151. Vengeance Racing, LS/LT Builds, Half mile, Quarter Mile Racing w/ Ron Mowen and Howard Tanner

It's easy to make the power.

Yeah, a thousand horsepower is easier than it's ever been to make. It's not the mystery that it was 15 years ago, you know, it's the norm.

My buddies asked me what I was going to do with it. I'm like, I'm not going to do anything to it. Now, it's completely, you know, six-second certified cage in it. Twin Turbos hanging out the fenders.

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 four loving co-hosts.

I knew the Ford thing was coming, for sure.

Dan, Mr. Gunner Garage. Yeah, I don't think there's, do you guys have a single Ford in here or no?

The tow truck.

Yeah, I was gonna say. I was like, you guys at least all use a six-seven power stroke to pull your s*** around.

You know, I had a 3500 for years, but with the new stacker that we purchased, that was really encouraged to give the Ford F450 a look. And it's a truck, it's a truck. I'll never use a Chevy again for any serious towing.

And that's the only clip, podcast over, right?

Yeah, my life's complete, now I'm good.

And then today we are back in, well not back, this is our first time here in Georgia doing podcasts, I think, right?

Yeah.

Thanks for doing podcasts. So we are here with Vengeance Racing. We are here with Ron Mowen. Did I say that correctly, by the way? I should ask.

No.

No, how do you say it?

It's Mowen.

Mowen, all right, swing and a miss.

It's industry standard, man. Everybody says Mowen.

Right. And then also Howard Tanner. So we've had a ton of referrals. Like you guys were our number one tagged shop when we asked who we should have on Atlanta. I think like three or four people, whatever, all over my Facebook. So go ahead, tell us a little bit about what Vengeance Racing is, how it started, and we'll just kind of go from there and then how you guys kind of got together as well.

Yeah, for sure. So we are a rate model performance vehicle installation and sales facility. We opened in 06, coming up on 20 years in business. Open the doors to give people an alternative to what your typical performance shop experience is in this world or industry. You know, we really tried to set things up where we had proper people in place, good customer service, transparency with the builds, provide not only the product that you purchased, but the results, you know, and just started off in 06 with that in mind and have grown and grown up to 2025 now. We actually started right behind me, the little machine room back there, if you will. We had one lift and we rented that area of this suite. And fast forward to the day, we own this building. We just acquired the building next door, and we've got another 7,000-foot warehouse for vehicle storage.

So it all started here then?

Yeah.

That's kind of crazy to think like you didn't just move facilities, you just kept buying up your neighbors here?

Yeah, pretty much.

Okay.

Yeah. When we opened, I think within 10 months, the economy crashed and the guy that owned the building was like, hey, I'm out. I'm putting the building for sale. I would suggest you guys find a way to buy it or plan on moving, because whoever buys it is probably going to kick you out. And it was definitely a little bit earlier than anticipated, but took the risk and it's paid off.

Okay.

And then transitioning a little bit to you, so tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get in this industry? And then we'll kind of meet somewhere in the middle after that.

Yeah, so very much like Ron, I had a shop, Redline Motorsports, which I started in New York in 89, maybe 90, a long time ago. Similar structure, late model GM cars. I moved the operations to South Florida in 2012, which was a blast moving to a different environment, growing the brand. And then about 2023, I was just kind of getting burned out, dealing with people. This wasn't fun anymore. Ron knows, right? Ron's only a few years behind that, right? And interestingly enough, you know, Vengeance and Redline have always been competitors, good competitors, for a lot of years. And, you know, Ron and I would see each other at events, mostly in Florida, Bradenton and whatnot. And we started rapping one day a little bit about the industry and the stuff that bothers us. And you start realizing that there's a pretty good common bond for a lot of shop owners with the frustrations that go on. And, you know, after a few cycles of conversation, we kind of joked around about, imagine if you and I worked together. And it was just kind of like this awkward moment. And you start thinking about guys that have that basis. Like we don't need resumes. We've done it, we've seen it. We've been through many evolutions of cars and the growth in the industry and continued to survive in it and grow. So it was a pretty interesting bond at that point. For me, the things I like to focus on were calibrations, engine development, going to the track. And less with dealing with the day to day. I think at that time, I think Ron was needing some more help in that department and some more experience, especially with the calibration side of it. And Georgia, for me, was a place that I could tolerate living. It was kind of a little bit like how I was in upstate New York where I started from. Of course, I'd never go back to New York. So all these things kind of just came together. And we probably spent six or seven hard months of emails, conversation, trips up here, and really trying to figure out, does this make sense and does it work? We both have big personalities. I think a lot of the industry was like, these guys are going to beat each other. Right. Doing this, you know, and we talked about, we spent less time talking about the nuts and bolts and pieces and more talking about, you know, are we going to beat each other, you know? So we got through it. And it's been like 14, 15 months already, and a lot of things have changed. And it's a great company here, going through growing pains like any company goes through. And I'm hoping that, you know, my experiences have been helping out and changing it. It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun getting it there. And I think we're on a really good, exciting path right now. So.

Well, you guys made it through the honeymoon period, right? A year past that one year, which is why it's kind of working out. So here's the thing. So I mean, both of you have been in the industry for so long, right? Was there, when you say changes, was there any difficult changes in the last year, like how you guys operate or was it pretty easy to sync up?

I think syncing up was pretty straightforward. As Howard touched on, I think our biggest challenge was going to make sure that we got along well. Both been longtime industry leaders. Like you said, competitors, friendly competitors, but nonetheless, we went to the track to whoop the other guy's a** when we could, and it felt good. But it was really just finding out how we could mesh and where to structure things as best as possible. I don't think there's been any challenges with that. Howard mentioned that a lot of people said we're going to whoop each other's a**, and I think we thought about that a lot too, but we took the mature approach and we spent a lot of time addressing that and making sure that we knew how to navigate things that were going to come our way and to maintain respect for each other and double, if not triple, the amount of experience in the same building as that process. From the evolution of the industry, I think he's more leading towards global B, calibration related stuff, keeping up with aftermarket parts, offerings and making sure you're working with quality manufacturers that deliver a product that actually works. Things along those lines, that's always a challenge. But we navigate that pretty well. And then, you know, where I'm strong in things, he picks up in areas that I'm weak and vice versa. And it's really been a great marriage, if you will.

It's in this world of cars and racing, there's a lot of talking. But at the same time, I've never seen a group of people, if somebody's in trouble, let's say on a racetrack, you need parts or somebody's broken or things like that. This whole community does come together when it needs to be so.

Usually. And I think the enhanced part about the changes is that, we were talking earlier about the power of the internet and YouTubers and Instagram and TikTok and stuff, that everybody's a hero today, right? Everybody's a know-it-all, everybody, I'm the best, I got the most whatever, but where's the experience? And I think what we find, and I think I can speak on both behalves of this is that because we've been in it so long, your competition is either really good and you embrace that, or they're just a pile, right? So you deal with a lot of that pecking and the internet banter and everything else, but once you get to a certain point of your business evolution, that stuff is, you know, it's like pissing in the ocean at that point. You know what I mean? So that has an impact. I think COVID was a little bit of a game changer for a lot of places. That's not even like a big secret anymore.

How did that affect you guys that period?

We made it through the economy crash when we opened in 06, and what it really did was it changed the dynamic of the business a little bit. In 06 specifically, when we opened the doors, it was like opening the floodgates, everybody came running. We had a reputation locally of building cars for people, the company I worked at previously was known worldwide, so we had a following out of the gate. But when the economy crashed, it took the average guy that had five or ten grand saved up for a heads cam package, and he went home and kept that money, stashed it, you know, until the economy got back to normal. And then what you had was people that the economy didn't really affect tremendously, that are like, oh cool, there's no line, I can show up now. And it just evolved from that. We kept getting more high-end clientele that wanted to do these bigger builds, and it really set the foundation and tone for the company moving forward. It allowed us to showcase our talent and deliver some really nice stuff. Now, you know, once the economy recovered, that guy with five or ten grand was still welcome back with open arms, but it allowed us to build the reputation that we have, and for people to know that if you're coming here, we're going to do things the right way and not really shortcut anything. So, and then with COVID, the biggest thing with COVID, business didn't slow down. You know, we sell parts worldwide. We've got cars in every state in the country and seven other countries. Manufacturing, getting product to support the workload was extremely difficult. Oh yeah. And that was our absolute biggest hurdle. You know, I actually closed our online store because somebody would go in there and order a camshaft. And something that I would usually have in three to five days was now three to five weeks out. And I'm just getting shredded by these people. So I'm like, you know, the sales aren't worth it. I'll just close it down. And when things get back to normal, we'll revisit that opportunity.

Makes sense. So here's a question, right? Because obviously you're a bigger volume shop or higher volume shop. When things came in stock during that period, you just gobble everything up, just buy the pallet load?

Yeah. I mean, we would order, you know, 40 sets of Johnson lifters.

Right.

And by the time they showed up, 35 of them were already allocated to builds that we were waiting on to get started with. And then, you know, you place another order immediately and it was, you were constantly playing catch up. You were never, you didn't have stuff on the shelf. And it wasn't easy to recover from that as far as the methodical scheduling that we do within the company.

Why do you think U2 had so much success in the industry?

Right.

Because to get past one decade is already an achievement in itself. Now to get coming up on two for Vengeance and then you've been around for a little bit longer. How do you make it so far? How do you keep a successful name that's respected?

For me, it was a lot of the intentions that I had when we opened. Again, I was an enthusiast. I saw the shortcomings that the industry had. A lot of performance shops that are open out there. It's a mechanic from a car dealership that did some work on the side for his buddy. And next thing you know, he's hanging a sign on a building that he's renting. And he's the parts guy, he's the guy building the car. He's the customer service guy, he's the calibrator. It's not a good business model, you know. You oftentimes come up short with that. The other thing too is this industry is not, you know, as expensive as this hobby is. It's not as lucrative as a lot of people like to think that it is on the back end. So owning your mistakes and doing the right thing when something happens isn't really a common thing, you know. You fire up a car and put it on the dyno and it kicks a rod for no reason. Usually, the shop is looking at the customer saying, well, you need to pay your bill and now you need to rebuild your motor. It's not really fair to the consumer when they haven't even taken possession of their car yet, you know. So you have to structure and run your company in a way that you not only consider those situations when they happen, but you're also financially able to do what's right to make that customer home. And for me, that's always been my thing is, you know, we have 18 employees at this point, you know, we're growing at a pretty rapid pace. People are prone to human error and making mistakes and parts fail. So for me, I've always hypothetically gotten out from behind my desk, sat in the chair in front of my desk, and you know, how would I want this handled if I was the customer? And I just sat here and spent 10, 20, $50,000 with this company. What should be done to make this right? And you know, sometimes it's a painful process, but you do what's right and it keeps your reputation intact. You sleep well at night. And then, you know, you make your money down the road. When that guy tells his story that, hey, this happened, but they did this, you know. The other thing too is very simple. And I know that Howard aligns with this, that, and this tremendously, is knowing what products to use, how to generate the performance that people want and expect from their money. You know, the trackside experience, getting cars down a racetrack, making big numbers, you know, winning races. You know, people see that and unless they got blinders on, it's hard not to say, hey, this guy knows what the hell he's doing. Okay. You know, we need to work with people that are versed in this industry.

Well, that's one thing I heard is from somebody recently, actually a former guest of the podcast, is like, how do you tell which shop to go with? Well, who's winning at the track, right?

You know, that's part of it. It is. It's part of it. There's more than that. Okay. There's shops that can build fast cars.

One time?

Right. It might go fast once.

Right.

And you got to be able to pay attention to that. You know, can they do it again? Can they do it repeatedly? What's the quality of the build? You know, you can go out there and grab some, you know, Summit Racing or nothing wrong with Summit, but you can grab some junk and put it together and get lucky. You know, I mean, look at these five, three single turbo cars all over the place, you know?

Got a few buddies with those.

Yeah. You know, I mean, no, don't dig on them. They can go fast.

Yep.

But there's a difference in that. And then building something that actually looks the part is consistent and offers some level of repeatability and reliability, you know? I think that's what separates people. And it's really hard for the guy on the internet or the novice at the racetrack to separate that, you know, until he gets some actual vetted experience in the industry.

There's so many topics just within that last two sentences. So, I mean, do you agree with most of that? I mean, what's your thoughts on the whole keeping a reputable name for so many years?

Yeah, your reputation is everything, you know? I mean, it's about consistency, repeatability over and over again, you know? I mean, at the end of the day, and we talked about this earlier, that you can have a million followers on Instagram or whatever. To me, it's all b*******, right? What matters is the guy that's at the track, the guy that's at the car show, whatever purpose he has with his car, if he's enjoying his car and he had a good experience and he learned from it, that's the best asset you can have in growing your brand.

