146. PMD Garage, The Viper Platform, Plymouth Prowler w/ Shaun Visser and Gordon Heidacker

If you really wanted to package well, the car would have had to have grown in width and in length to package a VA.

We knew what the failure modes were, and if you change those rod bolts, it's gonna eject a rod out. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It's coming out of there.

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.

Yeah, I feel like you need to turn the camera around because I'm in this GM staredown right now and it's a Ford over there. Yeah, I know. I'm trying to tell the audience, like, hey, go check this out.

You're just making it up. There's no word here. It's your imagination.

Yeah.

And today we are here with Shaun Visser and Gordon Heidacker of PMD Automotive. Correct. And why don't you guys just go ahead and introduce yourselves, and we'll just kind of take it from there. So whoever wants to start and we'll take it there.

Yeah, I'm Shaun Visser. I've been in the cars as long as I can remember. My dad is a retired GM guy. And yeah, I got a lucky break in tech school. I was told I had to go to college. And I gamed the system with my parents and found a tech school that gave out college degrees. That's UNOH in Lima, Ohio. And awesome school. And I was originally going to go work on diesels, heavy equipment. And, you know, make a living. And they were building their new motorsports facility. And I said, I'm here, I'll just take the classes. And then somehow I'm sitting here talking to you on a podcast, right? 20 years later, right? So yeah, worked on the Viper mainly for most of my career, but also a lot of other advanced engine development work for Chrysler, working for Aero Racing and Prefix. And then now I'm on my own doing PMD Automotive with Gordon.

Okay. And then, how about you?

Gordon Heidacker. Been in the auto industry, I hate to say, that's 46 years. Part of the GM connection is that my father also worked for GM for over 45 years. Worked directly for John DeLorean back in the 50s and 60s. So I grew up in that heyday of cars. Probably part of the reason why you see a lot of GM cars around here. I caught that bug from my dad. I told him it was all his fault, right? So, but he always said from the time I was five, I was always looking for little red cars. But I've always been an amateur with the auto industry, and I've been collecting cars since I could buy my first one in 1975. And we've been buying and selling and turning over and souping up and racing on Woodward as long as I can remember. Even to the point before when I was younger, my dad would take us out on Woodward because he did engine and drivetrain development for Pontiac. And so I was out there cruising back in the 60s with him, and then caught that bug and it's never really left. So after 28 years at Chrysler, working on Viper as well, twice, and Prowler, Dodge Ram, a bunch of other stuff and a variety of different senior management roles, I started a company called HPP, which was a high-performance products. We started doing Superbirds on Challengers for Mopar. Oh yeah, I hear. Richard Petty. And then we did a Trans Am on a Camaro, and then we continue to do the Trans Am theme on Camaros and still do that today with our ZTA kit. And then went and did a bunch of consulting and so forth, but ended up, we bought this building in 17, Dave and I, and then 19 when Shaun and I and Dave and our other partner Mike said, hey, let's do something fun, do something that's engine and car related. We said, hey, what the heck, and we jumped in and made a huge investment in that five axis machine that none of us knew how to turn on. The only person who really knows how to turn it on, Shaun, I know how to turn it off when he leaves it on. But, you know, and we just continue to make investment so we have more capability. So it's been a fun, long road, and we put it into a bit of a hibernation for a couple of years, and we're just ramping it right back up again.

What was that first car you bought in 1975?

A 69 Firebird, which at the time I thought was a really old car. Yeah. And, you know, in Michigan, cars, you know, after a couple of two, three years, they had to get all kinds of rust repair. Yep. So this one had Bondo in the quarters, but it was a 69 Firebird with an overhead cam 6, which was mandatory because my dad paid for half of the car. And they had paid 500, I paid 250, he paid 250. And he designed the overhead cam engine for Pontiac, the overhead cam 6. So that entire upper valve train, all that stuff, that was his work for John DeLorean back in the day.

Okay.

So it was fun.

Yeah.

And I learned real quick how to work on a one barrel, really crappy running car. I think I pulled that out and put a V8 in it as fast as I could.

So you were ramping up for some, I just wanted to ask that question.

I thought you were ramping up for something.

It's okay.

It's all good. It's all good. Okay. So you guys work on a number of things here. Obviously, the ZTA. You also mentioned some of the parts and all the various things there. Do you want to touch on that real quick, just right out the gate, like the Viper related stuff in particular?

We had an opportunity to purchase from Mopar. They were cleaning out warehouses and they needed space. They're bringing on new product and they were familiar with who I was because I had worked for Aero in prefix and was very close with Chrysler on development of the V10. I said, hey, do you guys have any inventory for sales? I was like, well, as a matter of fact, we do, but we'd have to get our hands on it. Okay, get back to them and they say, well, we're just going to scrap this. Like, whoa, time out, time out. Brand new stuff, you're just going to cut up. Well, who's going to buy it? We don't have part numbers and it was a big debacle. We worked with them and they were really helpful. We ended up with all this inventory you see behind us. I told them, I said, while I don't work on it every day, I spent pretty much my whole career, I was very, very, very blessed. You don't, people that go to the tech school I went to, the job I had is something you only dream about, right? Like, oh, I want to go work on hot cars all the time. Most of the time, guys are working out in the dealership or something like that, or if they even go into automotive at all. I have a buddy of mine who I went to school with that he's a machinist now, not even in aerospace, doesn't even do anything with cars, right? So, we just said, yeah, we want to glom on to it, and I want to be able to keep that knowledge going for the Viper community, because if not, all of a sudden we're going to see LS is swapped in there, and that's no fun for anybody, I'm sorry. There needs to be 10 cylinders under the hood of that car, not eight, right? Unless it's a Hemi, that'd be kind of cool.

A little tall for that.

A little tall, a little wide, but it would be neat, at least it would still be Chrysler. But yeah, so we have them. It's all Gen 5 stuff. I'm always looking at trying to find new old stock of other stuff, because the poor Gen 1 guys out there, they, I don't know what they're going to do for repairing those engines. Those are hard to work on, parts are very few and far between. My recommendation to a lot of people is just upgrade to a newer V10, either like a Gen 3 or a Gen 4 or 5, swap it in. Yeah, there's a little bit of work in there, but you get the best of the best, right? All the latest engineering that came to that car, right? So like on the Gen 5, arguably has the best oiling system out of all of them. They always had oiling problems and they still kind of do, I guess, but it's the best of the best. And I'm sorry, but 645 horsepower stock is pretty cool to have, versus the original Gen 1 was barely 400, right? That's a big upgrade, right? Big upgrade. So, yeah.

Well, we also had that opportunity. Linnimar was doing a lot of the assembly, right?

Yeah, they were doing all the block.

So we got a call from, again, Mopar, I think trying to keep some legacy supply available. Said, hey, Linnimar is getting rid of everything they had. And we got the list and we made a low ball offer and they sold us their cylinder liners and some of their block plugs and stuff.

Yeah, just all the stuff that goes to a finished engine block.

Right, so we got all that.

Yeah.

And there was a bunch of stuff that was for sale prior to that, that we bought Gen 1, Gen 2 intakes and heads. And just so we had them on hand, so if we ever had to benchmark or go back and look at something, we had at least models of what was done. So we were cognizant of trying to at least keep that history from Gen 1 through Gen 5 available for us to look at. And now it's just a matter of filling in the blanks, right? We've got certain parts, there's other parts we don't have, but we can make or we can design and have somebody help us make them, right? So at some point we've been talking about doing a short block, long block solution because there isn't one out there right now. And if we can get that done, then we'll have those kind of ready to go. And I think long term we even talked about doing our own engine block, but that's a long ways off and a big investment.

I was going to say that all of this sounds like a big investment. Is it risky to just buy up all that stuff and just hope it sells?

For the right price, nothing's risky, right? And I feel we got it up for the right price. And we have, like anything, we've diversified the things that we do so that we don't, we're not relying upon that income necessarily.

You're not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Correct.

Well, it's more of a future investment strategy, right? So if you can make it work financially and you can put it away, like putting it in the bank, then that's a good strategy, especially if it's all that's left. Now, you can go online, you can find people saying, hey, new engine block, new this, new whatever. And when you really get to the nitty gritty, it's been used or it's been refurbished or whatever. And frankly, right now, I think most of the cars we see, they've been relying on that kind of supply of used parts. But as the cars, I think are being driven less, being revered more, values are increasing, that supply is going to dry up eventually of those used parts. And then all you got left is what we have. And we're okay, we're okay sitting and waiting and hoping they come to see us, right?

Yeah, I'd say the fact that they don't make that car anymore and the fact that it has the following that it has, that's a pretty safe bet. So, yeah.

Absolutely. The car is, it's so iconic. And I grew up in a GM house, okay, to be clear.

So did I.

So when I told my dad what I was gonna be doing, he almost disowned me initially. But he's like, what? Dodge? Excuse me? Like. Now he's brand agnostic and even told me as such. But you, here in Detroit, it's amazing the types of cars you see. Like for once in a while, I'll see a Veyron driving around. I'm not kidding, right? Like, but a Viper, it's so unique to see a Viper. And I don't understand why that is when I can see a Veyron or, you know, a some kind of special Ferrari. Or a McLaren, right? And I'm not a Ferrari guy, I'm not an Italian car guy, so I'll butcher models, I don't know, whatever. But to see a Viper, it's like those things turn heads, right? I mean, they do. No matter what generation, they're just, they're super unique. It's very American, right? Like here, as much displacement as you can throw at something, push rod, but let's make it unique and make it a V10.

Okay, sounds good.

So, I had one Gen 1, two Gen 2s. Shaun helped me with the two Gen 2s, and recently, I got rid of those and I bought a Gen 3, and a coupe, and the ironic part about that is the reason I went to the Gen 3 coupe is my wife doesn't like to drive with her hair being blown everywhere and those wipers are pretty violent when you have them open, the Gen 1, Gen 2 Roadsters, and just never was driving it. So, getting the Gen 3 was a nice refinement upgrade, but also happened to be the same year model that when I was actually tasked with trying to carve Viper out as a separate company, as president and CEO, it was the same model that was being built at that time. And then Shaun said, well, every car we buy, we go, we can make that better. We can do something with that. And I said, no, no, it's not touching it unless it breaks, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what that transition, so you talked about where you went to school, and then we skipped right to Viper V10s. What was that in between? So you said you were very lucky. How did that, was it right place, right time?

So it's a story that I've told only a few times, but I was doing contract welding work, working indirectly for my father at General Motors, and I go through and I repair racking on the weekends. And UNOH, I don't know if they still do, but they had a class schedule such as four days a week, six week classes. I think it was six weeks. It's been over 20 years. But, so I would work on the weekends, and I was making really good money in the early 2000s for a, you know, early 20-year-old kid. You know, I was making like 25 bucks an hour. That's killer in the early 2000s. And my dad gave me the heads up that, hey, they're canceling the contract for you. You're not gonna have a job. I was almost done with school. My machining teacher at the time said, hey, I overheard you talking with one of your classmates that you lost your job. I know you're gonna graduate soon. I know a guy that's up in Michigan. I don't know if it's close to where you're at or not, but would you be interested in going and, you know, interviewing? I said, well, I need a job and I'm gonna need a job. And he said, okay. And I didn't think anything of it. He's like, well, let me see if he's actually hiring. I said, okay. And I went to, with a friend of mine, to Mid-Ohio for a race. And I forgot, I think it might have been World Challenge, but there were Vipers and stuff there. And it was, oh, what is her name? Cindy Lux. Cindy Lux's car, and I didn't know her at the time, but since then, after this, I had worked on her engines numerous times. But walking through the pits, we had gotten paddock passes and pit passes handed to us as we're walking into Mid-Ohio. All we just had was just regular tickets. Some guys were like, here. We're like, that's sweet, because we're broke college kids, right? Like, this is awesome. And there's all sorts of cool cars there. Porsche had cars there, like there was the diesel Audi R8. Le Mans car was racing there. What a sweet car that is. But walking through the paddocks, saw this Viper. And again, big GM guy, right? I'm like, yeah, you know, Dodge, who cares about Dodge? I go, and just flippantly, I go, I look at the car, we're walking through, I see this Viper and it's Cindy Lux's car. And I go, man, if somebody paid me, I'd work on this. I'm not kidding. I said this to my buddy Jeff, and we just walked on. And two weeks later, my instructor said, hey, I got you an interview. It's a place called Aero Racing Engines. I'm like, well, what do they do? He's like, well, they work on the Viper. I said, excuse me? And what 22-year-old kid doesn't want to do that?

Right?

So I'm like, okay. And I went and I interviewed and he had asked me a bunch of questions. And the gentleman's name was Bill. Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on this last name. Thank you, Bill Hancock. Oh, sorry, Bill.

Do it right, do it right now.

Yeah, do it right, do it right now. But I was sitting in Bill's office and in his office, if you're Bill, up here, there's a scaled down model of the Viper V10 block. And I'm looking at it going, I know what that is. In my previous classes, we had a teacher told a story about a pencil sharpener with a scale model V10. And there's only two of these V10s in the world because the founder that was casting them had burnt down. So they only produced two of these models. And there was only two of them. Well, here was the other one. I'm looking at it and I'm just staring at the damn thing going, no way, this is cool, right? But it kind of makes sense. They work on Vipers, it makes sense. And so, he left for whatever reason, I don't know why. He comes back in, he's like, well, any questions? And he had a southern accent, right? And I go, well, yeah, just one. Is that the other one? And he's like, what do you know about that? So I told him the story of what I got told. He's like, wow, nobody knows anything about that. And I'm pretty confident it's the only reason why I got the job. Honestly, because I told him, he's like, well, what's your engine building experience? I'm like, zero. He's like, okay. I said, I haven't put anything together that runs except for a Detroit diesel in tech school, in high school, right? Like, that's it. Like, I'm not, I was never afforded to just have a bunch of garbage laying around. My dad didn't allow that. Your mother parks in the garage. You can't work in the garage. There's always some reason why. And I just, I don't know, I fell into it. I left that job briefly because I was like, I want to live somewhere else, believe it or not. I gave up the job. I worked there eight months and said, nah, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to try living somewhere else. So I left and I hated it. Hated not living in Michigan. And I'm not originally from here. I'm from Missouri originally. And I came back and I had a job lined up in Ypsilanti for Federal Mogul working in their dyno cells on their medium duty diesel. So like 12 liters and above, right? So big stuff. And I was really geeked about it. It was a cool job. I'd be on call, right? And, but it fit right into what I wanted to do. And I was happy. And one of the guys that I worked with previously called me up, got a hold of me, knew that I was back in Michigan and said, hey, somebody bought this company. Cause the company got put up for sale. Would you be interested in coming back and working on the engines? So I'm like, hmm, race car? Ugly trucks. Yeah.

