176. DSX Tuning on Global B, LS/LT Tuning, and Product Development and Manufacturing

Like the C7ZR1, people were putting air intakes on and trying to put pulleys on it, and they would literally space the map or the mass air sensor out of the intake tube so that it was in a slower portion of the airflow to read less air to lean the car out. That.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, here for round three today, Dan. Yep. Here at PRI, continuing our special. And today we have Dave Steck and then we have Matt Koenig, right?

Koenig.

I wanted to say, yeah, we were talking about how is it pronounced before the episode and I'm doing it again, aren't I? Yeah. But anyways, behind DSX Tuning. So go ahead, just tell us a little bit about what it is you guys do and we'll just kind of go from there. Sure.

I started off right out of college working for Chrysler and bought a Corvette and wanted to f*** with it because that's just what you do. Sure. So I eventually just kind of started digging in more and more, gotten into HP tuners, started learning how to tune it, modify it, all that s***, and eventually realized I'm kind of good at this. I'm going to try to make some money. So I started profiting off of it. DSX Tuning kind of was an unofficial thing for a long time. I ended up working for a power plant company. I moved to Texas to work for a wheel company and a performance shop. And then I said, you know what, I'm just going to do this on my own. I spent a year in Austin doing my own thing out of my garage, and I ended up moving back to St. Louis, Missouri. Brought Matt on to work with me and help me out. We spent another year, you know, working out of my garage, just shipping a s******* of stuff and then ended up getting a building and then rapidly filled that up. And it's just been this slow accumulation of resources and equipment and people and trying to expand what we do. So, you know, what do we do? It's primarily GM performance crap. Flex fuel stuff was kind of the cornerstone of everything. And then that graduated into fuel system solutions. And, you know, if you're going to consume a lot of fuel, you need a lot of airflow. So we started making accessories to increase that. So, you know, supercharger pulleys. Well, now it's like, oh, my f****** belt slips. All right, well, now we're going to fix that. And it's this constant evolution of identify a problem, create a solution, and then replicate it well and support everybody along the way. So that's effectively what we do. We're just constantly looking for the problem that somebody has that maybe they don't even know they have. And then how do we fix that? But not how do we fix it? How do we fix it? Right. Sure. There's no shortage of people that are going to half a** everything to make a quick buck. And that's just not what we're about.

Sure.

And then so you come into this picture then. So you kind of mentioned that he kind of, you're the more customer facing side of things or?

Yeah. I basically, I'm operations. So basically day to day, everything is what I'm doing. I'm trying to give him time to develop basically. So when it comes to product development and anything like that, that's kind of all Dave's side. I'm more logistics, purchasing, stuff like that. So I just kind of keep the background running so he can do whatever he wants to do. It makes it easy on him anyway.

I think it's enabled us to do a lot cooler things in a very rapid amount of time. Sure.

When was that time period? When did you come on officially?

2018. 2018? So yeah, we'll be what, not eight years, nine years?

Happy anniversary.

I mean, at first, when I was still in Texas, I was having him fly down there and help me on long weekends. And we'd bust a** in the garage building flex fuel kits and fuel pump kits all god damn day, and then have dinner and then play video games in my house and wake up and do it the next day. And then he'd fly home. Wild.

I worked in automotive service departments before for like car dealerships and independence and stuff like that. And one day he's like, Oh, I'm going out of my own. And a couple of weeks later, he shares the Shopify app with me. He's like, check this out just so you can see what's going on. And you'd see a day and he'd sell $600 worth of s***. And then you'd see one day and he sells three or four grand worth of stuff. I'm like, Oh man, you're kind of killing it. And I remember looking and it was like a month where he did like 50 grand or something. I'm like, dude, that's really awesome. And I just kind of perpetually kept watching it. And he's updating me with what's going on. And I think Mike, our CNC guy now was helping him down in Texas. And he's like, man, I need some more help. So he started flying me down there. I mean, we've known each other for a long time. We met in a car with car stuff. Sure, breaking dumb s***. Yeah, I mean, we're probably 16 or 17 years old. And God, we did a lot of degenerate stuff. Yeah. He's like, I need help. It's funny now to me. It's funny now because he's like, hey, I need help switching my spark plugs on my clips. I'm like, yeah, I'll help you do that.

