145. Greg Banish on Calibration, Compliance, and the Aftermarket

The amount of power the engine can make is decided by the engine builder, not by me.

Yeah.

So, I mean, if I go to wide open throttle, I can't get more wide open.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And I'm here with my Ford loving co-host, Dan, Mr. Gunnick Garage, in enemy territory with another Corvette in the backdrop.

Well, just because he got rid of his Mustang doesn't mean I'm in enemy territory. He does still work at Ford.

I started there, right? Look at the wall.

Yeah, true, true.

I got my FoxBite on the wall for you, Dan.

Yes, he gets a pass.

And today we are here once again with Greg Banish, calibrator, extraordinaire, book writer, publisher, other adjectives and words. And I got a D in English class, so pick whatever word.

Well, I can't take credit for publishing, right? I cannot assemble. I just type and send. So fortunately, I have people that seem to turn that into something presentable.

Yeah.

Well, I think it was about time that we got, we were back out here in Detroit, sunny Detroit.

Yeah, a little warmer this time.

Yeah.

And it's been six or seven months, six months since we've had you on. So it made sense to come back out here, have a conversation, because at this present moment, you're still our number one episode with a lot of questions from a lot of people. Well, first of all, I want to kick it off with what's new with you. I see that this is no longer on a lift.

Yeah. So we just this week posted the results. So ongoing project with this thing, right? It's been turbocharged more than it wasn't. I put the turbos on this car with 1,500 miles on it, and I was the first owner of the car. So I ordered it when I worked at GM. It's an 09 model. I wide-bodied it, but I took delivery in 2008. So in 2009, it got the twin turbo kit. Ever since then, it's just been part of what we do. So we used this car in our training videos. So if you watched our GM Gen 4 training videos on how to do virtual volumetric efficiency, this was the car on the dyno. So we've been training with this thing for a while. Hey, it's kind of cool car to own. It's a lot of fun. I've replaced my Fox Body Race Car, the American Iron Car, and my daily summertime car, an E36 M3, with this, because it does both things better. It's hard to argue, and scoreboard, right? C6s are that really cool plateau of performance. C5, C6, C7 are all kind of in that space, and what you do with it from there, they're like Legos, right? You can do all kinds of cool stuff. So a while ago, we put a head cam package on it, and never kind of really got the results that we expected from it.

What's a while ago?

The other day.

Years.

Actually, settle this argument for us real quick. When somebody says, the other day, the other day, this drink is strong, right? What does that mean to you?

The other day? I don't know. Probably within the last week or so.

Does that apply to, let's say, several months ago?

Is that what we're doing?

Yeah, yeah.

Does this count if it's several months ago or years ago?

Well, I wouldn't say the other day if it was years ago. A while ago. And I'm losing track of time in my age, right? So when I say I put heads on a while ago, well, I don't want to go back and look at the timeline and depress myself with how long I've been chasing the same stupid problem. But I know what happens in the industry, guys. This happens. And life gets in the way of projects, and other things are more important. So my own project and playing with it, like, oh, boo hoo, my first world problem of my 600 wheel horse car that has traction problems isn't making 700 or 800. Kind of hard to complete. The car is still a riot, right? So but for the longest time, I've been like, OK, this package, you know, every time we say twin turbo head cam LS3, and you look online, all the experts are like, oh, they make this much power. It's a ton of power. Now it's kind of 660 wheel. We're always kind of rationalizing that. But you look at it and go, well, it kind of should make more. And we started taking data, right? And I've written several articles about this. Hot Rod's got a few of them. I don't know when they're going to get around to publishing them, but I put them on my website, put them on socials, and we did back pressure measurements. So we instrumented the car. So I've got a pressure probe in between the engine and the turbocharger, so I can see what the number is. When we wrote the catalyst article with this car, again, so we're testing various high flow cats versus straight pipes on the dyno, and how much back pressure difference is there between them? How much horsepower difference is there between them? And punch line, you know, spoiler, right? The right cat, zero power loss.

Really?

Yeah. This car was, it was line of line, same exact horsepower with the Jesy high flow cats, their newest, latest, and greatest stuff versus a three inch straight pipe.

How did they accomplish that?

Well, they have sufficient total flow area. And then the the substrate of the catalyst, so the the brick, as you would call it, is they're metallic instead of ceramic, which means that they're thinner. OK, so every wall in between the cells is physically thinner, so it blocks less of the flow. And so we have relatively high flow cell count on this, like 400 cells per square inch. It's pretty good, 300, 400 cells per square inch. But the walls of the cells are thinner. Now, the flow has to make it through all these little passages, but the wall takes up less room, the passage has more space. OK, cool. And there's more total passages, so suddenly swell cells per square inch, but there's more square inches, right? So given enough power, it's like, why are vipers awesome? Because they have 8.5 liters of engine. They don't have to be an efficient engine. They have 8.5 liters of it. Right. So all the Honda guys are like, oh, we make more horsepower per cubic inch, and the Viper guys are laughing.

Right.

Same argument. So just more cowbell. So at a 4.5 inch brick versus a 3 inch brick, there's more flow area. OK. And as you add a quarter inch to the diameter, it's the whole pi r squared thing. The area goes up pretty fast as the radius increases. A little tiny bit of extra radius makes a significantly larger amount of area. So, you know, high school trig going on here. So we just open up the area enough, and even with the cells in between there, we still have a lot of flow area.

OK.

And so the flow area of a 4.5 inch brick on paper is really not all that different than a 3 inch straight pipe.

OK.

And even a 3 inch straight pipe has a boundary layer around the outside, right? So the flow right against the wall is not flowing. It's, you know, and further away from the wall, you get the less restriction you have. Right. And the same thing with every one of the cells. But if we have enough of them, it kind of doesn't matter. And the proof was we instrumented before and after pressures, right? So we can see the pressure drop across the brick. When there's no significant increase in pressure upstream of brick versus downstream of the brick, the brick's not slowing you down. The brick is not restricting the flow. So basic science, right? We're just applying that to our hot rods. And so if I have enough area that the pressure drop is not significant, I wouldn't suspect that it impedes the flow and airflow equals horsepower.

Right.

And what a shocker. The two dynographs were line on line with each other.

Now, is it still spending enough time in the catalyst material that it's burning the emissions off that it was intended for?

So as we add more cross-sectional area, we now have more surface area of treated metal that can do the catalytic reaction. So some high flow cats are only 100 cell per square inch. And that means you really don't have a whole lot of surface area of reactive stuff touching the bad gases to help clean them up. And in the emissions range, we're not up at the wide open throttle power. That's a different discussion. So FTP75 is kind of the gold standard of how we measure emissions. And during that test, the flows are kind of low. So cats don't represent a significant restriction on cycle other than like US06SCO3. And even then, these cars, big engines, who cares? So the more surface area of the substrate we have available to interact with the exhaust gasses, the more conversion we can get done. On top of that, some catalyst manufacturers put more precious metal on than others. So a lot of the high flow cats might just be a piece of stainless sitting in the pipe. Others, like this one, have a significant amount of platinum, palladium, and rhodium on them, and they're expensive because the precious metals are precious.

So you gotta be careful where you park, says what he's saying.

Good luck getting underneath this thing. Yeah, yeah, right. Crackheads are not getting underneath this car. I'm sorry. I'm more worried about the ram.

Right, yeah.

This thing will be all right. They're not coming in and getting under this car. They have to jack it up, and God bless them. So having enough platinum, palladium, and rhodium, and rhodium is one of the ones that really does a good job of cleaning up the emission. But that's also crazy expensive if you check the prices.

I know this is a little bit of a side tangent, but is there like a ratio of those that you kind of want, or do you know much about that?

Oh, yeah, that's the magic. That's what OEMs will not share with each other or the outside world. They will not tell you. That's the secret sauce. I see it in my daily work because I do emissions homologation for an OEM, and I see their cat-loading on all the different programs. But that is strictly confidential.

Right. Yeah, yeah.

But yes, if they can get away with a little more eye of newt versus wing of bat, and whatever they got to do to get the most reactivity, to get nothing but carbon dioxide and water going out the tailpipe. That's what they're going to do. Now, obviously, they want to clean up the combustion system on the front end. Burn as much as you can inside the cylinder and be clean. And that lesson translates to, guys, tuning cars on the street. Just don't waste the energy in the fuel. Turn it into pressure on the piston.

If you start it, now it won't.

That's kind of what I was thinking.

And when we do something for an EO, right? I do a lot of Cal work that needs to get EOs. That's a large chunk of my...

EOs being?

California Air Resource Board, CARB, executive order.

Oh, gotcha.

Okay, right. And what it means is, for example, Flying Miata makes a turbo kit for the NC Miata.

Yeah.

And they have to demonstrate that installing this kit on the car does not make the emissions any worse than what it would have been originally without the kit. That's the standard. CARB says that car was no more than this emissions. You can't be up here. So we have to come in and run through a lab and demonstrate that we are below that threshold and not at the threshold, below it by a certain amount so that it's not questionable. And so the way you do that is make sure that everything that goes through the engine gets completely burned. If it doesn't get completely burned in the engine, your last hope is the catalyst to try and clean it up. So the more work the engine does in this whole process, the better. It's how we get good clean combustion. Guys in the aftermarket, hey, I just want to make my car run. It runs great, drives like stock. Kind of laughable, okay? Because at the OEM, we don't have that luxury of just runs nice. Look, fat, dumb, and happy would feel great to customers if they never saw the lambda sensor, they didn't see the air-fuel ratio on the dash, and we didn't have to measure tail pipes. We would still be running carburetors, it would be 1962. It works, right? You can supercharge, turbocharge something with a carburetor. It functions, it works. Engines want to run. They can run over a wide range of air-fuel ratios. Cleaning up emissions means don't have leftover stuff. So we first start by defining what is stoichiometric, and that's the chemical balance, that even parts of fuel and even parts of air completely react, and in a complete reaction, you have carbon dioxide and you have water coming out the tailpipe. That's it. When we have too much extra fuel, now you got hydrogens and carbons that form other nasty things that you and I don't want to breathe. And even on the lean side, you have extra nitrogens that form things that you and I don't want to breathe. Sorry. That's the game. Don't hate the player. I don't make the rules. I just dance to the tune they tell us. So when we do an emissions cal, sometimes we have to... Look, if you don't pass, you don't have a product. At the OEM, no program exists at GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, whatever, that fails emissions. It's not even an option. So whatever you got to do to make it pass, make it pass. In the aftermarket, if we're getting a Carb EO, again, got to make it pass. Doesn't matter how much horsepower it makes. Carb is not excited by our horsepower numbers. Yeah. Now, they'll test us. So if we claim it adds 100 horsepower, they want to see that we are indeed making 100 more on the thing that we tested when we run it through the emissions lab. So it's got enough of the stuff that could make 100 extra. But even with that 100 extra, when you drive it normal, the tailpipe is clean. That's kind of the challenge. It's easier said than done. And the emission standards are not getting any looser as time goes on. So the current LEV3 and now LEV4 standards are pretty tight. You got to have a really clean running vehicle to do it. Can I do that without making it feel like a bag of hammers to the driver? Because some cases we would like to richen up and give them better throttle response. I got to kind of hide that.

OK.

In some of my cases where I've worked on them, the difference between pass and fail is down in the fourth decimal place.

That's intense.

Yeah. But we're talking about downstream long O2 trims that are used to find the balance point for the upstream wideband, whatever. And depending on the logic, they learn based on this and the long dumb slow average could be off by a fraction of a percent. But over time, it adds up to just enough to fail the standard because the standard is pretty stinking tight. I have no choice. We got to pass. So now, once I get to that point, is it still nice to drive? And sometimes there are trade-offs, right? I would love to give my customers a couple of miles per gallon extra for free without the masking by shutting off the fuel quicker on de-cell. And look, the driver's got his foot off the pedal. I don't need to burn any fuel, but I ran into a case on one program where doing that cooled the catalyst too much. OK. And if the cat's not up at a certain temperature, it doesn't do anything. Right. And all our emissions are at cold start, right? Well, if I bring the cat back down to a cooler temperature, the emissions go right back up. So I got to keep that cat warm so I couldn't shut the fuel off. I had to keep fueling it just to keep that thing from cooling off. And this car still has cats. So even with the turbo upgrade, going back around to this, right, this car still has the cats on. It has the jazzy cats on it. And so we were chasing, why doesn't this thing make horsepower? Dragon is horribly back on topic here, right?

We're going to get there.

And the power kind of went up and it went flat from about 5,300 all the way out to 6,700.

OK.

Just absolutely flat, stagnant horsepower. And if you look at data logs, the mass airflow went up to a certain number and went flat. OK. Choke flow. Something in the system, it's some size orifice that we can only push so much stuff through. And no matter how much harder we push, that's the limit. In fact, that's how they level the playing field in many racing bodies, right? They have a restrictor plate. Somewhere in here, there's a restrictor plate. Right. Where is it? Let's find it. So we start measuring. And that's what the back pressure measurement tells us. So the back pressure measurement showed me it wasn't the catalyst. It wasn't the catback. The big drop was in between the pre-cat number and the pre-turbo number.

Okay.

Right. So the catalyst all the way to the tailpipe had about 2 PSI.

Right. And to clarify, that's one variable you didn't change between setups, correct? The cats?

Well, when we changed them for the hot rod article, we measured it, and I put that in the article. Right. So we started with an older set of Cook's high flow cats.

Okay.

And a little bit higher, because they didn't have as much cross-sectional area versus the jesies. The jesies are physically larger. So there's more area to shove everything through, although the jesies have more cells per square inch. Okay. Now Cook's now sells the jesies. So it's kind of a moot point. But I'm looking at old high flow cats. Right. And we get to the point where, you know, okay, if the cat is sufficiently large enough, and even with 400 cells per square inch, it's not really restricting the flow versus straight pipe. The only difference between that and a straight pipe is cost, and does the car stink. And a lot of people won't buy cats based on being a tree hugger and making a better earth. But they will buy based on my wife, girlfriend, mistress, whatever doesn't want to ride in the car because it stinks. And I've had a number of clients here who have brought me a car and said, put cats on it and retune it. Okay, cool. Love doing it.

Is there, in the aftermarket tuning world, is it safe to still do that with stock cats? Because I've always heard, because you talked about fat and happy, right? Which creates more soot, things like that, that come out the tailpipe too. Are your odds of clogging your cats go up significantly in that situation?

If you're irresponsible, absolutely.

Okay.

Okay. So I'm listening.

Well, we know tuners, right? Like there's good ones.

Okay, so there's tuners and there's calibrators. Yeah, okay. Remember the conversation before? Yep, yep. Okay, so let's take our run-of-the-mill Gen 3 Coyote. Yep. Lots of those out there with lots of superchargers on them, right? A lot of anecdotal evidence out there. Buy a Ford Racing or Whipple kit, same thing. Drop it on the car. Are you worried about your cats?

Not if I run the Whipple tune.

Bingo.

Yep.

Because the guy doing the Whipple tune is an OEM calibrator.

Okay.

He's got experience doing this. And when he first developed all of this, he was measuring catalyst temperature. Remember before we were talking about modeling that and everything?

Yep.

So there are models that... But we also understand there are things that make cats hot. One of them is wide-open throttle and what air-fuel ratio you're at, and total mass flow and heat flux and all that nonsense. You know, one of the other really cool ways to kill a cat is to be somewhat enriched at watt and then tip out and go to a de-cell fuel shutoff. So you load all those sites on the brick that temporarily store some sort of fuel variant and then cool it off. And you pump it full of raw oxygen. That's the Bessemer process. That's how we melt steel.

Okay.

Right? So don't do that, right? And so when guys melt cats and I read the forums, and they're like, oh, you know, if you have a supercharger, you have to get long tubes and a catless X-pipe. No, no, you don't. You have to be responsible about keeping the catalyst alive. And even if you had a cat on there and it has some sort of back pressure, because it's not a zero, is that really hurting us on horsepower? We live in the golden age of horsepower right now, right? Even the Whipple Tune, right? They've got tunes that make seven, eight hundred horsepower.

Correct.

