163. AMS Performance, Chasing Records, S58 and VR30, Quality Manufacturing w/ Martin Musial

Our tuners take a lot of pride in getting that car to be like an OEM car. We'll literally have customers like, oh, I'm happy with mine, and they drive one of our cars like, oh, this is, it drives like stock. Well, yeah, it should.

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

There is a Ford in here, back there.

Yeah, don't point to the Tacoma. And today, we are here at AMS Performance, here in Botvia, Illinois, and we are here with Martin Musial. So go ahead, just give us a quick introduction, who it is you are, what you guys do, and then we will go from there.

Well, thanks for coming, first of all. Like I said, my name is Martin Musial, with AMS Performance, and we do a few things here.

Just a few.

Just a few. You know, in a nutshell, performance parts, right? So, you know, we focus on a lot of different cars, a lot of different platforms, and we come out with, you know, core performance, both on products, for, you know, I said, various platforms. So really the end user has a nice, complete package of parts so they can enjoy the vehicle, make it faster.

So obviously we did a big tour here beforehand, checking out the entire facility, but I'm more so curious about this, because I want to hear your side of the story. Obviously we had Arnie on a few weeks ago. I want to hear how this all started from your perspective. So from my understanding, you guys started with Miracourse.

What, the origin story?

Yeah, the origin story.

Okay. Yeah. So what's crazy is this is really my first job. I would say my first job is AMS Performance. So I went to college, I got a mechanical engineering degree, and as I was, my senior year, loved cars. I was always kind of, very hands on, loved tinkering. I did formula SAE in college, which is basically you build a race car chassis around a motorcycle engine. So I did that throughout four years of college. I was team captain last year. And I wanted to work for one of the big three and work maybe in the racing division. But a lot of people I talked to was like, hey, you're going to start low. You're going to be designing door handles for a year. And I'm like, I don't want to be doing that. Right. So but I was considering it. And then my dad had a really small tool and die shop, him and another guy. And, you know, his business partner actually just left him high and dry. And he's like, I need your help. I can't say no to my dad. I mean, he's he helped me out through college. You know, they paid for college. So I worked for my dad for for a while, lived at home. And, you know, aspirations of starting something automotive. But again, living, working with my father and living at home, they had their houses under a thousand square feet. So that was challenging. You're I'm out of college, driving my own person. And, you know, Arnie, who was, you know, best friends growing up, he had a house and he, we're always kind of tinkering with cars. And he actually goes, hey, you can, in trade, you know, I'll give you a place to live here if you work on my car, you know, Miracore XR4TI. So, you know, super, super nice and a huge opportunity for me. So I moved to my parents' house, still work for my dad. And I was tinkering with this Miracore XR4TI. Arnie was not part of AMS at that point. He was still had a, you know, his regular job was kind of tinkering. And I'm like, oh, I want to make this stuff. And, you know, back then the forums, people, you know, I was modifying the car, I was tuning it. And one thing like I see needs a camshaft and online on the forums kind of, you know, I met up with this guy who's super intelligent and turns out he was a NASA scientist.

So he knows a thing or two.

Yeah, so again, huge car guy. And so we kind of connected and we're like, let's make a camshaft for these things. You know, 2.3 turbo Ford, iron head thing was it was so heavy. I remember a bunch of a story. I was porting the head on Arnie's car with a die grinder, rear exhaust, die grinder and blew all the iron dust into my eyes. That was a nice visit for the morning. But him and I, we designed a camshaft for the America XR4Ti. And that was kind of the first official AMS product. So that's kind of how it started a little bit. But then...

Do you know what year this is?

Oh God, this is... I graduated college in 97. This is probably 99, maybe 2000, somewhere around 2000, around there. And we're literally doing like group buys on the forum for this camshaft. And eventually I'm like, I want to turn this into a business. And the guy, his name is Fritz Moore. He's like, I'm working at NASA. You take it and run with it. If you want to pursue it further. So he kind of, you know, we kind of split the money on the camshaft stuff. And I started AMS and an opportunity came up with, in my dad's business, he had extra, we're supposed to get a big job, a tool and die job. And he rented a small unit next door to kind of prepare for the job. And the job filled through, so he had the space. So I'm like, hey, I'm gonna start doing car stuff over here. And my dad, my parents are European. They both came from Europe and they're very tough love, let's put it that way. And he's like, what are you doing? This is stupid, you know, cars, like you have an engineering degree, come do this metal tool and die stamping with me. And it was not exciting for me. The whole industry is super conservative, old school. And like when I went to meetings with him, it was like, you're meeting with like six year old dudes. It was metal stamping. It was not exciting. But yeah, so I started there. I started basically back then DSMs, were a thing, Galant VR4. I remember I bought a Galant VR4. I think I made an exhaust for it. Arnie worked at, it was a place called Fry's Automotive, a heavy duty truck towing company. And he let me use his welder over there and I fabricated exhaust. I did some stuff to it. And so we didn't have the equipment yet. And this is my space. It was literally just a concrete floor. But that's kind of how it started. I started working on cars there. And I'd say about a year in, I was working on AmeriCores, DSMs. I was the mechanic and it was just kind of mayhem. I was trying to do everything. And then I brought Arnie in, I think it's probably about a year in. Arnie was helping me kind of like just in his time because he still had a full time job. So he was helping me. I was kind of the mad scientist. He was kind of the guy organized, he's very organized and organizing behind me and putting structure to it. So-

Did you ever cross paths with Tim Roman, by the way, during on the whole AmeriCore thing? Was he like the first like all wheel drive one or something like that? I can't remember what it was.

Yeah, but this would be later. That's, it's kind of intrigues me because you, at that point, this is late 90s now, that's a 10 year old platform already and they're not making it anymore. So that is kind of a weird bag to jump into.

But it was a cool platform. I mean, I think Arnie's car, I was making back then on Pump Gas 360 or 370 the wheels on Pump Gas back then, which is pretty decent. I mean, I remember coming back from Great Lakes drag strip and there was like a, what was it, a Firehawk. It was one of the Camaro or Camaro SS, something like that. And it was modified. And we were racing on the highway and he could not pull on me. He was like, F is that thing? You know, and we pulled off. It's like, what is a four cylinder? And here's a V8. You know, something like it was like, you know, the car was lighter than the Camaro and it was making decent power. So it was fun. It was fun to surprise people with that car. But yeah, it's kind of how it started. Arnie came on board and we both kind of grew and, you know, the business and moved from, you know, I was working on the cars, I was fabricating to hiring people on and kind of training people to replace what we were doing, you know, and moving up.

Were you doing like turbo coupes and Mustangs and stuff too? Or was it mostly just Mercurs? No, just Mercurs.

You know, it's the same engine. Yeah, yeah. Thunderbird Turbo Coupe. Yeah.

Yeah, that's I have an 88 Turbo Coupe. It's one of my favorite cars. Yeah.

That was intercooled, wasn't it?

Yes. Yeah, it has those little nostrils on the hood.

Yeah, Mercurs was not intercooled. Yeah, it was not an intercooled turbo car. Yeah.

It's still not very impressive. I have a 2.3 EcoBoost ready to go in it when it's... I'm trying to blow it up right now. Actually, I'm driving around really hard and it's not...

They're hard to blow up.

Yeah, they are.

Okay, so this is kind of a question that I have for people that are in your position. And by that, what I mean is it takes one thing to grow a shop to five, ten guys. How do you get to this scale? Like, is it passion for the product, for the cars? Is it learning the business? What exactly was it that led to this?

A combination of things. It's luck. It's a lot of mistakes you make and learning from those mistakes. But it is, I mean, in this industry, it's passion. If you don't have the passion for it, it's not, no one with a mindset of, oh, I just want to make money, but I don't like cars, gets into this. Because it's not, you're first and foremost not making money for a long time. I mean, we weren't profitable. I wasn't taking a paycheck for years. You know, I was just like, dude, it was, it was, it was tough. And it's always tough in this business. But it is, you know, you have to at some point treat it as a true business. You know, I joined a group of other business owners, not automotive, just a peer to peer network of business owners. They're varying, you know, from insurance to other manufacturing, you know, a group in 2017. And I learned so much that the core of all business is the same, you know, from inventory control to finance to managing people, to project management, all that's the same, which is what you do. And when I learned that, that was kind of a game changer because it was, you know, people from the outside, you know, even like say 15 years in the business, like, oh, man, AMS got it made. So lucky. What are you driving? And like Porsches and Lambos, like, no, I'm driving, you know, an old car. At one point I was driving my parents' old Maxima that was running on like sometimes six cylinders, sometimes five cylinders, you know, and trying to make ends meet. It was, everything was getting poured right back into the business, you know, to keep feeding the monster, I call it, you know. So you have to learn business principles. You have to, cause if not, you'll just, you'll grind yourself to death. So, and that's, it's a lot to learn. It's making sure you have the right people on board. It's the process, the finance is a big thing. You know, we've competed with people on price. I'll say, we've, we've came up with products and you can see the people that come out with products are not a real business. Like you're not making money selling at that point. You're working out of your garage or your garage, or it's, you don't have a real business. You're doing it cause you love that car, but you're not making money. And for us, that was a tough thing. And learning that aspect of it, how to build margin for dealers, how to build a distribution network, how do you make, let everyone play.

What was the biggest hump you had to kind of cross over the years?

I'm sorry?

What was the biggest hump you had to cross?

How many? Which one?

Yeah, I mean, I know it's hard to nail it down, but is there any pivotal moments? Like for example, a lot of people go back to 2008, 2009. It's like, how do you mitigate that? Or like, COVID, for example.

Yeah. Again, this is a tough business. We've had so many being in business that long. Like 2008 was definitely difficult. Obviously, that downturn. Thankfully, I saw it coming and we had a decent international network and I just pushed that really hard. Travel overseas, push that international network hard. So as US sales fell, we kind of international stuff picked up. We still had to do a lot of damage control, as far as like following sales, stuff like that. There was that, what I tell people is AMS version 1.0, there's 2.0 and now we're working on 3.0. Eight years ago, 2017, that was probably our biggest hump we had to get over where from the outside looking in, we're doing great. But on the inside, it's like we're not making any money. We're setting records, doing all this stuff, but really not making the money. And I'm working 50 hours a week plus, and I'm stressed and not sleeping. I'm like, something has to change. I don't want to, I'll also get a job. I had friends from college that were way more successful just working for companies financially, and also with vacation time and free time and less stress. So that was the biggest thing for me is like, I need to turn this into a business, not just a passion that's grinding me to death. So that was the biggest hump I had to get over. And that was, you know, it was very difficult. It was, you know, like Parting Ways with Arnie. I mean, that was incredibly challenging, you know, and we said different, you know, different kind of visions and I, you know, and I want to take the company a certain way. And, you know, it was a very difficult decision for me. And, you know, I really think he's better off now doing what he's doing, enjoying himself. Cause you know, this is a grind. This is, you cannot take your foot off the gas in this business at all. You have to be on it all the time. But that was difficult. We had to do a lot of changes from personnel to how we run the entire business.

Going back to the beginning a little bit, so you had the camshaft. Is there a product that you developed? Or what was the first flagship thing that you guys did? All of a sudden, you're like, okay, we're taking a next level up here. Do you know what took you to that spot?

Sure, I got to remember this vividly. We came out with a turbo kit for the Evo 8. Evo 8 was pretty fresh. Obviously, the Evo's been out overseas. I think one of the first Evo 8's in the Chicagoland area, overpaid for it, of course. But there was a race, I think it was called the DSM Shootout. It wasn't even called the Evo. Back, was this 2005, I think? Or 2006, and we had got the car. We didn't have much time. There's some tuning solution that kind of worked on it. And we had this race come up, and like, we have to build a turbo kit. Something differentiated than just bolt-ons. And it was me, this guy, Adam Doerr, one of our fabricators. We were up for days, days, like, picking an existing bolt-on turbo with our external wastegate on it, and adapting, making this kit, and making this turbo work for this thing. And like, I remember driving to the shootout. I think it was me, my girlfriend at that time, and Arnie, and I was married at that time, or it was his girlfriend, driving to shootout. And like, I was like, I couldn't drive. We were always so tired, taking turns driving there, just falling asleep. But that, you know, that differentiated us. We came to the shootout with a car that wasn't stock turbo. It had an upgraded turbo kit, and then we revised that so it wasn't a rush job. And that, we sold a lot of those turbo kits, a lot of those things. Yeah. Yeah.

So at that point, were you a lot in the forums and stuff back then? Like, how exactly were you marketing back then?

Yeah, forums were huge back then. So, you know, the big things we do is we'd race the car. So we'd do drag racing, we'd do time attack racing. And back then, with the magazine coverage, you got a lot of free exposure, right? You didn't have to go out and do all your own marketing on social media. Sure. You had the magazines who were, you know, chopping at the bit to get media coverage.