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So you really got to look at each customer individually and say, well, let's focus on this one guy because this guy will spawn off into somebody else. Nobody really has a car and doesn't have friends. It's a big community. So he's hanging out with his buddy and like, oh, what did you have done? Oh wow, that thing performs for you. How was your experience? I had a blast. It was great. They did it on time. The results were there. They taught me things. I just felt comfortable. That's the best thing that you can have in your brand. So when you asked about how you start this out, I mean, same way with Ron. I mean, we both started out of necessity. You know, I was a kid coming from a carburettor getting into fuel injection and there was nothing. There was no internet. You really had to dig in and then you start realizing that people wanted that and they wanted it done right. So then you do one car, two cars, three cars, ten cars, fifteen cars, and now you hire one guy, now you hire another guy, and next thing you know, you turn around and you got 18 guys here and it's 25 of Vengeance Racing. Then all of a sudden it's like, wow, what happens? You know, and it's, and those are, those are the interesting struggles in any business to grow, but the core of all that is stay true to each customer. I have to admit also, Ron does a great job of backing up the customer. I mean, there's times when I've seen situations and I'm like, I don't know if that's really our fault, and he'll default and we'll deal with it. And I'm not saying my side from any deviant or disrespectful side of it, but he tends to lean on the other side with it, which is a good thing. That doesn't mean take advantage of it, because it's not gonna happen, but more times than not, if there's something that was questionable, cars leaving here right one way or another. So that's the sales pitch. Okay. So sometimes your best marketing things are the guys that have an issue or a problem or a delay or a bad part. It's how you get out of it. How you resolve that issue. Did you leave me stranded? You're telling me to stick it up my a**. So I think that's a big part of maintaining and growing your brand is that consistent flavor.

You, and just before I switch to you, you mentioned reliability, and we were talking about this a little bit off camera. Is a thousand horsepower reliable?

The answer is yes, it can be, if it's done properly. But it also has to be explained that this should, but on the same token, man, s*** happens. You can use the best components, you can have the best technician put it together, you can have a perfect calibration. Then you have to factor in, do you have a customer that knows how to drive it, how to maintain it, and things to look for when it's a minor issue before it turns into a big issue. But the simple reality is, is parts fail. I got a friend who owns a fencing company, and he told me years ago, he's like, man, I should have chose a different industry. I hate my customers and my employees. I looked at him, I said, man, I said, how many of your customers, when you leave the property finishing a fence, walk there and beat the s*** out of it with a sledgehammer? He looked at me like I was stupid, he didn't get it. I'm like, dude, every car that leaves here, they beat the living s*** out of it until something breaks, and then they're knocking on your door wondering why it broke. Like, you got it made, I get emails from cars, I have a car here right now that we built 14 years ago, and the guy's got a check engine light, he's the third owner of it, he doesn't even know anything about the car, and he's brought it back, hey, what's going on with this thing? I personally think it's pretty cool that it's 13 years old, makes, think that one made a little over 1050, 1080 wheel.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's a YSI 427 C6Z, good car. So can they be reliable? Sure. You have to have the expectation that if for some reason it's not, that's the game where you're playing.

That fence analogy is officially the best analogy I've heard ever for reliability.

That is true. And you never know, you don't know, I ask this all the time too, I'm assuming there's plenty of times you've handed over the keys and went, this isn't going to go well as it leaves here.

You know, we were very fortunate with as big of a customer base as we have, that we kind of screen our customers these days. Especially when they go from the production shop over to the race side, that's very much an interview process. And if you can't understand, you know, these guys, again, the internet, they see a record, you know, white car with an automatic 4,000-pack, whatever record it is that day, and they want to beat it.

Draggy forms.

Right. They don't really understand what chasing a record entails and why it's a record. You know, they don't know that that guy went through three engines, 10 transmissions, 50 track outings, and thousands upon thousands of dollars. They think he built a car, went to the track, and made a post on the internet, and that's not the reality. You know, so yeah, we interview people to, A, steer them in the direction that they actually want to go and not where they think they want to go at times. You know, we get a lot of people, hey, I want to make a thousand horsepower. Why? I don't know, it sounds cool. I saw it on the internet.

It's that four numbers, man. I've had friends make 991. They're like, oh, I just want that number.

Me too. We've sold a thousand horse package. And when Howard's finished with the calibration, it made 996. Well, you told me it was going to make a thousand. It's like, dude, come on. You know what I mean? But you ask them why they want that number and they don't really know. They saw it on the internet or that dino graph looks cool on the dash at a car show, but they're never going to do anything with it.

That sounds like a GM owner thing, by the way. Just, you know, here's my dino graph at a car show.

It's like ramminated in his wallet. Even with that process, I mean, I would rather talk to a guy down a couple of levels.

Okay.

To give him something that is safe for him. I've had guys come in with a car and they're like, I want to make a thousand horsepower. And they're like, what kind of car did you just come out of? I had a Hyundai Sonata. I'm like, all right, let's sit down a minute, right? So you try to talk some sense. If you take him out in a car, it makes like 700 wheel on there and they're grabbing the door handle like for dear life. And they're like, wow, this is plenty. I'm like, okay, well, we just saved you a bunch of money. Probably saved your life and your wife's not going to divorce you. Right? So you solve those problems, but you do need to get into the psyche of your customer and figure out, what are you doing, dude? Because it is the default number, 1,000.

Yeah.

Do you think it's too accessible, 1,000 horsepower?

Oh yeah. Yeah. It's easy to make the power.

Yeah. 1,000 horsepower is easier than it's ever been to make. And you can do it with a lot of factory components and pump E85 fuels. It's not the mystery that it was 15 years ago. You know, it's the norm. But it doesn't mean that everybody should have the norm.

Yeah. If you really, I think you should go out and talk to some people that have a plus 1,000 horsepower car and ask them, because a lot of times they're going to be like, well, when ship race is expensive and it's the drivability of them isn't always awesome. You know, a lot of those guys I talk to have more fun in a six to 800 horsepower car.

That's the number.

Yeah.

And here's the biggest thing. You know, you can, the difference between an 800 wheel car and a 1,000 wheel car, if you're looking at like a C7, Z06 or a 6th Gen Camaro is really just boost. You can make, you know, if all the components are there, you can make 800 wheel or you can make 1,000 wheel. It's going to drive and act the same. You have higher risk of braking at 1,000 horse, but you also have much less chance of winning a race on the street. You can't put it down. So the number you just said, the 6 to 800, anybody that's built 1,000, 1,300 horse cars, if they're playing on the street or, you know, on unprepped surfaces or they're not the most experienced racers, that 6 to 800 wheel is a lot easier to manage, a lot less prone to failure, and you can make it work on the street, you know?

What you're missing out of this discussion is the testosterone and ego that goes behind it.

Yeah, that's true.

Which is what feeds the industry.

Maybe it's, as I'm getting older, that's not as much of a problem. I could give a s*** less. I just want to have a good time.

Well, I mean, like, so we both grew up around, like, a C6, ZL6 was always, to me, like, the best car ever made, right?

Yeah.

And we know when they were the best, when they were a head cam package.

Yep.

Right? And then, of course, they never lasted like that. You know, you get a built motor, twin turbos, and of course, we had fun with it, but like, now they're not nearly as fun anymore. And I think as we get older, it's like, I just want to get another C606 for the head cam package.

That's why I'm saying you should go talk to one of those guys, because nine times out of the 10 guys that I talked to, they wish they would, you know, they had more fun in that realm than they are where they are now.

We've joked around about, you know, at least I had this joke down in Florida about having another division called Back to Stock Motorsports. Right? Because, you know, the guy just crosses over that abyss, and now he's just full blown, full on, buttons, knobs, dials, all kinds of s***. And he's realizing now, this is not nearly as fun as it was before I started this. And now you wish you could unwind the guy and get him back to something a little bit more civilized. That's the nature of the business.

We had John Dock on the show down in North Carolina a couple months ago, and he calls it leaving the fun zone. It's like, I was fun up until this point. Like, yeah, it's faster, but you're not in that fun zone anymore.

The dark side.

Have you had customers come here, try to revert every once in a while or not really?

The biggest thing that stands out to me, it's not really revert, but it was funny as hell. I had a C5 Z06 come over from Alabama years and years ago, and we supercharged it, headers. And I think, if I recall, the issue was, we put an ATI balancer on the car, and I told my guys to throw an overdrive on it so we could make a little bit more boost, and if we needed to change it, we could just change the upper and not have any belt slip issues. Well, we called the customer and told him he was out of fuel system because he was making X power, and the guy yelled at me for 10 minutes, asking me why I made so much power, and why did I go overdrive and this and that, and I'm like, you know, at that point, we would have been open 10 years, and I said, I can't believe I'm getting yelled at for making too much power. I've never had that happen.

You know what breaks my heart? No, it's not the 2% female demographic, it's the fact that 80% of you guys are not subscribed and following the show. So go ahead, hit subscribe or follow, and of course, if you're on YouTube, hit that bell so you are notified when we drop a new episode. Let's get back to the show.

But to answer your question, yeah. Typically, what happens, and you see this from a lot of shops, a guy will overbuild his car, and next thing you know, two weeks after he takes delivery, it's for sale. It's for sale, yeah.

We've seen that too, yeah.

You know, man, I promise you 80% of the cars for sale out there, big modified cars are people that built s*** that they shouldn't have built, and they didn't realize it till they got in it, or they're so disgusted with the shop, with how long it took to get built, and the amount of extra money that they weren't prepared to spend, things like that, and then you couple in reliability, and drivability and enjoyment, they just put it for sale.

The glamour's kind of gone.

There's so many shops that have broke car guys out there, for sure. Oh yeah. Yeah, they're back in a Hyundai, and they're like, f*** this.

I don't know if it gets that bad.

Yeah, I don't know, I've heard some horror stories.

That's why if you're program, you build in stages and packages, you can get people to kind of, we try to make sure that whatever they spent in round two, they would kind of need for three, and whatever's in three, they need for four. You get to some point where some stuff's going to go bye bye when you start getting up into the bigger builds, but people like also that kind of, it keeps the money flow, even though they're going to spend 20 grand in any way, it's three grand at a rip. So it's a mental game you play, and they may play from their wives, too, with their slush funds. I've been able to disperse the money out, but they really enjoy that next round. So I've enjoyed customers that will come in and be like, well, I'm going to do this now, but I'm definitely going to come in for the three, and then I'll go to the four. Those are good deals. It's the guys that come in here that are like, they go right to the mat, full on. Car came in, you're making 520 wheel, at least you're making 1150 wheel. It's a big job. It's doubled. It's nuts. We get numb to it, but at the same time, it's ridiculous.

Well, you probably oftentimes have people coming in here, and it's their first time in a four-digit car. Okay, the Internet tells me stages are bad, stages are made up, marketing ploys, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've also heard that sometimes, skip all the rebuilding process, just go straight to stage four, stage five, whatever, full-tailed build. Where do you guys stand on that?

I think it's up to the customer in the situation. For me, anytime I'm sitting down with somebody, financially, I always do what makes the most sense for the customer. What's your end goal? Okay. Okay, you're in here today for a cam, a ported blower, set of headers, and a cold air, but where are we 24 months from now? 60% of them are like, oh, this is all I'll ever do. Dude, I don't think you realize that you're kind of at a legalized crack house, you'll be back.

Yeah.

So let's, you know, what are you using the car for?

Okay.

If they say of any sort of competition at all, you know the build's gonna progress. Yeah. If they're drag racing, if they're half mile racing, if they're on a road course, they're gonna get bit and they're gonna come back and it's our job to plan for that upfront.

Okay.

Now, sometimes it's budget-oriented. Hey dude, I want to get here, but what makes the most sense to get there with what I have right now? And you set them up to go that direction, you know? Like when there's Gen 5 stuff, if you're gonna try to make 850, 900 wheel and you're putting a cam in it, it's almost idiotic to not go ahead and put ported heads on it because you're buying a spring kit for the cam, you're taking the heads off the engine anyway, you're buying head bolts and head gaskets, you need to find that extra 3 to 5 grand and get the free labor versus coming back in six months and doing the heads again. Now, some people enjoy the build experience. I've got customers that build cars, they buy them, build them and then sell them because they enjoy the buying experience, they enjoy working with us to spec out a cool build, modify it, see the finished results and then they flip it and start over. And then you've also got people that, hey, I'm willing to write the check and it makes absolutely the most sense to do it all at once to get where I'm going. And sure, financially that's always build it once, build it right, but everybody doesn't have the budget to match their goals. So sometimes you have to break it down in the stages. It's really dependent on where they are financially and what they're gonna do with the car.

So you might spend, you know, what, I'm just gonna throw a number out there, 20, 30% extra, but you were able to do that process along the way then. Yeah. Okay.

