131. 1000HP DCT E36, M50 Platform, Carbon Monoxide Poisoning, BMW Builds w/ Gus Erickson

They come from the factory with 184 horsepower. That's to the tire, to the crank. You know, we've taken these engines that are made to do that, and putting eight times, seven times the horsepower through them, like, they're not meant to do this. What matters is in that moment, when you're lined up next to someone. The only thing 60 to 130 is for, is for bragging rights. He said, you have 33% CO2 in your blood right now.

Holy s***.

And so a person who smokes a pack a day has less than 10%, and 40%, you're pretty much dead.

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 cohost, Dan.

Yeah.

Mr. Gunner Garage.

I'm here.

I drove over here.

The one time he drives.

It's not that bad.

It's not that bad. You know, it's crazy. You know what's wild, man? It's like, you'll drive across the country, no problem. Right? But when it comes to driving more than 31 minutes to go see a friend, it's like, nah, that's too much.

30 minutes, that's the cutoff.

That's kind of like the cutoff. And then you see that meme where people are complaining, like, oh, you aren't real friends. Hi, are you a real friend if you make me drive more than 31 minutes?

I mean, I drive all over the Twin Cities to see my friends.

You're a better person than me. I am, I am. But today we are here with Gus, Mr. DCT E36.

That's me.

Dude, this has been coming for such a long time. Like I, we were just talking about this off camera, that like, I've been wanting to get you on the show since, I want to say like the first 10 or 20 episodes.

It was very early on.

Yeah, but after-

He did make a small cameo appearance in Shawn.

That's right. Yeah, did you notice I kept that in the episode?

Yes, I did.

I called, there's actually about the white car behind us.

Okay.

So I was ordering parts for that one.

Some like Caltech stuff or what was it?

Okay.

A PDM. So control the chassis.

Okay. Well, we got to hang out with you quite a bit last year. What was it, first or second power cruise?

I don't know.

Both.

It might have been both.

The first one though was when we spent all that time at night. We were drinking, watching him work. I believe that was the number one.

I think so.

Yeah. That was the first one when I did the head gasket in the pits.

Well, dude, that was hysterical because there was maybe like 15 or 20 people just around just watching you just work on this thing.

Well, it's like when you're under the hood of this, there's really not a lot of room for multiple hands.

Yeah.

And it's like, I already know what I'm doing. The only thing people can help me with is lifting or getting me tools.

Yeah.

And there was plenty of people to do that. Thankfully, Ratified was right there. So all those guys were over hanging out, drinking, watching me.

Yeah, that was kind of perfect to be next to their camp.

It was on purpose.

Yeah.

They definitely had some tools that I needed. So definitely it was nice.

Well, go ahead and tell us a little bit about what this car is. I've definitely made many mistakes on representing it, especially on Shawn's episode. I'm like, what the f*** is it anyway? So go ahead and tell us why is it so special? Why this platform? And we'll just kind of go from there.

So yeah, my name is Gus. I grew up in Northern Minnesota. I started with BMWs. It was my first car. It was an 89, 325 E30, very similar to this white one. It was a sedan. It was automatic. It had a bad transmission in it when I bought it. And I drove it with a bad transmission pretty much all through high school. Finally put a transmission in it right before I sold it. But I had that car because my dad had owned that car before me and then my brother had owned that car before him. And then it went to somebody else in between. But growing up, my dad had always went to BMWs. He had a 94 325 IS. And the reason he picked those cars is he was traveling. And he found out that you're going to work on a car regardless. Doesn't matter what car it is, what brand it is. You're going to have to do something. What he found out with BMWs is, all right, I have to do struts every 100,000. Okay. Yeah, the part might cost twice as much than as a Chevy Cavalier. But guess what? That Cavalier needs two sets of struts every 100,000 miles. And so parts cost half as much. Your time's more valuable. And so he was finding that, I'm going to replace parts half as often and enjoy the car that much more in that time. And so he's traveling a lot for work and that's where my passion for BMW started. And yeah, so this car, I had probably five E36s before I even moved to the cities. Different variations all the way from 92 all the way up to I had the latest was a 97 through 28i. And just everything in between, I had, you know, always grew up with them. So it was like an easy thing for me to go to. Always watch the YouTube videos of the crazy Germans building these things and making thousands of horsepower. And you're like, I'm going to do that one day. So moved to the cities, met my best friends, which I'm sure we'll talk about soon. And who are they?

So we can just touch on it right now.

All right, we'll just, I moved to the cities to work at a shop called Recycle BMWs. Okay. I had my 2000 BMW E39 M5 at the time, straight piped, loud as hell. And I'd moved down. I really only had like two or three friends that I knew down in the cities. And so in my free time on the weekends, I would go out and do stuff. So I looked up and I found a BMW S1000 RR. And I'd always wanted one. I'm like, I'm going to go test drive this. So I hop in my M5 on a Sunday. It's like 11 o'clock in the afternoon and I'm just driving over and I drive past this house and I look over and it's two cars that I recognize. And so I revved my car, bang limiter, go on my way. And I had messaged the one person who knew, I knew exactly whose car that was. And it was Jacob Vang. And him and I had been friends on Facebook. We had talked back and forth. He was also into BMWs. And the car that was in the driveway was his Fox Body Mustang at the time. And so his roommate at the time was Alex Mauser, who had a 94 325i sedan, very similar to this, bone stocks sitting in the driveway. So I messaged Jacob, I said, did you hear the sound of God drive by? And he goes, that was you? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, dude, swing by. I'm like, well, I'm going to check out this car and this bike, I will on my way back. And swung back in, best friends ever since. These two kids hopped in the Strangers M5 and we went out on the side road and I drifted curb to curb, whippin it around, having a good old time and yeah, we clicked. But then Alex had a Mark III VR4 or VR6 Jetta that was turboed. And it wasn't that fast, so he ended up selling that and buying a fully built turbo kit for his E36. This was engine ECU turbo, it was a 6262. I am very green still when it came to turbos. This was 2018 and I had absolutely no idea how a turbo worked even at the time. And so I was like, yeah, we can put this in. So in our house garage in Brooklyn Park, he brings the car over. We, there's pictures. We pulled the freon, let them fill the whole garage.

We're all coughing and wheezing.

And we swapped the engine, put the turbo in. We went out and ripped it. And I'm pretty sure Alex didn't have a license at the time. So Jacob actually drove it. And we're four deep in his car. We hit boost for the first time and we all just freak out. Erupted like kids in a goddamn candy store. It was amazing. And the car ended up blowing up because I didn't know what I was doing. And I think I messed up something, whether it was the tune or the fuel pump, something. Anyways, engine blew up. And so we took it apart, figured out what broke. That's when we met Dan from Precision Race Engines.

Oh, okay.

And so we started the build process with him. And in the meantime, we connected with Shawn.

Shawn.

Tuned by Shawn.

Tuned by Shawn, okay. Sponsored the show, by the way. Check it out.

So I had met Shawn from Friend of a Friend.

Okay.

And so we're up at Brainerd and I see this white 2G Eclipse. I'm like, damn, that thing's cool. It has a massive turbo. This is 2018, probably 2017, 2018. I was up there with my E46 M3 that I had at the time. And this weird nerdy ginger looking dude was standing behind this table in a polo for Turbosource. I was like, what the hell is Turbosource? I don't know. And so I started talking with this guy and I had told him about my M5 and I was like, I want a twin Turbo. Could you help with it? Oh yeah, we can do that. Absolutely. He was always a yes man. We'll figure it out. And so I met Shawn and then I met Andre, the owner of the 2G Eclipse, and they were friends of my buddy Jesse. So then November of 2018, Jesse has a 30th birthday party and we meet with Shawn to put an adeptronic, which is a pre, they got bought out by Haltech, but an adeptronic was a modular ECU, is very good, but it wasn't like there wasn't a lot of support for it. Right. So we put an adeptronic on Mauser's car, put a built engine in it. This was 2019. And I built, I have a picture, we carried his built engine out of his living room down a set of stairs. And you guys know Mauser, he's smaller than I am. And him and I picked up this iron block, fully built engine and set it out. And then we put it in his little one stall garage, put it all in, in his car and it worked. We dinaled the car at Moe's, we hit the two step, rowdiest two step you will ever hear. I have a video of it. It is insane. And that car, all of 2019, well the rest of 2019, this was probably June, drove the hell out of it. Had a great time. And I was like, I gotta have one. And so, it's actually funny. I was at Power Cruise that year. Mouser didn't want to take his car. So I went up there and I rode in a buddy's Turbo E36. And this guy, you know, I hop in, he doesn't know who I am. I don't really know who he is. He's a friend of Shawn's. And the guy is actually one of my best friends now. And he just mentioned this, but he's like, I hopped in his car and I'm riding, and it does a pull and I'm like, dude, I'm gonna build one of these. I want one so bad. I'm gonna build one. And he goes, yeah, okay.

Like, who's this kid?

He doesn't know what he's doing. And he just mentioned it the other day. He's like, dude, you actually did it. You actually built one of these like better than I could. And so, yeah, October of 2019, I grabbed Jacob Vang and we drove out to Columbus, Ohio with a U-Haul trailer and picked up this car. So in its roots, it was a 93 325i. Somebody had put a different transmission, a different differential and a turbo kit on it. So I bought it already turboed. It didn't run right. So when I bought it, the guy was like, I don't know what's wrong with it. It doesn't really run right. It needs a bunch of work. It had like tan interior and it had like weird wheels on it.

Well, that's pretty honest. Most of the time, the Facebook marketplace thing just says, oh, it just needs a tune, man.

Yeah, right. And that, I mean, that's kind of what he thought. He's like, oh, it just needs a tune, but I knew better. And I didn't care. Cause I was like, I don't, it's all getting ripped out eventually.

It had good bones. Yeah.

That was basically why I was buying it. The transmission was the main selling point for me. It's called a ZF and they're known to hold decent power, even though I broke a bunch of them. So Jacob and I drive out. We left Minneapolis at like 6 p.m. Cause he had to work. And we got to this guy's house at like 7 a.m. Get the car. I go, I was like, can I test drive it? He's like, yeah, sure. So I go to drive it and I was like, it just, something doesn't feel right. I don't know. It's weird. Drove it on the trailer. We drive all the way back. We towed it with my s***** BMW X5 at the time. That was leaking more oil than gas. Every gas stop, you had to put like three quarts of oil in. The entire trailer had like this film of oil around it because it was coming underneath. So get back and I found that there's a linkage for the throttle cable that was left loose. So the throttle wasn't opening all the way. So I tightened that up and this was, I mean, October, I started just beating the car. And so immediately, Shawn's like, we got to put an electronic on it. So that's what we did. And stock turbo that was on it, it was like a GT35, Okay. Pump gas and started ripping on it. And I was like, damn, this thing's, it moves. Like, let's figure out how much it makes. And so I was on my way to Moe's, right? It was like 2019 was the first year Moe's opened. Yeah. And so I was heading over there. It was like December. I drove the car in the middle of winter, ice cold. And heading over there and I blew a charge pipe and a hose sucked into the turbo, took the turbo. So I was like, damn it. All right. Well, it's going to my buddy Bimmerstang and we're building the turbo kit. I wanted a new turbo kit. Shawn was all about it. He's like, we're going to do this. We're going to make turbo kits for tuned by Shawn. And this is it. And so that's the same manifold that's actually on top of the car is what Bimmerstang made back in 2019. And we did an oval downpipe. We did twin 40 mil waste gates. Did stuff that nobody's ever done on these cars. Everybody always puts the same standard turbo manifold on it. And they just leave it at that. Well, we want to go above and beyond. So we did all that, put it all together, put an EFR 9274 on it. So it's a 72 millimeter turbo. And the car was an absolute animal. And so we found out very quickly the limits of the stock engine. Found out how much we could push it. We bent a lot of rods. We broke a lot of pistons.

Is this that R&D period that Shawn was talking about?

Correct. This is all the 2020. 2020 was R&D.

Well, you guys were like, what? Grabbing engines out of the junkyard or something and swapping heads out. Oh yeah. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so we're on the dyno on Mohs and it's March something. I don't remember exactly what. And we're doing a pull and it hiccups right at the end of the pull and it's misfire. And I was like, something's not right and sure as s***, Benzorod's. So this was probably nine, 10 o'clock in the evening. I already had an engine. I had a mock-up in. I called Bimmerstein. It's at his house. I said, hey, I'm coming to get the engine. They're like, okay. Two o'clock, the car was, two a.m. The car was running again with the new engine.

Jesus Christ.

And so, yeah, we did a lot of crazy stuff. And like, that was a common occurrence. We'd dyno it, we'd push it really, really hard. You know, we're doing, if you ever go to Mohs, you ask him to look at my dyno runs. I probably have 400 dyno runs at Mohs. In this car, in just this car.

That's kind of crazy. You've got to hold the record, right?

I have, it's got to be up there.

It's got to be up there.

It's got to be up there. Because like it was an a**, a crazy amount, but we're always changing something. And Mohs was always about it. I love Moh and Sam and Hussain over there. They're amazing guys. And they were all about it too. They were like, dude, this guy has ambition. Let's go, let's go. And so yeah, 2020 was a great year. We learned a lot. We did a lot. COVID happened. So there's nothing to do anyways. And yeah, we built this thing up and learned a lot.

Is that when Antonio was the shop manager over there?

That was 21.

21, okay.

So I was there, obviously COVID's happening. So there's not a lot of stuff going on. I was working with Mohs a little bit, doing side jobs for him while I was working on this. And, you know, Carl, CJ Toons. Yeah, yeah. TSP. TCP, yeah. TCP, yep. So he was there dinoing cars. And that's actually a really funny story. You know, I took this car out a lot. I put 30,000 miles on it in 2020 with Jesus. Five complete engines, probably about five heads, 10 head gaskets and seven transmissions and three differentials and two axles.

Holy s***.

To be exact.

So you're driving and working on the car. That's literally all you're doing today.

That's all I did. All of 2020. I'm not lying in the slightest. And the funny part is, is it didn't cost me anything. So I'd buy an engine for two, 300 bucks. Oh yeah. The dirt cheap. And I would sell the parts that I don't need off of it. As you can see over there, there's a pile of heads that are remaining from that. But I would still have a good head, you know, cause the bottom end would be bad. So I'd just take the head and sell it. Sell it for $500, $600 and it would pay for everything, including gaskets. Yeah. So really it didn't cost me all that much at the time. So that was a lot of fun and learned a lot. Learned what not to do. With Shawn and I were trying to set up a rolling antilag. We were out at the Coon Rapids Boulevard cruise and Shawn had had a couple beers.

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And we went to go get McDonald's. We took the car and he's like, I'm gonna try something. And we had it set up to the AC button. That was the two-step and we all, so he was messing with the two-step. So 4500 RPM, I pressed the button, smashed the gas and it dumps 300% fuel and basically hydro locks the engine and bent all the rods. Oh my God. While I was driving down the road, just like, and so pull over, it's just knocking, still running. Car always, I don't know what the deal, it always still ran, drove me where I needed to go. And yeah, that was one of them. Another one, I was giving my grandmother a ride. My 80-year-old grandmother has ridden in the car. This was in 2020. And I was up north at my parents' three hours away. And I was hitting two step for my cousins and my brothers and stuff. Everybody's loving it. Drive, do a pull, leave in. And I was like, it's kind of smoking. That's weird. I get to my dad's house and I open up the oil fill cap and it's just chooch and smoke. I was like, ring lens, blew the ring lens out of it. It's like, dang it. So I put a microfiber over the top of the oil fill cap, zip tie it on, and I drive it three hours back. And it made it totally fine. And I pull it apart and the ring lens are just destroyed, gone. And I'd actually, that was probably on a Thursday or something. I came back and actually went out street racing that night with it. There's a video of that. It was amazing.

And did you do the microfiber thing just to release some of the pressure? Correct, exactly.

So what was happening is as boost pressure gets added in to the top of the piston, it's blowing past the rings and pressurizing the crankcase system. And what happens is it doesn't allow the oil to drain back from the turbo. And when that happens, the oil pressure has to go somewhere. So it goes out the exhaust. And so then you're burning oil out the exhaust. And then plus all the pressure is then pushing oil up from the bottom going on top of the pistons and burning that way as well.

I've blown a valve cover off of a Coyote motor.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yep, they do that. But then, yeah, broken transmissions, power cruise 2020 was, I thought that's what you guys were referring to when you said you watched me do a head gasket, because that was a more memorable event.

Oh man, we were, I was not really involved in the scene. Like I was still doing like photography at the time.

Yeah.

So I wasn't like super involved. Like ever since this podcast kicked off, like that's where I really started being around some really cool s***. But yeah, back then, I think I was just, you know, hanging out, doing photos, still exploring myself.

It's still, it's crazy how like-

I'm having good memories here, Dan.

I'm sorry. But even with you, like how like, it doesn't really, the short amount of time. Right. You're telling me that in 2018, you barely know what a turbo is. And like go to just last year, you're managing a high-end JDM shop in town. They're like, that's just f****** crazy.

It's crazy how fast it happens and how quickly it learned. And I literally, I credit all of it to Shawn. He taught me basically everything I needed to know about a turbo in 2018, 2019. And we figured it out. And then I taught him everything I knew about these. And so we learned a lot together. There's definitely some, some button of heads sometimes, but you know, we always push through and it was always a great experience. So, but yeah, Power Cruise 2020. Mouser and I, we're full of piss and get vinegar. You know, him and I, we're cocky as all get out. We show up, we have two 600 horsepower E36s. I had some sticky tires for the back. I had scramble button. I had a semi-built engine. I was like, we're doing this. I'm going to mess some people up at Power Cruise. And so we get up there and I get out on the track and the car was on like 18 pounds and then I pressed the button and it went to like 28 pounds, which was like, holy cow at the time. That was a lot. And so I do a pull, there's a video and on the big straight, click forth, roll into it, and I hit the button and it's like, shh, shh, and it just comes on super hard. Top of fourth, I just roll it into fifth and it like gets loose.