Whether you are new to working on cars or a seasoned shop owner at the top of their game, the High Performance Academy is where all car enthusiasts can go to expand their skillsets. If you want to learn how to build an engine, tune your car, improve your wiring or suspension setups, the HP Academy has the perfect step-by-step course for you. As a friend of the show, they've provided listeners with a special 55% off discount code that you can use risk-free on any course of your choosing. Details are in the description of the show below, or go to the partner's page of minnoxide.com. Go check it out. Let's get back to the show.

And you know, there's the comfort level as well, right? So I said, yeah, sign me back up. And just dove right into it. And the, oh my gosh, all the stuff that we did. Again, it was OEM development, right? I saw like when they were trying to sell Viper in 08, right? And I was wondering, am I gonna have a job? Like what's gonna happen here, right? And we're like helping sell the car company that we were working on to doing development for the Gen 5. I remember one Christmas Eve, we were doing a bay to bay breathing test. Christmas Eve, had to run it on a dyno. Me and this dyno operator. And I was so fed up with like working. I'd worked so much. I'm like, it's Christmas Eve. We want to go home. And we, but they wanted to know what the inside looked like because they were, again, day-to-day breathing, right? It's little windows next to the main caps, right? And they're like, well, what happens if we seal it off? So I took JB. Weld and blocked all that off. You want to talk about killing power. Ooh. But the dyno operator, Larry Otto and I, we had that thing stripped down to a bare block and 45 minutes we're wearing gloves, right? Things are raging hot coming off the dyno and just zip gun and stuff, handing parts to them like, let's get this thing done. Let's go home, right? And it's silly stuff like that, right? I mean, doing the OEM development stuff, right? Worked on so many different programs. Some of them I probably can't talk about. Yeah.

Anything you can, we can just never happen.

Yeah.

Maybe I can, but Arrow was a really cool place to work because it was a Skunk Works, essentially, for Chrysler. You needed something done, they take it to Arrow, right? Bill had worked with Richard Petty back in the day, and because as he told me, he's like, well, I was told because I talk like them, that I should go down there and work with them. Makes sense in my head.

It's kind of like being German and going to Germany. Exactly.

Same thing, right? Just it was such a cool, you worked hard, right? People think that engine building is super glamorous. It can be, but they don't see anything out in the world, especially now with social media. You only see the cool, sexy stuff. You don't see all the hard work that goes up to it, the busted knuckles, the sleepless nights because you're working sometimes straight through 24 hours to get something done. They don't understand all that and you don't make a lot of money doing it. You just don't because the margins are so thin. So, it was neat and I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy the stress of it. And that stuff is not for me anymore. I'm over it. I like working on stuff, but at some point, I go, nah, I've had enough. Let somebody else kill themselves. I think horsepower is neat, but I'm not gonna kill myself to get somebody what they need anymore. It's just not interesting to me anymore. Unless, you know, I can be bought. I will say that. So, if you want to spend a lot of money, then yeah, sure, why not? I'll kill myself, but I'm gonna take a long vacation after we're done with the project, right?

So, how do you guys end up working together and meeting each other? At what point?

So, okay, that's a funny story.

That was a funny, it was an accident.

Better than a pencil sharpener?

So, the guy who bought Aero was a friend of mine that worked with me at Chrysler, Lee Carducci. And I worked with Lee Carducci on the VIA Mottori engines in Italy and, you know, Lamborghini and a variety of other things. And, you know, Lee and I probably traveled back and crossed to Italy many times during that time frame. And, you know, years go by and then he ends up there and I end up, you know, starting HPP, which was doing the Superbirds. And for the first show car we built for SEMA, I needed somebody to install a pro charger on this 5.7 Hemi. And so, of course, I call Lee and I go, hey, you got a guy over there, can, you know, moonlight over here and do something. And he says, sure, I'll get a guy over there and, you know, we'll do that. Well, the guy who wanted to do it, I guess, said no and didn't go. And Shaun goes, I'll go do it.

Part of the stuff he just complained about.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, right, right.

So Shaun comes.

I was young and dumb at that point.

Right, but Shaun comes over and has his toolbox and same thing, wearing a hat and walks in and says, I'm here to install your supercharger. I go, cool. And the thing that was interesting is that he attacked it, was very meticulous about it. And so we said, well, hey, do you want to moonlight on some other ones? Because we had built the show car and then we were starting to build serial number one and then serial number two. And each one of them had the option to upgrade to a supercharger, whether it was going to be one or another brand, it didn't matter. And so Shaun started doing all of our installations and we started doing advanced suspensions. He did those. And so Shaun became more of a fixture around that shop and was integrated into it. And Shaun and I just had a friendship. As a matter of fact, his birthday and my birthday are a day apart.

Oh really?

Okay. And so the joke was always, hey, I'll buy you a beer for your birthday. And the ironic part was sometimes it would take us a year to get back to that point.

Yes.

To have that beer at least, right? Yep. And so long story short, HPP went to a certain period and then I sold out of it. Shaun went off and did his own thing. We stayed in touch for many, many years. Whenever there was a project that I was working on, Shaun would come over and we'd, we even started to try to do things in a hanger and trying to build parts and whatever. We always were working on something. And when he was at Prefix, after Aero got sold to Prefix, we just got to a point where timing was opportune. We had this building, originally thought this would be a fun car club to park cars in, but believe me, that's not a good business model.

Yeah, no, it's a cool place for doing that.

Well, yeah, but you're dealing with a lot of personalities. Let's leave it at that. And so we said, let's get into what Shaun does, what we do best, and let's build it from there. So we started in 19 and we've just never stopped.

Well, we're to conversations leading up to 2019 then. Like, when did this idea start coming together instead of being just a car club?

Well, we always talked about doing something together. And let me backtrack here just real quick. First time I walked in, I could see Gordon's face because I had zero gauges in my ear and not as many tattoos as I have now. But I knew that look, and that was the look of, okay, if it's not bolted down, it's probably going to disappear with that guy. So let me keep my eye on that shady guy right there.

It wasn't that bad.

Yeah. Well, yes. He'll deny it, but I know that look because I've been dealing with it ever since I've had this.

Well, how long was it since the last time you guys saw each other at that point?

We kept in touch pretty regularly. So, you know, it wasn't like, I think at one point the longest stretch was about a year. This kind of lost touch because Gordon was doing something completely different. And I was tied up. I was super busy with work. And it's just, you know, how it goes sometimes.

I think I went into consulting. He was still doing the prefix thing.

Yep.

Okay. So I was doing management consulting for KPMG. What year was that? Oh God, that was 16, 17. Then I went to Rivian for a while. And then I went to Weber Automotive. Then I went to a company called B. Riley and did more consulting for four and a half years. But during that whole time frame, we always stayed in touch. We'd find a reason to go over to the Dragon Mead Brewery or whatever it was. And now we did stuff ironically later on for Rivian, on the Amazon trucks. Okay, yeah. And so we did a variety of things for a lot of different OEMs over the time. But when the discussion was always, wouldn't it be great just to do what we really love? And do something where we are in control of our own destiny to a certain degree. And I think it was always an objective. Yeah. The building came out of a necessity that we were in, Dave and I were in another garage. That garage kind of had some problems and we basically got out of that, went to a hangar and then we started looking for a building. And ironically, we bought another building first that fell through. Then this one came along. And serendipity being what it was, this building had a lot of ties to my dad. And it was just really weird.

Didn't know that at the time.

Had no idea.

Really?

As a matter of fact, when we bought this, we had no idea it was even a Pontiac dealership in the late 20s, early 30s. This was the first Pontiac retail store in downtown Pontiac. That was owned by General Motors. And when we bought it, all we knew was that in 1957, it was a Lincoln-Merc radio.

Yeah, it was Central Lincoln-Merc.

That was it. And what was really interesting about this building, and blew my mind because my father was in charge of all the advanced engine development parts for racing and all that in the 60s. And George DeLorean was in the building, so John's brother, and I had grown up with John, didn't really know George that well, was in here with a friend of Shaun's again, where these things crossed, named Bill Gill, who had this nasty Cobra automatic because Bill had one leg. And we were in the building in George's literally underneath that overhang down there. And he's talking about this building where he came in and got his 63 Catalina Swiss cheese super duty cars and his engines and so forth. And we're looking at him going, how does this guy know this? And then we start quizzing him. And he says, well, there's a basement over there, and there's a staircase that goes up to the upper floor. And nobody knows that about this building. And Shaun, I looked at you, all right, this is the building. So this was the Skunk Works for Royal Pontiac and all the drag racing in the 60s. My dad had told me there was a place in Pontiac where they had the Skunk Works, but never told me where. And so my dad died in 2011. We bought this building in 17. We called it PMD Garage because of our association with Pontiac. And then we start to find out the heritage of the building. And that was just a weird, serendipitous thing. Raise a hair on your neck because my dad would have been in this building.

Yeah. It was very, very, very strange.

It's kind of crazy how all that stuff kind of comes together. It goes around and comes around.

And the funny thing is, I laughed about it today because we had a hardship finding and negotiating any building. This went so simple, right? I came to see the realtor on a Saturday morning. We made an offer Saturday afternoon. We had the offer agreed to on Sunday morning and 30 days later, we closed. Not a hitch.

Yeah. That doesn't happen in any real estate deal.

No.

Not at all.

And everything went perfect. And I'm going, I've bought buildings before. That's never happened, right? Even the little crappy building we bought down on Woodward, we had problems with that for almost a year after we bought it, right? So it just was very weird.

Yeah.

I kind of laughed a little bit that maybe my dad was there, and John DeLorean was there, and now George is there, and Mill's there. But, you know, it just it was it was interesting.

Just to keep things weird.

All right.

All right.

Where are we going?

When is your birthday?

All right.

Ninth and tenth.

Yeah. November.

November.

November. OK. So we're only two days apart. That is kind of funny in August. Yeah. Well, July, August, July, August.

We're still Leos.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I definitely knew they weren't Leos.

They were going to say like end of July, early August. I was going to freak. I was going to leave.

No. When they said that, I clocked it. I'm like, these guys aren't Leos.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But no, it was it was pretty funny. But yeah, I mean, we've we know each other's wives. We, you know, Sean's kids have grown up around here.

Here's what's weird.

Oh, that's even stranger.

Our wives are related by marriage. No way.

Oh, yeah.

It was the strangest thing.

I was like his wife was talking about a aunt. Yeah, great aunt.

Yeah, great aunt.

And she mentioned the name and my wife goes, that's my whatever, whatever. And we looked at each other. OK, this is really.

Yeah.

I was like, whoa, spooky. The city freaks me out.

Yeah, it was kind of destined that we'd be working together. That kind of stuff we're working on.

Well, especially since you guys have known each other for, you know, whatever amount of years and 2009.

Yep. Yeah.

So once you find that part out, then that you guys are kind of within the same family there.

It was it was during the time when he was dating his wife to be and we were at an event. And then it was it was right about that time. Right.

Yeah.

And then then we went to the wedding and then she found out more. And my wife has a book on the family and goes all the way back from from England. And she went and looked in to find out what the relationship was.

And that might be the only reason he stayed with her all that time, was just because of that connection.

Actually, we're both blessed with really good wives.

Yeah, I got one of those two. I'm here with you guys right now.

Yeah. Look at look at this. Yeah. My wife just laughs, I bring a car home. Is that a new one? No. Yeah, it is. I brought the trailer home empty. You know, the day when we had to get the trailer out of the other building and we had to clean it out for some other work we're doing. It was just funny. I put the trailer on the truck and I decided I would drive it home just to park it at home for one night. And she goes, all right, what did you buy now? Right. It's always the same thing.

That's funny because before we left, I didn't have time because I was working on some stuff. So I sent my wife to the bank to get cash because I drove out here with a trailer to drop a car off and I said, I don't want to come back with an empty trailer. So she actually drove to the bank, pulled out cash for me so that I could come here and not leave with an empty trailer.

Are you buying one of these two cars or are they for sale?

They're cheap. We've got to get rid of them.

They're multiplying.

I'm sure he could be convinced.

Well, let's go right into that then, because I was going to ask you about this, your experience with OEMs. Let's talk about some of these redheaded stepchilds behind you and whatever. The Fiero, that was a program that you were a part of?

Yeah, so ironically, with my dad being at Pontiac and all the guys that I grew up with, one of them was a guy named Hulkey Aldecuste. He was the father of the Fiero, right? So when I was going to graduate high school and was going to go to U of M for engineering, my dad goes, you're going to see Hulkey. He's going to give you some advice. So I went down there and sat with him. And at the time he was starting to sketch on this a little bit. So that would have been middle seventies. And he said, okay, there's a couple of things that I tell you, number one, when you get out of college, you know, always have enough FU money. And really, it pertains to what we were talking about, which is when you're in an OEM or you're in a job like that, if you don't have enough FU money, you can't go out and do what you want when you want. And you can't just basically walk away. You're basically tied down. So that was one lesson I always kept with me. But in 79, you know, I worked at the, what is it, the engine rough machining plant. And in 1980, Holke called me and said, hey, I'm working on this really weird car at Pontiac and need some help. You're an engineering student. We'll make you a design checker. This is when they had the big prints and you got to go through all the designs and you have to check off to make sure all the dimensions are there, make sure the drawings are complete. And then I would roll them up and take them to Pontiac headquarters and I'd go back and forth between En-Tech and you're walking around and in those days, everything was done clay model, clay done, then translated with calipers to a drawing. There was no CAD, right?

You weren't emailing prints back and forth.

Yeah, right. And so you walk in and you see the body buck and you see the guys working on it. And I remember leaving that summer job and going, man, this is just going to be a killer car. So it was the 84 like this one here. And I was telling everybody, but it's not Pontiac's never going to do a mid-engine car. Right? And so I graduated and my first new car had to be an 84 Fiora, which is basically identical to the one that you see here. This one came out of a dealer's collection, only has 15,000 original miles on it, has every option on it you could get an 84. And I ordered the same car except for I didn't order the sheepskin seats, which is what has. But it was just, for me, it was a really neat experience as an engineering student to work in that environment. And having had my father be at Pontiac all those years and have these guys who led these programs, like Holke Aldecoste, who I have a picture of the guys on the wall of all the guys that were around when I did the Trans Am conversion. And unfortunately, when I took that picture, I had no idea how many of those guys would be clicking off as dying, right? And unfortunately, the first one in that picture was my dad, that died. So yeah, that history and so forth compelled me into enjoying these cars for what they are. Of course, every time I bring one here, Shaun goes, what trailer park did you pull it out of?

Between that and the Trans Am.

And the Trans Am, that one he really ridiculed me about.

Yeah.

I think that's a 301. I mean, talk about, those things are only good for boat anchors.

Well, there's only one reason that like, Burt Reynolds is the only reason that those things are cool, right? Otherwise, I mean, they kind of kept it that whole thing going on. I mean, is that the same style again that?