Some podcasts just come straight to you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it is. That is, you know, that's a great thing, right? Back then, it was just, it seemed like it was so much easier back then. And you had forums you can go on. It's just different these days. So we'd drag race, we'd time attack, you'd get a ton of media, like magazine exposure, because everyone's reading magazines back then. You'd have the forums, which, you know, the nice thing about the forums, I do miss that, is you had good information that would stay up and be relevant. Now, with social media, it's there and gone, there and gone. It doesn't stick. And so the same people either don't see it or they ask the same question over and over again. It's like, and it's just...

People don't know how to use the search bar either, by the way. Like, you can find anything in a Facebook group. You're set to look for it.

Yeah, yeah, but it's harder these days, I think. There's a lot more misinformation, too, out there about stuff. I mean, dude, I bought a Nissan Stagia, right? I imported from Japan and I'm researching online. I go, I've got a 350Z Brembo brakes bolt right up. You gotta do a few little things to it. It does not bolt up. I mean, show me where, like, now that I'm doing it, I'm like, show me where. I just bolt, I just gotta do something. Like, show me what you gotta do. There's so much misinformation out there. And I'm like, no, it's not, it's not easy. So, you know, sifting through that these days is challenging. I feel for the consumer sometimes where there is b******* marketing out there on products plus 20 horsepower, plus 25, you know, like what's real and what's not. And that's the challenge here is doing the good work, being honest about what we do. It takes a lot more effort to do that, right? To be honest about your products, making sure it's the best and then you compete with someone who just blabs out numbers or BS.

So there's a few ways I could take this. So first of all, you've done a number of programs over the years. Like, first of all, when did you go from just modifying cars here and there to actual dedicated programs? Like the one that comes to mind is the GTR program, right? Like you guys were chasing everything at that point. Before you did that, like when did that jump happen? Was it the EVOs?

Yeah, it was really the EVOs. That's kind of where the DSM, DSMs I would say, I mean, we're doing some bolt on parts of those. We're driving those in deeper building engines. But really the EVOs were kind of like, at that point, building our drag EVO, we're making over a thousand horsepower back then on a 463 and really taking a deep dive. One of the lessons I learned is you can't do too much of that because that is a huge resource suck. When you have to take a car like a V10, Audi R8, or Lambo platform, or the GT-R, and you want to go that far with it, to do it properly is 20x. The effort is to put out a core product, let's say the F150, which is doing an intake, intercooler, bolt-on turbo, maybe exhaust. Getting deep dive into that is so much, just figuring out the engine stuff. How do you come out with a good engine package that's reliable, that can hold up to four times the amount of horsepower of the stock. It's a huge investment of time, and we've made mistakes in the past where you go too deep. You try to do it on this car, and this car, and this car, and you're stalled out, and you can't get it all done. It takes forever. I'd say the EVO is the first one, and then the GTR.

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And then we learn, hey, let's pace ourselves. Let's do some other easy bolt-on stuff while we kind of then pick our next platform that we work on.

So let's bring it back to the EcoBoost and the G80 over here. What goes into a proper program, right? Because one of the things that we talked about off camera and in our tour is a lot of people will make these claims. They will say, you know, plus 20, plus 25 horsepower, as you were saying. You guys test everything here, including your competitor's products. Yeah. What do you do differently in order to accomplish that?

So, you know, one, data, right? Get data and get good data. Because, you know, bad data is almost as good or worse than having no data. And, you know, we've seen people make claims and then you look into it and it's, oh, it's done on different dinos, at different cars. And it's like, we keep all the variables the same. So, you know, we talked about before, like, you know, any of the development cars, we create a wiring harness where we measure, you know, all the temperatures and pressures across the whole intake and exhaust track. So you're measuring stuff, you know, along the, you know, from the intake system, turbo inlet tubes, inner cooler, charge piping, intake manifold, turbochargers, exhaust, whole exhaust system, downpipes. You're kind of measuring the efficiency of that, you know. And we do it on the same vehicle, you know, standardize the tune. So we spend, that's a lot of time. And we're talking probably just censoring a car up is probably two weeks of time, censoring up, getting all that right. Then baselining it, putting on dyno. You know, we keep that same too. It's like, well, we tend to run the dyno so it's standardized over time. We're not just doing a quick pull. Hey, let's make sure the runs last, for example, eight seconds. So this thing's under full power for eight seconds. Because when you're on the road, the truck, you're towing up a hill or getting on auto ramp or doing a zero to 60 or a pull, nothing lasts two seconds. It always lasts longer than that. And when you can load and stress the parts, the OEM parts or our parts and see how they truly perform, that's a good baseline to have. So we standardize all that. You know, we look at all that data. We do the same for the competitors. We're not trying to falsify things. So we literally will just do it on the dyno. We'll stop at the part. Part for part, all the same sensors, and we'll get data. And it's surprising to see what people will claim and what it actually does. We've tested parts for this platform that the competitors' parts are worse than stock.

Well, it also kind of speaks to BMW. Well, you could probably speak about it a little bit better than I can, but just how amazing out of the box they are as is.

Yeah. I mean, there's clearly a lot of headroom in this car as far as making more power, but a lot of the OEM parts are already really good. And it's a struggle too. It's a struggle. It's not easy. It's not as easy, for example, as like on the F150 EcoBoost to make the parts. This is a lot more work.

So a lot of people are comparing this platform to like the GT-R in some ways, right? Is it harder to develop than the GT-R when you first got into that?

GT-R was difficult. I mean, they're both difficult, but when GT-R came out, it was a tuning solution. You know, the Trans was, you know, being a dual clutch and the hard launches, it was a little more sensitive. I'd say we didn't know as much as we know now. We didn't have the tools for data analysis, for tuning. We just had, we have so much more experience on knowledge. So the GT-R was harder, I'd say, in the beginning. Yeah, for sure. But this car has a ton of potential, you know. You just get the right parts on it. And it's pretty impressive. Like it's bolt-on-wise, it makes more power than the GT-R, the same bolt-ons.

One of the questions that I had while we were doing a tour, like when you were showing us all the sensor stuff for the F-150, or sorry, the Raptor back here. Is there, when did you go down the MoTeC rabbit hole? Because a decade ago, it was all AEM stuff. When did you start going down that rabbit hole and then saw that as a real solution for you guys?

We've used a lot of different things. Like I said, AEM, I mean, I was on board when AEM was first coming out with their AEM EMS for the DSMs. I was beta testing stuff back then for them. So we've used a lot of different things. The main driver, I think, was... Well, what's scary about MoTeC is its price, right? It's expensive, but it's really good. It is very well thought out. You can do so many things with it. We chose the MoTeC Dash for our data gathering because the data analysis software is very powerful. We're using AEM, which is an Italian company, before that. The software is good for track stuff, maybe the AEM stuff, but the MoTeC is great because you can adapt it for anything you want, be it for on track use or for capturing data logging on an engine dyno or, in this case, on the vehicle essential. It's very adaptable, very configurable. So that's the advantage. Nothing bad against AEM stuff. It's just not as easy to configure.

For your specific usage.

Yeah, it's expensive, the MoTeC stuff, but it's very powerful. Yeah.

So when you say powerful, give me an example of some things that it's helped you in development. Is anything come to mind?

Just the amount of like, sensors you can feed into it. Sure. You can do it through the dash, through a CAN bus, and then the analysis, the back end of it. So, you know, I can feed all that data into it and I can build out my own math channels, for example. So on all these vehicles, we do intercooler efficiency, which is not a sensor. It takes multiple sensors and a math calculation to spit out intercooler efficiency. It lets you build that all into the background and it lets you display intercooler efficiency, for example. So, you know, it just makes it easy, right? For us, you know, being on the dyno, you can quickly see on the dash what's happening. Download the data. I can show marketing. I can make a special dashboard for marketing so they can see a comparison between stock part or competitors and our part. It's a nice graph so you can customize all the stuff. It's very configurable. Yeah.

So, I'll let you talk at some point. I'm on a roll right now. One of the things that you talked about is that you're heavily involved in the R&D side of things right now. So, what does that look like, right? Because obviously, you're doing sound and MoTeX stuff, like you're developing the screens and all that stuff over there, all these various things. Are you in that by yourself? Is there people helping you? Is it a combination?

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I've kind of moved around the company. You know, my main thing is I love a challenge, right? I love solving problems and I love, like, improving things. You know, you can tell about parts, right? These parts make cars go faster. I like improving them. I enjoy that. So, I also enjoy that in the business. Where can I make the business better? So, you know, I've in the past, I've spent a lot of time in tuning, you know, and then, you know, training tuners and then obviously then taking off and running with it. And now they know more than I do about tuning, you know. So, you know, I've moved around the business to where I see I'm needed, you know, rebuilding the engine program from scratch. Lance and myself, we did that. I was needed there. I'm very much data driven and, you know, meticulous as far as figuring out how stuff works. So, that was a good role for me. Once that was kind of sort out and Lance, you know, took that over or ran with it and he's doing an awesome job. And, you know, then we kind of saw that, hey, R&D, you know, we can improve that. That's kind of the, maybe the last thing we really have to work on. Because it is a very complex process to do correctly. And again, one of the reasons I got into the business is, or I say got into the business, a reason I want to make products is, you know, I want to create some stuff, create great products. But also I saw how terrible was working with most aftermarket products. The instructions suck if they exist at all. The parts don't fit as advertised. What you get, you know, what's on the website or in the picture is usually always what you get. So that was a big thing for me. I was like, I want to make it like OEM plus. It fits like a stock part, but it performs way better, right? And it's got the proper support, meaning the customer service team, documentation, instructions, to make life easy for everyone, be it guys installing themselves in the garage or another shop. So that was kind of the goal for making those products and, you know, make them easy. And that's kind of the goal of R&D, right? So, you know, it's a lot of steps. Like, for example, when I stepped in here, we didn't have a really a set. We never need a project management software. The projects were managed. We have a lot of, and it was a lot of great stuff. It's just, we've always been like just running and gunning and creating all these products and tacking on more things as we needed, like, oh, hey, we got to add this process and this process. Before you know it, you've got five Google Sheets, Google Docs, Excel, OneNote and Google Calendar, and you're trying to manage all the stuff with, you know, across eight platforms, and you can't. So that was kind of one thing like, hey, we need to bring it all together, because it's coming out with the intercooler for the F150. That's 120 steps, right? And we have a check mark for each one. It's doing market research. It's analyzing competitor stuff. It's getting data on the flow bench, on the dyno, censoring a car up, taking measurements, doing manufacturing risk analysis, design reviews, creative roundtable. There's then vetting manufacturers and RFQ. And there's so many steps in the process. If you don't do it correctly and follow it, and you forget one of those, you can set you back in months sometimes. So that's where I came in, and I can't take credit for it myself. Max helped me a ton. He's great with organization and software. So we work together on getting that done and streamlining it. And my ultimate goal is, how do I prove myself as a roadblock here? So if I'm spending all my time managing projects for people, that can't be, you know, it's not good. Then I'm the roadblock. So that's what the project management software did, is let, you know, I can keep a pulse on it, but people now can manage their own stuff. The next step was really, you know, all our testing, right? We have a flow bench that we built. How do I make that efficient so anyone can use it, not just me, and gather the data, same with the cars. And so, you know, building out a training, then I had the time to build out a training program, train people, and now if someone's working on an intake, they're just using the flow bench and just running with it. Not like, hey Martin, we need you to set this up and run it for us and show us the data. It's, they're doing it on their own. And that's, I enjoy that. I enjoy teaching and like I said, removing myself from the roadblock and the systems.

There's a lot of time that goes into the initial step for you though. It was like, I was thinking about this dash layout here, like you have in the Raptor here, that just going through all of the data that MoTeC provides and deciding what you need to or not to look at, that must have been a pretty big initial time step.

Huge. I was up till one in the morning sometimes. Building that dash out, it's a lot of... I look at it like, if I want to put the work up front, a lot of work up front, it's got to bring efficiency. The goal here is to... We want to do three, four platforms a year, three, four vehicles a year.

When you say three or four platforms, you mean like actual...

Yeah, like let's say in one year, I want to roll out products for Tacoma, F150. We're going to be doing two more vehicles coming up. So every 12 months, I want to have four vehicles I'm making parts for. You got to be efficient. So it is a lot of upfront work to set all that up, a ton. I mean, standardizing the harnesses, just building a harness with 18 sensors. What thermocouple amplifier do you use? What sensors do you use? Standardizing all that. So when these guys go, hey, you're going to build four of these harnesses, use all the same sensors for every car. I'm going to build out a MoTeC dash layout, which is literally, I just, the guys are trained to now move from this car to the flow bench. They load up a different calibration, or move to Tacoma or the WRX. They load up the calibration, it's ready to go. It did take a long time. Again, I was like, there's some nights where I got into it, and I was up to like one in the morning, just programming away and setting it all up. Yeah, it's a lot of time.

Where did that come from, by the way? So remind me again, your degree was, was it mechanical or chemical engineering?

Mechanical engineering.

Mechanical engineering. So where did, I mean, you don't exactly seem like somebody who's not busy. When did you learn to program?

By programming, using like MoTeC, right? But their software, it's not easy.

I can't start it today. Like it's not exactly like something that's just grab it and go.