They got roached in like two weeks.

Yeah. So I was like, yeah, I can help you do that. So to go from helping him do that to him, like developing his own port injection controller is just kind of a funny timeline to watch. But yeah, I mean, basically, we've been best friends since we're, I guess, like 17 or 18 years old.

I guess over half our lives at this point.

I think it was an obvious choice, like when you have to pick someone who's going to represent you well and who you can trust, you know, like I think it just kind of made sense then. So it's been a really, it's been a fun ride to see where we started versus now, you know.

Well, because every year it's just like, you look back one year and you're like, holy s***, like this happened in that time and we had no idea.

Yeah. It's basically like watching technology over iLifetime where you're like, I can't believe we went from pagers to computers in your hand. So like what we started with to the polished product that we have now, and each product gets more polished. We're now, we're making the stuff that we were buying, like when we were younger, you know, now you're like what, like that's the level. If not better than, you know.

Well, I first got into cars when I was in high school. And I mean, before that, I didn't play sports. I played video games, and that was it. I mean, we had this effectively a recess in high school. It was called activity period. And one day I went in the library. So there's like nothing to do. I happened to pick up a motor trend, and there was an article about a Hennessey Venom 800 Viper. I was like, f***, that's really cool. Well, it's funny now because Hennessey buys s*** from us. That was that cannon moment when I was like, man, cars are kind of neat. And it's funny to watch it come full circle, what, 25 years later now? I'm like, holy s***, like Hennessey's placing orders for fuel systems from us. It's a neat turnaround to watch how it happened. I mean, it's still kind of surreal. I definitely have imposter syndrome. It's like, I'm just some f****** idiot in Missouri. Like, do I really know what I'm doing?

That's what we think about all you guys in Missouri. Don't worry about it.

Yeah, I can see that.

We're in the Missouri part too.

We're not in the Missouri part.

So how much? So you do remote tuning and stuff too then as well?

No, I don't tune people. I started tuning people's s***. No, tuning sucks. Tuning people's car sucks. The industry sucks. The customers typically suck because they don't want to f****** pay you. It's always, well, so-and-so said they'll do it for 300 bucks. Yeah, they're probably going to blow your s*** up or it's not going to idle right.

I think most people don't understand the true cost of doing it correctly. And then you wind up with this divide where I can't offer you what you want. I can offer you what I have to offer. And most of the time, there's a big enough divide there where it just doesn't make sense to do business. And there are people that do what the people want. They'll cater to their needs, whereas we're just catering to make it correct. And it's just a different segment altogether.

Well, I think the customers get scared into a corner where it's like, my car doesn't really run right, but I'm not going to tell people that because I don't want my tuner to not try to fix it anymore. You know, and eventually it comes to a head and they go find somebody else to tune it and they'll lambast the guy that they were praising forever. It's a weird segment to be in. I mean, you have to, you take a step back, you think about GM, you know, getting a Camaro to start an idle. They've got an army of people with near infinite resources and thousands of man hours invested in making that thing run the way that it does. And now you're going to throw a cam in and a supercharger and all this other b******* and, you know, half of its mystery parts. And you're going to give it to some dude and be like, all right, you got two hours, make my car run perfect.

Hey, you got two hours and 600 bucks. Yeah, go.

Yeah, and you know, they want a thousand horsepower car without typical thousand horsepower problems. And that's why you see a car that makes a thousand horsepower, you know, like a new ZR1, like it's an expensive f****** car. It's because it takes a lot of money to do it right.

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People don't understand that. And they think that like, oh, you can just go get HP tuners and do it. Oh, I'm going to learn it myself. And it's like, all right, I get it. And it kind of goes back to that Dunning-Kruger curve. And everybody is at the peak amount stupid. And that's where they stop. That's where they live, because you get such this false sense of accomplishment and success and knowledge. And then you have all these people that are like, well, I have HP tuners. I can tune my car. They have no idea that like what you see in the software is maybe 5% of what really lives under the skin. So like when I decided to really stop tuning people's cars and focus more on manufacturing, like never mind the fact that manufacturing is a far more profitable business model with — don't tell everyone.

Yeah, well, keep the secrets out.

Yeah, most people aren't going to get up there and do that either, though.

