? Like you've gone, like we have started when- Oh, I've spun out.

Yeah, it's not anymore. I don't as much.

Yeah.

But we start it 500, 600, 700.

Yeah, we did go through a progression.

Today it's, I want a thousand horsepower. That is a normal phone call to get is, I want to make a thousand horsepower. Like it's crazy.

It's kind of the standard now, though, sadly. It's kind of the standard now, though, sadly.

You can't when they want it. The cost point of getting to there versus what the reality is. Keds Cam back in the day was like three grand. Like on the original LS1 stuff, it was nothing. You can't even get a cam parts for less than three grand.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Yeah. It's evolved. It's fun. But it's like that's what I have to do. Like he's not on forums, social media other than Instagram, which doesn't really count. You have to like watch the Internet, right? You have to see what's popping up. You do have to see trends because you're like, I don't want to miss out on it. I want to see if that's something we want to try because new technology comes out. Yeah. It's like you want to be involved with that.

And so there's like people want to build a crazy big NA car, right? That's a niche where people want to do it. I just want to put 2650 on the car. It's simple.

That is a weird thing, right? Like the whole NA thing.

It's very expensive, right?

We've been beat by an NA car. Like it's happened. We've had our fast cars get caught.

We built an NA car. It was f****** expensive. We were the first 440 cubic inch LT for six gens. We had our own six gen. We put a lot of money into that motor. This is before any aftermarket head came out for them. So it's only what the stock casting could do, right? So we're limited. So now the technology has changed, right? You buy something new and then a new TV comes out the next freaking day with more technology. Same thing happened with us with our motor build, right? So it's like you-

But now they run them on Nitro. It's like not a normal-

Well, we had a full weight vehicle, full exhaust, AC, cage in it. Not what your typical grudge racer will do, but we wanted to do what we thought a consumer would do and then we moved to Texas and we realized everybody guts their s*** and we're like, this is a 2020 Camaro and it's gutted. What did you do? So we were in other-

Backseat delete, passenger seat delete, every car.

We were in other shock when we moved here to Texas and these kids are gutting out their brand new showroom floor ZL1s. We didn't understand it. We're like, oh, this is a whole another level.

Like these kids- It's a level of dedication.

Are on a whole another level.

It's a level that Mirza has, but yeah.

Dude, Jesus Christ, one of the GM engineers we had on the show, he has a Gen 5 Camaro and I think he said he weighed it in at like 2,800 pounds.

It's gauges zip-tied to the firewalls.

Yeah, I believe it, yeah, yeah.

And that's not- If you look at my car, it's full interior, like everything.

We just made up with it with boost. I'm like, f*** it, what's another 10 pounds?

I don't want to race in a tin can.

What I like about you guys too is you're not- Like some of these shops get stuck to a secret sauce and they just kind of go away. Like I see centrifugals, PDs, turbos, like you guys are like, you want boost? We don't give a f*** about flavor.

Yeah, I'll do it however. I'm not- I like a pro charger.

We love nitrous, we do. Yeah, like we grew up on nitrous.

Would I build that for a customer? Probably not.

I mean, I build that for a customer.

It's simple to put a Maggi on a car and drive it everywhere and not like, you know, like your pro chargers are very linear with boost and RPM where a Maggi is instant now, there's less issues with them.

Like you got to gauge your customer.

Well, I want to try everything too. So my wife has a 13 Mustang pro charged. I have my cars are PD cars and then my diesel is a turbo.

And then he tried my VW GTI. He's like, this is so fun now.

Yeah, it's so fun.

You should have heard it.

It's zippy.

Zippy is the word, yeah. God, I miss that car.

It is its bite size. I love it.

The LGB GTI.

And I think I opened him up, sadly, to, I'm like, we need to do this. Cause like, I'm seeing things that pop up.

The first 6th gen we ever did in 2016.

That's it, right there.

It's so funny. It's right there. I did not want to do it. It was difficult. No one was doing them at the time. We put it on foot. That is the very first 6th gen that we ever did. And was probably one of the first 6th gen's I've ever done.

He said, I never want to do another one again.

And I said, I would have been back at BMW.