You know, that's I think, you know, that's part of why we've been successful as a company. Cause I have that passion for figuring out things I don't know, right? It's also a curse sometimes, but you know, here's MoTeC, here's, you know, I2 Pro, the data analysis software. Here's Dash Configurator, learn how to do CAN bus stuff. Here's our display creator, how to create displays. It is, it's a lot of time. It's really just, you know, I'm not one to give up. So it's just spending a lot of time, you know, and managing it. Do you do it here at work? Do I do it at home? And that's why this business is like, it is hard. It's a lot to learn, you know, sometimes you find a good people for it. Like I said, with tuning, you know, I've got two good guys that, you know, I said I trained, but they took over and they have the same passion of figuring out how stuff works. So, but it's really, it's a lot to learn. You have to know a lot of things in this business. You have to be good at a lot of things in this business to make it successful.

How did you first start getting into tuning? Is there anything exactly have HPA Academy or anything like that back then? Were you just kind of trial and error or was that?

Back then, it was on the Mercure, on the 2.3. It was called the Ford EEC, because the EEC-4 ECU, Ford EEC tuner, which was like a binary ROM. It had some tables in there. There's no wide bands back then, were like $3,000. If you went to a dyno, it had one, maybe, you're lucky, but there's no portable wide bands. So you're tuning off a narrow band. You go to a dyno, verify it, see if it's okay. But I learned that. I read a lot of books. There's a lot of knowledge out there if you look for it. I mean, there's books. There's one book on engine theory, which is from like, it talks about World War II. If you look at engine technology in World War II aircraft, it's pretty amazing. Methanol injection, I mean, double overhead cam, direct injection, mechanical injection.

Yeah, I mean, mechanical direct injection, but still, there's a lot of our innovation comes from government did.

Oh yeah, this has stuff been around for a long time. So there's places to learn, you know, and now with the internet, it's easier than ever. Sure. But I taught myself, I'm very meticulous about things I do. So, you know, I'd learn and the tuning, that is like even finding someone to tune, hiring for that position. You have to find, you can't just teach anyone. You have to find a person who has that passion. And they have got that knack for mechanical knowledge, because you can't just know, what does ignition timing do? You have to know how that interacts with cam timing. What does cam timing do? What do you do when you advance and retard an intake cam or exhaust cam? How does it affect the V, the motor, the exhaust back pressure? How does all intertwine? It's a lot to learn, a lot to figure out. And I'm still even learning some stuff now about, you know, tuning. There's some, like the direct injection stuff. I mean, there's like, you could never, it's a, I'm not going to claim to be an expert. I know enough to be good at stuff, but I'm always still learning.

Right. Well, as I ask, is there anything in this building, like, is there any role in this building that you couldn't, I guess, understand or be able to do yourself?

I mean, like, welding. I mean, I used to, I used to weld, right?

Sure.

But I'm not proficient. I sat down a while ago, did some balloon welds, and it'll, not great, but I was able to stick two pieces of metal together, but I haven't done it in a long time. Yeah, I could, you know, I mean, I can't run like the CNC, like, Zach's our machinist, right? I don't have the experience running a CNC, for example. So no, but there's a lot of jobs I could do, but it doesn't make sense.

You have an ultimate understanding of how it works, though.

Yeah, and I think that's important, too, if you're managing, if you're managing departments or people, or having a business like this.

Wow. Rookie movie, that's the first time mine's ever went off on 163 episodes. Pretty sure that's the first time.

But you have to know enough to where you can assess if people are doing a good job, if you're getting bamboozled, you have to know enough.

What about you, you're probably learning all the time. Where are you placing your energies?

Oh man.

Has something got your eye, like currently, is there anything that's on the horizon?

It's really, for AMS, it's making sure, for us, the growth is in making parts, right? Is, we can work on the cars here, but we'll limit it on space, how many cars we work on. Where you can't just, you can't go, we're gonna double that output, we can't. So for us, it's maximizing that, but it's also making parts, because if you have a big enough dealer network, we have the capacity over here for inventory and manufacturing and the supply network, where we can probably do double or triple the business out of this space. So for us, it's the parts. It's finding the platforms, identifying those platforms and the parts, and just rinse and repeat in an efficient manner that brings about good products. So that's kind of what excites me, is streamlining that and really teaching the whole R&D team, the whole process. And they're good. They're getting really good. And they're like, the biggest thing I think I have to transfer the knowledge on is some of the data analysis, like stuff in the MoTeC, where we're analyzing, for example, like how does this affect another part? We've got a decent grasp, but I think that's the final puzzle, is transferring that knowledge to guys where they can run with it. And that's the fun part for me, is if I can teach something to someone and they can do it, then that's exciting to me.

Do you see yourself transitioning out of the builds at some point in time, if you can, or spending less time at the track or doing stuff like that, or?

When do you go to the golf course?

Yeah, what? What's that?

When you just...

I mean, yeah, I mean, it's funny, because I've got friends outside of work and they're like, they know all about, I don't know, I mean, NFL and college teams, like, when do you guys have time for this? And clearly, they have a day job where they have time to burn, you know? Like, so I don't have any of that time. So this is a lot of time. And that's kind of what drives me, is to keep improving things, is to me, at this point, at my age, and like with family and everything else, is like, I need to create the time so I can actually enjoy myself a little bit, because a lot of this is very high pace and high stress. And again, I wish I had to learn or know what I know now about business in general 15 years ago. Totally different landscape, right? But unfortunately, this was my first job, which probably, if I would have worked out in the world for maybe five years, I would have seen, a lot of things that opened my eyes, but this wasn't my first job. I know nothing about business at all. I'm a mechanical engineer, trying to make the best things I can. That probably hurt too. So there's a lot of things, I wish I had known back then, I would have been a different spot now, but here we are and I just keep kind of pushing forward and what drives me is seeing the improvement and seeing get better. So again, now, my stress level now compared to what, even though it's still very much, you're on it all the time compared to, let's say, you know, 10, 8, 10 years ago, I couldn't go on vacation. I'd go on vacation and I'd come back and there'd be a line on my door of people. I was dreading going on any vacation, you know, and I think. I remember we kind of did the big kind of like revamp AMS version 2.0. It was 2018 or 19. I remember went on vacation with my family, went to Europe, and I was gone for like 10 days or eight days. I was stressing and then each night I'd call in. I was like, how's it going? I'm like, stop calling. Like, it's fine. We really got it, you know. And we came back and sat at my desk and there was not a line of people on my door. I'm like, what is this? This is amazing. So, you know, it's and I'm sure many business owners in this industry can relate to that. It is it is difficult. And then like just you got to make sure the business is right.

How did you get to that point? Like, well, how exactly you went from not being able to ever take a vacation to all of a sudden you can? Was there a difference? Like, what changed?

It's not one thing. I mean, it's a lot of things. But I mean, if I have to, you know, if it's if it's narrowed down, really, it's people in process getting the right people on board. And, you know, in the business, we had all I mean, we started the business as a passion. And you're working with people who bring on board who you become friends with, right? Or someone else who had the same passion and you're friends with them, right? And they're good, they're good enough, right? They're not maybe not at their job, but they're not amazing or great, but they're good enough.

And you kind of like, I keep telling this to Dan, by the way, he's good enough.

How I strive to just be good enough.

And it sucks because some people view that as ruthless. But when you're grinding and killing yourself and you see like, s***, man, I gotta let this guy go. Cause you know what? I can do better. I can get someone on board who can do better and it sucks. And you're friends with them. That was the hardest thing is the people changeover, is getting different people on board. And we lost some good people, but we swapped over some people that we need to swap out. And that was probably the hardest thing from an emotional standpoint that had to do in the business. That was incredibly tough. But it was that and then putting process to everything. I mean, when I first, I brought Max on board, he's our CFO, COO, he's been a great asset additional to the business. When I brought him on board, originally as a consultant, right, he knows finance. And he saw the exact same things I did. And we had a list, I'm not joking, we had a list of 100 things we had to work on. And I call it the, I don't call it, it's called the flywheel effect. And it's a lot of work to get the flywheel turning. And it seems like you're not getting anywhere. You're working on all these things, chipping away one at a time, one at a time, and all of a sudden it starts moving faster and faster, and then it's moving on its own. So, like I said, it's a lot of different things, but the two biggest things is people and process. And you get those things right, and you could do a lot of cool things.

Well, it seems like you're really big on efficiency, you know, having processes, things like that. So, you're... That's a good recipe for you being able to relax a bit more. If you make things more idiot-proof, for lack of a better word, you know, you've got your dashes, you've built up, people can move them from car to car, you're using project management software, it makes it easier for people to see what's going on. All those things are going to take stress off of you, put it back in the hands of your employees a little bit, and give you a chance to maybe step back a little bit, I suppose, at some point in time.

Yeah, yeah, I'd step back, I'd like to be able to work on finding that time to explore what's the next thing to do with AMS, right? There's some different product lines or different business models we can go into. And that thing, like I said, I'm not trying to put my stress on other people, because again, when you put that process and efficiency in place, it helps everyone out, right? I've been there so many times where I have not put myself in a good spot where I had a good process in place, and I'm struggling, you know? And, you know, it's always takes someone an outside perspective, like, hey, what are you doing? And my wife's really good at that, like, what are you doing? You know, slow down, you know, step back and look at what you're doing. And I've had, thankfully, people here also, I'm open to criticism. I have people tell me, like, one on ones with my engineers, like, hey, let me know what I can do to improve. Let me know things I'm not doing right, you know.

So it was longer than a 20 minute chat yesterday then.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I was like, oh, his engineer's tearing up a new one.

Yeah. And like, you know, I do one on ones with my guys, you know, every three weeks. So I go for a walk and talk and get feedback. I want to keep a pulse on everything that's, you know, they're seeing and I'm seeing. And it's, it's, it's, you know, you know, the, the once a year reviews is, is I think, you know, you got to keep a pulse on, on everyone. You got to, you can't let it slip for a year sort of, yeah, you can't, you can't, you got to be, you got to be, you know, active with the people. And again, I've, I've learned this over time. I haven't been in the past. I've, I've, I've been in, you know, into my work only, maybe, you know, and not so much into the people. And that's, that's, that's had a change. So it's, you know.

So obviously this is 10% luck, 20% skill. And whatever the rest of the song is, but I don't think this is all luck. Where did, and we'll come back to the cars in a second, but where does, did you have a business mentor along the way or mentors? Who are you learning lessons from? Or is this all just like, this isn't working. Let's use my process oriented mind to change it.

The first 15 years, no mentor. Okay. I mean, it was really just figuring, I don't know, making mistakes and, you know, Arnie and I like staying up late at night and figuring stuff out and going, why is there inventory way off? Why is this wrong? Why is it like, it's just, it was, you know, God, I wish, like I said, I can go back and know that I should probably get a mentor. And that's what, that's the biggest thing. And like I said, in 17 or 18, where I joined a group of those business owners and you literally see everyone has the exact same problems. No matter if they're a roofing company, insurance company, they manufacture medical equipment, everyone has exact same problems. And, you know, that was, you know, I wish I would have done that a lot sooner. So, you know, my advice to anyone is seek help. Don't be afraid to ask questions. There's a bunch of, I mean, like they're, they're called like this Vistage. There's, I think, EOF. There's a whole bunch of different things out there where you can join, sometimes paid, sometimes for free and just get together with other business owners and you literally learn, they learn from you and you learn from them. Like I remember my first meeting, I learned so much in that first meeting. It was a whole day meeting. It was once a month. I couldn't sleep at night. I'm laying in bed, just minds racing. I'm making notes. It was like my first few months like that was the same way. I go to meeting and I'm like up all night. Just, oh my God, all the stuff I can do, I need to prove on a change and it was kind of a cheat code.

I do want to kind of pivot gears a little bit here. That's not correct terminology on that one.

Switch gears.

Yeah. Who pivots gears?

Pivot.

I see that.

There's obviously a lot of things we can touch on. I want to touch a little bit because World Cup Finals is going to be coming up a few weeks after this episode airs. You have four cars going there if I remember correctly. Sunday will be running the new, that's fine. Sorry. But they're going to be running the, what's it called? The new billet blocks that you guys are developing or developed, I suppose. Number one, how long did that program take and how come it's ready? Is it ready?

Too long. Designing a block that has a water jack in it, water jacket in it is not easy. Especially that block, because it's a lot going on there. That's probably now almost three years in the making, I'd say, at least two and a half. You know, and, you know, proving that out. So you have, I mean, you have the first iteration. It's not right. You have to do all this work to get it right. And we've had some good partners work with as far as like, you know, this is before we had our machine shop up and running that we worked with them as far as helping us sort some stuff out. And, you know, you test in a vehicle. We got to the point where comfortable putting in a car and Jordan Martin, he's a great customer to work with. He's a friend, a great relationship as far as like, hey, he understands the risk. He also wants to be part of the risk and be on the cutting edge. So, you know, he had a motor in his car that was he had 10,000 miles on that cast factory block. And the engine is still good, it's actually in one of his other cars now. But we put that motor in his car and he drove it, put some power through it and, you know, we took it apart, we inspected it, we made some more changes. And now we're, I think we're in revision three, and we have like three or four blocks here now with three of those going into cars that are going to the race. But it's a lot. And even on the revision three, you're finding some stuff you can change around. We're seeing some, oh, we're seeing this happening. We're making that improvement. So it's like our GTR bill block. We've gone through many revisions that I'm guessing five, five, maybe six, you know, really. And out there we're like, oh, it's a game changer. The rest are junk, but hey, how do we make life easier for rebuilding them, standardizing something? Where can we find improvements to find more strength in it? So we've had a few revisions along the way.