Through the factory brick with the factory exhaust manifold. And I read, I was in one of the cool things, like while I was doing the cat research on this thing and trying to uncork this a bit, I actually saw a really good thread on the Mustang 6G form. So there was a dude on there named Engineer Mike, and he's taking measurements and putting data on it. I love data. And he's taking back pressure measurements, and he's making changes, and he's looking at his exhaust system and saying, where's the choke point? And so the coupling between the catalyst and the cat-back went down to 2.25 OD, and that was the first thing he cut out and put a straight, larger diameter. And he had back pressure at every point on the curve, and sure enough, that was one of the restrictions. When he was all done with the project, he still had the factory bricks, but he had larger cones going in and out of the bricks. So he was able to direct the flow across the entire surface area of the brick, not concentrated in one little center area. And he said, look, the pressure drop across the brick is not that big. And he's making like 700, 800 to the tire. Dude, on a street car? Great. Yeah. Right. So is the catalyst really a problem? No. It took a little bit of time. And he's doing all this. And I've seen where the guys like the flange on the exhaust manifold comes down to kind of a small diameter. So they cut that off and they put a three inch V band in there and a nice large three inch V band to catalyst entry cone. And now it flows nice and smooth. And you use the whole area and then you have a nice cone coming out of it back to either three inch or two and three quarter or whatever under the car. And you go all the way back. Is that really hurting us on horsepower? No. I mean, it costs some money to do it. Right. Although he didn't have to buy new bricks, you know, so the most expensive part, thousands of dollars worth of precious metal he already has. He just did the fab work. And some guys are really good at doing exhaust fab. Great. You know, I can make two pipes stick together, but I'm a MIG guy, not a TIG guy. I'm not that good. I'll farm it out if it needs to be better.

I took mine down. I just ordered pieces of stainless off of Amazon. And same thing you're talking about, the choke point, right? So where it bolted to the stock stuff, that choked down there. And then when it made it to just make it easier for installation, right? You bolt it in, you're done.

Yeah. And they've got like some really tight bends in there, too.

Yeah.

There's some 90s that are really sharp.

Yep.

If you can replace that with a larger radius.

That's what I took it to a local shop and had them, I was like, here's what I need. I need to this point, this point, this point. They made it. I went home, put it on the car.

And what was the result on horsepower?

I have no idea. I just saw that as a choke point.

Yeah. Yeah. But at the same exact pulley ratio, I would suspect that maybe your map goes down a little bit if you're measuring map, your mass flow goes up, and your horsepower goes up.

Okay.

And your horsepower is going to go up for two reasons. Number one is the mass error went up, so the total flow through the engine, so total number of oxygens plus total number of fuels that carry the energy to release goes up. So you release more heat to the piston. The other is that your pumping losses went down. So on the exhaust stroke, as we try and shove everything through the exhaust valves and all the restrictions of the exhaust system, that's work coming off the crankshaft. And so we have a general rule of thumb in the industry, roughly three horsepower per PSI.

Okay.

Roughly. On a lot of engines. Now some are more, some are less, whatever. But just to give you an idea of the magnitude. So if you pulled three PSI out of the exhaust system, you could get almost 10 horsepower for the car. Starts to be real numbers, really fast, right? This car, in the original iteration, with the original turbos on it, was at 32 PSI back pressure.

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So you want zero back pressure is ideal, right?

Yeah, yeah, engines don't really need back pressure, right? Yeah.

You want to dispel that myth real quick, by the way?

Engines don't need back pressure.

Okay, yeah. Don't click dispel.

Yeah.

Good stuff in, bad stuff out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, if you want to create RAM tuning on a naturally aspirated thing and try and get scavenging, separate discussion.

Okay.

Okay, so positive wave, negative wave is a separate resonance discussion. Generally speaking, at wide open throttle, especially way up high RPM, right? So long tube headers are way past their tuning frequency at 6,000, 7,000 RPM, look, mass flow wins. Just get more stuff through. I will have a hard time believing a case where we add resistance to that and somehow make more power.

Okay, fair enough.

Right, we just want to let the stuff go through. So, we were at 32 PSI. I went through and did a series of changes to this thing. So, we ported the turbine housings as much as we could by hand. Now, by this point, they've been on the car for over a decade, and they're good and work hard. And they're high nickel content, right? So, it's like stainless, right? So, you're trying to grind. So, you go through multiple tools. Luckily, that was my turbo guy, not me. God bless him. So, we ported the housings. We did the old school trick of we had the turbine wheels clipped. So, they basically put the turbine, the turbocharger, and the turbine wheel on what looks like a valve grinder. And you take a certain number of degrees off of it.

Okay.

And you grind it. So, you might have a 10 degree, a 15 degree, a 20 degree turbo clip. That's what they're doing. The turbine wheel kind of curves over like this. And if you chop this last little bit off, the stuff coming through, instead of hitting that, is now free to exit. So, you lose a little bit of a mechanical advantage on pushing the turbo, but you increase its ability to flow more. So, you're trading low end response for top end flow. It's kind of like going to a larger AR. It has the same net effect. So, we poured the housing, we clipped the turbine, and we actually increased the clearance in between the housing and the turbine itself as well to allow a little bit more leakage. We turned the down pipes into full 3-inch, all the way to the front face of the brick. So, previously, this kit was designed to fit a stock LS3, or really LS2 car, and they have that 2.5-inch donut flange in between the factory cats and the factory X-pipe. Yep. And so, I chopped all that off and put 3-inch V-bands on it. So, it was 3-inch all the way straight through into the front faces of either brick. So, whether I was using the old high flow cats or the new jezzes or the straight-through or whatever. And that was all present when we did the Hot Rod article. And what we found was that our upstream back pressure went from 32 PSI down to about 24. Okay. Significant improvement. 8 PSI out of it. Directionally correct. And the power jumped a little bit, but not a lot. And we started talking about, you know, there's guys who make a career out of turbochargers and turbocharger matching. And, you know, they'll say, okay, you want a certain pressure ratio between your exhaust back pressure and your boost pressure. Right. And so race cars will have a one-to-one. Okay. If you're doing IndyCar, Formula One, whatever, it's probably one-to-one. Two-to-one is where we start getting nervous. Some street cars will accept two-and-a-half, maybe three. I was well over three, right? So I can tell I'm on the bad side of that relationship. I've got too much exhaust versus resistance for the amount of intake flow I've got. And that's what this was teaching us. And it almost doesn't matter what the engine is doing. I had a great set of heads on the car, and I had gone through three different camshafts, and none of it really mattered. Because no matter what, any of those could flow enough that we got up to that plateau where now we're hitting choke flow. Yeah, yep. And the turbine was pretty much a restriction. It just can't get any further. There's nothing I can do with the keyboard to fix this. There's nothing I can do with the camshaft to fix this. That combination was super well matched on a stock LS3 at 6 PSI. And trying to run eight or even 10 PSI on ported heads and a bigger cam, no bueno, right? You are out of turbo. Unfortunately, the kit is designed around T25 integrally gated housings. And that is not easy to change. That's just how the kit is built. They're cast manifolds. They go down to a T25 flange.

Okay.

A lot of other turbo kits are built with T3s. I wouldn't have this problem, right? We just pick a different turbo and bolt it right on. But I'm forced to use the T25 housings. So I'm looking at this, and I go, okay, what do we do? Really, the only option is, we're looking at it. We did everything we could to that 56.5mm turbine. The only option is go to a newer one. So the newer Garrett GTX and GTX Gen 2s and some of the other stuff out there have 60mm turbines. And there are, like, ATP makes a housing, or you can just machine this one that has a 60mm hole in it. So now you can put a 60mm exhaust wheel. In there, pick a different center section. So I had my local turbo guy, finally, he's the one who did the clipping before, and we tested him. Nick, we really didn't get anywhere with this one. So Nick over at Turbo Concepts, he's my guy over in Pinckney. And we just couldn't get there with the existing wheels. So finally he said, okay, let's machine the housings for the 60mm wheel. And now we've got what they, you know, like part of the five-blade mafia, really. There's 10 blades, but only five of them are full length. The other five are stubbies. And the pictures are on my website of, you know, the two next to each other and kind of see what they look like next to each other. You'll probably put that right here on the video. And you can see, okay, well, that's going to have less stuff in the way of the flow. And by the way, it's a physically larger hole by a few millimeters. But again, as we talk about adding area around the outside of a circle, matters really fast, right? Yeah. And so as we uncork that, and there were bigger compressor wheels on it, too, so they're able to keep up. And then we re-test it, right? And so I got them, I put them on the car, and I've been driving around for a little while. Everything's cool. By the way, zero calibration change to go from turbo A to turbo B because the ECU doesn't know and doesn't care. It has a mass airflow meter. And the pumping efficiency of the engine at every other than the absolute watt line is basically the same. So I didn't need to move the volumetric efficiency model. I didn't change fuel injectors. And my mass airflow meter is still the same mass airflow meter. Hmm, no change. Just drive it. And by the way, I get the same amount of air per cylinder air charge into the cylinders. Well, then it wants the same spark based on the measured temperature. Okay, cool. So all that normal cal stuff just kind of works. So as I got the turbos from Nick, I kind of took whatever he gave me, and I backed him off one turn on the gates. I'm like, let me take some preload out of this. I don't want to make too much boost. I'm driving around like, oh, that's okay. It's pretty cool. We go to the dyno, make the first pull, and it spins on the dyno. Interesting. Didn't do that before. So we resettle the car, strap down nice and tight. Like, okay, we got to be diligent about it. Really make sure. I'm like, try to look at it. I'm like, it didn't make a whole lot of boost on this run. It only made like 140 kPa up top. And, you know, ambience like 97 on that day, you're still looking at like 5 psi. Like, it's kind of light. So I get on there, and previously I found that it took two complete turns per psi on the old setup with a lot of back pressure because the back pressure was really pushing the pucks open on the integral gates. So I put three turns in it. It should be one and a half psi based on the old map. And we made a dyno. Like, unfiltered, it was shown like 816. Like, the car previously was struggling to make 660. Yep. Like, no way. Something's wrong. And I go back and I check the math, right? Because I'm looking at my laptop, my HP, and I'm like, OK, what was the air flow? And what was the manifold pressure? The manifold pressure was still about 150 kPa up top. Wasn't 140, it was 150. OK, it was only picked up a little bit. Oh, it shouldn't be that crazy. Air flow. Well, the air flow is up. So we were previously, I don't know, 64, 65 pounds per minute. Now we're like 77, 78 pounds per minute. OK. And I was so used to my old rule of thumb about 10 to 1 between air flow and horsepower. So if you look at air flow in caveman units of pounds per minute, it's usually about 10 horsepower per pound per minute of air flow. So 70 pounds per minute would be 700 horsepower. I'm thinking, well, if we made 800, I should have way over 80 at the end air flow at the engine. It's got 78. That 800 can't be right. I'm not on gasoline. I'm on the 85. OK. So I got like 80 percent plus. Like I got a strong blend in this thing. Well, ethanol brings its own oxygen to the party. And so you run ethanol at 20, 30 percent richer just to hit stoic. So everything, you need more fuel system to go with your ethanol. Well, of course, that's why I put two pumps in this thing and a dash 8 feed and billet rails and 1060 injectors. OK. And it's using it. So, you know, and I'm like, it was like spot on. Lambda 78 start to finish on the dyno run within one percent all the way across. It goes right where I pointed it because we did the Cal the right way before. Like it's relentless pursuit of the fundamentals on the calibration. There's no magic s*** to this, right? And so it's getting lots of fuel and the fuel brings oxygen with it. So that 78 pounds per minute is not all of the air in the cylinder. Right. Really matters is oxygen molecules versus carbons and hydrogens. We were bringing more like, oh, yeah, I guess, you know, even if you got 20 percent more because of, you know, the extra fuel that would check out. Now that you're 78 pounds per minute, 780 airflow horsepower plus some fuel flow. Yeah, now it starts with an eight. Like, OK, cool. And then I remembered this is a stock bottom end. I've never been into it. So it has the stock pistons and the stock ring gap. Like, this is dumb. I mean, we made a backup pull, and we changed the correction factor, too, because it was doing kind of the standard correction to 77 Fahrenheit. I put it on the other standard that goes down to 72 Fahrenheit in a less forgiving barrel. Now, the other thing is our barrel was a little low on the test day. So we get a fair amount of correction based on the barrel. And here's where you get to cheat if you have a turbo. Because all of the SAE correction factors are based on air flow through a fixed orifice. So if you have a naturally aspirated engine, it's correct-ish other than if you have a lot of air temp correction and spark efficiency. Which, by the way, when it's cool, then you get more, you run closer to MBT. So if your intercoolers work really well, then you get to cheat a little bit. Well, with a turbo, turbos are regulated by pressure against the diaphragm pushing on a spring. The spring does not change with barrel. So it takes a total amount of absolute pressure pushing on a certain number of square inches of diaphragm to push against the spring before that wastegate opens. And they don't give a crap if you're at altitude or not. So a lot of Subaru guys are like, why do so many people own Subarus in Colorado? Because as I drive up the mountain, the car is still the same. Guess what this thing doesn't care about? It's a little bit of change in the barrow, right? It just, the turbos can now pump it. So you spin the turbo a little bit harder than you normally would. But I now have headroom, and they're now able to do it. And so, yeah, they just, they made, yeah. So it gives my correction factor, even though the correction factor says, well, I'm gonna give you a little credit because the barrow is low. These things don't care. They're like, oh, here's your airflow. We keep going until there's enough pressure to open the gate. So, I mean, we, on the other correction factor, made 790. Because it's roughly about a 3% difference between the two, and 3% of 800 is a big number. But okay, but either way, in my 810, in my 790, whatever, it's more than this tire's gonna hang on to. Yeah.

Are you going to change that soon, by the way?

So I took one full turn out of the gates when I brought it home. Like, this is dumb. I'm going to Hot Rod Power Touring next week, right?

Yeah, that's right.

I don't want to do anything too simple. And I want to be able to drive it. I want to drive it without worrying about it. I mean, the knock sensor is not picking up anything. Every once in a while, you get a little tiny bit of trace knock. Perfect. So the Cal is on the money. So it goes where it's pointed and it's not knocking. Two things kill engines, knock and RPM. And I don't spin this thing to the moon. It's got the fuel cutoff is like 6,700. They're Gen 4 rods. They're good for it. And I'm not knocking. I'll be all right.

What should the bottom end of one of these be able to hold up to?

I mean, I've seen the sloppy guys are making thousands on them, right? So what I did is not revolutionary. I'm not the pioneer here. I don't get special credit for that. I have just another belly button LS3 with turbos. And it made what belly button bolt-on LS3s with turbos on E85 makes. It just finally made what it should have made all along. I finally got to where I should have been. But what did it take to get there? That's the lesson, right? We recognize that we had choke flow on turbines. And so the back pressure data, right? We went from 32 to 24. And at that particular airflow rating, now we're down around 16, 17. So now the P ratio is back in the box. Now, the total back pressure still went up from there. And at the end of the run, back pressure on this was still about 12 kPa less than where it was before. Right. But it ridiculously higher total mass flow. So we're making more power, and we still had less total back pressure. And now the map was reading 150. Do I believe the map became the next discussion point? And the first answer is, I really don't care, because it's not that map makes horsepower, it's airflow makes horsepower, air and fuel flow. So I certainly have a lot of flow, and the horsepower agrees with that. The manifold pressure dropping a little bit as RPM and flow climb, I can just digest that and say, yeah, it's okay, it's cool. I do have a BTR stage one centrifugal cam in this, so it's meant to keep swallowing as we go to higher and higher speeds. Brian did a great job on the camshaft. It works great. It's got a really early exhaust valve opening point to try and get the bad stuff out of the cylinder so that we don't have as much pumping work on the exhaust stroke to try and push that stuff out. It lets it blow down early and start going on its journey out of the car so that we don't have to force it with the piston. And the higher we go, the more that particular part matters. And his V2 camshafts have surprisingly lower durations, but he's picked the IVO and IVC points such that they're useful.

I was going to ask you about, especially when it comes to cam selection, I've looked at the BTR catalog before. So is there, and we might be straying from the main discussion here, but is there any reason that you select that over, let's say, a big honking cam, like some other people made?

Two-hour discussion with Brian Tooley on an eyeball engineering level.

I do want to get him on. That's one of the bucket lists, yes, for sure.

Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, he and I chatted about this at PRI a while ago. We agreed, yeah, we'll get the wrong cam in the car. I had the old school thought process of we needed more intake duration. So this cam that's in here now is only 217 on the intake side. The old cam was 220. And I tried another one that's probably very similar to Brian's cam. So there's multiple cams out there that will do what this does. Brian's a good friend. I like the stuff he makes. I've worked out with him on some other projects. So I'm happy to run that on this car, and the results are great. And the thing sounds great. Okay, cool. So between his cam and the Hooker Catback, start this car, and it's like, okay, it sounds cool. And it's still MPP, so I can make it louder or quieter or whatever. So I'm happy with what I got. And that's what a lot of this is about. When we work with people, and you're doing individual customer cars, the only thing that matters is the guy happy with his car. True. It doesn't run right for him. It's not about what I want. So if a customer says, I want to hear the cam, okay, cool. We can put Chop on a stock camshaft. It's just really bad idle control. So that's entirely doable. Can I smooth out a cam like this where you couldn't hear it at all? Yeah, probably. So you would never know. I've intentionally left some verbal in this thing, because V8s with verbal sound way better than four cylinders doing pops and bangs.

Oh, there goes our four-cylinder audience.