I'm like, whoa.

So I pull it out of gear, it dies. I coast back, get all the way back, and it lifted the head. Never retorqued the head studs. So I was like, God, what do I do? I bought a spare head. I bought a spare head gasket. The only thing I didn't bring was a radiator. And so there's a picture I have, and the radiator literally went from like this tall to this tall. And it expanded because the cooling pressure went in and it blew out the radiator. So in Brainerd, there's this man named Perry Hubling, who's big into the M50 scene. He's known all over the world, and he's a great dude. And I hit him up, and he's like, yeah, I got a radiator. Shows up with a radiator and a spare head gasket. It's like, my guy.

That's clutch, yep.

So that was Friday. I took the head off. It completely lasered the head. So you guys have seen water jetting, right? Where the water needle, the head lifted and the fire that was inside the cylinders was then going into the cooling system.

Okay.

And it literally water jetted the cylinder head and just ate it away.

Holy s***.

Yeah, it's absolutely insane. And like, I had never seen anything like it. I pulled the head off and I'm like, what the? This is crazy. So then Friday night, that's all I did, was put it all back together. I did a heat cycle. I re-torqued the head that night. I was all excited. I'm covered head to toe in grease. Right. Crawl into bed. I wake up the next day. I'm like, all right, this is it. Mauser was out there. He was out beating on his car. He ended up breaking a transmission. It's like, oh man. He's like, oh, I brought a spare with. I had two spare transmissions, a spare differential, two cylinder. I came prepared. I brought a drive shaft, all sorts of stuff. So then I go out, I have the sticky tires on. I'm coming under the bridge and second gear, the car spun, click third gear and it spun a little bit. And then it hooked. And when it hooked, it exploded the transmission.

Oh s***.

Exploded. There's a big old piece out of it. Well, when it did that, it also broke the differential.

Jesus.

So I go back to the pits. This was probably, I don't know, first session, so 10 o'clock. Go back to the pits, swap my transmission and my differential. And I'm back out by 2 o'clock. Well, when I went to go do it, the transmission, when you pull them out, there's a pilot bearing that sits in the crankshaft. And when the crank gets warm, the pilot bearing falls out because there's nothing supporting it anymore from the transmission. So when I pulled the transmission out, the pilot bearing came out and it fell between the clutch disks. And so I had a twin disc clutch. So when I went to go, I pushed in the clutch and it wouldn't disengage because it didn't have anywhere to separate.

And it's got no pilot bearing in it.

No pilot bearing. So I was like, got, all right. So I get back to the pits, tear it apart, find that. Well, when that pilot bearing was in there, it actually warped the clutch disk. And we're like, oh man, what do we do? So I grabbed 12 people, I put them on a car trailer. Okay. I grab a floor jack and the clutch, and I put it between the trailer and the jack, and I bent the clutch disk back flat. And I put it back in the car that night. I did a couple of pulls, it slipped one time, it was perfect ever since. I still have it. I sold it to a friend because I told him about it. It's over there on the shelf. It works perfect.

Jesus Christ.

That was Saturday. Okay. So then, Mauser and I drove our cars up there from the cities.

How did you get all these spare parts with you then?

Mo's came up with a trailer, but I throw everything in the car. It's a sedan, bro. It's a sedan. Rear seats fold down.

Those aren't small heads.

No. All right.

Well, did I have the X5? I might have had somebody drive my X5 up.

Okay.

All right. But either way, like I brought my whole toolbox.

He's resourceful.

Yes.

And so, Sunday, well, Mauser broke his transmission Saturday. He's all bumming about that, but he's like, yeah, whatever. You know, we'll put one in it before I leave. All right, cool. So, I had just done mine. I had just fixed my clutch and put my transmission back in, and I was still just ready to go. So, I went over to his car. I had his transmission replaced in 34 minutes.

S***.

34 minutes.

Now, this is on your back, on jack stands.

On asphalt.

Yep, yep.

People coming over, sticking their head under the, what's going on? Just replacing the transmission. This time, I pulled the clutch off and made sure to put the pilot bearing back in.

Yeah, yeah.

You learned from that one.

I did, I did.

Can you get to those top bell housing bolts pretty easy? Or is it one of those where you got to use 42 extensions and go from the way back?

Can I go grab a tool?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, you're good.

So this is the tool you got to use.

That's my biggest holder, because I can pull a manual transmission pretty fast, but getting those bolts, especially laying on your back.

This is such a German thing. This is the tool you got to use.

Right here.

So yeah, it's a three foot, and it's an adaptive from half inch to three eighths.

Okay.

And so yeah, this is the exact length of a ZF transmission.

Okay.

And what you do is you take the transmission mount off, and then you can do it. Super easy. But so yeah, I mean, the car was running and driving, and from the time I lifted it to the time it was back on the ground was 34 minutes.

That's nuts.

So then I took the sticky tires off my car for Sunday, and I was like, I'm going out there, I'm having a great time. Turned it down to 15 pounds, I think, and I went out there and just did burnouts the entire time.

And it was so much fun.

And I put the other tires on and I drove it back home. And that was our power cruise. And Mouser went out for a couple of sessions and he said, I'm not going to risk it, I'm just going to drive it home. So that was our power cruise in 2020. It was a great time. And like, that was like, I thought that's what you guys were referring to. And you said you saw me do a head gasket in the pits, because that's what everybody talks about.

Okay, this is pre-me and Dan.

Yeah, because I didn't do anything like that after that. You know, I did an axle at a Proving Grounds, snapped an axle on the car, but like, other than that, that was about it. But all of 2020, I was pushing towards doing DCT. And for those of people who don't know, DCT is a dual clutch transmission.

So just to clarify, at this point, you still have a ZF in there, right?

Correct, ZF 5-speed. They came in BMWs from 96 all the way till 2004 or 2005.

Okay.

And so they're super common. They were super cheap at the time. They're not anymore. And I'm sorry. It's my fault. I have a picture. I have all seven broken transmissions in the back of my car. I kept them all. I did.

I kept them all at the time.

So I finally got rid of those in 2021. But yeah, so all that whole time, I was pushing towards the DCT. And there's this guy named Nies Jernette. He's in Europe somewhere. And he had a DCT swapped E30 all wheel drive.

Okay.

And you search his name on YouTube and you see these videos and it's incredible. And that was my inspiration.

Okay.

And so this company came out and it's called HTG. And they came out with a controller for the transmission. And basically you have to remove the stock control unit from the DCT and put in this board or solder directly to these micro pins. And so that's what Shawn and I did in probably either late 2020 or early 2021, like that build season that everybody goes through in the winter, you know?

Yeah. Or tries to.

Yep. And at the same time, I was also building the engine for the car. I was like, I'm finally done with stock engines. We learned enough. We've done enough. Let's put a real engine in the car. So we're doing the DCT. We're putting in a new engine. We put it on a Haltech. We put it on an Elite 2500. We did the IC7 dash. You know, we did a lot of stuff to the car in that season from 2020 to 2021. It was a completely different car. New differential, all new suspension, like everything. And so I was gearing up to go to Texas 2K. You know, I've always heard about Texas 2K street racing. That's what I'm going to do.

And this is 2021, correct?

Yeah, early 2021, the winter. Yep. And so HTG wasn't necessarily new, but it wasn't well known yet. And so in 2021 was this huge fad of DCT. Nobody had really been doing it early on in the way that I was trying to. And so the transmission physically bolts up to the engine, totally fine. You have to do some stuff to make the starter work, and then you buy a flywheel. It's just a chunk of steel with the hubs for the DCT, and it bolts right up. It's like 700 bucks. So we get it in the car and we get it working, and it's just, nothing seemed to work right. It was like, something's just wrong. And so Bartek, he's the owner of HTG over in Poland. Bartek was remoted into my car probably seven, eight hours at a time from Poland on my laptop, trying to figure out what's wrong with the transmission, why it's not working.

That's a seven hour time difference too.

Correct. So if it's seven, eight o'clock here, it's two, three a.m. there. And so yeah, he was doing all that, trying to figure it out and he did. I mean, we got it to work enough that we're like, all right, let's try dynoing it. So Shawn and I, we went to the dyno and we got it to work. And I just, I still wasn't confident about it, but we got it to work. And you know, the car made at that time, 882 horsepower and 726 foot pounds of torque. No vanos, so no variable valve timing. And it was awesome. So loaded it up on a trailer. We did a two place trailer with Mauser and I and drove it down to Texas.

Real quick, did you say what DCT came out of?

So it's out of a BMW 135, 335. And so they used to be cheap. I bought the first one for 200 bucks.

Are you talking like the 2011 era?

Yeah, 2010.

It was the M54 generation, right?

M54 and M55. There was a half year on both. So you get it in a M54 or a M55.

Gotcha.

So, but yeah, and I didn't know s***. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know how any of this stuff worked. And to make it work here in Minnesota on my car with tuned by Shawn, like I thought that was insane. And so 2021 went to Texas, had transmission issues, imagine that. And came back and that's pretty much what I fought until I ended up having an engine failure. And it took out my fully built engine. And valves broke on the intake side, dropped, took out the piston and it completely sent shrapnel through the whole engine. Block was gone, head was gone, valves gone, the only thing salvageable, the rods were gone, the only thing salvageable was the crank. So, cranking cams, yeah. It was devastating to me at the time. I almost gave up then. That was June, July of 2021. And then I was like, you know what? I'm going back to my old ways. So I put a stock engine back in there. And I beat the rest of that year. We figured out the DCT at the end of the year, coming into 2022 and I was so excited. I was like, this is it. It's finally working. Go down to Texas in 2022 and it broke again. I was like, oh my God. Figured out what it was, came back and we fixed it. And all the while, like every time I had reached out to Bar Tech, he would help me almost immediately. And throughout the years, it's kind of fallen away. And that's the trend that I see. And as popularity grew, his influence got less. So we get this car in 2022. I stayed stock engine, had fun with it, you know, blew up, I think, one, went to Power Cruise, was out there spinning tires, banging gears, ended up blowing it. I did a head gasket there too, actually, 2022. I forgot about that. 2023 was the manual car. So come all the way back to Mauser's car. In 2019, Mauser drove the car all the time. 2020, he drove the car all the time. 2021, not as much. We put a GS6, so a six speed from another 335 in it, and the shifter kind of sucked. So it kind of ruined the drivability of the car. And then, end of 2021, he did a money race against an Evo on the street and lost because he broke an axle, and that kind of deterred him. It did. So then, coming into 2022, he had talked about selling it. And I was like, you know what? That's the car. That's the one that I learned on. That's where I got all my stuff from. Like, I need it. I was like, if you ever want to sell it, just let me know. And he didn't say anything. And then next thing I know, one of our mutual friends at the time had bought it. And I was like, dude. And he ended up blowing it up. God, dude. So I bought it from that guy and all of 22, end of 22 into 23, I rebuilt it. And in the fall of, or spring of 23, I took it to Texas 2K. And that's where Gus comes back out again. Car made 786 and like 750 foot pounds and thing was an animal. It was on a Borg Warner 8474. So it was a 68 millimeter turbo and it lit instantly. 3,500 RPM, 20 pounds of boost. And like in a car like that, that makes it very fast.

Yeah, it was ready to party.

All the time. Yeah. So we go down to Texas. I went down with the all wheel drive, twin turbo Beetle or turbo Beetle. Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. Nick. And Zach Lawrence with the LS Hoopty. And we go down and first day out was fine, but the car was making some weird noises. I'm like, something's off. So that was Wednesday. Thursday, out on the street and I go to do a pull and something lets loose, grenades. Car still runs, but the transmission is making a bunch of noise. So we're in Houston. I had a buddy in Dallas that had all the parts that I needed. He had the transmission and he also had another differential. And so I told him about the noise before all this and I was like, hey, maybe come down like Friday with those things. From Dallas, it's about a three hour, three and a half hour drive. And four hours actually, because he was on the north side. And he's like, okay, I can do that on Friday. I was like, all right, sick. So that happens Thursday. I'm like kind of given up. But then I was like, you know, maybe it's just a transmission. Maybe it's just the differential. Maybe I can fix it, you know? So I pull it all apart. Well, the clutch had actually separated and it cut through the transmission. So it was a spec clutch and they have these rivets that hold the fingers in to keep like the pressure plate in place. And yeah, those rivets broke and just cut the whole transmission while it had stopped the transmission. Well, then in between the transmission and the tire is a differential. So it broke the transmission and the differential at the same time. I was like, oh my God. Well, now I have to figure out how to fix this clutch because I got to get this thing re riveted.

Right.

So I'm like, we're in Houston. Somebody has to be able to do this. I spent probably two hours on the phone that morning, Friday morning. And I was like, who can do this? And every time I would call and say, yeah, I got a BMW. Oh, we don't work on BMW.

Right.

I was like, well, it's basically a GM clutch. Like that's all clutches are essentially they work the same way.

Right.

You know, and I was like, I just need this rivet replaced. Like that's it. No, we don't do it. We don't do it. Finally, I call a semi shop that puts new pad material on brake pads for their drums. They also do clutches. And I called them and I was like, Hey, I got this clutch. It needs these rivets replaced and possibly the new tension springs. Is that something you can do?

Yeah. Yeah.

What's it on? Chevy pickup truck. And he goes, okay, is it out of the truck?

Yep. I'll drop it off.

Hop in the truck. We drive an hour and a half down there. It was towards Beaumont. Show up and it's this just run down diesel shop and guys there are like, I show up with this clutch and it's blue. No truck has a blue clutch in it. And I'm like, it's aluminum. It's a billet aluminum piece. It's a nice clutch. And I'm like, here you go. They're like, all right, yeah, we can do that. So we're sitting there, we're hanging out and I'm talking to people and he comes back and he's like, all right, so what race car is this in? Yeah, it's a BMW that makes 800 and he goes, dude, this thing is sick. He's like, I replaced all the rivets, I put in new tension springs for you. I was like, all right, what do I owe you? He's like, nothing. I was like, what?

No way.

I gave him 100 bucks. I was like, dude, you saved my entire trip.

Right.

Thank you. This is like three o'clock. And I'm like, dude, we got to go out tonight. So we ripped back to the house. That time, my buddy Jacob had showed up with the transmission and differential from Dallas. And I was expecting him to just drop it off and leave it. Granted, we're in an Airbnb, only with tools that we brought from Northern Minnesota down. And I was like, dude, thank you so much for bringing them. Like, I'll replace them. I'll pay you. I don't care. And he's like, don't worry about it. Are you putting this in right now? I was like, yeah. He's like, can I help?

I was like, yes, please.

So we spent the next four hours swapping everything over, doing the transmission, doing the differential. And we go to put the clutch on. And I think I'm like, I don't have a clutch alignment tool. How am I going to get this clutch, twin disc clutch realigned? Went to the hardware store or the Home Depot and I got a dowel. That was the same size. And on these transmission, there's a pilot pin that sticks out of the flywheel and the transmission slides onto it. So I eyeballed it and I drilled a hole right in the center of that dowel that fit perfectly on the clutch discs and just winged it. Sent it in there and we put that transmission on. And I don't know, you guys, if you install transmissions, manual transmission, that's all I care about.

Yeah, I have a whole bucket of alignment tools.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The little black thing.

Even when you use them, they never go on right.

Yup, yup.

You have to wiggle them.

You're twisting the thing.

Yeah, you're trying to, you use bolts to suck it in sometimes, you know, like. And I was like, dude, we're gonna fight this. This is gonna suck. It's gonna be awful. We slide it on and it slides all the way in perfect. First try.

Then you have to be like, okay, did I do something wrong?

I second guessed myself. I was like, did I leave a bolt loose? I was like, I don't know. So we get it all back together. It's now 11 o'clock. I leave the bumper off. I leave the exhaust off. We roll out. Josh Sealing was out. He had some spots for us and we pull up. And yeah, we met up with all the guys. I went out and I raced and beat the hell out of this 800 horsepower Civic, all wheel drive Civic. K-Swap had a 68 millimeter turbo on it. I beat him so bad that he said in the group chats that I made 1400 horsepower. And the guy, the owner of the group chat, Junior, he's like, he tagged me. He's like, Gus, how much power does your car make? I was like, seven, 800 on a good day, but I'll race anything. I don't care. And he's like, why is this guy saying you make 1400 then?

I was like, he's just mad I beat him, I guess.

And yeah, the video, it's like, literally he hits it, obviously all wheel drive, he gets out on me. I grab third gear and I just start coming, grab fourth and just, just around him.

1400 would be terrifying in this, by the way.

It is.

Yeah, it is.

It's not there yet, but it's a-

I can imagine it will be there one day.

It's close. I, you know, if we're talking crank horsepower, Yeah. It's at like-

Behind the balls.

1300. Yeah. 1300 to the crank, to the flywheel.

I just want to acknowledge real quick that, so far, you've told us a bunch of stories about you going out and racing.

Yeah.

This, other than you fixed it right before you went out, but nothing broke this one time?

Which time?

Right now. You said you went out and beat the hell out of this car, right?

Oh yeah, so the rest of that weekend was great.

Okay, perfect.

I went- Oh, I broke another axle.

I did, I did do that.

Because otherwise, every single one, you're like, I went and did this, this broke, I replaced all of this.

It's been a lot of that.

So let's see. There's been times that I've gone out and it hasn't broke. The last Texas was good.