You know, Howard touched on, you know, dude, we got guys that hopefully not too many women watch your podcast, but...

It's a low number. It's like 2%.

All right, cool. You know, we got guys that will spend 50 grand with us and they'll hit us up, you know, a couple of days before they're coming in, pay the bill minus 1,500 bucks and come in and thank us for getting the transmission fixed and write a $1,500 check in front of their wife, you know. So there's a lot of variables in there as to how these guys can and do choose to spend their money.

What I did with my orange car, I was going to do an NA build, which was going to cost me 3, 4 grand. And then I decided to just 10 grand bolt of whipple to it. So I knew that was going to be my end goal. And the other money I had before that was just going to be wasted.

And now you're divorced.

No, no, no. No, now my wife has a pro-charge car. So yeah, yeah. So it's cool if you let her play too, then it works.

She's our 1% demographic.

There's 1% for sure.

We used to call that the wife witness protection program.

Yeah.

You know, just to play the game. But that's a whole other chapter in the book.

But you're right. That made the most sense to do it all at once and be done with it. You know, financially, you're going to spend the least and you have less chance of any redundancy throughout the build process of something being overlooked, not included, or, you know, worked on twice, whatever the case may be.

Yeah.

What's your ratio?

Oh, just I talked to us with the guy last night. The famous while you're in there.

Yeah.

Yeah. That costs you money every time.

What's your ratio of guys that want to compete, they're racers versus a guy that just wants a fast car?

So the company itself is broken down for both of those customer basis. We've got our production shop and we try to keep that 1,100 and under. Factory ECUs and Leicester's port injection on a Gen 5, little to no fabrication, pump gas, E85, stuff like that. Then we have our race division, which is up to 4,000 horsepower. Custom fab, twin turbos, chassis cars, fuel tech, ECUs, you name it. Obviously, those guys are highly competitive. But in the production shop, man, I would say 30 to 40 percent of the cars never get used to their potential. I have guys, they've made it. They're a business owner. They built them way up through whatever corporate company they work in, 40s, 50 years old, and they're ready for their reward. They go out and buy whatever it is, a Gen 3 V or a Corvette, Z06, ZR1. They want that old muscle car sound, and they might punch it on the way to work at 6 o'clock in the morning on the interstate and cruise to a car show. But that's about it. Then we do, 60 percent of them, they follow us to races. We do a lot of track support, and we show up to events all over the country to support our customers at these events. Do our best to put them in the winner circle or at least go rounds.

Going rounds is such a big thing. Some customers, they'd love to win. But going rounds and making it past at least one round is something.

So I tell all of my customers, and I don't say this because we lose a lot, because that's not the case. We have a pretty good success rate of going anywhere in the country and bringing back a s******* of wins. But the reality of it is, a win is going rounds, maybe going a little faster than you went last time, and then driving that b**** in the trailer, or driving it home, you know? If you go to the winner's circle, 90% of the time, that's just luck. The faster guy broke, he spun, you hooked, whatever the case may be.

There's so many variables.

Yeah, there's too many variables to put that in play, to say I just went out there, and I was the fastest car, and I performed every pass like it should. You know, the fastest guy doesn't always win, and that's because there's a lot of luck involved, you know?

Yeah.

You got one? Go ahead.

No, please go ahead.

Okay, so what is, I'm a Ford guy, right? I woke up this morning, I hit my head real hard, now I want to buy something GM. What's my entry level? I want to come in, I want something most reliable, six, 800 horsepower range. What should I go get?

Well, first of all, I want to welcome you back to reality.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, your family and your doctors have been waiting for you a long time to regain consciousness. Glad you're back. You know, the Gen 5 platform, which is probably 80 to 85% of our core business, it's real hard to ignore. Factory supercharged, forged internals, they support, you know, you can take a C7 Z06 as an example and put ported heads, a cam, port the stock blower or upgrade to a Magnuson 2650 and you can make a thousand wheel on E85 and drive the car every day.

What kind of world is it when your new balances got more miles than your car? It's a world where you thought a stock ECU from over a decade ago would cut it, not knowing there's a way to get better traction control, launch control, and most importantly, engine protection features. It's a world where you didn't know you could save 5% on a Haltech Plug and Play kit for your C6 Corvette using code Minnoxide. How's that jingle go again? Go to toonbyshawnshawn.com to get your Haltech goodies and see what's right for your build. Whether it be a C6 Corvette, a Supra, or any other project you've been cooking, there's a solution for you. Link in the description. Let's get back to the show.

I mean, a lot of them, you can do that with both of them. You know, especially 600 wheel to 675-700 wheel, you don't have to go into the engine. You know, ATI balancer, set of nice long tube headers, aggressively ported blower, good cold air, key calibration, you know, you can do that with both of ones. You put a camshaft in it, a set of ported heads, put it on E85 and mid-800s is usually where you land. Okay. So, you know, the one thing I will say, you know, this being a Ford guy, that GT500, the power for power if you will, take a Gen 5 PD car versus a GT500, that GT500 is a blast. We work on Fords. Four or five years ago, we started opening up on a case by case basis. You know, we talk to the customer, we make sure it's a vehicle that we want to work on and be involved with. We make sure that their goals and parts selection are things that align with us. But you know, you take a GT500, you throw a big cold air on it, port the stock blower, big throttle body, set of long tubes, some injectors. You're making 900 on pump and 1050 on E. And I love those cars, man, because you can go out on a set of Toyos on the street, hit it from a second gear roll at like 30, and that torqueless motor will just paint black stripes as it pins you to the C. And then when it gets up in that power and takes you to 8,800 RPM, dude, it just works so well.

You just brought memories back of me driving Mark's car. Literally, it was still in the stock Cup 2, actually Cup 2R or whatever. Again, it made 1014 to the wheels, 30 miles an hour, just pin it and just goes. Just it's ridiculous. I wanted to ask you though, so what do you mostly or primarily, hold on, do you use the word calibrate or tuning?

Calibrate.

Okay, so you're from that banished circle then.

Well, I mean, that's really, you know, I've gotten flame for that for many years. Now everybody's using it. So it kind of made sense. And the OE calls it calibrating.

Right, yep.

And because I play guitar, I always tell people I tune my guitars and I calibrate cars.

I was going to say, I saw the Eddie Van Halen one in your profile.

Yeah, so that's how I get out of out of that. But yeah, I mean, calibrating is the art of getting a car's computer back to where it needs to be based on the mods that you put in it. So there's some finessing going on with it. So I'm going to stick with that word.

OK, so what do you primarily, you mentioned there's a lot of stock ECU stuff in here. I see a FuelTech shirt. Is that primarily the two that you stick with or?

Yeah, I mean, the OEM stuff. I mean, it's amazing, especially guys that have been in it for a minute, know how to navigate around that controller. At some point, you can reach its limit, but it goes quite a ways. When you're building cars that we do on the race shop side of it, I mean, you've taken all the factory functionality out of the car anyway. There's no need to have to dance around all the idiosyncrasies of a factory controller. So, FuelTech has been our big boy controller. We're fortunate enough those guys are only 25, 30 minutes from here. Awesome, awesome guys. And the controller is pretty hardcore and will support all this stuff. So, you know, that Holley has always been the bread and butter controller. But, you know, the majority of stuff on the production side is all factory ECU stuff.

Okay.

It works.

So, do you basically go FuelTech once it migrates from the production side over to the race car side of things then?

Well, we can, I mean, we've done some blending. We've got some cars that are running factory ECUs and like a Holley. You know, for Port Fuel. FuelTech just recently released their new FT700 controller, which is pretty b***** for me who likes technology. It's amazing.

That's the big one that we saw yesterday. Yeah. It's a big boy.

Yeah. I mean, that's a controller they built for the next 10 years.

Right.

So, it's got a lot of expanded capability. We're in pretty good with those guys, so we're kind of partaking in some of the beta and it's evolved, it's evolution. And for me, it's more home, because it's got a lot of factory OEM capabilities, which most guys aren't going to understand. So, the cars that we build on this side are all pretty much going to be fuel tech cars.

Okay.

We like the, it's back to that consistency again, right? You know, if we got six or seven monsters between 2000 and 3,500 horsepower and we wire them the same, the strategies of how the system integrates are the same, it's much better for the customer, us for diagnosing, us for getting the car's dial in because of that consistency. So we're kind of married with it.

Do you kind of want to touch on what's, I mean, kind of alluded to it already, but that FT 700 plus package, what kind of, again, from your perspective, what makes you excited to work with that going forward for the next, again, 10 years?

Well, I mean, One Fuel Tech is a great company that has definitely proven themselves in the hardcore world. I mean, they're on every Pro Mod and radial tire car out there that's fast, right? I mean, their stuff works. And their prior controller, which is the FT 600, which is no computer that's going into retirement anytime soon, it has a certain limit of what you can do with it with all kinds of neat stuff. And the 700 just has all kinds of customizability, faster processor, so you could push it further and do more with it. And we like working with current new stuff. It's like anybody else, a new vet comes out, they gotta have the next model. But all the stuff that we tie into a car, whether it's shoot deployment, safety equipment, active arrow, suspension control, being able to log video footage on the same log as the log going down the track, just got a lot of cool stuff out of it. So for us, it's like, why not have that on the cars we build at that level? I mean, these are not cheap cars, these are $150,000 to $350,000 Builds. You want good stuff and from my side of it, from the power management control, I mean, you want stuff that's smart, fast, consistent and they just got some cool features coming out with the controller.

I think with the car yesterday, we saw a backup camera and it was like a full on like-

Yeah, it was a pro mod.

Pro mod, yeah.

They're driving pro mods on the street now. Yeah. So, stuff like that's important. People always want to make the power, but they always want to skimp out on safety and engine management, which are the two biggest things you should be spending money on. You want that engine management to protect your investment, and you want the safety upgrades to protect you. But most people just want to go A to B as fast as they can, and that other stuff is extra money they don't like to spend.

Yeah, well pop a motor and then tell me how you feel.

Right, when your ECU kills the ignition because it sends the problem, you're pretty appreciative of it at that point.

So again, it varies by tier of car that comes out of here, but what are some safety packages that you try to sell to customers?

So we implemented safety years ago with when we were getting really big into the half mile scene. The half mile scene, totally different than drag racing. Drag racers are usually a little bit more experienced. You got your first timers, but they've been there, they've done that usually and they understand. Even when they don't understand, the tracks have mandates for you, long pants, long sleeves, helmets, seats, cages at some point, stuff like that. The half mile had nothing for years. When it started, going 145.5 was big. You blinked and suddenly 200 is the number. Yeah.

Starting for some of these guys.

Yeah. So we really step back and we said, okay, if there's no sanctioning body that's going to do this, as a company, we're going to protect our customers. It was really simple. If you modify a car with us and you're going to show up at these events and race under our umbrella, pit with us, get track support with us, you're going to have required safety based on vehicle speed. And we try to keep it within realm of normalcy for the customer to where it wasn't a huge financial impact and it didn't impose on their street cars, but at the same time kept them safe. Helmet, fire extinguisher, parachutes at certain speeds, harness bar and harnesses at certain speeds. And then as you got faster, full fire suit, full cage, actual fire suppression, stuff like that.

And what level is that? Like what mile per hour are we talking?

I mean, I started at 150, you had to have a DOT helmet, long pants, long shirt. I didn't do shoots at 150 in the half.

But I think that's the speed for NHRA.

Yeah, for NHRA, yeah. You know, the half mile is a different world. And a lot of these people are showing up in their street cars, and they don't want any of that stuff. You know, I got 60, 70 year old guys that are coming out and racing half mile with us for the first time in their life, and they have a blast. But they also like drive the car to their VFW meet on a Tuesday night, you know? So you got to be careful. So the biggest thing for me was driver containment. If I can, you know, at the half mile, you got tons of real estate to slide around all over the place, minimal chance of hitting another car. Really looking at the accidents that happened, you had very few turnovers, you know? Cars slid around and came to a stop every now and then, bumped into something. So my goal was to keep people in the seat. You know, we did a HANS device, a helmet, long clothing, fire extinguisher, harness bar and harnesses, and kept you secure if something happened, you're likely going to walk away. But and that was like 160 and it teared up to full cages and fire seats.

Okay. So I'm curious, what is your fastest half mile car?

I guess it's still Ned with the orange Viper. Okay. Ned went to 233. Okay. I've been 217 in a C6Z, and we've got a C7 that's been 220. He's right on Ned's heels, high 220s, 226, 228. Okay. I built my car to actually go out and compete with Morris Malone for the real-world drive record.

That's a crazy car.

The Half Mile itself has kind of gotten, it's dwindled down a little bit. Okay. And Morris is just such a cowboy. I'm like, dude, I'm going to stick to the track. So I kind of refocus my energies there. You know, I think he's going for 250s or already clipped like a 252 or something.