What's a revision cost roughly between each iteration of it?

I don't want to know. I mean, the engineering time, I mean, imagine, I mean, you have probably a straight engineering time. Six months. So imagine what that cost is. I mean, it's not just half a year of a salary. You have the overhead. So like, we kind of plan here. We building all the overhead in place. It's about $100 an hour cost per person in here in R&D. So if an engineer spends 10 hours, it's about $1,000 our cost. So it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot. And then, if you get a billet made, that's not cheap, especially if you're working with, you're not going to go, this is a version one, make me 10 of these. You have one made or two made. And those are really high because you have tooling, you have fixturing, you've got CAD CAM, or you have CAM programming, because we do the CAD here. But they make you one block. And it's probably two, two and a half times what it's going to cost you once you get into a point where you're making five at a time or 10 at a time. So it's expensive. It's, I mean, I've, in that program, I've got, I don't know, probably $200,000 wrapped up into that without selling one yet. Yeah, without selling one.

What about like when it comes to other? Is that probably the most expensive component to make out a bill of them?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a lot of billet.

It's I mean, it's expensive as far as I mean, the material is like for the GTR to it's not a regular 6061. It's a 2000 series like special aerospace grade lunar that doesn't change strength of temperature. It's three times as much as 6061. So that the bill itself is expensive, but then machining it and getting right. It's a lot of work and it is expensive.

So here's another thing. A lot of people just want to use that as a cheat code, right? Like, all right, we're going to get billet everything.

Yeah.

You have one. It's a cast block over there. That car that was in Jordan Martin's card, I was making what? 1800, 2000 horsepower before you guys are going to be throwing.

Let's make in 20, I think 22 or 2300 wheel horsepower. Oh, sorry.

I'm thinking. Oh, yeah, because like Omega was, yeah, that didn't even have a billet block either.

No, no. That thing was probably pushing 25, 2600 wheel horsepower on a cast block. It goes down to like the, you know, we're not just building engines here, we're doing engine development, right? So, you know, bringing everything in house from, you know, all our multi-step cleaning process to the engine machining, to the assembly, to the, you know, special, the room we have with its own HVAC system, the all plays into it, and then, you know, figuring out the weaknesses. Where is this thing failing? And why is it failing? And what can we do to prevent that? It's the whole discussion of something as simple as tightening a bolt, torquing a bolt. What's the clamp load? How do you get that to be even on, you know, an aftermarket product, which is nowhere close to an OEM consistency. OEM torque to yield stuff, like I said, is amazing. The aftermarket stuff, it's very difficult. It took us a long time to come up with a process to get consistent clamp loads, but all that comes into play. It's that, it's how you assemble stuff, how you clean stuff, clearances, little tips and tricks you do here and there to get all this stuff to live as long as it can, because eventually it is a failure mode. You know, and the cast block, that V10 is, it's a very hard cast aluminum material, but it's very brittle. So eventually they do fail, they crack.

So between the GT, I'm just gonna use these two as an example, between the GTR and Lambo program, which of those two was your favorite or which one was more difficult?

More difficult, the GTR.

GTR?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, GTR. Because again, we're doing a lot of the firsts with that, right? I mean, chasing that six second pass, you know? That was in 2018, I think, or I think it was 18 or 19, where we were chasing the first of the sixes. And it was like us and like there's some shop or some guy in Middle East chasing it and ETS and a couple of guys. It was a race to see who would go first. I was just throwing money at it. And it was looking back, it's like, what the hell? How much money was spent on that? We could have done some really great things with, but that was difficult. And again, we learned a lot of things and now we're applying that towards the V10. So I'd say that was definitely more difficult.

So obviously that comes with learning processes and stuff. So when you went to go onto the V10 platform, what were some lessons that you learned from the GTR, or I guess the R35 chase that you applied to that? Did it make life easier going into the V10 development? Or did that come with its own problems?

It definitely had its own problems, right? It definitely had its own problems. But yeah, like the engine stuff, you know, and I think I told you that kind of we revamped our whole engine program about five years ago. And that, you know, we learned that we were probably weren't doing things that the best way we could. And we had success definitely, but I would say nothing to the degree we have now, where, you know, as far as warranties, as far as like the confidence, like, hey, this thing is going to last, right? As long as you do something stupid to this thing, it's going to perform well, it's going to stay together. So there's, you know, except the V10 itself had its own challenges. The gear, the transmission was a challenge. I mean, the GTR was too, but Datsun had a lot of that figured out already. And the V10 was, was new to Datsun also. So there's a lot of challenges there. And, you know, and to expect, you know, the difficult part with any of these platforms is to expect a company to go, hey, listen, we've tested this thing for three years at 3000 horsepower. We've thrown every scenario at it. It's all good. It's guaranteed. Oh, and it's, and this package costs $300,000. You're basically asking for a Bugatti for, you know, it's like the reason that stuff costs a lot of money because they have so much R&D up front into it to vet all that stuff. So, you know, we do the best we can, but working with some suppliers too, it's like, we're part of the beta testers, you know? We're testing, it sometimes takes months, sometimes a year to get stuff that holds together because not everyone has a 3000 horsepower car they can throw together or a way to test the transmission to, you know, 1500 foot pounds of torque in some controlled manner. It just, sometimes it is, it's difficult. It's, that's why I said spacing out those kind of, I call them halo cars. So like the GTR, the V10, and I'm not sure what's going to be next, but you got to space those out.

I was going to ask if there was a next halo car.

I mean, there will be. We got to figure it out and you got to be, you know, I'm very much a, I want to do a lot. I want to look at it and I'll jump at opportunities, but I've learned I got to hold back. I've got to make sure it's calculated because I can get into trouble. If you do too much at once, you get into trouble. So there will be a next platform. Just got to figure out what it is.

Well, I can't remember if it was on your episode with Street Alphar or who else, but like these programs aren't exactly cheap or like to go through.

That's going to be my next question. What's an Alpha 20 package cost? I got an R8. I want to come in here. I want an Alpha 20. What is my out the door?

Ballpark, 250 to 300, depending on what you want. But that's transmission, that's engine, that's fuel system, that's tuning, that's safety equipment, fire system, that's a whole, a lot of parts, traction control. And then most importantly, it's all put together and ready to go. So, we've got cars here that are making 2,000 horsepower that if you get in a drive, you couldn't tell it was modified.

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Besides being a little louder.

What's that weird whistling sound?

Yeah, but it's like you can't, it drives just like a stock car. And the beauty of it is when you have all stuff dialed in, especially like the traction control, that thing can put down all the power, whatever the road will take, it'll put down. So it could be 1,500 horsepower, 1,200, 2,000. And it's no drama, it just goes straight, and it's safe and it's fast, and it's fun. It's like a personal roller coaster, really.

Yeah. Well, what I was getting with it is you could easily slip and be like, up and there goes six figures, right? Because you could choose any one of these platforms to really develop. Like the G80, some people are going to be saying that it's, like there's like 2,000, sorry, 1,500, 2,000 horsepower Supras are, I don't want to say it's the norm, but they're not uncommon to see when you go to these big events, I mean. I know you don't want to disclose it on camera, so I could totally cut this part, but is there a particular platform that's catching your eye? Or is it you're just going to wait a little longer on a Halo car platform?

I think wait a little longer, because we want to get the bill of block stuff out of the way. Nothing's really catching our eye right now, because if you're going to do that, it's a lot of effort and energy going to, right? You put in a lot of, it's a big investment, it's a risky investment, so you want to make sure there's going to be ROI, pay back on it. So right now, there's nothing super particular, like, I love these cars, but I think to have this as a norm of, like a 2,000 horsepower V10 R8 or Huracan drives nice. Like it's livable. Like Jordan drove his Performante with that, he put 10,000 miles on a thing, and that thing's got, he was making 2,200 real horsepower, went 740s and a quarter mile. He'd drive it from Rockford all the way to Chicago for a meeting, drive it back. You can drive it and use it. I don't know if he could say the same for 1,500 horsepower Supra. Okay. So, you could drive it, but it's not going to feel like a stock car. He's got a Starbucks in his cup holder. You can talk in it. It's quiet. It's drivable. It's an overheat. You can use traffic. But even like this, trying to make 2,000 or 1,500 horsepower with this, there's going to be compromises. So for us, it's making the halo cars showing off what we can do with the platform, but also you got to make it viable so the customer can do it. I don't want to, whatever we choose, I don't want to sell any false promises. Yeah, 2,000 horsepower all day long. It'll live. It'll be enjoyable. So that's where we're taking our time picking that.

That makes sense. I might be wrong on this because I don't follow it a lot, but not that there's not plenty of them out there too, but they don't have those platforms anymore either, right? The GTR is gone. The V10 Lambo is no longer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is the thing. The GTR is gone. We don't know what's next for that. The V10 is like the Temurario. I think it's a V8 high revving turbo. So that's interesting.

I'm curious to see what people do with that. I definitely am keeping an eye on all the other big names that are potentially going to explore that as well. So that's a weird platform.

Yeah, and it's like super new. It's super new, right? And it's a risk. I'm not going to go out there and spend $400,000 and go, oops. You know, again, this business, it's cool, but I'm not driving Lambos. It's a tough business, and we have to really calculate where we spend our money to make sure it works out for us.

There's another new turbo car. It just beat that stupid Mustang at the ring. Oh, the ZR1.

The ZR1, yeah.

Any jab at him, I can get it. I'll take it. No, yeah, the next five to 10 years will be strange, because we had the luxury of visiting SEMA Garage, right? And we get to talk to other folks who work at the OEM level and what it takes to make sure you're compliant and all that. I'm sure that's something that you're also constantly concerned about when it comes to all this. Yeah, yeah.

Are you guys members?

Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, we're, you know, we've had this been on our radar for a long time, you know. So, you know, we have products that have a CARB EOs on them.

Oh, OK.

Yeah, so we've been-

It's selling in California, right?

Yeah, yeah, well, and we've sold some stuff through some OEMs we do some work with. So they required us to do CARB EOs. So, you know, we're familiar with the process.

Well, people don't realize what that takes, too. Like that's a process in itself. That's time suck and money suck and-

And it's a government agency. And when you have eight people on a call, just to question one word you have in your website, it's like, what is going on? Like, you're just paying for all this. You know, but it's important. That's why we kind of, you know, for us, the focus is on the core bolt-on products, like intakes, you know, intercoolers, bolt-in turbos, not turbo kits where you have to change out the downpipes and all this stuff. It's how do we make a bolt-in turbo that you plug in, it's plus 30%, 40, 50% power capacity while still looking like stock and all the stock lines bolt up to it. You know, that's the kind of stuff we're pursuing. The turbo kit's nice. Like, people ask us, make a turbo kit for this thing. I don't want to. Like, there's no, first of all, there's no room. So anything you do is gonna be a pretty major compromise, right? And it's just, you're gonna spend a lot of time and energy getting something that you can barely get an air filter on. It's not the way we do things. And then you're gonna sell how many of them. It's just, it's not super exciting for me. I want to make something that's a good engineered solution, that's elegant, that works well, and it could sell a bunch of, yeah.

Is it easier to package the Infinities compared to the G80, or is it roughly the same?

They're also tight.

They're also tight.

They're also pretty tight. I mean, maybe a little easier on that one. Easier. This one, this one's, this one's tight.

There's a rat's nest in there.

Yeah, like I said, like the intake, even designing intake on this thing was, it was tough. It's without having a 3D scanner and scanning the components, OEM components, and also the environment they sit in, the whole engine bay and everything around, without scanning all that and doing it all in CAD, you're not going to make anything better in stock. You're not. I mean, they said there's one, you know, the reason our intake works better than anyone else's on this car is because we remade one of the OEM components, which everyone else didn't. They assumed it was okay or good enough, or it is difficult to make and design, and we did it because that's where we saw the restriction. But again, you're only doing that if you have everything scanned, because it's a complex shape. It's not easy to make.

Well, touch on that as well, right? Because I, so, first of all, how much are you outsourcing overseas, like when it comes to like manufacturing stuff? Is it a significant portion of the business or?

Nothing's made for us overseas, right?

Okay.

It's components. It's a casting. It's this part, like we get everything in. It's from many, many different vendors, right? The cores from this vendor, the castings from this vendor, the silicones from this vendor, the stanchions, the bracket. It's all from everywhere else. I mean, we do some US sourcing, but I mean, to be honest, it's very hard to get stuff made here. It's very hard. We do when we can, but when you get samples from an overseas vendor, and it doesn't have to be China, an overseas vendor, when you can get a sample quicker than you can get a quote from a US vendor, that's a problem. That's a problem. Yeah. And it's sad. It's sad. And there's actually an episode, it's called Smarter Every Day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I saw that one.