No, the Burt Reynolds, the Smoking in the Bandit was a 76 actually, with a 77 front end on it. It was early in that time frame. And if you look at the movie, sometimes you'll see that the wheels aren't the snowflakes or the honeycombs that were from 76. And some of the shots, and they had to mix them up. But when I was graduating from high school, this was the car to have. And ironically, I had a 79 Trans Am that my mom got as a GM car. It was identical to this car. And we drove it from zero miles to about 12,000 and got rid of it. And I found this about three years ago with 12,000 miles on it. And I go, and I took it over to my mom. I said, do you remember this? And she goes, and she's 84 now. And she looks at the car and she goes, how did I open those doors? Because I mean, they're massive, right? But yeah, so the Pontiac thing has been, I'd say, a pretty strong theme in everything I do. I've had a couple of Fords. I had a Ford GT for a while, prototype. And then we've had now these race cars, which was kind of ironic on how that was. That first car I bought, the Indy car was a little more purposeful. But yeah, and we just, at this point, it's just trying to have some fun with these things.

No, and I don't mean, as a Ford guy, GM is the one who I give those guys crap all the time. So I mean, no disrespect. And I know there's a huge family.

We feel so terrible for you.

Oh yeah, that's fine. I can take it too. If car guys can't give each other s***, then what's the point?

Well, we all have problems, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So if anybody's like, oh, this is the best car, and there's never an issue, you're full of s***.

Yeah.

Everybody, it's what problem are you willing to overlook?

Yeah.

Right? And be like, yeah, it is what it is, not a big deal, right? Like, 7.3s, the oil pan rots out. I mean, come on, one thing, it's got literally oil in it and it rots out. What the hell is going on?

Well, if it doesn't, it leaks. So their whole fix for resealing it is, you use a whole tube of silicone, RTB.

To reseal it.

Yeah, right. You just put it all on there and mash it up and tighten them up as much as you can. I do like these cars. I love the way they look. Sure. So the Iron Duke is what really gives it the, right? That's where everybody goes, how did that come into play? Or can you tell us about how that happened?

Yeah. So GM was doing what I, same thing I did on Prowler, same thing we did on Viper. We used a dumpster dive of corporate hardware.

Yes.

So I think it was the X-Car front dropout, the K-member had the Iron Duke in it, and all they did is turn it around and put it in the back of the Fiero. I mean, there was some other things that didn't change it. But fundamentally, it had no power steering, so it was a really simple front steering rack, and you took that powertrain and flipped it around, and the Iron Duke was produced in massive numbers. So the trick about the Fiero was to get a mid-engine car past the corporate governance side, get it approved, and it had to be a commuter car with good fuel economy. So that's what they sold in 84. Then they put the V6 in, right? And that was in 85. So you could get a notch back that looked just like this with a V6 in it, and those were a little more fun.

Sure, 2.8.

Yeah, but tons of power, not really.

But it was the 80s. I mean, nothing really had power back then.

I mean, that thing's got 195 horse and it's a 403.

Yeah.

It had a lot of torque.

Yeah.

But when you're a kid, you don't care about the horsepower as much as you want to do a burnout, right? So you want the wheels to spin, and if you put a little water down or shave the tires down, you could smoke them all day long. I even got smoke on one of my Firo's once, but those tires were bald. But you have to look at what was going on in the 80s, right? There was a lot of boxy cars, and General Motors was doing the badging game, so everything looked similar or identical other than badging.

Yeah, like a G-body.

Yeah, badging identity stuff. And we really had kind of the driven drab of cars in the 80s and maybe even in the 90s. So for me, I thought a Firo was more exciting, and I think the 88 was kind of a nice round up with the new suspension and everything. The 89 was supposed to be fabulous. You know, they had a twin turbo V6 in that thing. It was supposed to be a pretty nice car, and then it got canceled. Oh. So for me, I've always enjoyed the cars. Yeah, I always go to Shaun, you know, can we do something with Iron Duke? No.

Yeah, take it out.

Take it out and put something else in, right?

I see a lot of people putting the 3800 supercharged in it, which is, yeah, there's a motor that will, we've talked about this yesterday. There's one at the end of times, there will be cockroaches and 3800s out there. So yeah. Yes, 100%.

Right.

100%.

And so, yeah, there's kits now where you can do that. Yeah. I don't, again, I'm a big powertrain guy and I like to see that all integrated very well. So it's finesse and I don't think they, there's not a lot of finesse in putting a 3800 into a Fiero. I mean, I'm sure it is fun and it's a kick in the pants, but I'm not sure it's all matched very well with the transmission and drivetrain. So, that's one of the things that, that's why you develop a car. That's why it takes time.

Well, we're also learning that too as we spend more time in Detroit. I was telling you before we started, we really like talking to people that were involved at the OEM level. Customers can b**** and mow and all they want, but we learn how much corporate red tape that you guys, I mean, there's so many cool ideas that just get like, yeah.

So I ran, I was on the, in 1989, when The Viper first came out and there was a show car, I got put onto the team on the transmission side. And one of the things, when I finally got the deal done, going from a Getrog to the General Motors, BorgWarner, at the time it was the T6, I think. Herb Helbig called me up and he says, hey, Gordy, come on out to the Proving Grounds. As a reward, I'm gonna let you have some fun. So here's the white fiberglass car with the 360 motor in it and the roll cage. And Herb, in those days, in purchasing, you're wearing a suit and tie. So I'm out there in an open air car, here's Herb sitting on the thing. He's got his cowboy boots on, his cowboy hat. I mean, it's seen right out of a movie. And we just beat the crap out of that car. And I came back with a permanent smile on my face. Little did I know that to reward all the suppliers because they weren't making a lot of money on it, purchasing had a fleet of four to six Vipers at any one given time. Well, everybody thought that, and I use the cliche, they were Mario and Dready, and they'd go out and they'd crash the cars, they'd smash parts, things would fall off the cars, whatever it was. So, for about two and a half years, I was the fix-it guy for the fleet, because I didn't have a budget for it, so we'd get parts, I'd take them to my garage in Birmingham, and I'd change tires and change wheels and fix thermostats and repaint scuffed parts, you know, for a long time. So, I always had a Viper rotating in and out, and actually, that's where our other partner, Dave Nunley, got to know me, is that I was the guy on Cole Street with Vipers in his driveway all the time.

A factory ECU can get you really far, but if you're trying to get the most out of your car, you have to take your tuning to the next level. Whether you are doing a highly original LS swap or are a glutton for punishment and want to keep your rotary, a Haltech can help you extract top level performance while keeping your car tolerable to drive. If you go to tunedbyshawn.com, you can schedule a free consultation to see what is right for you and your build, but you can also go there, save 5% on all Haltech goodies using code Minnoxide, and do it all yourself. That's tunedbyshawn, shawn.com. Let's get you back to the show.

And then I went on to Prowler in 93, and when you start to talk about development freedom, right, and so forth, Tom Gale had the wonderful site to do this hot rod, and they showed it, and then they said, okay, let's do a feasibility study, and they got four guys, and I was one of those four. And we all went together, and the other one is a guy named John Rasback. There was a guy named Bob Holderith, and another guy named Jim Fink. Bob Holderith is no longer with us, unfortunately, but John Rasback is a chassis suspension guy bar none. I mean, he's one of the best, and he still hangs out with us. And Jim, I haven't talked to Jim in years, but we basically went from a 60-day study to a 90-day study to whatever it was. But the issue with that car is we were given the freedom to do things you couldn't normally do, right? So it was an aluminum body, it was an aluminum chassis. We had what we called an isotropic casting, which is a semi-solid aluminum being pushed into a die for suspension. We did metal matrix composite rear rotors. I have some in my office there. You pick up the rear rotor, it's nothing, right? So we did a lot of really unique things on that car, because we had the freedom to do so. And at the time, Bob Lutz was one of the mentors for the thing, and he said, you know, they came in, the marketing guys wanted to do a marketing study on the appeal and how many cars we would sell. I just remember in the meeting Bob going, why would we waste money doing that? Right? We're just going to build the car and we're going to sell 15,000 of them, we're going to be done. And so we got a lot of freedom to do a lot of things that you could not normally do. We also learned a lot about aluminum. We learned about certain alloys and epoxies and how to bond things and riv bond. And he was blind rivets. And we did all kinds of really unique stuff. We were doing carbon fiber. We were doing carbon fiber reinforced SMC. All the kinds of things that you see today in cars, we were doing back in the early 90s.

Did they do that a lot to speed up some of that development on those things? Were they?

So Viper, when it came out, was to support Dodge and the brand and give it some push, right? And Prowler was conceived in a very similar manner to take Plymouth and give it some legs, right? Give it some sales legs. Unfortunately, before the Prowler was done, they killed the Plymouth brand and the Chrysler Prowler became a reality in the last two years. So yeah, I mean, the theory was get a bunch of engineers, sequester them, give them a lot of leeway, right? Not a lot of money, but a lot of leeway. And let them go play. And we had to make do with stuff. We had to negotiate things that would be different. And we got a lot of suppliers involved because they really wanted to push their technology. So it was fun. It wasn't like doing a RAM where you can't take that kind of risk, you know? So they would say, if you can take a risk on a car that you're only going to build 15 to 17,000 of, it's not endangering the minivan. It's not endangering a Dodge RAM. It's not endangering your bread and butter cars. And if you learn something, then you can run parallel path with something else.

Yeah, that minivan was a home run. Oh, always, always. What was it like with the Prowler? Because that is such a unique car. How did the public take it? I don't know anything about when it came out or stuff like that, but was that, would you get a lot of hate? Did you get a lot of love? What was the response? Why doesn't it have a VA? Yeah, and John Resbeck, if you'd say that to him, he'll just go apple collecting and go off in a corner. Well, talk to me about the new Ford Bronco and why doesn't it have a Coyote in it? Yeah, I feel you.

But the reality with the V8 is you really couldn't package it very well. And Bob Lutz had asked the question and he wanted a manual transmission. I don't know if you know the drivetrain of that thing, the engines in the front, we had to create a separate prop shaft tube that put the clutch or the torque converter in the back with the transmission separate from the engine. So yeah, if you were going to do a manual, you'd have to do the same thing, you know, try and put the clutch, put a prop shaft through it.

It would be similar to the Corvette.

It would be similar to that, but at that time we couldn't do it. And the other part is that you had, if you really wanted to package well, the car would have had to have grown in width and in length to package a VA, right? To do it well and make it look, I think, from when you look at the car, right now when you look at the actual car and you put it next to the show car, if you put them in separate rooms, they look like the same car, but if you put them next to each other, you can tell how the size grew and everything, right? So, you know, it's a matter of perspective, right? It's a matter of not showing the show car that close to a real one, and you start to see the differences.

Does it break your heart with how big cars are getting nowadays?

I think the weight factor is more, you know, NHTSA-driven, compliance-driven, offset-impact-driven. When we were selling the Viper, one of the hardships was, and this was, you know, Daimler had sold Chrysler to Cerberus. Cerberus was selling a bunch of things, and they came to me and said, hey, can you help me sell Viper as an independent company? And I said no. Unfortunately, I didn't know that. I didn't have a choice, so the next day I was president and CEO of Viper to do the carve out. But, you know, the thing that was weird about it is, when you stop producing them, the value drops, right? And so you have to look at these programs as conceived for a reason, and they're kind of the lifeblood for a program or for a brand. And if you rip that out, sometimes you really forsake some of the things that people equate to your brand, right? I think that Prowler was conceived in a similar manner, but didn't have the same impact, right? I still have all the original program notes and all that stuff from when we did it. And to me, I think that was pretty innovative. You don't see that in car companies today, right? No, I don't think so. You know, I think you have to have a management team that's willing to set you aside, give you some free rules. Of course, they're not going to let you fail, right? But you can fail and learn and recover, right? That's what these programs are all about.

We've talked to a couple current engineers, and yeah, the amount of hand holding sometimes that has to go on to on that engineering front gets to be hard.

I think the approval process is...

Yeah, I mean, that's more what I'm talking about.

Yeah, so if you look at any car today, they have a formula, right? So back in the late 90s, the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord were benchmarked for seating ingress, egress, shoulder couple, H-point, all those things that formulate to give you a good interior package, right? Well then everybody else wants to copy that. So eventually, you have these rules that thou shalt not, you know. On the Prowler, you could, you know, there's what we call an upward angle view to look at the lights. On the Prowler, you can't see the lights unless you do this. Same thing with Viper, right? On the Viper, when you get into it, the first thing you notice is that because of the transmission tunnel, you're actually driving like this, right? Your feet are off to the side, and a lot of people get in and they push the pedal and they think it's a clutch and it's the brake pedal, right? And they don't know where the accelerator pedal is. And so it's a little disorienting, but you see that these cars all made concessions to get the style to fit with being able to drive it. And today, there's such a large investment on regulatory and crash compliance, and you can't take a chance on high-volume cars anymore to do anything that isn't within a certain formula to be competitive, right? So getting freedom to do things financially with design and with packaging is not something that I think you see today, people making those bets.

Is there anything out there that the big three are doing that maybe slightly resembles that between the GTD, the ZR1? Do you see anything like that nowadays that slightly resembles that, or being able to do it that way?

Maybe a little bit on... I think the Vette has some packaging issues. I mean, I think if you're tall, you can hit your head on the A-pillar. You know, I did. I'm getting in and out. But I'm also old and I don't bend as much as I used to. So you find that there are some of those that are made for styling reasons. But I think a lot of people are very afraid, because a lot of cars... I mean, the design office does it through a lot of design iterations around a package requirement and a powertrain package requirement. So, I guess my biggest complaint is if I squint my eyes and I'm driving down the highway, everything looks like the same car. Yeah. Right. And then you see these old cars, or you see something that's more in the performance category where people can afford to take those risks, and they're paying for it, and then those cars stand out. So, to me, the engineering process has changed a lot. Okay. Back in the 50s and 60s, style was everything. Yeah. Right? I mean, General Motors led that charge, you know, with the design studios ahead with Harley Earl, and, you know, the guys after that. You know, Dave Holes, who was a good friend of mine, was a vice president and did Cadillac for a long time, and he did some wonderful designs. But, you know, it was back when you could do the Dagmar's on the front bumpers, and you could do all that chrome. And, you know, we've gone to cheating the system a little bit, and that, you know, a front fascia now does the entire front of the car, and it's one injection molded piece, and you're done. Back in the 50s, you'd never do that. You wouldn't do that in the 60s. So we've simplified things, and a lot of it had to do with bumper, you know, and crash impact stuff. You know, if you look at the 74 Firebird, which I hate, it's got those two bumperettes on there with their big black bumper, and that was all to meet crash.

My dad's always cursing Ralph Nader. He says that was the... That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, he took on the Corvair, right?

Yeah.

I think there were some other things that happened, which I won't get into here, but yeah, it's... I wouldn't say it's unfortunate. I mean, look, we've all seen bad accidents.

Yeah.