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You know, these cars, they come from the factory with 184 horsepower. Yeah. To the crank, to the tire, to the crank. So it's like, you know, we've taken these engines that are made to do that and putting 10, like eight times, seven times the horsepower through them. Like they're not meant to do this at all. And so all the components, everything, like you figure it out. And yeah, I mean, like I said, I've learned a lot, done a lot, and I've applied it, not in only my car, but I have customer cars here now that I'm able to do it to and friends that I'm able to help out with. And it's pretty, pretty crazy. So, but yeah, the rest of Texas in 23 was awesome. I ended up selling that car shortly after that to a friend. He actually owns this black car here. His name is Jesus. And I just got it back to him after the built engine had an issue. We put a stock engine in it and it made 550 horsepower at 20 pounds of booster. So on a bone stock M50, head gasket and head studs, that's it. So yeah. And then coming into 24, I, the rest of 23, I basically bought parts. When I sold the manual car, you know, I didn't have a lot into it, but I had a lot of time. So then all that money that I used, I put into this. I bought a Garrett G45 1500. I bought the Nexus R3 ECU. I bought the insane brakes that you see on it. They're 355 millimeters, six piston rear brakes. That was a huge thing for me. When I first bought the car, it had stock brakes on it and I turboed it. I made 600 horsepower and I took three of my friends in the car and we went out on 610. Middle of the day traffic and I did a two, three, four, top of fourth and I slammed the brakes.

They're like, dude, that was sick.

I'm like, oh, it could be better. Let me brake boost it. So I did it again, two, three, four, slammed the brakes and nothing happened. Pedaled to the floor. And I like, it took me a second, but I got it and obviously the car slowed down. There was no issues. And I was like, the next day I bought a big brake kit for my buddy. Put it on the car and I will never mess with that ever again. So people say that the car is sketchy, the car does this, the car does that. It has the best brakes money can buy on it. They're $10,000. They're very expensive because that's important. Even with those other brakes, you get into situations where you have to hit the brakes hard. That's what people always say. You're doing 160 miles an hour. You need to be able to stop. And that was huge for me. So this thing, it turns the world the other way when you hit the brakes. It accelerates and brakes the exact same way. Like it pulls just as hard as when you hit the brakes. Yeah.

Well, kind of, where did you get the big brake kit from?

The first one came from a buddy. It was a Brembo GTS kit. This is a GTR kit from Brembo, Race Technologies. So it's a six piston, 355 millimeter front rotor, four piston, 335 rear rotor.

Oh, so you went big on the rear, too.

Oh, yeah.

Jesus.

People are always like, oh, you got to run a 15. It's like, no, I want to stop. So the car's on a 17 now. Yeah. And it's like, the car does very well for a 17. It's a 275, 40, 17. And it hooks up. It does really well.

So there's a compromise that happens when you want to go to, you know, like, for example, on Caleb's, was it C17? No, no, it was a ZR1 actually.

Yeah, C6. Yep. Yeah.

He got the little tiny little car. They're still carbon, but they're like small.

And it's like, yeah, that could work great. Don't get me wrong. You know, you have these guys with TBM brakes on there, 200 mile an hour drag cars and they stop.

There's a market for it for sure.

Yeah. But again, the whole purpose of this car is, it is a street car and it's at, and I started doing track car stuff. I want to go back out on the road course with this at 1200 wheel horsepower.

But that would be insane.

Right. So it has KW V3 suspension in it. It has, I forget the name, big sway bars, big sway bars all the way around. All the control arm bushings, all the, every bushing you can think of in the car is upgraded. And the goal with the car is to road course it. You know, that's, going fast is one thing, but going fast around a corner, it's a whole nother.

I never knew you had an itch for that.

Yeah. So I raced my E39 M5 on the road course. It had a Bilstein coilovers, Einbach sway bars and I took it out and beat the hell out of it on the road course.

At that parallel, but now you just got to get into the crazy air. Are you going to be like, you know, for us.

Yeah.

You're going to do that sort of stuff.

So there's talks about doing a chassis mount wing on the back, which would not only help with downforce for going straight, but also on the road course and then do obviously a big front lip and some ducting.

That'll be crazy.

So that's like, I've always drawn towards that. So my buddy Andre has a FDR X7. He's a mutual friend of Shawn and I's, and he had a DCT in his FDR X7. Things go card on crack. And he's taken the car all over the country. He's been to Road Atlanta, and he's been to Road America, he's been to Laguna Seca, and his FDR X7 is pretty sick.

So are you thinking you want to do stuff like grid life, for example?

I don't know if I want to take it to that level. It's going to be hobby.

Okay.

And so high performance driving weekend, things like that.

Yep, HPDs, yep.

Okay.

All that stuff.

We're not even competing, just like, you know, like one weekend or two.

Yep.

Cause it is expensive to go to do that too.

Well, all I know is this thing rips past me like I'm parked at power cruise. So if it starts ripping by me at Road America, I'm just going to hang it up.

Yeah.

So, you know, obviously safety is another thing, you know, that people that want to talk about, I put these seats in right away. These are fixed back seat. They're not only keep you safe in this regard, but they also keep you safe laterally. So that's one thing. And I should probably do a cage in the car. Car's never had a cage, you know, at this level, it's dead.

I was going to say, at what point do you start thinking about that?

Back to street car. That's what I keep saying. And you can talk to anybody who's had a street car. You put a cage in it. This is probably going to be very controversial for people, but it ruins a street car. You get all this road noise. You get the cage that resonates. You make it hard to get in and out. I love the fact that I can put two people in my back seat and go gap Mustangs.

Sorry.

It doesn't take much to gap them.

I've personally seen it happen to myself.

And like, you know, Power Cruise back in the day, we had three people in the back seat. And I was like, you know, maybe I should get rid of the lap belt and make sure they have the shoulder belt on. So I mitigated that. But still, two people in the back seat, ripping around, I took my mom out in it in Power Cruise this year. She rode in the front. It was awesome. Except for she kind of bullied me.

What do you mean bullied you?

So we get out and this car has a GM 88 millimeter throttle body on it. And they don't have a really good lip because they're not meant for boosted application. So the couplers slide off for the charge pipe. And so we get out on track and I do a pull and I was like, God, it's kind of down on boost. I was like, maybe that charge pipe is about to pop off. And so I do another one and all right, yeah, it popped off. And my mom was in the car and we're on our way back. And Josh's girlfriend, Amy pipes up from the back and goes, So Stacey, what do you think of Gus's car? She turns around and she goes, Well, I thought it would be faster.

And I'm like, Mom, no.

So I was making out how much at that point?

Well, the charge pipe was coming off. So it was like 10, 12 pounds.

It wasn't a lot.

So then I put the charge pipe on and then it was up to 30 again. And then she was like, all right, all right.

I understand.

Okay, gotcha.

She rode in the car last year, 2023.

Yeah, we met. Oh no, we met her this year too.

Yeah, I saw her there.

Yep, yep, yep. My mom's awesome. She's a horse girl. She's not scared of anything. That's where I get it from. But yeah, that was cool. Taking my mom out in it. And then that same weekend, 1320, rode in the car.

That's right. What's it like having a 1320 guys ride with you?

It's good. I got at Texas this year in 2024. Fred, actually, this is the highlight of my career. I'll always say this. So we're leaving a meat spot. It was Thursday or Friday. And this year in Dallas, it rained pretty much the whole time.

Yeah.

And so we're at a spot and we're just kind of like waiting for the rain and everybody decides to leave. We're like, all right, we're just going to leave anyways. So I have three people in my car. We get on the highway and I see Fred hoppin a C6 and I was like, sick, all right, I'm going to race it. So the C6 gets on the highway and that's another funny story about how you meet people all over the world. And so he comes out, big old camera hanging out the window and it's like just starting to sprinkle and the car, like obviously it was probably making 1,900-ish.

Right.

And we go and the guy was doing like 20 miles an hour. So I had no boost at 20, rolled into it and he gets out and I just blow by him, spin in the tires and make him look like he's standing still. Fred comes back out and he rolls out, you built a bad b****.

I was like, no.

When Fred says that, I was like, I was so hyped. It didn't matter what I did for the rest of the trip.

He's a BMW guy too, isn't he?

He's a Euro guy for sure. He likes Volkswagens. So he rode in Nick's Bug back in 23.

Okay.

He loved it.

By the way, I haven't talked to Shawn. Did that thing fire up? All right.

Yep, it runs. They're working through it. Obviously there's some changes that have happened to that car. So that'll be talked about here soon once that thing gets finalized.

I'm excited to say the least.

It's going to be really cool.

You know what you're talking about, right?

The silver bug?

I don't think so.

You want to give them just a clip notes because it has a DCT in it, right?

Okay. So Nick Bertula, he did some fab work on this. He's a good friend of ours. He's a Fabber, Arcbright fabrication. He lives up in Princeton area, Zimmerman, sorry. He has this, I think it's a 2004 Turbo Beetle. So it started off as a 180 and he fully built the 180 through Dan.

Yeah.

Put cams in it, put a big old precision on it, and had a six-speed and he made it all-wheel drive.

Was it front-wheel drive?

They come front-wheel.

Okay.

So he made it all-wheel drive with TT stuff.

Okay.

He cut the floor out of a TT, cut the floor out of his bug, and welded it together.

Really?

The guy's crazy.

Did they have the same wheelbase?

No, that's why he cut the floor out.

Oh, okay.

So he cut just where the differential mounted.

Okay.

Yep. Just this way he could take that section and put that back up. But yeah, and the car made 780. Yeah. Insane. And a little bug. And so yeah, he took it to Texas and was just starting to get into it and stuff and having fun with it. And then that year, he ended up blowing up the engine. So he's now switching to a different platform. I don't really want to speak too much.

Yeah, you don't have to. Yeah. I'm blanking on what it was, but it was cool.

Yeah. I mean, it's still Volkswagen. Very Volkswagen. All the parts.

Yeah, because Volkswagen isn't the biggest company in the world or anything. It really narrows it down. Right.

It's cool.

He's got the W16 from Bugatti in this.

Yeah, it fits for sure. But it's going to be really sweet when it's all said and done.

Yeah, I'm excited for that thing.

Yeah. So the whole time on my car, it's been a stock DCT, bone stock, just the HDG on it as well. It's been the same tune from 2021 when Bartek was giving me all of his time, the same tune. I haven't touched it. The only thing I do is it's called adaptation. And so it learns the clutch limits and the gear selector where how much force to push on it. And yeah, I mean, I broke a fourth gear this year. One thing that I really like to do, it's a lot of fun, is you full throttle, a big turbo, obviously it's not spooling. You come up right about 5,000, right when the turbo starts to light, you shift, you upshift. And what that does is it holds the boost, but brings you down in the RPM. So the torque just skyrockets. It's so much fun. It's like, and you're at like 4,000 RPM, and you're just hauling a**. Well, when you're putting probably 1200 foot pounds of torque through a transmission, that's the other side. So I broke a fourth gear because of that.

But what are you redline at in one of those?

So that's another thing. So when I built the car, I never wanted to go high RPM because I know RPM is bad.

Yeah.

Yes, it's great for big turbos, and it helps with keeping torque down, but you're talking harmonics. And so I actually had a lot of failures because of harmonics with the S52 crank. And so that's a 3.2 liter crank, and they have terrible harmonics. And what was happening was is backing the crank bolt out, back flywheel bolts out, you know, tear up rod bearings, main bearings, all sorts of crazy stuff would happen. And this, on this engine in 24, I put in a S50 crank, which is a 3 liter. So they have a little bit less stroke and they're known for better harmonics. And so I didn't want to rev past 8,000. That was my cutoff. It's like, I'm never going to rev it past 8,000. That's it. We go to the dyno with the G series and 8,000, it's amazing. Car worked really well. And I ended up, when I blew up the engine at Power Cruise, one, where you guys were at, I ended up shipping that turbo to a buddy who wanted to try it. It was a G45 1500 with a 115, twin scroll housing, and great turbo. You know, we saw probably, I think I put it to 55 pounds one time on the dyno. Stock engine made like 900 horsepower, bone stock M50, stock head gasket, stock size head studs. And that was crazy. But we shipped it to him, and he was taking a while to get it back to me. He went to vacation, his car broke, all this, and Power Cruise 2 was coming. And I was like, dope, I need this back. So I called my buddies at Turbosmart. He's like, hey, what do you got? He's like, I got a 7880 on the shelf I can ship to you. All right, do it. So I put the engine in on Thursday. We got it running on Friday. Turbo showed up on Tuesday.

The coming, like the Tuesday after or just before?

Before Power Cruise.

Okay, got it.

So Tuesday before Power Cruise, I'm leaving Friday. So Turbo shows up on Tuesday. We get it running with the Turbo on Wednesday because I had to fab some stuff to make it work. And we put it on the dyno on Wednesday night. And I was like, this Turbo sucks. Well, I went from a true twin scroll turbo, divided housing to an open. And they had sent me a 124 AR, which is massive. You're talking like a seven liter engine is what this is made for. Or four cylinders actually spool those very well. So I called the guy, I told him, I gave him all my data and he's like, I'm going to send you a 0.96. And I was like, all right, well, it's not going to be here in time. This is Thursday at noon. He's like, no, I'm overnight it. You'll have it. They're in California, by the way.

Oh, Jesus.

Go load up all the car and everything Thursday night, Friday. I wasn't planning on working. And I was like, I made a pit stop over by JWP around that time. And sure as s*** there it was 12 o'clock, less than 24 hours later, I had the hot side. And so I drove up to Brainerd and I swapped it on. I never got to re-dino it on that exact setup to see what the differences were, but it made a huge difference. I think it actually picked up overall power because the boost was coming in so much earlier.

Okay.

And so even on the dyno that time, we didn't turn the RPM up that high and we're like, you know, maybe, maybe it wants more.

And so famous last words, by the way, for a lot of things.

It has the valve train for it. It has the cams for it. The entire transmission has been known to hold high RPM. So we just turned it up. So at power cruise, it saw limiter at 9,400 RPM.

Holy s***.

On an engine that turns 6,500 from factory. So, and ended up killing an alternator because of it. Okay. So on Friday that happened. So Saturday, Perry again coming in clutch. Thanks Perry. He brought me an alternator. So I was like, all right. I looked at the log. I found the exact spot that the alternator died. And it actually, I was racing Hunter Payton or Zach Payton in his G8, the maroon one, big turbo. Okay. And it hit fuel cut because the car had a voltage booster on it for the fuel system, which is also another touching point on this. Everything on this car shouldn't work, and it does. And it works very well. Yes, I broke a lot of s***, but we did a lot of cool stuff with the car over the years. And so yeah, it hit fuel cut because it had a voltage booster on the fuel pump. And when the alternator died, it was trying to boost voltage from 11 instead of 14. And so it popped the fuse for it. And I had Eddie and his brother, Eddie with the white Evo. Okay. Yep. Turbo, RS motors. Yeah, one of those Evo's. He was in the car after he broke his transmission at Power Cruise. And the fuel pump fuse pops. I pull off to the side. I barely got off the track. And they're like, oh, man, we're going to have to wait for a tow, blah, blah, blah. I like reached under the dash and I grabbed some speaker wire, rip it out, strip both ends and stuff it in the fuse holder, fire it up and drove it back. At that point, I still didn't know that the alternator had died until I looked back at the logs and figured that out. But yeah, it was crazy.

We're in problems over.

At that time, you didn't lean out then, hopefully, did you?

Yeah. So when it hit fuel cut, the Haltech has all the safety setup and it catches stuff very quickly. But I mean, you're talking milliseconds that stuff happens and it happens so quick. We have individual EGTs, it can add fuel based off of the EGTs. So it added as much as it could, but I was out of fuel system. I've been out of fuel system. The cars had stock fuel lines, stock fuel tank, single fuel pump, 5 16th fuel line, like tiny stuff. People say that you need to upgrade to make 600 horsepower or making 1100 wheel.

And still on that?

No. So this year, this year we're switching over. I got a full radium surge tank set up. We're going to do dash 8 feed, dash 6 return. And it's going to have 2 Deuschwerks 810s in it. It's already all in the car, actually.

You know what I'm thinking about in my head is all those Facebook Marketplace posts where it's like, oh yeah, the car's capable of 1800. Right. Because of the fuel.

Yes. So that's, I mean, like literally people talk about it all the time. Like if you don't have half inch fuel line, you don't know, you're not making power. It's like, well, I made this much on 5 16th fuel line. Like I literally, like I would open my hood and there's a rubber fuel, rubber, not AN. There was no AN fuel line in the car. It was literally rubber to the stock hard lines. That's hilarious. Yes. And it worked. It worked great.

And well, you can still have, I had a four dual pump in mine and had a fuse go out and leaned out and blew an engine out that way too. So, you know, you can have them big fancy fuel systems and they still can f*** you in the end.

And that's where, right at the top there, the hall tech. That's where he comes into play. Because, yeah, I mean, we probably would have had a lot more failures if that wasn't on the car.

Yeah.

Now, granted, Shawn is the reason it's blown up a few times, but also this thing right here is the reason too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, there's definitely a lot of times where I should not have had a laptop with me, but I did.

And yeah.

Wait, what do you mean by that now?

So, in the end of 2020, it was on a stock engine manual still on the adeptronic. And Zach, we went out to, with actually Caleb, we went out west to Menominee, or east, sorry, east to Menominee for street racing. We got like probably 20, 25 of us, and we met up with a bunch of Wisconsin guys. And we went out on some highway pitch black. This is, it was my birthday, it was November. And pitch black, like literally, I could not see you like this. It was the darkest night I've ever seen. And there's probably 50 of us on this little side road part. We went out and we're starting to do some racing. And I don't know where the beef with Zach and I had started at that time, but for some reason, him and I were button heads. And at that time, I definitely was cocky and arrogant, but I was new, I was new to the car scene. But I was definitely probably one of the cockiest and arrogant people in the car scene at the time. And everybody knew it. Everybody hated me. And I was like, I don't care. I got this fast BMW. Come f*** with me, you know? And so we finally lined up with Zach. First race, I think his buddy counted it off. I don't remember. I mean, this was four years now. And I got out on him and I just stayed there. And I never saw him. So then he's like, oh, we got to run it again. So we turn around, we run it again. And he gets me, but not by a lot. And I looked down at my coolant temp set, like 240 degrees. And I was like, I gotta drive this back. We're in Menominee. We're f****** in two hours from the house. So I was like, ah, maybe I should.