Sorry, guys. But it's not pops and bangs. It's burbles, right? With six liters of engine, you hear the Viper guys with it right there. They do it, too. A lot of new cars do it from the factory because they can kind of make the car sound more aggressive, more sporty without ruining other things. Now, there's a limit somewhere in there. It's a gray area. How much is too much? How much garlic do you like in your pasta?

There is a limit. I found it.

So, there is a limit of how awesome is awesome. And some customers will say, give me more, give me more. Fine. That's the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. Now, if we have to pass emissions, then there are some limits.

Whole different ball game.

Yeah. But, I mean, there are a lot of factory cars that pass LEV4 emissions with some verbal in them. So it's not entirely prohibitive.

Remind me, so LEV4 is the incoming one?

Well, it's current now.

The current one. So when did that come into play, roughly? When did it come into play?

26 model year, if I'm correct.

Okay, gotcha.

They're out there right now. Okay. But the emissions bins in LEV4 overlap with a lot of what was there in LEV3. It's just they're trying to push the fleet average tighter and tighter. Okay.

So that means somebody like, let's use Ford or GM as an example, that means throw more EVs into the fleet as well to bring that average down?

Yes. And it's a bigger penalty if you have something that's up in the dirtier bin. So some things like supercharged V8s might be what we would call bin 125, which is 125 milligrams per mile average on the FTP 75. Okay. They want everything to be 70 milligrams per mile. So for every vehicle you build at 125, you're going to have to build a lot of 30s or 20s to offset it. And eventually get to the point where you really can't afford to do very many 125s. You're going to have to make things 70s or 50s or whatever. So you look at that little white sticker under the hood of the car. So pop the hood, there's a little white thing. It's called the VECI, vehicle emissions control information. And on that, it will tell you US EPA Tier 4 Bin 125, or it will say California LEV 3 Bin 70 or something like that. And that tells you what emissions been the vehicle was certified to. And so ironically, if we're doing stuff in the aftermarket, if we want to go get our car BO, that's how clean I have to be. So if it was originally a Bin 70 vehicle, it means I have to have no more than 70 milligrams per mile on the FTP.

Does that go just across that model? So does it average out that way? Or can a Mustang and a Focus be... Can the Focus offset the Mustang, or does it have to be within that model run?

So for the fleet average, Fosai offset Mustangs and F-150s.

Okay.

So big V8 heavy things probably have worse emissions than small, lightweight, clean four-cylinder things.

So it doesn't need to be within a model. It's them as a fleet across all models.

Yeah, there's no Mustang that's bin 20, bin 30.

Well, I was thinking of the Mach-E. I was trying to figure out why they would call that a Mustang.

Yeah, you get to average in what used to be... It's funny money on how they do the averaging. So the EVs, you get a certain amount of credit for. And that was the whole... Oh, good tangent here, Dan. That was the whole...

I'm just trying to make the Mach-E make sense to myself...

. for what the fleet average was going to be. And the EPA recently revoked that. Congress revoked it and said, no, you don't get to supersede what we federally have said. And really, what that was is they were using the fleet average making it such a low number that there's no way you could get there without averaging in a bunch of zeros. Because engines on average are not that clean.

Right.

So the only way you get there is by playing funny money with zeros. And so it was forcing an EV mandate. They were backdooring the EVs in. And Congress came in and said, you know what? Your standard shouldn't be tighter than our federal standard. And this is the whole recent SEMA win on this. That now we stick to the federal standard. Now, the cold hard reality, I think we touched on this before was that some of these emission bins are cleaner than the background sample in big cities. So how dirty is a vehicle? Even bin 125 is a ridiculously clean vehicle.

What is the, the new ZR1 was a ridiculously little bit too. Was it 125?

Well, I don't know. They didn't release it yet. I haven't looked it back up. The certificate of conformity for the Z06, cause they did release that, that's in production, was bin 125. Crazy.

Is that the largest bin?

Is the dirtiest bin in bin four.

Okay.

But even when we say dirty, 125 is really stinking clean.

Yeah.

It's 125 milligrams per mile over what's effectively a seven and a half mile test. So it's less than one gram of non-methane organic gases plus oxides and nitrogen combined over the drive to work.

It's kind of small. Do they factor in heavy and medium-duty truck stuff?

Different stuff.

That's a whole different.

So this is light-duty vehicles.

Okay.

Oh, that's right.

So one of the workarounds is when they make a vehicle that's so heavy, it gets binned as a medium-duty vehicle rather than a light-duty vehicle.

Yeah.

So hummers, escalates, really big, heavy things. If they weigh so much, I guess if you shoot the moon, you play a different game, right? Now you're up over here. It's a medium-duty vehicle. It's not this. The problem is that it's neglecting the fact that people are driving that to work as their daily.

Yeah. Because I think the three-quarter ton rolls into that medium-duty.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. Three-quarter ton.

That's why they don't advertise the MPGs on that stuff. They don't have to, and they don't want to.

So once upon a time, I worked on F250 350. Yes, it's medium-duty standard. So those, instead of being a 125, might be a Bin 160 or a Bin 250.

Okay.

So 250, that's twice as much as this other 125, right? The math checks out.

Yeah.

But I mean, when you have a 9,000-pound vehicle that you have to get moving from zero up to 40 miles an hour and back, yeah, it takes a lot of energy to move heavy things.

Bin 125 would be rough.

Well, and again, if you had perfect combustion and you had no leftover parts, then the tailpipe emissions would be clean, because none of this includes CO2. So miles per gallon is not part of the emissions test. There's a separate CAFE standard, Corporate Average Fuel Economy. So fuel economy is a separate shell game of numbers, and they have to play that as well. So that's a separate discussion. They have teams of people at the OEMs. That's their job to understand how the fleet average is for that as well. And it's based on some really fuzzy math, and I don't love the game, but I don't make the rules. When we talk about passing emissions, you can burn all the fuel you want as long as you burn it completely. So perfect combustion of a hydrocarbon fuel. So I take H's and C's going in and mix them with air, which contains O2. I should get H2O and CO2. Neither of those are regulated on the standard. So when I say BIN 125 or BIN 70, it is the 70 is milligrams of combined non-methane organic gases. So what used to be hydrocarbons, but now they call it NMOG, because there are other things other than hydrocarbons that come out the tailpipe, especially for ethanol. Ethanol makes formaldehyde. So formaldehyde is not a hydrocarbon per se, it's an aldehyde. And so instead of just being a pure HC, there's some oxygens in there, and it still makes a bad thing. So they've been that all in together. So they took away any advantage to running flex fuel. Even with flex fuel, you have to be cleaner. Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah. So when people say, I can smell the corn, you smell the formaldehyde.

Okay. That's what that smell is. Okay.

Yeah. Don't breathe too deep.

So which one's worse to breathe in though?

Well, they use formaldehyde in Belm dead bodies, right? It's carcinogen.

Yeah, but some people use it to get high.

So it's a carcinogen. I mean, I wouldn't want to be breathing any bit if I had a choice, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

But the 70 in bin 70 means non-methane organic gases plus oxides of nitrogen, all oxides of nitrogen, not just N2O or NO. It's all of the weird things. So largely, you get those on the lean side, and largely, you get the N-MOGs on the rich side. And you have to take all of your rich airs plus all of your lean airs together, and it's no more than this standard.

Okay.

And then, oh, by the way, we're going to check you on carbon monoxide as well. So there's a CO standard. And then they're going to do particulate mass. So that's the PM number. So with direct injection, that's a bigger deal than it is for port, because sometimes if we put fuel in at the wrong time and it doesn't completely mix and evaporate, the little kernels of fuel, the outside shell burns and the inside stays, and you get this little tiny chunk of charcoal, goes out the tailpipe, and that's no good.

Turns out that stuff's really bad for you too.

Well, yeah. So we talk about PM 10 and PM 2.5, and it's how many microns is the little thing. And the little tiny micron thing goes into your lung and finds a spot, and it agitates things and turns into really bad stuff.

I do wonder, and I'm not saying this jokingly, because we had this Canada fire at the present moment, I wonder what the... I'm sure there's a measurement somewhere, how fine the particles are.

Yeah, 100%. Even with California wildfires. Completely undid all of the vehicle standards. 100%. That's an inconvenient truth, as they say. You're not tested based on wildfires, unfortunately.

No, we were told that that's why they added port injection back in on a lot of things, was to help burn that.

Yeah, so when do you make that? It's when you try to put a lot of fuel in in a really short window. And that's what, DI, the window, is about a quarter of the size of the PFI window.

Yep.

Okay.

Basically, of the intake stroke, out of a four-stroke engine, the intake stroke is the only real window of opportunity to cleanly add fuel to the engine. Now, usually, that's enough for most cases. That doesn't. But we're idiots, right? We like pumping more stuff in there, and we need more to go with it. So if you pump more air in, we gotta get more fuel in. And how do you get enough fuel in? Well, you try and jam it in. Well, if the time window is only this big, you gotta get all this more fuel and less time. It's gonna go in like a fire hose, not like a fine mist. Yep. And it's harder to evaporate. Evaporation takes time and temperature. Really simple, right? That's six credit hours of classes for you right there. Evaporation takes time and temperature.

Well, I always think about it too when you see like an animation of how a four stroke works, right? They're always showing you everything in slow motion, right? And I'm like, now you understand that that's happening 6,000 times in a minute.

Yeah.

Like that's crazy.

Every 20 milliseconds at 6,000 RPM.

Yeah, that's insane.

Which means the intake stroke is five milliseconds. Holy s***. Five milliseconds.

What do you think about that way?

Yeah. So your pulse width on DI, if your DI pulse width is over five milliseconds at 6,000 RPM, is by definition no longer the length of only the intake stroke. You have either violated on the front side into the exhaust stroke, where the valve might be open, or you're not getting it done and it's still trying to happen as the piston is coming up towards TDC. So now during compression stroke, even though you injected, and even though the fuel is physically present in the cylinder, does it have time to mix and evaporate?

Right.

And the answer is not always. Right. And that's where, you know, so if only the shell of it evaporates and the inner core doesn't, and flame comes past it at that point, you're left with a little tiny chunk of charcoal. It becomes your PM out the tailpipe. That's the problem. So as we PFI it, the nice thing about port injection is the entire two revolution window at 6000 RPM is our available time to add fuel to that particular cycle. It's from intake valve closing event to the next intake valve closing event. That's the window. And at least the fuel gets delivered. And if it hits the back of the intake valve, it may have some resonance time, but it starts to evaporate and become a cloud there, and then it gets sucked in, and it mixes. And the cool thing is, at wide open throttle, port velocity is crazy high. So the mixing is pretty good. So port fuel doesn't necessarily have the mixing problem that DI could have in some cases. So if I get to the limit, and I've used all of that intake stroke time to get the fuel in, and I need more fuel, what's my next tactic to get fuel into this engine? I can go to a bigger DI injector, but that time window is not going to move on.

Right. It almost seems like it would be harder to do it with a bigger injector.

I hate touching DI injectors for that exact. Now, Gen 3 Coyote and now Gen 4. Awesome. I love it. I did an EO program on a supercharged Gen 3. I passed the missions. Right. Cool. But I like it because I can add all my other fuel from the port. Yeah. Don't touch the DI. Now, Ford actually does use the PFI on cold start because, oh, yeah, by the way, hitting the valve and giving it a little bit of resonance time gives it a chance to evaporate. DI is actually kind of hard to light off when it's really, really cold. OK, cool. Once things warm up, then it's cool. DI is cool because you get some in-cylinder cooling. Yeah. So it's like having a second intercooler. Cool. To a limit. After some point, you can't really evaporate all of it, so you don't get that benefit anymore. You might as well put it in somewhere else. So on Gen 3 Ford, I get to play that balance. And there's a table in the ECU of what percent is DI versus PFI, and I can play that game. Cool. GM did it on the C7 ZR1? Yeah. And they're doing it on the new LT7? Absolutely. For a reason. Because you can only fit so much stuff in on the DI side, and when you want to make 1,064 horsepower, it's going to take a little bit of fuel.

Just a little bit. So I want to ask you this question because this is something that we discussed actually with Sam back to Episode 110. And can you touch on why time is so important? And I'm going to ask this question horribly. But one of the things that he mentioned is, for example, Mercedes did some crazy development with the way that their cylinder heads are shaped and all this to make sure that everything is getting burned fast enough. That's how they accomplished their highest horsepower for bang or stock ever or whatever. Do you kind of see where I'm going with that question?

Yeah, so now you're on to combustion time, not evaporation time. But like on the heat transfer side, all the equations include a T for time, right? So heat transfer and evaporation takes time, right? Some is faster, some is slower, but it's never a zero. And now we get into combustion time. And so even in my first book, I touched on this. I had the benefit of putting in there some AVL Indicom plots. And we're showing what is, in the industry, we call it the log-log plot. And so it's volume versus cylinder pressure. And so you can kind of see the four strokes of the engine in the two loops. So you see the pumping loop on the bottom of exhaust, then intake stroke, and then you see the compression stroke, and you see the power stroke. And it's all logarithmic scale against volume so that it becomes something that we can see, because putting it in raw, it would get really stretched and really weird. It's hard to see it. But the fact remains is that gasoline and air, or even ethanol and air, or methanol and air, like this doesn't change with the fuel, burning stuff is not instantaneous. It's kind of a relay race from one molecule to the next molecule to the next molecule, going from the spark plug all the way out until it hits quench at the wall. Now, it's not that simple, but it's the easiest way for us to think about it. If we drop a rock in a pond, and the ripples would go out, right? That's the perfect world. We don't live in that world, but it generally follows that trend. So that takes time. We want that process to peak at a certain point in the cycle to give us the most effective work on the crankshaft throughout the power stroke of the crankshaft. Right? So when we're pushing, the piston is pushing down on the crank. I want to get the most average pressure on top of the piston throughout that whole time frame. And although the more the crank moves, the more the volume changes and more the pressure drops. Right? So you've got these very non-linear relationships that do all the calculus. And the cool part is that almost every engine, it works out to within about the same answer within a few degrees of each other. Reciprocating piston engines want that peak pressure to be somewhere between 12 and 15 degrees after TDC to get the most work from the pressure. So whatever I got to do to try and make that in-cylinder pressure peak at 12 to 15 after TDC. Now I can go from peak cylinder pressure to what's my burn rate. And this is where really cool, geeky level instrumentation at the OEM comes in super handy. And top tier race teams have all this stuff, too. We'll talk about this in a few. But that's where in-cylinder pressure transducers matter.

Okay.

So if we were to measure that pressure in the cylinder, now I can see what the actual instantaneous pressure is against crank angle. And I can start plotting it. That's how I create that log-log plot in the first place. I have to have a pressure sensor, and I have to have a high-resolution crank angle to plot A against B. And now I can see the heat release as a function of pressure. And so as burn happens, I have a heat release, and I can see what percentage of my fuel has burned throughout the cycle based on that. And that becomes what we call the crank angle for some X% burn. The one we look at is 50%. Where did half of the fuel burn? Because that's usually pretty tightly tied to my maximum pressure in the cylinder. So we look for CA50, crank angle for 50% burn. It's a few degrees ahead of the location of peak pressure. So if you want your LPP, location of peak pressure, to be 12 to 15 after TDC, it usually means CA50 in the terms of heat release is somewhere in the region of 7 to 9 degrees after TDC. But whichever system you glom on to, I don't care. We're just looking for, did we get most of the stuff on its journey by this point? How does that process start? It's the ignition. So I'm going to pick, at any given constant engine speed and constant engine load and constant temperature, I'm gonna pick some ignition point that gets the thing to start to build pressure, such that the pressure peaks at this point. And that way, it can do the most work on a crankshaft the way that. This is spark tuning. At the OEM, this is the only way spark tuning happens, other than, is it tickling the knock sensor?

Well, I was gonna ask that because on a Coyote, you can modulate the cams, right? That you can do different things, open them sooner or later, whatever you want to do. On a car like this, I've always wondered, how does tuning or calibrating work? Because the only thing you can really do is when it fires and how much fuel it throws into the cylinder. Is that, and again, I'm not, okay.

So this is kind of cool, right? Yeah. I said it before, watt tuning is easy. There's only a couple of knobs to turn.

Yeah.

Great. On this car, it's air fuel ratio, lambda, and spark. It pumps what it pumps. Did I give it the right amount of fuel to go with it? And did I light it off at the right time such that I'm getting the most pressure on the power stroke without knocking?

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Okay.