Yeah, 253, dude.

252, 253, yeah. And it's, you know, I know what it was like to do 217. And the Half Mile stuff's really awkward to talk about, to like a real racer. You know, you go to an 8th mile track and you pick up some RVW dude and you're telling him about Half Mile, and you're like, yeah, I went 230 and a half. And he's like, boy, I go 210 and the 8th. They can't correlate it. But they're not out there with an unprepped surface spinning for the first quarter of a mile. It's just a totally different ball game.

Oh, that's what I was trying to think. So again, I love harping on the safety thing, especially after we had Calvo on episode 130, I think, 129, whatever. You know, obviously, everybody saw his accident at the half mile. So I've chatted with race tech ever since. Is that why? What's your go to seat? I'm just curious. Where's it all over the place?

It depends on the application. We use a lot of quirky stuff. We use a lot of Recaro's. I've got Recaro podiums going in a 3000 horse car right now, because it is going to have a lot of street use, but he's also going to compete. And we've got a good, rigid foundation of a seat that we know is high quality, but still gives them a little bit of comfort.

Is that bouncing back and forth between street car and race car too?

Yeah, we have our street customers, and we have our race customers. Both of them are very easy to navigate. It's when you get that strace guy that wants his cake and eat it too. He wants to not only race, but he wants to be competitive and win in these events, but then wants to go home and change his 15 inch radials to a 20 inch Toyo and take his wife to dinner. And he wants the best of both worlds. And that's, it's not difficult to achieve, but it has certainly got more challenges in just building one or the other.

You're probably not going to be able to do either one at 100%.

And that's what you have to tell them, you know? I've had people that have built cars that, and Howard can attest to this, they want to drive it through downtown Atlanta traffic. They want to go to Road Atlanta on Saturday, and then SGMP on Sunday, and they want to compete in classes at both. Can you do it? Sure. Are you going to be as effective as you would be if you built it for one specific thing? No, you're not. At that point, it's a mixed-use vehicle. If you want to go out and win as competitive as things are today, and the amount of money people are willing to throw at things to be competitive, you got to be specific to it. I mentioned Ned earlier. Ned started with us with the Orange Viper, and he got a touch or a taste of going really fast, took him down to SGMP, watched some lights out races, and next thing you know, he was building the Blue Viper.

Yeah, that's a crazy one.

Isn't it amazing? That car is phenomenal. But he built the Blue Viper, and he wanted to drag race it, he wanted to drag and drive it, and he had specific goals outlined for the car. What happened the first year? He goes out and he runs a couple of RBW races. Turns out to be one hell of a driver at that level. He's always been a driver, but he goes out there with RBW, but he's got a multi-purpose Viper, and he's a tenth and a half behind what he needs to be to run at that level. Now he's in an orange Camaro, and he's right there with him. So, you know, he's put Stevie Fast on the trailer a couple of times, and I don't think he's taken any wins at RBW yet, but he's been second place, and he's in that same realm as far as ET and Mount Our that he needs to be, and his program is virtually new.

Okay. So you still have a relationship with him then?

Yeah. Ned outgrew what we are willing to offer.

Right.

I like to stay where we should be. You know, I don't think you can be great at everything. You know, you got to specialize, and I like to think we know our limitations, you know, and the world he's in now is, you know, RK Racecraft, Proline and FuelTech.

Right.

And that's ultimately where he evolved to.

So we just stick with a measly 3000 horsepower.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

See, you guys are pretty pro-mod.

Just a little, yeah.

There's a lot of shops out there that oversell themselves quite a bit. So that's a good business practice to not...

You have to know your limitations.

You seem very aware.

Otherwise, you're in over your head, and it goes back to what I said earlier, you take that guy's money, and you don't deliver the product. Nobody wins. And quite honestly, you didn't make any money on the job because you spent so much time and invested so much time in figuring out how to make it work or why it didn't work and navigating your pissed off customer that you should have just said no to the job and sent them to somebody. And that's what happened with Ned. When he started talking Blue Viper, we immediately said, Billet 481X and RK for a chassis, you know? We have the capabilities internally to build a chassis, but is it what we do every day? Do we know every little in and out secret to make that chassis perform the way it needs to to be competitive? You gotta know your limitations.

Oh, you're gearing up on me over there.

Well, I'm leaking so much water, I gotta keep hydrated.

Yeah, it's toasty down here. Oh, so I was gonna ask you earlier. So obviously the shop started in 2006, and you know you had your shop. But what happened before that, right? Were you guys just on the street back in the day? Like, where's the origins of you guys being car guys?

So for me, I was always a car guy. I 15 years old, my first vehicle was a 77 Jeep CJ5.

Okay.

And I lived with my grandparents, so my grandfather would walk out in the driveway and just yell his a** off at me because I'd have it up in the air when Cinderblock's doing any upgrade I could think of at the time, you know, and he didn't want me working on the car in the driveway, getting grease on the driveway. Ultimately, I went into military and I was a Mustang guy. Spent four years with the 75th Ranger Regiment down at Fort Betting. And when I got out, I had a 97 Mustang Cobra Triple Black. Everything in the world you could possibly do to it. And it was, you know, on a good day, it was a 12-2, 12-3 car. And I was traveling up through Atlanta and rolled up on a red 4th Gen Camaro. And I thought I was king s***, you know. I was an Army Ranger for four years. I had a Cobra with everything in the world, 48 gears, you know. So of course, I rolled up, downshift a couple of gears. He looks over at me and just straight up f****** laughs at me. We get after it and this dude put bus links on me, just bus links. I catch up to him 30 minutes later, get him to pull over. Next day, I owned the car. Turns out it was one of the first fourth gens in Georgia to have heads cam on it. And it had a hundred shot of nitrous, you know, 10 second car versus a 12 second car. So that turned me into an LS guy overnight. I sold the Cobra and got heavily involved in that car and that platform. My plan was to go into higher level law enforcement when I got out of the military. I'm not a huge politically correct guy. There was a lot of politics, a lot of things going on that once I took a close look at it, I said, this isn't for me. Followed my passion, which was cars. Went to work for a company about an hour from here called GMMG.

Why does that sound familiar?

They built specialty cars for GM. The Dick Harrell Edition, 4th Gen's with the wide bodies, Dale and Heart Intimidator SS's.

Didn't they do some weird Audi R8 that was a special wide body? No, I'm thinking of something else.

No, everything they did was 4th Gen platform, TA and Camaro. So got a job over there and had no formal experience, but just worked my way through the ranks. Like I said earlier, that place wasn't open to the public, but people that knew me knew what I did and where I did it. And they were like, hey man, can we do heads cam on my car this weekend? So we would work with them and we had an instant following as far as people wanting to work on the cars. When that place started to change directions and we knew it was time to do something new, I was like, you know, let's open a speed shop. Let's go out here and fix the industry and do this the right way.

And was that right around like that 2006 time? A little before?

Okay. Yeah, we, I still worked there for probably six months of overlap while we, you know, secured the building, got a couple of customers, things like that. But yeah, I was still there a couple of months and then dove in head first in 06.

Okay.

And been cool and strong ever since.

Did you have some money stowed away at this point when you were jumping into the shop? No?

No, that's funny. I was early 20s, didn't have a pot to piss in. My side hustle outside of work was I was porting F-body throttle bodies back in the day. You know, if you picked up five, seven horsepower and a little bit of throttle response, you were doing good. But, you know, that was fluff money for me, but lived in an apartment, made 50 grand a year and didn't have a pot to piss in. I just had faith in myself.

Okay.

So then luckily I was not wrong.

How did that conversation go with that Camaro guy?

I mean, once we got done laughing, you know, as soon as we pulled into the parking lot and I heard the car, m***********, you got to be kidding me. You know, a heads cam F-body at that point was unheard of. You know, he was literally one of the first in Georgia, and I was just floored by the car, you know. We laughed about it, cut up a little bit. I'm not used to losing. He didn't lose. Hey man, you interested in selling it? You got to be s******* me, right? No, I'm not. I can go to the bank right now and write you a check. With a loan, of course, at 21 years old. But he's like, man, if you want it, this is the number. Met him the next day, gave him a check and hopped in my car. Wow.

If you don't mind divulging, do you remember what you paid for it?

Upper 20s, 26, 28. You know, I mean, it was a nice car. It was super clean back then. It was a year old. It was built by a local shop. And it's like anything, the parts that were on it, that's kind of what I've keep going back to with why we opened. It had a GM ASA cam with stock ported 853 heads. It was essentially garbage, you know. On a good day, it made 399 at the wheels, but then you'd spray 100, 150 shot on it and hope it didn't blow up. But, you know, I winded up redoing everything about the car doing a set of TEA heads with Tully, Spectrum own cam, you know, changed the headers, winded up making, you know, I winded up forging the bottom end at some point, but winded up making over 500 wheel with heads cam, just using the right components and doing some testing.

You still have that car?

No, funny story, you know, I owned that car while I worked at GMMG. And when we were rolling into that Dick Harrell edition wide body, we had to work with General Motors on that wide body concept. It was based off of a blue Sonoco car that GM had built, but they didn't create any molds or have any reference as far as duplicating the body kit. So the owner of the company said, you know, F bodies were real hard to get a hold of at that point. So anything he procured was allocated to a customer that was brand new. And he basically said, hey, you know, since your car is a couple of years old, you've beat the s*** out of it. If you'll let me use it as a donor car to send to General Motors, they're going to cut 5,000 holes in it and then attach red clay to it and shave it to create the body so that they can create the molds off of that. In return, I'll give you a set of panels and we'll build you a Dick Harrell car. So, you know, as we navigated that process, that's what happened and we did my car as what we called the Dick Harrell drag car, DHDC1, painted it candy apple red like Dick Harrell's original 69s, you know, put a 12 bolt in it, turbo 400, and made it a drag car and then ultimately sold it. When I left that company and opened this place up, sold it for, it was pretty cool, sold a 4th Gen Camaro for, I think it was 119 that I got for the car. Okay. So it actually came back here. I think you were here last year when it was back, weren't you? Might have been the year before, but it set in the museum for the past 15 years. And another dude from the Midwest who was a customer of mine here, bought the car and then sent it to me to go through it and freshen it, and just kind of have my way with it for a little bit.

Okay, that's a throwback.

That is pretty cool. Yeah.

Full circle.

Yeah.

Well, how about your origin story then? Where is that?

You get in the film? How many decades you want them to go back here?

Yeah. Well, the fact that he said film is already telling us.

It's going to be a silent movie for this part.

Let us just put a new reel on. Yeah.

I mean, long before driving, I was a kid that was into electronics. I spent a lot of time at Radio Shack buying devices and things. I had an uncle and a grandfather that were both engineers, so it was always around intellectual things like that. Then when the state of New York decided to give me a driver's license at 16, actually I was 15, I bought a 69 Firebird with a small block in it for 650 bucks. Of course, I didn't have a driver's license. I used to get home from school at 230. My mother wasn't home till like 6. So that car went ripping up and down the roads, and I had to put it back in the same spot it was. When I took it out, nobody would identify it. So my life just started with carburetors and muscle cars and all that stuff. And my mother came home one day with an 82 IROC. An 82 was really the transition point at the fuel injection. The carburetor was gone in 81. And having a background of electronic stuff, as soon as I popped the hood and started looking, and I'm like, that's gotta be for fuel. There's a ninth injector in the back, must be for cold startup. There's a sensor here in the mass. And I just, you talk about the beginnings, that was the beginning.

So-

That's that two and four injection, right? Wasn't that kind of garbage too, technically?

Well, it's garbage as we sit here now. Yeah, that's true. But back then, it was bad to the bone, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You gotta put it all in perspective, you know? So that was the beginning of that. My buddy and I went out and bought 88, 89 IROCs afterwards. And we were doing stuff with Lingenfelter with the SuperRAM Intake. And back then, you had to have the computer reprogrammed by somebody else. And it was just a whole, but it was cutting edge stuff, you know? And as time evolved, I think I bought a 92 Corvette, which now the now multi-port got more sequential, got more sophisticated. And we started going fast with the cars, you know? And here's a time when you're at a drag strip with a laptop, and people are like, why do you have a laptop in your car? You're at the drag strip, now it's no big deal, right? You know, but it was pretty neat. And this is, you know, there's no internet. There was nothing to learn from them. You were really kind of scratching and clawing from it. And I started building my own cars and then building cars with my friends till finally you're at the track. And people are like, how'd you get the car to go that fast? I did whatever. You want to do mine? All right. And that's how it starts, you know? One, the next one, the next one. And it just keeps evolving. I actually, when I graduated, I went to an automotive college up in New York. And when I graduated there, I got accepted out to Detroit for engineering. And I kind of held off on it because I felt that the best engineers or guys with dirt under their nails, kind of like Mr. Vanish, we'll call it, right? We'll plug for Greg Vanish. You know, so I basically kind of put that off and said, well, I'm going to go work at a dealership. And I had all the dealerships wanting all the guys out of college that were in that top 2% of the class. And about a year and three quarter through that, I got in a really bad car accident, ended up in the hospital. And while I'm in the hospital, I get diagnosed with cancer. So a lot of stuff's going on at one time. And it basically derailed my trip to Detroit. And I found myself getting into another industry, the glass industry. And the cars kind of sat for a little bit, but then the cars were evolving. And-

What time period was this, by the way?