He rolls out, yeah, that's what I thought, you know? And I was like, let's run it again.

All right, f*** you, yeah. And I think I leaned over and shut the coolant temperature safety off because it had a safety so it wouldn't rev past a certain RPM. I shut it off and we did another pull and he got me again. And I was like, you know, I'm still happy. I was like, dude, you beat me. I was like, I didn't care at that time. I was, I was over it. I was like, the car's hurt. I don't care. So left it at that. I was like, I got him once. I supposed, I, of course, I only posted the video of me beating him, you know, and his buddy took it from the backseat. You see me, literally tail lights disappear and you can't even see me in the frame anymore. It's like, all right, that's, that's pretty good. Apparently his car made just south of a thousand horsepower at the time, 600. Right. All right. We're on our way back and some Mercedes, the car was running fine after that, by the way, 240 temp, it cooled down. I think I had some water in the car, so I dumped that in and it was fine. On our way back, some Mercedes wanted to race and I had either one or two people in the back, did a pull, shifted to fourth, exploded the differential. That was the last time I drove at manual. That time, yep. And yeah, ended up the next day, I had to go get a trailer and trailer back and it was a whole thing. But then Zach and I, all of 21, beefed and then Power Cruise 21, I took the manual car when Mauser still owned it because my car had just blown up right before that. And dude, I probably did 40 or 50 races at Power Cruise in that car and it was so much fun. 700 horsepower, maybe 750 at the time and it was a riot. Mauser still owned it. And I lined up with Zach and that's actually one of the best races I think I've ever had. And we hit it on the big straight, you hear his big turbo come on and we're literally right there and every time I shift, he'd pull back a little bit and then at the top, I just barely edged him out. Ever since then, I messaged him, I was like, dude, that was a great race. And now him and I could have a conversation like this.

That's cool.

And it's like people always talk about me back in 2020 in the car scene and I will be the first to admit that I was a dickhead.

Everybody has that phase.

You know, and it was, like I said, I just started it, I just come into it and I didn't know anything about anything. I thought I was the fastest s*** out there. And obviously I know I was faster s*** then, but it was just, it was a lot. I learned a lot and I learned a lot about, you know, my car and how to make it faster and do all this stuff and I mean even still I get hate all the time for the car and it's I just always come back to it's a 94 3-series that made 180 horsepower from the factory. Right. It has a bone stock transmission in it. I'm never going to upgrade the DCT. I'm going to switch before I upgrade it. It has an open differential in it. You'll jack it up right now, you'll be able to spin each tire different directions. It's wide open and it's a sedan. It doesn't have a cage. It's like all this stuff that shouldn't work, it shouldn't be this fast. And it went 159 miles an hour in the quarter. Did a 10-0, 2-0 60-foot, 10-0 flat at 159 miles an hour. And like, I don't care about drag racing. That's not why I built the car. It's a street car. I hop in it. I take my mom, I take my grandmother for a ride. That's why I built the car.

Is it at least limited slip?

No, wide open. Wide open differential. There's nothing.

So it's a one-wheel wonder?

Apparently not.

Oh, f***.

When you put that much power through them, it's kind of what I figured out. They, it just, it puts it to both of them. It doesn't matter because it's forcing it so hard. There is times where it'll spin one. I did a burnout at the BIR, but it's just, it's how much water was on it. Which one spun easier, but if they're both on the same surface, it's gonna put the power to both of them. So, it's pretty crazy. People, again, that's another thing. It shouldn't work. The fuel system, it shouldn't work. All this stuff. The intake manifold. I had an eBay intake manifold on it for the last four years. Straight from China, unequal length runners. Everybody's like, oh, your EGTs are gonna be all over the place. Perfect. And it's like, all right, I don't know what to tell you guys here. It did work. I've done it. I've been there. And it's been an incredible journey, for sure. But moving back to 2020 real quick. Arrogant Gus. We pull up to this meat spot as a Gapplebee's meat. And it was me, Mouser, and a couple of our other buddies. There's, I think, three or four cars with us. And Mouser and I had 500, 600 horsepower at the time. And I walk up to some people that I knew and I said, hey, what's up? And this old white hair chimes in, and he goes, who invited you? I was like, oh, this guy right here. Oh, well, this is 600 horsepower only. I was like, yeah, I got that. He's like, oh, which car? I said, any of them, doesn't matter, pick it. And he's like, okay, okay. And I kind of calmed down for a second. So that was in the city. So then we drove out of the city and got to the spot again. I don't know why 2020 was so dark besides COVID, but in a lot, dark as hell. Can't see each other like this. And we go through our little driver meeting about what's going to happen and all that. And they're like, oh, anybody want to do call outs? And I raised my hand and said, anybody want to run the black BMW? White hair times it. Yeah, I got it. It's like, okay. I'll guess what he's driving. A Corvette. Yeah.

Okay. I was going to say CTS-V. I was going to say that, yeah. Yeah.

C7 Corvette, white, manual, and Caleb actually flagged it at the time.

Okay.

And so we pull out on the street and I like lean over. I was like, so what role do you want to do? And he's like, role? I hope you didn't bring a role card to dig race. Me? F*** no.

I'll dig this thing out. Give a f***. Yeah.

And so do a little burnout and the car was on 18s, 255 35 18s. Not a tire that you should be doing digs on by any means. Line up, we go, I get out on them a little bit in first just because I didn't have the boost yet. I shift to second and just blow the tires off it. And he gets out, I shift to third, pull up next to him, shift to fourth and just blow my car. And we turned around, we do it again, but it's even worse. Just gap them even harder.

And- Really social distancing.

Yes, really. It was fourth gear that the car just freight trained on people doing. Fourth gear was a party. And we get back to the lot, I get out of the car, I'm walking over and he goes, well, I guess it's pretty fast, huh? I said, I guess so. And I haven't heard from him since. And we're on our way back to the city. And Mauser and I, we both rolled up on him. We both, yeah, bust them on the highway from a roll. Just bust them. Well, turns out, so I was still working at Mose at the time.

Okay.

That was probably a Friday or Saturday. Carl always came one day a week and tuned a bunch of cars. So Carl from TCP shows up and he goes, hey, did you race a white Corvette this weekend? I was like, yeah. He's like, yeah, he called me all pissed off. He said he needs to make some more horsepower to beat a little black BMW on the street.

And I was like, I'll take my commission.

It's okay, Carl. So that was-

I wonder how many people, you have got to have single-handedly pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the economy by pissing people off.

It has to, it has to.

Great for GDP over here.

Yes, yes.

But it was just funny. Carl shows up and it was comical. Yeah, I was probably working on the car at the time because something had broken. But that was just another day. And 2020 was really, like I said, a great year for learning and figuring stuff out and meeting a lot of really good people. Yeah. Back to the other person that I had met. So the C6 that Fred was in at Texas. Okay. The owner's name is Thomas. And I had raced him that night. And then the next night he came up to me and he's like, Hey, I'm Thomas, the black C6.

Oh, hey, what's up, dude?

He's like, Hey, my friend is Jacob Edwards. You sold the DCT to him this week. So this guy is Jacob, another Jacob, has a 2J swapped E30 with a DCT in it. And he bought a DCT for me. Well, he lives in Arkansas, which is next to Texas, you know?

Yeah. It's adjacent, yeah. Yeah. All right.

Louisiana, sorry. Which is again, next to Texas. So Texas last year was a long one for me because I worked Wednesday. Okay. Up at the shop. I worked from eight to six. I got done at six. And I drove through the night to Shreveport, Louisiana.

Shreveport.

Shreveport, yep. Wherever it is.

Let me guess, you've been there too, Dan?

No, I haven't.

Okay, you just have been everywhere. I've been everywhere, man.

You're gonna be like, yeah, Croftfish is right there.

And I delivered him this DCT. Well, Thomas is actually friends with Jacob. And so it's just like this small world. Jacob and I hit it off as friends. And yeah, it's like, I've met all these people all over the world now because of it. And it's incredible. But yeah, DCT brings people together. I'm just saying. So and yeah, employment wise. So obviously this all costs money. Yeah. You know, you got to figure that out throughout the years. Well, I don't really do a lot as far as like hobby wise, besides cars and fishing. I like to fish. Northern Minnesota, I fish a lot, but that really doesn't cost anything unless you have a boat. Boats are expensive, but I don't have a boat. If you ice fish, you got to have, you know, snowmobiles or four wheelers, I don't have those. I use my buddies. And so the real thing that I've put all my money into has been the car. I don't really game. I don't do, you know, any home hobbies or anything like that. So as far as employment wise, I worked at a shop called Recycle BMWs from 2017 to 2021, and I still work there part time. In the meantime, I was a server at Applebee's for a year. And then I went to a two for 32, man. No, it's well, it used to be two for 20, bro. Yeah.

Well, they have three options.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

They used to be two for 20 or two for 25.

Yeah. Okay.

And that was a good deal. That was when I first started there. That was a good deal.

That's what he did after Shawn's podcast. I'm like, man, Applebee, I haven't been to Applebee's in like 10 years.

I'm like, they still have, I, their French onion soup.

It was good.

It's good. I hold it as like a standard. It's not the best I've had, but it's not the worst. Like it's right in the middle. It's my house, like whatever that is, the standard or the control.

Yes, the test subject. Yes.

Yeah.

I have no regrets working at Applebee's. People will look down on me for it. It was a great time, great experience. I made good money. So what? I worked, when I moved down in 2017, I was working at Applebee's in Grand Rapids, where I'm from. And so I moved down. Well, I didn't give two weeks. I just literally just uprooted my life. So I still was working in the one in Grand Rapids before I transferred to the one in Plymouth, where you guys probably went. Yeah, yep. And so I would work at Recycle, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, from eight to eight, probably. And then on Friday, I would work from eight to noon and then drive up to Grand Rapids and work Friday, double Saturday, double Sunday. And then come down and I did that for three weeks. And then I transferred to the one here in Plymouth. And what I did is I worked at Recycle from eight to four or eight till five. And then I would go to Applebee's and I did that Monday through Friday. I was averaging a hundred hours a week, all of 2017.

Jesus.

And so I got to do a lot of cool s***. I had an E39 M5. I had an E46 M3. You know, I bought all those things.

What you're saying, if you work hard, you can also play hard?

Yes. That's crazy. I was going up north every weekend. I was fishing every weekend. I was doing all sorts of cool stuff going all over the place. And then, yeah, then I got roped into car building cars.

Right.

And so I, that's when you throw away all of your other hobbies, life goals, dreams, all that stuff. Yeah.

Right.

Well, then I quit working two jobs and I was like, oh, I can live this way. And then I built Mouser's car and I'm like, I want to build my own. Then I got another job to help build it. And at the time I had my Turbo E36 sitting in the driveway and I had my E39 M5. E39 M5 was by far my favorite car in the world. You could hop in it, quiet, comfy, but then you have a V8 with a six speed. I beat the living heck out of that car, as you can imagine. And it was amazing. Granted, I did a lot of work on it at the end, but I still sold it and I regret it because I had a Turbo E36 and I was like at the time, 22 years old, 23 years old. I want to go fast. You're not going to go fast in the E39 M5 without spending 20, 30 grand.

Right.

And now, of course, here we are.

Here we are.

But, so yeah, I sold the E39 M5 and then I had been working at Topgolf. Topgolf was an amazing experience. I never anticipated working at a place like that. I went in for an interview and they make you dance in a full room with strangers. And some of you might think that's crazy, but it actually brings out the quirky people that you want to serve you. Some of your best experiences at a restaurant will be because of a server. It will be a fun server, they'll make you laugh, they'll make jokes with you, they'll throw s*** at you, whatever it is. Those are the people you want. And so that's what Topgolf was doing. And so you get in this place and it's all a group of people like that. And so it's just hanging out with your friends. And so some of my best friends that I've had over the years have been through Topgolf. And you know, you meet all these like-minded individuals and you all hang out and you all do sort of the same stuff. There's a lot of people in cars, bikes, fishing, all sorts of stuff because we're all at the root of it all, the same person. And so I did Topgolf for a while and then I served at another place called Park Tavern. All the while.

Isn't this place the St. Louis Park?

You got it. I love that place. And that was because of a manager that worked at Topgolf had moved down there. And so, yeah, I went over there and again, awesome place. Same sort of deal, like-minded individuals. Everybody's just hanging out, having a good time, while making money. And-

Did the whole, can I have some ranch thing piss you off? No. No. Okay. Just making sure.

No, honestly, like people think about serving as like, like a daunting thing, having to wait on people hand and foot. It's like, it's not that big of a deal to me. It really isn't. I would go back in a heartbeat.

Do you think it's your personality type too though?

I think so. And so that's the other thing too, is like when I moved to the cities, I was definitely an introvert.

Okay.

And serving definitely helped bring that out. And then when I went to Top Golf, it just brought it out even more. And then I got into cars and that brings it out even more. And it's like, you can't be this sheltered person in the car community. You really can't.

The guy that leans against his car.

Yeah. Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Like I have a turbo sitting on my hood, dude. Like I don't, I don't care. Yeah.

It almost rolled off early.

And so it's like, you know, you could have all these nice cars, but if it's nobody else appreciates it because you're a dick, what's the point?

Yeah.

You know? And I've come off as a dick before, but it's it's usually needed. Well, then I was working all the while at all these restaurants. I was also working at shops, you know, helping Shawn out, doing jobs with him, building my friend's cars and then doing mechanic work on the side. And so that's been like the last two, three years. And about a year and a half ago, John, JWP had reached out and said he wanted me to work for him. And I made the joke like you can't afford me. And he goes, no, no, no, I'll figure it out. It's like, no, you can't afford me. Like I make really good money doing what I do. I will not make that as a manager. I'm sorry. And then he made me an offer. And I was like, you know, I'm almost 30 years old now. Maybe it's time I don't work so hard. And so I went over to his budget auto shop and managed it. And that was in July of 2024 or 2023, sorry. And managed that at the same time, I was working at Park Tavern only on the weekends, two days a week, super easy, making good money, funding the car, building it. And I was like, you know, I don't want to work this hard. So when I moved over to his JWP location, I was like, hey, there's a lot more work. I don't need to work this hard. I'm going to quit Park Tavern. And so talked with John, we figured out how it would make sense, moved into JWP and that was really home for me. I was set. I was so happy there.

It was noticeable by the way. I said it like a million times too. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, it was the perfect atmosphere for me. I could talk to customers. I could be this goofy person and talk to them and make jokes. But I still got the passion of the cars. I had a great team behind me. We had Kyle Lurk tuning on the dyno. We had a bunch of good guys in the shop, and then John was in the front and he was doing all of the, John's quirky too. You guys have talked to him. Probably get him on this eventually. Maybe. Probably not. We'll see.

He's fighting me still.

Yeah. It was awesome. I really did enjoy it. I was happy. I was comfortable. I signed a three-year lease here thinking that was it. I was going to have my own shop where I can work on s***. And then I have a shop that I get to run and work with some of my friends. That's pretty awesome. Right. And yeah, unseen circumstances with the economy right now, unfortunately, I was let go. Right. No real hard feelings towards John. Definitely could have had and handled a little bit better, but it is what it is. Yeah. So we're working towards a new step in my life. Probably gonna move. We'll see what happens there. Yeah.

We'll see how it shakes out.

But in the meantime, I got to finish this thing. So back to the whole route while we're here, this DCT 36.

Well, before that, cause I've been wanting to ask this question for like the last hour, I want to say. I just was trying to find a great place to put it. You, you came into this knowing for lack of a better term, nothing, right?

Literally nothing.

I almost said, f*** all. I stopped myself. This is a PG show kids.

Watch the language.

God damn it. But so how do you teach yourself? Where do you, where did you learn to learn?

Sounds like you break a lot of s***.

Yeah. Trial and error.

But are you on forums? Are you, for example, taking HPA courses? Code Minnox.

But like, no.

Like where are you learning all this? YouTube University?

Just do it.

Okay.

So like I said, I started up north in northern Minnesota.

Okay.

It's cold. For two months out of the year, it's below zero, even negative 30 for two weeks.

Yeah.

It's cold. Ship breaks for no reason. It's just cold.

Okay.

So you have to figure it out. And so growing up, that's the mentality I had. I grew up in the woods. We burned wood. You know, we had a nice garage. We got to work on stuff there. We'd had dirt bikes and four wheelers and snowmobiles. And then we got into cars and cars break. My first E36, the injectors were sticking open because it was so cold. The cold start valve sensor was sticking open and it was dumping all the fuel. Holy s***. And it eventually washed out the rod bearings and I sent a rod through the side, you know? And it's like, you break stuff and you have to fix it. You don't have an option. You don't get to go to a shop to figure it out. You don't have money for that. You have to figure it out. And I'm not saying I grew up poor, but I didn't have a lot of s*** growing up. I worked hard for my stuff. That's how I've always been, is I work really hard if I want something. And even my first car, my dad's like, I'm gonna buy it for you, but you owe me. You pay me back. So I got a job. I worked at a pizza place for four years.

Which pizza place?

Sammy's.

Sammy's, okay.

In Grand Rapids.

Okay.

Gold, it's good.

Okay.

Best pizza in Minnesota, without a doubt.

Really?

That's a bold claim.

That is a bold claim.

It has to be Grand Rapids or Hibbing Sammy's.

Okay.

There's one here in Coon Rapids. I eat at it. It's not the same.