Guess what? This is all you're going to do, so you're going to have to learn to love it. And guess what? It's his favorite platform.

You started with LS and then the LT came out. And that was like a game changer back then. Now it's just standard. Now you get the C8 and every other progression.

Can I touch on that? Okay. So what did you have to learn to love?

Abuse?

I don't know.

I'm on that section too, bro.

Sounds like a typical tier.

Yeah, you got to sit late nights on the dyno. Like you got to learn. Sometimes you look at a tune revision, you're on like revision 22 and the tunes start saying, f*** this car. Like, you know, the names get real creative when you get that far up. And then you finally find like that solved the problem.

So we call it tuition bills.

It's a tuition bill.

So it's a tuition bill. So if something goes wrong and he has to learn it and it takes him, he thought it's only going to take him four hours and it's taking him five days. It's a tuition.

Haltek was a tuition bill because the way that Haltek wired into that computer and what signals it grabbed and what I was capable to do, that was a tuition bill. That one took weeks longer than it should have. But now I feel very confident in Haltek compared to not using Haltek on a lot of stuff.

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

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

So I think it would be great if she used your credit card to go to ToonByShawn, shawn.com, to get you a Haltek 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.

So the Haltek is what you want to put your, but you got to like the abuse. I guess that is it.

And so when we were in California, how I treated him was like, you better do this or else. Right. And I was, it was horrible. I was a bad wife. When we moved here, I was scared. I was straight up scared. I was like, I need to be nice. I need to be nicer to him or else he's going to leave me. I need to be sympathetic. So whatever he needed, I would just adjust for it. Right. Whether he needed time, whether he needed-

You're like, you're three days behind on a car. That's going to throw- We were booked out-

That's okay.

Sometimes we're booked out, let's say three months, and this car goes a week extra.

That's okay.

That's going to screw up that entire-

So I learned when I moved here, it's okay. I don't want you not tightening something because you're stressed out about it. That's fine. Take three weeks more. I don't care. We'll figure it out. That's something I learned and progressed as a business owner. Yes, oh, you have to do it now. No, when it comes to high performance, you can't do that.

There's no other employees here, so there's nothing else-

You can't blame nobody.

Yeah. So if I screw up, it's on me. I know every nut and bolt in the car, which is huge. Most jobs don't have that.

It's kind of crazy when you look in here, what do you have? Like almost 20 cars here?

Yeah.

That is kind of crazy to think that your hand has been on every single one of these.

No one else's. Yeah. Yeah. It helps because I will remember every nut and bolt. So if someone called me, I'm like, hey, check this. I know exactly what's on- I'm sure there's a ton of people on it.

And that's crazy to me.

You're making a thousand horsepower car, like, man, you can't, not that there's, I'm sure there's tons of shop with a lot of capable techs, but I've always been so scared to bring someone in and then find out the hard way, you know? You'd have to bring somebody in at like top tier level to come work on this stuff, not learn on it. Like I see people, oh, we're hiring entry level.

There's like three people I would trust to bring in the shop, and they're doing their own thing in a good way, and we remote tune with them.

Yeah, so it's the caliber. You could hurt somebody with this stuff, and then you gotta make sure you do it all right, and make sure you have the time with the customer to tell them about it, teach them about it. So that's what's scared me from that. But everyone in here is sitting here for a reason with something like, you know.

And we're excited about it, you know? Like, I think about each and every car every day.

I don't like having three in the middle right here. I want this whole floor space open. And one in the diner room is a perfect shot for me.

Yeah, there's a little much.

There's too many cars in here right now.

It's winter time. I'm like a chipmunk.

A winner.

Sure, we'll call it that.

I was at the hotel.

We're having a snow flurry on Wednesday.

I was at the hotel this morning. I look up and when I looked down, I was like, oh, there's water in that pool.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's actually movable. It moves.

It's the highest I've heard your voice go, by the way.

And it's open. I'm like, it literally like is like a running deal. I don't know. It had the pumps running in it.

39 degrees is warm enough. They'll kick on.

It's okay. It's a Joe Rogan ice bath.

Who cares? No, f*** that. Nope.

