154. FuelTech, Racing and Tuning, Development w/ Luis de Leon

They put driving above their lives. There's some drivers out there, that if you see, they're every week competing in some class, different classes. That's one of the reasons they are there, they are there, they're driving.

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

Yeah.

Mr. Gunner Garage.

Been more Fords here so far.

So you are so close to having a Ford in the background in the other building and then I know, I tried to convince you. That's all changed. Yeah, it didn't end up happening. But today we are here at FuelTech, the last stop on our Georgia trip. And we are here with Luis de Leon of FuelTech COO. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, FuelTech, and we'll just kind of go from there.

Okay, okay. It's a kind of long story, right? Like I'm 39 years old now, and I pretty much devoted all my life to vehicles with wheels or of engines, you know? Like I remember like it was today, when I was underage and I didn't have like a license, I used to go to the gas station with my bicycle, just to be around, you know, cars and stuff like that, you know? And one thing that's actually pretty cool, it's cool to mention, I have a group of people back from that day, you know, great friends of mine, and we had like, you know, an enthusiast club, you know? And the name was Oxide Race Team.

Oh, okay.

Because like, as most of people, right? The easiest first power adder is Nitrous Oxide. Yep. Right? So it's so simple, you can have a bone stock OEM vehicle, and you buy a wet system, and in one hour, that thing has another 50 to 200 horses. That's crazy, right? That's really cool. So I joined FuelTech a long time ago, I don't even recall the day, and the company was really small back then, but it already had like a great product. I was actually a customer, right? I bought my first FuelTech ECU on the first year or so of the company, Anderson Dick is the company founder, and I started dealing with him and some other people there, and at some point, I just mentioned to them that I was leaving my job to go somewhere else, and then he invited me to join the company, and that's how everything started.

What were you doing at the time?

I was actually working at Delphi.

Okay.

So that's AC Deco sub-brand, let me say, right? That they do parts and stuff, and they used to have a large plant on my hometown city.

And it's mostly electronics that they do, right?

Yeah, that plant, they used to do steering pumps, hydraulic steering pumps, CV joints, and they start implementing electric power steering, EPS, right? So I was there with a friend of mine, great friend of mine, Rodrigo, and I was helping him. He was already an engineer, I didn't have graduated yet, and I was helping him on that, and prototyping stuff and blah, blah, blah. But still, it's cool stuff, but OEM cars is not what I wanted. I used to drive a modified 4-cylinder individual throttle bodies, camshaft, nitrous, that was my daily back then. So at some point that happened, I joined FuelTech because it's race cars, it's race cars. And my first project there was to actually support road racing. It was a small, the first step on road racing class, but most people use FuelTech, so I would go to every single race, make sure people are using the product correctly, and stuff like that. Company was about 20 to 30 employees, something like that. And that was, I don't know, 2011, around that, something like that. And from there to here, I moved to USA, Anderson gave me the opportunity to join the company as a partner. So today we are three partners, me, Anderson and Leonardo. And FuelTech USA was born about 10 years ago. I was the first one to move from Brazil here to start pushing the company. We had great partnerships. The guys across the street from us here, Proline Racing, they were amazing supporters. They helped us a lot with their knowledge. They are a race engine program, because they have one of the best programs out there for billet, 3000 plus horsepower stuff. And they gave us a lot of leverage to understand what the domestic USA market needed. As we go forward today, the company has around almost 40 here in the United States. So larger than it used to be, just Brazil. And Brazil is around 250. So we're getting close to that 300 range worldwide. We have an office on Australia, another one on Germany, and Brazil obviously is the largest one. And just like we were talking before, this is one of the greatest things, in my opinion, in FuelTech is the human factor. Everyone in the company really cares for what we do. We are private owned, right? And I think this plays a big factor than I thought it was 10 years ago. Today, I can see this better. Where we really care about this, we really love what we do. I personally race cars, right? Me and my partners, we kind of, we complete each other. Anderson likes more, you know, exquisite fancy vehicles. And you can see like, he has this amazing DeLorean with a Ferrari power plant, you know. You must be crazy about this thing to do it.

Yeah.

It's business perspective is zero, right? But like, it's such a nice car. You have to love what you're doing to do this kind of stuff. And anyone that likes cars, if you crank this thing close to him, like it doesn't matter what you like. You can be a Honda guy, you can be a domestic V8 guy. You crank this thing and you look at DeLorean because it's a mix of everything. It has 2025 technology, it has a flat plane V8, high revving engine, it has an iconic movie car. It messes with all your feelings. It's amazing, dude. And the company today is highly focused on drag racing. This is something that we see where the electronics shine. I drag race so I can say that with some property. The driver on drag racing has to be a good driver. Don't think that's just to let off the bottom and go. But to be fast, it's 100% reliable on the vehicle. The driver cannot make the car go faster. The driver can only prevent an accident and make sure that the run will be a good run. That's what the driver can do. But how fast it goes, it's 100% dependent on the vehicle, right? For sure, there's some cars that stick shift, that relies a little on the car, on the guy, right? But everyone that drives a stick shift is so good that when you go to a stick shift class, they don't drop the beat. They shift properly. It's almost going to an automatic anyway, right? Because if you see them racing is bad a**, they all bad a****, right? So it levels the playing field. But what makes the difference is the electronics, right? How the electronic can be reliable to the tuner, to the crew chief, or if the driver turns himself, to do exactly what you want to the thousand of the second. People don't realize, but it's that crazy. So right next to me, next to you guys, I don't know if you can see, but like there's a high profile Pro Mod here. This thing today, a Pro Mod car, will build from no less than 3,500 horse, a good Pro Mod. Like that's the bare minimum of a Pro Mod is 3,500 horse.

That's crazy, right?

To over 6,000 horsepower.

Wow.

And 99% of them are full power in by one second. So you need to manipulate all that power, right? In one second, you have one second, you have 1,000 milliseconds to manipulate 6,000 horsepower. And this is what some people sometimes think, oh, I'm going to do active control and close loop and this and that. You can do that kind of stuff, but like it's so quick that the vast majority of sensors don't even work that quick on a way that they're reliable to do what you want. So it takes number one, the human factor, a good tuner, right? To set up the car to understand what the car needs. And number two, electronic. That will be the tool that will do exactly what the tuner is requiring the car to do, right? If you have an electronic that fluctuates 10,000th of a second, you still may go down, but it's lower. And sometimes you don't ever figure out. You go to a racetrack and like, man, I have the same everything. I have the same chassis, the same power plant, but the car is lower. I'm almost there, but I'm not there. And sometimes it's just like that, you know? Sometimes I joke about like, we that like cars, some people at least, also like sound systems, right? And then if you go to an amplifier back in the day, it was pretty popular to have like peak power and true power, right? People don't say much, but some ECUs are some like that. Some ECUs will have like peak power, but that's not what you want. You want true power, what is all the time doing what you want. And we proud ourselves of having an ECU that does that. What you tell the unit to do, you will do. And that allows you to go back, analyze what the unit's doing and improve the vehicle. So in between all those 10 plus years here in the United States and pretty much 20, 22 years worldwide for FuelTech, we always focus on that. A system that's easy for the user, so a easy tool, and that does what the user is asking for. So the perfect tool, let me say. Not necessarily all the features, not necessarily all the fancy stuff and details, but like what actually you need to make your road racing car, your drag racing car, your drag and drive car, you name it, right? What you need to make this thing works, right? And then across the years, we expand our product line into ignition modules, right? We have FT Spark, that's the strongest CDI system out there. We have injectors. We started building injectors with another company, actually a partner company called MRB. It's a huge OEM parts company manufacturer. They do engine blocks, heads, crankshafts for millions of vehicles, right? And they develop a small section of their business to do motorsport stuff. And today they do billet blocks, billet crankshafts, and they do our injectors, FT injectors. Okay. And the injectors is the same thing. How reliable can it be? Every single race, it does exactly the same through the whole season, through two seasons, three seasons. Because we saw that some injectors would be really good when they knew, and they kind of fade away. But it's really hard to see you when you start changing 2, 3, 4% along the lifespan.

So, okay, you mentioned a lot of stuff there, a lot of complex and complicated stuff there. So, I guess, how are you involved with the development of the company? Because again, you're overseeing the United States side of things, and there's three partners involved. What do those conversations look like? How do you guys decide what to pursue? Because that's a big undertaking.

It's a lot of brainstorming, right? We have... So, it's not just we three, right? We have really good head guys on departments. So, tech support, marketing, design, research and development. And all those guys, they are car guys, right? So, every single head of department, they have heavily involvement with car culture, right? My accounting head right here, he does time attack and road racing, you know, accounting, right? Even that guy does that, right? So, it's not something sometimes you expect, but it does. So, like, as we were setting up the deal here, you guys are talking to my guys, they do design and marketing. And you see he has a modified Mustang, right? The other guy just came from Brazil. We brought him from Brazil, actually, because he had a specialized knowledge that's really hard. We tried some years to find someone here, we couldn't, so we brought him over. He also loves vehicles and he understands about everything on cars, every car show he's in there, you know, that kind of stuff. Those guys, they have plenty good feedback, right? So, when we're trying to understand, okay, where's the market going? Where we feel we could provide a better fixture, you know? We do that, right? And then, well, obviously, it comes to a decision, okay, let's focus on this, let's focus on that, right? But that's pretty much how the process goes. We start with the application, right? We have someone inside our circle, company, friends, customers, that they are really smart, they understand what's going on and they see, man, there's an opportunity here to improve this, right? People here are struggling. They need a better system, they need more data, they need a better dashboard, they need a better data logger, they may need, I don't know, suspension adjustments that we may help them somehow through this. So my tech support head here, he does oval track with mini cars, right? So it's a 600 motorcycle engine on a small quad that goes round and round, you know? Like he's one of the guys that actually got in touch with the market, like man, it's a cool deal, I love this thing, right? They use it mostly OEM ECU, so they kind of like stuck to that, it's not that simple to use if they need to do something, like they need some feedback, they need this and that, and we have great dealers that he worked with, and then he even became a driver, you know? So like the process comes from the bottom, so it's not like a money decision, right? Oh, let's put some money on this and see where it goes. We don't do that. It's the other way around, right? So this is a cool example. Like at some point, we were looking at this like, man, we all like DeLorens, you know? They suck powertrain wise, right? But we all love this thing. The car school is hell, you know? Like I remember when I was a kid, I was born in 85. So the movie was about that, 84 or so. But when I was young, you know, five, six, seven years old, I remember watching these movies and I love, it's my favorite trilogy, right? It's Back to the Future is awesome. I have a mini DeLorean home and stuff like that. Anderson and my brother are like, I love it too. I have big ones. I have everything. Let's find one. We found one. What are we going to do? Not many people have FuelTech on Ferraris, right? Why do we do a Ferrari engine? We have a great customer. He's a drift guy, Federico. And he has a 599 for drifting, V12, single turbo. Great dude, great driver. And the car is crazy. It's a V12 drifting car. Yeah, right. But that was the first one. That was great. It helped us developing VVT control, cause that car has a state of the art VVT, and that was really good to do it. The car has electronic waste gates. So he was one of the early adopters of electronic e-gates. He does for drifting. So there's always something in the back that's regarding how can we use this better. So like now, just to be honest, it's a great opportunity for people to do, you know, those V8 swaps, because for the engine, it's a race engine, right? It's fairly cheap, right? Now we have a solution. You can actually buy a cheap Ferrari engine, direction injection, and apply one of our systems, and we don't hold back, right? So like we put that kind of tune up available online, right? So like you can actually, because that's really costly if you think about it, right? To make this thing run. We have available, right? So jet skis, ATVs, stuff like that. It all comes from passion. I think maybe that's the best way to describe it. The passion kind of builds up into us doing something to improve that deal.

Yeah. Well, speaking of the tuning aspect, when I looked at your website, it looks like you guys offer some classes. You got like a basic startup class and then a little bit more in-depth one. For your average enthusiast that might have a little more knowledge than the, you know, so I said average enthusiast twice. I'm going to do an I guess. Yeah. How hard is it if somebody has some basic knowledge to get something like this and do some tuning after taking a class?