This was 1989. 89 is when the cancer started.

How old were you at that time, then, roughly?

20 maybe.

20? Okay.

Something like that. Was your car crash fast car related?

No, I got pounded by a tractor trailer that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. And luckily I walked away from it. But it did induce me to get into another medical situation that I had to resolve anyway that I hadn't even known about. So you kind of knock on wood, you wonder why it happens. But then I had some big block cars and still back in the carbureted stuff. And then I bought that 92 LT1 Corvette brand new. And it was just game on. And of course we didn't have a lot of stuff for that either. But I had a car run in 1050s, 1040s back then. And that was kind of unheard of. Right. And that just kind of opened up that Pandora's box. As I started building more cars and then LS came out, I mean, that was just, it was a good time, you know? And I was actually dealing with a shop down in New Jersey for the tuning at that point. And it was a struggle. Three and a half hour trip, waiting all day long. I get the cars back, engine lights, they drove like s*** and everything else. And that was my departure into calibration. And I bought a dyno, and then my life was forever changed afterwards and been consumed with it. And so Redline Motorsports, which started in New York, was, you know, it was a hobby gone mad. And that's what happens, you know, it's your passion. And the demand was so high and there was nobody up there doing it. And then you get obsessive with it. And we had talked earlier about like, you know, how do you evolve it? What happens next? And, you know, what's the next model coming out? You know, how do you go out and get the next car and have something that's a record, which now today is kind of a joke. But, you know, you had cutting edge stuff to do that with. And you don't look back. And next you know, you got to shop, you got people and you've got a brand building. But, you know, it started from a hobby gone mad, I say. I'm fortunate, though, looking back at the growing up around a carburetor and realizing that if you made one horsepower per cubic inch, it was pretty b*****. And then we talk about cars today. I mean, look at the new ZR1 Corvette. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just, it's insane.

You think you guys will get that in at some point in the next few years?

Yeah. I mean, the problem with that and what we find with the new ZL6 is that we're calibration limited at the moment. And even when we do get on that, it's going to be, you're going to need some smart guys. Yeah. Which we have to be able to manhandle that. But watching that whole evolution from making 265 wheel and you're a b***** to finally breaking 400 with an LS car, to what we're doing today is just-

Crazy.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah. But- It's funny that you mentioned that you were all excited about fuel injection. When I collect some Fox Body stuff, and when I first started buying them, it wasn't uncommon to get an 89 or a 90, that somebody had pulled all that s*** off and put a carburetor back on it. It was super annoying. I had to go source all that other s*** then and get it put back together.

Well, I mean, that's what's cool about the carburetion side of it. I got good with a carburetor because I'm like, I got to figure out how this works to make the car run good, right? Yep. And in retrospect, looking back at it and comparing it to fuel injection, what a barbaric piece of s*** it was, but it worked. And if you think about it, calibration work today is still doing the same functions. You still have idle, you still have off-idle, you still have acceleration enrichment, you still have wide open throttle. We're just dealing it with way more infinite and finite specific control than we did. So I still get it in my head. I still geek out about that.

Yeah.

You know, and now I've gone back. It's been a while, but I've had a couple of guys bring me carbureted cars and I'm like, let's do this. You know, because it's so simplistic because of all the detailed depth that you now learn in the modern day with stuff.

Right.

But I'm fortunate for growing up in that era and being around those earlier cars when... I mean, there's things that it's kind of funny, like, you know, car stay, we put port fuel on them, right? On the DI cars, you know. That was stuff that we were doing back in 90, 89 on a C4 with a supercharger because we had no other way of getting enrichment. So I actually had done a 15 ZL6 when they came out and I went back to old school, like, make a plate, put an injector in there. I got a small wheel controller and I just blasted fuel through it. And, you know, we we made a thousand horsepower at a time when it wasn't happening, but it was my roots. Yeah, is the point I'm trying to get it is, you know, I'm fortunate to have seen that evolution. Where today these modern day kids, they don't, you know, they they're picking up what they can pick up today. But that that basis is what that's the experience.

Oh, there's I'm sure there's a s*** ton of them out there that have never even seen a carburetor.

Yeah, you know, what is that anyway? You keep saying this word.

Well, I sold my 69 Continental, otherwise I'd show you.

It's something you take off to put fuel injection on.

Yeah.

It was when guys were doing it, when I'm talking about the Fox stuff, it's because they didn't understand this other stuff. So it was the only way they could tune them, right? It was back when you had to burn chips in order to get s*** to work.

Oh, I mean, I've been through so many people during that evolution that were the older guys, you know, they're older than me and they came from raw carburetor stuff. And they're like, oh, that's stupid stuff. And they couldn't understand it. And then years later, they bought themselves a brand new Camaro.

Yep.

Oh, wow, I got air conditioning and XM radio. And this thing is pretty, this will beat the crap out of my 69 Camaro. And they they started understanding that it's nothing to be afraid of. You just have to it's this whole different thought process behind it, you know, and it's they won't know what it's like to not have a cup holder, to put your big, dumb cup in.

Yeah, that's what sold you into GT 500.

Well, I made the jump, I went right from Fox Body. I mean, I had some other cars in between there or whatever, but my Fox and then my next car that was really building, I bought a 2015 GT. And so I made the joke that I spent 25K to get a cup holder because the Fox didn't have s*** in it. But then I got cool seats and Bluetooth.

I mean, in this day and age, you shouldn't have spent anything. You can sell a coupe for 25, 30 grand these days.

I still have a collection of Fox bodies. We're good. I don't have any more coupes because I did sell them all off, but.

Who ever would have thought that a $5,000 car would be worth 30 grand 15 years later?

Well, and then when I was, everybody liked the GTs, the hatchback with all the plastic molding and s*** on it. And now it's like, I want an LX notch and that's it.

So.

You gave me an idea. I want to make a Minnoxide classifieds section to the website now.

Yeah.

Here's what Dan has for sale. It's okay. Do you guys do any racing yourselves still? Or are you just so busy with the business?

That's the subject isn't it? It's the business owner blues. Right.

Yeah. You know, mechanics car never runs, painters cars never painted. Yep.

You're closer than I am though, Ron.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got a C6 Z06, the one that went. Is it a white? Yeah. That went to 17 and a half. I talked about earlier. Well, it was 17 or 18, 2017, 2018. When I ran that pass, we were at a runway in North Carolina. And when I deployed the parachute, it literally ripped right off the anchor in half. Too fast, too heavy, not enough chute. Going back to that safety thing that we really pushed on. So at that point we said, you know, we got to set the example. We got a 10 point, but we're 3,600 pounds. You know, let's do a full chassis on this car, blah, blah, blah. Well, fast forward to 2025, and my car is literally sitting at FuelTech today. They upfit it from the FT 600 to the FT 700, and it should be ready to go to the track as early as next week. Okay.

So basically just, what, seven years? It was kind of just on the sidelines?

Yeah. You know, every time we would have good intentions, we would stop. And the problem with that too, Howard and I both are pretty extreme OCD perfectionists. So if I'm going to invest in the building of the car, of course, I love racing. But also people know that if you want to become a millionaire in racing, that you need to start with two million. Yeah. So I'm not a huge proponent of investing tons of money for just the sheer purpose of racing, going back to that whole speed shop, not being crazy lucrative deal. So for me, I wanted to build a car that we could showcase our talents and our capabilities, work with the vendors that we work with and show people the limitations of the LS world, which has now become the LT world. But it's a new and small block, 438 inch engine, twin precision turbos, lock up 400 and on the FT 600 over at FuelTech, it made 3072, took a tire, went 50 pounds of boost. Pretty confident we would have saw 33, 3400 or 65ish, which is where we set it up to run. We just literally ran out of time. Came back here, was gonna take it racing, had some stuff take priority, and next thing I know, the 700's coming out, and well, let's just put that in, since it's the latest and greatest. That's my toy, should be on the track by the end of the month, if all goes well. My garage ornament is a C8 Z06. That's us showing our age. We both have one, and it's amazing how much fun they are stock, to the point that you don't want to modify the car, because GM has just done such an amazing job with it.

You said ornament, though. Is everything okay?

Oh, yeah.

I just pull it out.

I've heard things. No, I drive it like it's meant to be driven, but I try not to put a ton of miles on it. Something we've done as a company for the past 15 years is every time a new vehicle comes out, the company will purchase it, and we do all the R&D on that in-house versus a customer coming up with the car and, hey, what can you do? Oh, man, we can do anything. B*******. If you haven't done the testing, you haven't worked through the calibration side of it, know what works, what doesn't. You know, when the Gen 5 came out, that LT was a whole different animal to the power capabilities, the calibration side of it. All of that was night and day. You can't learn that on somebody's car. So we'll go out and buy, you know, we bought a C6 Grand Sport with the LS3. We've had C6 Zs, C7, Sting Ray, Z06, ZR1, 6th Gen Camaro, and we do all our testing and implementation on that so that we can show you real world results. The cool factor is I get to beat the s*** out of it for six months to a year, and then usually flip it and get what's coming out next. I'm waiting on my ZR1, who knows what we'll be able to do, at least for the foreseeable future. But how do you find out if you don't have one in the shop?

Right. Real quick, how are you doing on time?

I got a little more time.

Okay. I was asked, so are you calibrating that half mile car then, or how's that your 06 build?

So what we typically do, Howard's got a real close relationship as the company does with FuelTech. Okay. But for like an initial startup file and initial dyno testing, we're actually doing that at FuelTech.

Okay.

It has zero to do with Howard's calibration abilities, and more so they created the product, they tuned thousands of cars a year going down the track with every single application, and they're going to maybe catch something that we wouldn't. And it also just allows us to work with them closely, learn from them, and then get some, you know, they like seeing the little small block LSs, you know, versus their 570 inch big block billet setups, you know, with triple digit turbos. So we do that, and then, yeah, when we go to the track, Howard's the man behind the keyboard, you know, FuelTech, OE, whatever it is, we take over from there.

Okay. I definitely want to talk about track support here in a minute, but what was your, so your pride and joy at home, I guess, what are you, are you doing any racing then or?

I got an Arsenal stuff that has traveled down from New York to Florida, and it sat for 12 years in Florida. It's now up in Georgia of cars that were, I mean, I've got my 2010 Twin Turbo Camaro with 15,000 miles on it. It was probably one of the first 2010 Camaros when the Camaro came back. And it's a nice car. I enjoy it and I haven't got a chance to enjoy it, which is part of my whole transition to Georgia to enjoy that stuff.

Yeah, nice car. My buddy says, the car is so nice, they killed it twice.

They killed it twice, yeah.

Anyway, sorry.

Yeah, I mean, my CA Z06, I took out Sunday. I've had it for a year. I think I just broke 1,150 miles on it, which is pathetic. Some of this has just been the transition moving up here and getting situated with a new house, whatever. And then I got my Z06 race car, which I bought brand new in 2006, C6 Z06. The car I brought home and my buddies asked me what I was going to do with it. I'm like, I'm not going to do anything to it. Now it's completely, you know, six second certified cage in it, twin turbos hanging out the fenders. And I kind of, it was another car that really hadn't been on the tracks since 17. And the build kind of, I had to get the build to a point for moving up to Georgia. And then when I got up here, we just stuck it in the warehouse. And I just picked it up out of the warehouse, like two weeks ago, to start sniffing at it. That car's got a pretty nasty Holley install on it, but I got a pile of FuelTech parts for it. And for me, as much as I want to get out there with our customers and get out there and have fun with it, that's a test bed for me for the FT700 to really work the s*** out of it. Same reason why we talked about, you know, you buy your own cars for development. And, you know, the FuelTech stuff is still, they're adding new stuff to that stuff weekly. It's that new of a system. And I think to be able to support my roles here at Vengeance with calibration, I mean, if you can work it all out with your own car and you can spend time on a Saturday on the dyno with it and make it all work, you're just providing a better product to those customers that are coming in for the bigger builds. So, yeah, we were just at that event in...

Rockingham.

In Rockingham.

Yeah, we saw you guys down there.

And, you know, you get a little bit sentimental because you want to be out there with a car. And, you know, for me as the calibrator and had been the shop owner, it's hard to go out there with your own car and do s*** because you're babysitting all the time.

Well, how many cars were you guys supporting at Rockingham?