Okay.

It has to be there. It's the water.

It's the water.

For the dough and the socks.

I'm serious. No, that makes a huge difference.

It does.

You got a lot more chlorine in the water here than you do there.

And it's a lot of, there's a mine pit up there in Grand Rapids that's beautiful. And the water is amazing up there.

Okay.

So all the lakes are clear. Pegama Lake, which is in Grand Rapids, was voted the best lake ever. I think at best, literally the best lake, freshwater lake, I think is literally what it is.

Okay.

So somebody can fact check us on that.

Please don't.

No, I'm serious.

I'm gonna pull up Grok real quick.

But yeah, so did that. And like, I work hard for my stuff and you know, you just got to figure it out and recycle, recycle BMWs. So they specialize in used BMW parts, but we did service, we worked on stuff. That's where I learned 90% of my stuff.

When did you start there again, by the way?

2017.

2017, okay.

So I'd been there for two years before I started the E36 project.

So you got to kind of, so was somebody there like teaching you how to work on stuff?

Nope. Figure it out.

Okay. I'm just trying to pin this back. Did you like learn some stuff from your dad or you just take s*** apart and hoped it comes back together?

I learned a lot from my dad, like the basics, the fundamentals, how to work on things. But not like turbo stuff, not race car stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The more advanced stuff came later.

Auto, small engines, things like that in high school.

I was already beyond that when I got to high school. You know, I had a mini bike that I literally took the whole clutch apart on. I was 10 years old and put it back together. I had a KX 60 when I was eight years old. My dad at the time had a CR 250, bigger dirt bike, and it was on race gas, high compression. And I was like, dad, I want to ride it. And he goes, no, no, no, no, it's too much for you. It's a fast bike. No, dad, I really want to ride it. And he goes, if you can kickstart it, you can ride it. Okay. So I walked over to it and my feet barely touched the pegs while standing. Okay. So it's a big bike. And it was leaning against a tree and I got next to it and I pushed it down the driveway. And while I was rolling, I jumped on that Kickstarter and all my weight, all 90 pounds or whatever I was at the time, on that Kickstarter as hard as I could. And it went, glug, glug, bring. And I went up and down the dirt road for 30 minutes on that thing. Ran it out of gas. Okay. And you know, like that's unfortunate that kids aren't doing that anymore. And you know, I have people all the time messaging me, asking me for help. And I like, I'm reluctant to give it to them because you want them to figure it out. Kind of wanted to figure it out on their own. But it's like, also, I had to work so hard for what I have. Like, it's not necessarily free information anymore.

Well, you earned those scars, I guess. Yeah.

Well, we can get into that. I almost died over this car.

Like legit. Okay.

Like legit. And so, yeah, recycle BMWs. I owe a lot of credit to him. Brian Tool over there. You know, he helped a lot.

Okay.

So. But yeah, I almost died. Yeah.

Death. Get in that hole.

Holy cow. So 2021, when Bartek was helping out a lot, seven, eight hours a day.

Just to clarify, this is the Polish guy still, right?

Yep. From Poland. HDG doing the transmission. Engine runs perfect. Things flawless. It's ready for the dyno. We just got to get this transmission to work. We can't figure it out. And the root of it all was spark plugs. Spark plugs caused an EMF through the...

Oh, I remember you telling us about that. Yeah.

And it caused the transmission to freak out. And so that was the root of it all. My wiring was perfect. Shawn's wiring was perfect, but we still swapped back and forth trying to figure it out and it ended up being spark plugs. Anyways, Bar Tech was trying to work through that and figure out a way to go around it. He was figuring out all the CAN bus stuff so we can communicate to the Haltech. My car was one of the first ones in the country on the DCT with HTG, let me mind you of that. First swapped car, HTG, even with a Haltech. It was like one of two or three in the country. And it's like one of two or three left in the country on HTG, everybody's moved away from them now. And so it's February, it's cold outside, I'm running the car trying to work through these problems so Bar Tech's remote it in and I have that big three foot fan in the garage door. The garage door is similar to this. And I had the door open to the top of the fan, the fan's pushing fresh air in. Car's running for probably an hour while Bar Tech's doing the, it's called adaptations. You need fluid pressure to do that. And so the car's running, it's on E85, it's full three inch straight pipe, you know, whatever. It's idling, nothing's crazy about it. And I shut the car off after we finally come to a stopping point. And I was, I was going to go out or something, it was like eight o'clock at night. And I'd been there all day already. So I was like, all right, I'm going to leave. And our bathroom was set up in the corner, similar to this and how the air was coming in, it would go in through the shop, circle around, and then it would go through the bathroom, because then there was a door that led outside. So it was just a big circle, just funneling through this shop. This was in St. Paul. And I walk into the bathroom, use the bathroom, and I walk out, and I wake up on the floor. And I was like, no idea where I was, what time zone it was, anything like that. All I could do was I rolled over, I pulled my phone out of the pocket, and the last person I had called was Josh Seeling. And I knew he lived somewhat nearby. I called him, I said, hey, I fell or something. And Sam Moraine had parts there from his Audi at the time, and I blamed it on that. Like I tripped over his parts or something. I said, I busted my face, I'm bleeding and it hurts. Can you just like come check me out? And so the door's still open, fan's still on, and I get myself up into one of those chairs, I'm drinking some water. And while I'm waiting for Josh, I call my dad and I was like, yeah, I fell and I don't know, I just feel off. And he's like, yeah, you know, maybe you should go in. And I'm sitting there, I'm talking to him for like 10 minutes. And I was like, yeah, I was just working on the car and like all this. And he's like, you sound drunk. And I'm like, I haven't drank anything. And he's like, yeah, you need to go in. And so I wash my face up. And at the time it was end of COVID, it was early 2021. I hadn't shaved in eight months. I had this big beard and I had hair at the time. And so Josh brings me into the hospital and we went to the St. Paul Hospital. I don't know if you guys have ever been there, but please don't ever go. I walk in and again, I still look homeless. I'm not going to lie. And I walk up and I'm like, hey, I fell. I need to get checked out. You know, I was running a car and they're like, okay, we'll get you into a room eventually. And so they sit me on a couch out in the lobby. I don't remember much of that. Finally get into a room and they put the thing on your finger where it measures your oxygen. And the tech didn't say anything, but he kind of like looked and then like freaked out. And I was like, okay, well, this is weird. It's now like nine o'clock on a Friday, I think. And I was like, that's weird. Okay, and then a doctor comes in right after. And he's like, you could have died. You basically died. He said you have 33% CO2 in your blood right now.

Holy s***.

And so a person who smokes a pack a day has less than 10%. And 40%, you're pretty much dead. And this was an hour after I had walked enough.

Yeah, I was going to say, it cleared out a little bit at this point.

It had to have. So I get transferred, they get me all this blood work done and all this. And they're like, yep, you got to go to a pressure chamber. We're going to pump you and basically send you below C level and fill you full of oxygen. It's going to push the CO2 out of your blood. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, I fell on my face. Like it really hurts like right here. And I was like, can you see if I need stitches or anything? And one nurse looked, oh, you're fine. I was like, okay, well, you know, like blood like I'm still actively bleeding. And like I would keep wiping. And like I said, I had a big beard and I kept wiping and more blood would come out. And I was like, it really hurts right here. And this probably was about 10 o'clock now. Shawn had came and he was sitting in the hospital with me and they're like, oh, well, we got to wait for an ambulance. And I was like, well, why can't I just because the pressure chamber was in Minneapolis instead of St. Paul, so they had to transfer me. I was like, can you just drive me? And they're like, you could die on the ambulance ride. I was like, oh, I'll wait for the ambulance then.

Yeah.

And so ambulance finally shows up at like a little after one, get over to the other hospital. And again, in the ambulance, I asked, can you look at my chin?

Oh, you're fine.

Okay. Get to the other hospital, ask a nurse, can you look at my chin? And at that time, I'd finally like started to come around and I took a picture of myself. Yeah, I was like, yeah, I wouldn't serve me either.

I look literally, I literally looked homeless.

I had no hat on, so my hair was all scraggly, and it was probably a little greasy because I was working in the shop and dirty clothes. I was in a gown at the time then, and finally get into the pressure chamber, and I'm sitting there and I'm talking to that nurse. And then I was like, can you look at my f****** chin? Like, please, just, and she finally digs in there, and she's like, oh, that's kind of bad, but it's already starting to scab over. I was like, yeah, because it was 12 hours ago. And so finally get out of the pressure chamber. I was in there for two hours, get all discharged. Shawn picks me up and brings me home, and I just go straight to bed. And I wake up 12 hours later, and I looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn't stand it. So I shaved my whole beard, my whole face, and I've shaved my head ever since. That was five years ago. And when I got down to the chin, there was a chunk of meat hanging out.

Yeah, I was going to say something.

So I have a scar on my chin here because of it, but it was disgusting.

Yeah.

And it had already been 24 hours at that time. There's pretty much, it was already healing. So I was like, there's not much you could do, but I needed stitches and they wouldn't give me stitches because I looked homeless. Yeah. So I almost died. So had the door not been open, had the fan not been on, and had I not gone in, had I gone to sleep, I would have died.

Oh yeah.

So the fact that I was able to get up into one of those chairs there that you guys were saying were so comfy and didn't pass out.

That's really comfy.

Yeah.

I could die in a chair like this.

Right? Yeah.

And my phone at the time didn't work that well. I remember when the screen would only turn on sometimes.

Yeah.

I was terrible with phones then. They were always broken. And I had to hold the Siri button and talk to Siri and said, Hey, call Josh Seeling. And it almost didn't call him because his last name is a little weird.

Yeah.

But yeah, that was the most dramatic thing that I had with the car and all this stuff and all that never crashed or anything like that. But yeah, I drove it into the side of a truck one time. That was pretty cool.

Yeah.

So 2021, we were figuring out the DCT still. And I had to get the throttle body modified for the GM LS1.

Okay.

We needed to switch because the Bosch one we had wasn't working. And I got a GM one for free. So we made that intake over there. Just made a plate for the throttle body. Well, while driving it over to my buddy Bimmerstein's house, and it was March, but all the snow had melted except for the shaded areas. And so his driveway was like a two and a half car wide driveway. And he had a big Ford on one side, and then it was open into the garage on the other. Well, I was all excited about the car, giving it gas and stuff. So I accelerated down his little side street, hit the brakes and came into his driveway. And the car just slid straight into the truck. It never turned. Once I turned into his driveway and was gonna keep going to go into the garage, it just went straight into the bumper of his truck. And I just swapped the fender out last year. The hood's kind of still messed up because of it right in the corner there. But the funnier part was we hadn't figured out the DCT yet. So it's called take up. And that's how you like basically start from a stop, how the clutches slipped. Well, the car was in take up and it was engaging the clutches as I was sitting against the side of his truck. And so I'm sitting there after I just crashed into his truck and the car's just, Robber, Robber, Robber, bounding into the bumper of his truck. Nothing happened to the truck, it dented my fender. But like that's pretty much it. I've spun the car out once at the track and never looped it, never nothing like that. It's always been good car. And as Shawn said on your podcast, the fastest, sketchiest car he's ever been in. But he also feels the safest. And I don't know what it is about E36s. You can hop in a car, any other car that has a thousand horsepower on these tires or on any tire, you give it gas, it's gonna go sideways. Nine times out of ten, these cars, they do weird stuff. Maybe it's the open differential in the back that makes it go straight. But I could be laying 11s for miles and the car's just driving Miss Daisy. I have videos at Power Cruise where I'm literally just going down the straights, just doing burnouts, just driving it along. You know, and like, it's always been that way. It's never been scary. You know, like, you see all these crazy videos of people hopping in these fast cars and everybody freaks out. It's like, yeah, it's fast, but it's not like scary. Oh, it's different.

That fourth gear sounds rowdy from what people tell me.

Yeah, even in the DCT, it's fast too.

Is it going to be ready for Power Cruise this year?

Yeah. So I was going to try to make Texas, but obviously due to losing my job, I kind of put a halt on that. So right now the engines tore apart. I'm doing a new turbo, so we're switching from a 7880 to an 8280. Turbosmart is also releasing a divided housing. So we'll be able to switch back to, similar to what the Garrett was, but an extra six millimeters bigger.

Okay.

So much bigger turbo. We should be able to make the power goal that we want of 1300 to the tire. With just boost only. I've always wanted even, it's funny because like, as a kid, you know, growing up with these cars, I'm like, I'm going to have 1000 horsepower E36. You get 1000 and you're like, all right, now what? Right. It's like, well, I know I can do more. So you just keep, you keep going. And so we'll see what the DCT can handle. Maybe I'll tone it back a little bit this year, just because.

Well, at what point do you start considering, because earlier you mentioned you might get rid of DCT. And once you get to that level.

Yep.

Would you ever consider upgrading a DCT?

The problem is, there's not a lot of aftermarket support.

That's what I was going to say next.

You can put clutches in them. And so that's the funny part about this. It's on stock clutches. And a lot of guys in the stock cars, so like 135, 335, M5s, M6s, F80s, they all have to do upgraded clutches at 600 horsepower.

Okay.

Because the stock controller doesn't apply the same pressures that it does on the HTG. And you know, I'm making 1100 and it's stock clutches. You know, I've had some issues, you know, but it's not anything crazy. So it's like, I could upgrade the clutches, but I already broke a fourth gear.

Right.

Nobody makes gears for them.

That's what I was gonna say, cause like-

Nobody takes them apart and fixes the gears or anything even. There's a few people that have tried and they've failed.

Okay.

You know, maybe if somebody is like, hey, I can rebuild your DCT. I have three. I'm ready to go. I'll send them out. I'll get them all rebuilt right now.

Okay.

Because they're starting to get a little more expensive, you know?

We're about to find some weird guy in the middle of nowhere. That's gonna be like, oh yeah.

Well, what's in like the Audi TTs and stuff like that? And they use Datsun stuff?

It's completely different DCT. So this is a Getrag DCT. That one's a DQ500. I don't know who makes it exactly. It might be Getrag as well, but it's a different gear set. This is a rear-wheel drive. That's a, we got another story.

Maybe you need to find one out of a wreck GT500 or something, a Tremec.

Yeah, you know, but then if I'm adapting it, why wouldn't I just put a different transmission in that's equally good and has aftermarket support?

Well, what's the next step?

8HP.

Okay.

So 8HP came in the Mark V Supras. They actually started a lot earlier on in BMWs. I actually have one here. So it's the next step because there's a lot of aftermarket support for it. There's a drop down, 10 grand, you have a 1300 horsepower transmission. You know, it's like, who am I thinking of that makes those? Peer.

Peer, that's what it was.

Peer drivetrain solutions makes it. You can do it yourself.

You said it and I still read on my head.

Yeah. So no, I didn't say it yet. Peer drivetrain solutions. So yeah, I mean, that's the next step. And it's not a DCT. It'll never be a DCT. There's something magical about that transmission that it hits all the right neurons in your brain and it feels just so good.

What DCT does? I agree. This is my first experience a year or two ago when I got my car. Yeah.

And I mean, it's just something about it, especially in this, it's so raw and aggressive and it's like, and it drives so good still. And it's so fast because of it. It's like, I never had shift cuts. So when you'd upshift and never cut torque or anything like that, it just slammed the next gear. I have never had down up rev or rev match downshifts. So when you downshift the tire squawk and stuff, it just forces the gear and the engine revs because of it. It's like, it's so raw and aggressive and nasty. It's an electronically shifted manual. It's the best way to describe it.

Just not the garbage one that's in the R8s and the AR-9s.

That's not a DCT though. That's like an external box that shifts.

They still call it like an electronic manual or whatever. Yeah, it's not a DCT.

There's still one clutch.

BMW did that in the E46s called SMG, semi-manual gearbox.

How was it in those?

Trash. The gearbox themselves was just a manual. And then they had a slave on them that was hydraulically operated by the car. And then the shifter was also hydraulic. And so there was a pump on them and the pump failed and the slave failed and then the shift selectors failed. And then one thing goes wrong and it doesn't shift right and then it breaks the transmission.

You still gotta put a clutch in it at some point in time.

All the time because it wears it even faster because it's slipping it all the time. Right, yep.

So one of the things I was chatting with, I think it was with Caleb actually, we were talking about various transmissions. Do you have any idea just how quick this DCT shifts?

40 milliseconds or so.

Okay, Jesus.

Very fast.

That's what I thought, yeah.

Very fast. Yeah. You know, when I turned up the power past 1000, we had to add a shift cut because it was slipping the clutches really bad. It still did at the end of the season. I was trying to do better 60 to 130s. And I put weight in the car and turned up the power and it actually went slower than it ever has. It still did a 4.1, 60 to 130, spinning the clutches. You can hear it in the video. It's in the graph. It's so funny. I posted the graph and so many people had so many negative things to say about it. And I still come back to stock clutches. Right. Like if I put clutches in it, it would be well into the threes. And it's gone faster. That's all I'm going to say. Never posted it. It's gone faster.

Okay.

60 to 130.

You don't want to release it right here, right?

It doesn't. I don't care about 60 to 130.

Okay.

I tell people that all the time because this car could go out and do a 60 to 130 in three seconds. This car could go out and do it in three seconds. You put them next to each other and they both go fours.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter. What matters is in that moment when you're lined up next to someone. The only thing 60 to 130 is for, is for bragging rights.

Well, that's one of the things that we've talked about countless times on the show at this point. It's like, it's kind of ruined racing from what it sounds like.

Yeah. Like you walk up, oh, what's your 60 to 130? Oh, it's in the fours. Oh, you're slow as piss. And then he goes out and gaps you. It's like, okay, well, what changed? Well, the road, the temperature, the car, the engine, the transmission, the differential, the tires. Like there's too many variables to put it into effect in the real world. And anybody who's done 60 to 130s, like a lot, knows that. Everybody has a glory pass. Everybody says that they can go out and do it over and over and over again. Not on different roads, not in different temperatures, not on different days.