I did that for a solid year and then I started almost passing out. I'm like, yeah, let's dial this back a little bit.

I don't know if I could do that.

Did you say almost passing out?

Yeah, I got absurdly high blood pressure for a 25 year old. Don't worry about it. It's okay. It's a doctor problem.

He's 45 at heart.

I don't think you understand. When he's 25 and I'm 40, I f****** mean it. But anywho, shoot, I lost. I had a great one in there. Oh, so one of the things I'm noticing here, it seems like there's really no cheap builds here. And I'm not saying the stuff that you do, but almost like your clientele kind of like understands like what they're getting into. Is that a fair assumption? Or am I making s*** out of it?

Honestly, if I look at other competitors' pricing and we're like some of the cheaper pricing-

Everybody says it like, damn, that's a great price. I'm like, what the f*** are these people charging?

Yeah. So I'm on the opposite end because I'll see what other shops charge to do a job. And I'm like, I would have been happy.

I've seen research fees on invoices. Like imagine getting your bill back and it says research fee. So you're telling me you charge me like, I would never do that. Like I'd take that tuition bill. You know, like we do hear a lot in our pricing.

I'll do a $800 tune. Like we, you know, we'll do that on a daily basis. But I would love, like people want more horsepower. It's addictive, right? Like you get a little bit, you want more.

Maybe in the LS stuff, they wouldn't understand what they're getting into. Like the LS is not, it doesn't snowball so quick.

Yeah.

The LT s*** could go from like, oh, I just got this flex fuel car and then boom, go off the deep end. Like there's a huge bit, there's nothing that snowballs more than like an LT fuel system and going up that way. So I think a lot of them understand. And then if we're pushing the products like this, like if you see that, you're automatically going to expensive and it's half the cost. Both of you guys, it's half the cost of what you thought it was.

There's maybe two people in Texas that are known maybe for MoTec and the GM, and we are one of them, you know? So it's like it's not many. And I like that. I like being different. I want to do something different than other people are doing. I like not doing ice tanks. I like doing inner chillers, you know? And I can have my 95 reasons why 99% of the people would want that over, you know, an ice tank. I'll pick a Magnuson over a Pro Charge and I'll give you a reason why, you know? But every person is different in their goals.

The clientele will evolve to what they're seeing you do. And I was laughing, I was watching an interview with Tony Pelo with T1. I'm like, that dude's my hero. He will not take in a car unless it's on MoTec.

Is that the one that he did with Street Alpha?

Yes, T1 race. Like if it's not on MoTec, they don't take it in. I'm not that, like, to that level of doing it.

But he would love to be.

I would love to be, but our market's not, like, I got to be reasonable. But his market, the customer probably evolved. Like, I think he even started in the Honda stuff and like he evolved it. But if you're not coming in at that particular shop, I think they were talking about like 50,000 is their entry level into that shop in all MoTec, like nothing else but MoTec. So it was crazy to hear that.

That's our goal, right? We want that. That's our goal is for these people to come in, you go with our $60,000 package, let's start here and then move up. But what pays the bills is getting people introduced with a tune, flex fuel, supercharger, or heads and cam, and you know what, people grow.

And that might not be for everybody. Like there's some instances, I can't put a MoTec on, I would like to, but there's some cars that it doesn't fit their needs. They maybe want to stop at 850, and that's what they want to do. Or 550, or 450.

Right.

Right? And that's fine. That's where I started. So it's like where we came from, and I used to pay a shop for parts. Like I said, I went to another shop and bought parts. Like we came from that.

Yeah. And I think this is more of an obsession where you could just nerd out on all the stuff this thing could do. Like that's where it comes, like just wanting to do more of it, because I know what it's capable of. So that's where that next level of passion comes from.

He's excited to do it. Like when you want to work with something, don't you want to work with somebody that's excited about something? Like that's what draws you to pay someone, right? Like you don't want to pay somebody that's not excited with what they do. Saying f*** your car. Yeah. Like I don't want to work on your s***, but thanks anyway. You know, you want somebody excited to work on your car. Not saying that only MoTec would make us excited to work on your car, but just having the same passion and knowledge and what we do in this field, you know, gets us excited.