The guy that went out to meet the better grill brush.

Yeah.

Great show. And you see the challenges he has to go through to get that made here, where there's literally some of the processes are lost because we've outsourced it and they don't know how to do it anymore, or they don't know how to do it efficiently anymore here for that kind of application. I mean, anything like aerospace or government, sure, you'll find stuff, but that's crazy expensive. We've tried to get some stuff made here for like, you know, some of our CNC stuff. That's like really precision. And you'll go to some of these places like, we'll do that stuff where, you know, ISO 9000, we're this and like that. You have to cool back and it's, you know, 10X. Like, I'll sell one intercooler or one end tank. No one's gonna buy it, right?

Right.

So, like I said, we source from all over the world, you know, but it's quality stuff. We don't, that's a huge challenge in itself as a vetting suppliers. It doesn't mean it's cheap, you know? It's, you're still paying for some stuff. It's just, you can get good quality stuff there for sometimes less than here. The consumer has a limited budget, right? They want the best part for a certain amount of dollars. And our goal is to bring that to them. So we have to be creative.

Especially when you're doing pay in for builds, you know? Yeah. Well, I always tell people when it comes to like sourcing outside of the US, right? It's like, well, imagine it was the other way around, right? Like, let's say somebody from China wanted to build something in the US. They're going to have to talk to vendors all across our 50 states. There's bound to be a few bad ones, a few good ones. So it comes down to choosing a good one.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's sometimes you can't even get stuff made here. I mean, casting in general, right? Oh, casting? I've had castings made here.

Really? Okay.

I have. The cost is 10x for tooling. And honestly, the quality is...

Less than I've heard in some cases.

It depends. It depends on what you do. Like no one here wants to do small production ones. They don't. Everyone's geared up to do large production runs.

There's that too.

You know? A few people want to scramble with release. Unless if they do, it's crazy expensive because it's for some specialized industry. So it's a challenge. We don't get any finished goods from overseas. I mean, we get components from like, it's all assembled here. It's welded here. You know, that's one thing. Like we order competitor stuff. You can immediately see when they get it in a box from China, Taiwan or wherever else.

You can immediately see it.

They get it already. They design it maybe. But you can see they get it manufactured all in one shot over there. Right. So, you know, we see that we don't we don't do that. Our stuff is finished here, which I think as far as the tariffs go, that was our advantage. Also, we were definitely affected by the tariffs, but not as much because, again, not all our stuffs from from from the place that hit really hard by tariffs like China. And then we're doing a lot of the finishings that work here. We're doing the weldments, the assembly, the fitting, the testing. So, you know, that was maybe a little easier for us. Weren't hit as hard because we saw like, when they came out, we saw some suppliers going immediately like plus 20% and every few weeks plus this, plus this, like, whoa, you know?

Well, it's crazy. Like when I was buying my 3D printer, the guy's like, oh, you came at a good time. This is almost twice as much a few months ago. It's like, man, it's crazy.

We've had really one price increase and it was relatively small.

Okay. Well, yeah, that's also good. One of the things while I was going down that kind of machining and vendor route is, for example, you're talking about the water jackets in the billet blocks earlier. I mean, can you kind of touch on why that's so difficult? Because my brain can't even wrap around if I wanted to go produce something like that.

Well, it's difficult. When you have a casting, when you're machining something, you have line of sight, right? Your tool has to reach where you want to go. So if you have water jackets in the billet block and you have to go, you know, eight inches deep, you got to have a tool that's that long, right? And sometimes the head of the machine or whatever else is like, you have to have a really skinny bit. So now you have a long skinny bit that's moving really slowly. It takes a long time for the machine. So one is you have to design it to be manufacturable, right? One, you got to be able to make it. So I mean, you have to have, you know, physically be able to make it. But two is how do you make it so you can make it quickly, right? And that's something we've been learning along the way too, is like, yeah, these design features are great, but I'm going to spend a day on a machine, just profiling this because it's so hard to get to. And I got to use a quarter inch ball and mill. And it's, you know, so there's, that's difficult when you're machining something on a billet with a casting. You know, one of my engineers here, he comes from a casting background. They cast iron blocks, stuff like that. You have a lot more freedom. The cores and stuff, you get water passages, which you couldn't ever reach with a machine, for example. So it's just, you know, that has its own challenges, obviously, with casting. But in that case, like doing water, Jeff, a good water jacket and a billet block is difficult, is difficult.

Yeah, because like, like, for example, like, again, I keep referring back to 3D printing. It's like, oh, well, you can't reach that there or whatever. Like, how does it like? And I could probably YouTube this, but it's like, how do you get all the bends and stuff within there? Like, how do you machine those within there?

You got to have a tool. It's like a five axis, which is a three axis plus two, or a true five axis, where they can swivel and they can machine in there. But you got to be able to see it. It's like head porting. You're seeing a head porting machine where the head's moving around. It's trying to get into ports, and it's got to come from both ends sometimes. It's got to go from one end. It's got to go from one other end and kind of meet up. So when you're designing, you got to make sure that, hey, can I reach everywhere? And if you can't, sometimes you got to make a feature like a plate where, hey, this part's bolt on. It's machined out, and then the other half gets bolted to it. Right? So that's how you can, you'd never be able to reach it from one end, but when you have two halves and you can bolt them together or weld them together or whatever else, that's how sometimes you can make that happen.

Okay.

Yeah. There's actually like on the V10 block, there's one where the water, I think exits or enters the block. It's not machinable in one piece. So we actually have a plate that goes over it. So it's all nice and smooth and contoured, but then you have a plate that kind of covers it all.

Good.

Okay.

Okay. Sorry, I'm just digesting.

No, that's cool. I mean, you haven't seen enough engines apart, probably to really like, so I can picture all the water jackets, all the stuff, the heads lining up, all the jackets having to line up, all that stuff is, it's an engineering marvel that any of that stuff even works.

We tried doing billet heads one time. We tried doing billet heads for the GTR, and I don't know how much money I sank into that. We never came out with it, because it was not a viable product, because there's a lot of heat that goes in the heads. A lot of heat, right? You don't have much, like when you cast stuff, you have like, if you ever cut a head apart, it's kind of crazy, it's like a skeleton, there's like a dome, right? The chamber dome, and it's, you know, I don't know, it's not that thick, and there's a whole hollow cavity for water to kind of flow around it, and there's steam ports, and there's different ways for water to get to, we can make sure, like, for example, cooling the exhaust valves is a huge thing. The exhaust valves and exhaust valve seats gotta stay cool. Doing that ability is virtually impossible, even in multiple pieces. It was very hard to do a good set of bill heads for that car. We tested, we spent a lot of money, got some aid, put them on a car, went and did not quarter mile, but did half mile pull-excess and the seats to store it. The head starts to form. Went through a couple iterations, I threw the hell on it. I've got way too much money and time into it. And then to sell it, we were costing us, I don't know, $14,000 for a set of heads. We're looking at people willing to pay, what are they willing to pay? $18,000. I'm never gonna make my money back. You gotta give a dealer any discount. I mean, I'm making a couple of thousand dollars on a set of $14,000 heads with massive risk behind it. Like, I'm not even selling it. I'm not even worth it. Cause it takes one time for us to have to cover customers. You're not gonna recover from that.

Was that a weak point that you were looking to try and fix? Cause usually heads aren't a horrible problem. Other than the floor.

So that was another thing we learned a lot there, too. So it was sealing the cylinder heads. I mean, these cars, when you run them hard and you pull them off, the whole chamber, if you deck it, if you measure it with a flat edge and a feeler gauge, or if you put it on a machine and skim one thou off, you'll see the whole chamber kind of sinks in a little bit, moves. So they have a limited lifespan, these heads. And then the seats distort. You got to do certain things. Like we've had to move to exhaust valves that are larger and have a larger stem diameter to help pull some of that heat away, transfer the heat to the guide, do different valve seats to transfer more heat out of there. So are they a weak point at this point? Not really. We've also did some things. There's some parts of the chamber, like I said, it's kind of a, you cut it in half, which we have. We've cut blocks apart. We've cut heads apart where it's kind of an exoskeleton in there. We found one part where the heads would always kind of lift. And we're like, oh, how do we reinforce that? Like, oh, we can come from the top. We machine a flat, machine through the top of the head. And you can see the back of the chamber in which you can be with this, you know, and they'll pull a little flat on there and you put a jack screw, a set screw on top and you're preloading. And you're actually pushing down on the chamber and that weak part of the chamber, you're pressing down and preloading it. And so that's the one solution we came up with. And then, of course, when other people saw it, we're doing it. Oh, so they're doing the same thing on the head in the same spot. Well, whatever, it's just, you know, it's just, I can't stop that. I'm not even calling it copying. It's just, you know, we came up with a solution for us and work good. And other people did it. But then, yeah, we just that fixed a lot of those issues and good. Getting good head gaskets in solutions solved a lot of those issues. So that's why, in part, we stopped pursuing that. Yeah. OK. And then if you're truly doing a bill at CNC head, you're going to change the angle of the runner, both the intake and the exhaust port, to really take advantage of, to improve the V of the motor, right? You're going to do stuff that's going to kill probably emissions of what OEM would design a head for, but you're going to prove ultimate engine VE at higher PM. Then you got to do a custom intake manifold, custom exhaust. It just gets out of control really quick. You're making it for the two customers that are going to do it.

Is a lot of that coming from that? Because what you're explaining to me, you're talking about right now in this engine development stuff, like that's some OE level s*** you guys are doing. Is that your engineering background that's kind of coming into play there? Do you have other specialists that you work with when it comes to that kind of?

I mean, I wouldn't say, I mean, OE is, I mean, they have teams of people dedicated, they have combustion analysis, they have engine dynos, they have spin trial. I mean, they're doing, well, I don't know if they have spin trials, but they do some pretty crazy stuff. I mean, we're doing the best with what we can.

Right.

But I'd say it's just, it's a lot of research, a lot of learning, and it's making a good judgment calls. It's a lot of analysis. Like when stuff breaks, like I told you, like, we'll, you know, if we see a, hey, why is this material not holding up? We'll send it out to a lab and it's thousand to 1500 bucks and they'll give you, they'll literally, you know, tell you this is the composition, all the alloys, here's the hardness test of it, here's exactly what it is. And then, you know, we use some of those tools to kind of help us make decisions on which route we go. You know, so I wouldn't compare us to an OE level, but they do like engine software simulation, you know, that we don't do that. But we'll do stupid little cool stuff. Like we turned our flow bench into a blow bench. It was blowing air and we made a miniature, a third scale version of our intake manifold for a vehicle. And, you know, we restricted the flow out of the ports. We were blowing air through it. It's a plastic 3D printed third scale model. And we're using, oh god, it's called a pitot tube, and measuring the pressure in different areas and seeing flow distribution out of that manifold at certain flows. And we'll do stuff like that. It's a lot of iterative testing or using just good common sense. And how do you get the most out without spending the most amount of time? Because you can spend, and we've done it, we spent a lot of time, money on doing simulations, the CFD simulations. It gets very costly, very expensive. And the reasons, oh, we do it because they're building a million trucks. We're building 20 engines a year. You can never charge them. I mean, you could if you do an F1 team or NASCAR team, right? But we're not charging that kind of money for these engines.

Yeah.

But we did have Hiroshi Tamura, who was a big guy on the GTR, had a lot to do with the design of that car and the Nissan Z and the path forward on that. He visited us at their old facility a long time ago, and he was very impressed. He was like, how do you know how to do all this stuff? How do you know even the clearances when you're designing the parts, how do you know? It's just from, I don't know, intuition, experience, like that. It's kind of, you know, we've kind of learned along the way, and I think using 25 years of making mistakes, in my case, you know, or 20, more than that. 30 years of-

So trial and error is a big part of it.

Yeah, learning from your mistakes. Whenever something doesn't go right, I always figure out why, right? Because if you don't, you're gonna make the same mistake again. So, you know, why did this happen? You know, what can I learn from it? That's the biggest thing. You know, be it from engines to components you make, to a fuel system you make, to, you know, business decisions, to whatever. You're always gonna make mistakes, and so how do you learn from them?

Well, and that's a big thing with like, we've had a number of OEM folk that we've met or have had on the show, and it's like, they're also kind of limited by their bubble, right? Like they don't get to iterate as fast as you may, and just like, you cannot iterate as fast as like a single guy working at his shop, but you all have your own different restrictions and goals that you're trying to go for. So one question I had earlier, is there any like, because I saw like a stack of books in one of the offices over here, is there any of them that you kind of go back to every once in a while?