There is, there's different perspectives, okay?

Okay.

I like to compare vehicles, install, tuning to artwork.

Okay.

I like to do the comparison, right? To try to paint a nice canvas, right? You can go to a class to understand how to paint, to mix colors. And that's really important if you like paint, right? If you're not just a collector, right? Just like cars. Because you can collect cars and you don't have to understand how they work. You can just love them, how they look, how special they are, right? But if you are into like, man, I actually like to draw. I like to do something. I think taking classes on how to draw and how to do painting and how to choose the best stuff, it's really important for you. So that's what we do here. We do here on a way that we have different classes, right? Because not everyone can spend the whole week or three days, we have different classes. We try to do that. We try to get people that like cars, but not just like cars, they like to put their hands on. How can we explain to them on a easy way how to put them together? What kind of product they need? What is the best solution for them? Because sometimes people are like, I want a nitrous car. They don't know what it takes to run a nitrous car, right? We try to explain to them, this is what it takes. I like a turbo car, I like a blower car. We explain to them, sometimes they come here with an idea, they swap their plans, because they are lovers for everything. Nitrous, blower, turbo, NA, you name it, right? But sometimes people don't understand, we try to pass along the knowledge. This is what it takes to do this. Okay, this is kind of what you want. What kind of product can we provide to you? And if you don't have the product, we actually recommend other companies that do something that we feel like is a good product, right? We don't try to, don't go there out just because we don't have the, we actually, man, this guy has a beautiful solution for this. Just talk to them, you know? And then it comes the part where you start applying a lot of knowledge to their heads, right? There is a lot of details involved in tuning, right? What we do here is try to show you how to do it, how to install after selecting the products, how to make it work and how to try to fill the car. But fill the car just like doing like an amazing Capella Sistina deal. It takes a lot of time. Those guys that do amazing paint jobs, they didn't do when they were 12. They spend their whole lives doing painting to one day do something that's amazing. Yeah. Right? Or they had some problems through their lives, so they're special on doing that, right? It takes some time, so you need experience, right? Anyone can be a tuner, just to be honest. But it does not come overnight. They first need to want. Then they need to get someone to teach them the basics like we do. Then they need to practice, right? If they apply this, they can be really good. They can be really good. But just like anything in life, if you want to, I don't know, win a World Cup or a gold medal somewhere, not everyone will do that. Right. So, if people are looking to be the best of the best, anyone can be the best of the best. But you may take a long time to discover if you can do that. Right? So, just be honest.

Right?

Anyone can tune basic stuff. Anyone can tune average. When you go to the higher profile, it's going to be less people that can do it.

Right?

But you can have a lot of fun going through this. Right? So, I know so many people, there are not those high profiles that do this for a living. They'll win big bucks and win big races. They still enjoy what they do. And they do, you know, with passion every day, they have their personal cars that they tune in. And it's amazing. Right? When you have a good tool, it makes your life easier and you can enjoy the process. Right? Because in the end, that's what it is. Right? So we try to have a system, and some people sometimes compare like Androids and Apple and stuff like that. We try to be more like the Apple side, where we have something that's more intuitive and easy. Right? And do this kind of stuff on a, you know, graphical way, colorful way, feedback way. And if you get stuck somehow, you can mail us, call us, and you know, we give a hand, man, go this way. Oh, I didn't see this. You know? This is the kind of stuff that we try to do. So again, I believe anyone can be a tuner. Honestly, I truly believe, like the guys from, I believe, HP Academy, they have great.

Yeah, they're our sponsor, actually.

Great people, right? I believe they have a saying that tuning is not black magic.

Yeah.

Right. And I 100% agree with them. It's not black magic. Right. So anyone can understand and be a tuner.

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But also it's good to put your feet in the ground. But not everyone is going to be a top fuel tuner. That's the only thing. But anyone can tune its own car. Anyone can do that. It just takes the wheel, the time, the experience that they need to develop.

I love the Android-Apple comparison, because he's an Android guy, I'm an Apple guy, right? And I could just... It's just too funny. But I'm like... I was smiling the whole time. But...

Yeah, there you go.

Oh, okay. But you used an Apple comparison, so...

I highly respect Apple, right?

That's fair.

And I understand what they do, and I agree with what they do.

The philosophy.

And the whole philosophy of having those two major operation systems, just to be honest, because on Android, you have other brands, right? It's just a base. And I think there's space for everyone, and it would be a sad world if we had only Apple or only Android. I actually like that, right? So we have Apples because we develop software for them because it communicates with the ECU, right? You know, my kids have, you know, like you have here and there. My preference is this one just because I can do some stuff that I cannot do there, but I still believe that's a really good platform. So it is an option, you know, I think it's an option. I think it's actually good to have them.

Yeah. I have so many questions. So first of all, I want to go a little bit further back. Where does this passion come from, right? You multiple times in your podcast with Tuques on Street Alpha, multiple times since we've got here, you keep mentioning Ayrton Senna. What is your earliest car memory? Where does this passion for cars come from for you?

I'm not really sure where is my first memory. I struggled to do that because it was really, really, really young. But I do have one with uncle of mine, Pedro, and he's my mom's brother. And he had a Chevrolet Opala, just similar to the one that you guys have on the back here. Similar year, right? But it was a light color. I don't recall if it was a light gray or white, but it was a light color. And I remember when he had that car that he took me for a ride. And I was crazy young, four years old. I have that memory, right? And I have one photo on the hood of the car, kind of baby, right? And I don't know if that was the tipping point or not. I'm not really sure. We spend a lot of time together. We talk sometimes, like he's still in Brazil, so we don't have that close relationship anymore. But I remember the city that was born is really close to a huge lake, right? And they have a small beach, really sand on the lake. And he used to live close. And I remember sometimes we would take like a motorcycle to go there, you know, and just spend some time together and ride the motorcycle and stuff. That was really cool. And it was a similar zone where my dad was closer to vehicles. Most of the cars in the 80s in Brazil, they were all carbureted. There was no EFI in Brazil in the 80s. EFI showed up late 80s, early 90s. So there was a time to adopt overall. People start seeing EFI mid 90s, to be honest, right? It takes a second to go to everyone. And I remember doing regular maintenance with my dad, taking the carburetor out and rebuilding and cleaning, and distributor and stuff like that. And I remember clearly like that. And I always like it. And I remember that I developed a passion to the vehicle. One day, my dad, and I was young, maybe seven to nine, my dad changed the car for a newer year model. He never told me. He just like, I'm going to change, I'm going to buy a new one, right? He just went out, didn't told me anything. I was young. He doesn't have to tell me, right? He comes out like...

He didn't need your approval. Yeah, don't need my approval.

And I was playing with my buddies and he comes back, I don't know, maybe hours later, different car, newer car, right? He comes in like, man, it's a cool car. What happened? Where's our car? Oh, I left the dealership, we exchanged it. Man, I cried for two days. I cried for two days. I could not believe he did that to me. Because I love that car, right? My dad, I think my dad cried too. I think he went away and cried by himself there because he felt guilty about it. But I had that on myself since I was really young. I grew up watching Ayrton Senna. So Formula One was really strong in Brazil before I was born. I think highly about Ayrton Senna. I think he was one of the best ever did. But I think that Fiti Paudi was a better driver overall, in my opinion. He was on a better, on a worse moment, harder moment, right? And not saying that Ayrton didn't do well. Maybe he was the best on the rain by far, right? By far, ever, ever compared to anyone else. But I think to be the best driver, you need other stuff, right? And I think Fiti Paudi was one of the ones that leveraged Senna to get in. I think this gives him points as well. Okay. Not that Senna didn't leverage other people like Barrichello, that's another Brazilian driver. But like, there's so many good drivers in Brazil, right? And that was from, you know, early. We have Piquet, amazing technical driver, right? And sometimes people don't say so much about those guys, they're world champions, just because Senna blew up, right? So not taking anything away from Senna, you know, it's one of my favors by far. But like, I think we have several good drivers. Yeah. And it was like a moment in Brazil that people follow Formula One so much. We had a Brazilian Formula One team that Fiti Pauli put together with his brother, right? So that's one of the things that I think give him points as well as a good driver, right? Because he drove for the team as well. So, this is where I was born inside. I was born in 1985, where people follow racing in Brazil aggressively, right? As soon as we would watch TV, there's Formula One on TV, you know? Like people would gather together to watch Formula One. My uncle had a cool car, it was a coupe, you know, back in the day, you know, that kind of stuff. He would love cars and motorcycles. I think that would kind of build me up into racing and engines and stuff like that. You have to be 18 years old to have a license in Brazil. My family was wasn't strict on a bad way, but like a biting citizen, right? So they never allow me to drive a car until I was 18, never ever, right? Nothing like you have to be 18, you're gonna do it. Do you want to crank it? You can crank it, you cannot drive it, don't put it in here, you know, that kind of stuff. And then I was a lot on bicycles because I want the movement, I want the speed, right? Just like I was telling you guys, I would go with my bicycle to the gas station, where back in the day a lot of people would do car meets and gas stations and stuff. And the scene was amazing, would close gas stations just like here, right? Close the gas station with different cars, modified cars, street racing and stuff like that. So I was bored on that situation. A lot of racing, right? Stock car is a class that's been around for, I don't know, 40 years or something. I always forget because it's so long. That's the longest standing class in Brazil, stock car racing. Okay. And they used to race those cars. Yep. Stock car used to do Opalas back in the day. And they had the Maverick, they have the Charger and the Opala, pretty much racing there back in the 70s. And then it's just like you have that inside passion, right? And then you have that environment. There's nothing you can do about it. I would say it was a mix, you know, myself and my surrounding, you know, the people, the situation in Brazil and stuff like that. And when Senna passed away, it was really strong for everyone, you know, because he was a world champion. He was fighting. It was a hard moment for him. He was struggling.

The car was difficult.

The car was difficult. And everyone could see, Schumacher was coming in, amazing driver as well, with a better machine. That's what he looked like. And he still could outpull him sometimes, you know, that kind of stuff. When he passed away, it was a... If you like car and you're from Brazil, you recall that, like it's impossible not to. I remember, I was nine, I believe. I think it was nine. I crew my heart out. It was something like hard to explain. It was like losing a family member or something.

Did you watch the documentary or a series that came out last year?

Yes.

Yeah.

What I like about all the documentaries that they do in the movies and stuff, is that they all show a little bit different, because there's different perspectives. Some, the family kind of endures. Some, the family does endorse and some friends do. And it's cool to see, not just Senna, but what it takes to be a high-profile race driver. And one thing that's pretty clear, looking to all of them, you need to dedicate your life to that, in a way, that is really hard to concept that without someone explaining like he did, not him, but people did his life through all those videos. Racing was number one for him, above his life. It was not above just his family, it was above his life. He put that 100% above his desires. He wanted to have a kid, he even tried because he would upset his racing career. He had some relationships where it looks like he would fade away on purpose, because he didn't want to prejudice his career. He would put his life in danger just to try to win, to make sure that he could be the best of the best of the best. So I think it's really cool, and all of them are good, none of them are bad.

I was going to ask, again, I know you were a kid at the time, but do you feel like they depict the legend? Do you think all of those depict the legend very well?

They all did to some extent.

Okay.

Right? Because they all fail in details. So I think it's important to see more than one. One of the movies that have a lot of interviews with drivers and crew chiefs and stuff, that one is really important because it tells a lot of stories from other people perspective, and they're real, it's them talking, right? It's really important. But if you go like the last one was Netflix, right? The last one, the mini-series that they did, shows a lot of personal stuff that most stuff was only on books that most people don't read, right? So I think it was cool to kind of, you kind of add and you can kind of put a puzzle together from his life because any race car driver that is a high profile guy, his race, his life is so complicated because it's a balance that's unbalanced. The balance is on racing, right? And you still need to survive. I think it's cool that that Formula One series is called Drive to Survive. Yeah, right. Because that's what it is. You know, they driving, right? They're not surviving. They driving, survive with secondary. It's crazy, right? And that goes along with drag racing, man. Like if you think about, you know, you have, you know, John Force, you know, you have Rick Smith on ProMod Racing, those guys, they dedicate 100% of their lives to racing. And that's one of the reasons that they are so, you know, con-decorated and they want so much.