With much less stress of like painful interactions. You know, I started to get access in to like, all right, you know, here's an A2L file that was floating around on the Internet. And suddenly you were like, wow, there's a lot of s*** you can edit that I had no idea. And you suddenly start to realize how things really work. And you're like, s***, man, like, I don't want to do this because now I know this is here. And that's going to take a lot of time to set this up right. I'm not going to get paid for that time. I'm not going to do this. And that was kind of when I decided, you know what, we're just going to manufacture. So I still tune my own stuff. Sure. Because we have to do that in tandem with all the development work. So, you know, if we're making a fuel system or we're making, you know, a port controller, God, I've got this 2019 Camaro and this poor car owes me nothing. It has racked up about 3,000 miles without actually moving anywhere because it lives on my main line. I mean, we've done probably 900 wide open throttle pulls on this thing. I mean, we've let it shift through the gears on the dyno and s***. Like, I've tried to blow this thing up in the name of developing a product. So that's an example where like I will tune this car. And even then, I'm like, this is a bolt on car that we're just trying to validate that things work. And I'm still defining a s*** load of custom parameters and stuff just to make sure it's right. Like, nobody goes through that effort. Nobody's gonna do that. So we do it because we want our products to have standing and proper data to go with it.

Do you offer some of that information to people that are buying your product in order to like give that to their tuner? Or is that information accessible?

I think a good example of this is the the Intang Fuel System that we make for the Camaro and CTS-V, like the LT generation one. HP tuners had some basic stuff in the editor for it, but there were other things that were missing. So while I was going through setting this thing up, you know, I had to set up all the feed forward stuff, all the pressure limits, this, that and the other, and get it all to work. And when I was done, I sent a list of things to HP tuners. And I said, hey, can you guys add this? And then roll it out to everything else. And they did that. And then I went through their software, made a template. And now anybody, when they buy this fuel system, they can go download the template. They just hit go and it okay, matches everything that they need. So we try to do that when appropriate. It's like we've got a fuel system for C7s that's got an auxiliary pump. Same thing. You know, we provide a template, goes through, sets it the way that it needs to. So you don't have to do anything. Like it's been done. We give you the data, you know, it's like an injector dynamics. I love that company, and that's the only injector I'll use because Paul and Tony are awesome. Super smart, like, but they give you what you need to make it work. And at the end of the day, that's what people want. They just want their s*** to work.

Yeah.

Like, if you're not providing that, I think it's kind of a disservice. I mean, like.

Here you go, have fun. Good luck guessing.

Well, I mean, think about if you bought a camshaft from somebody and they gave you a VE table for it. F***, that saves you a lot of time. You might have to tweak it a little bit, but by and large, your VE table will be roughly the same for every engine that thing goes into. It's kind of the same thing. Like, you give people such a better product if you give them the data to go along with it.

Yeah. How many products do you guys offer right now?

A lot.

A lot.

Your eyebrows almost flew off your head on that one.

Yeah, I mean, there's some like core lines, like there's flex fuel kits, and then the low-side fuel systems to support those. We have an offering of factory GM parts, like a common replacement part sensors, things like that. Sure.

We dug into the V10 world a little bit.

I saw that a little bit, yeah.

Yeah. That's really, that's an awesome project.

I bought a Perfumante, and I was like, f*** it, I'm gonna twin-turbo this thing, and sent it to T1, because I like Tony. And Tony was like, well, you need to build an intake. I start looking at all of them, like these are all pieces of s***. We're gonna f****** make our own. So we had a stock intake scanned. I went through, designed the whole thing in SolidWorks. Mike went through a program, because we have five access machines, so Mike programmed the intake. We cut it, we do the whole damn thing in-house, like start to finish. It starts off as blocks of metal, and we even have our own powder coating, too. We send a finished product out the door, we try to send it through as few hands as possible. Anodizing is the only thing we don't do ourselves. That's a miserable place to be. But like the intake, it was a project born out of spite.

Yeah, there's a lot of those.

Yeah. That's how a lot of good companies get started, to be honest with you.