Six, maybe?

Why don't we have nine?

Yeah, it was some of the street cars.

Some of the lighter guys don't require much, but we're one of the few shops in the country that go out with the amount of heavy hitters that we do. You know, it's nothing for us to show up with five or six bottom eight second cars that require a s******* of effort to keep them going down the track. You know, so yeah, if a guy runs 950s, we're like, ah, cool, if you need anything, let us know.

That's cute, yeah. Well, that, if you have as many cars as that and you're in a lot of classes, you would be busy, although we did notice there seemed to be a lot of downtime at that event.

Well, that's racing anyway, and you know, this.

Well, Nate, I think Nate does a really, really good job with Bragging Rights, the way he structures it and organizes it. He's trying not to lean on the cars with back-to-back rounds and make it an enjoyable event to be at.

Yeah.

That's something a lot of promoters don't focus on. So I give him kudos for that. For us also, it was, we've kind of become a very well-oiled machine, and we're very fortunate that our team, man, we go to the track and if you tell a guy to swap a transmission on his back in 100-degree heat at most places, you can't pay that dude enough to do that. And at Vengeance, man, we have people crawling under the car fighting to get to the first bolt. We got a great, great team of people here that they love what we've become, and they understand that to remain what we've become, we have to continue that level of support and legacy, and they embrace it. It's crazy the amount of effort that we'll go through at a track to keep people on track. I mean, if you guys were up there, we swapped differentials, we swapped transmissions, we had a guy show up with the wrong lug nuts and studs on his new four link that he had done at a local chassis shop. I mean, not catastrophe after catastrophe, but running at that level, s*** breaks. And the guys were just killing themselves, man. It's a cool thing to see. It's really rewarding that the teamwork and the camaraderie that comes out of that, the customer appreciation for getting them down the track and going around. It's not cheap for those guys. They got to pay for the event. They're taking time off work. They're paying for lodging. They're paying for some level of track support. They're spending thousands of dollars out there. So, to me, it's in our best interest to make them have the best time they possibly can while keeping my guys off a suicide watch and embracing the opportunities that are there, you know?

All right. So, from a business perspective, how do you do that? That is insanely difficult for any shop owner to do is to get people that want to work. And at that level, like we came in here, me and Dan were talking about this. I'm like, these guys are getting s*** done in here. Like, there was no lollygagging, nothing. Like, how do you do that? That's not an easy feat.

I mean, it starts with the hiring process.

Okay.

And I've unfortunately learned the hard way. I think with Howard being here the past year and a half, I really spent a lot of time building the positions around the people because I could help them out in life or, hey man, you'd be great at this. We can do this. But hiring the right people is the start. Okay. And that interview process, a lot of my civilian life has been heavily based on my days in the 75th Ranger Regiment, where if somebody tells you to jump, you don't say how high, you're already in the air before they finish the word jump and there's no questions asked. So trying to find a person in the civilian sector that's never really experienced something like that is difficult for sure. But explaining to the guy, if they make it through the interview process and there's somebody that's worth hiring. I mean, step one, we do a trial. I don't hire anybody without a five to seven day trial in the shop. You can work for another LS, LT shop in the country, whatever. You're on vacation, you got COVID. I don't care, but we're not hiring you unless you come in here and work and show us you can back up what you do. If you make it through that, which is an 80% failure rate.

Really?

Oh, absolutely, man. Howard can attest. We had a guy that lived in Alaska and wanted to work for one of us. He was moving to the continental and ended up at Florida, told me he liked the beaches and the location. I knew it couldn't have been Howard. We're both a*******, but he liked the beach and whatnot. We've both dealt with a lot of people that make big claims that they can't back up.

What's that look like? What's the claim that hasn't been backed up?

You know, I've...

Wiring.

Wiring is a big one?

Just ability in general. Howard ran his shop the same as we do, so it wasn't really different for him. But the people that I've hired, I don't necessarily think they were trying to bamboozle me. They just didn't realize the level that we operate.

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Your average car goes to a speed shop and it kind of like disappears for months, you know? And if the dude decides to return a text or send an email and let you know where he's at on things, you might get some communication. Otherwise, when it's done, it's done. And the bill is the bill. Here, we have a very structured scheduling procedure for the production shop. We pump out 1,000 wheel cars with two weeks on a rack and a week in calibrations. So you come in, you make your deposit, you've got a drop off date 2 to 3 months later, all your parts are procured, and then when that car hits the lift, as a technician, I've allocated, you know, this many hours for this, this many hours for that. And it's, the time that I allocate is very generous. So you have to be able to make it work within that timeframe to meet the company's expectations as well as the customer's. And a lot of people, like you said, you walk in here, you're like, damn, everybody's working. A lot of shops you walk into, man, and they're just f****** off. You know, they're like there for the day. And I'm like, what'd you, what'd you get accomplished today? Oh man, I got the headers on. So what'd you do for the other eight hours? That's, that's two hours. You know, we're not slave drivers, but there are realistic expectations and there's accountability.

You do the Elon Musk thing. Give me five things you did this week.

Oh, you don't have to here because you see it, right? You know, you walk out in the shop, you know, three hours after we get here, the dude's got an engine on the stand, right? You know what he did for three hours.

There's a big difference between a guy with a car and a car guy.

Yeah.

Right. So what happens is during the interview process is you get the guy with a car. Well, my dad had a car and I got a car and I bought a thing on the Internet. So I guess I'm poised to work here. And it's like, no. So that's one thing that we've been working hard on this year is defining the job descriptions that we use to hire. So when you sit down now, we go right for the throat. You should, yeah. And you should, you know, and again, and I think I got to give kudos to Ron over the years of trying to be compassionate with people and trying to find the good people, which is, which is good. I mean, I'm not dismaying that. But from a business standpoint, you have to be able to sustain the job role. So now when interviews happen, and it's like, this is what we need you to do. There's 20 items, let's say, right? And the guy can get through 18 of them. We might be okay with that, but we've talked about it. We've laid it all out. And then there's detail on that. So they're either going to walk out of the interview going, oh my God, I oversold myself or they're going to be like, man, I understand what I'm getting into. We understand we're getting into. So that's a, that's a big business component that I think a lot of shops don't put into their repertoire because they all came like we started, guys building the car. We didn't go to business school. I mean, myself fortunately, I've had the fortunes and other businesses to suffer through having to learn things. And then I brought all those into Redline and I'm bringing those things up here. And I'm enjoying working with Ron with those things because I didn't invent them. They're just business 101 that we lose sight of. And I think a lot of tormentation that we take as business owners, and I've seen him take, is because you got the wrong guy for the job. Doesn't make them bad, right? Doesn't make them defective. He's just wrong for us. So how do you get around that? So we're doing a better job of defining that and trying to treat the place like it's a business, which is a hard thing to say because it is a business, but you need to treat it like a business.

Step one is hiring right, and that's the biggest obstacle. Once you hire right, you got to do what it takes to keep people. It's no different than what we touched on earlier with customers doing the right thing when something comes up. You have to know that there's a guy five miles down the road that's willing to pay him 50 cents more an hour, and he's willing to go. Got to give him reasons to stay. Okay. So, A.

Is that pizza parties, or what's up?

I wish it was that f****** cheap. It starts with the place you work at, a good work environment. It's clean, it's well-lit.

Air conditioning.

You know what? I offered it. I was going to buy air conditioning this year, and the guys, we got the big a** fan over there.

Over there is the air moving pretty good.

Typically, over here, the dyno is going, so we got all the exhaust fans, so it's breezy too. But give them a clean, well-lit, professional environment. The reputation goes a long way. People want to be here. They want to relocate from Texas, Minnesota, California, whatever. I've got a guy right now that's working on getting his immigration paperwork to come up from Brazil to join us.

I love how you mentioned all the s***** states, but I don't know.

Yeah.

Texas is cool.

Yeah, I like Texas.

Yeah, California and Minnesota. I think the only thing in Minnesota is that I would claim the fame. Aaron's got a great thing going up there.

When you come down here, there's so many fast shops. There's some fast guys in Minnesota. But when you're talking about upper echelon, it's rare air.

Well, the biggest thing too, I think it's the season. We can race 10 months of the season out here.

We got 16 hobbies up there, like you got jet skis and all that stuff. Yeah, snowmobile. I think that's part of it too up there. It's like you got something for each season. You got a boat for this time of year. You got a race car. Yeah. That's a big thing.

Yeah. Down here, you can be able to track. In January, we'll go up north to catch some cold air. And when it's too cold here, we'll just make a short trip to Florida. We can technically race 12 months a year. But yeah, the reputation really helps. When you're looking for work or looking for employees, you hear people tell you, man, it'd be a dream to work at Vengeance Racing.

Oh yeah.

That's not usually the case. You know, all that glitters outside is not gold internally. They don't realize how hard we work, the standards that they're held to from every aspect of the operation. But that's what attracted them to be here. They just don't realize that, you know? But I think we're one of the few performance shops in the world that we have very competitive salaries. We do a company matched 401k program for my guys. The company does 3% match for anybody that wants to participate. We offer top tier health care plans. We've got vacations that are tier based on times in service. You know, I give my guys use of the shop, want to change the wife's oil, want to work on their own car, stuff like that. And one of the bigger things, if you can find the person that appreciates it, I've always ran this place that whatever you're doing, I don't care if it's in the engine bay, under the dash, behind the fender, the wiring, the plumbing, the execution, needs to be indicative of the car leaving here and getting taken apart by another shop. So you really, if you have pride in your work, but you're working for an a****** that's just trying to make money, they usually don't work out too well and you're having to shortcut things and do things half-assed to get the job done, where here, I'm all about showing off your capabilities and what you can bring to the table and what our company offers to the consumer and I want it done right. It's from every aspect, from how my invoices look to execution on a build to calibration, it doesn't matter. We have a standard to achieve and if we achieve that standard, that gives us the ability to continue to beat our chest and be proud of who we are and what we do. So people appreciate that. Is the market big for those people? No, it's not. But if you can find them and build that relationship, it's very rewarding and I've been fortunate. I've gone through a s******* of people over the nearly 20 years in business. Probably 70, 80 percent of it was my fault from hiring to begin with because I had too much faith in their abilities, which is why we started the trial programs and all that.

When did you start that, by the way?

Probably six years ago.

Okay.

He still works for me to this day and I love him to death, but I hired a guy, I won't say his name and I won't see where he came from. But he was from a top tier shop in the country about 12, 14 hours away and he was their lead technician. He called me and I'm like, thank God, somebody that does what we do that wants to work, hired him sight on scene, flew him in, gave him a relocation bonus, put him to work. His abilities did not align with what either of us thought they were coming into it. So it was a rebuilding phase, you know, him and his family were here. I wasn't going to send the guy packing down the road, but he was by no means what I expected when he arrived. And admittedly, the way they did things was the quickest, most half-a** way you could possibly do them in an effort to create revenue. And we don't take that approach here. I don't care if it takes twice as long to do something than it does the other way. If there's a reason to avoid doing it that way, that's what we do.

Sure.

You know, so now he's one of my greatest guys in the building. He's hard working. He's learned an absolute s*** ton being here and love, you know, couldn't imagine not having them. But for those reasons, we trials are mandatory.

That's fair.

You know, not just technicians. If I'm hiring a project manager, you know, to sell builds, whatever, I've learned that you're going to come in. My standards are somewhat abnormally high, but I've told myself I can't waiver from them because that's what has created the brand that we have.

We see that with a ton of businesses, like either the owner is no longer with the business for whatever reason, or some people move around or the right guy leaves, and all of a sudden, you know, within two or three, we talk about this off-camera, I can't remember with who, but it's like, it just starts going downhill. And then there goes your brand, and then, oh man, those guys kind of suck lately, you know.

Yeah. The minute you change your standards, the minute the company's image changes with it, you know, it's more of a lapse time. But going back to Howard and I, you know, when we, I don't think either one of us ever actually, for a split second, considered one of us closing a business and joining the other to work together, much less the whole thought of even working together, you know. I mean, we were always cool, always had good conversation, but when that comment was made, yeah, right, you know. And then as we thought about it, just the sheer amount of experience with the same level of commitment, the same quality, the same mindset and doubling it up in one building, holy s***, this is monumental. If we can pull this off, it's not Redline in Florida and Vengeance up here. We're suddenly a mega power, you know, and everything that he's brought to the table, you know, even like the hiring thing. I don't need to be told how to run my business. I just need a good in-house calibrator. Six months later, we're like, yeah, I see what you were telling me. I clearly was f****** that up, you know. So we've learned from each other on various levels. And I think it's a phenomenal balance, but what we both have in one building, you're not going to find anywhere else.

Okay.

It's too intense. If I don't know it, he does, and vice versa, you know. And we've learned not from a book or from the internet, but from 20 plus years of hands-on experience, you know.