Well, so you could have, obviously you come from that perspective, you know, with Formula One being so strong in Brazil. And how do you end up in this world, this drag racing world? Do you remember when your first time around a drag car was?

Drag racing was always strong in Brazil. It was stronger back then, just to be honest. Now they ramping up again. They even had one of the coolest things, they did the festival in Brazil on a track that doesn't exist anymore, just to have an idea. There was Brazil vs. the United States. People from the United States took top fuel cars and funny cars to Brazil to race against Brazilian guys. And that's back in the 90s, right? Like, so cool. And we have people, they still race today, that they used to be there. And I was young again, 9, 10, 12, 15. And I would look up to them. I remember that I had a poster on my room that was a yellow Opala from the bear, Urso. And it's a ProMod that became like a ProMod. A Opala that became a ProMod as it was being developed, because ProMod didn't even exist back then. Yep. You know, mid-90s, you know, they were trying to follow the United States to some extent because you guys have more racing here than there, right? As the ProMod class was born here, they kind of did the same. They tried to stretch the cars and make lightweights and put more power and stuff. And I remember that was on the first, and like I have the pleasure that today, the guy is my friend, Carlos Cacadaude. He used to race early 2000s with a front-wheel drive car. And I remember looking up to him. And then he went to Chevy, right? He was a Volkswagen guy in the start, and then he went to Chevy. And I personally, I have a good connection with General Motors and Chevrolet cars. I like them. And then I remember having the same thing, photos of his car and admiring the guy. And one day I got to meet the guy, right? Because he was an early adopter of FuelTech. And I remember the day that he saw my daily car with individual throttle bodies. Damn kid, that's a b***** car you have. And I was early 20s, maybe?

What car was this again?

That was an Opel Kadett. It looks to a Honda CR-X. Similar to a Honda CR-X, but it's European model. Mine was like I stroke it, so it was like 2.3 liter, 16 valve, 4 throttle bodies, nitrous.

And you did that yourself or did you work on it yourself?

All myself. I used to live with my family, it was an apartment complex, on the garage, open garage, the rain, sun, whatever, did everything, ceramic clutch, changing rear end gears and stuff like that. It was a good time, but I remember like, this is the part of me growing as a car guy, let me say, right? Doing stuff by myself and having those iconic people around me.

Was that because...

He races all the way to today. He is record holder for 4 cylinders on the 8th mile. He goes like, I believe, 381 on the 8th with a 4-cylinder, right? He still races today. I finally convinced going V8, so the next car is going to be a pro model V8. And he's my friend. You know, he calls me all the time. I call him, we share stuff. And it's so cool that I used to look up to him like, man, this is kind of one of the gods of drag racing in Brazil. You know? And now he's my friend. Sometimes he asks me stuff. Sometimes I kind of stop before I answer him. I'm like, man, this is unreal.

You know?

This is unreal. We're kind of bouncing ideas with a guy that's like a legend.

It's so cool.

Is that one of those things like... Because sometimes they say, you don't want to meet your heroes. Is that one of those where you're happy that...

Oh, hell no. I never had that.

Okay.

All my heroes that I met, the great people.

Awesome.

All the heroes that I met. Like, there is another Brazilian guy. He's the only Brazilian that I know of, 100% sure. They race top few. He raced top few in the United States. Sidney Frigo. Right? Great dude. Don't get me wrong. He raced top few. He has money. Right? He has, you know, one of my heroes has money. He has the recipe to maybe, you know, not be a nice guy. You can't find a nicer guy than him. Crazy. He built a racetrack in Brazil, a b***** drag racing track, just because he loved the sport. Wow. He knows that doesn't make a lot of money. He built the track. It took him forever to be able to open because he was having a struggle with the environment down there because it was close to a water source. Okay. Right? But it was okay. It was just like politics. Right? He finally was able to open and he holds the best races today in Brazil is at his track. Not because just he has money. He puts his heart on it. You can see him on every race. He didn't have to. Every race he's there. Every race. He races himself at that track. Right? He holds the track record at the track today. And he's getting young. Yeah. Right? He's getting that old, but he ain't young. And he's still doing and putting like, what we need to make this track better. He don't care. It's not a business. It's his passion. Right? So I think we Brazilian, overall, we love cars. Overall, right? We just love cars. And I think Brazilian and Americans, we're really in line with that because we all love cars. Like, I think the car culture here is amazing. And here there's more opportunity. The dollar, the fuel, energy, everything is stronger for you guys. And it is, you know, the birthplace of a lot of stuff. Drag racing, crazy high-power engines, experimenting with fuels, right? We go on you guys' trail, actually. You know, we kind of look up to the United States and they're doing this. Oh, let's do this here, too. Let's try this. And I think it was a really perfect combination. You know, people that have a lot of passion on a place, they have a lot of resources, right? And passion, right? But we are really creative because we don't have the resource. So we need to be creative about it. Like, man, we don't have this here. It's like Brazil was close to imports all the way up to the early 90s. You could not import anything. It's not like in Texas. You couldn't. Oh, I want to buy a brand new corvette. I have money. No, but you cannot. Right. That was how it is. And that's why our muscle car was this car, a six cylinder, because we didn't have V8s. Yeah. Right. Because the company will have to open a factory and build in Brazil to be able to do that. Right. So Ford did, Dodge did. But they kind of struggle too, like there's not much market to do that stuff. Fuel is expensive. The vast majority of cars there is like today, three cylinders, four cylinders. Fuel is expensive. Right. So we bring our creativity from here, our passion, join with United States domestic passion and resource. I think it was actually a no brainer to do this. Right. And I think that's why FuelTech and Proline, when we start working together, was such a good synergy. They have the resource, they have the passion, they have the mechanical resources. One of the bad a** engine that you can have it, they didn't have the electronics. So we came with that. They literally made a list, you need this. Eric Diller, Steve Paddy, they came to me and Anderson, right? You need to do this, you don't do this, we're using FuelTech, man. They're like, okay, let's fly back to Brazil. We flew back to Brazil, went to the developing team, guys, we have a mission. We need to do this. You guys okay? Yeah, let's all hold hands. Come by my lord, let's go. Six months later, we came to the United States. Hey, Eric. Here you go. Where is that? You asked for it. That's your list, that little box there. No way. Let's put on the dial. And then that's how it started, right? And then they saw that we were in joking about it.

Well, even before that, can you tell me about the early days of FuelTech and in Brazil then since you're, say you're working with limited cars, stuff like that. What's product one and what did that look like? What was the birth of FuelTech? Like, do you?

Product one.

Yeah.

Okay, product one was called Turbo Pro.

Okay.

It was a fuel only auxiliary control. So you could have an OEM vehicle, you could put a turbo charger on it and you didn't have to put a carburetor system to tune it. You would leave the OEM fueling system and you put external injectors and that unit will add fuel as boost kicks in.

Okay.

Right? That was the very first product, 2002, 2003, something like that, right? Around the number. That was the very first product. Then the next product was the S Pro, S Pro from Naturally Aspirated, right? It was a unit that was TPS based, throttle position only, that would do just fuel, throttle position. So you have a throttle, it will fuel by throttle. So you can do a naturally aspirated car by that. The game changing unit for us, back in early 2000s was the Race Pro, because we joined both. You could do fueling from the naturally aspirated phase all the way to the turbo phase, and we integrated ignition control. That was our first ECU. They will look the same outside, and they always had the same approach as we have today. Built-in dashboard, it was a small 16 by 2, deal? And four buttons, no computer connection. You will do all the tuning on the screen. Up, down, left, right, like a minigame. You were like, up, down, up, down, more or less. That was the first EFI system.

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It was on Brazilian currency about 1,700 bucks back then, and so they will put in real back then in dollar, maybe $900 back then on that moment. But it's really expensive to import stuff. You could import, you could have an import ECU, but it's really expensive. No tech support, nobody speaks Portuguese with you anyway. Anderson and some other guys were willing to help you. So having a good manual, going to the track to assist you, that's when I purchased mine. I purchased, my first one was a Race Pro. So I bought that and I put on that car, that little Opel on my apartment garage, same deal. Cut some wires, do this and that, have some struggle, just look into the manual. Okay, this is crank trigger, this is injector, okay, this is what I do. First crank, it cranks, runs like s***, but runs. Okay, I have something. I start playing with, you have nitrous controller building, like, oh good, okay, let me put some nitrous on this thing, put nitrous on that thing, start running really well. That was the very first product, that thing was crazy successful. It still runs like a champ. If you have a unit from the early 2000s, they run like a champ. We actually even supported it.

I was going to ask, do you still support them too?

If you break that thing, we can fix for you. It's crazy. From time to time, we receive something that I get, man, it's working really well, but something stopped working. Yeah, you know, it's old. Vibrate something, lose. I don't know. Something got burned. It's a easy deal. We just click something, call the guy, small charge, small fee, send it back, the guy's happy. So that was the deal. And then the product develop, where it was a similar concept, had the connection to the computer, had the building data logger. We started developing the deal. Then we started doing... I don't remember the year now, but then it had a 4.3-inch touch screen unit, right? That was revolution, to be honest. I don't recall having issues with touch screen units when we did ours. I think that was the first one. Then we started doing the new generation with more features, the Power FT line, beauty engine meter, fast speed sensor reading, transmission controllers. That's the Power FT, all the way to FT600. Crazy successful unit. As today, we sell over 1,000 ECUs monthly, worldwide. And then the Vision FT line came about 3 years ago, right? And we had some different struggles of the unit because it was COVID zone, post-COVID, right? And last year, we had a major flood. The largest flood ever recorded on our hometown. And our factory was about 7 to 8 feet underwater.

Yeah, we were just listening to that on the Street Alpha podcast about that story.

There was, you never would think about that. Like I saw floods in my life, right? I never thought I would see in person, right? It was a really hard moment for us. We will pay the price for a long time, right? So we, but at the same time, we knew like it, like you can't just be crying because your leg's broken. You need to do something about it. You know, you still need to eat. So you need to go after. So I did an emergency flight with one of my guys here. There was no flights to my hometown. The airport was on the water, the airport. They couldn't take all the planes away quick enough. There was one airplane. The water was on the belly of the airplane. On the airport. Wow. It's that bad. Big trucks that can go into floods were floating on the flood. It was that bad. There are other cities that were worse. There are places where the river rose 100 feet.

Wow.

There were... What is the... What is called where the... I'm sorry, I'm from Brazil. Sometimes I forget the word. What is the place where the horses sleep? Oh, like a stable? Yeah, the stable. There were places that the water was... They went above stables, right? So most of the horses, they die. And when the flood went down, there was horses on the top of the stable. Yeah. Oh, wow. And we all know how high they were, right? Crazy, like unimaginable stuff. Like, you know, those power lines, they're really high. You couldn't see on the floods on some places. And people were stuck on the top. Just trying to survive, you know. Hundreds of people died. It was awful. You know, it was awful. And for us, it was a really strong deal because we didn't thought it was that bad. We prepared ourselves for something way smaller. When we saw that it was that bad, there was nothing we could do, unfortunately. So we had to react, right? So I flew there with one of my guys and the team in Brazil worked together. We'd go to the company with jet skis and boats. Through the city, we would ride jet skis and boats through the city.

Unbelievable.