We've been known for these sixth gens. Like that's what we've done a lot of. And there's like a little micro record thing, but they keep a list of like the top 26 gens. I don't know how wide this list goes, but we got like four or five of them on that list of the top fastest sixth gens. That's legit. So someone kept a spreadsheet and did all that. And at one point we had five, we might have got one knocked off and we got like three more coming. So we like this platform, we're pushing this platform as far as we can. Sevens are difficult unless you got turbos on them. We don't have a lot of that clientele, so it's all 2650 Magnuson.

Well, we're getting more turbos.

So yeah, I mean, I guess the more we work on them, the more of the same product we put out there and could show the benefits of it, it will attract more people to it.

What do you guys' choice for a turbo?

Custom. I just did a-

Custom kits, but with precision.

I did a-

Oh, precision, okay.

Yeah, I did an off-the-shelf kit the other day and that's a project that went, I'd never done one and it went at least a week extra. That was a tuition bill. I know to never do it again. I didn't charge-

We charged like $1800, we should have charged 10 grand.

Yeah, I even texted her, I was like, I wouldn't touch this again for 10 grand. There's some people that love that job, install it all day long and could probably do it quicker, better, easier than I did because they do it all day long. It's just not a direction I want to go.

It doesn't make him happy.

Yeah, that job didn't. You think like installing turbos will make you happy on a car. Now, custom doing a turbo kit and getting the car and installing the MoTec, tune it, race it, yeah. But I don't fabricate here or do any of that.

I was going to ask, who does fab work for you?

I have a local guy who does all the turbo kits for me. If we're going to custom build one, like he's J-Fab in Frisco. He's doing a twin turbo kit on it. The car that's supposed to go to Texas 2K in 29 days or whatever it is.

I think it's less than that, by the way.

Yeah, don't do that.

It's going to freak you out a little bit.

I'm like, shh.

I mean, to wake calendar, actually. To wake up every day and get to work on stuff like this all day. And I take incredible pride in the shop and keeping it clean and cars clean. And if you don't bring it to me clean, we're usually watching it outside.

I might have to put that on the check-in, like, please bring it clean.

I'll give it back to you clean, but don't bring it to me. Some cars come in, I'm like, no.

He has a problem.

Well, I got to give you props on that too, right? Because when it's just you and, well, technically two of you, but when it's technically you by yourself in here, it's so easy to let it slip and just be absolutely f****** disgusting. And the fact that you're able to keep it clean and keep that accountability, that is rare to see.

He can thank his mom for that.

Yeah, OCD. Like when we take a car apart, it goes on to a cart just with that car. And then we wrap that cart in Saran wrap. So nothing dirt gets in, nothing gets in.

We have muffin pans.

And then all the bolts go in muffin pans that are divided.

I saw that over there.

Yeah.

So it's a weird trick I learned at BMW. And then in there, there's more carts that are staged with the new parts for the car.

Okay.

So it's a constant. Nothing gets swapped between cars. Everything is organized.

So I'm not waiting for parts when a car comes in. Like I know what I need. It's all here. It's ready to go. You bring it in, I install it. Go home.

Like during COVID, like yeah, engine build times were extended. Imagine taking a car apart and three months later, having all the stuff to put it all back together.

Don't tell him that. He said two years.

Yeah.

No, no, no. No, no, no.

It was like three months, bro. That was a bad choice of an engine builder. I had bought a car that already had a problem and he promised to split the bill with me, but he picked the builder and it was not, it did not.

Yeah. Three months is like excessive, but it's doable.

Keeping your tools clean. Like if you don't organize stuff, like when I was working with people together in a shop and you got two people working on a car and someone thinks they did something and didn't, then he gets confused. And if your stuff's not organized and laid out, like you could bring me one of the, I have had these cars brought to me with a bucket of bolts. I'm talking bins of bolts, unorganized. I could put a 6th gen back together because I've done so many of them. But when I take them apart, it is divided equally by every like super.

He knows a 6th gen per bolt.

Yeah.

That's how Bowen got my Celine Cobra, by the way. In bolts? Yeah, it was in buckets.

It happens.