Yeah, but it turned out to be super cool. It looks really awesome, it actually makes more power than the other stuff that's out there, and then we started making these other little pieces. You know, we make like a setup to delete the direct injection, and now that's what everybody uses on these engines. We make, you know, a piece that deletes the oil heat exchanger, because it's a common failure point. Everybody's buying that now, and it's... It's cool to see it happen, but it's a very small subset, but that was literally just the result of, f*** it, we're just going to do this.

Right.

And see what happens.

What's your number one seller?

Low-side fuel systems, probably.

I think the Gen 5 GM stuff, so Camaro 6s and C7 Corvettes.

I was going to say C7 Corvettes, probably the number one, in terms of dollar amount.

That, and then we have the Billet Supercharger covers that we customized.

We sold the s*** out of those things.

I mean, those, yeah, that's a really common product. But yeah, low-side fuel system stuff, I think, is the biggest dollar spender, because you got to have it. And what's messed up is, it's kind of like an afterthought for most people. They're on the dyno, so they're overnighting it, because they're like, I'm out of fuel. Surprise. But really, I mean, it's just a big complimentary catalog. I mean, I think as we move into the next five, ten years or whatever, the port injection stuff, it's going to take over, because it's not just a port controller, it's like a whole ecosystem of stuff that we're supporting.

Yeah, so this is just to feed the high pressure pump, right? That's when you say low?

Yeah, the low side will just feed the high side, and then now we also supplement the high side with port injection with the plug and play controller that way that we designed, that Dave designed and patented.

That's an important part of it.

Really, I mean, that's a killer piece. That'll, I guess, take us to retirement.

I think I bring up the patent because the war along the whole time has been just people knocking s*** off. I mean, some people are just absolutely scumbags about it, and they don't care how they look. And sadly, that exists a lot in this industry. Yes, they do come and go, but some of them perpetuate.

Yeah.

Yeah, but they cash out on the way out. So like, you know.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. We were talking about this the other day. It's like people don't realize, when you're spending money with a company that keeps developing, like you're just furthering the development. So the next car you buy in five years, I guess what you have flex, you have access to flex fuel for it. You have a poor controller for it. Because in the beginning, when you started with your earlier gen car, you bought your product from us, and we just kept going and developing. When you support people that don't develop anything and just copy stuff, it just becomes a, just this perpetual motion downward where, well, now there's no fuel to feed the next generation of fuel or controller or anything like that. And I think people kind of start to realize that, but a lot of people are just looking to spend as little as possible, and that's unfortunate, but it is what it is.

And you'll always have those people that don't want to pay for something that works, something that's new. They're looking for that guy that portrays himself as Robin Hood.

Yeah.

We don't want to deal with those people anyway.

The patent thing is crazy, though. Last year, we had somebody on the show. They were a turbo company, and literally a competitor of theirs ripped off their product, even though there's a patent. They literally had a booth two doors down or whatever. It's like, yeah, we're in a lawsuit with those guys.

Well, and that's why some stuff ends up taking a longer amount of time to complete, because now you're having to divert resources into protecting your own s***. Like the patent that I got for the port controller, it has to do with like the math behind how it handles everything. I mean, I think the final bill for all that was close to $50,000. OK, just to make sure somebody can't do the same f****** thing. And then when you're done with that, somebody inevitably finds a loophole and you're like, f***, I didn't, you know, sure, I didn't think about that. And it's like it's miserable. It's miserable to be in that space. And that's why, like with Flexfuel on the Global B cars, you know, we only have authorized dealers to do it. We make them all buy in so that they have skin in the game. They have to sign an NDA. We're really protective about what they can show, what, like who can see it. Because that wasn't a quick, easy thing. You know, I had to buy a I had to buy a car. I had to go through all this time because I figured out how to do it on the C7 ZR1. To date, I'm still the only one that does it on that car. But, you know, I had to buy a car. I had to poke it with a stick and pour through all of this crap and all this reference material and just experiment. I mean, I probably had about 400 man hours invested into making that work. And then it finally works, but it didn't really work. So then I was like, all right, we got to go back and figure out what doesn't work now. And then I had to go with HP tuners. And I paid them to help me with a custom patch that fixes some of GM's logic. And then suddenly, it was all fine, and it worked. I was like, all right, cool. We haven't recovered that, the time. I think we've sold 52 flex setups for a ZR1. You look back at what that car cost and the time invested.

Well, how many of those cars did it even make?

2700.