Yeah, how many hits did it take you to get that f****** glory hit that you posted online?

That's what I'm saying. Yeah, and it's like all these guys in Minnesota especially have done it on the same roads. There's a lot of people that have gone and done it down in the same roads.

I still don't understand when, so do you do it from a dig and then it's okay, so where you are at a 40 roll?

Where do you go? I was starting in 40 in second and I have a very violent video of that. When I first started getting into it and turn up the power, it was on brake boost and it was so aggressive that it was throwing me around the car because I was sitting there and I was trying to pedal it, trying to get it back in the boost and the throttle blade was opening and snapping and the boost was there. It was just so gnarly. And yeah, that one went like a 4.3 and it was still just spinning the clutches. Like I just don't care about it. I really don't. People, like I said, I turned the power up and the car went slower. So do what you want with that. People have said it back and forth so many times. I made a post about it when I first wanted to post it. I was like, hey, I'm gonna go really try to do a good 60 to 130. What do people think it'll do? And people were all over the place. 4.8, 3, 2, 4, all these numbers. And people that I have raced, that have done it, had said numbers. And I was like, all right, you know, that's pretty close to what it should do. And, you know, obviously we had issues, so who knows? But it's gone faster, so.

If you could change one thing on this car today, like unlimited budget today, what would you change? Or upgrade, I guess.

Probably, I mean, it's due for an LSD. I think that might help a lot in the car in the back.

I think it would help a lot.

I love the fact that it's stock body. I love the fact that it's a sedan. The fuel system was definitely, you know, a crutch. So we just got a fuel system in the car. That's going to be a huge, huge difference. You know, we made, on a Mustang dyno, it made 975, and it was out of fuel system on 2200 cc injectors. Like people will say, you can make 2000 horsepower on 2200 cc injectors. Yeah, you probably can with the right fuel to supply them. So that's an indication like, hey, yeah, we don't have enough fuel going to these. We need to up that. Other than that, I like where the car's gone. I've pretty much done anything that I wanted to do to it. I've changed everything that I wanted to. This year, we're putting a PDM on it, so it's getting rid of all the stock body function. Okay. Literally, when I tore it apart, it had power locks. That still worked. I still have the key for it and everything. It has a stock steering column in it, stock dash. I took the heater box out of it back in 21 and put an aftermarket heater box in it because we're in Minnesota, we need heat. Yeah. All the windows work, sorta. But other than that, I really wouldn't change much. Really, maybe get a good cage in it and maybe some different seats. I don't know.

What about the cage thing is a tricky one, right? Right. You like taking people out for ride-alongs. Yeah.

I mean, there's people out there that have good cages for sedans that you can still put people in the back.

That's what I was going to say. What's that solution look like? Any idea?

It's expensive.

Yeah, definitely expensive.

Well, I want to ride them, but just keep in mind, I still have kids.

Right.

So yeah.

Like I said, I've never done anything crazy in the car. It's only tried to kill me outside of it.

Yeah, which is hilarious.

Right. There was a time I was out street racing, and I stabbed the throttle, and it went sideways. And I remember I looked out the right, and I was looking at the guy's taillights or something like that. I went like, no, it went this way. The back end came out to the left, and I saw a Mauser behind me.

Oh, yeah.

That's like literally did that. And then it went straight. And I was like, okay. And it was over a bridge. I've learned, don't do pulls on bridges. A lot of people will say that.

Well, unless you're in Tampa on that one very special bridge.

Yes.

Well, that's a long, it's all bridge. Here we got like short little bridges.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's, so this has, and again, I'm not...

Okay, so we'll go over, set up on the car.

Well, wait, the engine, it's an M50?

So we'll go over the setup on the car. So the car came with an M50 from 1994. It was a 2.5 liter dual overhead cam inline six, 84 millimeter bore, 86 millimeter stroke, I think, I don't remember off hand. So pretty small for an inline six, 2.5 liters. The M3 came with an S50, which was an 86 millimeter bore and was a three liter because of the stroke. It had a little bit more stroke in it. And then the S52 was a 3.2 liter, which was an 86 and a half millimeter bore and a little bit more stroke yet. So that's why I switched back to the S50 crank. And then I took an M50 block and bored it out from 84 to 84 and a half. And so what that does is it gives you a little bit more meat between the cylinders, rather than going all the way up to the 86 like on the S50. And what happens is over time that material is so thin that it'll eventually crack because of the boost pressure. And so the cars had Sandor spec cams. They're an aggressive cam that we can time individually. It's had dual valve springs in it from Ferreya, valves from Ferreya, stock heads, ported heads, all sorts of stuff. It's got diamond pistons, powder rods, and the stock crank, stock block, stock head casting. And then, yeah, so it's essentially a 2.9 liter and then really aggressive cams, 9,000 plus RPM, stock DCT behind it, steel one piece driveshaft, the differential is out of a five series from 1990. So it's a 210 millimeter ring gear, open. And then it's got GeForce axles in it. So I got sick of breaking axles, so I put good axles in it.

And this thing is also crazy light too, right?

We had 3,200 with me in it.

Okay. Okay. So it wasn't in the twos like I heard from somebody else.

Engine wise though, that doesn't, again, I don't, I don't live in that BMW world much, but it doesn't, it's not common either, right? Oh yeah. Is it? Okay.

Yeah. So there's one in this car. There's one in that car. There's one in that car.

So why not just go to like an S58 or something? Is it cost costs? Okay.

So like this, did you miss the part where he was getting them for $300?

But that's probably not the case anymore.

It is.

Is it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So I just bought one this past fall. I bought one. So they, the common thing to do is put them in E30s because the E30 M20 is a terrible engine. Okay. And to make, especially to make power on. So people put these M50s in them. Well, you need a front sump oil pan. And that only came in the five series E34s. So I bought an engine with that front sump oil pan on it for $500. And I sold the oil pan to Shawn for $500. Because they're doing a car with that engine.

Right.

So it's like, and that's part of the reason that I did it so early on is because I had all these parts available. I can get stuff cheap. I can continue to get it. I needed that engine for the block. That's all I needed. I sold the head, I made money off of it. Like that's how I've done it for so long. And that's what I know. Yeah, you can go to an S58 or a B58.

I don't know what it's cost though.

10 grand minimum just for an engine.

20 times the cost, Dan.

And you can't control it. You'd have to do a stock controller. Stock do you mean? Oh, true. You know, like Shawn would have to figure it out. He's willing to, I'm sure. But like that's a lot to figure that out. Right. So we're at the point where this is already figured out. It's close. We're going to do a different set up on the engine this year. I went through a built engine back in last year. That's when I swapped that head gasket in the pits. It was, the guy screwed me over. Do not trust engine builders. You don't know. You've been there, done that. Yep. So unfortunately I learned a very hard lesson and it sucks because when it failed, every engine that we failed, that's failed, we've learned. We've learned something from it. That one, we learned nothing other than, don't trust that guy.

And that was your first built one too, right? Or second. Okay.

After three years of not having one.

Do you know what the highest horsepower through this setup has been?

There's guys over in Germany that do dry blocks and they're making 2000 plus horsepower.

Holy s***.

Yeah.

But they're dry cars. One pass.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, six, seven second cars. Like there's plenty.

Kind of like the Barra in Australia. Correct.

Yeah. Nobody does that over here.

Yeah.

You know, because they're not great, but.

I almost bought one.

God, thank you.

Not for that level.

Yeah.

They have the four liter Barra's have so much harmonics.

Do they?

Yes.

Oh dude, that's why I was gonna ask you earlier. Thank you for bringing that back up.

Okay.

At what point did you start realizing that harmonics was going to be an issue? Like what are you looking for? How did you know you were approaching that threshold?

When I saw our crank bolt, our main crank bolt that holds the harmonic balancer on, that holds the crank pulley on and everything. That's where we run the crank trigger for the crank sensor. That bolt is torqued to 300 foot pounds. Okay. Holy s***. It's a big bolt, about that big. When I put red Loctite on that, I was going to say Loctite too. Torqued it to 350 foot pounds. And it's still backed out.

That's how I knew.

That's f***** up. That's basically welded in.

Yes.

And the crank hub to put it on was press fit and it was spinning, it was snapping the keyway.

Okay.

So that's when I knew. And it could have been partly because of the DCT. You know, this was a flywheel that was not designed to spin that fast. So it was a giant chunk of steel. Maybe it wasn't balanced. I don't know. I bought it from Nies over in Germany and he put it in. I don't know. So when I switched in 2023, when I bought all those parts, I put a sprung hub in. And so basically you guys have seen clutch discs and how some of them are straight and some of them have springs in them. So that spring basically absorbs some of the shock. Well, I bought this sprung hub. It's rated to 1200 Newton meters of torque.

What's that in Bald Eagle?

I have no idea. Thousand, roughly, give or take. And I put it in and it had made a bunch of noise. It was chattering. Well, the car chops at idle. Craziest idle you'll ever hear on an inline six in my opinion. And it sits there and it just chops. Well, that chopping is the engine spinning. Well, then the transmission can't keep up to it. So that hub is sitting there. It's rattling the whole time. Those springs are compressing and decompressing. Well, eventually wore it out. In last year at Ice Cream Cruise, I was going into it. I knew that it was worn. And I was like, you know what? It's either going to work or it's not. If it fails, it's not going to be catastrophic. Nothing's bad is going to happen. So we went to Ice Cream Cruise and that was a great time. Kyle in 1320 put on a great event. Never had been and went to do the roll race. I did one solo pass and we're dialing in the traction control and turning up the boost. We got it pretty good. Went out and I did a race against Stefan's TTRS. And we go, we hit it, he gets out on me and I just start to come around him, hit the top of fourth and I was like, I'm good. And before the finish line, I got out of it. I was pulling on him. Video was amazing. I was so happy. Matt was in the car from 1320. I was like, oh, that was it. We're so good. So we cruised back and then Carl has a LS swapped twin turbo E36, the EXO cage one.

Oh yeah, I saw that one.

His name's Carl. Go over to Carl and we're talking.

He's like, yeah, that's what you got to do to get enough room for people inside.

Right, yeah, do an EXO on it.

Yeah, totally. Anyway, that's all right.

You know, you're good.

And big problem solver over here.

I mean, provide helmets.

Put the cage on the outside.

And so Carl and I want to race. And I was like, Carl, what did you make? And he goes, oh, on that dyno right over there, I made 875. I was like, oh, that's cool. I said, what kind of dyno is it? He goes, oh, it's a dyno jet.

I was like, oh, okay.

He's like, why, how much you make? I said, 975 on a Mustang dyno that reads low. And he's like, oh man. He was like all excited because he was going to get a good race. And then, yeah. So we go, he misses a gear and I go and ends up the clutch disc came apart and it had cut the transmission bell housing where the clutch cover is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was super. That was a super cool video. I'm glad you guys got together on that.

Yep, yeah, I reached out to them. It was my birthday, and I was like, dude, I want to do a birthday burnout. This is the first year since 21 that the car's been together on my birthday. I was like, we gotta do something. So yeah, we went up to Lifestyle Tint. They have that big lot there.

Okay, wow, what's the guy's name? Is it Corey?

Corey, yep. And I planned the whole thing. Aaron with the Widebody E36 showed up. He lives up there. And get it off the trailer and we go out and I gave him a ride. I had my cousin with me and they had never been in a car like that. We did it. I had two 35s on the back and it still went a four 60 to 130. That's crazy.

That's wild.

And it was like, it was spinning but the traction control was coming in and it was like cutting it and stuff. It was insane.

What tire was that on?

Michelin something, I don't know.

Like a PS4 or something? Unbelievable.

Yep.

Unbelievable.

Two 35, 18, by the way, 18. I was doing the burnout on them. I put them on just to do the burnout.

That's what I had on my golf and I was spinning.

Yes. And traction control.

The purpose was for spinning, right?

Yeah. So then I do the burnout and the car would not come up on the turbo at foot braking. Like sit there, try to break it and it's like, and it would not spin the turbo because the transmission engages at 2000 RPM. Okay. So it's just sitting there and it's fighting the transmission and it's trying to slip the clutches just enough to come up on the turbo. So they're like sitting there. I was like, God, it might not work. I didn't know where I was, couldn't see anything. So I just got out of it and stopped. And there were some guys that were working on a truck on a different lot, like two blocks away. And they come over and they're like, yeah, you can't do that. You're throwing rocks all over the place. And I'm like, all right, you know, I don't want to piss anybody off. So otherwise I would have fired it back up and continue. Yeah. But turns out, yeah, that really hurt the engine. So it was 180 degree intake air temp with 34 pounds of boost and like 13 AFR, a lot. It was not good. And yeah, I shut all the safeties off so I could do the burnout. No fault to Shawn, not anything he did wrong.

One of those things where you had your laptop with you.

I did.

Yeah, I did.

Well, I had to have it so I could shut traction control off. So this year we're going to do a lot of different things. And one of the things is we're going to have a keypad so we can change different lap traction control settings, different boost settings, and things like that without having to have a laptop. So it'll keep me safe.

So as we kind of start to wind down here, you've done a lot of things in the last, let's call it seven, eight years.

Yep.

What are you most proud of?

Golly. I mean, hitting that thousand horsepower was always a goal as a kid. That was probably one of it. You know, making all these friends across the country. That's pretty awesome. You know, and just I get a new opportunity every day because of it. You know, I get all these people in my life. I'm always super proud of all these people that I have. We're always pushing each other to do better, be better. And, you know, we're all doing very well. And I'm super proud of that. So. That's awesome. You know, nothing, I don't think personally that I've done anything that's worth that recognition. But, you know, as a whole, I wouldn't be where I was at without my friends. I really wouldn't. So I have a great group of people in my corner. We all help each other out.

I wanted to touch on this, but then we went into how your car almost killed you. And that was a very dramatic story. But speaking of like not being in it for very long, right? You're talking seven, eight years. I have the tools I got from my dad, because basically we work on the s*** at my house now. And I'm 42 years old and over probably 30 some years, I've been collecting tools and buying s*** and doing that stuff. It takes a lot to just amass that kind of a, where I could pretty much work on anything. So how was that for you? Did you get some stuff from your dad? Or did you, are you still working on a limited tool thing?

So when my grandmother passed away, she had bought these $100 gift certificate things or whatever every year for us as children. And we would get them on our 18th birthday, and they would be worth more than $1,800. So every kid got $1,800 at a minimum. But I don't remember, they're like certificates that valued more. I dropped out of high school. I went back and got a third party diploma after, but I never went to college.

I did the same thing, by the way.

Yeah, and so when that had happened, and I turned 18, my dad's like, this is meant for you to go to college with, do with it what you want. And so I bought a lot of really nice tools. And those have been with me for a while. I've just accumulated over the years. Actually, all of my tools are in this white cart behind me. That's everything. That comes to the track with me. That comes to Texas with me. It loads right in the back of my X5 and it's perfect. But yeah, so tools, I've always made do with what I have. It's never been anything crazy. It's never been super expensive. It's never been a lot of them. But damned if I can't figure it out.

Yeah.

And that's, again, growing up north, you just gotta figure it out. You don't have another option.

That's it.

Figure it out or you don't get to go hang out with your buddies because your car doesn't work.

We hear those stories all the time on the podcast too. It's like, all right, a car's taking apart on Sunday. It's got to be back together by Sunday 4 a.m. or someone's not getting to work.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, that's, I mean, pretty much my whole life has been around that. You just push so hard because you have to figure it out. You don't have another option. And that's the drive that I have at the racetrack. That's the drive that I have for my friends when they're like, oh, my car's broke. I can't do, no, let's figure it out. Let's go. I'll get an engine, I'll get a transmission. Let's figure it out. And that's part of the reason that I have so many good friends and part of the reason that we figured cars out and get them done as quickly as we can. Josh will always say that he's the most impressed by this in Texas the first year that I went in 2021. January, it had nothing in it. It was just a shell. No carpet, no interior, no wiring, no suspension, no subframes, nothing. And I still got it all together and still went to Texas with it in March. Two months later.

Well, we got 10 days till we hit the road. So, right.

You're not a problem guy, you're a solution guy.

Correct.

Yes.

I'm never a victim either. Like I'm never like blaming somebody else for what went wrong. I'm always like, you know what? I'm gonna figure this out. I don't care.

No matter what, it's your problem, whether somebody else caused it or not.

Yep.

Absolutely.

And you know, nobody knows about that engine problem that happened, but I never actively went at the guy. I never did anything like that. I talked to his boss about it and his boss was kind of on the same page that I was that like, there's nothing we can really do. And you know, if the guy ever tries to talk to me, I'm gonna tell him, he better have my money or get out of my face. Like I'm not talking to you. Fair enough. Yeah. It definitely was a hard time with that whole situation because he showed up, looked at the stuff, said everything was fine, called me a big baby and left.

Okay.

Like I'm not one to go about that. I was like, okay, dude, like that's, that's something else.

That's s*****.

And I had a lot of really good professionals that I trust in my corner, had them look at it, and they all agreed that there was something wrong in the machining process.

Okay. Oh, so that's what it was. Okay.

Yep. So again, not my fault, not Shawn's fault.

That's your problem.

That's my problem. I'm a figure it out. And I did. I figured it out.

But yeah, so I got one more in me. Do you have anything on your end?

No, I don't think so.

Tools, basic hand tools, dude. Really?

Yeah.

That's all it is.