The same thing. Well, I took the car apart, sent the engine to go get built, and then two years later, I got the f****** engine back. I had already had to move the car. It was on my left. I dropped the whole K-frame out, like to get the engine and everything. And then it was like I had other s*** I want to do, so I moved things around and then it just got to be a f****** s*** show. But he's a 20 year master Ford tech, so like you, he knew where all the bolts go.

He knows it.

Showed up to Jared's house. He didn't even care. And I said, I'm sorry, please help me.

He didn't care. He was like, as long as it's all here.

All that structure like I got from BMW, like we used to take body shop cars apart and put them on, all of it comes from working from a high line industry. We had million dollar floors in that dealership. You had to present yourself to a certain standard and that will stick with me forever. I won't go home until this shop is clean every night. You will never find s***. It could be a bad night where I'm like, just shut the door as I'm done. Today's not my day, but come in. This is standard how this shop will look. So when customers come in and they see how we take care of their cars, this is number two Hennessy Exorcist. They're very particular about that car. Like, I feel good knowing it's going to be inside, climate controlled.

Or this is this guy's dream car. Like, I don't even care what number, you know, but this is this guy's dream car and this is all he's safe for, you know? Like, I don't care what number car it is, I will treat them all the same.

Yeah.

And our own car is sitting in here too. Like, we treat it, we truly treat it like it's our own. Other shops used to have to keep cars covered because of dust. And California had like, we had a recycling plant next to us. So all the cars were covered in like crazy dust.

Yeah, but we would clean them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are you working on anything else? Like, I know you say you did some Toyotas, but what would be like the next biggest thing?

Hellcat.

I mean, we do Hellcats, we do Scat Packs. Back in 2016 and 2017, we did a lot of R&D on Hellcats. So we have like our specific niche on them.

And the market's pretty, like there's some good people out here with the Dodge stuff, like builds refer some of that stuff out, but like there's certain...

I'll build a b***** Hellcat.

If it fits what we want to do, like we just did one thing.

I'm very particular. So I have my people will cheap out, people have their own builds for their Hellcats, and I'm like, no, this is the only way I do it, because this is what works, right?

Do people have their daily drivers? Like I've done Tundra stuff, I've done like some random one-off exhaust systems, but like a Tundra Maggi, because we have such a relationship with Maggi, 4Runners will do those, doesn't once a year maybe. Yeah, right. Maggi, okay.

Any Fords are on through here at all?

I will do the new Magnuson on the new Mustangs.

Oh yeah, that's right, they got a Magnuson.

So they got the new Magnuson for them. I haven't gotten one in yet, but shocker.

I won't, like I don't, I wouldn't even touch a Ford tune anymore.

But I will do it with a Magnuson with them.

Well, you don't know how to adjust those cams that do all that.

No, bro, you guys, we have two timing tables. We have high octane, low octane. Fords have like 30.

Yeah.

I guess crazy.

They don't want to know his rate for that.

I don't, I'm good.

There's a couple people in the world that tune Fords, and there's a reason, right?

Yeah, like the main, they're your power players, and I always make fun of my buddies. I'm like, you guys all use the same tuner. There's two of you, three, however many Ford tuners.

So yes, there's many parts installers for Ford, but there's only a couple tuners.

There's a couple tuners for them.

You know, like we will do MoTec. I will do MoTec on Ford. I would love to do Lamborghini on Ford, or sorry, Lamborghini with MoTec. I would love to get into Vipers. I would love to get into Vipers.

Who knows? We'll see what that all turns into.

So what does that look like then? Because that's still like dual overhead cam, variable cam type.

At the end of the day, any motor is an air pump, right? That's all it is in and out. So it's just learning the rest of that stuff.

We're hoping to expand to an all wheel drive dyno. That's our next step. Like I said, I would love to get into Lamborghini and MoTec. That's something we're talking about.

Like you're going to go borrow a Lambo, though. You know what I mean?

R&D car. I don't know.

You never know.

We might run into it.

This all comes in naturally, though. Even our friends at Radar Race Lab, they were doing these RS3s and stuff. Now, they're doing Porsches. They had a Twin Turbo RA that just got sold by Chicago Motor Cars, just a variety of stuff. You never know what's going to come through.