Not enough.

Yeah.

But, I mean, there's a silver lining that fed into the Global B stuff. So when HP Tuners announced that they had unlocked C8, I went out and bought one that day. And two days later, I had Flex working on that. Yeah, that was very fast. Like I went and got one. We ripped the ECU out next day to HP Tuners. They got it back to us, put it in the car. The same day that ECU unlocked went in the car, I had Flex working.

Yeah, we were making a video that afternoon.

Yeah.

So laid the groundwork, then? Yes.

Like the Global B stuff, we've sold a s******* of those, but we still get people like, why won't you let this out to the public? Why won't you? It's like because somebody out there is waiting to get that little nugget, because once somebody else has done all the work...

Suddenly it's very easy.

Suddenly somebody else is like, well, you're not doing anything. It's like, do you have no idea what went into finding this little breadcrumb to trace and do this? You know, so some people think we're a******* for it. It's like... It took work. Like, we have to be compensated for that. That's how this works. But as a result, we take all of that and we put it into new stuff. You know, that's why we've got, I think, eight cars at the shop now that are all...

I was just going to ask how many R&D cars, and how long do you hold on to one before you're like, okay, we don't need this one anymore?

We've only gotten rid of two. Well, what's f***** up is we got rid of our V3 and then we bought it. We just bought the same car again. But we did get rid of our C8 because Dave hates C8s.

Yeah, the C8's a piece of s***.

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That's a terrible car. I will take a C7 any day.

Okay.

I have a ZR1X on order because that's just another animal, but like a Stingray is a terrible car.

What do you hate about it?

The car feels very tight inside and visibility is terrible. Sure.

I loved it. I liked every part of that car.

I mean, we'll come back to the redeeming factors in a second.

The car, I mean, it's a push rod V8. It sounds like a f****** dump truck, but it's in a car that looks like it should sound cool. And it doesn't. I mean, we had an R8 that we put a T1 turbo kit on and we tuned that and we did some stuff on it. And I made a thousand wheel horsepower. That's the coolest sounding car I've ever heard in my life. Sure. It had Zona turbos on it. That car sounded like something out of the Jetsons. It was awesome. I was like, this matches. This is a cool looking car that sounds like it looks. C8 does not. That car sucks. So but now we've got 23 Silverado, 23 Escalade V, 23 Blackwing, like CT5V Blackwing that I just bricked. So that's in the process of being recovered. 2019 Camaro, the 2019 V3.

19 ZO6, the 19 ZR1.

17 ZO6, 19 ZR1, and then I've got my Perfomante, which that's more just like a dust, well, they're all dust collectors and they're all blue.

Okay. Oh, really? What's it called?

I don't buy anything that's not blue, except the Escalade, because they don't make it in blue. Oh, sure.

Do you have any interest in dabbling with the C8 ZO6 at all? Or not really? It seems like everybody we talk to is like, I don't care for it.

I mean, if I'm not going to be the guy that unlocks it, I don't know why anybody somewhere along the line thought I unlocked the ZR1. I had nothing to do with it. Right. Yeah, I mean, I would love to, but it comes down to like resources and what we can recover from the time that goes into it. I think that's the battle with any product is, do we think we can make it worth the time to do this right?

Is there any car that you personally wanted to develop, but it just didn't make business sense to do? To do anything for? Not really.

I've been a GM idiot for... Yeah.

I'm glad somebody said it.

I had a... I mean, I know what they are. $160,000 Escalade and you shut the door and it rattles. You know what you're buying. You're buying something that just has a really powerful engine.

A troubled past.

You can make a lot of power in, but it's still a piece of s***. Like, no, I... You know, the first car I had was DSM, and that thing went through hell and it, you know, crank walk.

So you're used to punishment anyway, then? Yeah.

I mean, that thing, we beat the f****** hell out of that car. I remember the... It wheel hopped so bad one night that the crank pulley fell apart because it had that like rubber band in it. We went to a buddy's house because he had like a Gen 1 Talon.

He had a blown up Gen 1 Talon.

The engine was locked up and we showed up with like f****** bolt cutters and cut the timing belt or the serpentine belt.

Yeah, cut the serpentine belt, and zipped off the crank pull.