No, I've learned, I did that for a long, long time. Like actually just at PRI, I bought a Tecten set of really nice, like Torx and Allen's long ones, short ones. It was a $200 case, right? Of all this stuff. I've been working off of like little f****** bent, angled Allen wrenches my entire life. And I was like, as I'm getting older, I'm learning to appreciate using the right tool for the job. Mostly because it saves me time also. I don't have as much time now. I have four kids, like s***'s crazy. So like, yeah. So I'm like, all right, cool. It's time for the Milwaukee Power Ratchets and all that s***.

I don't have any of that. I have a quarter drive impact and a half inch impact. Sawzall. I don't even have an angle grinder. I do all this s*** with a sawzall. I put on grinding disks on my drill and I grind stiffed on with the drill. Like I make it work. Or I have friends that have good tools and I take the car to them and we do it over there like Shawn.

I did that for like, I recently, like literally just recently over the last like maybe few years, I've started treating my tools better and getting some better s***.

What did it for him was when he got cup holders in his Mustang GT.

Speaking of cup holders.

I knew I'd trigger something.

Obviously, there's no shifter in the car.

Right.

The DCT is all controlled through the paddles. Put it in gear, shift gears, all that is through the paddles.

Okay.

So in the center console, there's a spot for a shifter, but there's not anything there. I had a shift boot there for the first year. Well, as anybody who knows me, I drink Red Bull.

Right.

Specifically, the 12 ounce Red Bulls. They taste different. I don't care what anybody says. 12 ounce tastes the best.

A little more metallic.

It's something about by the time you get to the bottom versus the 8 ounce, it's like not enough. Like right now, this tastes the best to me and it's almost gone. Oh. So I had this guy who was making shift surrounds for like sequential shifters, make me a shift one to specifically hold the 12 ounce Red Bulls. And so I have it and it's airtight. It also fits White Claws, but it's airtight and it slides in perfect. So if anybody's at Red Bull and wants to sponsor me, I have the cup holder designed just for these. Nothing else fits.

There's an Aston Martin that's exactly that by the way. I'll have to look it up what it was, but yeah, literally it's just the Red Bull size. Can't compare to that.

And it slides in perfect and yeah, it doesn't go anywhere.

Well, Red Bull sucks. Alani, I'm looking for a sponsorship also.

Wow. That would fit too, I guess.

Yeah, it probably would. It's probably the same company in China making the same 12 ounce can.

Probably.

Yeah.

But yeah, either way, it was, and it go to car shows, you know, people are always like, there's no shifter. How does he shift it? There's a Red Bull sitting in there. It's always funny.

And by the time this episode hopefully airs, we will hopefully be sponsored by Reckon, Reckon Energy, depending if the other b******* is done with.

Well, if they have these size, I'll put them in there.

All right, all right, all right. I'm going to be texting Alec about that afterwards.

There we go.

We need to make one, at least one 12 oz.

No, just one to put in there. Yeah.

I know I got to do some, it's a little background story. One of my buddies is making an energy drink. He's been doing it for the last year. And I just got to sample his Blue Razz flavor. Holy s***, dude.

I should have let you try a little bit of this one so you can tell me how it tastes.

I tried it already.

I was a part of the, no, I literally went to parking lots with him, like Vitamin Shop, Hyveys, whatever. We would sample six or seven different ones, be like, we would sort it, be like, this is a**, this is great. You gotta be better than this. So I can confidently say that it's a really good Blue Razz. Yeah. All right, you're not paying me for this endorsement yet, but yeah, he'll get it earful.

As you can see, I have arrow catches on the car. That's another story. I have stories for days on this. My camera roll is fishing and car. That's it.

I'd love to say goodbye to Minnesota for Minnesota folks. It's okay.

So the reason there's arrow catches on the car was actually I was racing Caleb in his Trackhawk when the car was on a stock engine.

Okay. God, I missed that track.

So we were ripping. We did a poll. We started at like 40 or 50 and him and I were door to door. My car was making like 450, 500. Obviously the Trackhawk makes 700 plus. I think it was closer to 800 at the time. But car's lighter, it's on DCT. And we're just door to door all the way up and neither of us lifted. We just stayed in it. We're at about 150 on the closed course or so. I saw this thing fly off the side and I was like, that was weird. I look over on my mirror and my hood seal is on my mirror. So on these cars, they have a little seal that goes around the fenders and up the top that seals the hood down. The car had come off of the factory latches at 150 and slammed up on to the safety catch. And there's about this much gap right here. And yeah, very terrifying. I got to where we were going and I was like, that's my hood. Oh, shut the hood down. And so that next season, I put the arrow catches on it.

Okay.

Yep.

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So that was a very terrifying moment.

You learn things out of necessity, it seems.

My one, I think my orange car, there's, so the safety catch, all of a sudden the latch is held in with two little, there's 10 millimeter nuts on there holding that little U shape that comes down, it catches everything, right? I had gotten somewhere and noticed mine was really loose and one nut was completely missing and the other one was about halfway down. That's not even gonna save your a** with a safety catch. That's the latch that's coming to f*** off. So yeah, that does get scary.

Yeah, very terrifying.

Have you seen a hood come open on a car? Yeah, that's...

So, Jacob Vang, my fault. God damn, so many stories. So, when I was working at Recycle, Jacob and Alex and I, we were all really close. If anybody knows Jacob Vang, he goes through cars faster than people change underwear. The dude's probably owned 200 plus cars in his life. And so when I was there, we were always doing something cool with cars and doing different stuff. He had a Mark IV Jetta Turbo, VR6 Turbo. He had several E36s, E46 M3, X5s. We did all sorts of stuff over those years. Like I said, I did a lot of car stuff from 2017 to now. People think about it as like, I've been learning my stuff for years. No, it's literally just that timeframe. I did a lot. And so, Jacob had this E36 and we were doing something on the car and it had a carbon fiber hood. No, yes. Either way, we didn't shut the, no, it had a carbon fiber hood because it had hood pins. We didn't put the hood pins on. And so, he goes to leave, makes it literally a hundred feet in front of the shop, hits 20 miles an hour, hood flies open, explodes the windshield, breaks the sunroof because it came all the way around you. Pulls back into the shop and I'm like, was it you? Was it me? Either way, I felt so bad. So I ended up finding him a hood that I traded an oil pan for and put the hood on. He got windshield fixed through insurance and it was like no big deal. But that was the only experience that I've had where it was like something, somebody didn't latch it. So, I mean, yeah. Growing up doing all sorts of redneck stuff, Enduros, Chevy pickup trucks. I grew up with Chevy small blocks as well. Building race trucks and stuff like that and nothing.

He said Chevy. I was just expecting.

I'm sorry. I just feel like my mouth a little bit.

I just got it for you.

I mean, you know, it is what it is. It's fine. I don't have any brand. Obviously, I'm loyal to BMW because that's what I know.

Right. Yeah.

But if I knew Mercedes or I knew Audi or I knew anything else, I would be into them just the same way. They all have their ups and downs and I'll say that about new cars as well. Minus Max 5, it's the perfect car ever.

What year is that by the way?

2020.

That's what I thought. Okay.

So B58, bulletproof. I'm sorry. It's a Gen 2 B58, downpipe in a tune. I run 87 or 88 octane through it. It gets 20 plus MPG. I put a trailer on it. I tow cars much heavier than this thing and it's been great. It's perfect.

Yeah.

I put almost 100,000 miles on it in two years. Drive the hell out of it and it's phenomenal.

Any issues?

I've done a water pump and spark plugs.

Okay.

Water pump checks out.

Water.

It's also at 100,000 miles.

It was at 100.

Yeah.

It was at exactly 100,000. Right when they said that it needs to be done. It cost me $200 or so in parts and I did it in like two hours.

Okay.

No big deal. And spark plugs I've done twice because it's tuned.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I run cheap fuel.

On a stock boosted car, should you still do spark plugs more often than you would normally? Yes.

I agree. BMW calls every 50,000, 60 for the first one, 50 after a thousand miles. I do it every 40. Same with oil change. They claim I can go 10,000 miles on an oil change.

You remember how long it went on mine?

Yeah.

Yeah. I remember that. You were like, I was like, well, it's boosted and tuned. I was like, I feel like you should be doing your spark plugs way more often.

It ran way better after, didn't it?

Yeah.

You probably didn't notice, did you?

No.

He was trying to get rid of an issue that we thought that would solve, that didn't fix that issue, but I'm sure it did run a little bit better.

Fun fact, after the new owner got it, and he put in the spark plugs that Brian May recommended. Because remember, I got those before Brian got back to me. I was like, I'm just f****** buying these because somebody else recommended it.

Yeah.

Bad choice.

I always go with Brian May. That's who tuned mine.

I should have just waited a day or two or whatever just to hear back from him. But anyways, the new owner, because I basically sold the car not long afterwards, because just the right price for this one and blah, blah, blah, all that story. But basically, the new owner put the correct ones in and he's like, oh yeah, it's way better now. Because I always felt like it just kind of had a period where I was like, not as quick as it should have been. Yeah. So relatively speaking.

We, I had Brian tune that. It makes 410 to the tire on 93 octane.

Okay.

All wheel drive launches.

It's perfect.

Yeah. It's amazing. If anybody is looking for a 20 to $30,000 car, if you consider anything with a B58, you're in the right path.

It's crazy what you could pick those up for.

340, 440, 540, 640, 740, 840.

Well the X3 is even.

X3 M40i, X5 M40i, f****** X7. I just had an X7 over in Seattle. They're all incredible.

And then what you do is you take it to Ratified Motorsport and get a tune by Brian May.

Yeah. And make 410 wheel on 93 octane. Yeah. Done.

Sold.

Yeah. I beat up on scat packs on the highway.

Yeah. I love how that's like our metric. Like how many Mopars can we beat up on? Is it a Hellcat or a scat pack?

Any scat pack in Minnesota that wants to get it, X5. 60 to 130, Dig, any of them.

I'm going to tune my, my 35 EcoBoost Navigator out there and we'll see.

Ben, let's go. I want to race an ST I want to race an Explorer ST so bad.

That's why I was asking you that, cause this is my first experience. So I have turbo truck, I have diesel, right? But glow plugs, no spark plugs.

Even if it doesn't have a glow plug, it still starts.

Right. These were, so these were done at 86,000 miles. The plugs were, I saw in the Carfax and I'm at 140. I'm thinking about doing it again. But this is my first time, like twin turbo V6. And I did a little brake boost off of the f****** stoplight earlier today. I have my kids in the car and my daughter had just picked up all the DVDs cause they tipped over cause I drive like an a** a**. And she had just fixed it all. And so I was like, I'm going to do a real hard launch right here and make them go fly into the back seat. So I did that and she was pissed at me. But I was like, whoa, this is holding on to the brake and give it a little bit of gas. That f***** took off.

Didn't you do that for the first time in the GTI too?

Yeah, when you did. Yeah, you had a rolling anti-leg.

So yeah, I mean, starting off, I had E36s, E30. I moved up to, even when I moved to the cities, I had an E36 as a daily in the M5. And then I got an X3. So a 2004 X3, it had 180,000 miles on it, two five, inline six, bulletproof. If I had to pick one daily driver for Minnesota, and like, that was it, $4,000, X3.

We'll get to that shortly. Dan will answer to that.

And for $4,000, dude, all wheel drive, you have a bunch of storage. It's dead reliable. And if it does cost, if it does break, it costs $3 to fix it. They are so cheap. And like, yeah, I drove it to 240. I replaced the engine because an injector failed when it was stupid cold out up north, and it melted a hole in the piston. It cost me $200 for an engine. I swapped it over. I did all new parts. I think all said I was $1,000 into it.

BMW is the new LS swaps?

I don't know. I was looking into those when I, so this is my wife's SUV. We just replaced her excursion with it. And, but I needed a third row. I was gonna, I was looking at X, do X7s have third rows?

It has captains and then third row.

But they're newer though, right? Like you, they're pretty expensive though. Yeah, but you're looking- How much?

30?

Yeah, well I'm nine grand into this truck.

That's fair. That's understandable. But yeah, so then from the X3, I went to an X5 because I wanted to tow a race car. So I got the first gen X5, their E53 V8, broke a transmission on the first one. Second one, that one ended up something catastrophic with the engine. The M62 engine in there is not the greatest engine in the world. I will never say that it is. But then I bought one in 2020. It had a hundred K on it. I did timing chains. I did all the struts. I did all the control arms. I did brakes three times. And I drove it to 200,000 and it was great. I would, if I could find one with like 20 or 30,000 miles on it for under 10 grand, I would buy it again. They're amazing. They're super comfortable. They're quiet. They make great torque. They have a hitch. They can tow 6,000 pounds.

The V8, one is the one to stay away from though, or no?

Yes. Yes it is.

But I think I was looking at one of those and I sent it over to Dave at DRSC. And I was like, cause I knew he was a BMW guy too. And I was like, he's like, no, no.

Yeah. So the next gen had a turbo diesel. That was a good option. Those are great engines. They also had the N55 trash engine. Sorry, any N55 owners. N54, N55, worst engine BMW has ever made.

Really?

Granted, it makes a bunch of people rich, like myself, I'm going to be working on one. That's what that car is out there that I just did an engine swap on at a hundred K. God damn. Trash. But, you know, they all learn. B58, I think is by far the best modern BMW engine ever made. And even like, I think it's the best engine currently being produced across all platforms. As far as aftermarket, cost to power, and cross compatibility.

I can't hear anybody complain. Like I'm not hearing bad things.

You can get it in a two series, and you can get it in a seven series. Like, are you kidding me? What platform is doing that with the same engine? Nothing.

Yeah. For that many platforms, yeah.

That's why I was like, I mean, there's so many of them out there.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, mine has been dead reliable. I highly recommend it to anyone. You can get into a 340, 445, 40 gen one for like 15 grand now.

What's the difference between the S and the B for people that don't know what they'll?

S is their M line engine. So it only came in the M's. X3M or G80M. The G80 is the new M3. And it's just more power, two turbos instead of one.

Is it a little bit more beefed up though?

Yeah. They made it to make more power. Obviously it's an M chassis. It's an X3M, it's an X4M.

Can I also ask another really weird ignorant question about how do you twin-turbo an inline when... Again, I'm a V8 guy, right? I'm used to bank one, bank two. Easy, right? So they have the same thing. So you're just doing three and three? Yep.

So even on my manifold, you can see there that three cylinders go into one collector, three cylinders go into another collector. And yeah, they classed it as bank one, bank two still.

Oh, okay.

Yep. And all the way back to M20 had one, O2, OPD one. They had individual manifolds for three cylinders. So they could classify each bank.

There's something about it in line six that just like, it makes sense. Even Ford, they're a 200, straight six, like you can't even kill those things.

No. Yeah. The 306 in the Florida, the secret sauce.

Yeah.

It's a great engine. My brother has one, he wants to turbo it. Shawn's going to help us out with it maybe.

Yeah.

We like doing weird stuff like that up north, but yeah. I mean, I've always been drawn to in line six and it's just, it makes sense. You know, they're smooth.

It's only the perfect engine.

I mean-

He just said that it was the perfect engine.

I did not say it was the perfect engine. I've always been drawn to them. It just makes sense. They are good engines. You know, and I've never been like in my X5s, the V8 was good, but I was like, I'm never going to make power in one of these, you know? I've never been an LS guy. Everybody always like, you should LS swap it. That's sacrilege. I'm sorry. Don't LS swap things.

I agree with that. I'm anti LS swap the world.

Everything in this car is BMW based. BMW engine, BMW transmission, BMW differential. You know, yes, it has aftermarket parts in between that connect the things, but-

Yeah, it has an account.

Yeah. And it's like, that's what I wanted. Like even the 8 HP is a BMW. It came out of an N55 335. Like that's, that's what I've always been pushing for. So it's not, I'm not a purist by any means. I'm cutting up my car to make it go fast, but-

I still think it's cooler that way, right? There's a little bit of like a kind of a cool thing about it.

Everybody always asks too. So this car is street car. It drives amazing. There's no vibrations. There's no rattles. There's no harmonics because it's all meant to be in the car. Like the engine, it's designed to fit in the car. Granted, I have a giant turbo and a 4-inch downpipe that go through it.

There was space for that.

We made space with the strut tower. Anyways, but people do LS swaps and they vibrate your teeth out. I don't know if you guys have ever been in a car like that, but it's annoying. I don't want that. That's part of the reason that I haven't put a cage in the car yet either. I don't want that. I want the car to be drivable. So yeah, I mean, like I said, I put my mom in the car even though she's a b***** lady that rides horses. She has no complaints, so. But yeah, X5 is great. I love that thing.

So my last question then is, hold on, it's been a half hour so I wanted to ask you.

I was going to say, is this the same question you asked me about?

Oh yeah, that's right. Okay. So obviously we have like a wide variety of listeners on the show. We're up to like 2 percent female now, by the way.

F****** huge.

Let's go.

Let's get out there.

I'm single.

But what's it called? Sometimes we have some younger listeners on the show, right? Like one of the things that you brought up is like, all right, you've figured everything out, right? Like you figured things out on your own. What is some advice you would give to like 17 or 18 year old Gus?

Just do it. Don't hold back.

Okay, Shia LaBeouf style.

You just have to do it. If you are always scared about failing, you're never going to succeed. You have to be willing to fail in order to succeed. And that's what I did. I failed. I failed miserably. I'm still failing. I have no problem emitting that. The car has been a failure. I have failed. I have gone the wrong direction. I have put the wrong stuff in the car. I have done the wrong thing to the car. Guess what I learned? You learn from your failures. If you don't learn, then you can never succeed.

A great post I saw the other day was, if you knew that success was on the other side of these 30 failures, how fast would you want to fail?

Very.

And I think you fall in. Because 400, 500, 600, up to 1000 horsepower, you have to fail a lot of ways up to there.

And everybody's like, I don't know how you keep going, I don't know how you keep doing it. It's like, if you just, you don't see the failures as a stopping point.

You see the helps on the engines are 200 bucks a pop.