Like, we did an interesting, I can't say cool, but interesting documentary about it. We have on FuelTech YouTube deal. It's about one hour long. It has a bunch of we talking what happened and a lot of footage. If some people want to understand what happened, what we went through was not as hard as losing your friend or your family, but it was really hard for the company because since we have over 200 employees, we're responsible for them to some extent. If the company would just break and everything, all those people will lose their jobs and stuff. So we were like, no, we need to do something about it. So we went over, we work hard, we were literally swimming on the middle of this deal. Like this deal would be swimming on the middle of this. Crazy, right? Trying to pick up and save everything we can. We were able to save a lot. We lost all our manufacturing line. There's kind of no insurance for that kind of stuff.

So I was gonna ask if Brazilian, how the insurance stuff works.

It doesn't work for that at least. So we pretty much everything that we lost, we lost. A lot of people helped us. So a lot of people like allow us to have stuff at cost. They rent stuff, they gave us small stuff, but like in the end, the overall loss was ridiculous. We talk about millions of dollars, millions gone. All the wind, millions. So we're just working harder now. There's nothing we can do about it. But the interesting thing is, we were the very first company back to work on that whole section. The whole neighborhood, everything were the very first one. And we were one of the most complex ones. But the guys were so hard working, right? All the passion that they just didn't stop night after night. Because everyone understood, we either hold the hands or we'll separate.

Yeah.

There's no other option. So let's hold hands and let's do this.

Well, this is right as you're getting ready to launch another product too, right?

Yeah. So, man, that sucked.

Yeah, I bet. That sucked big time.

So that's another hold back. So we were finally able to start delivering the unit late last year, 24. Yep. And now we are getting close to 1,000 units out, right? So it's ramping up production, units out is really cool. We have a whole class in Brazil called Stock Car Racing that I told you guys. High profile road racing. Have a building camera, have 5G communication so people can see live what the driver is doing, push to pass, active wing, S section, just Formula 1. You know, all the stuff runs through the ECU. Bad a** deal. That's awesome. Amazing. You know, they have ballast of performance per car. They have electronic gate. You know, it's a four-cylinder, turbocharged, sequential transmission. It's a really nice deal. 500 horsepower, lightweight, big slicks. Beautiful vehicle, fast as hell, right? Really fast car. And we proud to be part of the project and to be racing. I'm actually going to Brazil next week because of that. They have another round. And this is one of the things, one of their head guys is a friend of mine. And I told him, man, if I can help, I can help, I'm going to be here. You know, let's do it because I want to live this. This is a moment on Brazilian racing history, doing this, because it's the first time they do a car in Brazil for that class. And they have high hopes that that car is such a good car that they can actually do a world class for touring cars, single car, just like we were talking about, like Formula 4, Formula 3 and stuff like that as a single vehicle. So it's really cool to see. We overcame all those obstacles and just like working hard every day to make it better, to make it better.

So you guys think you're back up fully, everything's good now or you're still catching up on that too?

No, the company's 100% up and going, right? We receive our new, we got a landed line, production line. After we put the company back up, everything was okay. We still didn't have manufacturing, right?

Yeah.

So the company that makes those Fuji, they actually allow us to use one of them, use the ones that they have because the cars get a trade in sometimes.

Yeah.

And then we purchase top shelf brand new one, but it takes some time to have it, right? I believe they deliver it in October to us, and we already have that thing running, three shifts all day long, fast as hell.

Awesome.

It's actually better than before, it's just the cost of replacing. Right? But it's state of the art equipment, it's really cool, really cool. We end up hiring more people on development, on tech support, the company's back growing again, you know? It's just that big bill that you pay every month.

Yeah, yeah.

To pay everything that you have to leverage, cause there's no other way, right? So, but like it's working really well, man.

It's really cool. Can you take us kind of through the product line a little bit? And so was it the 450 all the way up to the 700? Like what application would work best for who and what they're trying to use it for?

So FuelTech issues have this approach. Be easy to be used, have the best and most used features that you may need, right? And have the hardware attached to that, because in the end, the unit cost is the hardware, right? The product line cost is the firmware, right? So that's pretty much how we work with. So when you have, today the PowerFT line is my main line. There will be 450, 550 and 600. Those are the three units that I hold for that thing. Okay. The 450 is the entry level deal. It's less than $1,000, right? Has less inputs and outputs, because it's intend to be used on a single cylinder to entry level six cylinder. That's pretty much what the unit is built for. If you have a four cylinder, it falls right into that really cool deal. But if you have a really high profile for a cylinder, where you're using a lot of stuff, you may need a 550 because you're going to need more inputs and outputs. Okay. If you have a racing car, like that you're actually going to compete, not just like a club deal, then you go to the 550 as well because he adds building G meter. Right? That helps a lot. And by having more inputs and outputs, it allows us to do strain gauge control, so you can have like flat shifting if you have a sequential transmission. So that unit has more inputs and outputs, internal G meter because you need that for any kind of race, you need to analyze how the car is moving through acceleration. And then flat shifting if it's like a sequential shift. When you go to the 600, you add way more inputs and outputs. Right? So you add stuff. You add more memory for data logging, you add external LEDs for warning, sequential shifter lights and stuff like that. So again, if you need more inputs and outputs, like a ProMod, most, if not all ProMods, they run 600s. Right? But that also true for a b*****, you know, drag and drive style car. If you have like a race F150, they have a 10 speed deal, the 10 speed transmission that we control takes a lot of outputs and inputs. So you're gonna need a 600 to do it, just because it takes a lot of inputs to do it. But if you have a manual, Twin Turbo Coyote, you can go away with a 550. So that's pretty much how it is. So the cost involved is mostly harder. You add harder, you add cost. You take harder away, you remove cost, right? And now the new line is called Vision FT. We start with the higher end, the 700 and the 700 plus. So the 700 is a seven inch unit. The plus is the same unit with a 12.3 inch e-screen. Both follow the same deal, touch screen, right? But because the new product line, it has a ton of stuff that we don't have in the previous line. So it has wireless through Wi-Fi, wireless through Bluetooth. It has audio and video inputs, so you can connect cameras on the unit, either to show or to log. You can connect a radio, for example, and log your radio on the unit, right?

Oh, cool.

Right? Doesn't seem that good until you use it. And then you actually see the recording from the run and how you communicate with the driver. That's actually pretty cool. Then we put so much memory. We kind of call it infinite memory, but we know it's not infinite, but it's a lot of memory. If you're not using video and audio, you can record for weeks on that thing non-stop. So it's a bunch of stuff. The unit cell records a really higher rate. Older unit, 200 hertz, the new unit can be 1,000 hertz today. The dashboard is fully customizable. The previous one, you could do some stuff, but not all. Now you can do everything. So as I showed you guys before, this thing has a dash that resembles back to the feature. Ron, great customer friend, right there. B***** car. Ben Jones. Yeah, LDR style, so drag racing only deal. Man, state of the art LS, Númen platform, he's a big Chevy guy, big LS guy. So he's into that. This is pretty much the best that you can have on this thing. He has a 700 and it's like a C6 style dash on this deal. You can finance how you do. You can do like a random dash if you want to, but again, it doesn't look that important until you do it. So it helps the driver if you can make something larger, smaller, this and that. So the older generation couldn't do, now you can. It has four cam networks, so you can integrate with OEM stuff better. So if you're using an OEM platform for something and you want to integrate, or I don't know, you have a power steering rack that is electronic control, and you know how to control through Cambus, you can have one network with that language, just controlling that deal, and you're still having other networks to do other stuff, right? We have eight high-speed inputs. There are, and I always forget, because it's such a high number, and I don't recall, I believe it's 400 kilohertz. The goal of this is to record in-chamber pressure sensors, right? So this is something that's not available in the software yet, but the hardware is there, because that's the hardest thing to do. The hardware is there. Our goal in the near future is to be able to do closed-loop timing through chamber pressure sensors, right? So this is, nobody has it. Just to be honest, we don't have yet, right? The hardware is there, but that's the goal. This is an easy way to try to explain how far ahead we're looking into with this platform. Future-proofing it. Exactly. So the unit can connect as well through the back with a USB adapter to 5G and have pretty much worldwide connection, right? That's being used in a stock car as those races are using those. Way more inputs and outputs, obviously. We have a section of the software that you can build your own functions. They're really graphical, similar to like a, there's an engineering software called LabVIEW, and it's really similar to that. It's like you can open something like a block, and then you tell what the block means, and you connect to another one, and then you can do a condition up and down, then you can have a sensor that triggers. So it's really graphic to build your functions, right? So that kind of stuff is another one that's, it doesn't hold back, so the system is not so naked like some systems are, right? The system comes complete. It controls 10-speed, 8-speed, you know, have all this stuff, but you also have a section where you can do 100% custom. And then you can, I don't know, I want to do something proprietary for myself. You can do that and lock only the section and maybe you can sell us, you know, intellectual property to someone else. I have my package, you know, I develop something to control a specific vehicle, a Pagani or something. Yeah. And I don't want nobody to have it, it's fine. You put a lock on that, nobody will have it, it's just you and then you can sell for your customers and stuff like that. So that's what we envision with this unit, and it's really hard to tell where it's gonna go, how far ahead we thought about hardware wise, right? So, and then that line will be the new line where we're gonna start doing smaller units at some point. Right? Obviously we were behind because of this whole hardware we had, right? But the guys are working pretty fast. We may have, you know, maybe PRI will have something to show for next year or something.

Oh, no, no, no. I heard about this not just from the other podcast, but from Ron. Can you guys have some kind of like dino simulation thing you guys can do, too, on there? Can you explain that a little bit?

So this is a cool deal, okay? This is pretty much a service. We work closely with a company from Australia, New Zealand, Mainline. So Mainline built what I think is today one of the best dinos that is available. There is other good brands like Dynacom, right? Mustang Dino. There is good brands out there, right? But Mainline I think was the first one that made something that we felt like, and that's some years ago now. We have this sub-dino operation for, I don't know, six years more. And they had a really good hardware. That's what I was looking into. When I look like, man, that's a heavy investment back then. I don't know, $150,000 for a dime. And they're like, okay, I think we can do it. And when I got that thing, I'm like, man, I think this is better than I thought. I think I can leave stainless steel from this guy. And because I don't have a roller, ain't gonna spin the tire, right? Not even me and I knew how to do this. We actually developed the usage of this, right? And we understood how to do it, how to properly do it where the dino would repeat, because in the end, that's what it is. And then now, since then, we did close to 5,000 laps on that dino. That dino is being used. I personally did close to 3. Me personally decided to do. And we simulate runs on cars from 200 horses all the way to 5,300 horses. That's our record, right? Drag racing style, just like anything could be. You can simulate road racing as well. You can bend gears up and down, right? So, but that road racing style, really high performance, nobody would have done prior to this. Some people had that dyno before us, but they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't start from scratch. They would do high gear pulls, just like a regular dyno would do, right? We were the first ones to do, and then it spread away. A lot of people that bought dynos, I think is really helpful. More people can tune it, right? And we still offer the service today where you can bring your FuelTech-equipped vehicle instead of going to the track. So we rule out track prep and we rule out suspension and stuff like that. And we dyno with a professional team helping, and we actually can steer you to the right direction. Because the car still works, it's hold by the wheels. It works like the dragship. It squats, separates, just like at the racetrack. So if it's a radio car, we can kind of watch and observe, look at the dog like, man, I think we need to do a bar change here. ProMos the same way. It tries to pull wheelies, just like at the track, it's crazy. So you can actually work on the car and there's a lot. I'm gonna guess over a hundred people that came here, we did our thing with them, they learned about the system a little better, and they went to the track, and first day at the track, personal best. It's not just an engine deal, it's a whole package, how to run the vehicle. I think that's a really cool deal. There are people that have good dynos at their shop, and when they get to the high profile, high horsepower, they come to us. Ron is a good deal. He has a b***** shop, Vengeance, everyone knows about it. He has dyno at his place. When he gets to that crazy high horsepower deal, he gives us a call, he brings the car, sometimes he drops the car with us. And then we handle that to him, because we are specialized on that. We can do small power as well, but we are shop-wise, service-wise, we're specialized on this really high horsepower. Honestly, 2,000 and up, because we do a lot of ultra street cars, and today they do 2,000 plus, right? Ultra street is crazy. It's a regular car with 2,000 plus. They go low four seconds to the eight mile, and it's still a car. It's still like a Fox body with carpet and stuff. It's crazy. They're crazy fast, crazy fast.