And we've seen people get hurt, and we've had people that we know die in car accidents. I know I've had several. And, you know, people, if you wear your seatbelt, that's still your safest way to drive a car. And the airbags, you know, sometimes you're doing the airbags for the unbelted passenger, which is an unfortunate statement, right? So I would rather people wear their seatbelts 100% of the time, because that's still your safest way of being able to walk away from a car.

Yeah, damn.

I don't get it. My kids never got in their car without the seatbelt.

My kids do. If I'm in town where it's 25 miles an hour, I'm running up to O'Reilly's, I don't always put it on. Or sometimes I forget until it starts dinging at me, and then I'll put it on.

Oh, he drives me b******. And then whenever he's in one of my cars, he's a passenger, I'm like, it's been 15 minutes.

Yeah. It's going ding, ding. No, and my brother was killed in a partial ejection rollover accident. So had he been wearing a seatbelt, he'd still be here today. So, yep.

I lost quite a few people when the helmet law went away. We lost two or three people we knew. One of my, my roofer, first day of no helmet died on that day.

Really?

Yeah, he had the rear of a car went airborne, landed on his head.

No, we can complain all we want about the things that they're doing to some of the cars, but it also creates innovation and people work around the rules and whatever. And as I get older, you can go, okay, I see why that's there. You know, it's, this is why things are painted yellow and have foam corners and things like that. I get it, but it's not nearly as cool sometimes.

No, I mean, I think, again, maybe I'm not, I know I'm not typical when it comes to cars, right? I mean, I can get in that red 69 Firewood back there. It has, you know, no nannies, no control. It's got a very rudimentary wire harness, but that car's radio has never worked. I've owned it since 83. And I like that car because of the exhaust note which Shaun, and everybody, we start that car in this building, everybody goes, well, what was that? Right? You know, we ported and polished and matched the heads, the intake to the exhaust, and that thing breeze, you know, unlike any other 400 that I've ever had, and it's pretty stout, and I drive it and I just giggle, right? But, you know, I think in some ways, we've created worse drivers with all the cybernannies.

Oh yeah, yes, I agree.

Kids today will back up and they think that the car is going to stop automatically, or they're going to see it on a backup screen. None of these cars have that, right? Any of those proximity sensors or any of the other things that are out there, I think it becomes a crutch for today's young drivers, and they're not as good. And if you put them in a car like this, they're going to crack it up, right? There's no two ways about it.

Or if it quits working or whatever they're using, they're going to blame that, right? They're going to back up. It didn't beep at me. I don't know, you know, it's not my fault.

I know someone that whacked a shopping cart once on accident. That's an off-camera story. By radio, he means carplay, right?

Yeah, well, I do it now as a father of four. I have a perfectly functioning radio and I find myself in the truck by myself sometimes not having anything on for like a couple hours. I'm like, oh, I didn't turn the radio on because it's just the silence alone. You're just like, oh, thank you. Just soak it in a little bit. Let's live in here for a minute.

It's not kid's music, it's not Barney.

Well, fortunately enough, where I'm getting to that age now where I'm not, it's no more Disney music. Yeah, we had the caravan with the flip down DVD player. My wife could recite Disney movies word for word, although have never seen some of them.

Ours was Scooby Doo, just let it continue.

Yeah, but no, I'm trying to keep it all alive with the kids that I'm raising. They're going to be, so I picked up an 88 Thunderbird turbo coupe, and that's how my daughter's going to learn how to drive stick. She's 15 now, just got her permit. So we're doing the behind the wheel and we're doing all that stuff. She's driving my wife's Navigator, things like that. But when her and I go out to do some real driving, I want her to have the no nannies, and they're all going to learn how to drive stick because I don't want them to not know how to drive anything.

Keep it very analog.

So in Michigan, when you get your license, you have two rules. One is you only have one passenger and the other one you shouldn't use your phone.

Yep.

So another Fiero story. My oldest got his driver's license and he wanted a car and Fierro's were really cheap, still are. I said, you're getting a Fiero manual. I went to go take him to see when he started crying. So needless to say, he didn't get a Fiero manual. But of all my, I have four kids and of the four kids, my daughter is the one who likes to go cruising on Woodward, not many of my boys. And she's going out cruising. I'm going, Drew. Yes. And she always wanted to drive. I had another 69 convertible and she wanted to drive that, and Max wanted to drive it. And I got my other son into a C3, because he goes, dad, I don't understand these cars. Why don't you buy a new Corvette? So I put him in a really nice C3. I pulled up next to him and I have still got the picture where he puts the window down. I said, what do you think? He had this big smile on his face. Okay, I get it.

I always liked the long hoods on those, the C3s. It just always was perfect. Tell us a little bit about that whole Viper being sold off story, I guess.

Yeah, I keep hearing that too. And I didn't know if, did you know that was a thing that they were trying to branch it off on its own thing?

So what happened, you know, Cerberus came in and Cerberus was a financial company, right, and they buy and sell their investment group. And they are very good at buying a company and then dismantling the things that are not useful and selling them off like most private equity is. And they got to a point where they said, you know, look, Viper is still an asset, but I'm not sure it's something that fits with the future. And they weren't really investing in new car programs. And so it was a little scary at that time to be a Chrysler guy or gal. And they came and said, you know, I was in the M&A side of it, right? So I was doing a lot of the acquisitions and I was doing a lot of the foreign country type work. So I was in touch with the Cerberus guys on a regular basis. And the guy who was leading it pulled me into his office and said, hey, I'm thinking about this. And I said, well, I'd stop thinking about it. It's really what rallied this company back together again in the 80s. And it's kind of, how would you say, the mascot of Chrysler's can-do spirit, right? It was that, I guess, intertwined with our DNA. And they said, well, we think we can sell it. And I said, well, I wouldn't. And so I went away. And the next morning, they called me in the office and said, we've come up with a plan and you're going to be president and CEO and you're going to be working with Lazard, the investment bank, to build the performer that go on the roadshow and sell this thing. And so then I had to bring a bunch of people in as consultants. Because like any car program, it's got shared resources. It doesn't have its own marketing. It doesn't have its own quality group. It doesn't have its own purchasing. It didn't have the infrastructure. So you had to kind of create that to sell it. And the bigger issue in that one was, whoever bought it would have had to go and immediately do a new frame for NCAP offset crash, which would have been about 20, at the time 25, 30 million dollars for certification. So whoever bought it would have known that they would have had to buy it and then put that money in. I got to the point where we started the road show and right at that point, we were hitting the skids. It was, you know, 2008. And during the time when the Germans were running the show, they had built as many Vipers as they could and they had put them out into the dealerships. So we had an abundance of inventory, not a lot of sales. So they shut down production. Well, I don't know about you guys, but trying to sell a company that's producing nothing is a little, so the valuation we had up here continued to erode through that process. And then they pulled me out and made me go into another area in purchasing and I ended up taking a $10 billion deck of buy and that got handed off to another team and eventually, I think we were hitting bankruptcy with our suppliers after bankruptcy. The economy was falling down. We had the large mortgage failures and everything fell apart in 2008. So I think that project just was stillborn and just went off into the distance. And finally, when they declared bankruptcy, Fiat came in and then they started to say, okay, let's resurrect this. Let's get what we got. Let's build it back up and that's when you ended up with the Gen 4. Correct. And then the Gen 5.

So how did the Gen 4 come to life? Were you a part of those conversations at all?

I left in 2008.

I left in 2008.

So that's when I started my development company and that's when I met Shaun. So I left in 2008, started HPP, late 2008, we met in 2009, prior to SEMA.

Got you. Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah. So it was an interesting time. I still have my business card, says President, CEO, Viper. But that was a short period of my career.

Hey, it happened.

Frame it somewhere.

Yeah. Along with all the other business cards, right?

Right.

But it was an interesting time. It was a scary time. I was glad that it didn't get sold. Because I think Ralph Shields took it and took it to the next level and did some really cool things with the team. And I was glad to see it stay. I was sad to see it die.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Sorry. When it comes to the engine development stuff with the V10, and you probably know this more than I would.

Because you give way too much credit to me.

I know. Well, Dodge, like they had the V10 in the trucks, right?

There were two V10s. There was the Iron V10, which had absolutely zero part sharing with the Viper. I was actually when we were planning that, I was the product planning exec for Dodge Ram. At that time, everybody thought they were going to do the same thing. Before I went to Germany when Daimler had bought us, I was product planning the Ram, and I remember they asked me to do a bunch of buzz models. Ironically, Jim Schrayer had sent me a note and said, hey, my brother wants a Viper V10 in his Ram. Can you have it done? I said, there's whole certification, blah, blah, blah. We started doing a feasibility study, and I did a financial review. I went into a meeting, the way these things get approved, you go in for an annual buzz model or annual vehicle program where you display to senior management what you want to do and what the budget is. So I walked in there and I presented the SRT-10 Ram. And I was sitting there, and Frank Clegan, who was in charge of Ram at the time, kind of looked at me a little funny because I think he knew what I was doing, but I'm not sure he agreed with it. And, but he was always a great guy, and he was always a good mentor for me. And then Wolfgang Bernhard looked at it, and I said, well, we want to launch this, and you know, I think it was 2007 or something like that. And Wolfgang looked at me and said, no, we will do it, and we will do it in 05.

Well, at that launch, it was available in 04, it was the first year of it.

Right, but he said, he pulled it forward from when I wanted to plan it. And then we gave all of that to ASC, which had a building across the highway.

Here ASC comes into play.

Yeah, and at the time, my buddy Paul Wilbur was running it. And Heinz Prechter was the one who started it, who actually, another weird serendipity thing, he went to grade school with my dad in Germany. So, but-

Wow, I told you, incestuous.

Yeah, every time I was in Japan on some Mitsubishi thing, I'd see him at the Imperial Hotel having breakfast, and, oh, how's your dad? I go, that's great, walk off. But anyway, so John Rundles was running that program over there, and John was a guy that was a design office guy at the studio at Chrysler, took a secondary job after he retired to do the SRT-10 truck. And so that got planned and done while I was over in Germany doing my five years.

Okay.

So, but that engine was similar.

Yeah. On that, though, when I was working at Aero, they had talked about, I've never seen it done. I'm sure there's examples out there. I've never looked into it. But apparently, you can take, and they did this, where you could take the top end off of an aluminum V10 and put it on the iron V10 and totally wake it up. Make it a whole different beast. I've played with the idea. Before I bought that blue beast I showed you downstairs, I found some really clean examples of iron V10 trucks. I was like, they'll tow anything. I mean, they're super torquey, right? And I was like, man, I got enough inventory sitting upstairs, like, I'll just put some heads on it. Like I said, between my inventory and the five accesses, like I will graft a aluminum top end on that thing and it'll be awesome. It'd be a ton of fun. But I've never pursued it and I've never seen one in person. I've only heard rumor of it. But yeah, they're not the same engine at all.

Okay.

I think more spacing is the only commonality between them.

And that's probably something that real Dodge and Chrysler people know. I know that there's a difference between that 5.4 and the Navigator or Expedition, but that's where my knowledge falls short.

I get it.

Yeah. Sorry, I didn't have a follow-up. I did have a follow-up and then I lost it, so we'll get back there.

I get it. Well, let's touch on some of the race car stuff you were doing there. I know we're hopping all over the place here, but that's how... Actually, I met you through Greg Banish, who gave me a little insight. He's like, yeah, you did some Viper race car stuff. Good luck. Thanks, Greg.

It sounds like Greg, yeah.

Well, it was a little better than that, but just, yeah.

Again, cool job to have. Everybody dreams of having the type of job that I had, and I'm very grateful for it. The things that I got to work on, just unreal to think about. One of the things that we did do was we, in our shop, came up with grafting the V10 into the body and white challengers for the V10 Drag Pack program. I remember sitting with an engineer, and we were trying to figure out the air box, and I just grabbed a stack of manila folders and a big roll of tape, and we just started cutting it up, and we took from the grill back and made the intake, so that, you know, blasting down the tracks, just this big ram air coming. The whole grill was the intake manifold, was the intake into the intake manifold, right? So no air filter, just sucking tons of air, right? We did so many cool V10 projects. There was a guy named Kent Croker that did Baja, Class 8 Baja, and he had a 540 all-aluminum engine done by Indy Cylinderhead and showed up at our shop, and this thing was a tank. I mean, huge, massive, right? And all V-belt drive and just massive, and he's like, I can't get him to live, and I want to do something different. And somehow he got hooked up with Lee, and Lee said, let's put a V10 in this thing. And in class eight, you had to run a factory chassis, from my understanding, right? Or factory appearing, something like that. And luckily enough, the V10 came in those trucks, right? So it wasn't out of the realm of possibility to say, yeah, it'll fit, it won't fit. And once we came up with the mid-engine, it was, yeah, because he moved it to the back. Yeah, that's right. So mid-engine, so it became this dry sump, flipped the intake around, its own special motor plate on the front, V10, and got it all working and up and running. And first race out, 1,000 won the class. First time that a Dodge had been on the podium in 13 years. Right? And so then it was on. And I remember one time he was doing some development work and we had talked to him and he's like, he flew a helicopter, he was a pilot and did a lot of special operations stuff and whatnot. And he was in the helicopter trying to keep up with the truck and the truck was just walking away from him. He said it was unlike anything else he had ever been in. And he's like, when you think about, oh yeah, the truck's going 120 miles an hour, it's like, okay, it's not that fast. Through the desert, through whoopty-doos, right? Tons of suspension travel, 120 miles, pulling away from a helicopter. Just go, whoa. And again, he's flown fighter jets. And he's like, this thing scares the s*** out of me. And I always get that from people with the V10 stuff. It's like, this thing scares the s*** out of me. My father-in-law is a big car nut, and I took him for a ride one time, and because he's like, oh, my friend's car has 800 horsepower, and I knew that was a ball face lie. I was like, there's no way. You're not saying his car isn't fast, but I had a car, it was a development car of ours, and all it was was a tuned headers, yeah, just tuned headers and exhaust, and it was mid 700s, and at the time we were developing our big valve ported head package and a cam, right? It was our stage two package, and I picked my father-in-law up, and I said, hold on, and it was a Gen 5 white, and he, the O s*** handle is right here, right? And he's like, what do you mean? I said, you need to hold on to that. And he's like, what? And I just go, right? And I am by no means a professional driver, but I love to drive. I've been driving, my first vehicle was a stick. Very confident in that. Viper still gives me chills every once in a while, because you're not paying attention, it will get you, right? Some people claim it's not, but I disagree with them.

Well, it doesn't have the Whittle Maker nickname or something like that.

Yeah. The Viper, when we first came out with Gen 1, Gen 2, the thing said from the time you get into the seat and turn the key, it wants to kill you.

It wants to kill you, yeah.