That does help. Don't get me wrong. You wouldn't be failing as much if they cost 20 grand.

Back to the S58 thing.

Maybe we would still fail, but it would be different failures. There's still people out there failing with the S58s. They're trying.

Dude, shout out to the guys that are doing the R&D on that too. Like that big one, was that the green one that got hit with like a however big shot of nitrous last year?

Yeah, it blew up on the dyno.

Yeah. Like somebody had to do that.

Somebody's doing it. I mean, they did the same thing.

How do you know where the limits are until you break them? Exactly.

They did it with the B58s when the Mark Vs came out, which is kind of upsetting that Toyota had to come out in order for people to put money and effort into a BMW engine, but you know, it's fine.

Well, to be fair, well, actually, yeah, you kind of have one there.

I think it was the Supra name that really...

So, the BMW B58 came out in 2016.

I was going to say, because...

Oh, really?

Was it the second or third gen in the Supra?

Second. So, same exact thing as in my X5.

Okay, gotcha. And now they're in a technically third gen of it, right?

I think it's still technically the second gen.

Is it still the second gen? Okay, gotcha, gotcha.

I really hope that they put the S58 in a Supra. I think that would be really cool.

They're just wrapping up production on it too, though.

I know, I know.

One send off here, please.

I know, but it would be amazing if they put an S58 in the Supra, because that thing would rip.

We can only pray.

Make it all wheel drive, except for a lot of people.

Is that first gen B58 still- It's good.

Yeah, it has problems, but they all do and they're common, they're well known. Like I'm going to be doing an oil filter housing on one this week because they fail, you know? And that's something BMW has always sucked at is for some reason oil filter housings.

They leak?

Yeah, they leak and crack. So this one has an oil cooler built into it and they crack around the oil cooler and then they end up leaking coolant and oil together or externally.

Let me guess, is it half plastic, half metal?

The oil cooler is metal. The filter housing is plastic.

Okay. That's the secret sauce for I'm going to leak.

And if you change your coolant, it won't deteriorate the plastic as often.

Okay.

So it comes down to back to maintenance. So if you just do the maintenance on your car, well, how frequently do you have to change your coolant? 50,000. Yep.

Okay. Well, thankfully my water pump went out for that.

Yeah. That's usually a part fails. So you have to change the coolant. Yeah.

That's the only time I've ever changed my coolant.

All my other, all my engines, I never had to do an oil change on because I would just break the engine or a head gasket. Whatever. I never ran coolant in the car. It's always ran water because there's no point. Also rotational idle helps with coolant temperature. So at Power Cruise, the second one, you guys were there, you know how hot it was. It was like 95 degrees.

It was a thirsty one.

I was sitting on, in the lanes of VIP, sitting there idling for 25 minutes. The fan turned on one time at 200 degrees. It stayed right at like 190 the whole time. And for those that don't know what rotational is, I don't know if Shawn talked about it. It, rotational idle is a Haltech function. A lot of other ECUs are getting into it, but it holds the throttle blade at a certain percentage, usually above 50%. And it uses ignition and injection to control the idle. And what that does is it allows a lot of air to move through the engine, but not a lot of fire. So fuel and injection is obviously fire. Well, fire makes heat. When you're not making heat and the car still runs, that helps with cooling. So, and-

Is it just automatically do it or is it a feature you gotta turn on and off?

You can turn it on. The Haltech like mine right now, we can have it set up on the button. So the keypad, which is what we're gonna do, or right now, the car was set up on coolant temp. So at 115, 120 degrees, rotational idle would turn on because if it was on all the time, it would never warm up.

But if you get on the throttle, that shuts off. Okay, okay.

So when you run the car, it goes off. And then when it comes down, it goes right back to it. And it's really nice for large throttle body cars, big cam cars, cars that are difficult to make idle because of their injectors, large injector cars. You talk about all these cars that, you know, even big cam V8s that are sitting there idling away and they chop really hard, you put it on rotational and it idles perfect. So like we had a customer at JWP that wanted a big cam. He's like, I want it to sound like this. And he showed me a video and I was like, I can do that. So we took a stock LS3, put it, it already comes with a drive by wire throttle body, put a Haltech on it and put it on rotational idle. And the thing sounded like the biggest cam V8 you could ever have, but guess what? It drove perfect. Customer was totally aware of it, loves the car, absolutely loves how it sounds, drives, all of that. You know, the car makes 400 wheel, fun car.

It's kind of crazy that some like...

Black Chevelle, white stripes, convertible.

The Dong.

Yep.

Yeah. Okay. So it was, yeah.

I think it's really crazy how some performance mods, like some people throw some real crazy money at s*** just for the sound.

Yeah.

I'm like, for me, I'm like, I want everything performance wise. I don't give a f*** if it sounds like a go-kart, like as long as I'm beaten, whatever, I don't give a s***. But just the fact that you would put money into the fact that I want this to sound like this is crazy.

Well, we're doing the LS swap anyways.

I'm sure it was still like good performance. It was correct.

It was a benefit of putting the Haltech in.

Yeah.

So, but we did pick the engine based off of that because an LS3 comes with 450 crank horsepower from the factory or through a manual, I think. So on our dyno, it made like 375 to the tire through a turbo four.

Pretty legit on a Mustang dyno.

Yeah.

So, but-

It's cooking.

But on a VCT motor, you got some people who want to, they'll pay for a tune to have it sound like it has a cam.

Yeah, Ghost Cam, literally. That's what the rotational sounds like is Ghost Cam.

Yeah.

Because you can make a car that's idle is perfect, normal without it. And then you turn that on and it sits there and chops, you know, because you can control how much it cuts and stuff and how much fuel it dumps. It's really cool. But yeah, speaking of mods to make cars sound better, people do mods and don't think about fuel economy.

Yeah.

So granted 1000 horsepower plus, right? I drove this in September up to my buddy's wedding. I was up there, Grand Rapids, Minnesota, three hours away. It's about 150 ish miles or so. Fully 85, pump 85, drove it up there. I got 18 miles to the f*** off.

That's insane.

I had $2 a gallon on E85.

Yeah.

And I was doing polls. I don't drive it normal.

Yeah.

So I drove it up there, hung out up there at his wedding. And then on Sunday, we piled everybody into it on the track, of course. And I did a poll on the street and it's the fastest.

What the f*** did you say on the track, of course?

Oh yeah. On the street track.

Road course.

Yeah, on the road course street.

Got it. Okay. My mistake.

Yeah.

That's the fastest I've ever gone in the car.

Why?

I don't want to say.

Oh, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough.

It wasn't quite 200. It's the closest I've been.

Kilometers per hour, folks.

On the track, in the quarter mile, that's what people do, right? They did 200 in the quarter. But yeah, it was an experience. And the car was dead straight. Everybody in the car was speechless because they were from up north. They've never experienced something like this. Yeah. You know, the couple of friends that I have ridden in the car were like, you guys got to go, you know? They've experienced fast stuff, but when you're riding something like this, it's a completely different game.

Yeah.

We got to get Dan into a thousand plus car.

Yep.

Because you still haven't done that yet, have you?

I'm not sure.

You talk about it all the time. You're like, oh my God, I really want to go to a thousand horsepower car.

Do I don't say that?

Well, you didn't say like that.

I want a thousand horsepower car.

Oh, there you go.

I'm not far off of what I've got for mods.

I'll build you one right here. Yeah.

I've got all this stuff sitting on a shelf to make mine pretty damn close to there.

We should probably get on that.

I know.

It's almost that season, you know? It's March outside right now.

I moved it into the shop and then I had some s*** go around with the Navigator, my wife's truck, so I pulled it back out and put the Navi in there. It's going back in the shop now though.

That's the worst.

But I actually had my 14 year old daughter pull the GT500 out of the shop, move it to the garage, and then put the Navi in the thing.

Hey, that's pretty nice.

She's pretty kick a**.

Well, that's what kids are for, is now you can start bringing them to work.

Yeah, so literally his daughter goes with us to 2K and is helping him unload cars and all this stuff.

I have her pull the car. I hate being in the car and loading on and off the trailer because I can't see everything. And then you're trusting somebody else to be like, you're fine, crunch, back up.

Oh man.

No, so I put her in the car, she knows exactly what to do. I'm like, I can be like, little bit of gas here, like come off, go on there, stop, don't, whatever. It's way more peace of mind having her do it than me do it.

Back to stories of loading and unloading things. When I bought my M5, it was in Winona, lived in Grand Rapids at the time, about five hours away. I went by myself. Growing up, we always had Suburbans. I had two older brothers and my mom was into horses. So we had three quarter ton Suburbans with 454s. Great, amazing rigs. We put 200,000 miles on three different ones because as we went through high school and we went on family trips and stuff. Well, anyways, I had a car trailer on the back and I went down to go pick up my M5. It was $8,000 at the time. For those that know, that is a steal. And we drive down, I drive down, meet the guy, check out the car. I was like, all right, cool, I'm gonna take it. You know, and it was in this apartment complex and I drive the car up on the trailer, pull the e-brake. Well, the whole deal with the car is the battery was dead. And where it was, I couldn't get to the battery because it was backed into a spot. So I took the battery out of the suburban, walked over, took the battery out of the car, started the car, put the battery back in the suburban, loaded the car on the trailer, left it running because I was blocking somebody in in this apartment complex. And so I pulled the e-brake and the car had been sitting. And if you guys don't know about e-brakes, when they sit, they don't work the greatest. And so-

Or they work too good?

It didn't work at all.

Oh, okay.

And it's on the trailer, I didn't strap it because I was just trying to move it quick.

Oh, so you pull-

I pull forward, the car rolls off the back. F****** rear tires off the trailer, it's just hanging there. And this guy's looking at me like, dude, this dude is an idiot. He just bought an M5 and made it fall off the trailer? Oh my God.

The ramps aren't on there anymore either, probably because you're pulling forward.

No, I pulled to much because I was moving it, and the car is low, so I had to lift the front up so that way it wouldn't scrape going on. And it was a whole fiasco. He had a jack, I ended up jacking it, and we just pushed it off the jack, onto the trailer, and it was just enough. And it was like, nothing happened to the car, no damage or anything. It fell right on the jack points. They have nice jack pads, and it fell right on those perfect. But yeah, that was, I was so embarrassed about that, and the guy's name is Spencer, and he's still a friend. Okay, that's cool. He hits me up still, and we talk about stuff, but that was an experience. I had that car, that was, second to this, I think, now, because I've had this since 2019, so that's almost, it's just over five years. I had the M5 since 2015 to 2020. So, yeah, five years as well. So, that was the second longest car I've ever owned. Otherwise, I usually get rid of them every two years or so, at the most.

So, people get rid of cars.

Upgrade, I kept upgrading. I've always done this. I've always find.

I keep upgrading, but the other one stays around.

Nah, that's the problem. You gotta get rid of them.

Yeah, yeah.

I sold my first car for more money than I bought before, after a year and a half of abusing it. Poor thing. Oh, but yeah, it's a great experience. I've learned a lot, done a lot. Met a lot of cool people like you guys.

Well, that's not cool. Yeah, it's a stretch.

It's fine. I met a lot of people.

There you go.

Yep. And yeah, I got a lot more to go. I'm not even 30 years old yet and it's just starting.

Yeah, dude, there's so much to go. Yep. This C4 is busting for a piss right now. So you want to pop the usual three down?

Yeah. All right. I think he probably answered this throughout this episode. But at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guest to pick three cars.

Hold on. Did you just smile at the camera at all this episode?

I don't think so.

Did you get the new one? Oh, no, you didn't. I was looking for this side. I was like perfect.

It was going to be Monday. Now it's going to be Friday of next year.

Got you.

It'll be all of a fresh smile for Texas 2K.

There we go.

Anyway, we need three cars.

You're never on my right side. You just look so handsome from the rear.

A daily driver and a, you f***** me all up now, and a show car.

You have an unlimited budget and I can modify them however I want.

Whatever. You can f****** cut two cars and have them welded together. I don't give a s***.

Sick. All right. Track car, E46, M3, easy pick. You can make them, even NA. I'll leave it NA and just all the suspension, all the mods and just drive the wheels off of it.

Like a CS or anything?

CSL, sure, whatever, but it doesn't matter. E46, M3 is by far one of the best handling cars I have ever driven. And I've driven a lot of cars. Throughout the years, I've experienced a lot.

You've pushed a lot today too.

I have. But it's, yeah, definitely E46, M3. Even mine that just had basic track pads and basic suspension on it was almost one of the fastest cars at the track, at the track day that I was at. With me driving it. People say that I'm a good driver, but I don't think so. I don't know, I'm the fastest one in my friend group. Sorry, Andre. And then, daily driver. I'm still on that X5, dude. I'm sorry. B58 X5 is probably bang for buck. I really want to make it 600 horsepower, like really badly, because I think it would be so much fun. But part of me is just so reserved, because it's lasted so long. I bought it with 80,000 miles and it has 170 on it right now. And it's been bull.

Not even a hiccup.

Yeah. It threw a check engine light one time when I was towing back from Omaha, because I was on 87 octane.

Okay, that'll do it.

I had an eighth gear and I was going through those hills outside of Omaha. Yeah, I know that. It was locked in eighth gear, because I'm a d******. And it was chugging up the hill at 1000 RPM. And it hit knock control on every cylinder and threw a check engine light and put it in let mode.

Little quick tidbit on that. So TRXs can run 88, right?

Like they can.

Yep, yep, yep. Now I'm towing though.

Correct.

Through those same Omaha hills.

Yes, yes, I bet. Yep. And yeah, so that was a problem. Yep. And then show car. I mean, I'm still BMW. I don't do shows. I've never built a car for show cars.

We hear that often on this show.

Yeah, because you talk to track guys. Yeah. But it's like, I don't build my car for other people to look at. I mean, clearly I have a turbo literally resting on my hood.

I don't care what it's great for the wrap.

I know. Well, yeah, this is a wrap. You know, I wrapped it because I wanted green. I like green. This is a cool color. But I walked on it to put my bicycle on the roof. Like, I don't care about show cars. But if I had to build one for the people, it'd be an E36 wagon. Oh, yeah. Oh, little low, you know.

Yeah.

Probably a turbo because turbos sound cool. Like four or 500 horsepower. Good interior type deal.

Any swap or anything in there?

No, obviously the stock engine.

Yeah. Got you.

Got you. Got you.

Yeah.

M50 for the world. I want to put an M50 in a G body. That's going to upset a lot of people, but make it happen. Yeah. Well, there's one right there.

Do people supercharge these cars?

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

They don't make a lot of power. You have to put a really big supercharger on them in order to make power. That E46 over there has a S54, which is the 46 M3 engine with a supercharger on it.

Okay.

You can make like 400 or 500 horsepower on them pretty easy. The S54 is like to rev. They have like an 8,000 RPM red line. That would be an engine that I could switch to in this car, but they're again, expensive. Even a stock engine is like five grand. So yeah, people supercharge them, but turbo is free horsepower. Supercharger is parasitic. Yeah. So I mean, I'm spinning an 82 millimeter turbo on my 2.9 liter very easily. People won't think that's very good, but it's like, you got to think EVOs are 2.4, 2.2, you know, and like those guys run 68 to 78 millimeter turbos, you know, big horsepower drag guys run these big ones, but guess what? They're bringing it up to 7,000 on the two step and it's seven to 10 grand. That's it. This is a street car. This will spool the turbo at 4,500 to 5,000 RPM. I will be able to roll in the boost throughout the entire RPM range and it won't feel terrible. Yeah.

So it's almost like everybody has a different definition of street car, but this is the most logical one.

Yeah.

You hear so many of these different. I mean, so the debate.

Yeah. This year, the car is going to be a little different. I took the carpet out of it and we're changing the whole entire wiring harness from stock to a PDM through the Haltech. So it's going a little bit away from street car, but even like last year, I put with putting two engines in it, two transmissions, two turbos, all of that. I still put 15,000 miles on it.

That's legit.

That's street car. I went through two sets of tires in the back.

Would you ever do a drag and drive?

Yeah, I would.

Okay.

I just, I know it's going to break.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's like, But you get to bring a trailer of parts. I don't care that much about drag racing though. That's the other thing.

This will be fun though.

It would. That's why I want to do it.

Just for the experience. Like you don't have to be a diehard guy.

But I can run what, 11.5 at 135?

Yeah, yeah. You'll be golden.

I went, I'd never have gone slower than 135 in the traps. Oh, yeah, yeah. Ever.

Good point.

And like, I mean, that's just the car. I never cared about drag racing.

Yeah, that's true.

Even when it was manual, we were trapping 140.

Yeah, like you'll run into some issues.

Yeah, they didn't like it so much when I did 159. Twice.

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

Instagram is DCT underscore E36. Facebook Gus Erickson. That's actually not my real name, but it's OK. Nobody needs to know. But yeah, I mean, I'm out and about doing BMW stuff. I probably won't be in Minnesota for long, but we'll be here for a little bit of time at least.

If you do something like that, you still plan on coming back for power cruises and things like that every now and again?

Probably at least one event. I love power cruises.

He'll be our new Texas 2K buddy.

Yeah. There's nothing like that in the US. There's really nothing. And you know, I do have a large influence here. I have a large amount of people here that I enjoy. And I still got to keep up the fastest BMW in Minnesota.

Yeah.

So I got to come back and get the plate back on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Dan?

You can find us at Gunner Garage with two ends. Snowmobile content is, I have it. I may share it with you. I may not. I don't know. Yeah.

The one day you got to do snowmobile stuff this year.

I packed in one good weekend of races and trail riding. And so I got at least a little more fixed than I got last year.

I'm a haw. As for me or here, blah, blah, blah, blah, what did I usually say here? Oh, Gus, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Finally made this happen, dude.

Yeah. Long time coming.

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