Yeah, there's stuff I'll go back through even from college. There's fluid dynamics books I'll go through, especially when I'm teaching these guys like the flow bench. I had them go through exercise in a flow bench. Like, here's, you know, here's an inlet. Try to make this better or try, here's an inlet with a sharp edge. Do a radius, do this and, you know, and there's all the stuff in textbooks, you know? And so I'll show them this stuff. Then you can real life test stuff. But there's stuff I'll go to. There's like fluid dynamics. There's like I said, there's one book, I think by Ricardo. It's an old engine book, but it's got so much good stuff. It's got data from, like I said, from, I don't know, was it 80 years ago, they're doing this testing with like, you know, crazy stuff they're doing and gathering data on it. It's all, it's a really good info. And there's, if you guys look, you guys spend the time researching, looking, reading, you know? There's a lot to be learned.

There's a lot of stuff that I look up thinking that, oh, that's a pretty new innovation in engine technology. Like I was trying to think of, I was thinking overhead cams the other day, and I was trying to figure out what was that forward one, who was doing it, and I found out it was like, it can go all the way back to like the 40s or something, there would be a car. The planes, remember? Yeah, well, I think it might have been planes.

I think the Germans had, it was a dual overhead cam, V engine, upside down in a plane, supercharged, like water-injected, I mean, it was...

I need to look that up immediately.

If you look at World War II airplane engines, the technology there was crazy, because they had these things, you know, hey, how do you make them fly at 35,000 feet, right? A piston-powered airplane engine where you're throwing a ton of boost through them, you know, from that era, that's crazy. It's crazy, there's a lot of interesting things.

It's gotta be aliens, bro.

It's definitely aliens. My dad just came from a Mustang show where they were talking about the independent rear suspension in the Mustang, which I think 99 Cobra is when they first had it, and I was thinking, man, that's cool, but the guy who developed it actually was his son, and they actually developed one for like the 64, 65 Mustang. They had one way back then, and they just like, nah, that's not gonna work, and they scrap it, or it goes in some kind of archive and comes out later, you know? So no, it's kind of a crazy thing when some of this stuff started.

Yeah, it's really cool.

What about the VR30 platform? What made you excited to work on that one, right? Because it's not an easy one to go into the eights with, because you guys just did an eight, nine recently, I believe, with two of them. I guess, what called you to that platform as a whole?

Searching for the next thing, right? It's how do we back then, you know, love working on with Mitsubishi's, right? We had the DSM, the VR4, the EVO 8, EVO 9, EVO 10, but that all came to an end, right? Which sucked. I mean, that was such a cool car. And back then, that was like the heyday where you can buy a car relatively affordable and have so much on with it and do all these cool things. And that was kind of like, when that ended, that really kind of was like, ah, okay, what's next, right? And, you know, GTR was obviously, that was kind of a big thing for us. Like, what's the next thing after GTR? And I'm like, oh, these things are interesting. It's a sedan or a coupe. It's a V6 twin turbo. It's turbo. Right there, it's like, okay, let's look at this. No one's doing anything with it. And, you know, it was kind of crazy. We're like, considering doing it. And all of a sudden, one day, this is our old shop, like sales guy is like, Nissan's on the phone, or Infiniti is on the phone for you. I want to talk to you. I'm like, Infiniti? I'm like, what? A dealership? I'm like, no, no, Infiniti. And so it was like the project manager, marketing guys, they call us and said, hey, you know, we see what you're doing with these cars. And like the level of engineering you're putting into these cars. And, you know, back then, the car was out for two years. And a lot of the magazines that tested the car, like, we wish this thing had a little more, you know, a little more, a little more sporty, be it with sound, with feel. It's a little too subdued. So then Infiniti's like, hey, do you want to work together? Do you want to do some stuff with this thing? Do you want to maybe help us with some product? I'm like, yeah, I sure do. But like, yeah, we went to it to you because we saw the level of engineering and the amount of detail you guys put into the products to make them like OEM, which so that was cool. That was kind of set that path for us. They gave us a dollar car or whatever they called it. It was like a media car, which actually is back, I think maybe back. Oh, that car on the left right there. Yeah, that's a Q60. They came out, visited us, gave us that car and said use it for some product development. We worked with them. We made some product for them. But it was interesting. It was again, V6 twin turbo. There was no market out there. People were not like, oh yeah, this is the thing that they modify, right? So we kind of created that market. And we've done that in the past where it's like, all right, there's not a market there, but there's potential in the car. And there's enough of a made out there where if we can provide people the path, provide them the package where, okay, we'll do an intake, we'll do a tune, we'll do whatever it is, a fuel system. Maybe we don't do like, use this person's exhaust. Here's a package that'll get you 500 horsepower reliably. No nonsense, no fuss. You can put it all together. It works, right? That was kind of where that recipe worked. Because when you provide people that easy button to get a quick return on their investment, they can enjoy the car, that's kind of, it propagates the hobby. It's the stuff that it's like piece, milling stuff together, or this doesn't work. And we've seen like in the V10s, a lot of people will buy that car, but then not want to spend the money to buy a proven turnkey package. And they'll buy this turbo kit and get that tuner, and this guy to build the engine, that guy plays the transmission. And it's like a puzzle piece, and no one, everyone's pointing fingers, and for the home run, so many horror stories, like yeah, the car has been down for a year, and that doesn't run right. And now it's like, and then they kill it, and they sell the car, and they're done, you know? And that's kind of sucks, it really sucks, but.

Well, you probably see that a lot, like I've seen quite a few builds come through Chicago Motor Cars over here, just next door, you know, sort of deal. It's like a lot of like turnkey builds, oh, 25 miles on it, sort of deal.

Yeah, I mean, some of those guys just go through cars. I mean, there's that too. There's a lot of guys just go through cars, build it, they enjoy it, they sell it, get another one. I mean, big guys that like gone through like, I did an R8, now I want to do a Lambo. I've done, oh, here's the first one, I had now I want to do a new R8. So I mean, there's a lot of those customers too.

I guess that makes sense.

Well, I suppose that's really smart on the manufacturer's side too, because you're going to build a passion for that platform and they're going to sell more cars that way.

Yeah, I'm really curious with some of the OEMs. I mean, like Infinity, obviously we work with Nissan, and I have a good relationship with them, but I'm curious if any other OEMs either, I mean, they probably hate it to some degree. I mean, I know, because it's a risk for them, right? Yeah, it is a risk. So I mean, I'm like, oh, they're probably like, we're cool with that. I mean, I bet you some of the engineers are really cool with it, but you know, as a corporate thing, they're probably...

Well, it's so funny, like every time we go to Detroit and we start talking about aftermarket, let's say we're talking with someone from... I don't think we can... I might use a Chevy example. We're talking about a Chevy engineer, like, oh, look at what they're doing over here with these. They're going to be like, huh? What? That shouldn't be possible, you know? And it's like, it's their own bubble. I'm not sure how often you go to Detroit, but it really is like their own bubble over there sometimes.

All the big three and all of the craziness that happens over there between all of the secrets and not secrets.

It's never-ending.

Yeah.

I do remember, I went to, what was it we were using? It was a Canbus stuff. We're learning some Canbus stuff. We took a course in Detroit and there was us, it was me and my two tuners back then and all OEM calibrators in this class, right? And then during our breaks, we're talking and we're telling them what we're doing. We're like, what? That's awesome. And like, how do you even do that? And these guys are like, oh, I tune just emissions on Cold Star. And I tuned the can. It was so separated and they're like, no one was doing all of it. How do you do all of that? So it was really cool to see. And they were just kind of amazed at what, you know, like, yeah, we're stupid. I spent so much time figuring this stuff out, not making money on it. But yeah, it was kind of, it is interesting.

Well, we've brought that up to OEM guys. Like, how does it make you feel like you spent the better part of two or three years of your life on this one single thing, just for people to rip it out, some of the deal?

Yeah. But they've got a goal in mind, right? They've warranties. The thing has to last, right? Whereas we know, I mean, if you double the horsepower, it's not gonna live for 80,000 miles of abuse, you know, where the OEM, I mean, see some of the abuse tests they do, it's like literally, you know, they put it in a cell and freeze the engine, start it and go full throttle, right? I mean, if you did that with some of this stuff, you know, so, you know, they have different agendas, right? And different goals to meet and emissions and all these other things they have to think about and cool and like, you know, they have to meet and, you know, by emissions, they're like, you fuel mileage, even economy, you have to meet all this stuff. So it's like a lot of, you know, it's a lot of other challenges.

Red tape.

Of all the platforms that you've worked on under years, what's one platform where you could double the horsepower and it's the most reliable?

I'd say probably the V10, the Audi R8, Huracan.

It is the set of the supercars, right?

It is, you can, I mean, we had our car making on a stock unopened engine. The trans is the weak point. But you can make double the horsepower, as long as you're gentle on the shifts and you program the TCU correctly and don't launch it crazy. You can live with double the horsepower. We've had an engine making almost, I think we've touched 1,700 wheel horsepower on a stock engine.

Oh wow.

I think it went, yeah, sevens on a stock engine.

Wow.

Yeah. So, yeah, 790s. It's, yeah, that thing is impressive. Very impressive, that engine, what it'll live with. And it's crazy high compression too, right?

So for these things to be going eights, right? I mean, how crazy are you guys getting with it at that point? Because you, I mean, how long have you been developing that platform now? It's been probably a few years, right?

Yeah, we've had a lot, like I said, our core products, like kind of the easy button for people. And then we saw people wanting to go further. So people, you know, other companies came out with bolt-on turbos, some turbo kits, and the people we saw, like, oh, we're interested in building engines, right? That's what we're calling, okay, let's look at that. Let's start our engine program for that, right? So that's kind of when it turned. Like, let's go in, let's take that risk. Let's spend the time up front and do all the research, and the debugging is how do we make these engines live, right? And, you know, that car, two cars next door, they both went 890s on a VR30, you know, making over a thousand wheel horsepower. And again, that was, you know, we can't charge a lot of money for those engines because it's not a platform that supports it. So it is a risk even building those engines because who's going to buy them? But people are buying them, people who see the value. Because again, there's not a lot of competition out there. And you see people trying to do it cheap, like, I'm going to put it together in my garage. And they're like, dude, no, you're not. I mean, you are, but it's not going to work out well. You know, there's so many things to know on a thing. It's not, you're not just slapping. And even some of the parts available out there, the aftermarket parts, you can't use. We have custom pistons made for that thing. I mean, we have custom parts made for it because it's the stuff that's out there isn't right or has to be reworked and debugged. And it's just, you know, someone's going to spend 30% less money, but they're not going to have a good time in the end buying an engine or building an engine somewhere else.

With the cars that you build here, what's the best bang for your buck? I mean, let's pretend I'm not trying to have a 2,000 horsepower GTR or, you know, is like 600 horsepower in one of those a good?

Yeah, it is. I mean, you can get 500 or 500 wheel horsepower on those pretty easily. You do, you know, all the bolt-ons, you know, intake, exhaust, intercooler, heat exchanger, flex fuel kit, fuel, it's an upgrade, and full bolt-on, it'll do over 500 wheel.

Oh, wow.

They're fast. They're fast. Stock trans, even those 890 cars, those have, they're not like, nothing's crazy done. I think Peer does the trans in those, like the converters change, but there's nothing, no gear sets, there's no crazy stuff in those, done to those things. I mean, our Z here went, how do I go, on a stock engine, we went nine, stock engines, stock trans, went low nines in it.

Okay.

Yeah. So, that's a lot of bang for the buck on those things. And you can buy a used one of those cars, now pretty cheap. It's got to find one that's not ragged out. But you have to put a ton of money on those things to make them fast. Yeah.

What does it cost? So, this one, eight nineties, right? All said and done, what's that whole program? What's it take to make that go eight nineties?

I don't know. To be honest, no.

I gotta get your CFO in here.

I'm not a sales guy, right? So, the engine, I don't know off the top of my head. I mean, that turbo kit might be $8,000. I don't know. I didn't know the engine. I don't even know what the engine is. I know what it was at one point, but we've changed some stuff. It's got a CNC head program on there. I don't know. I mean, it's considerably less than the GTR. I'll tell you that. But off the top of my head, I'll be making some numbers up.

That's fair enough.

Like I said, I know a lot, but I don't know everything.

We don't need anybody calling either and be like, yeah, you're like, get one bill for 20 grand.

Yeah, 20 grand and go, hey, it's... Well, also, that is something that's in constant development right now as well, right? So you're tweaking things all the time.

Yeah, I mean, the engine stuff is, like we don't make anyone a beta tester unless we have some agreement, like hey, like Jordan Martin. That's about the only guy, right? We want to test it first in-house on our vehicles. We want to break it first, find all the pain points, and not let the customers be the beta testers, because that can end really bad. It can ruin you, you know?

Did that come from experience as well, or did you just...?

That comes from observing other people, other businesses, and it takes a long time to recover. If you're the only solution, people will write it out. But if you're not the only solution, you're going to... You can do it yourself, yeah.

Is there a platform here that you think you've accomplished, or do you... Any one that you work on here, you still got further plans for? Like, are you after the billet block, you're like, okay, we could go here, or...?