That's it. Now, on a Coyote, I do all that at one cam angle pair. If I move one of the cams one way or the other, it will change how the mixture reacts in the cylinder and how fast things happen. So there's a right answer in cam angle pairs to get me the best possible reaction. And then for that cam angle pair, then there is a correct ignition timing for it. So if you look in the ECU and a Ford, there's not one timing table. There's 17 or 27 of them or whatever. However many they've populated for that particular program. Because Ford had to have a way to count for what happens when we move the cams. And it's not one cam, it's both cams. And so they've got this method of mapping ordered pairs of camshafts, and they have a certain number of these. And the cool thing is, in modern tuning software, we can log all of that. We can see where it put the cams, and we can see how much weight it put on which ordered pair to represent what's really going on in the cylinder. And then from that table, it grabbed this ignition number. And so if you go to retune it, ideally, you should be tuning that table that's using the most weight at that time, because that's where it's getting its answer for how much timing should I give this engine. And now does that need to be more or less? And the cool thing is, I got a Ford, the knock sensors are really good. They got multiple knock sensors, and they're really good at detecting the noise versus knock. And so they will even, Ford's logic allows them to go positive on more timing as long as it doesn't hear anything bad from the knock sensor on a stock engine. If you change your valve train, change your bottom end or whatever, you make more noise, you may have to play games with knock filtering and whatever. But for a stock set up, turns out the guys in Dearborn are pretty smart, right? And they've-

Imagine that.

Yeah. Well, they've had three years, the best toys with all these resources in front of them to play with it before it goes on sale, right?

True.

And it's not one dude, it's a team of dudes, right? Or people, right? So, they have time to play with it, and their logic is built such that it could go plus or minus. Now, this car can only go minus from wherever I put the good fuel, the high octane table. So, if it hears knock, it's going to dial back from there, but it will never give me more than what I put in for the best case scenario, which is why I always want it just barely tickling the sensor when I tune a GM. So, on the right fuel, it doesn't have any meaningful knock retard. Cool. If you get bad fuel, it can dial it back. OK, cool. Ford, the interesting part is, if you take a modern EcoBoost vehicle, and it was like an F150, it was tuned for 87 octane. Put 93 in it, it won't hear the knock. It goes, you know what? We can give you some more. If you data log it, you will see the knock learn, knock-ock mod, go positive. And it will give you a couple degrees more timing for free. No tuning required, no nothing. Just put good fuel in the tank. And when it doesn't hear knocking at high load, where it would have been restricted by the knock threshold, and it doesn't hear it, how about a little more? How about a little more? And it's got some amount of authority, and it could be three or four degrees more timing, which is a lot in a boosted application, torque-wise, and so they get faster. So it's not rocket science to come up with a tune that makes more power when you know you're moving from 87 to 91 or 93.

So it's funny that you bring that up because my wife just got a 2015 Navigator 3.5 EcoBoost. The Expedition, same year, same drivetrain. There's no difference between them, but technically the Navigator is like 35 horsepower more.

They might have different exhaust.

Okay, maybe, but it also says on the Navigator, premium fuel only.

Bingo. Yep. So a big chunk of that is you could take the Expedition, just put good fuel in, and let it figure it out. And the knockoff mod will walk up, and it'll say, oh, you got good fuel. We'll give you some more timing. The other is there is a back pressure difference between the two exhaust systems. Okay. And so the one with less back pressure flows more stuff and has less back pressure that would cause more EGR residuals and more pumping losses, more in-cylinder heat, and they all kind of spirals, right? So the whole reason, what do we do when we try to make things fast? We make the exhaust really efficient, right? We uncork the exhaust system, then cars go faster. So they did a little bit of that in the Navigator version versus the Expedition. So they might have a true dual into the resonator versus a Y-pipe into the resonator. Right. And that's the difference. And it could be 10, 12 kPa of difference. We don't read it as a lot to us. But at watt, at the rated power, you say, okay, max rated power is 5,000 plus RPM. Well, it starts to be a real number. Yeah. And look, one PSI is three horsepower. So they might pick up a couple horsepower just from the back pressure. And then, oh, by the way, we certified on premium fuel. And that's huge, right? So advancing timing and boosting cars, and boosted cars is huge, right? Because you talk about moving CA50, which might be really late as the timing is retarded to avoid the knock limit, and your CA50 might be down around 20. If you can move it up to 12, even though the optimal will be seven or nine or whatever, you're not all the way to the optimum, but you are on the steep part of the curve is recovering a significant amount of power. And that translates to Honda's, Toyota's, Ford, Chevy, whatever. It's just like most of our street driven stuff is octane limited, right? Especially if we go to higher compression ratios and we go to boosting systems. So how late are we?

I'm just checking to see how deep, just making sure everything's recording still. We've had one of those issues before. I say we pull a mark question. Should we pull a mark question?

Sure.

Let's see what we were working with here.

Well, if you were male, love it.

All right.

Yeah, this is something I'm even kind of toying around with the idea of, is just kind of getting more like, I guess, listener questions without the live thing, because live is dangerous, as we discussed.

Type it in the comments, folks.

Yeah.

Can't believe this jerk is still on TV.

I'll just run with this one. So as an OE engine wears, how much do emissions increase? Does the OE test on high mileage vehicles, and do they care? Is that something you could speak to?

So we absolutely test on high mileage catalysts. Okay. Because the catalyst certainly, it burns like a candle. So it's got, you know, the brick has this coating on it, and obviously you can burn that coating off if you get it too hot. We already know this, right? S***, if we get it really hot, we can melt the whole thing into a moon rock. But it does burn kind of like a candle over its life. The emission standards are written as full useful life. So again, when I say bin 125, it means 125 milligrams per mile on the FTP at full useful life. So if that vehicle has a full useful life of 150,000 miles on that particular standard, what it means is that the EPA or ARB could theoretically pull a vehicle of almost any mileage up to 150, into the lab, and it better pass. So the OEMs, we test with aged catalysts. So before we run the vehicle in our lab as an OEM, we will send the cat out for aging. We might do it in house. We might have an outside company do it, whatever. But there is a way in which time at temperature, plus a certain amount of poisoning, degrades the catalyst, such that it behaves the way it would if it had 150,000 miles.

Okay.

And we have to pass with that catalyst on the engine. Now, regardless of the engine, still have to have at least 4K, 4,000 miles on it.

And this is kind of like an industry standard?

Yeah.

Okay.

So we certainly get 4,000 miles, so you're definitely broken in, right? Rings are seated and things are happening. But the catalyst aging is way more important than the engine aging. Yes, we could argue that, okay, as the bores wear and we might get a little bit more blow-by, they don't take us to task on that as much right now as the catalyst, because the catalyst is the big noise factor. So we take fully aged catalysts, and we put them on the vehicle with at least 4,000 miles, so it's broken in. And we demonstrate that not only do we pass emissions, but all of our diagnostics, all our OBD stuff works. The monitors have to run and pass even. So that's why there's a certain amount of margin in that. You got to make sure that even if you had an old vehicle. Now, eventually, you have to do that on day one before you sell anything. So if you have a brand new vehicle, nobody's got vehicles out in the fleet to have 150,000 miles. Now, the agencies will still occasionally invite people to bring a car in, and they will pay you to use your car for a week, and they'll test it. And if it fails, the OEM gets a letter.

Interesting.

So this happens. And even the OEM might say, hey, we know you bought a truck from us a while ago. Can we buy your truck? We'll give you a rental for a while, and we'll give you a certain amount of money for it, and we just want to test it to make sure it's okay.

I have to point this out, so today we drove by an auto shop, and they had one of those McDonald's signs or whatever that says, oh, highest mileage vehicle this week, 186,000 miles. I don't think it's such a great way to catfish people in. I'm just saying.

So one of the other companies I work with does emissions measurement stuff internationally. They've tested vehicles in Nigeria, because guess where the vehicles go when they're no longer suitable for the US market?

Interesting.

And what's hilarious is, I was at one of the conferences a while ago, and they were presenting their data for this. And they show the mileage of the vehicle, and they said, don't believe this number. Because a lot of vehicles, ironically, get imported with precisely 260,000 kilometers on them.

Here's a question, so maybe you know the answer to this. What country, the plural probably, have the least stringent emissions laws?

Least stringent?

Or am I using that correctly?

There's gotta be a bunch of mother that have zero.

Yeah, there's a bunch that just don't have a program. So like Nigeria was one of the ones. They buy vehicles that are no longer fit for the US or Mexican market, and vehicles get shipped over there, because they still run at all. They may or may not have a catalyst. It may or may not be the original. It may have a pipe welded in, whatever. And it is the wild, wild west. It's Mad Max over there. If it runs, if it fits, it ships. It's gone.

So who do they get those vehicles from? Is it like a dealer program?

Auctions.

Auctions?

Like it's no longer saleable, but somehow still-

If you watch Co-part, the amount of overseas bidding that happens on those is kind of crazy.

Interesting.

I watch all of a sudden, I'm like, Kuwait, like who is bidding on this or something? That puts a little flag on whoever's bidding.

Well, also, a lot of countries also don't technically have salvage titles either.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, there's states here that don't do it technically either.

Yeah, completely different discussion. But a lot of Gulf Coast states have adopted the EU standard. So that's kind of off the table, but like Central Africa, they can't be bothered. They got bigger problems. Right. So and their fuel sucks. So they have really, really high sulfur content in their fuel.

I'm glad that you brought that up because that's actually another mark question. When it comes to dealing with other, like, do you have to worry about calibrating for, I guess, the worst common denominator when it comes to fuel or not?

Sometimes. Okay. So in the US, our fuel is regulated. It's pretty consistent. We know what we're going to get. You know, yeah, California fuel kind of sucks.

I'll say there's three states.

But even California 91 or, you know, California 87 or whatever is still better than anything you're going to find in Nigeria.

Okay.

Sorry. Fuel sucks.

And but yeah, engines are forgiving. Engines want to run. So as long as the engine runs, these guys will keep driving the car there. Right. So I when I worked on the focus, we had a warranty concern that we were chasing from one town somewhere in Mexico. And it was pretty far. I'm trying to remember. It's pretty far off the main path. And that one town had problems with the fuel polluting the DI injectors. Okay. Right. And where do they get their fuel from? You know, we always get from, you know, these guys, you know, the Volkswagens don't have the problem, but the Fords are having the problem. So now we have to go figure this out. And so is it our injector or is it how we're controlling the injector? But look, we don't have this problem anywhere else. And the only thing that's common is they have this rotgut fuel in this town. And so what we're doing is less tolerant of that rotgut fuel. Is there a way we can give them a fix without ruining everybody else's party?

Does everybody have to have the same calibration across the board? Like you can't calibrate differently for different countries?

Well, we want to minimize that, right? You don't want to release 30 different calibrations if you don't have to. It's a lot of paperwork. So if we can get one that covers everybody, that's always preferable. It's not possible.

Do you know what the lowest is in the US? Because I was in North Carolina the other day. Or where was I? I was somewhere, Colorado, maybe. I saw 85 octane for the first time in my life. I'm like, I didn't even know that was not true.

Yeah, Colorado will have 85.

That's a lie, by the way. You did my rally five years ago. You saw 85.

I didn't see 85, not at the stations we stopped at.

It was everywhere.

I never saw it.

So the thought in some of these... So 85 is about as low as it goes. Usually at altitude. So their general thought was, well, the engines have less load on them because you got less atmosphere. Now, take your turbo car there. Turbo doesn't care that it's at altitude. So hopefully you're not buying the 85. You're getting the premium 87.

It was a rental, so 85 went in it, yes.

But the premium 87 or premium 89 might be as good as you can find in that case, at which point you are now riding the knock sensor calibration. You're hoping that that dude did his job good, that he hears it and he dials back the appropriate amount so that nothing breaks. Now, eventually, you get out of that town, you go somewhere else and get a good tank of fuel in the car, peps right back up, right? Hopefully. I will tell you that on base fuel programs, not premium fuel programs, so you're not going to have that... You probably won't have that discussion on Mustang GT. But F-150 or Chevy Silverado or whatever, they're just going to say, look, make sure it runs on everything. So yeah, I guarantee you that Ford, Chevy, whoever, they've got tanks of 85 octane that they test with. They drive those cars to... As a calibration engineer, I can tell you, I went to Colorado a fair amount. And yes, we get whatever fuel they're selling there. We didn't bring our fuel with us. We're using the local fuel. So if it's 85, we're going to fill it up with 85 and see what happens. And it better start and it better run and better be okay. And that's why it takes years to build up a car before it finally goes on sale to the public. Because we got to go check that out and make sure that it will be okay. Is it going to be as awesome as it is here in Detroit? Nope. Will it start, run, and drive? Yep. Because Karen's going to get in and push the button, and it better run.

I remember that was a discussion we had last time, especially when it comes to tuning. What was it? Negative 40 degrees, I think it was?

Yeah. So we have to start at negative 40, assisted. Yep. So you can have a block heater, right? Or an oil heater or something like that going on. Battery charger, you're allowed at least one form of assistance, and it has to start.

I think it was negative 20 on assisted, right?

So minus 7C or 20F is the coldest emission.

You said C and I got lost. I was like, the bald eagles. Yeah, sorry. Bald eagles only here.

Yeah. So 20 bald eagles or minus 7 Canadian geese. Sure, sure. It has to start, and the emissions can't be worse than a slightly looser standard than what the base emissions are.

So there is still some sort of a standard.

Absolutely.

And if it's a 7-3 power stroke, it needs to be above 20 degrees plus.

Yeah.

Well, it's a plus or minus, right? So minus 7C could be minus 10C because there's a plus or minus 3C.

Okay.

So the EPA could test you at minus 9 and say that was a valid test. You can't have a cliff right at minus 7. And they're checking to make sure that your cows don't have hard cliffs in them. It better be a trend. And look, we tested plus or minus a little bit, and it better pass. And they don't want to hear excuses. It just better pass. So that's why a lot of OEM calibrators have jobs.

Is there, when it comes to... And again, we're not going to stick to OE the entire time here, but when it comes to the OE side of things... And I think we talked about this last time when we were talking about the 392 incident with you, which was hilarious in the last episode callback. Is there some sort of calibration that you are doing that is, quote unquote, unfavorable? Let's call it for a very dedicated enthusiast to make sure that you're passing emissions or a certain requirement.

No, the only thing is that like super twitchy throttle response, which could get into heavy transients really easily, is harder to clean up on emissions.

Okay.

So the emissions calibrator wants things to be nice and buttery smooth. Right. Because as we have rapid changes in air charge or throttle angle, which leads to air charge, we could potentially not keep up on the exact air fuel ratio on each cylinder event. So, you know, how rapid it's moving, we have a lot of logic that anticipates, but I don't want to rely on the anticipation any more than I have to as an emissions calibrator. I just want to be nice and smooth and right there, so that even my closed loop is keeping up and just keeping me right on target. Historically, emissions calibrators like automatic transmissions more than manual transmissions for this reason, because manuals had these abrupt changes as people engaged gear sets.

Yeah, and it can be totally different depending on who the driver is at that point.

Yeah, and in cases where the converter is not completely locked, well, it's a little bit of slop and it keeps things nice and smooth. The peanut butter fills in the cracks. So it's a little easier to pass on an auto versus a manual. It also means that the driver has less impact on the cycle. So a bad driver in the certification area can't fail the test for you as easily on an auto as he could on a manual.

Okay. Speaking of that response, I tried out a pedal commander for the first time the other day. And a friend of mine bought one. He's like, I want you to just try this out and tell me what you think. And that was a wild ride. It was very weird because I'm used to a little bit of lag there. And I tried it on the biggest setting, and there was nothing to touch the pedal, and the thing just wanted to take off like a bat out of hell.

Yeah, and so the zero and the 100 can't move, right?

Yep.

So normally, there's a curve like this in between the two, and they might draw a straight line, or they might draw it this way, or even curve the other way. The only thing I can tell you for sure on those is that zero still has to be zero, and 100 still has to be 100. And what it does is you're just telling the ECU the pedal's at a different place than it really was. So if you move from 10 up to 15%, they might report that you went from 10 up to 50. And the ECU is gonna do what it's gonna do when it says, oh, geez, the guy asked for a lot. Here you go. And it'll just give you the response based on what it saw coming in. Now, the reality is, if you decided you wanted to be a club-footed driver, you could probably elicit that same response just by really hammering the pedal every time. Would you do that? Probably not. No. But that's what they're doing, right? They're reporting a bigger change, but they can never report more total than the maximum. So they just get closer to the maximum sooner. I just did a cal for another customer who had one of those on his car. I'm gonna take this s*** off. Yeah. Oh, I said one of the seven words.

So by the way, I had it in eco mode and tried to pass a car through a wrench light, and then my gas pedal became useless. So I took it out, turned the car off.

It's weird that it failed the wrench light, because it kind of shouldn't be able to do that. But because wrench light means that you had more airflow than you should have at that throttle angle.

Okay.