Speaking of that, then, when we start talking about 2,000 horsepower up, traction now becomes an issue. You guys have, so there's other companies out there that are really great at traction management, all that kind of stuff. So you guys have that kind of stuff built into it too then?

Yes.

Okay.

So the system has pretty much two major traction control person. One actually is not traction control, but like it got popular like traction control in 80s.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. So traction control is actually based on traction. You lose it, it does something. Right. So we have that. That's what we call active traction control. It compares vehicle speed through G-meter acceleration or wheel speed and manipulate power in real time. Also set targets. So I have this lippage, this zone, this speed, this load. If it goes above, it start cutting or dropping timing or whatever. We do that. It's really useful for road racing, time attack, rally racing, where you don't have a good surface. You don't know how the surface is. Because like you're moving on the track, you may go through a curb, someone may throw dirt on the track. So active control is very useful. Then you have what people also call traction control, but honestly ain't, right? It's power management, time-based power management. That's really useful for drag racing. For drag racing, you have the opportunity to walk on the track. Even no prep tracks, you still can understand how the track goes. So that's more useful for drag racing. It makes better than active traction control because it does not rely on losing a little traction to react. Because that's how it goes. It's just like ABS. ABS needs to see that the tire is starting to stop to try to release. So that's why no ABS on a good driver is quicker than ABS. Right? It's the same concept here.

It's very reactive.

Yes. So if you can be pre-active and have the perfect power curve to the surface you're racing, you're faster. So that's under our time-based compensations, where you can do speed base and engine base, and you can manipulate power in between or both. You choose where the unit in real time manipulates the speed, the wheel speed, or end engine speed to be at exact point, at exact moment time through the run.

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.

And that's what it makes a drag race car really quick, really quick, because you can literally choose. This plot, how people talk about it, makes my car go 1060 foot. You go back out there, 1060 foot. It does what you're telling the car to do. If you walk to the track and you say, this track can take a 95, 60 foot. You can be assertive and go there, go up on your dots to go to a 95, 60 foot. You won't try to go 93, maybe slip a little and go to a 96. You go to a 95. So as you can see, it's not actually traction control, it's power management. You manage manipulating power to go to something that you feel as a tuner, that comes the artist side. I'll go there, walk on the track, see the track, twist your foot here, use a tool there, talk to your buddy, and make a decision. I decide that this car can do this.

So is that why when you look at, for example, ProMod events, is that why it's down to the 100th or 1000th of a second?

Yes, sir. Because today on ProMod Racing, we have, I don't know, maybe 100 plus ProMods in activity in the United States, b***** ones, right? You can see the winter series that Drag Illustrator put together on Bradenton, and I think they almost got to 80 on one of the races or something like that.

It's crazy, right?

And they fighting for 32 spots. And the difference in between the first and the 32 is like, I don't know, 100 on second or something, 32 cars. Yeah, it's crazy. Some s*** like that is ridiculous. It's because it's the best of the best. Everywhere, right? On qualifying day, the driver have one job. Don't f*** up.

That's it, right?

That's what the driver has to do, right? The driver don't do much. Just don't screw the deal. Just make A to B run. Stage as shallow as you can, right? And shut off if you feel something weird. Don't put on the wall, make to the strike, and we're going to qualify good. It's everything on the team and mostly on the crew chief. Calling the shots on the computer, on the suspension, on the way ballast, on the converter selection, on the tire pressure, on the wheelie bar height, how the car to go down the track. And then on the computer go out there and he tells, I want this, I want that, at this moment. And he goes out and he walks on the track back and forth, and he measures the track and track temperature and talk to someone. Some people are higher to analyze the track and give feedback to the crew chief, right? They analyze further down and they give them a review. Yeah, by 80 foot on the left lane, there is a small dip 10 feet from the center line. So people place the car slightly to the right, so it doesn't go to the dip. It's that tight. And that's why that's the higher grade of, you know, door racing. Yeah. You know, to qualify number one on a race like that, you ain't luck. I promise you that. You don't be number one by luck there, right? And everyone can be number one on that race, just to be honest. It's just that day, the sun shined better to a couple of guys because it's that tight, right? Then when race starts, then there's a shared duty. Now the driver has influence, right? Because today, ProMod Racing mostly, if you do a 30-thousand reaction time, it's long. Really? Yeah. 30-thousand is long. 30-thousand is taking the winning chance pretty far.

Wow. We have less than four seconds from start to finish, right? Like, there's no room for any guy.

Today, ProMod Racing, a really good ProMod driver, and I can tell because I'm not, I don't do that. I cannot go that fast, right? A good ProMod driver will be to the single-digit, all the way up to 20-thousand, every single run. That's a good driver today.

Wow.

If you can be in between a triple-zip all the way to a 19-thousand reaction time, that's a winning driver, right? That's a winning driver. There's not many out there.

No, that's not me for sure.

I've seen how you drive.

I'd be honest, I don't drive enough, because you need seat time, right?

Right.

I'm trying to take anything away from those guys, because I'm just not as good as them, like playing as simple. I can be a double-wo, I've been there. I did several laps double-wo, but that happens when I pretty much not working here.

Yeah.

I'm being at the track all the time, I'm doing five laps a day, I'm focusing, I'm not worrying about my wife is holding the forte home with my kids, there's nothing in my head happening, I don't need to worry about the business. I can do that. As soon as I start worrying about the business, my family, I need to travel around, I slowly creep up, I end up being a 50 to 100. And that does not stand a chance in ProMod today.

Yeah.

Right? Some other fields that may fly. ProMod, it does not. Because it takes that. It takes a good driver that can drive, a good driver that can release, and can be consistent. So that happens. And I don't think there's no shame in telling that because you don't want to take the light from those guys are really b*****. And again, they put driving above their lives. If there's some drivers out there, that if you see, they're every week competing in some class, different classes. And that's one of the reasons they are there. They are there. They're trying. Right now, there's one guy, he's a customer, but he's a friend of mine. He's such a good guy. Man, that guy is unstoppable. He's been racing for a long time. Don't get me wrong, but like, I don't know, maybe a year or two years ago, he started dedicating his life to racing a little more. He drives everything he can, pretty much. He has a lot of race cars and he drives for other people. He's always inside the car. And you can clearly see from two years ago to now, he got a better driver. That average 50, 60, 70 became an average 40,000, 30,000, 20,000. He does triple zips and 20s all the time. That's what it takes. It's cool to watch that. The guy grows as a driver on that small thousands of a second. That's all seat time. You know, dedication to the sport. That's dedication to the sport on that portion of sport, driving. You need to dedicate yourself. Tuning in different. You want to be a good tuner, you need to be out there every day tuning cars. If you drag racing, every day the track. If you use the engine, every day on the dyno. You have to do it.

What's your biggest market? Is it the stock cars back in Brazil, pro mod stuff here? Do you know where you've got the biggest presence?

It's hard to tell.

Street cars.

In the United States, it's pretty clear, drag racing. United States drag racing number one. We did focus a lot on that. So drag racing number one. We've been growing a lot on other stuff as well, but drag racing is by far number one. If you go to a pro mod race, Radio Verstel World, Limit Drag Radio, X275, you go all those classes. You can go to Outlaw 632. You go to those classes that people can use FuelTech. Some classes don't allow you. Pro stock and the nature you are not allowed to. But if you go to classes that you are allowed to, you're gonna see always over half of the field is FuelTech, and then the other brands on the other half of the field or less. It's pretty cool. It's rewarding to go to the track and see so many guys in FuelTech and doing well. Qualifying number one, winning the race, it's cool stuff, right? In Brazil, there's a vast variation of usage of the unit. Because over there, there is no strict regulations about usage. So, there are a lot of street cars down there. Road racing, a lot of road racing is FuelTech. Water sports and stuff like that, pretty much everyone uses FuelTech, small boats, everything, you name it. There are prototypes, airplanes, and helicopters in Brazil using FuelTech. Really? Crazy. I'd rather stay on the ground, just to be honest.

Yeah.

Or in the water, like that kind of stuff. I like flying, but I like big airplanes.

Yeah.

But I think it's pretty much it, because the system is pretty much universal. So you can do on anything you want, honestly. If it is okay to use on that, it's okay. Middle East, a lot of people use it. Europe, Australia.

That's awesome.

Really cool.

So basically anything internal combustion, but I see there is a Mustang over there that has EV. Are you guys controlling that in any way, shape or form?

And I'm sorry, I'm not an EV guy, so I end up forgetting that. Because this is the deal. I respect EV. You got me wrong. I always joke about it. I have hybrids everywhere. My car is hybrid. It has an electric motor to crank my combustion engine. I joke about it, you know, because in the end, man, electric car came before combustion car. I don't know if you guys know. It came before, right? And the major hold up about electric cars, it's range. How quick can you charge and the range that they have, right? That's the hold up. And they've been improving. Anderson had a Tesla plaid for a second. There's no way you don't like the car. That thing is bad to the bone. It's fast as hell, but it's preference, right? My personal preference, it is the sound, you know, the noise, the vibration, the smell, you know, that thing is just cool as hell. I like, that's why I have like the old Bimmer V12, 1991 Turbo Deal, you know, because it's cool. It's not because I won that car, you know, I can buy a brand new car, it's way better than that thing, you know, but that thing is cool as hell. I love it, you know? And then electric cars, they are really challenging and I like that challenge, that's why we have one of those. We have Fox Body here, really nice Fox Body, you know, it's a regular HODL, it's nothing fancy, about low 20,000 miles cars, it's a really nice shape. I think it's a 86, I think it's 86, I'm not sure. We made an EV conversion, so we tried to do with that engine from Ford, and then Ford kind of did a bad one on everyone. That motor don't have no manual orientation. Different from a regular motor, you cannot guess how that thing works. You cannot just like, let me put some fuel, see if it cranks. It doesn't work like that on that kind of motor, right? You need to understand what is the angle of stuff and how you manipulate the magnets to make that thing spin one way, the other way. If you don't have it, you will take, I don't know, almost infinite time to be able to reverse engineer the thing. So that being said, it's paperweight. Those four engines that they have, I don't know, Illuminator, Luminator, whatever the name that they gave, Electrilator, I don't know. They're paperweight. Everyone that has one is paperweight besides them. They never share. It's a shame for them to do that, unfortunately. I don't know what they did that way. It's not that complicated to share the information. We could be using it to be happy with. We were doing a four-wheel drive Fox Body with two of those. We have two of those here on the show.

You're talking about their electric drivetrain?

Yeah, we have two of those here. It's a similar deal to the Mustang Mach-E. It's not the same. And then we were doing a four-wheel drive Fox Body. That would be cool. Absolutely. We didn't. So how can we do a cool deal? Because we're doing, man. We're doing. We say we're going to do electric car, and then we did a different way. A regular deal. But look at this. We kept the clutch at the five-speed.

Oh, really?

It is a five-speed electric car. We gave some soul to that thing.

Yeah.

So you can leave a first gear and bang gears on electric car. And I must tell you, it's cool. The sound, it makes sound now. So you can literally go, eeeem, eeeem, eeeem.

That's awesome.

So it's actually cool. So when you go on the highway, it's quieter, eeeem, because it's like low RPM. But you can actually put in first and that thing like destroy tires, like there's nothing. It goes from nothing to the highest speed on the motor, almost instantly in first gear because the gear leverage, right? So some people talk about, oh, electric cars don't need gears. That's a true lie. It's a blunt lie because everything needs gears, just to be honest. Either to go high speed or either to accelerate quicker. Either or, even Teslas. If the Tesla had better gear, it would be quicker on the quarter mile.

I can see that.