I think the V10, once we do a billet block, I think that's about it. I mean, we have some plans for a different, like, intake manifold, something like a lot sexier than what we have now, and better performing. That's the... When I was telling you, doing the testing on those manifolds, the miniature version, we're measuring air distribution per cylinder, and we're made design changes and prototypes of stuff to help increase the air distribution throughout the engine on that one, and make it look nicer. But that's about it. I mean, the V10's really... There's not, like, there's a whole lot of meat left on the bone with that platform. And same with GTR, obviously that's, you know, long in the two and around, and there's not much else to do on that car. But like Toyota, like we're not going to... No one's going to build a Tacoma race truck for a thousand horsepower. Yeah. This platform, probably EcoBoost also, is going to build those bolt-on parts, the intercoolers, the intakes and the tubes, maybe bolt and turbo, exhaust components, maybe a fuel system, reflect fuel solution, and that's it. That's what's going to be 95% of the aftermarket. That's going to keep everyone happy, right? You always have the one guy, but I want to build a thousand horsepower Raptor, and if you go, okay, we'll spend all this time, you're going to build one, and then you might get one or two more guys.

You're going to stick with, you guys pretty much just want to stick with the performance, like adding horsepower and performance that way. I mean, your trucks here, you're not going to get into lift kits or shocks or anything like that, or is that something that could be?

It could be. I'm keeping that open. You know, the performance side is hard. It is. When you're making, there's a lot of work. Like you can see, there's a lot of data. There's a lot, you have to censor it up. You got to test it, measure. There's a lot, right? There's a lot. When you make a part, a bolt-on part, like you just make it and sell it, you know? So it definitely interests me because even though I enjoy challenges, I don't want to work hard at everything. I don't make everything hard, you know? So yeah, so I am, you know, it's open. I'm not saying we're making parts for the accessories, but it's a possibility. That's one of the avenues that we're looking at, you know, down the road of adding some stuff, like some cool stuff that's unique, that has the AMS spin on it, you know?

Well, sometimes the low-hanging fruit helps fund the hardship.

Yeah, exactly. Like you have to have some of that to support some of the racing.

Like a lot of the performance shops that are at least keeping the lights on, most of them also do service.

You can't survive building just race cars. You can't, you'll...

Well, that's why Ferrari's are making cars for stupid normal customers.

That's why the guys at Rada don't have their jet ski yet.

Yeah, are you doing much crash shopping before you settled on Motec? Or was that just kind of like the obvious choice?

For what? For like...

Whether it's data collection or just for all the race cars?

Yeah, we've used a lot of different stuff. We used AM, AIM for data decision. We've used Cyvex. I've played with Haltech. I've played with ECU Master. I've used a lot of different stuff. But in some cases, like the V10, they have a great plug-and-play solution. Motec has an awesome plug-and-play solution. So it depends on the situation. Like we use Cyvex for some GTR stuff. They're also a great solution. They have some great products. But for the platforms, I mean, Motec is just very capable. There's pros and cons to it, but it's very capable. It just works really well. I won't say it's easy to use. I mean, it's easy once you learn how to use it. Sure. Once you've used it for a long time. But at first, it's daunting, but it's very capable. I've tuned people's cars on, oh, God, I don't want to. No. I mean, I've tuned someone's drift car years ago on a different brand, ECU. And it's just simple stuff, like cold start compensation. It's like, OK, they have one part of right, but they don't have the other part. They're missing this complete. So it's like, yes, does it work? Will the car start? Yes, but it's not how it should be. It's not, to me, selling the customer solution is like, no matter what the temperature is, no matter what ethanol content's in their car, they should be able to push a button. It's cold, it fires up, idols nicely comes down, they can drive it away dead cold, and it drives like stock. And things like MoTeC and Cyvex let you do that. So, yeah.

That was when we talked to Sam the other day, our mutual friend, Sam Barrows, he was talking about. There's a team of engineers that work for years just to get cold start right on an OEM ECU. So, sometimes when you go to a stand alone, now you're back at step one for that.

Yeah. I mean, we can circle back, like us building cars or tuning cars here, like our tuners take a lot of pride in getting the car to be like an OEM car, right? And that's, like I said, making power on the dyno, honestly, is one of the easier things. It's the things like, how does the car behave coming off a cold start? How does it cold start? How does it behave coming to a stop sign and driving away? It's all the things that you don't really think about until you have to drive in traffic or use it as an everyday car. That really sets what we do apart from a lot of other companies or tuners. Not saying other people don't do it, but a lot don't. Like, oh, it's good enough. And we'll literally have customers like, oh, I'm happy with mine. And they drive one of our cars like, oh, s***, this is, it drives like a stock. Yeah, it should. Like, oh, mine doesn't. But to them, it's normal. Like, ah, it's tuned. Yeah, it kind of has a lumpy idle. No, that's not how it should be, you know? Or it's modified. It doesn't have to be. So that is, and stuff like, like I said, MoTec and SideBikes lets you do those things that you can drive it like stock.

Do you do any, like, I guess at what point do you have to go stand alone? Like, let's, again, let's use the V10 platform. When do you go stand alone? What power level or build level?

I mean, once you get much over like 1200 horsepower, we like to go stand alone. And there's some great, you know, tuning solutions like Accu-Tech. I mean, you know, they've got solutions for, you know, GTRs, the VR30s, Tacoma they're working on. They've got some great OEM solutions as far as integration, where you can make changes to the OEM ECU. Because OEM ECUs are good. They're not like it's like, well, it's not a good ECU. You just rip it out and replace it with a stand alone. It's, they're actually very good. If you can control them correctly, if who's ever doing the work like Ecutech or Cobb, they can, for example, inject custom code to bring flex fuel into it. If it wasn't designed for, or bring things like trash control or a different boost control into play. So OEM ECUs are not bad. They're actually really good. Like a lot of the European Bosch stuff is really, really good. It's does torque management well. That's all it's great. As long as you have access to control and modify it. So it all depends, but it depends on the vehicle. Like on V10s, it's much over 1200 horsepower. We like to go stand alone. You just have a lot more functionality. Like I said, the traction control, right? It sounds simple. Just do traction control, right? Well, it's not just that. It's how do you get a good ground reference speed when you have four wheel drive? How do you handle it when the GPS drops out and you're in a tunnel or under a bridge? How do you handle that properly? How do you, everything from slip ratio to how do you make it all so it's seamless? Where the customer doesn't even feel like, how does this thing? We have customers like, I don't even feel the traction control kicking in. Because you don't, it's so seamless. Whereas a lot of OEM cars, when traction control kicks in, it's very abrupt. It's like, you can kind of feel it pull power. And the V10s, even the NA cars, their traction control is very, when it's on in any form or fashion, it's very intrusive. This car is great. This car, ours is rear wheel drive. And I didn't know this, but the all drive doesn't have this. The rear wheel drive, you can set up traction control on there. It's zero to 10. You can vary it. And you can like, with zero, it's off. Like you can feel if it's in one, two, and three, it'll let it slip a little more. It's actually very good traction control. So again, OEM could do it, right? Absolutely. You know, but with like MoTec, you can dial in on however you want and you can give the customer control of it. You can give them, hey, this one, here's your traction control. Here's, you know, off, like for dyno mode. Here's the different levels of TC. And I've done a demo at Sheena R8 where the car is tuned for 1200 wheel horsepower. I'm in the rain with one hand flooring it. And it just goes straight and there's no drama. It just goes. And whatever power it can't put down, it does. And if you look at a log, you see the rear wheel speed is kind of like, just doing this right above and holding like a 2%. Well, whatever percent of slip target versus speed, it's just holding it. You can't even tell.

I think one of the other big things too, is I suppose as you start turning up the power, I'd like the extra nannies you can get, right? Because now you can, the second that does anything weird, that can just shut it down.

Yeah, yeah. That's a hundred percent right. I mean, Acutec has some integration of that. You can actually bring sensors in over a CAN bus and do some of that. But like with the MoTek or any other standalone, it can bring coolant pressure in, fuel pressure, oil pressure. You can do, I mean, there's so many things you can bring into play where you can have it go in varying degrees. Sometimes it's catastrophic, like let's say, let's say oil pressure, you shut the party down. It shuts the engine off, right? But you have other things where like, with temperature or coolant pressure, we're also like, hey, white cars has a rev limit at 3000 RPM, it's flashing the light three times. Oh, that means this, you know? Which is kind of cool because we have cars we build, we send out, and you know, something stupid happens, a fuel pump dies. And like, hey, my car is doing this, and the check engine light flashes four times. Like, oh, that's a fuel pressure thing. Let's look at the logs. Oh, your pump's dead. Or something happened here, a line must have popped off. Because again, we build cars here, but we also send out our kits to customers worldwide, right? Overseas here, and that helps us diagnose. And we'll do remote tuning on those cars with those packages.

Okay. So you have like a dealer network of people that you trusted. How does that look getting into that dealer network? They need to prove to you somehow that they're capable or?

So that is tough. We do vet people, because, I mean, if you have someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it could be a nightmare. Absolute nightmare for us and them and the customer, right? Because if they can't put it together, right? We've had people work with where we sell them a kit and like how to hook up a line to the manifold for boost, like what, what you call it? You have to walk them through everything, right? Which in that case, it turned out great because they're mechanically inclined. They just didn't understand how everything worked. But there's absolutely, that's something you have to vet. You have to talk to the shop. You have to make sure they know what they're doing. They know what they're getting into. We've definitely not, we said, hey, just ship us a car. We even have like a referral program. Like listen, you got the customer, here's X percentage for the build. So you don't have to deal with the headache. Because again, if you mess it up, it can be very, very expensive, right? When messing one of these V10s up, I mean, some of this stuff, it costs so much money. I mean, it's crazy. It's really bad.

You've had some cars shipped here from overseas to build and ship back over?

We've had, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

But again, that side of the business, the shop side, that's kind of like, you know, you can't triple the size of that, right? We're kind of, we're at, and we're selective with who we take in and how much work we take in. And work with good customers, you know, back in the day, you'd take whatever business you can get and you'd be, you know, 30 hours deep and on a build for someone, and there's b*******, complaining, and you're trying to make something fit because they brought you these parts, and you said it would fit, and it doesn't fit, and they're like, well, it'll take me 10 hours. I'm not paying for that. I said it would fit. No, man. You know?

How's track support go for you guys then? Because that, I've, we've got some people that we've talked to that are kind of cutting back on that a little bit, because that's a huge expense and an endeavor in itself.

100%. Let me take a sip of water. Because this could get interesting. So.

I just want to touch all the aspects of this that sucks.

Yeah. I mean, relive some nightmares here. So it gets interesting with track support. I think the way we used to do it, and a lot of people did it, is the customer was like, we spend all this money with you. Now we have this build, we're going to a race. We want your support. And as shops, we're like, well, we have to support them. It's gonna make us look bad if we don't support them or something goes bad. We want to make sure we get the best out of it. And the customer was like, well, this is free marketing for you, right? But to do proper track support, it costs so much money. So much money. And the one of the things I talked about is getting a grip on your finances. Because when you actually itemize, when you look at the flights, the hotel, all the money you're spending on food, I'm paying for the guys' breakfast, lunch and dinner, paying overtime, paying for transportation, the time away, time you've lost from here, it is scary how much it vents. I mean, we're talking like 50, $60,000 in costs.

You're probably going to need to ship your car soon or know somebody that will. And as someone who used to work in freight logistics, I understand the difficulties of finding reliable transport, especially when trying to make it to rallies, racetracks, or the warehouse to hide your Corvette, because you're going through a messy divorce, and when she says everything, she means everything. Anywho, Nick Scheer is the proud owner of SureThing Logistics. Having traveled much of the country with every type of vehicle you can imagine, he's got the experience and reliability that you want to ensure a safe journey for your pride and joy. If you want to find out what it takes to ship your vehicle, go to surethinglogistics.net, fill out the intake form and be sure to let him know I sent you. Let's get back to the show.

Right? I mean, how are you going to recoup that? Oh, we'll get another build and we could support that build for free too. We would just keep it. You can see where that goes, right? Now we have 10 cars we've got to support for free. We're going to really make money then. Yeah. So, we tried two things because we charged a certain... We had to start charging, right? We charged and it was just to recover something and some customers complained. Like, okay, well, for us, track support is like, I don't want to half-a** it, right? We bring out our tuners, we bring out sales guys to handle the customers and the questions. We bring out at least one tech for each car. So if a customer has a problem, he's like, my car is an issue, I paid from tech support. Oh, but he's working on his guy's car. We bring one guy for every car. We're bringing an extra guy to be at the end of the track with a golf cart, with safety equipment, fire extinguisher, he's helping. And he goes bad down there, he's ready for it. He helps pull the car in if we need to do. We bring a guy who's kind of cleaning up the pits, helping out, pack chutes, stuff like that. It's a big operation. And then packing, one thing I mentioned, packing for a trip. Make sure you bring all the spares, because you don't bring a spare and a customer doesn't have it, they're not happy. So to go through now and have all the spares, itemize all the tools, I mean, it's literally days of packing for a trip, and then days of unpacking for a trip, that you don't realize the cost of it too. So we started charging, some customers aren't happy, so we just scaled back, okay, well, we got a charge, we started basically not doing the one tech per car, and that did not work out well, because they got pissed, like when the customer, when they couldn't get service right away, and like, well, I paid for service, like, yeah, but we're losing money, like we're trying to make it work with one guy for two cars, and in the end, we're like, you know what, f*** it, this is what it costs for us to go, and we're literally, all we're trying to do is recoup our costs, not make money on it, just to cover our costs. We're still losing money, because we're not here working on cars and doing builds. Our guys aren't here on the phone selling stuff. Granted, it's marketing, if it goes well, you can get more part sales, but we're trying to just recoup our costs into it, and it is what it is, and we got flamed for it by some shops, like, well, they're charging, how dare they? And all of a sudden, two years later, I see they're charging also, or they're not even going to events, because they realize how much, we can't afford to go to events. So I think there's some shops, I think UGR doesn't charge for support, but if you look at their build, price for SARS, it's, they build it up front, which I get it. They build in a cost of a warranty, right? They warranty a lot of stuff. They also give track support, I don't think they charge for that, but their builds are considerably more than our builds, like a lot, lot, lot more.