This is back when electric impacts weren't like really a thing, but somebody had one and we borrowed it. We buzzed the crank pulley off of it. And went and swapped it out on my car.

We were running a couple of hours.

We were 18, I think.

Dumb.

Bad.

Did your buddy with the blown up car know you were doing this?

Oh, we told him.

We told him after we had already acquired the car.

We didn't warn him we were doing it.

It was blown up anyway.

As we're destroying this thing on the street of South St. Louis. No, I mean, after that, really the next thing I got, I got a 06Z06, put a cam in it. Then I ended up putting a whole other engine in it, twin-turboed it, auto-swapped it, put a 4L80 in. Did that whole auto-swap with all GM controllers. So it behaved like it came that way from the factory. And like, that was a cool learning process. And then from there, it's just always been GM stuff.

Sure.

You know, the only time I deviated was, you know, the R8 that we bought, and then the Perfomante.

Sure. What about, again, when you were at Chrysler then, how long were you there for?

Two years. Two years. I worked at the plant, like the truck plant, as an engineer.

Okay.

And, I mean, that was miserable, but sure, good exposure.

That was also a great time to be in that industry too, right? Because, what would you say you got? You were at Chrysler, what, 2007-ish?

2006 to 08.

Yeah. What a great time, right?

Yeah. So, I was like the powertrain engineer at the plant for the trucks. Sure. I mean, it was cool. I got to take trucks home and stuff, and beat them up, and...

So, you're kind of in that rare bag of guests that we've had, where it's, you have kind of that OEM experience, but you're also in the aftermarket. Are you able to kind of speak to the difference between the two, how things are approached, or not really?

I mean, I wasn't in the OEM for very long, but I mean, the stark difference is red tape, do whatever I want. Yeah.

Sure.

You know, anything I wanted to do, like if I wanted to change a bolt out at Chrysler, like that was a big deal. They had tasked everybody with saving seven cents per vehicle built. That doesn't sound like much, but it is hard to do that. Like, if you wanted to swap a bolt out somewhere, because there was a monetary value to standardizing a bolt. So like, if two applications both used something that was a little bit different, and you could put a longer bolt in this application over here and eliminate a part number, like that was worth X. So you're going through trying to do that. And then even that, that seems so mundane and so boring and so simple to just do it, but you couldn't just do it. So I mean, what we do, if we want to do something, we just f****** do it. I don't have to answer to anybody, and we just try it. And if it fails, so what? You know, I would say that's the biggest difference that I noticed. You don't have any bureaucracy or politics. I mean, there's politics shop to shop, but I mean, internally for what we do, no, it's free range.

And then, so what did we do? Were you going to like track events and stuff too when you had the DSM, right? Were you doing much stuff with that or?

No, just being a pud on the street.

Sure.

You know, racing whoever wanted to.

Doing some of the dumbest things imaginable.

Trying not to blow it up.

I keep hearing you say that. I'm like, what does he mean by that?

Just things that you wouldn't do now being of age, where you're like, none of that was worth the squeeze, I guess.

Like pouring Mountain Dew in the...

Yeah, well, there are plenty of...

In the valve cover of the Dodge Colt.

Plenty of things that we regret.

How's that, dude? I had a Dodge Colt and couldn't kill it.

We successfully killed this guy.

We ended up leaving it parked.

Mine was a Dodge Spirit, but not much different.

Okay, yeah.

We ended up leaving it parked with a brick on the gas pedal in neutral. Just to see how long it lasted.

Before we... We can't incriminate. We then pushed it in the river. And then it was covered after that.

Oh, we didn't.

Yeah, you're right. We didn't.

Allegedly.

What was done to your DSM?

I had an Evo 16G on it.

Okay.

And I mean, that was really it.

Okay.

I didn't go very far with it because it was just it never stayed running, you know. I think the only car I ever had that stayed running was my Z06. Like that continuously ran. And I was like, well, this is weird. I don't have to constantly work on it.

You said it was a 2006 Z06? Yeah. Okay.

It was blue.

Of course. Naturally. Where does this affinity for blue come from? Were you a Smurf guy?

Probably autism. I don't know, man, as long as I can remember, I was like, I like the color blue, and I want everything to be blue.

This is what the show's divulged to you, by the way. What's your favorite color and why?