100%. I drove several times that, right? I drive race cars. I can feel when the car is like, it's missing here. The car can take it. The car, the vehicle can take it. It's been manipulated not to do, and some of the manipulation is mechanical. Because if you don't have the right ratio, you can put full power and it doesn't go. That's all we do with these cars. You can have a pro motoring speed, and you get to a track that attracts bad, you know what you do? You live in second. Yeah. Because you take leverage from the gear, right? That makes sense. And it goes down slower, guess what? But if you have too low of a gear, you don't go anywhere, it just smokes the tires. There is a balance, don't get me wrong, right? There is a balance. But if you just have a fixed gear, you're compromising something, right? That FoxBody is a good example. First gear, useless, it just smokes the tire. High gear, too weak, you can put full power of the electric power plane that we have and he ain't fast. But if you put second and you ramp the power in, she's fast, quick, right? But then she's not fast, you know what you do? Clutch, next gear.

Yeah, that's cool. What inspired that project?

The challenge, the challenge.

Who's the first person that brought it? Like, hey, I got a crazy idea. Who texted the group chat?

I'm not sure, okay, just to be honest, because we start back in Brazil to do some helping on electric conversions because there is a lot of government rules, right? Sometimes like, you have to be electric. Like for example, there's some forklifts because they run inside an warehouse. Now there's a rule that they have to be electric. So we had customers, I have this bad a** forklift, but it has a four-cylinder, I can't run this. Is that a way I don't have to buy a new one? And then people started doing conversions, forklift conversion from a combustion to electric. Like, we can build a controller for you, but and then we can recommend a motor and can put on that. And that's how we started actually, that side of the business, helping people on actually real life products that do daily tasks, right? So they were doing that and small buses and small cars and stuff. And we started doing that and then at some point like, man, we need to understand a little better. I want one here, you know, but like I don't want electric forklift, you know, it's not a closed hour warehouse. Our forklift is combustion. It's going to stay like that for now. And then, okay, what if we do a left car, but like we cannot do some something that's not, that's dual. We need something cool, right? What is cool in the United States? That everyone likes it to some extent, at least. Fox body, man. Fox body, everyone likes a fox body. Like even watching being fast at the track, nobody say that's a five second quarter mile fox body is lame. Fox bodies are cool. And I'm a Chevy guy, I still like that thing. So like we found one, we bought the one, and we told the previous owner, just so you know, we're not going to keep OEM. Okay, you're okay with that, right? Because if you think this is a museum piece, we're going to buy another one. Like, it's fine, I sell to you. So we bought the car and then okay, we took the 5.0 out, low miles. And then we actually took the transmission, rear gear, everything out. Try to do the four wheel drive. We got a newer generation Cobra rear independent suspension from the next platform.

Oh yeah, the Terminator Cobra one.

Yeah, we adapted that. We finished adapting the motor with that. And meanwhile, Ford never helped us to make the motor work, so like, okay, scrap that. We have to scrape that. That's a shame, right?

Yep.

And then, okay, put it back, the rear gear, for 8.8. That's a b***** regular gear. Put it back, the transmission, I think it's the T5.

Yeah.

And then we made a plate, put the motor there. We have a battery pack on the nose, another one on the trunk, so we kind of balance it out. She actually lost weight.

Really?

She is lighter now. Can you believe that? But the range is great, I'm gonna be honest.

Yeah, sure.

It's about 150 to 180 miles if you don't use the motor all the time. So you can go to a car show, come back without charging, right?

Yeah.

Can charge on a regular power outlet or you can do a fast charger like a Tesla, that thing, that doesn't take that long. But if you go like, I don't know, less than 100 miles or 60, you can actually roll the coal, right?

Yeah.

And that thing moves pretty quick. And I think the gear made more of a difference than we thought, because we were like, eh, it's going to break the transmission, maybe this, let's do it. Nobody did that we know, at least if they did, they didn't show. Right? And I think it's pretty cool. I think it's an opportunity to make this a little cooler. Let's keep the gear. And it does have a clutch pedal, and it does have gears. And it's fun, because again, that's not a car to be cheap, that is not a car to be a daily commuter, that is not a drag racing car. Why would we do a fixed gear? Because they will take all the fun from the car. Now it's actually fun, you need to buy gears.

What power plant did you end up using then? I know Teslas, I think, are a common swap.

Yeah, it's not Tesla, okay?

Is it the guys from Utah, maybe?

No, I forgot the power plant now. I'm going to need to... Maybe someone put something under here and explain what it is, put a link or something. I forget about it sometimes. We did, some time ago, this project. It's actually a dual motor. They stack together. We can stack several. We have whatever brand, the inverter, BMS, something that we can control. So the electric car works pretty much with, I don't know, maybe I think it's five items. I think it is. A battery, large, heavy, not cheap. But they do last a good three to five years at least. So it's not that bad. A BMS, that's a controller for the battery. You have to have, right? They don't come building on that kind of stuff because you're going to need to do a custom package. If you do a custom, I don't know, a standalone battery with a BMS, they usually don't work the way you want because you're trying to mix cells to get your voltage and your current the way that you want. So you need a BMS compatible with your cell package, right? Then you have a inverter that receives the power and talks to the motor, not engine, right? Then you have your motor, right? It still doesn't work because you have a controller that talks to the inverter. So it's fairly complicated if you think about it, right? And we build the controller. So all of our units, 450, 550, 600 and Vision FT, they have built-in EV controllers. Oh, wow, okay. So that is available. You don't need to pay extra or something like that. If you connect to an inverter that is compatible with us, you can go there, you can do a hybrid. You can do a car that has a combustion engine and electric on the same with a FuelTech system. Oh, really? Right? So you can do that today. Okay. And then that inverter has to be compatible with the BMS, right? The BMS has to be compatible with yourselves, right? And the motor as well. They all need to talk, right? If they don't talk, it doesn't work. So it's a little tricky to put together. But if you think it's not trickier than a combustion engine, where you need to have an engine, an intake and an injector, and then a fuel rail, and then a fuel pump, and then a fuel cell, in the end, it's just we're not used, like regular people are not used to that. And there's more companies doing EV. And I think there is space for everyone. To be honest, I almost bought an EV Silverado. Okay. I almost did it. Because if you think about it, EV cars are really useful for daily commuters. They're quiet, right? If you have a charging way at your house or your job, you never go to the gas station anymore. Because sometimes it's a pain in the butt, sometimes it's not, but sometimes it is. Really comfortable. They all high tech. So they all have nice comfort creature deals. All the bells and whistles. You can make sure that you never go in on a summer day and it's hot inside. All of them, right? It's always warm in the wintertime. You don't have any struggles to crank no matter what. They don't leak. They are really good transportation cars. They are really good. That's why I was thinking about the Silverado, because I think it's beautiful. That thing is gorgeous.

That's the one that has the Hummer EV power plant. But it's gorgeous.

I think it's gorgeous. It's just like when I was thinking about it, they didn't came out with, then they came out with, and the range goes really down when you start to pull something. And all the time, there's a lake nearby, and we take the jet skis and the boats to test. It's almost the perfect racetrack, right? Because you can just send it, there's nobody there. I wouldn't say safe, safe, but it's kind of safe. Safe, safe, safe. Because we have like a 1500-horsepower jet ski here, so it's like, there's no way to be safe on that thing. But if you want to go there and test, that thing goes like 110 miles every day, all the time. You're not breaking the law and stuff like that, so it's easy to go there. So sometimes you go there and you spend a good time there, and you need to have a meeting in the middle of the day, so you crank the car up, have AC and talk to someone, then you go back on the water and this and that, and sometimes it's not enough range. That's why I end up not buying one. If they make a truck that has a better range and is not as ugly as Tesla Cybertruck is...

There's so many of them down here, by the way. I cannot believe how many there are.

Well, props to the build, because I think the build is okay. I just think that's horrendous looking. And honestly, I'm sorry. Some people may think it's beautiful, but I don't think it is. It's just so, I don't know, maybe childish drawing or something. There's no way that thing is safe anyway for people outside or whatever, right? It's just weird. But let's not go on the subject.

It's a topic in itself.

But like, EVs are useful. When Anderson had the plaid, I thought about it. Because there's not many things in the surface of Earth that move as quick any time of the day, anywhere, any circumstance. That thing is a blast to drive, right? It has better range but doesn't pull weight, right? It's easy to charge, right? That's a cool deal. It's just boring to some extent, right?

Yeah.

But if it's just a commuter, I honestly, I may have one at some point. But to be my weekend car, my drag racing car, man, you guys saw we maneuvering this thing, right?

Yeah.

There's nothing cooler than having an alcohol engine idling and skipping because of the cam. And it's struggling to go back and forth. This is part of the experience, right? It's part of the experience. So I think they will coexist forever, in my opinion. I believe so. I truly believe so.

Yeah. We looked at an EV for my wife for commuting to work. The other aspect I really liked about it was zero maintenance. I don't have to do oil changes. Maybe I do brakes every once in a while.

But I never had one, right? So like, but I heard the brakes last forever as well.

Yeah. It's like, I think I heard that too, because they do that regen. So the engine kind of slows you down or the motor slows you down more than the brakes do. And yeah.

So if you plan to replace the car in five years, you pretty much don't do anything.

Yeah.

And you can even don't go on the gas station for five years.

Yeah.

Think about how much time you save not going to the gas station for five years.

The only thing you will lose is the resale value on EVs is garbage.

So in five years, it may be one of the best or the only car that's actually good to do a lease.

Yes.

Just do a lease. Just do a lease, buy the bullet, do a lease, don't worry about the resale value. Choose what you want, do a lease.

Here, this is worthless now. You can have it back.

You can have it back. I have my time. It was like my scooter. It fit four have doors.

It is, you know. That's the deal.

Real quick, how are you doing on time on your end? We definitely blew past the one hour for sure.

We have a little time. Okay, sure. We won't die.

We won't die.

Yeah. One of the questions I had earlier, so if you go back to like when the car scene explodes in the United States, it's always because of a movie. You know, let's use Fast and Furious as an example, but there's movies before that, of course, Dan's an old guy. Yeah, I was going to say a guy in 60 Seconds as well.

My dad had a car that went up. Yeah, we had a 69 Mach 1 Mustangs, and after that movie came out, it prices went way up.

Bullet.

Yep, Bullet for sure.

Man, that car, that movie is one of the best, in my opinion. Bullet is just crazy. McQueen driving that thing, sanding, real tires smoking, like that thing.

Yeah.

To the bone. Mad Max for me.

Oh, Mad Max is huge for me. My dad and I, we watched all of those when I was, all of those ones, the early ones too.

Man, that movie is so cool.

Beyond Thunderdome is one of the greatest movies ever.

It's just a cool deal. And I agree with you. I think movies, right, they put dreams into images. And I like books as well. I don't read much. 99% of the books that I do is technical, right? But a lot of books that I do is technical, historical books. I just bought one about the history of the Suzuki GSR, right? Just because I like motorcycles, I have one myself. And they're like, man, this is actually a cool deal. I remember the first one, the 750s and stuff. And I'm about to pull the trigger on 1000, because they're going to change the generation. And I want to buy one of these generations. So I'm thinking on doing that. Let me buy the book. I bought the book, it's just a cool book, right? They could do a movie about it, you know? Passionate people from Japan doing a mechanical horse that goes fast and the guy is just like embracing the engine, the rest 15,000 RPM. Like, how cool is that? That's like, that's real romance if you think about it. You know, like this is just so cool. So the movies translate that to life, let me say. And when you have good actors, Nicolas Cage did a good job on this, the new movie, right? Not the original 60. He did a great job, in my opinion. I think he was perfect for the job. Angelina Jolie, matches perfect. Classic combo. Man, you see that thing, like you excited about it. Like you don't realize, but out of the blue, you're like, Diaz, watch it. You're like, oh my God, what's going to happen? Man, I want the car. You know, like, man, this thing is so cool. You stop the movie if you're at home just to look at it. You know, for sure, movies are great. I think there's several. If you start talking about that, where do we go far?