So, I take my father-in-law on this tear, right? And just, you know, just blasting and making turns. And, you know, I've got, growing up, my dad managed the company car fleet for General Motors, so this is before they didn't allow anybody to drive the cars, right? But I was able to drive all these cool cars, right? Like brand new stuff. And so I always had all these routes around our house, like cool roads to drive on. And so I just start going and I see a cop. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm like, well, so I'm just driving. And as you can imagine, a car like that, cops like, what's going on? And then the second cop, I turn to try to lose, like, oh, we'll just drive nice. I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm like, well, I guess I'm not going to be able to really scare the crap out of my father-in-law. And we turn onto his road that he lives on, and the cops go somewhere else. And I said, check this out. And before he can say what, I just start going. And I mean going, like three-digit, scary fast. And I slow down. And I mean, I could see his knuckles, like through his skin, like he was holding on for dear life. I said, so he's like, I've never been in anything this fast in my entire life. I said, exactly. Like, and this is only 725 horsepower. I think that's what it was. I said, only. I say that only. Depends who you ask now. Yeah, only. Right? Now that is low nowadays. Now it's four-digit stuff, right? But yeah, another race car stuff. I mean, the V10 drag pack I worked on.

When you say worked on, like how involved were you?

What would that look like? At one point, I picked up, there was a few engine builders at Aero, and the other engine builder had some other work. He had to do a development program or whatever. So he got through the first 10 of them, and I built the last 40 of them, hand-built for the cars themselves. Then we followed on with starting to work on the supercharged Hemi drag pack program. I've got some pictures of the original all-aluminum one that they were working on. Eventually, that became something that BES, Tony Bischoff took on, and our shop took on the 426 naturally aspirated stuff. I did that entire engine program, whereas I'd pull the parts, machine the parts, and build them and go through. It was a lot of fun, to say the least, as you can imagine. Being able to hand build a all-aluminum small 426, my Gen 3 had me 426. That makes 900 horsepower, I think, something like that, spin it to 9,000. You want to talk about an unholy sound. It's just like, wow. It just blows your mind. What are the racing? I did the GTD stuff in the Rolex series in 2013. Riley Motorsports was campaigning the car for Ben Keating. And Ben Keating owned, I don't know if he still does, but he owned Tom Baldodge, if I remember correctly. And I remember one time I was walking through Home Depot with my wife and there was a race going on. And all of a sudden I get an email on my phone and I'm like, oh no, car's on fire. And I look at a video and I'm watching this race car, this Viper on fire at Home Depot. My wife was like, are we gonna go? I'm like, hold on, I gotta watch this. And he's not getting out of the car. I'm like, did he die? Like, what the hell's going on here? And I'm starting to get like, get out of the car, get out of the car. My volume's going up and my wife's looking around like, he's fine, just don't worry about him. And finally he gets out of the car. I'm like, oh good. And then he comes out, he goes out of the scene and he goes back in, and he goes back into the car. And the thing's like engulfed in flames, right? Like, what are you doing, man? And grabs something out of the car or whatnot. But, gosh, Trans Am Racing did a lot of TA2, so not the full blown, unlimited Trans Am stuff, but the restricted stuff. So I worked with the guys at Mopar on doing a Gen 3 Hemi for, you know, in Trans Am. And that was received with mixed reviews, because anytime that you mention Hemi in racing, people want to throw a restrictor or ban or, I mean, it happened originally with 426, right? Like they just said, nope, not doing that. Like, oh. And so we always had one hell of a restrictor, right, in that stuff. And later, then that was a 360 cubic inch aluminum V8. My later manager, who I met, he was in charge of that program, he eventually came to work, Rick Talbott came to work at Aero and was my manager. He came up with the idea, let's do a 392, let's do a 64. It's like, well, we already got a restrictor, we're like, what's the point? Well, it's torque, right? And we went through and we did all the work and we got it approved, you know, and crossed the T's, dot the I's, and we take it to Sea Rim, which is the first race of the year. And it's kind of luck, but that's how racing goes sometimes, good break. But we won the first race with that on there, you know, the 392 package. And it was so cool because people thought, oh, well, I can, the car is heavier, the challenges are heavier. Like everything about it, like doesn't make sense to go racing. And all of a sudden it's the hot car, right? And I mean, if you tell any racer, like, oh, if I do X, Y, I'm doing X, Y, and Z, well, that X, Y, and Z is particular to their car, their setup. Well, they're going to copy it because they think that's the hot thing to do, right? No matter what. You say jump up and down three times, they're going to jump up and down three times when they get in the car. Why? Well, they did it and they won. So there must be something, I don't know. But yeah, Trans Am racing, that was a lot of fun. I did a lot of track support. So going and, you know, just keeping an eye on engines.

What time period was the Trans Am stuff?

So this would have been 15. Yeah, 14, 13, 14, 15, 16. Yeah, yeah, even into 17, right? It was more development stuff. I wasn't doing track support until 16, 17.

But beforehand, you're basically just trying to develop things? Or what does development look like? I guess.

So we would get stuff from Chrysler. And you talked earlier about red tape. One thing that would always happen, you know, the Viper is an expensive engine to build because it doesn't really share any parts with anything. There's some commonalities, like the Gen 4 connecting rod is common with the... I'm going to botch this. It's been so long. Somebody's going to pound the keyboard and tell me I'm wrong. But it was the 6.1, I believe, had the same connecting rod. Or maybe it was the 6.4. And, but you couldn't use the stock Hemi connecting rod bolts. It would just eject out the side of the block. And this was a known thing. So the Vipers that come factory with ARP rod bolts, those aren't cheap, right? And every time somebody knew, we'd be like, no, let's cut costs. We'll just change these rod bolts. They fit right in here. It's not going to be a big deal. And we knew, like we had seen this play out before. It's like, no, that's going to get window. We would have stuff come into our shop because not only were we doing advanced development, but on the Gen 5, every engine was dyno tested and it went through our shop. So everyone went through our shop, right? And we knew what the failure modes were. And if you change those rod bulls, sure as s***, it's going to eject a rod out. There's no if, ands or buts about it. It's coming out of there. And we would just go, yep, it's going to puke. But they would always try different things, right? Like the Vipers are known for oil consumption. So it's like, okay, well, how do we fix this, right? And so I don't know if you guys have ever heard of a spintron. It's a big electric motor and people use it a lot of times for valve train development, right? They'll window the side of a block and they'll use a high-speed camera and lasers to watch valve train motion, right? And do traces on how the lifter follows the cam lobe, right? And trying to figure out a valve spring to control that valve event, right? To keep that valve doing, making, staying happy. And we would do wild stuff like, okay, let's rotate this engine block over to this angle to simulate like a high-speed turn and just spin this thing and see where all the oil goes. And understand why is it consuming oil, right? And if you look at the Gen 5s, there's, I think, three different iterations of the PCV system. And the last one, the last year, and not all of them got it, was like towards the end of the production had, they moved the one vent tube to right on the inside, pointing towards the intake, if I remember correctly, on the driver's side valve cover where the oil fill is. To try and eliminate that oil pulling in, right, into the intake track through the PCV system. But like I was mentioning earlier, the bay-to-bay breathing stuff, or here we're going to do like a min-max motor, so minimum thread engagement stuff, and will you pull threads after you torque it up, or a lot of teardown analysis, so run the dog s*** out of it and see what happens.

You may have noticed that we have a lot of guests on the show who design their own parts or systems, and if you want to learn how to do that as well to make a car faster and safer, or a product stronger and better, you can learn how to do just that with our partners at the High Performance Academy. Using code MINNOX to save 55% on their courses, you'll get access to hours and hours of step-by-step 3D modeling and CAD content that will teach you how to create and design before you execute. All details in the description below or at the partners page of minnoxide.com. Let's get back to the show.

So, right, just people would think of weird things to do or, hey, we're gonna try out this new ring pack, right? Or, hey, we've got a new piston supplier. We're gonna try this out. We would, and we would work in conjunction with the dyno rooms and engine build over at Chrysler, right? And, you know, pick up stuff from them and take stuff and run stuff. And they would do the same. Like we didn't have a motoring dyno. So like when we were doing the V10 drag pack program, they could, you know, to spin the engine to whatever RPM and then light it off. And I remember one time I was sitting there, Dick Winkels, who I'm sure you've heard his name, right? Dickie and I went up there and they had one of the V10 drag packs on the dyno. And I'd never heard of V10 at 8,000 RPM. And that is, I was like kind of going, standing back, because I knew that we only revved those things to 7,000 max. And I mean max. And you're saying 8, 8,500? OK.

It's really cool. I can tell you that. Yeah.

Like, it's woof. And there's just so many little things you don't think of. Like, in the aftermarket, like the OEs are looking at a completely different set of stuff, right? Like, not that it matters. It shouldn't matter on a big of an engine, but emission stuff, right? We would see, we would look at it, do emission studies, and how, you know, if we change this, does it get better, right? It's stuff like that, that I would work on. And I'd also, we were the warranty engine center, right? So, those, the dealerships weren't prepared to rebuild those engines. It's just...

They're still not.

Yeah. And that's not a knock. It's just a fact, right? I was talking to a gentleman that I just did a machine to block for. He's in the marine world, and he does big block Chevrolet's. And he's like, I've never built one of these. And I said, well, one thing you need to know is, doesn't have cam bearings, didn't know if you knew that or not. It runs right in the aluminum. So, you got to be very careful. I said, I highly recommend you make an installation tool just to give yourself that leverage as you guide that camshaft in. Because if you nick that, if you raise a burr, it's going to be game over pretty fast, right? That aluminum is going to transfer, it's going to ball up and then stick a cam. And we've seen that a lot. And it's not fun, you're pounding it out with a sledgehammer. And then maybe you can save the block, right? Yeah, stuff like that that you see in the OEM side. Late nights, just weird stuff. You know, just s*** that never... Like, I have parts that never have seen the light of day. Like, they try to do an even fire V10, right? Instead of the odd fire. And so, they have a split rod pin. Kind of like the 47 Chrysler's or a lot of the V6 stuff where they split the rod pin, right? That did not make it very far at all, right? So, that was always the coolest part, I think, about my job was I got to see a lot of really neat, advanced stuff that never saw the light of day. Did it do anything good? No, probably not. That's why it didn't go into production, but it was neat to see, right? You could see where people were thinking about things, right? I had the opportunity one time to work on Dodge's ProStalk program and all I did for six months, and I'm not lying, six months, torquing a torque plate and looking at bore distortion, right, for honing and trying to replicate the cylinder shape in a running engine so that you can machine it so that it was as good a seal as you could possibly get, right? And so we would take and carve up a torque plate or carve up a cylinder head and have this really expensive thing called an incommuter and a PAT gauge, I forgot what PAT stands for, it's an acronym, but it would take and you'd look at a bore and if you look at it with your eyes, you're like, that's a round bore. This thing, it looked like a clover leaf, right? It would show you all the distortion, right? And multiple levels. And did that for like six months. That's all I did. All I did was torque king torque plates. It's like, holy cow, like, and again, that's what I said earlier, people want to think the engine building is super sexy. It's like, yeah, I'm going to torque a torque plate non-stop for six months. Super sexy. But I learned a lot. Like you can't, that kind of knowledge and experience, I don't know how else you get it, right? Besides being exposed to advanced engine development, right? You're not going to see that unless you're at like F1, or maybe there are some pro stock teams or top fuel guys, right? That take it to that level and have access to those tools, right? But on the everyday thing, you'd never, you'd never see it, right?

Do either of you, and you can both speak to this, it seems like this industry is kind of like passing the torch constantly. Do either of you have any mentors that have kind of guided you in your careers along the way?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I think the best part about the auto industry, for me, is you see people who have passion for automobiles. And so when I got into the game, this is way before Shaun was there, the guys that were at the auto companies, 60s, right? 50s, 60s, early 70s, right up to the oil embargo, right? Car guys, everywhere. I mean, everybody did their own repair. They're all shade tree mechanics. They all wanted to go racing on Woodward. They all would buy speed parts. I mean, all the guys my dad knew were all, you know... Look, after church, he'd have a Trans Am and the guy from Ford would have a Mach 1 Mustang. We'd go drag racing with all his kids in the back seat. I mean, that was normal. The time after the oil embargo is, you had the industry all of a sudden have to change from rear wheel drive V8 architectures to front wheel drive, right, four cylinders. And so the guys that were mentors started to get out of the industry, right? They said, I'm not doing this anymore or whatever. But I was fortunate, and Shaun can probably attest to some of these guys. I worked with some really gifted people that were really, one of the guys that worked on programs with two or three times with, I got to be exposed to Bob Lutz, and Bob was a eloquent speaker. He was an awesome kind of mentor when it came to, we're gonna do it this way. Now we had engineers that were there that would say, you know, engineering managers, that would say, we're doing it this way because this is what we need to do, and they would buck the system, right? I also had some really good mentors in finance, actually my next door neighbor right now is the guy who mentored me during the time when he was doing M&A work, right? So he and I were friends and I moved in, I didn't even realize he lived next door. And you bump into people through your career that were, you know, like Hokey Aldecuste and all the, you know, all the General Motors guys that I grew up with, they were mentors because, you know, a guy named Jay Wetzel, he was the chief engineer for Pontiac. I was doing my 69 Firebird and I had it repainted and he came and dropped a Trans-AM, you know, hood bird on for my car. You know, those kinds of things, and they would help foster you along in that pursuit of trying to understand everything, you know, automotive. That really started to fall apart probably in the late, well, middle to late 90s and then you started to really lose a lot of car guys in the 2000s.

I don't know. I kind of disagree.

No, no, at the OEM level.

At the OEM level?

I think they all kind of went out into suppliers.

Some of them.

Some of them, but you could swing a dead cat and hit one.

No, I guess you're right.

I've got a few between now at this point.

Yeah.

I mean, it really got sparse.

Yeah.

I mean, there's still good car guys. Sure. Ralph's still a good car guy.

Yeah, he does some cool stuff.

Yeah. I mean, here's a design chief that I go into his garage and he's got the bottom of his Viper engine pulled out and all the pistons are out. I bought my welder from Ralph, right? So I mean, there are those guys, right? But Ralph and I kind of came up at the same time at Chrysler. And I was working on the image team and I was always fighting the non-car guys to try and understand what we were trying to achieve.

What does that kind of fight look like against the non-car guys?

It becomes financial. Well, it's financial. It becomes group think. It becomes competitive in the sense that, well, Toyota is doing this so we should do that.

Oh, I see.

And Honda is doing this and we should do that. Or we did a lot of teardowns of entire vehicles. We always did that. Everybody does that. And then you start to benchmark our parts versus their parts, their cost versus our cost. And, you know, Shaun, you ran into all kinds of things on the engines where, you know, could have gone to a higher grade this, a higher grade that. One of the things I saw when I went from Chrysler to Daimler is that Daimler would always spend, you know, another 15 cents on coatings or another 20 cents on this or another, you know, something on a higher hardness.

German engineering, right?