Yeah, we've heard some of those price tags in yes.

Yeah, and again, that's their business model, and good for them, if they get those prices, more power to them, and that's the service to provide, but this is kind of how we operate, and now the customers know, and they expect that track service, and if the customer doesn't line, that's what it is. I don't want to... That's the worst when, again, you've got a customer who wants the world for nothing, and you accommodate them. It's usually, you're just stuck, and you're in a bad place. So, but again, now people charge for support, and in the past, when it was a passion, like some of the guys would go, and I've talked to the shops, like, yeah, well, my guys come because it's a privilege to come to a race and like that, and we were doing it at some point too, but at some point, it's a career for these guys. You gotta pay them. You gotta pay them over time. And then, and so like, because it is a job, and they'll get burnt out eventually too. So, you know, then people realize, no, you gotta pay people, and that's a cost in overtime. And we do nice things for the guys, like after some events, we'll like, we'll stay an extra day, and we'll kind of relax, we'll give them a day off. We all go do something fun, go fishing or something like that, depending where we are. But it's, it's, it's a, those, those events are, can be brutal, man.

They're not short days. Like sometimes you're working until two or three in the morning, you know.

Texas 2K is a week long event. We're there for like eight days.

That's intense.

And you're setting up for morning, tonight, and like, I mean, some of our customers are great. Like, hey, I'm buying dinner tonight. And I'm like, that's great, but we're going to be here working, you know? Or like, I'm making reservations. And they're like, I'll let you know when you can make a reservation. Because right now, things are unknown. We might be here working late. And a lot of times, it's, you know, it's sometimes you get out at 6 o'clock, if you're lucky, 7 o'clock. Sometimes you're there till 9, 10 o'clock.

Right.

Well, that and you're not working on concrete polished floors either now anymore. So now I've seen plenty of guys with their legs hanging off underneath the car. And they've got, you know, eight lifts back at the shop and their Snap-on toolbox.

Yeah, we've had to buy the portable scissor lifts. We bought portable, and those aren't cheap. Buy those, buy lighting equipment, pay for the, when you're there, you got to pay for the tent. You know, that's not, and lighting to be put up, it's, yeah, it's, well, it's a good time.

Do you have a customer stacker that you bring with you everywhere?

No, we used to have, we used to have an RV. We still have a stacker. We let our customer use our stacker. Dude, every time the RV moved, it was just, here's $5,000, light it on fire. Every time it moved. Cause you have an RV, it's towing a stacker with two cars in it, or a car and equipment. Everything is overloaded. It gets beat to s***. It seems like every time a tire would pop. Because, I don't know why, they always break down. And it's like $5,000 to $10,000 just every time they move. And when you put that on the customer every time, we got rid of that thing. We're like, we're not doing it. I think every RV or total home is a giant pile of s***. Unless you're spending a million dollars on it. Even then, they're all piles of s***. Unless you're buying a Prevost or something that's like a bus chassis, everything else is literally a cardboard box on wheels. It is. It's like we've had some of the stuff we've seen. Like, why is the seatbelt pulling? Oh, it's screwed into like fiberboard.

It's like, what is the amount of money people will spend to be abused like that is kind of astonishing.

Yeah. The wiring on RVs. It's like, I don't know, a crackhead electrician was doing it. It's like, what the hell? Yeah. So we're done with that. Right now, we get rigs and put it in transport, and we pay for a car spot or two to put all our equipment in there. That's just, it's... Sure.

Well, we just lost our RV sponsor. Thanks.

Yeah.

I'm about to edit that out.

What sponsor do you have? That's a good one.

It's Camping World, I promise.

It's not Camping World, oh my God. I wouldn't even let you take them as a sponsor.

Listen.

Oh, they're horrible.

I have ethics, but there is a certain size check. Camping World, you definitely cut me. So I have a few zeros. All right. Well, obviously, we want to start wrapping down, wrapping up a little bit. Man, my choice of words is not here today.

You're getting very close though.

Yeah, you're close.

Wrapping down. So what are some things that you're kind of jumping into in today? Are you doing that much calibration yourself nowadays or not that much? You leave that off to your team.

I leave it to the tuners. I mean, like I said, they've been doing it for, I've been not doing it for that long and they've been doing it every day and learning that they're ahead of me. Some of the stuff like for the R&D development, I can jump in and do, but even like the Raptor, that was new to me completely. I fiddled my way through it for a couple of days, got somewhere. They've got a Ranger, which they've run 12s in. They know this in and out. They jump in and get it sorted out right away. So, I know my limits. So, not really doing much calibration.

What do you do then, like tomorrow's Friday, we're not gonna count Friday, but let's say next week. What's the game plan for next week? Does every day look the same for you or are you constantly just doing something different?

It's pretty standard, but running a business is a lot of things you, from financial decisions to planning to dealing with certain issues to keeping a pulse on the whole business. And thankfully, I've got great managers in place. I've got a manager for the shop. I've got a manager for the kitting and assembly team. I've got one for sales, marketing. So, a very tight-knit group. We meet every week. We discuss things. We kind of get ahead of things. So, I mean, as far as that, I'd say, probably 20, 25% of the time, it's kind of just business development, or just running a business and dealing with either issues, opportunities, you know? Then the rest of my time is really in R&D, keeping a pulse on all these projects, making sure things are moving forward.

You seem very involved with every project here. You can rattle off almost everything, which is honestly kind of impressive.

It's a lot to wrap your head around, but it's keeping tabs. Hey, again, with systems in place now, I don't have to keep tab on every single one of those 120 steps in every project, but you're still kind of looking at the big picture of everything. Are there any pain points I can help solve? Are there anything where we're stuck at? What can I do to teach some of these guys something? Free time, I'm mentoring at a local high school, it's actually right by my house where my kids are going to go to high school. They've got a, it's called the incubator program where these kids, it's elective, they take this class and they start a business in this class, it's a year long. And so it's, I'm in this program where me and three other people are basically, you know, teaming up with kids and kind of their mentor in this business, which is kind of, it gets kind of cool. You know, for me, it's like, if I could help someone avoid making mistakes or learn about business that I've had to learn the hard way, to me, that's great, that's just make like someone else's life easier, help them out, it's all good.

My daughter went through one like that, I think her freshman year of high school and hers was a like tuning and performance stuff. And I'm pretty sure her teacher was like, that's a stupid idea. It's a stupid idea, yeah, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it's once a week, every Thursday morning, I go there for an hour. And, but some of these kids are really impressive. I mean, they had some guest speakers that come through where they've went through the program and one guy actually had started, kicked off his business. And man, it's pretty impressive. You know, I've, man, have you seen the movie Idiocracy?

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Okay. It's a comedy slash documentary. Yep. But, you know, man, it's kind of scares me where the world's going with people and intelligence and, and, you know, even, even hiring people or just dealing with, with people in general. It's like, it's sometimes like, what is happening?

I just want to say that you're putting a thousand horsepower capable infinities in people's hands.

So yes, yes. Yeah. I mean, there's some good customers and bad customers and you know, like I said, in every platform, you know, and, but my God, it's, it's, I feel like, again, I'm old and grumpy, but it's not the same. It seems like it was 20, 20 years ago, but it did like the, we got an intern here. He's a sophomore, we know he's a junior in college, but when he came through and he said, I want to become an, you know, I want to come work with you guys. And what I saw in him, like the drive, I was like, oh man, okay, this is, there's still people out there like this. And in, in this high school program, there's still people out there who are sharp and want it and get it. And then like, so I'm like, okay, so I got some renewed, you know, faith in youth, you know.

Every once in a while, you come across something and you're like, oh, this is, it restores your faith in humanity every once in a while. Yeah, every once in a while. I want to ask this before I forget about it. So remind me again, did, did Underground recently take the V10 quarter mile record or am I making it up? Because I think that, I think it was, I think it was their silver R8, I think it just beat Omega, right?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's like six, yeah, they're very close, but yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you see yourself kind of trying to take that back again? How, how do you, do you find yourself competitive with a lot of other shops when it comes to track?

Oh yeah. I mean, absolutely. But then at the same time, you can't get the red mist, you know, like what we did with the six second, we never got our money back. The amount of money we spent chasing that six second pass. It's not like all of a sudden Monday, like we sold 30 more intercoolers Monday. No, it was, I think all, I think all of us who did it like, what the hell were we doing? You know? So you just got to be careful, you know, how far you get into it.

Are you referring to the GTR or the V10 platform when you got the six?

I'm sorry, the V10 was much easier. But yeah, I mean, we're competitive. We want to, like, you know, we have to look at what's the resource outlay and time, people and energy and money to go after and compete record for record. And it's got to make sense, right? Because, you know, if it doesn't align, you got to say no. You got to know when to say no. Sure.

Well, again, I'm pretty sure those cars were smoking pretty good by the time.

No, no, you're thinking about a different one. No, was I? Smoking or not, it's still one.

Yeah, yeah, I guess.

I know what you're referring to.

Yeah, but at what cost sometimes, right? Are you going to hail Mary passes like we talked about earlier?

I think the six second pass on the GTR, I think it was smoking like I dropped a cylinder. That was a whole that we actually rebuilt the engine or popped the engine out in the pits that weekend. Oh, yeah, it was a whole thing. It dropped like a cylinder, coal went out, melted a piston, but yeah, we got a six second pass.

Well, whatever happens after the slip prints, nobody cares about. What's that, six fingers?

Yeah, and to that, we ran at six, and then people have gone faster since then, but no one remembers. Like, they remember kind of the first six second pass, and people even like, a year ago, like, you guys stole the record for that. Like, no, people have gone like 650s, like we've long, like way, like, you know, but not even a year ago, but a couple of years ago, like, no, people are going way faster now, so we just, you know, but they kind of remember that.

You think you'll ever have a psycho customer that wants to make a Dragon Drive car?

A Dragon Drift?

Dragon Drive car.

Oh, Dragon Drive?

Although, I don't know, sorry.

Drift should be easy in one of his cars, though, right?

Because they drive that stuff. I mean, that is like Jordan's Performante, 740s and a quarter mile, and they usually drive it like a stock car. You know, they drove it to the downtown, and then it's already builds Dragon Drive.

It is.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about some extreme where it's like a, you know, six second, I mean, we don't.

Yeah.

We're not in that.

I would say that's such a, outside of.

Yeah. Yeah. Like I said.

They're dragging daily cars.

Yeah.

Well, perfect on that note. Did you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah. This will be interesting. So 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 can build whatever you want. Money is no object. What are you doing?

A track car? Oh man.

Any kind of track?

Probably a GT3RS for road racing.

First time we've heard that one.

I love road racing, man. I mean, I'd still be doing it if it made business sense. It doesn't. People like horsepower and they can equate quarter mile times. But I love road racing, and then I could be a GT3RS would be awesome. Daily Driver. I think an like the newest gen R8 with like 1600 horsepower. OK, I think that'd be pretty awesome.

Daily Driver was the last year for that 23, I think 24.

I think so, 23, maybe 24, I don't know. But that'd be awesome. And a show car, I'm not a show car guy. Probably like a super, super clean OEM plus R34 GTR.

OK.

Yeah.

Would you do like the Bayside blue or like midnight purple?

Purple.

OK.

One of the guys here, Marcus, has an R33 purple GTR. It's awesome.

It seems like you're in one camp or the other. It's like the blue or the purple. Nobody cares about the others. Well, perfect. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on before we closed notes?

I've talked a lot, man. So I don't know.

I'll hit record any second now.

That was practice, right? That was the real deal.

I got my whole list. Well, perfect. On that note, where can everybody find you?

amsperformance.com. I mean, you know, on our website, we've got, you know, Facebook groups. We're all we're out there.

Perfect. Well, awesome, Martin. Thank you very much for making this happen. This has been awesome.

Yeah.

A long time in the making. Dan, thanks for existing. And we'll see you all next time.

Thanks guys for coming out. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, no problem.

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