Well, the reason I ask is because, you know, that influences a lot of our car scene here. So, you know, you mentioned earlier, your first modified car. Where did that idea come from? Was it hanging out with friends, your dad, a movie, all of it, none of it?

It was not a real movie.

Okay.

Because like, yes, we had the movies, right? There is our most popular singer, it's our, you know, pop king, I would say, right? It's Roberto Carlos, right? That guy is huge in Brazil, South America stuff. But when he was younger, he actually used to do movies as well. He likes cars. He would do movies with vehicles as well, right? And that was really cool. I watch, I remember when I was really kid, the Beetle movies, Herbie. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like Beetles. I don't like Beetles at all. I respect the car for what it's worth, right? But I don't like Beetles. I don't think I'll ever have a Beetle. I drive sometimes. I think it's cool. I see some Beetles. They're amazing creations. But a bone stock museum piece, meh. It doesn't mean much to me besides like, it was a staple on automotive industry. As a vehicle, I'd rather have the Jeep, right? As an important vehicle, you know, that helped winning the war stuff. You know, that made against the Beetle the same. So I honestly think that's a better vehicle, right? To compare about historical stuff, right? But movie-wise, at least my passion came way before, and I don't think it was that it had an influence on movies. When Fast and Furious came, I was already into the scene, right? And it was huge in Brazil too. People start, you know, doing those, you know, weird tuning deals and big wings and neon lights. They didn't have that up to the movie. When the movie started, holy crap, everyone had like under lights and big wheels and spinners, and like, what the hell is going on? I was always a performance guy, always. I would say I was influenced by competition in the movies, right? One thing that I forgot to mention, my dad and I, we used to go to the racetrack, Tarumã, close to our home to watch Formula Truck. It's road racing class with big rigs, right? Just the tractor, right? They went up to 1500 horses at some point. They blew up too often, so they brought down to 1000 now. But it was pretty popular, right? Because truck drivers love that deal, right? And I remember the race was like Saturday, Sunday, and we would go to the track like Thursday, Friday. We would camp to be able to have a good spot and watch the race and stuff. So I think my influence was my dad, my uncle, and racing for sure. Going to the racetrack with them, watching Ayrton Senna, you know, knowing about Fittipaldi, Piquet, and other Brazilian drivers on Formula 1. You know, I saw Barrichello becoming a driver, right? That kind of stuff. Then Filipe Massa, crazy thing. Now I work with them. They race a stock car, right? Filipe Massa and Barrichello, they both race a stock car, right? Fittipaldi family, Piquet family, they also have people driving, or crew chiefing at the track. And I'm going to be honest now, maybe they watch this at some point. It's hard for me to know how to behave near them, because you look up to them so much, right? And again, they are my heroes as well, right? And they are not a*******. I'm glad I met them. That's actually cool. But you go into that fine line in between, I'm a professional here, right? I'm a professional here, so I represent my company. I'm the guy coming here with the knowledge about the electronics and race cars, because I also drive stuff, right? But I'm dealing with, you know, multi-time champion, Formula One driver, you know, people that I was a kid, and I watched this guy racing on, I don't know, Brands Hatch England, you know, that kind of stuff. And now this guy is literally like, hey, Luis, so like how this works, you know? And it's kind of tough for me as a person to like, should I ask for a selfie first? Can I ask for a hug on this guy? Should I say something about how I think he's an incredible driver? Should I just focus on the business? So like, if they're watching this, you know, just so you guys know, it's kind of hard, you know, to react when you think so highly of those guys.

Give him a hug next time you see him.

You just look up to them on the way, that's like, man, okay, let me focus on the professional side, because that's easy. I can handle that easier, right? But like, should I, man, just give me a hug, man. Sometimes I want to do that. I actually did two, one, okay? Because like, Vicente Origi, it's one of them, right? He never drove Formula One, but he was a drag racing guy. He left drag racing to go road racing. And he also liked Chevy's. So that's the connection there. And then one of the races in the stock car, he's a driver now. He knew me because FuelTech. I'm like, oh no, I know you, Luis. And stuff like, man, I need to tell you something. Man, I love you, man.

Like, this is so cool.

It's so cool to be working with you. I always look up to you.

This is so cool.

You're a great driver. Now you're driving this. This is a dream come true. But at least we had that opening, you know, that was-

Yeah, yeah, just get it out of the way. Yeah.

It's really cool. It's cool to do that, to be working with people that you used to just like, look up to.

Right.

That's really cool.

You obviously have a lot of knowledge about, you know your products very, very well. You're not doing any of the engineering yourself though, are you? Or what does that look like?

No.

So, engineer is a strong word, bud.

Yeah.

So, I am engineer by trade.

Okay.

So, I'm a mechanic engineer actually. Okay. In Brazil, they have a graduation that's actually automotive engineer.

Okay.

It is mechanical, focus on automotive field, right? And inside that, you can actually have a little focus on electronics, hydraulics, pneumatics, mechanics, but for a car, aerodynamics, right? I went on the electronic side, right? Okay. But I'm a mechanic engineer by trade. The engineering that I do is field engineer, right? Okay. I do a lot of testing, right? So, through an engineering point of view, right? So, I do every single time. You see me either tuning, kerchiefing, wrenching, driving a vehicle, there is a reason behind Attach to FuelTech. I want to test something, understand something, or develop something, connect to FuelTech that requires that point of view. And I kind of mix and match, because I can mix and match the user as a mechanic, the user as a driver, the user as a tuner, and a little bit of the engineering side on how to build that, because I have a close relationship with the programmers. So I can quickly tell, I have this idea, do you think this is kind of easy to do or not? No, it's hard. Let me think on an easier way, then. We bounce ideas and we get somewhere. I could not do by myself, he could not do by himself. We kind of complement each other. So I fly back to Brazil constantly to talk to them. We talk daily, phone and remote meetings and stuff. And Anderson does simulant. Anderson is an electrical engineer. So he goes a little less on the car, a little more on the electronics and the programming. So we overlap. I go less on the programming, less on the electrical side, more on the mechanic as driving. So we kind of overlap. Then we have another overlap on the hardcore programmer guys. And then we overlap again with the hardcore network of driver racers that we have. So I usually the closer contact point with racer driver tuners. Anderson is the closer to the engineering, but we all overlap each other. So it's almost like a flow that don't have any gaps in between.

So very good recipe for a good ECU company.

In the end, that's the engineering, to be honest, because we require the end of the line. I need Stave Petty. I need that dream team tuner crew chief to tell me something. I'm never going to be him. I understand him. But when he creates something, I couldn't create that, right? He is the Picasso of ProMod Tuning. I'm never going to be. I'm going to be the regular painter that can do what color you want here.

You can fill in the lines. Yeah, exactly.

No, he's the guy that can do. He does that daily for 40 years now. If I leave FuelTech, I may be there one day. I don't think so, but still, I'm not going to do that. But he's there. So I need that guy. I need Brandon Pest. I need Mike Chance. I need Mark Savage. I need Steve Jackson. I need those guys. But when they provide me stuff, I provide them a better tool. So it's a back and forward deal. But to give the better tool, I need to come with that, talk to my engineering, back and forth, test by myself, make sure it's okay, maybe see from a different point of view that they didn't see it, make sure it's okay, then come to them, hey bud, is that what you need? And then they say, damn, that's better than I thought. Or, man, I like it. What else we can do this? Damn, I didn't talk about that. Let's go back to the drawing board. And that constant back and forth is a closed loop, right? The back and forth, that's what makes the product so great. It's real people working out in a good synergy with good people, programming, webbing.

Well, you can only do that with a private company too. Try to do that with a board of directors.

Speaking of that, that is one common thing that when we've talked to these other shops and stuff and people that use your product, the common thing we come across every time is your customer service. And they say that is hands down one of the best. Not that you don't have same features at other companies, or they may have more, or you may have less, but that is one of the major reasons they...

I will say this confidently, okay? There's companies out there with more features than us. There's companies out there with less features than us. There is no company out there with better service than us. I'm confident with this, right? We have service across the globe, Australia, Germany, United States and Brazil, right? Straight up. We have big teams here and Brazil. My guys, they all race themselves. They know what they're doing. We didn't hire them on the, you know, I don't know, newspaper job offer.

Right.

We found those guys because they were racing, they were competing, they were building stuff for their home. This guy does drifting, this guy does oval track, this guy does drag racing, this guy builds engines at his home. Those guys, they all know what they're talking about. If you call, email and that guy don't know what you want, he have someone next to him. Hey bud, oh, this guy wants ProMod stuff. I don't know ProMod. I'm a poor guy. I do front wheel drive stuff. Okay, that's fine. Send it to me. You know, and nobody has that. Just to be honest, nobody has that. Right. And then me, Anderson, a good example, right? Anderson again, the company founder, the main owner, right? He didn't have to be doing this, right? He goes to the racetrack.

Yeah.

And helps people. That's awesome. And one in the morning, trying to solve a problem.

Yeah.

Like again, I can say clearly nobody does that besides FuelTech as a company, right? I just had a crazy cool experience with Motion Race Works. Those guys, you know, they have one arm on Florida and one arm upstairs. I forgot the state now. And we did a drag week, right? Is that sick week? Sick summer. Yep. Right? Man, I could not have a better time on competition. Right? Brad Lasala, that multiple time champion.

Oh, we're very familiar with Brad.

Message me like, hey, bud, well, we're going to do a drag event, right? Sick summer. You want to join us? I like never did that. I always wanted to. Let's go. And they're like, okay, we're going to be driving El Toro. Like, I think I heard about that car. And then I went over like, dang, I know what it is. This is like, it's like almost like a rat style Fox body deal. No, we made some improvements, but just to be honest, okay. Had a different ECU on it. Okay, let's put FuelTech on it. I guarantee it's going to be faster. I guarantee you, but don't worry. I take it back if it's not faster. Okay, let's do it. Put FuelTech on that thing. He brought it to the shop. He got to know the shop with that thing. Already made great power. They were impressed about it. And then he took it back. And he's like, maybe Luis don't want to drive. It's kind of like he's used to pro mods and stuff. Like, no, I want to drive just to be sure I want to drive. Okay, you're good. Okay. He drove back to the circuit that we're going to do, right? And then he test the car on Saturday. Track wasn't there. It was the first time out. He made a couple runs that spawned the tire. First lap that went out was already pretty much personal best for the car. He impressed with that, right? So Sunday, I fly in, you know, easy job on me, right? They did all the hard work. You know, the guys from Motion Resources did all the work. I just jump in, help the tune in between the races and to swap the car back and forth in between, you know, drag and drive, right? And then I go there, I come in, straight doing laps already, drop the number, obviously everyone was impressed. And then I told them, man, there's so much left on this car. Like, this can be so much quicker. And then, okay, let's do it. First day, we're ripping, bud. First day we're going, by the end of the week, we're going four sevens with that thing. It's a single turbo Coyote with an old, halfway through eight and a half cage, you know, 8.8 deal in the back to glide to speed on eight and a half tires, really small deal, right? And we won the class, Routy Radius. Like, that was a blast. It was a blast. Every day we would go down the track. Every day we would be fast. You know, everything would work. Can't complain. They're amazing people. Doug Cooks, the main owner, Andy and his brother. I knew them, but not like so long, right? We spent a whole week together. You know, such good guys, such good guys, you know, private owned. Yep. It's straight up people that want to do better stuff, right? Doug works 24-7. Brad's the same way. They have their line of stuff, so they have motion, rife sensors, TBM for the brakes, and fluid works for the pumps. And man, they just do good stuff. I made a tour at their shop. Man, great people, great stuff. That's what the kind of synergy like. We straight up like, we need to do more stuff together.

Yeah.

You know? Let's put FuelTech on your cars. Let's put your stuff on my cars. Let's do it.

Yeah. It seems like a secret sauce. So we were at Reese Brothers shop too, right? So here I'm looking at a car. There's a Proline engine in there. There's RIFE sensors and there's FuelTech. So it seems like a very good combination that just works well.