But what you probably had is such a rapid change that it wasn't, the anticipation wasn't keeping up with reality. Now, if you had just stood on it as a driver, you went from 0 to 100 right away, leaving a parking space. They should be able to respond. I mean, that's how we do burnouts, right? And it shouldn't it shouldn't throw a wrench light for that. But I work on a lot of cars where, okay, we make a lot more power than stock, and it's not super rewarding to make the 0 to 20 percent super twitchy. If you take a whippled Coyote and it makes 7, 800, I still want to occasionally be able to drive it into a parking spot or parallel park, right? Or drive in front of a school where there's kids and people, right? Without being able to light up the tires every time I breathe on the pedal, back to the 392 discussion, right? I need some modulation down low. So, even as I make more power, I mean, back when 3-valve was the new thing, right? And that's when Ford first went to torque-based throttle control. I actually thought it was really cool because I could make lots of power up top, and I could actually soften it from stock from 0 to 10%. It'd make it easier to drive because you don't need 700 horsepower to parallel park. And you don't want it, right? So let me give you some resolution down here. And if you want more, the more you step on the pedal, the more I will reward you for it. But if you're not asking for it, I'm not going to give it to you. So the pedal commander type things, the pedal modulators, just give you more in an area. And people perceive that as, wow, it's really sporty. But it never gave you more than the engine ever would have been able to.

Right. That's how I always thought about it too. It just took that delay out, which then I just adjusted my driving style for when...

So after two days, you will figure it out, because humans are really good pit loops, right? So you will figure out what proportional and integral changes you need to make to try and get your feed forward to match the system's output. And so, you know, the engineering students are nerding out over this right now. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the reality is, humans are pretty good at correction loops. Well, I submit to you that if I took it away, after a couple of days, you would get used to it, but not being there also. And if you want more, you'll just ask for more. And so, I had to coach my driver. My guy brought me a car, and I took one of those out. I said, just drive it. And don't call me for two days. Call me two days later and tell me what you think of the car. He's like, oh, yeah, this is pretty good. Good. Then you didn't need that funky little box. And that's just one more failure point that we don't need to worry about. So, I mean, unfortunately, that's one of those parts. And I have friends who manufacture and sell them. That's cool. They've hit a market. Great. It's not for me. It's not the kind of work I do.

So it does for what? Like you said, it tricks you into when you get it at first. You're like, oh, wow, man, this thing is a whole other car.

But you could you have the ability to elicit that same response. Just step on the pedal harder. And once I start coaching people on that and explain to them, look, the car responds to how you drive it. If you drive aggressively, it will respond aggressively because, oh, by the way, not only is it just throttle movement, but the trans adapts to that, too.

Yeah.

Right, so modern transmissions are looking at estimated torque and then giving you a reaction on either shift duration or inertia harvesting, which turns into clutch pressures, directly proportional to what the driver request is. It might be in units of torque, but it's still more or less. That's right.

What? You all right?

No, I'm just giving you a... Whenever we have one of these lulls, I'm just like, that's freaked Dan out for a second. Do you have some...

We need like 10 seconds of uncomfortable silence in the middle of...

Well, it's like those like Super Bowl ads. I remember when we started playing like the dead silent ads for a while, and like everybody was like, my TV break? Like, you know, just pay attention. Just want to make sure people are still listening. Do you have a tune or a calibration that comes to mind? I was just like a nailed it situation. Like that just like I really uneffed up that car or whatever the case is.

I mean, that happens. I don't like having to play the game of I can do this better than X, Y or Z.

Well, not necessarily, but better, yeah.

Is there a more rewarding one?

Yeah, there we go. That's the word. Not uneffed up. Rewarding.

You're drunk.

It's fine.

Look, any time we take something that makes 50 to 100% more power than stock and make it controllable, I feel like we did a pretty good job. Now, if we can do that and, oh, by the way, pass emissions, then that's really cool, in my opinion, because not only does it feel OK to the driver, but the agencies can never really come after us for that. We've done the right thing. Making horsepower is kind of easy. Just force more stuff through there. Bigger pump, put a bigger supercharger, bigger turbo, more boost, whatever. Shove more stuff in there. More power is not necessarily the stick by which I measure if I did a good job on a cow, because the amount of power the engine can make is decided by the engine builder, not by me. Yeah. So I mean, if I go to wide open throttle, I can't get more wide open, and I can't move the knock limit, and I have to give it an appropriate amount of fuel for what it's doing.

You just triggered a question that I forgot to ask somebody else. I forgot to ask Ed this yesterday. When it comes to, well, first of all, what do you turn on? Is it a Mustang dyno?

Dynos are hammers. We use it as a tool. We can pound a nail or we can smash our thumb. I love working on a load-bearing dyno, because the load-bearing dyno can replicate the loads that we see out in the real world. So if we do a wide open throttle sweep, it takes more time, the higher speed gets to continue accelerating. During that time, heat builds up in the chamber, and if we are not limited, that's where we're going to see it. So I want that to kind of match reality. The nice thing is that on that dyno, we also can usually never get the same airflow across the car that we get in the real world. So it's a little warmer than it would be in the real world. If I can live there, I'm going to have a hard time breaking it in the real world. So that's why I like that. I don't build my career upon, I can make more power than so-and-so. Right.

Do you adjust the load on the Dino based on what the car weighs?

Yes. Yeah, that should be part of the initial setup all the time. So it should know the difference between a pickup truck and a corvette.

OK.

So both in mass and aero load. So there's usually a couple of numbers in there that you have to adjust. And a lot of the modern Dinos do that automatically. When I had my shop back in 1999, I bought a Mustang Dino. I was one of the first kids on the block to have one of those in a world of Dino jets. Dino jet has a load bearing Dino available now too, right? So given my choice, would I want a 248 or 224, or would I want a 224 XLC, right? The LC is load control. I want the load control one, please. Because I always have the option to add the load. Now, for marketing purposes, people like the inertial Dinos and the sweep happens faster. So what might be a 13 second sweep on one Dino might be a 10 second sweep on another Dino. And by letting it sweep through really fast, we can get away with s*** that we normally wouldn't do. And you feel like you're OK. I've also seen cases where cars were dialed in on that, and then they go to the drag strip and the engine comes apart at the 1000 foot mark.

Yeah.

Feels kind of bad. I don't want to have to explain that to my clients.

Yeah, I think I was watching a Banks video like a year ago.

Gale's got a Mustang Dino for a reason.

Yeah. I can't remember how long the sweeps were. It might have been 15 seconds or maybe even longer.

Well, he does trucks, right? So they got a lot of mass and a lot of aero resistance.

Well, and they're also just constantly under a ton of load, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So on the OEM side, when we work on a truck program, we have to do testing that basically simulates hauling the trailer up the hill forever. In fact, all the OEM engineers who have done this, you guys are laughing now, have gone to Baker Grade in California. So there's a freeway section that goes right through Baker, California. It's a 70-mile-an-hour freeway, but it's a long uphill slog. And if you have to run the truck at GVW and often tow a trailer up that at freeway speed uphill in the California desert.

That sounds easy.

It's going to get warm. The other is Davis Dam. So that's on the Colorado River, but it's a steeper, and it's kind of a little bit of undulation, and it's really heavy, it's really hard. There are a number of these tests. GM tests in Death Valley a lot. So we would go from Stovepipe Wells up to either Daylight Pass or Immigrant Junction. And again, there's a mile of elevation climb, and the bottom of Death Valley is 120-plus when you start. And although it's not 70 miles an hour up there, it's still, even if you're going 35 miles an hour, and you're trying to haul all that mass up the hill, it might as well be steady state. The guys who are kings of steady state, boats, land speed guys. Land speed is like the ultimate, right? You're just up against, you're pinned against it, against aero load forever. Yeah. But boats are doing that continuously. The only good thing is they're floating on an infinite volume of cooling media if they choose to use it. So I could not see racing a boat and not using forced induction with lake water charge cooling as my advantage. Right. I don't know why you build naturally aspirated race boat unless it was class rules. Right. But you are going to plan on being wide open throttle for quality amount of time. Okay.

I think about that all the time on a boat because I do a lot of boat stuff too. So you're running that thing at four or five thousand RPMs for a long period of time that you would not normally on a regular vehicle.

100 percent. And so cooling is a bigger concern than total raw horsepower output in most cases. Now you guys race boats, right? So now how much power can I make with the constraint of temperature and time at temperature? But the truck guys do exactly that all the time too as well.

Okay.

So I'm curious, because whether it's a OE level or aftermarket level, because there's some crazy aftermarket testing out there too, of course. How intense does testing get? For example, how much stress do you put an engine under? Let's say we were talking about dino sweeps earlier. Are we talking just throw the house at it for a day or something?

One of your other guests talked about this. So a lot of OEMs have the equivalent of the general engine durability test, which is a sawtooth between peak torque and peak power, and back and forth between the two. And I think Sean was the one talking about it, because that's a Ford test. And so the GED test is peak torque to peak power to peak torque to peak power, and theoretically for 300 hours.

Holy s***.

So if you have a F-150, we might be towing for a while. You have an F-350, might be towing for a while. And so we want to make sure that the engine can do that, make the hardware. Now within, again, this is not at the supercharged level, or whatever, this is like as delivered, which is why, oh, they're detuned. Well, yeah, but they live through this.

Yes.

And so that is a fairly standard type of test. Every OEM has got a version of that. Even at, you know, at Chrysler, they had the same thing. So the 5.7 has to go through it because the Hemi is going to just sit there in tow uphill forever. The, getting an exemption from that takes an act of Congress at the OEM. And usually the ones that get the exemption are sports car things. And the only way we got the exemption, like when I was at Chrysler, was to point out that, look, a Hellcat at peak power only has 16 minutes of fuel in the gas tank in the car. You must stop the car and refuel because the gas tank only has this much fuel in it. There is no way you could be 300 hours of continuous work. You would have to stop. Because they wanted us to test at like 700 plus horsepower, going from 700 horsepower to 700 foot pounds back to 700. Yeah. Like, that's cool and all, but the customer can't do that. It's just not possible, even in a TRX. Even in a WK or WD, you just can't. The tank's only so big, you can only keep going for so long. And to force that engine to have to pass that durability standard is laughable, because, you know, oh, by the way, how fast are you going after 10 seconds at watt in one of these vehicles? Yeah. You're going to jail. And so to talk about doing that for minutes, right? Are we really in Mexico this week? Because that's where we're going to need to go to test. Like, you can't even, it's hard to test that on, like, GM's got the 1,064 horsepower ZR1, and they've got a four and a half mile circle track in Milford. And even with that, even with the banking, you can't really be at 100 percent all the way around all the time, and just keep doing that forever. And that's like the best possible place to kind of test something like that, unless you fly to Italy and go to Nardo.

I was going to say, do we have a six mile circle anywhere?

Well, Nardo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vehicles have been tested there, but where are you going to do this? Right. Yeah. And even if you're racing Silver State Classic or whatever, you're out in Montana, and I can see the horizon on this stripe. OK, cool. But eventually, it ends, and you're going to eat it up pretty fast at 200 mile an hour.

Yeah, I've seen how quickly a road disappears at those speeds. OK, so you're obviously... You have a lot of things available to you. You see a lot of cool things. You've seen a lot of cool things over the years. What's currently the way that the automotive industry is heading is what impresses you currently? Does anything come to mind?

Well, I love that the combustion has gotten super clean. So even the dirtiest bin, 125, is so squeaky clean. Like we said, it's cleaner than most big cities' background sample. And even our dirtiest vehicles that make 700-plus horsepower, pass that. That's impressive. Mercedes making 400-plus horsepower out of two liters of engine. Crazy good. So we truly live in the golden era of engines. The electrification is kind of cool. I'm not an EV guy, but damn, is that e-ray cool.

I remember us talking about that last time.

So e-ray is one of those things, like the LaFerrari's and the hypercars of the world. Now you've used some electrification to do the work that we could, that last little bit that we just can't get out of a standard ice configuration. It's cool, but you'll never be left stranded.

It's kind of crazy, to your point, how we're starting into those middle 2s, even low 2s, 0 to 60s, just in non-EV vehicles.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the tire matters more than the powertrain now, right? Yeah.

Do you, I'm curious, like, do you see tires improving over the next 10 years to be able to support that?

Well, they've gotten better.

Well, yeah, of course, they always will.

Like everything else, I think it's kind of the Pareto chart, right? The first 80% is a lot easier than the last 20%.

Right.

Right. And it's diminishing returns the further you go out that curve.

Because everything's a thousand horsepower now. Like that's going to be even worse. And, you know, especially like we talked about last time, like, you know, GM making the Hummer and whatever. Like, there's going to be that's going to be one of our biggest challenges.

I would rather see the industry lose weight. That would be way cooler for me to see the industry lose weight. Even Lotus doesn't do it like they used to, right? Lotus was really good about selling lightweight vehicles. And there's not a whole lot of that. The Nd Miata when it came out was, I think, 400 pounds lighter than the Nc. Unheard of weight loss. But every generation of a new car seems to be heavier than the previous.

Why is that?

People want more stuff. It's heated and cooled seats. It's heated and cooled cup holders. It's more sound-deadening. And some of it's government required. Hey, we need side-impact crash. We need offset frontal crash. We need roof rollover crush protection.

So, and this is a question I was, who was I having this debate with the other day? Why is it that the GT3RS, for example, is still a thousand pounds lighter than, let's say, maybe not a thousand pounds, let's say seven, 800 pounds lighter than a GTD, for example. How do we answer that question without, you know?

You know, because weight was the priority there, right? Okay. So you have to make it a priority, otherwise you're not going to get there. And that's a leadership decision.

And does the GT3RS have all the bells and whistles? So let's say, does it have heated and cooled seats? Does it even have electric seats?

That's a great question. But here's another comparison. The ZR1 the other day was only five seconds faster at VIR than a GT3RS, but it's making twice the horsepower. So what I'm getting at here is, is horsepower just kind of like an easy answer sometimes?

Well, it's easy to make more power right now, right? So we have proven as an industry, we can make more power than we can harness. So knowing that, I would love to see them attack the other end of the equation. So take the mass out, because this whole F equals MA thing, right? So you can put more force in, or you can have less mass, to get the same acceleration. And we're kind of limited on acceleration capability, because again, the tire can only do so much work. Even if we're using all four of them.

No such thing as too much horsepower, just not enough traction.

Yeah, but I mean, if the car was lighter, the same amount of energy input to it would accelerate it faster. Yeah. So until that becomes a priority, it's hard to get there. And I love to see more stuff in the aftermarket that was meaningful weight reduction things. Right, so replacing a steel hood with a fiberglass or carbon hood, cool.

Well, I think the OEMs have gotten pretty good about that as well, right?

Yeah, so the low-hanging fruit is pretty much starting to disappear. Now, I love seeing carbon wheels. Carbon brakes, carbon wheels, because that's the best place to lose weight. It's unsprung rotating mass. Awesome. The next best place would be up on the top of the car. So, carbon roof panels. Well, a lot of OEMs are getting into that. So, okay, we took mass out of the highest point of the car, but in the next breath, they added a hybrid drive system that added 800 pounds to the car. The new M5 is shameful.

I was going to say M5.

Yeah, it does not replace the F90, sorry.

So, that's a good transition, and you asked what excites him or what your, whatever about the future of this. Is there anything that worries or scares you into where this is all going?

Well, I don't want to see politics drive the requirements, right? So, because politics can change with an election. Yeah.

Well, look, you already said some of the emission stuff has been pulled back, right? Was that a political?

Well, they didn't pull back emissions requirements.

They just shut California up a little bit.

Yeah, they told California they didn't have their waiver to force the CAFE standard, which becomes an EV mandate de facto. Tier 4 vehicle emissions are so stinking clean. And even if I've talked to the guys at the EPA, even they've said, look, if the entire fleet, if nobody in the fleet was dirtier than Tier 2, which is like late 90s kind of emissions, automobiles wouldn't be a significant contributor to the environment. We'd be cool, right? But because there's enough bad guys out there and it's not racers only, it's Karen who's never put a tune up on our minivan, right? So to offset that, we got to make sure enough that all the vehicles coming out are so stinking clean that they offset these handful of bad guys, right? So it's again, kind of the 80-20 thing. Right. That's pretty clean. And I mean, it's a whole separate camp worms geopolitically to talk about where is the emissions, right? Other countries, other shipping methods, like, you know, trans-oceanic ships, really awful for emissions.

Have you seen how big the engine parts are for those things, by the way? That's a lot of energy to spin some of those things.

As we're drinking something that just goes on a boat ride for fun.

Yeah.

Just saying. Yeah.

And this is where we give Banish 15-second ad on, what is it again that we're drinking?

Well, this is Jefferson's Ocean from our friends at Kentucky Artisan Distillery.

Delicious, by the way. The boat ride is totally worth it.

If you guys need a spokesman here in Detroit, Calabrese Success is available to talk about ethanol. How we use it for its many purposes between propulsion and consumption.

Yeah. So where does it ship from, then?

It does it. It goes on a boat ride just for flavor.