We're unstopped with MoTec, right? Other than the fabrication part, but if it comes to tuning wiring.

I got pretty good support. The people I work with MoTec are very like, if I had needed things written or changed, we could do it.

Well, you're not reinventing the wheel either, right? It's like Twin Turbo Huracans have been around since the beginning, or R8s, or Vipers, whatever.

That'd be like a dream, but is it really working on that kind of car? I'm sure those come with its own set of problems and you're going to have to see.

But you've got to think, we grow, our customers grow. I've had customers that had a Camaro SS, a ZL1, to a Z06 and now they might want a Lamborghini or an R8. So it's like you want to grow with them as well. So that's what's, hey, I had a Camaro SS but now I got a ZL1, what do I do now? So it's like you want to grow with them, whether they are becoming more successful in life and now they got a Lamborghini, it's like, okay, we could do this to it. So that's what's thinking in the back of our heads.

The Camaro I was able to buy as a project, as a R&D car. I don't know if I can just go out there and get a Lambo and be like, oh, f***.

Tuition build.

That's a big tuition build.

Well, even like yesterday, we just had Cobb on and they were talking about like the GT3RS Wysock package, it's like, yeah, we can't exactly, and they're a big company and even they're like, yeah, this is a quarter million dollar car.

I know, that would be amazing. He would love that.

There's gotta be a big enough market of them to sustain a business, right?

Yeah, like why we didn't get into like the C701, it's like, it's a very small market, right? So I was like, do you really want to invest into this R&D car for this little small market? Not really.

And then if you've got somebody who's killed that market already, like you're not gonna just jump into it.

Well, same thing with like Vipers, right? It's like Calvo and Enthomoto, and you got a few small other players, right? But like at the end of the day.

I just want to do it for myself.

Well, even Calvo, okay, it's a me thing.

I want a Viper.

Calvo talks about, because they're all handmade, I guess. I watched his podcast, and he talks about like, there's a day dedicated to shimming the f****** bumpers, like bumpers and trim.

It's the one dive of the bumper that's in line.

Yeah, it was the whole day into shimming the bumper. It's so crazy how different our businesses are, but at its core, how similar all of our businesses are. That's very true. We're doing completely different price points on what we do, and what is super expensive to me is just a drop in the bucket for some of these other shops.

What we like, what we see ourself is, is a 610 ZL1. If I was a car, I'd be a 610 ZL1. Actually, I'd be my Mustang, but reality, I'd be a 610 ZL1.

If I didn't live on a back road, I'd have a ZL1.

Yeah. I mean, we've had 11 Camaros. We've had our due time, but that's where we fit in. That's what makes us happy right now. Would I love a Lamborghini? Would I love a Viper?

Yes.

I can tell you, I come from the Viper world. I'm telling you, well, actually, you guys are no strangers to horsepower, but after being in an Enthomoto Viper, it's a different feeling.

Yeah.

Someday.

I believe it. I'm like, can we just do Vipers?

Thank you.

Yeah, until it's like what, $20,000 for a bumper.

Damn it.

Yeah. Well, they just ran out of windshields, like OEM windshields, like last year, I think.

Because of the production.

Yeah, it's not producing f****** everything.

Yeah, even though I think a C7 came out in 14, right? The first C7.

Yes.

They stopped making parts after 10 years in GM, like 10 years of stop producing a part. So it's crazy to think how much time went by.

But things fade out, so we need to progress.

We got to keep going to the next thing and learning new products.

But it's like, when is that platform, like realistically, let's say that you drop the C7 in 2014. You start making like noticeable gains in development, probably like, what, four or five years after? So already halfway through the generation, before you start modding it beyond.

That's why you go like crazy.

At least you won't have to worry about staying up on the Camaro. My friend says, the car is so great, they killed it twice.

Shout out to the Cessro.

Yeah. I figured I got like 10 years from the last time one was produced. Yeah, we got 10 years.

His bones are only going to last for so long.

Yeah, like my body is going to get... I have at a certain point, I've got to do something because at a certain age, like it's not...

Yeah.

Tuning or you get into the, you know, they do in the remote stuff.