I met Reese close to 10 years ago, I think, right? He didn't have his shop at full time yet. You know, I don't recall what his day was due, but he would do chess and stuff on the side. And I had a friend of mine that does installs, Michael Bunton, he was still racing his car. And we asked for help on suspension setup, right? Again, talk to people that know s***. And I remember him talking about this, and he would swing inside under the car, look at the bars and stuff and try to move the car. He's strong, right? So he would move the car up and let it go down and see how it goes and blah, blah, blah. Okay, let's do this. Man, I think this should work, okay? Shouldn't have to mess much with this for your power level, just manage the power and go, right? And it was good to see as years comes by, he went full time and he has a respectable chassis shop. He builds really fast vehicles, you know?

Beautiful cars too.

Yeah. Beautiful cars. He does from the street appearing all the way to crazy lightweight ProMods. It's cool stuff, right? And he does pretty much every single combination. Nitrous turbos, screw blowers, you name it. You know, he does everything. Nice guy to deal with, straight to the point, you know? I really like him. We're actually glad that he's close to us. Yeah. You know, he's not far from here. So we have some good shops around as well, you know?

Well, we discovered that too, like when we came here. So this trip has been very successful for us. It's the most episodes we've done on a single trip. We're at six for just what, three and a half days?

Yeah.

But it's been so fun to just get to know this community here. And yeah, we had a son on, he wasn't in town, but we had Quentin on.

Okay.

So that was, yeah, it's just, it's really cool to see Luis. But as we kind of start to wind down here, I did have one more question on my end. Who do you respect the most in this industry? Or who are some people you respect? I'm sure it's a long list.

Man, it's a long list. I'm going to start saying that making a list for people that I respect, it's unfair.

I agree.

Because there's a lot of people that I don't even interact with. But I know how much they do for automotive industry overall, not just drag racing. There is a show that I consider the best worldwide. I've been to several and I think it's by far the best PRI. And if you go to PRI, you will see a lot of people worldwide going there, doing everything from, I don't know, material suppliers all the way to machining, to electronics, to tires, to wheels, to power adders, whatever, right? And you will have people from, I don't know, you know, we have the supercharger guys, right? Procharger did a lot in the past few years, right? PSI superchargers always did great. Vortex is a smaller company and they still really active doing stuff. Whipple, amazing product. They also do a lot for the deal. Even if you don't deal daily with them, they all do good stuff. On the turbocharged deal, you know, you have the big ones like Garrett, that they're always good. You have the ones that, you know, they spearhead changes like precision and up to day, they're one of the top notches. Then you have a smaller guy like Hartz, that comes out of nowhere, and it's nowhere for drag racing at least, you know, because he was big on the diesel game. And comes swinging with amazing turbos and now centrifugal chargers as well. You know, it's unfair to give, you know, one or another a better deal. We have turbos, Marty here leads the deal in the United States. They do valves, now they're doing turbos as well. You know, the guy that left, Harry, that left precision, now doing turbos and adopt a different place, you know. So even sometimes we don't do business with one of them, they're still really important for the industry. And we still respect them a lot, you know, just to be fair. We have those guys that come from the outside, you know, like us. We came from Brazil, right? And we come here trying to do better and better product for everyone to try to help, you know, the scene. It doesn't matter what kind of type of racing that you do, you know, we try to assist the guys. You have high like mainline, mainline goes to PRI, they're not from here, they're from, you know, New Zealand, Australia, you know, that kind of stuff. I have a really good friend from Australia that works at Dandy Engines. There's like a really good engine building tuning service that they have there. They come to US to get updated all the time and bring better racing to Australia. Australia racing improved a lot in the last years and one of the responsibles is Frank Marquise and Paul Maillep. Two guys that come here, they grow and they then grow Australia. And then they come here, they grow and then there's more people in Australia wanting to put money into racing. So, the list is crazy. It's crazy, you know, like, it's gonna be, you know, Anderson, my partner, it's gonna be, you know, just like I said, Steve Perry, Brandon Pez. I'm not a fan of the Tuning side. There are people that I don't work with at all, like Brandon Schweitzer, and he is a staple on the Nitrous Tuning. How can you not respect a guy like that? There's so many people. Again, I mentioned some, right? But I cannot even get close to 20% of the list.

Yeah, it just keeps going.

It just keeps going. Eric Diller Proline, what he did with Proline, unheard of, right? The guys from Nuno, you know? The guys from Nuno, guys and girls, right? From Nuno. You know, again, Australia, you know, putting effort here in the United States.

Yeah.

Bill Miller engineering, you know, like each... You're never going to stop talking about this, you know? Mike Janis, driver and Ruth Superchargers. You know, you have the guys from Modern Racing that turn key stuff, just thing else, turn key stuff, the whole car, it tunes the cars to go fast and win races. Like, not every shop you can find this stuff. You go all the way to some types of racing that are not so popular, like No Time. No Time also comes with less marketing, right? So sometimes you have, there's a race going on, a boat is racing this weekend. There's not much marketing like NHRA, but it's still, there's going to be millions of dollars moving on the track. It's just not there, you know? So you have a lot of people, you know, Jacob Harper that does a lot of promoting on this stuff. There is a lot of people, promoters, tuners, you know, the McCain brothers that they tune, they drive. Man, holy moly. Like it's a crazy, crazy long list, right? And it's good to mention something that we didn't have a long time ago. People that through a lot of exposure, right? They influence people, right? So we have people like Alex Taylor on the Dragon Drive scene, that she brings a lot to the table by bringing her real life again. She puts a lot of racing above life, right? To show how it is, because she's highly focused on Dragon Drive stuff, right? And that helps bringing Dragon Drive scene up. Some people do a lot of cool stuff you don't know about it. You kind of need to show and tell, right? So there is a lot of huge list of influencers that would do a lot of stuff, and they fight for, and they go after, and they promote stuff.

So damn.

You still got 10 more minutes to come up with that list. I don't know.

I think it's better to stop, because it doesn't matter.

It just keeps going.

I'm just going to stop with sorry. Too many people. 100% I will miss. There's no other way. But it's good to mention my guys at the shop. Felipe runs the shop. Felipe Andres runs the shop itself. He drives most of the cars on the dyno right now. He does a lot of tech support at the track. He's a multiverse guy. He does everything. Cameron runs the dyno itself most of the time. We have Eduardo that does the training. He came from Paraguay to do training here. So, it's worldwide stuff. Man, we have everyone. All my guys in the inventory and tech support and sales, shipping, accounting. Like Fueltechs is what it is because of the group of people, not because of me or Andres. We do steer the boat, but the boat don't move by itself. So, we have that amazing group of people that understand, okay, we're going that way with the boat. Let's go. Hold hands.

Is the boat running on FuelTech, at least?

Yes, sir, and it's hybrid.

Yeah, all right.

It's electric, so you can dock somewhere, they can make noise, but it has a combustion engine, so it can go fast.

All right, perfect. Do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah, so I'm excited for this one. At the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. I need a track car, a daily driver and a show car. You have an unlimited budget, you can put a Ferrari and a DeLorean, whatever you want.

Okay, track car, any kind of car?

Yeah, any kind of track, any kind of car.

Okay, I have some goals with drag racing right now. So I'm going to pick and choose a drag racing car. Okay, so today, I will choose a Rick Jones, Rick Jones ProMod, quarter max Rick Jones. I will do that. That will be my deal. Okay. It will be twin turbo, right? It will be a twin turbo power plant. And I will go with a PJS power plant or one of the new Pro lines muscle heads they're doing, either or, right? With a Mark Mickey 3-speed lock up deal. That will be the one, right? Okay. Newer style Camaro body style. Okay. That will be my racing car, right? There is other stuff that I would like to, but I think I don't have to. I think I love road racing, but I don't think I ever going to go professional road racing. Drag racing allows me to not spend so much time to become a good driver competing. So I think drag racing will be my focus on racing. If you think about show and daily, I think I'm going to pick two hybrids that I can do both. Because I would never have a car that's show car only, never ever. Every single car I have, I can drive it. So I'm never going to have a car that I'm going to take on a trailer or something. I would drive to the show. I drive back to the show, from the show, so I would do that. I may not drive every day like a motorcycle. You don't drive in the rain and stuff, but I would do it. One thing that I love it, it's a Lamborghini Diablo.

Okay?

I'll have a Lamborghini Diablo. Obviously, modify.

Would you do like a SV or something?

Yes. But I would do this. I would have to modify that thing. More like a supercharger, more like a centrifugal charger. The truck that has a pro-charger D1X, something like that, maybe a little rowdier, like 1,000 horse, I think it's not fair for the Lamborghini. It needs to be more. So maybe a larger supercharger on the deal. There will be one. Show and daily. You can daily a Lamborghini.

Which one would that be though? Show or daily? What do we lean towards?

Put that on the show.

Okay.

Right?

Because the Lamborghini.

What color do I have to ask?

Yeah.

You know, like then if you go to a daily, man, I need to go with something that is still useful. Okay. I have kids.

Sure.

I love my kids, love my family, love my wife. I need to be able to take them together, and I need to pull something because I love jet skis, boats and stuff like that, or a motorcycle, or a small toy hauler or something, right? So I think I'm going to go with Escalade V.

Ooh.

That would be the one. Obviously, we modify that thing a little.

Yeah.

Like we do some stuff here and there. That one can stop at a thousand horse. I think that's enough for a daily.

Yeah.

I think that's fair. That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I think that's pretty good.

I think that would be pretty practical. Yeah.

No practical. But man, if I do some wheels and some other stuff, I still can go to some shows with that thing.

Yeah.

So I think that would be my three-car deal. I can still take my ProMod on a small trailer with my Cadillac.

Yeah.

Right. And my wife can drive the Lamborghini.

Yeah.

She wants to go there. So they kind of practical. I like it.

Well, perfect. On that note, where can everybody find you?

Well, FuelTech is fairly easy, right? fueltech.net, right? That's our website. We are on Instagram, FuelTech USA. We have an Instagram for FuelTech Brazil. That's FuelTech only. We share different stuff, different markets. So both are cool. The YouTube channel as well. We have both YouTube for regular YouTube, FuelTech Brazil and FuelTech USA. FuelTech USA is located at Canton, right? I'm sorry. Balground is right next to Canton, I live in Canton. So, Balground, Georgia. We're about 45 minutes from the airport on a good traffic, almost two hours, Atlanta traffic. I'll let you know. Yeah, let me know when to go there. And in Brazil, we're all the way down to the last state. It's called Big River of South, right? And we have several racetracks around, and the company is five minutes from the airport. So if you guys go into Brazil at any moment, you're more than invited to go to our main factory. It's a cool place. We have a nice store, cool cars, big plant. People love to work there as well. And we have racetracks around that can take you guys to some drag racing scene, road racing scene, right? Really cool stuff. So those are the places. And you also can find me on pretty much any single racetrack. I think I'm going to Brazil next, Velocita. Velocita, it's Italian, I believe. It's a really nice track in São Paulo, right? Then the following weekend, I'm back here. I'm trying to go to South Carolina, More Sports Park, CMP, I believe. Carolina More Sports Park, to do some track day with my motorcycle. And then on the following weekend, I'm going back to Brazil to another drag racing on Sydney's Figure Track. And then after that, I believe there is a race here in the United States. So like, I'm all the time traveling going to races.

That sounds like a pretty cool job to me. Yeah.

It is a pretty cool job. I cannot complain. I love what I do for a living. It's a really cool deal. I do miss my kids, my wife sometimes. More than I should. Just because like it's so time long. I try to take them with me sometimes, but they have school, you know, she does, she's the head of marketing here. So like she also works. Okay. Like she can just follow me everywhere, you know, but like it's a good deal. It's a good deal.

Awesome. You can find us at Gunna Garage.

Perfect.

And Luis, thank you so much for making this happen. This is awesome. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks again for watching the show guys. Be sure to go into the description down below and check out all of our sponsors. They are what make this show possible. It allows us to travel the country and talk to some really cool guests. So be sure to check them out, support them just like you support us, and see you all next time.