Well, they distill it in Kentucky, it's bourbon. And they barrel it, and they age it. And then after it's aged a certain amount in Kentucky, then they take the barrels and put them in a container and put that on a ship. So the ship was already going to go on some sort of voyage. They just put a container full of barrels on that ship and say, here, go along and bring them back here. So the source and the destination are the same, it's just that it's on the journey.

So it's not an extra boat that they're getting just to...

Well, I mean, if they get the place of some other thing that could have gone on the voyage. So there might be an opportunity cost to it.

Well, you weren't kidding. It just goes for fun.

I told you you didn't hear him tell us that in the beginning.

Oh, I was blanked out. Oh, okay.

I mean, the result is pretty good.

It is pretty damn good.

I will say it goes down pretty smoothly. I would definitely get a bottle of this at home.

And if, shout out to Secret and Jim, because I'm drinking it and they pay me for it. It's okay.

I'll e-mail them, and if they don't sponsor this, this whole segment's gonna get cut. No kidding. But anyways, shoot, what the heck were we? I don't know, politics and such. Yeah, that's what it was. Okay. Well, anyways, this is one of the things I wanted to talk about, because obviously you have this handy dandy injector machine right behind you.

It's my cheat code for tuning.

Yeah. Well, so real quick, I know we've talked about this a little bit in the previous episode, but for people who haven't heard before, touch on what that is, what the goal of it is, and what's your affiliation with it.

Okay. So my affiliation is mine. I invented it from scratch. I was using one of the other machines out there. What this is not is it's not a clean and flow machine. So if your injectors cannot be cleaned using a little ultrasonic thing like this and get them clean enough to work, I don't want to run them in this. This is a precision measurement instrument. We've got a fairly spendy flow meter in it. And in addition to the spendy flow meter, it's got all the other stuff to keep it consistent. So once upon a time, as I got better about realizing how this calibration thing works, especially in the aftermarket versus the OEM, OEMs have laboratory machines that, by the way, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what this thing does.

And what would be the difference between this and OEM level?

$100,000.

Yeah. Damn great. Look, I get to within a couple percent of what the answer is going to be, and anything within 3% gets you an A&E engineering class ever took.

Yeah.

So I'm okay with this number. And by the way, injectors in production are plus minus 6% anyway.

Okay.

So any random set of injectors, if I pull them out of stock, they should be within a certain percentage, and the OEMs will just accept it. Now, we as race car people, we want things tighter and cleaner. Like, okay, we want to know exactly where our engine is. So do I accept that plus minus 6% from generic data on something, or do I find precisely the answer for this set of eight injectors? This lets me answer that. So even though they may be flow matched to each other, and you can find that on a cheap bench, like the Alibaba $100 benches, we'll show you if injectors are close to each other for whatever certain pulse width you want to test them at with whatever goo or fluid or whatever you shove through them. If you want the calibration data that you would copy and paste into the ECU that represents what is going out of the injector based on how long it's open, and every OEM has a slightly different way of modeling than that. We have no choice but to run the complete sweep of tests, and then normalize that back to the units that that ECU uses. So the machine can run the test, and the software that I use, I've reverse engineered most of the popular injector models. So I can take the raw data from the machine and turn that into something that my clients or myself can paste right into the ECU, and now I have a very solid relationship between on time for the injector and milligrams of fuel going into the cylinder on that shot. Now the fuel delivery part of air to fuel ratio is no longer a question. Now I use my lambda sensor to solve for airflow, right? Because we have lots of unknowns, right? So in basic scientific method is one test, one unknown, one change, one result. And if I'm sitting there idling, I'm trying to figure out, well, why am I rich or lean? Is it my mass airflow curve or my VE table, either or whichever one I'm working off of? Is it my desired ratio or is it the fuel delivery? And the fuel delivery, unfortunately, is not one thing. It is the sum of the flow rate, the offset and the nonlinear characteristics at small pulses. So I've got too many unknowns going into the one equation. So if I take all of the fuel injector stuff out of the unknowns, I know one target ratio, and now I can get down to this is what the airflow must have been. Now, at the OEM, to supersede all of this, they put one of those, they put an even more fancy, more expensive flow meter on the wall of the dyno cell while they're running, and they know the instantaneous continuous fuel flow going to the engine. What I'm doing here is I'm measuring the injectors such that the injectors basically become the fuel flow measurement. Either way, you take that and some chemical balance, which a lambda sensor is really good at giving us, and solve for what the airflow must have been. So if I wanted to make it richer or leaner to get on the target, the cool thing is if the fuel flow number is right, 10% change is a 10% change, a 5% change is a 5% change. So now I'm calibrating, not tuning. Right. So now it's just math. And I get there in one or two shots. Cool. Bang. There we go. I waste less time. It saves me tons of time on the calibration side, on the backside. And the quality of my work gets better because now I've correctly estimated the air charge for today's conditions. And so now if the weather conditions change, the only thing changing is the weather influence, not the fuel flow. So all of this just makes it much easier. It's the fundamental, the number one thing that we start with. So I tried to point that out in the earlier books, in some of our training or whatever. I'm finishing up book number four.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. How's that been going?

I'm almost done. I'm working on the appendices now, and then I have to get my images and everything. I want to have it off to the publisher this year.

Okay. And we'll come back to this in a second, but what's the hardest part about writing a book?

Setting the time aside, it's easy to get interrupted. Each book I've written has been about a two-year adventure, just because stuff comes up. You can't just sit and make it your job for 40 hours straight, and another 40 hours straight. That's not possible. There's too many other things going on in life. I wish I could pay all my bills by just being an author. It's not that simple. So unfortunately, I've got to go work and do other stuff. But I'm trying to get this out. I just want to do the brain dump, and gosh, I wish somebody would have told me this earlier. Those become the lessons that become the books.

So your newest one, what's the overall title that the publisher is going to change on you?

So actually, I talked to them today, and I think finally on book number four, they're going to accept my title. So this one, loosely, I'm aiming for how to tune practically anything.

Okay. So then does that kind of... So first of all, when did the first one release? Was it 2007? Okay, I was gonna say 2006.

Yeah, 2007 is when that first one went up.

So with your new one, obviously you're taking, we're almost 20 years later. Well, I guess when you got the knowledge for that one and all that, let's call it 20 years, are you basically adapting for all of that?

And I think everything that I published in that first book stands.

Okay.

It's the science. The science, the equations, they don't change. How a mass airflow sensor has not changed in 20 years. It's a hot wire element with air blowing over it. It gets a signal proportional to that.

Okay.

O2 sensors haven't really changed. So all that applies in the first book, Engine Management and Advanced Tuning, is watching at home. If you want to sign copy, email me. Check out my website. Get ahold of me. I will send...

Is your email on your website?

Oh, absolutely. It's gregatcalibratedsuccess.

Okay, cool. I've had a few people ask, so.

Yeah. And we've got an online store, but it won't let you finish the sale. It'll still, it'll send it to me, and you'll get an email from me or whatever. One of the options I offer is, you know, hey, if you want to buy the book, you know, yes, you can go to Amazon. They'll have it on your doorstep tomorrow. Or if you want to buy it from me, I'll sign it. There's an option. I'll write something naughty in it for you. People love that, apparently. You get to say the seven words inside the book. They can't say one here.

The seven words. So that was a great text, by the way. I made my lunch today. That was hilarious.

Yeah. So yeah, you can't. At any rate, if you order the book from me, yes, I'm happy to sign it, whatever. Cool. I'm flattered. I love it. And I love connecting with people. I like seeing the light bulb going on over someone's head. So the first book was kind of cool because it really laid out. These are the fundamentals. These will never change. I wish somebody would have just explained it to me this way before. And that's the groundwork I kind of had to lay. This newer book is much more practical. So I'm going to assume you know what's in that first book. I'm not going to repeat myself too much.

Oh, OK.

But what do we do with that? So what's the you're going to see something that looks like this and you're going to do something that looks like this as a result until it looks like that.

So you kind of want a little bit of a baseline going into it.

Yeah, because I don't want to spend all day again, explaining what volumetric efficiency equations are. Right. But by this point, you appreciate that they represent something. And how do I know if I need to make this bigger or smaller?

OK, cool.

How do I know I'm close enough? Cool. How much? Why should I add spark here? Why should I not? OK, right. Things that weren't necessarily as much of a deal then, like I've got a lot of torque security discussion on the new book and drive-by-wire, because all modern engines are drive-by-wire. They don't make string throttles anymore on new cars. Yeah. So this is a reality. So what does that mean when we say it's torque based? I have to explain that. So this book has a discussion of that. We live in an era where, like it or not, emissions are a thing. And so this stuff is in the ECU, and there's no reason we can't make cars really stupid fast and still have cats on them. So how do we make that live? All right. So all those Whipplecows still live with the factory cats. This car just made 800 of the tires through a set of cats. I'm good. So there's a couple of things I want to do to not torch them. But other than that, yeah. So that's part of the discussion. Yeah, I know people are out there running long tubes and catless ages and whatever. Okay, cool. That's fine. Then skip this discussion.

I'm those people.

It's fine.

Yeah. But you said, right, we have to offset. There's the good people and the bad people. I am bad people. Sorry. Yeah.

I won't hold it against you. But for your daily, it's probably not like that.

No, it's not.

So I don't know. He did paint all the trees black coming into his neighborhood.

So yeah, a little bit of soot, allegedly got different tunes for that. That's right.

But so it's very practical. And I'm putting some appendices in there on the popular platforms, right? So there's a GM appendix. And so I'm spelling it out. Look, GM is a math model and a speed density model, and they have to agree. And in fact, if you're doing global B, it got even more important because the thing will absolutely wig out on you if they don't agree. So, you know, okay. So don't expect to tune one of these things by skipping this step. Okay.

So here's a question then. So you've obviously played around with the big three. Have you, and they're subject to whatever they own, but have you messed around with JDM stuff or not really? Or Euro even?

Yes and yes. Depends on the application. So again, I did the Flying Miata NC Turbo Cal.

Okay.

So that's a Mazda logic, not Ford.

Okay.

It is different than the Ford logic, even though it's the same engine family basically, right? And my Cobra once upon a time had a 2.5 Duratec in it with a turbo. And then I ran it. I know the Ford logic. I ran it with a standalone. And now I'm doing basically the same engine, but with the Mazda controls, it's just different. Now the final number for what we need for Lambda and Spark kind of jives with what I've seen before. But how I get there is a different path, right? How does Mazda model a fuel injector? It's different. This is a short answer. How do they control Spark? It's different. Okay. So yes, some of the other Japanese stuff is not as well supported for OEM reflash type tools in the aftermarket. I'm limited by the aftermarket, right? Yeah. I don't do software access. And even like on GM Ford Chrysler stuff, whatever, I stay clear of that that's poisoned to me because I've been on the inside and I don't want to have the illusion even of impropriety. I do not share any OEM stuff on the outside. But if software companies on their own have figured it out, reverse engineered, God bless them. Once they get to engineering units of revolutions per minute and degrees per top dead center, it becomes a physics problem. And I teach high school physics. It's just applied high school physics to everything we do. On the euro side, I worked for one of the European ECU companies. That whole Ford project we were talking about in the previous podcast was on a European ECU. So yes, we had to use their logic to run that. Bosch controllers are used on a lot of things nowadays. The Bosch logic. Well, the cool thing is, it follows physics. So yes, I can do Bosch injector data with this machine. So if we have a port fuel injector going into a Bosch ECU, yes, we can create that data for somebody for that project. So controlling it, you really have to kind of normalize it back to the physics. I kind of don't care what the badge on the fender is. We all buy gasoline in the same pump. We're breathing the same air into the engines. Degrees before top dead center are still degrees before top dead center. It's just how did they explain that relationship? And everybody, you know, it's no worse than going from GM to Chrysler than it is going over to Bosch.

It's just different than turning the distributor now?

Yeah, you know, there's 17 different distributors. You get it. Yes.

Right. Have you seen this kind of like an off the cuff question, but have you seen the rotary exhaust valve that's kind of being like some local is working on that out here? We actually tried getting them on, but.

They forgot how to make a pretty efficient two stroke engine by using a rotary exhaust valve.

I haven't seen that one. I mean, rotary valves on ice engines are not a new thing, right? They've existed before. OK. I think by the time I was doing my cowork, I kind of wouldn't care unless they go two stroke, two strokes, a different game.

Right, because the power density and all that.

Well, it's just the gas exchange is wildly different on two stroke versus four stroke. So degrees before top dead center mean very different things to two strokes.

Yeah, you're talking about an RPM range now, too, that gets much higher on a two stroke.

Yeah, I mean, I once upon a time, there was a local guy who swore he was going to turn the industry upside down on his head.

I think that's got to be a lot of the students around here, too, right?

His name wasn't Winkle, was it?

But, I mean, we're going to turn this 5-4 into a two stroke, and it's going to make double the power. Okay, I look forward to seeing your working engine.

Well, it seems like there's constantly new ideas, and it's like, all right, it checks off three of the four boxes, but that fourth box is super critical.

Yeah. So, engineering is a b****, right? There's three rules. You can't win, you can't tie, you have to play.

Okay, fair enough.

All right.

So why do all this? And this is more on a personal note, right? Where did the love for this all start? Why become...

Yeah, why all the math?

I think we talked about this before. I had an aptitude for the math and science as a kid, and growing up in Detroit, I wanted to work in the auto industry. So I went to engineering school to do automotive industry things, right? And I just... I overcompensated in college, and now here I am.

Well, why not boats or bikes? Or why not end up in the... Why aren't in the OEM clean side? Why are you not tuning top fuel dragsters or something?

They have a call.

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

Pre-ignition versus NOC. We don't use the D word a whole lot in engine calibration. Detonation is what happens to TNT, trinitrile tylate. TNT implies that molecules are losing stability and just spontaneously doing the bad thing. And I'm not a chemist, so I'm not going to explain that correctly at the right level, but NOC is abnormal combustion. And we can get NOC when we have spontaneous ignition of the end gases. So if the cylinder temperature and pressure get to some point, you exceed the auto ignition point of an air and fuel mixture. And so we can have combustion spreading, again, like the rock from the pond here, and it's squeezing everything. The cylinder tries to assume the same pressure. So you have combustion pressure here, pushing on uncombusted stuff over here, and it lights off. And it starts a second pressure wave. When those two pressure waves smack against each other, they make noise and they go back out and they hit the walls, and that makes noise, right? So now you're banging on the steel drums, and that's the marbles in a can sound that we can hear. If you put a stethoscope to the engine, and we can see it on a knock trace, right? So I'm cheating at this point. I have AVL Indicom software. I can actually see ripples in the cylinder pressure transducer output versus crank angle. Super awesome. So I see those pressure waves, and you'll see the resonance of it happening. And the resonance is kind of a function of the bore size. But that's knock. Pre-ignition would be... The easiest example is you have too hot of a spark plug. And so it's glowing, and it's hot enough that it starts the combustion process before the spark event happens. Or you had a little chunk of glowing carbon off in the corner, in the crevice volume, and it's glowing hot enough to exceed the ignition temperature locally of that air and fuel mixture there, and it starts the combustion from there, rather than the intended start of combustion at our ignition timing. So we go through all this trouble to say 20 degrees for TDC is when everything starts. So our CA50 is about 7 degrees, so that our location of peak pressure is 12 degrees. Well, all that goes out in the window if it starts by some other source. That's pre-ignition. Far more common kind of at lower speeds than higher speeds, because at lower speeds, the time at which the piston spends near TDC in the danger zone for this to happen is longer in units of milliseconds than it would be at 6,000 rpm, right? It's in and out so fast up high, but down low. And so we talk, especially on turbocharged direct injected engines, we talk about LSPI, Low Speed Pre-Ignition. And that's exactly what the name implies, right? So you're 1,000, 1,500 rpm. The piston has got a lot of dwell time, and all these heat transfer things have a time component in them again. So you have enough time for the heat transfer to happen to make it do the bad thing. And you get this pre-ignition event, which means the combustion process starts before we would have anticipated with our ignition event. And it's largely a function of leftover heat in the chamber. Something's too hot.

Okay.

So that's pre-ignition. And NOC is we did something that caused the combustion to either peak way too soon or combustion hit other combustion, and it hit. So, and this could be a long article or even dissertation on the finer points of these differences.

Right.

The industry uses detonation interchangeably because somewhere or somebody along the way said, yeah, that sounds cool. And they kind of glommed on to it. But you won't see a lot of PhD dissertations with that word.

Okay.

Right. And I hate to be super nerdy about it, but it's just it's different to us, right? If you really want to, I'm going to take off my aftermarket hat guy, and I'm going to put on my research guy, right? Because occasionally I have to talk to those people.

Right.

Don't say the other word because you're going to sound stupid. That's not what's happening. You're using the wrong term. Right. It's like telling your doctor, I have a tummy ache.

Or one of the seven words. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, so you're working with this gentleman over there, the PI Nock, and then, was there more to that slide?