You get lazy like Justin and you just go to tuning.

That man is anything but lazy.

I know.

If I pop a fuse at the track, I'm done for the night. This fool broke a diff and he like searched it and did it on the nuts.

It was a rental.

I don't give a s*** what it is. I know. If I got to change stators on that car, we're going to the next race.

He's like, you're good.

It's got a bolt together so I can change stators. No, thank you.

God, yeah. Shout out, Justin.

Yeah.

We love you, man.

I think we've got to be like three hours in. There's no way we're not, right? My clock got a little fuzzy about an hour and a half ago. Okay. I was like, man, this whisky feels light.

That whisky is good.

Oh, you think I edit this vlogger?

No, okay.

I just edit whatever you tell me to edit. But that's the thing. I tell this to all my guests. I'm like, you get three cuts. Yeah.

Yeah. You only took two. Yeah, we're good.

You had to go pee. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah.

But yeah, it's fine.

Pees are free cuts. By law, we're allowed to let you have a bathroom break.

You need a lock?

Yeah. If you want me to heat up any Chinese, I can.

Did you guys get all the questions you want answered or anything?

I think so.

You should think I had a list. It doesn't matter.

Yeah, it's fine.

Dude, honestly, this is-

What was he going to ask? He said he was going to save something.

Probably Turbo 400.

I want to ask about the Netflix stuff.

Oh, okay.

Netflix, Turbo 400, MoTec, Shop.

MoTec, Shop, Shop.

Yeah, we don't play our cards, right? We'll be up until 6 AM for sure. This is definitely on the more fun side of episodes for sure.

Okay.

Yeah. That's cool. I'll be done in a cut too, so shout out. But Dan, do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah.

Because they're a bad s*** insane, so let's see how this goes.

All right. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. I need a daily driver, a show car, and a track car. You can pick whatever you want. You can swap whatever you want, build whatever you want. You have a limited budget. What are you going to pick? That's easy. I need three from each.

I'm going to daily drive a 03 Cobra, even if I put all the money in the world, a perfect daily driver, with a Ford motor.

Oh yeah? I was assuming you were going to say something, and I was like, damn it.

I'm good with that. What was the other one? Road race?

No. Track car.

Track car? Man, I would do like a nitrous, like a lot of nitrous, small tar radial car as a track car. I don't even know what kind of car it would be.

Oh, I'm going to make you pick one.

Well, you need to pick a car.

You just can't pick the power adder.

Man, 69 Camaro, maybe.

Wow.

69 Camaro, nitrous. No, sorry. I'm going to take that all back. G-Body, like just gangster looking G-Body, nitrous, zoomies, but nitrous, like I'll be all right with that. Then what's the other one?

Well, I'm going to lock it in for the G-Body.

G-Body.

He would look sexy as f*** in a G-Body.

Slam, just radial race car.

We can't just do any G-Body.

Yeah, what's G-Body?

I don't know enough about them.

Just say a Malibu, just say a Malibu, just say a Malibu.

80s, something like that.

Malibu.

Dan, help the guy.

Yeah. And then what was their track car daily?

And a car show.

Well, wait, he doesn't let people get away without picking a make model. We're talking about where we got Monte Carlo's, Camaro's.

Monte Carlo.

Sorry, Monte Carlo.

Monte Carlo.

Yeah, Monte Carlo.

You can't get away from it.

Monte Carlo SS 4i, another 4i?

No, two right now. No, just stop.

It's okay, we got enough.

Stop it. It's not Monte Carlo, it's okay.

And then, man, I'm not a car show person.

They can be double duty.

Cobra. Just f****** no mileage. Okay. I don't even want to miss a chrome. That's a rare one. You have to do orange, bro.

Orange.

The orange or the yellow. Yeah, you don't like the orange. But no mileage on it, just stock as f***.

What's the over under? He says, never mind, hold on.

No, I'm good with that one. The competition orange. I don't think to go super car. It doesn't seem like anything. That car was a dream car.

You would pick a GT3.

GT3 RS.

Show car, okay.

Yeah, he'd pick a GT3.

The most recent one or?

Yeah. The one that's like 300 grams or something.