Yeah, leave it and make it work. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, again, from when I started in the auto industry, there were a ton of automotive car guys that were all mentors and always wanted to teach. You ended up with a very different mentality as time continued to go on, right? And the car business became extremely competitive, always very cost-conscious. So, you know, I understand why some of these fights ensued, but you had to have a really strong set of mentors and or car guys behind doing the things that were really unique at an OEM level. Having the car guys at the tier ones, tier twos, they might have a little bit more leeway to do some really cool stuff.

Who do you think is a car guy? I'll definitely get an answer to your question, but of the current leadership at any of the big three or whoever else, do you think any of them are car guys?

Well, so-

It's a loaded question, I know.

Yeah, I mean, guys will have to call me up and say, well, what do you mean I'm not a car guy? But there are at the companies, there are guys that have to make a decision the higher up they go. You have to make a decision between some of the fiduciary and financial responsibilities that you have versus being just a geeky engineer who wants to do something really cool. When you get caught into that management structure, you have more to answer for.

Well, people's jobs are underlined.

Well, that, and risk becomes your enemy. It's a time suck, it's a cost suck. And so we used to say that it was a joke, and I'm not going to point to anybody in particular, but we always used to say that really good ideas are like little ants crawling on the floor, and the guys that are running a platform want to kill as many of those ants as they can because they want to get rid of the risk. If they're given enough money to run a parallel path and say, all right, this is the status quo technology, and I'm going to run a parallel path on this, and if I can make the new technology win, then I can abandon the old technology and I can implement it into the vehicle. We've tried that on some things, and sometimes we've had colossal failures, sometimes we've had great wins, but nobody really wants to take on that risk when you're responsible for a billion and a half worth of investment when you launch a car on time, on cost, with good supply and good quality. So risk is your enemy when you're going down that road, and it hits everything. So if you look at it, like for instance, a dashboard on a car today with dual airbags and everything like that. In the 50s, the dashboard was, you know, let's put some metal over here, a little bit of padding over here, you know. There was really nothing to the compliance of a dashboard in the 50s. You could change it every year. But now you have to do all this compliance testing, and a dashboard is almost as complex today, and I would say maybe even more complex, than doing a whole car was back in the 50s or 60s, right? So, complexity has increased, regulation has increased, safety requirements have changed. So, a car guy that, again, enjoys all these things, has to go back in the past to still enjoy these things. But, you know, I have to say, they've now combined it over time, where a newer car that's a sports car has way more horsepower, way more controllable horsepower, better fuel economy, better creature comforts, right? And so, you almost get spoiled driving today's new horsepower versus driving one of these old cars.

New horsepower is a good way of putting it?

It is, because, you know, that was, you know, that's 79 Trans Am was the car when I was in high school. That was, everybody wanted one. 403 or 400 four speed. That's a laugh when you go down Woodward Avenue today.

Yeah, or get smoked by a Jetta.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, I mean, you floor that thing and, you know, a 3800 Fiero would take it, right? You know, so I really think that we've come a long way in the auto industry in now providing almost cars with dangerous levels of performance.

Oh, yeah, I agree with that.

Right.

I agree with that.

Dangerous levels of performance with people who really probably should get training to drive them. And yet at the same time, the creature comforts are better than anything else that you'd have with air conditioning and radios and Uconnect or whatever it is. So I think we've come a long way. I think the car's design could maybe change a little bit, but that's all perspective and matter of personal desire, personal want. I think it's finally come back around, and you have people like Ralph, who's got a good idea of horsepower, got a good idea of driving, and he's a skilled driver, and he also designs cars, so he can put all that together. And I'd say the interiors of Chrysler used to be not the prettiest, and he's upped that game a large amount over the time, and gave him a lot of credit for that. The things that I see even at GM, right, GM's upped their game.

Yeah, I have noticed that.

And Ford, they've all done that. So in today's age, you can still get a lemon, but you still have cars that have a much higher level of complexity, and they're still delivering good value. Cost is a little high right now, but.

Yeah, it's a little intense.

Yeah, it is. But you got to appreciate what it takes to get a car on the road today.

Oh yeah, we've talked to some OEM folks, and it's, again, we're from small town Minnesota pretty much, and it's like you come out here and learn what's going on in a big city. It's like, oh, that's a lot of red tape.

Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is that to be a supplier in the auto industry, everybody thinks it's easy and it's not, right? And there are a lot of things you need to know. The way business is done in the auto industry is very different than it's done in many other industries. There are parallels, but I think the lessons you learn and the skills you learn in the auto industry are very transferable downstream into other industries, but they're not always transferable from other industries upstream into automotive.

I think that's fair. Yeah. Well, we spent a little bit of time talking about education and stuff, and it just seems like there's a very certain route to get into being a part of, I guess, this culture here, if you want to be a part of it, and you're able to filter that out, but not filter it in.

I've been very blessed to have many, as I would call it, many phases of a career that exposed me to a lot of very unique people. Shaun has been blessed with a similar path with a lot of people that I would say came out of OEM industry and went into supply that were the engineers and the guys that are mentors. I mean, you can probably talk to that better than I can, but the same people he worked with are people that I worked with that I liked, people that I worked with well in the OEM side.

For sure.

Touch on something, because I can't cut you off on your mentor. Yeah, I just woke you up right here. He looks so-

He's falling asleep over here.

Yeah. Don't worry. We'll wake you up. So, Sandy, what's it called? I cut you off on the mentors thing earlier.

Oh, yeah. So, I agree with Gordon in that there's not as many car guys, car gals in the OEMs as-

Actually, there's more car gals than there ever was.

Which is totally cool. Which is great. But again, I've had a unique career, so it's not the same as everybody's, but a guy that I'm friends with, that I really do value his mentorship, he was working on developing stuff for what became the Gen 3 Hemi, the 6.1 and the 6.4. At the time, there was no 6.4, this was 06. I had just gotten out of tech school, hadn't screwed an engine together, nervous as I'll get out, I'm a perfectionist, I cannot, I have gone back into work and taken an engine apart because I swear up and down, I forgot to tighten something. I did it a few times, my wife would be traveling. I said, we just go swinging in the shop, we'll just sit in the car. Hour goes by and she calls me, what are you doing? I said, I'm putting it all back together right now, honey, I swear. That's just how I'm wired. And that's another reason why I don't like to do it all day, every day anymore, because for me, it just creates a lot of stress.

You do that where you set down something, too, and you're like, did that gasket stay in place?

Exactly.

You got to lift it back up, you're like, it was right there. And now you just gave yourself another chance.

I would start creating systems and little check sheets that I would mark off and told myself, if you did this, you know it's done. You need to accept this, that you did this and it's done. This sheet is your Bible, we'll say. But this guy, and he told me this recently, and I thought it was absolutely fascinating. He goes, you didn't know anything when you came on board, and I liked that. He's like, you weren't tainted. I said, okay. I was like, where's this going? And he goes, well, you came in, you were just tearing stuff down, because we were doing Viper engine warranty work, right? So we would, I'm not kidding you, we'd have stacks of these gray engine crates show up in the Gen 3, because they're having a lot of problems, right? And people would modify them, and their warranty system at the time was very liberal, in that they had warranty anything. And he pulled me aside and said, hey, I want you to help, I want you to work on this Hemi. And we built four of these engines. It was a Stroke 6.1, and it was development work. I didn't know this, but it was development for the 6.4, what became the 6.4. This was in 2006. And this guy always, he'd bust my balls all the time. I mean, all the time. And I thought this guy hated me. I mean, just headed out for me. And we had lost touch, and he finally, I saw his name come up on my phone, and I was like, oh, I haven't talked to you in forever. And so I pick it up, and the first thing out of his mouth was like, don't you answer your f****** phone? I'm like, whoa, dude, like, hold on. Like, yes, I do. I answered this. He's like, I go, man, well, what's the deal? And he called me back another day and said, I figured out what the problem was. I wrote down your number wrong, and I am sorry. I was calling somebody, and he's one digit off. But I've always, I've always tried to glom on the people that were willing to give me some kind of knowledge, right? Because I just, so I'm just always been in the cars. And like, I love how things work. And when I was able to get in the engines, I thought it was super cool. I tell people this all the time, if I get done building something, they're like, oh, I'm gonna do this with it. I said, I don't care what you're gonna do with it. They're like, huh? I'm like, you could throw it in the lake. I said, you paid me. I did what I needed to do. It made our, I don't care what you do with it, right? I just like doing that. An engine builder friend of mine, who lives just around the corner from me now, where I live, he and I have worked on stuff here in this building in my previous job. And we talk about it, we're kind of like watchmakers. Engine builders are like watchmakers, right? People don't understand the complexity that goes into putting an engine together. And sometimes I'll be very dismissive and say, oh, it's just circles and squares, right? It's just geometry, it's just all things moving around. But when you get down to it-

Yeah, that spins at 8,000 RPM.

Yeah, well, it's a thing like-

Consistently, yes.

Pull a hair off your head and explain to somebody that you're measuring tolerances one-thirtieth of this human hair, right? Like when you're doing a piston wall clearance, as an example, right? It's like, if it's too tight, bad s***'s going to happen, right? If it's too loose, bad s***'s going to happen, right? But all these old guy, I say that, I don't mean it in a negative way, but these old guys that had come up when technology, all this stuff was new, like an aluminum block was like that. I would always, I would argue with George about that, DeLorean. He was very adamant that you can't build a ton of power on an aluminum block with a sleeve in it. He swore up and down that the only way to do it was with Nicosil, doing Nicosil. And I was like, George, we're working on this, we were working on the Supercharged Drag Pack, you know, 354 cubic inches, static compression ratio of 13 and a half to one, then put 15 pounds of boost on top of that, right? And I said, it's living, it's making, you know, over a thousand horsepower, I think it was more than that, probably 1500, but we would argue about that because he was from this totally different era, right? Where they didn't even have an aftermarket, right? They would find the best factory parts. And my one buddy who's almost 80 now, he was telling me he used to do factory trans-am racing engines back in the 70s for Pontiac Motorsports, when Pontiac still had the Motorsports division. And he would tell me that they would get bins, bins of connecting rods, and they'd sort them, right? They'd find, they'd match them all, they'd sort through them. They would sort everything because there was no aftermarket. Nobody was making s*** for all this stuff, right? Whereas now we're spoiled, right? I mean, there's somebody stamping a part out somewhere for whatever you want. It's not anymore, right? And if not, give somebody a 3D scanner and a little bit of time, and all of a sudden, you'll have a part. So it's always been really cool to see these, to listen to these older guys and take that information and just apply it to the new technology because it's still an engine, right? It's still internal combustion, right? It's still the same concept. It's just we have access to machine technology that's better, alloys that are better, right? Communication is better, right? The fuel control, Banach could speak to that, right? Oh, he spoke to it last night.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Right? I mean-

It's getting him to stop.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I don't understand any of it because there's a lot of numbers of math involved, but yeah.

He'll go off on a tangent.

He's great with that.

The eyes glaze over. But no, there's been a lot of really- I've had a lot of great mentors. Again, I think partly because I was in this little niche. I don't know because I wasn't in it. I don't know if you would get that same thing if you were working at a dealership, we'll say, or an independent repair shop. Maybe more so an independent repair shop because somebody made a conscious decision to open up this and they're going to work on whatever hits the door. So they're a little bit more passionate about it maybe than, I have a factory store and I've got all this OEM support behind me. So I think it's sad to say that it's kind of dwindling. We're seeing that. I'm 41. And when I look, somebody 10 years younger than me, a lot of times they have zero interest in cars. And so I'm pounding into my two daughters the love for cars. And my oldest, she's five, thinks everything is a race car. It's great. She thinks everything is a race car. And she just, she watched Formula One with me all the time. I mean, she's into it.

I'm into my former other two cars.

Oh, yeah. I can't get her out of stuff. And so I think there's this dip for whatever reason. I think the technology that we carry in our pockets every day has distracted a lot of people away from really experiencing life. And for me, that experience, it's part of the whole being a car guy is like what it means. Like it's freedom. It's like, oh, I can just leave. I can drive over here. Right. I can take a girl on a date. I can, you know, me and my buddies, we can do a road trip. Right. I can take my jeep and go as far into the woods as I can possibly think and hopefully not break it and get back out. It's that kind of stuff.

I didn't go to school the day I turned 16 because I was in line at the DMV to get my driver's license.

Now kids are like, meh, I'll get an Uber.

Like what? Oh my gosh. I remember Nathan two years after he got his license. My youngest son, two years after that. I got to meet him. But the funny part about Shaun is if I really want to drive him crazy, I get him involved in doing some body stuff or something in the interior. And the dimensions are like 10x or 20x what he's used to.

Oh my God.

I can't have it. And he just, it just, his mind won't compute.

It drives me crazy.

So he's on that end. And I've been doing body stuff and other stuff for years. We still use GD&T and we still do all the stuff to make sure our tolerancing is right. But you don't have to worry about it as much when we're doing the stuff that I'm used to. And he, even the trophies, he's trying to get it perfect. I know, dude, stop, right? And then I'll finish it off and we'll deliver it. And he's waiting for somebody to say something and everybody's going, oh, that's gorgeous.

Yeah.

So it's a mindset, right? Between one or the other. But yeah, it's a really interesting industry because it goes full gamut from one end to the other through a car. And we've had the benefit of learning all that stuff through all the years of what we do, right?

And the other people that come before us, right? That's the big thing.

And in Detroit, it's really saturated with people who absolutely love cars and are historians in what they do. And they have history from people before them that they share with you. So you'll find that you can go back with people who have been in the industry from the 40s.

We had lunch at, what was the Irish place?

Dugans.

Dugans. And you talked about heavy truck stuff earlier. We've, sitting next to a gentleman, just sparked a conversation. He's been working at Detroit Diesel for 30 years, showing us pictures of the line he works on, the heads he puts on, you know, that weigh 300 pounds and just the big stuff. He's getting ready to hopefully cash out because he got his pension.

Yeah.

He was grandfathered in on all that stuff. So, but yeah, super cool. Like, I just love all that old guy, you know, knew everything about Woodward and everything that was going on. So, yeah.

Dugans is a cool place. They open up the windows when it's nice, right?

We were sitting upstairs.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a cool place. You watch the Dream Cruise. You guys heard the Dream Cruise?

It's our first time coming back.

Good. Good. Awesome.

Our balcony overlooks Woodward right over there. Oh, really?

Yeah.

And we have been doing a party there since 17. Except for COVID year. And we usually have sponsors and whatever it is. This year, we decided, you know what? We throw the party, but we don't party.

No.

Because we have all our guests here. So this year, we're going to get a barbecue out there, a couple of tents, and we're going to enjoy it ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah. We've had people as far as France and Germany and whatever people we've worked with for years that would fly over. And it's kind of fun because there's this traffic light right there and the burnouts, I mean, it's smoke wafting over here. It's hilarious.

Yeah. Well, we talked a little bit about, we talked a lot about your guys' past and how you got to this point. And we talked about your inventory. But what do you guys do here?