You had a 2% or 2 degrees.

That's just like trying to control cylinder to cylinder so that it's not getting PI. Now, the cool thing is they had way more injector on it than they need. So by the way, if I went to a slightly smaller injector with known data, that would make my life a lot easier.

Yeah. Wouldn't you just be able to bring this over there and help care for it?

Well, I don't need to bring it over there. They need to send injectors. They need to ship a set of injectors here. Yeah, that's way better. I get a lot of customer, look guys, send me your injectors. I'll test them right here, and I will send your injectors back and email you the data. It's on my website. It's a service. I do it fairly regularly for people. It's pretty quick turnaround, and we get that data for that set of injectors. I've got some injector resellers who send me, okay, well, these eight injectors, we believe to be the average of the population for this particular part number can give us the data that's mostly correct for these. Yes. Now, I warn them, like I'm going to give you the data for those eight. If you have a population that's this wide on highest to lowest, then your customer could potentially get a set that's over here, over here, and they're going to say my data is wrong. Just be aware, I'm giving you this data for what you gave me to test on test day. And even OEM injectors are plus or minus 6%, which means there's 10%, 12% between high and low. And even if all eight are lows or all eight are highs, they could be off by 6% from the mean that I tested. And in the aftermarket, it's even bigger. So Bosch Motorsport has wider range than Bosch OEM. That's just how it works.

And this is data you should be able to give to your tuner, and they should know what it means and be able to use that in their calibration?

Yeah, yeah. So we've been doing a lot of that, right? So there are certain injector companies that have good data, and there are certain companies that just have data. Yeah, it's kind of a BS detector, right? And if they're not testing with the right fluid under the right conditions, you're not going to get the right answer. Sure answer, right? You have to have an accurate flow meter. You have to test it a certain manner. And then you have to regress that data the right way to fit the model. I can tell you that the number for offset changes with which manufacturer ECU you're trying to normalize it to. So a forward offset and a GM offset are not the same number. You can't just take that and put it in here because it's said offset.

So you're just basically saying they got a FedExU. You're good. We're closing in on three hours.

Yeah, again.

We do this every time. I feel like it's going pretty good.

With injectors then, so let's say I send my set out to you and I want this data, you're going to give me it per injector? Like how does that work then? Because then do I have to specifically tell my tuner which cylinder I put that injector in? Or like, do you get like an average and be like, these are working this realm?

When you open the ECU, there's not a flow rate for injector one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Right, that's kind of why I was asking.

There's one number for flow rate. So what I'm going to give you is the mechanical average for the set of injectors you sent me.

Okay.

There's one number for offset at a certain pressure and voltage, right? You'll get an offset for cylinder A, B, C, D, E, right? So you're going to get the average. So really what I do is I normalize to a graph that kind of looks like that.

Okay.

Right? So this is the average. So we've got time here and the amount of stuff coming out of the injector here, right? And you see that up here it's a straight line. That's cool. The slope of the line is the flow rate. It's the size of the injector, grams per second, pounds per hour, whatever units you want, cc per minute. The gap between where this intersects and where this goes, and different manufacturers have different way to describe it, but that generally is the offset. And then this weird little hook down here is the nonlinearity. And again, different manufacturers have different ways of expressing that. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to average all of the injectors you gave me and get the average general curve and use that average general curve to give you the data that you're going to put into your ECU. Now, within the four, six, eight injectors or whatever, yes, you might have one that flows slightly higher than the others.

Is it a delta that is a no-go?

How much are you willing to tolerate it? The OEF is plus or minus 6%. So we in the aftermarket will, and again, take it with a grain of salt. It's not absolute. But generally, if you know one injector is generally a higher flowing injector, and you know which cylinders on your engine generally run leaner, I would generally push that injector that way. So like on an LS, the back of the engine tends to run leaner. So I put the higher flowing injectors towards the back of the engine if I have a choice.

And I think it's still under number seven, which I think is in that back corner, which so yes, I know what you're talking about.

There you go. Right. So in general, now, if you truly have a flow matched set, and they all really are within one or two percent of each other, it doesn't matter where they go. Okay. Right. But that's the difference between flow matching the set and getting cal data, because the flow matching the set doesn't tell your tuner or your calibrator anything useful. He needs flow rate, grams per second, pounds per hour, pounds per second, whatever units they're going to choose to type into a value in the ECU when he's staring at his laptop. He needs an offset versus voltage, sometimes versus voltage and pressure. He needs some sort of non-linearity. So on a Ford, it's the low slope and the breakpoint. On a GM, it's the short pulse adder. On a Mazda, they bake it into this other weird table. On a Bosch, there's another weird table for it, right? Different manufacturers have different ways to describe this. Nissan's OEM has no compensation for this whatever, but if you use a Cobb, then they add in through their custom software, a new low pulse compensation table that makes it way more accurate, especially if you're using high flow injectors. So, we need to normalize the raw curve that is showed to you into the data that somebody can type in, so that no matter what fuel mass you request, you're getting the on time that gives you the fuel mass that you request. That way, if it's rich or lean, the problem is on the airflow side. We just fed it the wrong airflow number. We used the lambda sensor to solve for that, right? And that's the very practical side of what am I going to do with this information? That's book number four.

Okay. Well, don't you also sell these machines too or no?

I've sold a handful of them, yeah.

Okay. You don't advertise it too much?

It's on the website. The problem is, they're 18 to $20,000.

Right. There's a specific type of customer for it.

So, people look at that as a giant investment. Now, the funny thing is, they'll buy a $100,000 dino in the blink of an eye. They'll have $50,000 in tuning software in the blink of an eye. An ejector bench. I'm going to use this other one that's only $10,000. Well, the $10,000 bench cannot do this job. They started throwing flow meters on them and whatever. That's cool. That's their product. I can tell you, I tried to use their stuff, and the supreme frustration with trying to make their stuff work is why I built this from scratch. They're out of pump. They're out of regulator. They're out of line. Their lines are too small. Their rail doesn't have any volume. It can't run the actual sweep of this versus that. Doesn't give me the data in high res. I went through years-long engineering process.

Who would be your ideal customer for this? Would it be somebody on a large-scale tuning effort, like Lund or somebody like that, that would use it for making sure they have the correct data?

There are a couple shops that have it. I mean, and some of the shops just send me the injectors because it's probably easier and cheaper to just send them to me. I turn them around in a few days. Here's your data. Here's your injector. Here you go. Put these on the car, and they're cool. And I do that for a number of shops. And I'm happy to do it. And then they're on the Pay As You Go program, and they can get it for this exact set. I've got a couple of injector manufacturers that I work with. Some of them just send me injectors. I test them. I say, okay, here's the... If you send me the average injectors for that part number, I'm going to give you the average data. There are others that have one of these benches in house. And so they use it during their R&D. And then when they're all done, they use it to say, okay, here's the average for this part number. But they also know their distribution over time and everything, and they could spot check it along the way. So it's different. People who... What I will tell you is there could be a significant difference between the static flow rate of an injector. So if they just turn the injectors on, they say, oh, well, it was on for 10 seconds, it flowed this many grams, and that's this many grams per second. Static flow rate is not the same as the slope of the line, especially as the injector flow rate goes up.

Yeah.

It gets really ugly, and you can make some bad assumptions there. If you bake that into your calibration, now you're putting the opposite assumption into the mass air flow or the VE surface.

Okay.

And you're off by even more at idle because there's non-linearity in there also. And now a modern ECU that's torque-based and trying to balance idles can't. It's just chasing its tail. And sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't. It's okay today, but the weather changed. Yeah. Because you don't really realize that your air flow number was based on a bad fuel flow number. Sorry. So this at least takes that part of the guesswork out. And I'm happy to do that for people. And there you go. If somebody really wants a bench, I've got a handful more of them over there. I can build a few more. I don't know how many more of these I'm really going to build. It's certainly not the thing I'm going to retire by having made. So it works. It does the thing. I've seen other benches out there that claim to do stuff. I've yet to see their data. I've got people using my data right now. There's thousands and thousands of people using our data that came off this bench. I'm OK with it.

I have a set of a certain tuner refused to use, so I might send them to you just so I have the data and guess I want to use them.

Yeah, absolutely. Tuners, they use what they're used to, and some of them use brands that when I've tested, I found that the data that they were telling everybody was the data is very wrong.

Really?

Yeah. And there's others, like I've tested against, like Injector Dynamics. They publish all their data. Turns out, Paul's data is pretty good. Now, he uses...

Good, because that's the other set I have.

Yeah, well, his stuff is good, right? They're expensive, but they're good. He tests with, like, heated virgin gasoline to get his numbers. I use room temperature and heptane. So, not exactly the same stuff, but the math comes out pretty close. And when you do all the other stuff right, so you control the pressure, you control the temperature, you control the voltage, and you plot everything faithfully, then it works out. And so, when I test a set of IDs, I usually come out within a few percent of his published data. It's never going to be perfectly line on line. There's always some noise in our testing methods and whatever. It's not blind faith in the SAE test description, but we get darn close. And it's an engineering exercise in what's the biggest noise factor, what matters, and what doesn't. And so, if you take care of the big things that matter, your answer gets really close, really fast. I got the benefit of sitting in class with Dr. Haywood, who taught at MIT at the Sloan Lab. He wrote the 900-page book that all engineering students who study engines have to learn from. Ford brought him in. I had to learn from him there. I got a chance to sit in the class. I wasn't required to, but I saw it was Haywood teaching. Like, put me in. I love, like, continuing education is cool. If you get a chance to learn from somebody smart, show up, right? I love doing it because there's always something more to learn.

What a crazy idea is driving 10 hours across the country for that.

But Dr. Haywood is one of those guys who's like, Pi, that's a 3, and gravity, that's a 10. You're like, no, 9.802. He's like, 10. 3.1415. No, 3. Because he's accounted for the major noise factors already. So that little last bit isn't as important as you would think, but the process by which you collect your data and analyze it matters way more. Remote tuners, send me your data. What data do you want when you send me the data? So if people are just randomly driving to and from work, and they send it to you and say, here, correct my VE surface based on that, it may give you a different answer than if I have you collect the data steady state on a load-bearing dyno. I want something that looks like this, because it takes these other noise factors out. Therefore, what I'm doing my math based upon is based on the core that really matters. And even if I'm off by a couple percent, I'm still pretty darn close. That it's the experience of knowing that the test method matters.

This, my experience with remote tuning has been, very first log is usually push it to 3000 RPMs, hold it there for a few seconds, let off, send me that data. Then it's, all right, go do a pull to this RPM, and then they compress progressively. Now do me wide open throttle for this amount of time.

Yeah, I coach people differently because I'm looking at it, you know, my method follows what I've published in my books, in my videos and whatever. So I get what they're doing with that first one, is they just want to see like, hey, if I'm globally off by 20, 30%, I'll see that pretty quick. It's off at idle, it's off up here, and it's off up here. I'm not looking for 2% corrections on that first pass. I'm looking for double digits.

Yeah.

Right? And then, now it's down to, okay, it should be within 10% most places. Now, I'll coach people, though. I'll say, okay, I need these channels, because these are important.

Yeah, a lot of times I get a calibration file, or like a data log file, or like put this up, they'll listen to your device. This collects all the information I need.

But I'm going to tell them, so if it's a mass air-based cal or a speed density-based cal, I'm going to coach them on how to drive it.

Okay.

So I'm going to say, look, you know, if it's speed density, I got this grid of RPM and manifold pressure that I need to fill and check in relatively steady state. So what I want you to do is try and find 2000 RPM and just very slowly creep through throttle position and manifold pressure and go up and paint me a line this way. Smoothly. Right? Now, I tip in and I go here every time, and I tip in and go here, and I got 100 hits of hitting it from the tipping. No, I want nice smooth through it at 2000. Do it again at 1500. Do it again at 2500, 3000, whatever. And then send me that. Now, you know, even if I don't get every single column, I can interpolate between, because I know the surface is going to be smooth and progressive. If it's a MAF, once I switch to MAF, it gets a lot easier, because I don't care what the engine RPM was. I care what the airflow was in the raw signal output, whether it's hertz, frequency, period, volts, whatever. But I get that MAF curve. The only thing I will do is I'll have them do it in a couple of different gears, so that when it hits the same airflow, it was at a different engine RPM, just in case there was an intake track resonance or something that I need to cancel out. But I want enough data that's a big, heavy, strong average, because then you get a cloud of data in the middle of the cloud is usually right. But one data point is dangerous, right? And data points where I'm always getting there by doing some weird transient thing, also very dangerous. So analyzing that, visually humans are pretty good at this, but then it's a lot easier if you just set up your data collection correctly in the first place. Right? So I've seen guys go through a lot of trouble to try and create exotic filters to apply to the data so that they can use this random driving to and from work to try and finally get that data. Or you know what? In 20 minutes of the right process, I get everything I need.

What's an example of like an exotic filter?

Guys are like, you know, so Delta TPS no more than this or that, Delta BAP no more than this or that, and it will only register as a cell count if these conditions were true, such that it was smoother, right? Which is to some extent, yes, true, but it's harder to get those. Well, I would just get it inherently if I just followed my process. So that's why I say, okay, only like ideally I'd want steady state, steady state, steady state, steady state, but a very slow sweep through there approaches that. But a step in, step out in traffic, garbage. So I try not to look at those. But if you can give me data when I open it up and I can see stair steps or continuous straight lines in the data over time, I know he did what I was asking him to do. And now I can put some more faith in that data. And again, the smooth answer is probably the right answer. You know, trying to optimize every single individual will sell. Doesn't necessarily work in a lot of control systems are crew fitting that anyway. So the answer is the middle of the data.

Okay. Do you think... I'm trying to think of a nice way to phrase this, because it's getting... In some ways, it's getting easier to tune, right? Whether that be because of technology, because of access of information or whatever, do you think...

Knock sensors. Yeah.

Do you think... You remember, like, two hours ago, he said not much has changed. But do you think people are taking shortcuts as tuning becomes more accessible to people?

It's more accessible, so it's easy to get in the game, right? Everybody with a laptop is a tuner now. No problem. And the Dunning career curve is very real, right? They get that first peak of Mount Stupid. When I was young and I first started going after it, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do this. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute. Why doesn't it follow this now? Right? And you start having that... Until you get that epiphany later, and you come back up the other side of the curve, then you finally realize it. So nobody likes saying out loud that they had that experience, but it happens, right? And I joke, and it never ceases to amaze me how dumb I used to be. I'm still learning. I've been doing this for over 25 years. I'm still learning. I look for opportunities to learn. And there are new tools coming to us as we do this. But the control system... The systems are not getting simpler. They're getting more complex, at least on the OEM side. Standalones, yeah, pretty straightforward. You know, other than they've now got kind of sophisticated methods of boost control and traction control. That's cool, I love seeing stuff like that. But it's kind of straightforward on how it works.

Have you worked with a lot of standalones, and do you have one you prefer?

I've worked with a bunch of them, you know, over the years. I mean, you know, I remember DFI Gen 6.

Was that before or after I was born?

I'm sure, yeah.

Well, before.

So, yeah, you had to have a parallel port on the ECU.

Oh, yeah. You can Google that. You can Google that. I know what that is.

So at any rate, it's all kind of pink in the middle, right? We're still trying to do the same thing. The ECU, the fundamental job of the ECU is finding out how much stuff was in the cylinder, and then give it the right fuel and spark for whatever that is. How we describe that is different between different control systems, but almost as a rule, standalones are way easier than OEM stuff.

Okay.

But the OEMs keep putting layers on the onion. Yeah. And...

Not by their choice, too, from what I've heard.

Not always. However, if you want to start smoothing out all these corner cases, it's going to require another layer or two to get there. And so, how you would fill this in gets more and more complex. You need more and more data to do that. And that's where some of the data parsing tools, and in fact, there's some things that are modeled that cannot, you cannot simply just do it. So the virtual VE was the first step that direction, right? So it became equation-based surfaces that together form this VE table. There's no real VE table in GM Gen 4. And that's like dating back to early 2000s. Now, lots of companies have neural networks.

Right.