Something changed for a guy like you.

Yeah. We are a shop owner.

It's a Camaro shop that's relaxed.

Yeah, chill, chill, chill.

These Chevy guys f****** really rake it in.

Yeah. When I heard Calvo saying like, man, we don't make much money, I'm like, f***, we're ruined.

Yeah, right.

When you hear someone like that with cars like that, and he's talking about like this.

Dude, you talk to a lot of these big shop owners, like you listen to Sunny's podcast too. It's like, it's pretty, you don't get into building cars to make money from what it sounds like.

You don't.

You want it to fuel your passion.

Right.

Right. At the end of the day.

That's it. It's just fueling my passion.

That's a legit ride off the trailers are like, it's all stuff that normally would not be. And that is a hundred percent purpose built for a full time deal.

So we're able to justify.

So, well, you got to look at the volume too. Like they work on a very niche market of it. Not a lot of stuff. Like there's Camaros are like cockroaches, man.

They're everywhere.

There's, you know, you're not going to get rid of them.

I love it.

Yeah.

Give it to me.

So you'll be working on these in 30 years.

Yeah. Give it to me.

GT3RS show car. Monte Carlo race car.

Yeah.

03 Cobra daily driver.

All right.

So you're up.

I love my Land Rover Defender as my daily driver.

Is it like a newer Defender or?

Yeah, the new one. I had one. I would get it again. So much fun. It made me happy every time I got in it. Just fun, especially on back roads. Race car. I'll just say, because I already have my dream race car, which is this one, but I'll say for a road course, I would do a 2015 Z28 Camaro for road cars.

So choose that or this now.

You can have multiple answers. Harris doesn't like that product. No, no, no.

I already have mine.

So you're locking this in it? So then you're locking in the...

Okay, I got my dream car. That's it.

Race car.

That's it.

That's my race car. Show car. It'd probably be my 51 Merc. Yeah, Chopped, Lowered. I love Lowriders. Oh my God.

Okay.

They're all over my Facebook marketplace right now.

No, no, no, no. I don't want it.

We flew in here with a one-way ticket because we couldn't book another flight because we didn't know sometimes we get podcasts on the fly. We make mistakes or whatever. So he's had me for a month now just shopping marketplaces. Like, well, instead of renting a car, especially if you take something home that's not rusty. So I've been looking at trucks and things like that. So we're gonna buy some s*** and just drive home. We ended up renting some because I couldn't get anything that was as good of a deal as I wanted to.

Okay.

How far does that drive?

That's cool.

Yeah.

Don't worry, we're picking something up in Kansas.

Yeah, I did find a truck. Are you?

Yeah. What did you get?

I'm getting a Navigator. I bought one off Copart for my wife.

It's gonna make it home.

It's got 340,000 miles of...

He doesn't know. V10 or?

No, it's a 3.5 EcoBoost. But with 340,000 miles, I asked him, I was like, I don't know if it's gonna make the six hour drive home, but I need it for the parts.

Okay, so we just gotta make it.

Yes, I made him a ridiculous offer. He was trying to talk to me at the coffee shop this morning. I was like, excuse me, I'm busy lowballing people on Facebook. And he literally said that.

And he actually took it?

Oh, absolutely. I got it for a half what he was asking.

There's still navigators around?

Yeah.

Oh s***.

Yeah, 2015.

2015?

Oh, okay.

But anyways, where can people find you?

Instagram, Accelerated Racing Solutions, Facebook, Accelerated Racing Solutions, YouTube.

Drive north, all the way to you. Almost said Oklahoma. That's us. You hit Choctaw, you've gone too far. Turn back.

acceleratedracingsolutions.com.

XRP, Yellow Belly.

Find us at the track anytime.

Find us at the track.

We are there, present.

From now till it f****** gets cold again.

Till November.

Yeah.

So from March till November, we will be at the track.

What a long season compared to us, by the way. F****** b*******.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, perfect. Brandon, Tiana, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you. Thank you guys.

I'll be honest with you. I was like, well, what are their f****** names again? Because I can't remember.

T, you're never going to forget my name. You can't even lie about that.

Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you 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, Tuned 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.