Whatever pays the bill.

Yeah. When I was giving you guys the tour earlier, I said, we kind of do whatever we want. I mean, you look downstairs, you saw we have a couple of jeeps sitting downstairs working on, got the five axis that they do work out of. We've got our inventory. It's, we're fortunate that we put ourselves in a position to be able to kind of control our own destiny to a certain extent, but still be able to play in the automotive industry. And so, I love to problem solve. I love fixing stuff and that anything. I don't really care. I love problem solving and there's always something where somebody's like, you know, I was thinking about this. And he's like, oh, that's kind of interesting. We've got a friend that deals in high-end cars, Mark. And he's also known as Mr. Tucker.

He's probably owned or worked on every Tucker that there was.

Yeah, right. One way or the other. He came to us one time with a part I had to modify. And it's got this really, really tricky rear suspension. He's like, nobody will touch it. Nobody will do it. I said, I'll do it. Like, okay.

Well, then, Chris is saying, this is one of one. And if you ruin it, I'll go, okay, that's nothing new.

Got it. I understand.

Thank you for that. I'll pucker a little bit.

Appreciate it. And you know, sat and did the work that he had done on it. And it was, it was fun. It was a really cool problem to solve, right? But yeah, I've never shied away from, it's the only one. I spit out a crank from a crank balancer one time. Don't know how it happened, but I didn't balance a crank for like a year because I refused to. I was like, I don't know what happened, but it was one of two 6.4 liter cranks before pre-production. I was like, oh, I need to go talk to the boss about this. So I sat down and like, just like slink down, I was like, I messed up. What did you do? I balanced the crank and it went bouncy balanced on the floor. He goes, what? He goes, well, I guess we have two of them, so that's okay. For like six months, he introduced me as the guy that likes to throw cranks out of the balancer.

That's pretty nice.

But you know, when you're trying new stuff.

If you can't be afraid to do things, right? You just go, well, let's go, right? Just press the button and go.

Well, all the years we've been working together, I like to take him and throw him in the deep end, see if he can swim out. He's still swimming out, so that's a good thing, right?

So has he ever drowned?

Drink a lot of water.

Drink a lot.

Yeah, I've sucked down a lot, for sure.

But it's-

It's only when we hold him down. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But what we do here, I mean, so like you said, I try to support The Viper in any way I can. And I tell people all the time, I'm here to answer questions. I love the car. And I just, it would be a shame if the knowledge that I've gained over the years just disappears, right? And so I don't ever want that to be the case. And so I'm trying to support it in any way I can. And beyond that, you know, we're adding to our machining capabilities to do more engine type work, right? And so that we can get through it faster because there seems to be a backlog in this area. As crazy as that sounds, where, you know, again, there's this big generational gap, where people don't want to do this type of work. I get it. I understand. But it needs to be done. There's still performance enthusiasts, there's people restoring vehicles, right? They need this specific engine done. Like I made a front cam bearing retainer for a 1936 straight eight Chrysler airflow engine. Guy couldn't find it.

Can't buy it.

Can't buy it. He was going to start buying engines from around the country and hoping that one would work. Because he couldn't get it. I said, I can make that.

Really?

Yeah, I don't know.

We'll make it.

And you know, it's stuff like that. It's like that person was able to get that engine back in the car and drive this beautiful vehicle, you know, back on the road. And it's like, that's pretty cool, right? So if I had to say, what's our objective? And Gordon and I were talking about this earlier. I think that's one of our objectives is trying to get the customer their cool car back on the road, right? If we can make that happen, we will, right? And with our talents and the people we know, we can put a whole car together. Like, it doesn't, nothing really scares us as far as what we're able to do.

Yeah, there's really not anything that we can't do. Yeah. You know, one off, two off. The real trick is when you're doing, somebody says, well, can you do, you know, 100,000 of these? We're not set up to do that, right? So for us, we're low volume down to really low volume. But, you know, right now we're doing the trans-amp steering wheel. We're going to do 100 of them at a time. And it's a brand new development that we had from the very beginning. And we can show you before you take off what we're doing. But-

Is that thing you showed me downstairs?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that was something that, you know, you have to reverse engineer it, understand how they got there. Then you want to improve it, and then you want to figure out how do you get the exact same material process that they were using in the 60s and early 70s, and nobody's using that anymore. They've all abandoned that and gone to other things. So, we had to recreate that process. And there's no map for it, right? And so, when you're restoring an old car, as you know, you go to junkyards, you pull things off, and things that have foam on them usually deteriorate after a while through a UV or whatever. And they're just not, you can fill it with whatever, and hopefully it looks okay, but it doesn't feel right. So, we try and pride ourselves to try and be as authentic with those things and then improve them as we go through it.

Is there a big demand for those wheels?

Apparently so, every car I've ever owned, those wheels are bad. Okay. And I've had a lot of those F bodies, and I've always tried to fix it, paint it, and make it look pretty, but invariably you can't. They all crack, they all have chunks that come out of them. The paint that they put on them peels off. I mean, this car's got 15,000 miles on it, and the steering wheel that was on it is original, already had paint peeling in four areas on it. Yeah. Right, so what do you do?

How do you decide what you're gonna, is it just kind of whatever? Do you decide you want to work, and do you guys inform, is figuring out what people need for making parts, or is it?

It's twofold. We drive things internally.

Our own interests, right?

Right.

You know, kind of self-serving, but then to your point, talking to people, right, as you can imagine, like Gordon here knows everybody.

Everybody.

Knows everybody. And there's so many people that have been in the industry, especially in the after-hours, that say, man, you guys could work on this, or have you ever seen this, right? And you go, oh, that's interesting.

Well, it's an interesting kind of puzzle, though, right? First, you gotta find out what people want, then you gotta figure out what you can make it for, then you gotta figure out what you can sell it for, and then you gotta go right back and say, okay, I can make these for X, and invariably, I'll buy a used one, or no, I'm not gonna pay that much for that, right? And then you're right back and saying, well, it's probably not worth it for us to spend the money. Where you have it, where they're on Obtanium, you can't find it, people just don't have an alternative. Those are the areas that we like to go in where it's not so much price sensitive as it is just rarity, right?

I see that all the time in the Facebook groups, forums, things like that, where somebody is like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this, I'm going to build this many, will you, they do like a pre-buy.

Well, I'll give you an example. The 69 Trans Am, again, I have a couple of them. The gauge package is unique for that. It has what they call a stair-step gauge. Well, people have been trying to remake these for years. Myself and a guy named Barry Martin, we're talking about doing it and then right after that, some guy on Etsy comes out and says, I'm making them, right? So I ordered one and I got it, and the quality on the gauge faces, it's horrific. Cost me $800 to find out that this is not, I mean, it probably works, but it doesn't look anything like what you want it to look like.

Especially when you talk about restoring that type of car.

Yeah, you're talking about $150,000 car and it looks like s***, and that's what you're sitting in front of all the time, right? So, you know, I looked at it again and I'm going, all right, maybe I do have to get back involved and do that because that option will fit in every 69 Firebird. So if somebody really wants a good gauge package or all that, they might want to up, you know, Dakota Digital does it right now for 67, 68 and 69. There's enough cars out there that people want to upgrade. So, you know, those are the, again, self-motivated desire to do some of it, but you always can sell more, right? And, you know, you have the one-offs and they're willing to pay the money and because the car's in value, you know, it's irreplaceable. And then you have people who come to you with a great idea. Like we had one guy said, hey, can you do this recliner on the seat for this car? And we said, we can only do a three degree lean and this is how we're going to do it. Well, then he told us he wants to sell it for a hundred bucks. So I can't even engineer it, tool it, and get amortization back on my tooling if I got to sell it to you for 50 and you got to sell it for a hundred. So it's a math model. And that's really where this business gets tricky, because if you follow a lot of those blind holes, you're going to drill a lot of them and you're not going to get anything back out of them. Then you have no cash flow.

What does coming up with designs and stuff like that look like for you guys? Are you doing any stuff like in CAD, any 3D printing or any of that?

Yes and yes.

Yes and yes. It depends on what it is. So for engine stuff, we can reverse engineer anything and do it in CAD and then from CAD, machine it and we'll print it or do an assembly. We did an entire race cart in CAD, which we don't have here but we could show you on the screen. Independent front rear suspension with four-wheel disc brakes and a differential on a small little go-cart type deal. That was a whole car program basically. I mean, we had a couple of hundred parts. Yeah, vendors, the whole thing. And you just find yourself getting into these situations where you have to be creative enough to realize where your skill goes to and where it ends and where you need help from other people. And what we've been fortunate to do over the last 15, 20 years is build a collective of people we can rely on to either scan or create math and create a CAD model or do true surface models, right? So we have one partner we've worked with since 2008 who can do surface models that are at the level that an OEM would accept the model, right? And he helped us on all the ZTA stuff, right? Right. So the hoods and all those math models that we have that we can show you on screen were done by him to an OEM level of CAD level, surfacing level and GD&T level, right? So we like to pride ourselves on having OEM level stuff, but doing it on low volume.

We got to make sure all that stuff fits, right?

Yeah.

Every time.

Not just once, right? Our kits are differentiated by the other kits out there where if you go to some of them, they'll build the car for you, but every part is shaved or hand fit. Ours, I tried this out when we started with the ZTA. I had a car, I took all the parts, I didn't even put them on the car. I had them all pre-painted in black, brought them back to my garage, and then took all the parts off and then fitted them to the car, and it worked. That first one we did. So that's a good sign of something where you have repeatability, which means if that car got hit, they could buy the repair parts, which we've had, and fix it again. So if you have one of these custom cars that are hand-built, you crash it, either the company is defunct or you can't get it fixed.

Yeah. As we start to wrap up here, I guess we'll start with you. What are you most proud of and what you've done in your career?

Wow.

I told you I'd scare them.

Yeah.

What am I most proud of?

I think sticking with it. I'm not totally giving up on it because there's a lot of times where I would just want to give up because again, the type of work that I was doing is very stressful, right? Building an engine and having people take it out and race it for a weekend, right? Do an endurance race with it, drag race with it, whatever.

Which of those two scares you the most, by the way? Which one gives you more anxiety? The endurance or the drag race?

The endurance, for sure. When I really got heavy into building drag race engines, I didn't realize how sloppy they would be built, tolerance-wise, right? They're very loose. Because they're getting taken apart, right? Whereas with like road race stuff, it's like, hey, this thing's got to last, 12, 24 hours, right? And it's probably not going to be rebuilt at all this season. So it's got to last. So I guess me not giving up on it would be what I'm most proud of, even now that I'm not in it fully. I still love working on engines. I still tinker with stuff. I have a lot of, I'm more doing unique engine projects now, right? Stuff that, you know, it's like, oh, I've never worked on one of those. Like, I have like a bucket list of engines I want to build. I'm that type of nerd, right?

What are your top three?

Top three? Well, I'd love to work on something like an Offenhauser engine, but that Gordon ain't going to pony up for that one.

So I'm sure as hell not.

So we're not doing that.

I'm not to that money level yet. But I own one of them, which is a Gen 1 Hemi. I have a 1954 Chrysler 354 that I'm putting back together for a traditional hot rod. Let me be clear, and I'm going to catch s*** for this. Not a rat rod. Not rat rod. Rat rods? No. I'm sorry. I don't agree with it. I don't like it, and everybody can crucify me for saying that.

Well, we just lost our rat rod audience.

I don't care.

I'm not a huge fan either, to be honest with you.

Listen, if you're saying that you're trying to emulate something that was done back in the 50s and 60s, remember they didn't have an aftermarket. They were just doing whatever they could, and the primary goal was speed. But when you look at what a Finnish car was, it was beautiful, right? It was very symbolic of what the American spirit was. And also for me, it's kind of like, if these engines hadn't developed and built and people raised them, I wouldn't have had the opportunity for a career that I had, right? I feel the same way as far as the top three goes. It's that, it's Flathead Ford, which I also own. People look at me like I'm insane. I'm like, can't build any power with that. I know.

But they're still cool.

But they're cool. They look cool. They look cool. They sound cool. They're very unique sounding. And it's not about making the power. It's just, it's the process. It's understanding like without this, we would not have everything we have, right? The innovations that happened, it's the first monoblock V8. Now you go downstairs, I can show you the casting. It looks like dog s***. I mean, it's horrific, but at the time it was revolutionary.

Yeah. And they put it in everything.

And they put in everything, everything. There's songs written about it. I mean, it's so iconic. And I could go on and on and on about different engines that I want to build. I just like weird stuff. I love weird s***, right? Because like, oh, I've never seen that before. I wonder if you could even work on it. Oh, that sounds like me. You know? And yeah, that's what I'm most proud of, is just not giving up, right? Because so many people get burnt out, they give up and they do a complete 180, and they just get out of this business. And I just can't. It's a sickness, I guess. I'm a constant acceptor of abuse.

Permanently afflicted.

That should be a T-shirt for you. For sure. The acceptor of abuse.

It's a pretty common car guy problem, though, really. Yeah.

Right? It is, right? We're just like, oh, why the hell do I keep doing this to myself? My bank account is nothing, my hands are all cut up, I got birds. Man, this is great. Like, what is wrong with you people? Right?

True.

Well, how about you?

Gosh, I've had a pretty rich 46 years in it.

Summing up in 46 seconds.

Yeah. I'm still in it, I guess is probably the biggest part of it. I still love it every day. I still like the challenge. And I told him I'll be doing this until I'm 74, 75, 80, whatever. I'll be still in here clicking away at stuff. I have an overhead cam 6 that we're going to build for my car, but we're going to change the intake and the exhaust. And I can't wait to do that. That's one of these weird engine projects. We're doing a 6-car Weber side draft intake on it. And so we're creating new stuff. But, you know, we're pretty meticulous. If we're going to create new stuff, we're going to make sure we can do it again and again and again if somebody else wants to do the same thing we did. You know, I think the things for me is just rounding out the career and taking the chances to do as many different things as I could over my career. I've had some really neat experiences that most people don't have. I've been fortunate that way and I'm actually really excited about what the next phase of where we're going right now with PMD is. That's going to be fun because I think the car industry has become a little more of the Wild West a little bit with all the different types of power trains and electrification and everything else is out there. The script isn't done yet. That's what excites me.

Out of all the projects and stuff that you've worked on, is the one that is your favorite out of the programs that you worked on?

Yeah, I think the Prowler was really, because I started from the very beginning and got to launch that car. That was a really unique time. Some of the friendships we made in that were really strong. Like I said, we still hang out with Raz all the time. That same group went to Bonneville. We were all out there at Bonneville a few years ago trying to do a speed run, not just to watch. Stupid me, I go, the average age of our group is in the 70s, and we're going to be one of the oldest teams out there. No, we're one of the youngest teams out there. There's guys out there in their 90s still trying to run. We had a guy one day, he was 98 years old, ran on a Harley and wiped out, got a helicopter away. We were youngsters compared to some of these guys. 80 year olds running for 200 miles an hour. Yeah. It was crazy.