A neural network, you cannot look at the number on a neural network for weights and biases and tell you what that means for percent VE has no correlation to us. So you have to have another tool to visualize it. The tool is going to have to show it to you in a thing that you as a human can look at, modify it, and then you have to tell it, go train yourself and give yourself the new numbers in whatever system that is, represent that and let it go. One of the fascinating things I saw when you were earlier, you guys were just talking about training AI to help them fill in certain tables because AI is really good at locking in lots of data and then giving you an output. But you have to tell it what you're looking for. And in some cases, I see where that'd be a really super useful tool. And in other cases, I see people thinking they can use AI for things that they absolutely should not. I'm not going to let AI do my base spark surface. I've seen way too many laughable AI spark surfaces. Doesn't follow the trend. AI, for some reason, just can't get it through its thick skull on what the trend needs to be for spark. And that's fine. I, as a human and with a fair amount of experience, understand that's not going to work. Don't use that tool for that job. Yes, I can pound a nail with my crescent wrench, but it ain't fun. So just don't use it for that job. There are other places that you could use it. Now, one of the really cool things going forward is, some of the really savvy guys use Matlab to put the equations in and solve for things. Once they understand the equations at work for some of these models, and you could ask AI to generate the Matlab script to do the thing, that's pretty slick. That's really cool. I like that idea. And quite frankly, that's one of those things I put on my list of, I need to start learning more about that. Because that could translate to a very real time saver or useful tool to do something that I couldn't just intuitively do, even as an engineer with decades of experience looking at this. I know what it's supposed to kind of do, but how do I land on that number pretty close? Can I get the 90% answer right away? That'd be cool. Is 90% close enough on that particular table? Maybe. I'd be willing to give it a shot. So I need to learn some more about that. So I'm not done learning that stuff.

So, and I think we should probably start wrapping up here soon too, but hey, got to give the people what they want, right? You just hear them in the background, Banish, Banish, Banish.

Okay, anyways.

I need a drink.

How do we... There's obviously a desire for this knowledge, right? Like there's a reason, for example, that this, and not to do my own horn by any means, but there's a reason that we have listeners of this show. There is a desire for knowledge. How do we get more and more of this knowledge out there, right? What is the... Is this something that... I guess, do current students at the universities, do they find stuff exciting? Do you see more people filling into the space? Is our industry growing and healthy, I guess?

The students want to learn this. The problem is they have a limited amount of time in university and limited resources at the university. So I have guest lectured at engineering schools.

Okay.

Like, I've gone back to Kettering. And, you know, I helped set up the lab for Dr. Davis at the Mott Building in Kettering. Yes. I've spoken to the guys, you know, UC Riverside. I've got a good friend who's a professor at Clemson. Right? There are programs out there to teach this stuff, but you only get the students for a certain amount of time. And they need to have a certain foundational level before you can get them to this. So, like, if you're in a four-year engineering program, first two years, you're not even doing anything engine-related yet. It's only after, you know, junior one or junior two that you could finally start to qualify for having that discussion about this. Like, you've got to get through lots of calculus and lots of physics and thermodynamics before you qualify for engine one.

Okay.

Because you learn auto-cycle and thermodynamics. So engines, you can't talk about until you've had auto-cycle. So we have a lot of prerequisites before you can even get here on the engineering level. And these kids, okay, well, it's theoretically this. Well, turns out no engine runs on auto-cycle. It doesn't run carno-cycle either. It's somewhere in between and it's a curve. It's not a straight line. Right. But they can't have that epiphany until they get into the lab and start seeing it and measuring it. Does the lab even have that? So it's a lot to throw at them in a limited amount of time. I don't think you can really get all of it, especially in an undergrad situation. There are some graduate programs that do some more. Cool. And, you know, I've looked at some of that stuff. It's cool. And I'm always keen to learn something new. But some of it, you know, you're not going to learn until you do the Smoky Unix thing and just go get your hands dirty. And there's a lot of people I've worked with who have no engineering degree, but they're awesome at this. Cool. Because they know by doing and they've done it. Now they get kind of stuck occasionally because they can't anticipate because they haven't had the hard engineering, heat transfer, thermodynamics, fluids, whatever, that tell them that this is going to follow this trend. Right. And so they don't know that, oh, that was a major factor that influences this. So there's some middle ground there, but I think the people who are successful are the people who continue to learn. Okay. So it doesn't matter if you have a degree or not. Do I come to it with an open mind? Do I always try and find out what's really going on here? Can I measure it? And what does that mean? All right. Once I can measure it and understand what it means, now I can do something with it.

Use it as your basis to collect the rest of the data.

Yeah, sure. Why not? Even Smokey Unic did that. You know, awesome. So, entirely possible. The degree is not the requirement, but it certainly helps.

And because I'm not too far removed from college, granted, not in an engineering field, but is there any fluff, or is there too much fluff in some of those base courses, maybe, that take up unnecessary time or not really?

No, I mean, they teach you these things for a reason. Heat transfer, you need to learn. Conduction, convection, radiation, those things happen in engines and even in suspension systems, in cars, in aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, whatever. A lot of these lessons translate. There's not enough time to cover everything. You can't learn everything all at once. And you certainly can't learn it in a weekend course. Right, so as much as I've taught classes, I can't give you...

Or a two and a half hour DVD.

Well, yes. So back to viewer mail. Let's hurry up and go back to our earlier question. For the first time in like 15 years, I got an email from a customer saying, hey, I saw your GM Gen 5, and I'm mad because you didn't explain some of these basic concepts, well, I call it basic concepts, but you didn't explain the volumetric efficiency thing. Like, well, in GM Gen 5, we originally put it together as a two and a half hour Blu-ray, because that's all the data I can put on a Blu-ray disk.

How long ago was this, by the way? This email? No, when you put together the...

Oh, years ago. Years ago.

For the kids listening and they don't know what Blu-ray is, we're just...

Yeah. It's all on the streaming site now, so cartrainingonline.com. Put the link right here. Sure. So, all of the video content is on the streaming site. In fact, if you go to calibratedsuccess.com, it will link you over to cartrainingonline.com. My buddy Dave runs the site because he's the magician behind the camera who tries to make me not look like a monkey. I just get on and talk. So, these videos, again, how much content can you give at what time? There's a lot of stuff going on in these ECUs. So, when I talk about GM Gen 5 as an advanced topic, it's advanced, it's not intermediate, and it's not novice. I need you to be aware of this and then this before we go to this. So, if we talk about what's new with direct injection and torque-based control, I said in that disc or in that video, you must already be familiar with Virtual VE. I covered it in this other session over here. Go check it out there, because I don't have... That was a 40-minute segment. I don't have another 40 minutes to dedicate to it again. And if you saw it before, I'm not going to insult you by giving it to you again. You paid for it there. You don't need to pay for it again here. So now I'm going to go on to this new subject matter that builds on what you should already know. So it's for the same reason I don't say how to connect to a computer and read the file and save it. In an advanced tuning video, you should know how to do this, how to turn on the scanner. I understand. So I'm going to focus on this. And a lot of my training is kind of over here. It's kind of advanced. I'm not the basic trainer of the industry. I'm sorry. And occasionally I get people who learn some bad habits, and then they come to us and I have to help them unlearn it. But I do this for a reason. But if we're going to talk about this, I'm going to have to have some assumption that you have that right. And so when a guy emails me and says, you know, I don't like this because you didn't explain this basic thing to me in the advanced class. Like, dude, you took the 400 level course. You need to go take the 100 level. Yeah. I'm sorry. There's prerequisites. It I can't make it any simpler. There is a lot of stuff going on. I didn't write the code at GM. Don't hate the player, man. It's like...

No, I understand. And again, even though I wasn't in engineering, there's levels to it. Before you take the 400 level course, you got to do the entries. I understand. So, okay. So, but back to my kind of initial question then, because again, when it comes to getting... Like, for example, like one of our schools back home, it was explained to me that basically you would hit a ceiling. So you couldn't even go work for an OEM over here in Detroit, because it's just a totally different ceiling as to the knowledge gap or level, whatever it is. So is there something out there that's just kind of missing, or do you just think there needs to be more time in school at the end of the day, more getting hands dirty at the weekend, hit the track, or?

So as a former hiring manager of a calibration group at an OEM, number one, I'm not allowed to hire anybody who doesn't have a bachelor's of science from an ABET certified university. That is an absolute requirement for the job. Don't look at me. I've worked with other calibrators along the way who had other degrees or not a four-year degree, and I think they did a great job. Now, they're kind of rare in the industry, but they exist. Absolutely. Doesn't mean you don't know how an engine works, and you couldn't calibrate. But to be hired on today to one of those teams, that's just one of the basic job requirements, is you have your engineering degree. So it's engineering or computer science, and from an approved school. So it can't be the Caribbean School of Engineering.

No Brown University.

So you had to check the box. And in fact, if you came from a foreign country, and you got your degree from your foreign university, you would have to have a master's from a US university on top of that, just to get in there with you. Not my call, but your resume wouldn't even hit my desk until then. Now, I looked through it, and the first thing I'm looking for, who's got dirt under their fingernails? Okay. I want people on my team who know the difference between a Piston and a Red Wing. They've got to know Crankshaft and Campshaft. It's really tough for me to... If you really don't have any experience with this, and you're coming, you're applying for an engine controls job, I expect you know what an engine is. So the people who are on a Formula SAE team, or even better, one of my favorite off-script questions that I'm only allowed to ask at the end of the interview is, do you have any hobbies? Do you have any project vehicles of your own? The person who comes into that interview and says, yeah, I've been working on, and I don't care if it's a Mini, a Silvia, a Mustang, Camaro, Corvette, whatever, anything with a spark plug, I want to hear about it. And you move right to the top of my list, ahead of the kid who got a 4.0. Sorry, don't really care about your grades.

So are you saying basically throw in like a summer course of build a project car?

Yeah, or be on the formula team at your school, right? And get your hands dirty. Do something. It mattered a lot to me. Now, the other managers, maybe not as much. I had another manager who would always ask kids about their GPA and what course did you have? And would, you know, tell me about your project. Interesting. Because the guys who had dirt under their fingernails, I'll pick them. I'll cherry pick them. And those, because no matter what, you're not going to know our control system and certainly not the details of our control system. Even if you were a straight A student with whatever at school, you're not using Itas Inca. You're not using ATI Vision there. You didn't have our tools, and you certainly didn't have our control logic. I'm going to have to, you're going to have to learn that anyway. But a kid who understands combustions like, or understands that as I twist the distributor, it starts to knock and understands that basic concept. Now I can turn them loose in a million dollar dino cell. I'll be like, okay, here, party time. Let me give you the cool tools. Let's see what you can do with this.

Have you seen individuals with an engineering degree without like a mechanical aptitude? 100%. Yeah.

100%.

Yeah. All right. That's kind of where I was thinking. There's a, there's a, that's why I see you pulling from that pole.

And so if I have an opportunity to trade with another team, or those are the first guys I'm going to volunteer to, oh, you got a new project. It's working out. You need a battery guy? Hang on. I got a guy for you. But I'm going to hang on to the guy who's got his own projects. Because when I throw some curveball at him, we've got a new engine that's got a new feature. And we, none of us know how that feature is going to work. Well, who's going to be able to figure it out? I want the dude who's had to figure something out. Great. So that mattered a lot to me. So I worked with Calibrator's, one non-OEM company I worked for. I had a really good Calibrator who worked with me. He had like a two-year degree. But holy s***, he knew his stuff. I learned a lot from him.

Really?

And I went to GMI. I'm like, cool. My GMI doesn't mean anything. Mike knows what he's doing. Cool. Teach me about that.

What did you learn about from him? Has it come to mind?

Well, he had been using their control system more. So he already knew how they did throttle control, how they did variable cam control on that particular system. He was one of the guys who taught me, hey, look, if you're doing drivability, you want the automatic because the torque converter spreads the peanut butter over the cracks. Use this. If you've got to do misfire detection logic, it's got to be when the converter is locked to get your worst case because the engine RPM Delta is going to be weird, and it's going to look like a misfire versus a normal combustion event. And so he was the expert on that kind of stuff. So he talks, I listen.

On that note, I should say we're not going to be like, we should wrap this up and then go another hour again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, your favorite three.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We will have to say sorry to Mark, but we only got to maybe a couple of his questions. I'm not doing all. I got 14 texts from him. Feel free to email Greg directly. And yeah, I'm surprisingly available.

So I do some limited remote cal support. I'm not the cheapest kid on the block for it, but we try to be fairly thorough about what we do.

No, you don't do a ton of tuning for everybody and everybody.

No, I help shop owners is a lot of what I do. So I can help shop owners bring their game to the next level. So part of it is training. Part of it is, have you seen our training materials? And then if you want more, I'll schedule one-on-ones over Zoom. So even though we're not in the same room together, we can Zoom, we can share files, we can look at stuff on screen and say, okay, put your cursor right here, see how this is going this way and that's going that way.

Okay.

Ah, okay, that's this table over here. That's where this is coming from. Oh, okay, cool. And light bulb goes on in their head and everybody's happy.

Okay, real quick, before you pop the usual three, I wanted to ask you this earlier. Obviously, the monster truck thing happened. Is there a dream gig, whether it's like a temporary thing or extracurricular that you want to do?

I don't know.

Put it out of the universe, man.

What's your favorite part of what you do?

Hold on. I'm not. I don't know if I can travel with F1.

Okay.

But that's fascinating. Like the absolute razor's edge of combustion technology.

Okay.

Their ignition system is radically different than just a spark plug. They do some crazy s***. They throttle the fueling. They're doing really interesting stuff, and then they got to interface with the hybrid system right now too. Kind of cool. I don't get to play with that stuff very often. That would be neat, but those jobs are not super common. The people who have them are pretty quiet about it. So I don't think Zach Brown is coming to ask me to go help Piazzari's team this week, but it would be cool. I follow Formula 1. It's kind of neat. Toto has got a hell of an engine underneath them. They're doing a good job at Mercedes, but it's not the same as street cars. I understand it's a different game. Street car stuff is interesting. These things that go through SEMA Garage, they're doing, hey, we added a supercharger system or some sort of air induction system, and we have to pass emissions. I love those gigs. Those are actually kind of fun, because it's achievable. It's doable. And everybody's happy when you cross the line, and it's like, yeah, it's high fives, right? And they end up with a product they can sell and make money. I get paid for my work. Everyone wins.

Formula 1 is just constantly crippling, like, oh, we didn't win this week. I have to ask him, did you read Adrian Nui's book?

I have not read it yet. So I heard you guys talk about the podcast. I looked up.

I'm bringing it up on a right count.

So I threw it on my Amazon list. It's on its way.

So I ain't striking a commission, Mr. Adrian. Yeah.

And the problem is here as one of my faults, I read painfully slow. I'm a terribly slow reader. So to commit to reading a book is a large time commitment for me because I read silently in my head at the same pace at which I could read it aloud to a room of children. Okay.

That's how I read as well.

My comprehension is pretty high, but my intake rate is very slow. And so it takes me a while to get through a book. I can't sit and crush a book in a weekend. It's not possible for me. And as a kid, they tried to give me speed reading classes and all of that. None of it gets through my skull. I can't do it. But if I slowly digest it, I feel like I've learned it a lot, so.

I've learned in my dream job is I'm now going to be aging catalytic converters with a blowtorch and a cigar, because evidently that's a thing that I didn't know. There was a company that aged catalytic converters.

Companies, plural.

Oh, OK.

See, there's more than one of those. And usually it's a big block. They just run a big block poorly and make the thing orange.

I've got plenty of cars laying around. We'll just strap them on. I'll sit there with my I'll sit in the driver's seat with the foot on the pedal.

You're not far off.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, let's let's wrap this up.

Sure. We pick a different three cars this time. Yeah. All right.

Cool. All right. So was it it's a street car joystick of my job, street car, race car, show car, daily driver, show car, track car, race car.

Okay. An unlimited budget.

Yes.

Sensibility no longer matters. So we'll pick our daily driver would be a McLaren Senna.

Okay.

All right.

Our race car would be the current McLaren F1 car, and the show car would be a McLaren F1.

Okay.

Nice.

Okay. What's with the obsession?

Call me Zach.

You really like Piastry right now, huh?

I met Chris once upon a time. I think he's a swell guy. I use their product a lot. It's cool to see the HP logo on.

Okay.

On Oscar's helmet. So, you know.

Fair enough. Fair enough. So that's why the McLaren love.

Yeah. You got to root for somebody. So I've been rooting for Oscar for a couple of years now. It's, you know, hey, look, I saw him lose an F3. Cool. You know, this kid's going somewhere. Oh, you got a seat. Cool. S***. He's doing really good.

Yeah. Yeah. I think he's Kimi reincarnated sometimes.

He's doing well. It's fun to watch.

Perfect. Well, on that note, where can people find you? calibratedsuccess.com, Facebook, Instagram, all that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, we got to get you on that, man.

So it CalibratedSuccess on Facebook, calibratedsuccess.com. It links to our streaming videos. If you want training, it's over at cartrainingonline.com. I'm easy to find. I'm Greg at CalibratedSuccess.

Simple enough.

That's it.

You want to learn from who the tuners learn from. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's funny. Like, you know, people like, you know, who can show us this?

Dan?

You can find us at Gunner Garage or MrGunnerGarage on Facebook is my personal one.

Cool.

And as for me, you found me right here. So I don't know how to sign off. It's been a long, long three and a half hours.

So we have to trim this down. What's not going to make the cut?

Well, Greg, thank you very much for making this happen again. Dan, thanks for existing. And we'll see you all next time.