They can't be the...

Yeah. You don't know how to succeed if you don't know how to f*** up.

All right.

It's funny because I'll find, we'll have a conversation and he's bothered by something that maybe something went down a certain way. And he's explaining to me like what happened and how it should be fixed and why it went wrong. And I'm like, I already know, you know, but he's not being used to having somebody that can finish the sentence and finish that off. It's a different place to be sometimes, you know.

We actually tread lightly with that. We try not to finish each other's sentences. It's kind of taken disrespectfully, you know, like, m***********, let me finish what I'm saying before you just chime in. But then you realize you're like, it's OK because he knows what I'm going to finish saying.

Right.

You know. So, yeah, it's just one of those fun things.

So since Redline is whatever you guys have joined forces, who's the replacement for that? Who's your biggest competitor right now, you think?

You know, I hope this doesn't come across arrogant because I don't intend for it to be. I don't focus on my competitors. I never focused on Redline. If I'm focused on you, I'm not focused on me. And quite honestly, if you're calling me, I'm just going to do my best to give you everything that we offer. I'm not going to reel you in. If somebody calls me two years ago and says, hey, it's between you and Redline, cool. I would encourage you to get a quote from them. I would encourage you to visit both facilities, shake hands, meet the people, look around, figure out which one's a fit for you. Everybody's not a fit for everybody. Make your decision the best you can based off the information you can gather. And focusing on my own business has always been very beneficial in that regard. Are there some respected shops out there? Yeah, absolutely, man. You know, I mean, Aaron and Enth, we're not, we don't specialize in vipers. You know, we've done probably a dozen. Aaron and Calvo got that viper market on lock, you know. Fran up at Race Proven, great dude. Love him to death. Different business models, but he can build a fast car, you know.

I think when you get to a certain amount of time in the business.

We'll finish the sentence for him. When you get to the level we're at, and those other shops are at as well, it's so funny. Society, the general public has no idea. All of us work together. Yeah. Behind the scenes, he'll pick up the phone and call Sam at AMP or whoever, whoever it is. But these top shops work together. We consult with each other. We work through issues together. We share the resolution to those issues with these other shops and vice versa on a constant daily continual basis. I've been so many group chats with shop owners across the country. It's not funny. His Rolodex in his phone and the paper one in his desk is so extensive with the people that he touches base with. The general public is like, I'm calling AMP, but I'm not going to tell AMP that I'm calling Vengeance and vice versa.

Yeah, we already know.

I had a guy bring me a C7ZR1 here from California, and the guys at AMP saw the car on our social media. The next thing I know, Sam's hit me up on the side and he's like, hey dude, just to give you a heads up, that guy did a charge back on the parts he brought from us that he's bringing to you. Just transparency on the things. But that's what happens once you get past the bickering level of everybody thinking they're the best and they're God's gift to whatever it is that they do. You get to an upper echelon of people that understand that you can be the best, but there's still somebody that knows s*** you don't and you work together.

Well, that's one of the coolest things I like about the industry, at least at this level where we've come past, is all the friends you've made and the people and the contacts and the resources and it's, you really think about the amount of friends that you have after all these years, they're all in the car business. They all came from some that you've built over the years and they'll call manufacturers because you know owners, they're just regular guys and they're sending cars to you to have work done. It really makes the industry enjoyable and then you really start separating that pack, which includes other shops, into the good guys of the industry. There's plenty of bottom feeders out there. They're never gonna go away. Actually, they do good for us, right? Because they create that delta between how to do it right, but I agree with Ron. I mean, even with Redline, I mean, we didn't grovel for work. I mean, the only marketing we did was just exploiting things that were fun that we were doing. There was never coupons and discounts and all kinds of b******* to go. We didn't need to. We almost made it like Fight Club, right? I mean, if you want your car, we got a reason why we want to work on your car. It sounds a little crazy like that, but it just builds that relationship with your customer that everybody's on the same page, and you're not out to get us. We're not out to get you, and we have a relationship here. But I think when shops get into that comfortable bubble, life's good. I mean, I was in New York and Vengeance has been here, and we were many states away, and then I move a state closer. I never, for once, ever looked at it like that. I never was like, man, we don't have enough work right now. Let's try to steal something from Vengeance. Never. Matter of fact, I always enjoyed the fact that, hey, if Vengeance built a car and the guy's down in South Florida, and he's got an issue and he needs help, you call that other shop, hey, can you look at something for me? They're not going to be down there, oh, they shouldn't have done that, and that's all wrong, and that s***'s over with, and then we just don't relate to those people anymore. So competition is a funny thing right now. There's enough work going around. Customers will make their own decisions based on consistency over time, and that's just how it works.

It's all about followers. Whoever's got the most followers, right?

Yeah. They have to be real.

Yeah.

Got to be organic.

Well, we were joking around about that earlier.

Yeah.

You're an Instagram sensation.

I mean, you got at least 20,000 Instagram followers, then I'll take my car to your shop. That's how it works.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Trust me, if I could count the amount of people, hey, you should build my car. I've got a huge following. You look and you're like, cool, dude. You got like 5,000 people and you talk about-

4,000 are kids that are less than 12 years old.

Right. Yeah.

So you sent them the address to the comedy store and tell them to go tell their jokes there. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, sir, not only am I not gonna give you the products, but I'm gonna charge you for the decal that you're asking for because it cost me money.

Right.

I kind of almost feel that like when the LS came out in 97, there was a huge competitive rivalry, new platform, b***** platform. It was a lot of punching going on to get things to like, you know, 375 horse, 380 horse, we're over 400, we went 11.0, now we're going 1080. It was a lot going on. And that always will continue. But I feel today that when you look at the shops that I would consider major shops right now, it's just smooth. It's really not a problem. We buy parts from shops that are making a part or a widget, whatever. I mean, it's just like there's no issue. I just feel like it's when you get up into that bubble, it's more professional, it's more relaxed, and there's more camaraderie in the competition.

So here's a question for both of you guys, and you might have some of the same answers here. Whether it's a competitor at the track, on the streets, a vendor, who do you guys respect the most in this industry?

Whoever deserves it.

Yeah. I mean it.

How does someone deserve it?

They have to have reciprocate the respect back.

Okay.

You know, don't, you know, we, we, listen, if any, if there's one thing that Ron and I have in common is that we have a lot of pride. We've worked real hard and we don't put up with b******* and don't insult me and don't talk down to me. At least I'm, I know I'm like that. Like I just can't deal with it. So if you approach that way and you become condescending, you're just getting under the skin of somebody. Of course, that sometimes is part of competition. And sometimes it can get out of control. We've seen plenty of fights on the internet. Oh yeah. And stuff like that. But, you know, I think as you get older and you get more mature in your business, that stuff becomes, there's no value in that anymore. It's just wasted time and heat and just go back to what you do and provide for your customers and let them have the heated battles and have the fun with it and remove yourself from it. So, you know, that disrespect can come from anywhere.

Okay. I think another facet of that is general misconception is if I sell, you know, Cook's or American Racing Headers, that I'm selling those expensive headers because of the margin that's built into it. I make a ton of money. I've never structured my company like that. The people I work with can provide me a quality, consistent product that I know is going to fit and perform the same every time when that same token, if something happens to it, I need to be able to pick up the phone and say, hey, this is where I'm at. This is what I got. It's time for you to rise to the occasion. If people aren't willing to do that, I'm not going to spend my money with them because it's a tough enough industry already, going back to the fence and the sledgehammer, that if you don't have support for manufacturers and consistency and quality of a product, you shouldn't be selling it. I could make, quite honestly, I could sell pace setter headers and make twice the margin on the product itself, but in two years when they're rotting through the primaries or the tech throws it across the shop because you can't get it to go in the car because it fits like s***, you're eating that margin. Sell quality products and work with people that are willing to stand behind what they do. For me, it's all about being legit and real. The respect thing is a huge part of that. The quality and backing your product is a huge part of that. Touching on the mutual respect for shops, the people that I respect are doing the same things we are. If a guy calls said shop and mentions our name, hey, they're a great shop man. I would encourage you to go there if you're closer to them. Mutual respect. If you b******* me, I have a transmission, and this is common in the industry, anybody watching this is going to laugh and relate. You have a transmission problem at the track. You pull the converter, you send it, you send the trans. Two weeks later, you call them both. Man, transmission looks great. Just had some converter material in it. We cleaned it up and it's ready to go. You call the converter guy. Man, converter look brand new. Had some clutch material from the training in it, so we cleaned it up and it's good to go. Well, it'd be nice if I knew which one was not working properly so we could address it instead of the smoke and mirrors b******* of my stuff's great. Working with somebody that's willing to be like, hey dude, yeah, we f***** this up, but we're going to stand behind it, we're going to fix it. For me, it's a quality product, a consistent product, and being a respectful person yourself. Unfortunately, that does tie directly to a lot of the people that have been in the industry for a long time, because so many young people that are up and coming think they know everything, and they're going to dominate the world alone and piss everybody off in the process and s*** all over them because they don't need them. And then they kind of find out later on, they're like, eh, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to piss that guy off, you know? So those people, we just kind of let them do their thing, and their followers are either going to believe it or not. You know, there's a shop on the East Coast that has a good thing going, has a good following, but just inflates and flat out lies about everything that he accomplishes and won't show up to an event and run his cars or his customers' cars in front of other competitors, but will go to a drag strip somewhere, make a test hit, and it's the fastest this, or it made, you know, a 440 cubic inch motor hydraulic roller on pump fuel made 970 to the tires. We're like, you want to tell me how you got so much horsepower per cubic inch with hydraulic setup on pump gas? You know, engine building is physics, buddy. But to his followers, you're just a hater. So a person like that just doesn't garner any respect for me in this industry because they're tarnishing what you're actually trying to accomplish. There's very few people that are just flat out honest, won't oversell you, will provide you what you actually need and want to achieve your goals and send you down the road happy.

That's one of my favorite things in the comments sections. Every once in a while, it's like, I'll have the owner of a shop on and they will admit that, hey, this other guy that is a competitor of mine is faster. And then the first shop's owner, all the comments are like, well, no, no, this guy, you know, is way faster. And it's like, dude, he literally admitted he's second. It's like, why are we... The followers thing is so weird.

It is weird, man. It's cult-like.

Yeah.

And you know, as an example, that the shop that I'm referencing focuses on one platform. Let's just say it's the sixth-gen Camaro world, and he's got one fast sixth-gen Camaro. And he's suddenly talking s*** about Vengeance because we don't have the same package at the same level he has. But then you go, you walk in our showroom and you look at the hundreds of plaques and trophies and awards. You go to our YouTube channel and look at the amount of 3,500 horsepower cars, record-breaking stuff.

Oh, that doesn't count, though.

None of that counts because you don't have that one sixth-gen Camaro.

That one micro record.

You know, and it's, I just, I used to, man, I used to just get so engaged in that, trying to prove to them that their thought process is flawed. And I've just had to learn, man, I read a book lately called The Let Them, and it's just a mindset of let people be them, let them do them. What's that?

Who, what's it called?

Dude, I don't remember your name right now. I couldn't tell you.

I'm horrible with names. Stevie.

But you just have to let people believe what they're gonna believe.

Sure.

And then know that the audience you're looking for, they're seeing it too. And they understand.

The right audience understands. I talk about this all the time with, again, I'm friends with a number of people in the umph camp. And they're like, yeah, people are going to see like it's out there.

Yeah.

Like the guys who are looking to get into whether it's a 2000 horsepower Corvette or Viper or Lambo, they're just going to look at the results.

Yeah. Yeah. They're not biased because they're obviously trying to educate themselves.

They're talking to the other customers. Well, the smart ones are, at least.

Well, you want the smart ones. Sure. I don't want the guy and that's like we've got talking to our competitors. We're very specific these days.

Okay.

We only work on 08 newer vehicles unless I or Howard make the exception. We only work on cars with less than 80,000 miles.

Okay.

I won't work on a vehicle that's had internal engine modifications unless we're doing a health check on the engine compression, leak down, filter cut, and we're replacing those components with what we use. So we tell 60 to 70% of the phone calls we take are referrals to other shops.

Okay.

Because we're not going to deviate from what we deliver. And I'm not going to sit here and convince you that your 6th Gen ZL1 does in fact have an oil pump pressure relief valve issue and you need to put this $1,000 KTEC pump in the car. If you don't believe me, we shouldn't do business. I'm looking out for your best interest. Trust me, the $18 I'm making on the oil pump doesn't mean two s**** to me. But you enjoying your car for years moving forward does. And if you can't grasp that concept, then we're not for you. So here, give these guys a call.

Well, being around for 20 years, and I'm assuming you have a wait list right now of some sort probably.