Yeah, I remember when we had Shaun on, he was doing some remote tuning for those guys that had the NA V12, whatever, and they're all in their 70s or 80s or something like that.

Yeah, you go to a restaurant out by Bonneville, and it's a bunch of spirited geriatric guys.

Yeah.

And they're girlfriends.

Spirited geriatric, I like that.

Yeah.

I mean, they can walk. They got their walkers or whatever, but it's pretty interesting. Keeps them alive.

Yeah.

I bought a 76 Honda motorcycle for my wife, and I bought it from a gentleman who was in his 90s, original owner of the bike, and sold it because he got a new one. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, right? I was like, all right, good for you, buddy.

Yeah.

But that's kind of the spirit that I think is really cool, is that you can realize that you can do the speed thing until you're in your 90s, if you're blessed to have the health to do that. My wife's convinced she'll find me dead in the shop working on a car at some point.

If we could only all go that way.

Right? Yeah. That'll be on the back of the shirt.

Died in the shop. Found in shop dead.

Suspect number one. Well, shoot. On that note, do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah. This is going to be interesting.

Another one I can't predict.

Yeah. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests or guests to pick three cars. I need a daily driver, a track car and a show car. You have an limited budget, cram whatever engine in, weld two cars together or whatever you want, whatever your imagination come up with. What are you picking?

You start.

He handles stress well from what I've heard.

Daily driver. Say that again.

Track car, daily driver, and a show car.

A show car.

Wow.

That's the sound his brain makes. Unlimited funds?

Unlimited budget.

All right.

Unlimited budget.

I got some of those figured.

Yeah.

So a daily driver. I'm a pickup truck guy. I love pickups. So for daily driver, I'd want a, I'll just say like this. I want the car that I want to build for the Hemi. 1935 Ford, I daily drive. I would daily drive this. 1935 Ford with the Chrysler Hemi in it. Fuel injected though. Don't keep it carbureted. I'm not a carbureted guy. And have some creature comforts, but I like a pretty bare bones vehicle, right? I just, I like it to do what it's supposed to do, which is get me from point A to point B, be reliable, right? And have some sense of comfort, but I like something that I can enjoy driving every day.

That sounds like something Jeff Schwartz would drive.

Yeah.

Right, I would drive that every day if I could, right? Now weather permitting, of course, here in Michigan. A show car, track car, and a track car.

Track car, anything?

I mean, anything.

Any kind of track.

Anything, anything, yeah.

Well, I don't know why, but I've always had a fascination with a 1956 Jaguar D-type.

Oh, yeah.

Go look that up. That's a pretty sweet car. And I became obsessed with that when I was in middle school, so that's 30 years ago. Love Jaguars, love that era of car. They're gorgeous. And that was right when you could see the Corvette, the first gen Corvette kind of looked like the European race cars of the time, right? And it's a single seater, it's got the cool arrow behind the driver, right? And it's just neat. It's beautiful as many of the Jaguars of that era are. And then a show car. I'm not one for car shows. I know it sounds really weird.

Yeah. But more like a show off car.

Yeah. But if I would probably have to say, as far as a show car goes.

This is the take your wife to get ice cream kind of car. Oh, right. That's a show car. Like, all right.

Man, I'm going to have to say a Viper. I know it sounds weird, but I don't have any desire to drive a Viper around a track.

Which generation?

So it would be a Gen 4, 2009 ACR, black with a green, a snakeskin green stripe. No, snakeskin green base, black racing stripe off the top.

Oh, okay.

They did, I can't tell you how many they did. Only a handful of them. And they come up for sale every once in a while, and they keep climbing, and I'm just not happy about it. But there's so many.

You want to do the black with the green though?

No, no. I had a black car once, and that's the worst idea on the planet, is having a black car. Sucks. But that snakeskin green. I mean, listen, if you're going to have a car that's obnoxious, it's got to be an obnoxious color. It just has to be, right? And snakeskin green is pretty frigging obnoxious. It is. Right? So that would be the show car. Because I think people, one, I've devoted a ton of my life to the car, right? I know a ton about the car. And I could speak to somebody at a car show about it at length and be confident that I was giving them accurate information.

Two hours and 12 minutes like we have today?

Oh, yeah. Something like that. Sure. At length, right? And I would enjoy every moment of it. Whereas, and I'm not knocking it, but if I had to talk about a Fiero for two hours and 12 minutes, I would, yeah, it would not be-

It's a two-story building.

Yeah.

You might live, you might not.

Exactly. I'd bounce maybe a little bit, have some broken bones.

Anyway.

Sorry about that.

Happy note.

Well, my Fiero doesn't fit into those three.

Good, good, good, good, good.

It shouldn't fit into anybody's three, as far as I'm concerned.

So I was a daily driver. I had a Ford GT 2004, five prototype and that car is comfortable enough to drive every day. So if money were no object, I'd just have a 05 or 06 Ford GT. Just all the options the way it is.

All four of them?

Yeah, all four of the options.

All four options, yeah. I like it.

That would be, and to this day, I'm really pissed I sold that car, but hey, life is what it is.

You said it was a prototype?

Yeah, it was one of the two Selene prototypes, and it was a early PV2 car? Yeah, it was an early car. So that would be my daily driver. Again, if I take snow out of it.

They got good winter tires nowadays.

Yeah, it might be fun in the snow. Yeah. Let's see, what was it? Oh, race car. Track car. I'm fortunate that I had bought it. Yeah, you have it. It's the Gurney Eagle Indy car that we're going to put a Viper V10 in. I sat in the Gurney Eagle that they had, which is the sister car. So this is a serial number 30. They only made 29 of them. They skipped 13. Oh, fair enough. And a lot of them have been crashed and no longer exist. So this is one of the chassis that stayed in the Gurney family collection until just recently. And for me, having that car done and with the V10 powertrain running, I think that would be my...

Where are you guys going to find a V10 powertrain?

No idea.

I know a guy who knows a guy.

Yeah, all right, all right, all right.

Show car, I think I'm also very fortunate. I'm building it right now. If you look over the thing there, it's a 69 Trans Am convertible with the Roadshop chassis LS3 T6060. That car should... I mean, it basically will look like that car, but it'll be driving like a new car. And I think that would be the ultimate show car. Yeah, it would be pretty killer.

Was it the one that you had at the Roaster Shop?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that full frame underneath it, that car will be... should be great.

Yeah, it looks pretty good just as it sits right now.

So that would be number three. And so I guess I'm a little lucky I've got two of the three.

Yeah.

Well, with the part of Pick Three, it's like if you can have anything, it's like something to look forward to. Obviously you've had a long career of 46 years, it's like now you're on the back end of that, you can get something cool now. So it's pretty freaking good. There's only been like maybe two or three people on this whole podcast that have ever been like, I got it or I'm working on it. Maybe a little bit like four or five. Yeah. But anyways, on that note, where can people find you guys?

pmdautomotive.com, we're in downtown Pontiac, Michigan. You could also go to woodwardspeechapp.com. So those are our two brands. The ZTA kits are on online all the time. And we have also a Facebook page for both Woodward Speech App and PMDAutomotive. And so, yeah, I mean, we're going to be doing a lot more social media stuff. We have a new person coming in. We'll probably get into a couple other new platforms and she'll be doing content and that will allow us to sell our t-shirts, our tchotchkes, help guide people to what we do best and we're going to build this engine business up and start really quick clicking on that.

Yeah, real quick, I have to ask you especially, what are your thoughts on these Fiero kick cars that are out there, like a 40 kick car, for example.

Remember that look he told us to panic about in the very beginning?

That's one of those standard look.

Fiero specific?

Sure.

Or just kick cars in general.

Let's take whichever one stresses you out the most.

What stresses me out the most?

Well, the Fiero kick cars, I don't know if there's ever been a good Fiero kick car. I think Gordon agrees.

The Miro was good.

I've not seen a Miro.

It looks like a 308.

I've not seen a Miro.

Ferrari actually stopped them.

Oh, really?

I think when it comes to kick cars, no, I don't think it's bad. It's not bad at all actually. I encourage people, I think it's super cool. Again, it goes right there with the execution with like rat rods is you've got to put all your effort into it. When I say effort, don't like learn how to weld, right? Don't put unnecessary things on there that you're like, oh, that looks cool. But what does it do? A vehicle is a purpose-built thing. Is it going fast? Is it going up this hill? What is it doing, right? And when it comes to kick cars and people are transforming the bodies, like what we do with the ZTA, it's like, well, I want that modern platform that GM did such a great job with, with the Gen 5 Camaro, the platform. I didn't say the body. Yeah, yeah. Okay? But I want to stand out because I don't want a belly button. And with the ZTA kit, you don't have a belly button anymore. You're like, what is that? Right? That's cool. So for me, it's all about the execution, right? I'm not opposed to kick cars at all. I think like Superformance does a great job.

It's amazing.

We got to ride in the GT40 a few weeks ago. It was amazing.

Factory 5 does a great job. That's our new, what I was telling you guys about.

That's our new ZTA.

Yeah.

Okay. Oh, the upcoming?

Yeah.

Okay.

That's my car.

Yeah.

And that has the front nose.

Sorry, everybody. You're not able to see this.

Yeah, yeah. No, I like it.

So, I don't, I just, like I said, execution, right? I don't think there's a bad kit car, as long as it's done well. If it's not done well, then yeah, it's a pile of garbage. And, you know, don't be proud of that, right? And, sorry, I don't know how else to say it.

But I just, you know. We appreciate well-done anything.

Yeah.

Right? So, if somebody takes a crappy kit car and really makes it nice, I still go and look at it. Sure.

Because again, you see the craftsmanship behind it, right? And that's what it's all about when you talk about putting a car together, is the craftsmanship behind it.

So hang yourself out there.

Yeah.

Do it well. I mean.

You know, be proud of it. And everybody should think about it that way in anything they do, right?

Be proud of what you're doing.

Put effort into it.

There's some great kit car companies today that do some really cool stuff. And, you know, then you've got, you know, the rest of mods, which are, you know, basically kit cars because you're using an old body, but everything else is new.

Yeah, like that Dutch Brothers GNX. Yes.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, yeah.

Holy cow. That is a beautiful car.

I would love to get those guys on because that is a... They do some awesome stuff.

It is gorgeous, gorgeous, right? Or Ring Brothers?

Oh, yeah.

Ring Brothers do some great stuff.

Oh, they do some great stuff. Like people reimagining these classics, right? And updating them and making it to where I talk to Gordon about this all the time, because Gordon's very much like, it's all original. And it looks like this, it has to be this way. Dude, listen, my generation doesn't give a s*** about that.

We don't care. We have those arguments. Right?

Like we do not care about that. Like we want something that's unique looking. And now you're starting to see like the 80s cars. That's why I bring up the Dutch Brothers stuff. When I saw the G and X, I was like, oh my gosh, a G body that looks cool. Right? And here in the rust belt, most G bodies, there's flapping doors because they're rotted out. They didn't last very long. Yeah, they didn't last very long, right? So again, for me, it's execution on a kick car. Like I don't hate any kick car in particular. Like I don't think there's a bad kick car company. I just think it's bad execution. Right?

Yeah, we've benchmarked, like we were doing, you know, we looked at Singer Porsche and what they're doing and they're, you know, taking an old 922 body and making it look like an old Porsche.

It's amazing.

Some of the stuff they've done is phenomenal, right? So we actually build a business case to build the bodies to do that. And then we looked at doing the 70 to 73 Firebirds as a pure restomod car, build 25 a year or something like that. We built that business case. Now, you know, the investment is, you know, high and you've got to sell them for, you know, 180 or their price each in order to make, as Shaun says, make a little bit of money so we can, you know, not be poor. Right, yeah. But, you know, any of these endeavors you go into, you're learning and you're learning about the market, the market's learning about you and your skills and your craftsmanship and they become one offs. And right now, we built the Superbirds on the Challengers. We built the Trans Ams on the Firebirds. We did the ZTAs and now we're doing the latest ZTAs. So we've done four or five of these things. I still get calls today as we sit here and it wasn't just, people who buy a Daytona or a Superbird conversion, somehow they find their way back to me and they call me and say, do you know about this? Do you know about that? What's the history of this? How'd you do this? And so we're seeing this following. I just had a guy call me on, we only built five of those 69 Trans Ams on the Camaros. Guy just called me out in Arizona. Just bought one of your cars. He needs to talk to you. I don't know how they find me, but they do.

It's surprising what a car guy will do to track down the history of a car he just bought. It's like some creepy level stalker. They should be hired by the government to track down people. Agreed.

It doesn't help that we've got all these pictures out there with us doing these cars. Shaun did all the superchargers on all of those.

Even though they track people down, too, and they're like, oh yeah, is it a serial number of this? Does it have a little knock out of the back of the head right here? Is there where I was putting it into the car? The fact that those people hold on to that information, too, is insane. Yes.

Well, we did document all the builds that we did in house, and we put serial numbers on those cars, and we did build books. And so those were highly coveted at the time, and those builds, and what I'm finding is, as those cars went through multiple hands, those build books disappeared, and I didn't keep files on those. That sucks. That sucks, right? So I mean, and the Richard Petty Superbirds that we did, I mean, we'd get them sent up here, we'd do the body in white, we'd send them back down, they'd do the powertrain, and then they'd sell them, and those were all serialized by Petty. So it was just really cool to be able to do what we thought was great, right? And believe me, the haters, I mean, so the Superbird that I owned was on the cover of Top Gear magazine twice, and there was a big, what, 12 page, 16 page spread. They came to Detroit during the auto show, and I drove the car down there, and we photographed it for hours. And I still have that magazine, and it's just, it's fun, right? They really enjoyed seeing this car. So we get to, we may not have really made a ton of money, but we did some really cool stuff.

Yeah. And people can hate all they want, but those original cars, they couldn't sell them, right? They sat in dealerships, and people would buy them and take the nose cone off, and the wing off.

Oh, the dealers were taking the nose cone, the wings off, and making some of them as a cornet or whatever it was, right? And when we did those cars, people absolutely did want them, because they were spending a lot of money to get the conversion done. And it was a throwback. And I had my car next to a clone Daytona at a gas station, and I took a picture, and there's no lie, it was at the Shell Station on Woodward. Probably 100 people around both cars just taking pictures.

Really? Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, crazy stuff.

Well, sweet, that was a good Midwest goodbye. How about that?

I'm glad we got that down.

Well, perfect. Shaun, Gordon, thank you very much for coming on the show. Appreciate it. Dan, thanks for existing, and we'll see you all next time. Thanks again for watching the show, guys. Be sure to go into the description down below, and check out all of our sponsors. They are what make this show possible. It allows us to travel the country and talk to some really cool guests. So be sure to check them out, support them just like you support us, and see you all next time.