Production shop stays 3 to 4 months out. And then race shop, usually a year and a half to 2 years. We had a guy bring us his car from California. He was picking it up from another shop. And one of the prerequisites was, I'll store it for 12 to 16 months to save you from making 2 trips. But we're not touching it for a year and a half. So yeah, and that's not an arrogant thing. It's a we're doing it right thing. And you can either see that or you can't.

Well, that's a Greg Vanish numbers thing, right? You've been along around this time. You are it's not like you have people falling off and nobody come in here. So it's supply and demand.

I try to never get pissed off if I have to wait for something as long as I'm told I'm going to wait. OK, you know, if I walk up to a steak house and there's an hour wait, that's a good thing. You know, if you walk up and the place is empty, you should probably think twice about it. And it's no different with your car. If you pull up to a shop and they're like, man, I can get you in next week. Let me see if I can get the parts. You can get a guy in next week. What are you doing? You know, sure, it happens once in a blue moon, but if you can get somebody in that quick, you got problems with your business model. And for us, the way, you know, COVID changed things a little bit with ETAs on parts. We're getting back to somewhat normal and we stock a tremendous amount of inventory. But if you come in and you do a heads cam, supercharger build, you know, and I got to order something I don't have on the shelf, having that three to four month window for it to show up and be on the shelf when your car gets here, to roll it in the shop and everything's here. It's a whole different business model than leaving it parked outside for three months and you're not knowing what's going on. And oh yeah, man, we're just waiting on the headers. It don't work like that. So.

Should we pop the usual three?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, I think we've been here for a while, so might as well let you boys get on with your day, but let's let's rip the usual three.

All right, so at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests or guests to pick three cars. I need a track car, a daily driver and a show car. You have an unlimited budget. You can build whatever you want, swap whatever you want. What are you going to pick?

Who wants to go first?

I got to think about this. All right.

He's got a much bigger library to think of with his age.

I have a real, another quick question. You guys, C8Z guys, do you guys only drive quarter and a half mile at a time or do you get on Rip A Road course ever?

Oh yeah. I haven't had my car specifically at Road Atlanta, but I've had it in some situations in the mountains and the curves that should have been on a road course for sure.

All right.

And I live 12 minutes from Road Atlanta.

Oh, okay.

So, and I, we've been there to support some customers that we've had some builds on. Every time I leave there, I'm like, man, I got this venue right in my backyard. I can hear them sometimes, you know. Again, it's just about the time, the time to get out there. But I don't know. That's a pretty vast question. I mean, I'm a diehard Corvette guy myself.

He's lying, I don't see new balances.

No, not that guy.

Well, especially given his age, he should definitely have a life.

What were the three criteria?

Daily show and track.

Yeah.

Unlimited budget.

Track of your choice, too, whatever.

Budget, it's funny that you mentioned that, and I don't mean to turn this into a topic. I look at most exotic owners as status owners.

Okay.

You know, I was having this conversation yesterday with a guy that's got several UGR Lambos. Sure. And he was calling me to talk about the C8ZR1. And he was like, well, you know, the average Lambo guy is still gonna stick with a Lambo. Right. Because it costs $450,000. And when he pulls up, it's a Lambo. But that same guy isn't at UGR, dumping a Quarter Mile to make 3,000 horse and have this b***** car. It's a status car. I personally, when the Stingray came out, one of my good customers had a Lambo and he was dying to drive the Stingray. We swapped keys. I couldn't wait to get the f*** out of his car. I thought it rode like a pile of s***. You know, it was just super stiff, uncomfortable seating. And I'm like, you know, it's a swinging contest. You know, I mean, do they have their purpose? Sure. Are there people out there that modify them and use them? Obviously, you know, UGR wouldn't exist if they didn't. But the majority of them, like if you have half a brain cell and the C8 ZR1 is going to be $175,000, makes a thousand at the wheels, factory twin turbo dual overhead cam. Tell me again, why you wouldn't buy that car?

I'd like a stock Huracan.

For sure. Sure. For sure.

It all depends on the guy.

Yeah. For me, I haven't driven it yet, but if I had to pick my ultimate car, it's going to be a ZR1X. You're going to give me a hybrid, all-wheel drive, twin-turbo, exotic for 200 grand. Throw in the unlimited budget thing. Sure. I don't know what that world looks like. I don't know what an unlimited budget is. So I'm going to look to practicality, and I think that car is just an amazing feat of engineering.

So ZR1X for show car?

No, for race.

Oh, for race. Okay, gotcha.

So, now when you say race...

And in daily, really?

Yeah, race and daily. And show, s***. Right, right.

So we got... That's it.

Okay, just ZR1X for everything.

Yeah, take it for everything. I'll keep my Vette for Quarter Mile Racing. Okay. That car is an absolute s*** ton of fun, and it's a true work of art from an engineering and build standpoint. So I'll keep my C6Z for drag racing.

Okay. So that's the track car.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. But the ZR1X will hit the mountains, will hit Road Atlanta, will go to the drag strip, Cars and Coffee.

So show for that one or for daily? I'm going to nail you down.

Okay. I'll do show for that one and my daily. I'm going to flip it. It would be a Denali Ultimate 2500, 137s.

Those get stolen all the time though.

Yeah.

That's an inside joke.

Because when you get old and then you pack on a few pounds like I have, crawling in and out of a vet as a daily becomes not so fun. So retractable running boards and setting up in your comfortable truck with air-conditioned seats, I'll take my Denali.

So the truck does have air conditioning. Yeah.

All right.

So what about you then?

I mean, I'm not much of a like a b******* dreamer. Sure. I'm watching like, oh, I wish I had. My life has never worked like that.

So back to an 82 iRock then?

No, that's a little pushing it. That was just the pivot point of my life.

The shift that was going through my head when he was talking about the iRock and the C4.

Yeah, but again, back then, it was state of the art.

They were stepping stones to get to where we are now, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Like an 84 Corvette, which is the ultimate pile. That thing was bad to the bone back then. But yeah, I don't know. I agree with Ron. I mean, I like where GM has done with the Corvettes, a car that kind of we hold tight to us for something that we've grown our brands with. And I don't mind driving my Denali Duramax on a daily basis. Works fine by me. And I don't know. I'm at a point where this is kind of pathetic that you don't get excited as much anymore. So when you're in your 20s and 30s, you're like, oh my God, I gotta have this thing. I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, oh, s***. You know, it's just a hard thing to it's a hard thing to gather, especially even a show car question.

Sure. You know, that's a tough one for race car guys. Yeah.

I mean, I'd like to, you know, I like to you go to the track and you put up a number and then just load up and go home.

But what car do you take you'll get ice cream with?

I take my C8. Well, when I drive my C8 Z06, I guess I guess in my my new life in Georgia would probably be that.

Sure.

Or my 2010 twin turbo car.

Okay.

Or my 11 car. Or my 2016 twin turbo 427 Camaro.

Okay.

See, I have a problem.

Right.

I enjoy those cars still. Yeah.

Right.

And there's nothing special to anybody other than me.

Right.

And that's all that matters. Right.

Exactly.

The other caveats of that is when you have been doing it as long as we have. You're jaded. Yeah. It's not even necessarily that the excitement wears off, but he sits in everything that we're talking about every single day.

Right.

I go out and drive them before we give them to the customers, every car that leaves. For me to like, you know, just be drooling over a 1500 horse C6 ZR1, like a lot of people would, I've driven a hundred of them.

Yeah. It's like whatever.

We've built them, you know. When I go home and fire up my C8Z, I'm smiles for miles, man. I love it. But I also am smart enough to know that, hey, I can't daily this thing. I don't have that kind of money and I can't sell this thing with 50,000 miles on it in two years.

Sure.

So it's reserved for, I need a smile, I need to pick me up.

It's a treat.

Yeah.

But it's the whole, I mean, I'm simple. I've got a 15 model Jeep and the doors are off, the roof is off, my leg hangs out the door, you get a breeze up your short, cruising down the road. And it's simple, it's cool. You know, so again.

This is a demographic question.

It really is. Yeah. You know, rich people obviously are going to have more grandiose taste and see things differently than I do. Those things are out of reach for me for the most part. And for that reason, I've just never had the desire. Sure. You know, I walked through a cars and coffee and I see a Lambo. Hey, man, that's a cool car. Hopefully, the owner is not a d******, you know. I will admit something that a few people will get a laugh out of, Aaron Miller specifically and Ned, but a white Viper is pure sex. A Gen 5 Viper in solid white with no stripes. Okay.

Anything white for him is what...

Everything I own is minus my Jeep. Everything is white. Even my Vette was atomic orange when I bought it and I had it painted white. Every vehicle I own is white.

Okay.

My fishing rod is white. My Harley is white.

Okay.

Yeah. But yeah, that white Gen 5, you got to fix the way it sounds. But for a show car to have in the garage, they're cool.

So is that going to be a show car then?

No, I'll stick with what I got. Sure. I'm just letting... Ned tainted me with his Viper fetish. Sure. And then he drove up here to Whitewood a couple of times, and that just made it worse. And Aaron has built some serious Vipers. And I think the two mix are pretty deadly.

Sure.

You're talking about the sound of the C8Z?

No, I like the C8Z. I'm talking about the Viper sound, the dump truck with cats.

UPS truck.

I'm going to lock you down. So Duramax for the daily. And then which one are you choosing for the race car?

We'll take the 01X for now.

The 01X? Yeah, and we'll change that answer next time.

I'll put 50 miles on it a year.

Yeah. Well, that's pretty demographic accurate.

And the other one is a show car?

Yeah. I don't let anybody leave without nailing them down.

The one car I really have always wanted was an original 69Z28 with a DZ motor in it with the cross ram, like the real car.

Sure. Okay.

Just because growing up and having a couple of those cars, not an original Z28, but having those and being part of that history. I was lucky. My grandfather was good friends with Zora Duntov.

Oh, okay.

So I got to meet a couple of times as a kid, and obviously owning Corvettes. And I've learned a lot about his pedigree. So I've always had this personal attachment to Corvette and the history behind it. It's hard to let it go.

So he's a little bit more to you. You're not just a guy that just saw one out of dealership one day.

Yeah, no. To met him and his wife and then know the shenanigans with my grandfather and him and his shenanigans and then to see the car, what it is today, with him being attributed behind it and stuff. It gets built into your DNA as a car guy.

Yeah, that's cool.

And the exotics, I just never really... I don't know. I appreciate them. I never sit there and be like, man, I'd like to buy one of these. Ever.

Who, engineering-wise, and I promise I'll wrap up. Who, engineering-wise, currently, who of all the manufacturers out there excites you the most right now?

Manufacturers or people that are part of the industry? Well, I grew up in an era where John Lingenfelter was the man.

Okay.

I mean, he just... I always wanted to shop like John. I always appreciated his legacy, his engineering prowess, his calmness, his professionalism, and what he created was always a big deal to me. And I think even since then, it's been hard to recaptivate that out of one person. Manufacturers, they're all a pile of s*** right now. They're all building crap. They know they're building crap, and it's unfortunate. It's a very sensitive discussion, to be honest with you, for a lot of people.

It's tough to tiptoe every time we go to Detroit.

This is how bad it is, right? I've got like 24 C8Z, and I got a 24 Duramax. Every day, I hope I can get home without a transmission locking up or an engine light on. So that's pretty bad when you take your $165,000 C8Z06 out of your garage that you keep in pristine condition, and you drive it normal, and you're just waiting for the infamous engine light to come on, because you know that they've got so many issues and problems. That's not good. You know, we chased some of that here. You know, not so bad in the Camaros and Corraveti work on, but like I'm not that impressed with any manufacturer right now at all. Except for Koenigsegg.

Really?

His stuff's cool.

OK. I would love to have him on the show. I've heard one guy who got rid of his because he was not a fan.

A what?

Koenigsegg.

Oh, Koenigsegg.

OK, got rid of it because it wasn't up to us. He's like Bugatti versus Koenigsegg. It's kind of like just Bugatti standard. It's just when you get to that world, it's a whole different world, dude. It's just. Yeah. But anywho, where can people find you guys?

Here.

Yeah, they can find us here at our headquarters in Cumming, Georgia. It's 241 Castleberry Industrial Drive, Cumming, Georgia. 45-minute ride northeast of Atlanta. Website is vengeanceracing.net, V-E-N-G-E-A-N-C-E, racing.net. It's funny, we spelled it correctly instead of leaving the A out. And every time somebody reads it back to me, they spell it incorrectly. Or you can give us a call, 678-513-7105. Hit any social media platform, Vengeance Racing and TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, we'll run all of them. Or at a racetrack, kick an a**.

Yeah.

Dan? You can find me, us at Gunna Garage with two N's. All right.

There you go.

Ron, Howard, thank you so much for making this happen. I appreciate it. We'll see you guys at some events upcoming here soon. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you all next time.

Thanks again for watching the show, guys. Be sure to go to 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.