Because I'm weird, man. I don't know. Hey, it's worked out well for me.

What's been the most challenging product?

Oh, the port controller hands down. Like, that's been a situation where there were just a lot of hands involved. It sounds corny, but there's a saying that I really like, and it's, if you want to go fast, go by yourself. If you want to go far, go together. So that's what I did. I had multiple entities that were involved on this product. So I had a core idea of what I needed to do, and then I was like, all right, I need to figure out who I need for what part. So, you know, I have this project management aspect of it, and then I figured out how I wanted to execute it, and then it was like, all right, well, I need HP Tuner's help to patch the ECU so that I can send this data out of the ECU and we can digest it. And then it's like, all right, well, now I need hardware. I got to have somebody make the hardware for this. All right, well, now that hardware needs code. F***, I got to have somebody make the code for this. And I'm fortunate in that I feel that I found the right people to be involved with and everybody has a common goal and wants to see it through to the end. And it's been this ongoing project that's still evolving, still getting better. I mean, it's pretty damn good the way it is now, if I do say so myself, but we just want to keep making it better. And along the way, I try to like take things off somebody's plate if I can, but I mean, you can't do everything. And that's ridiculous if you ever think you can. So I have embraced working with the right people, but I mean, it's been a lot of math, it's been a lot of troubleshooting, it's been a lot of testing, it's been a lot of coding and learning new skills. I mean, hell, like now I'm writing my own code in factory ECUs and stuff to change what's happening. And it's like, I didn't picture that I'd wind up here, but it kind of came out of necessity, I guess I would say. I mean, it still continues to be a challenge, not for any other reason than we just, we want to have something that's really, really good. And it's cool to see where it's wound up because it just, it works so well.

How do you get to that point as well, by the way, like you seem like somebody who's like, I'm just going to attack this problem by myself in my short time that I've known you. How do you release the grip to other people? How do you start working with other people?

I mean, that was, that was hard. Like he was the one that used to tell me like, you gotta let go of the reins on some s***, because like you can't do everything as much as I'd love to. Like I can't. And I think it really came down to like time management, but also just identifying, well, who can do this better than I can? Like if somebody else does something really well, I don't want to try to do it too. If they do it s*****, yeah, I'll throw my hat in there, and see what we can do. But it was more just a case of like, I know what I want done, and I know who can do this part and do a good job. And it just made far more sense, because that was the faster path to get to a good final product without me having to learn everything about electrical design, and start learning how to code all this s***. And it was gonna be way too much. So I think it just came out of necessity. I think age has something to do with it. When I was sub 30, I was like, fine, do whatever I want. The world owes me everything, and I can learn everything. I'm invincible. That's the same age when I was like, yeah, I'm totally cool doing 180 down the highway. And now it's like, nope, I'm gonna set the cruise control at the speed limit, and I'm good.

When did you lose that? I'm trying to picture my future.

Probably in my thirties.

Okay, I got a few more years of that.

Well, I haven't given it up yet, so maybe, maybe not.

I mean, I still love going out and making a hit. Sure. Four digit power car, that's still fun, but I'm not doing it in traffic, and I'm not going out looking for, there's a lot of s*** to lose now. Right. I'm not worried about crashing and worried about getting arrested.

Yeah.

That's a bigger problem.

You still have the R8 as well then?

No, we dumped that.

Just the Perfomante then still?

I mean, like the R, we just didn't need it. Right.

Exactly.

Kind of passed its useful life, I guess.

You just keep the Perfomante for fun at this point?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a good talking piece as well. Sure. I wanted a Lambo since I was 16. Yeah. And I was like, I had committed, I made a Facebook post about it, probably like 12 years. I was like, I will own a blue Huracan before I am 40. Like it popped up as a memory a couple of years ago. I was like, oh s***, like, yeah, I did it. You know, I think I was 38 when I bought it. So that, I mean, that was a big moment, but I don't know, it was kind of weird at the same time because it was like, all right, now what?

Yeah.

You know, it was very anticlimactic. So I think part of me can't let it go because it was a big deal. Like my ZR1 is the same way. Like there was a whole story with how I got my ZR1.

Yeah.

And I don't, that car sits. I don't drive it.

Does the C7 ZR1? Yeah. Okay.

I like, I can't, that's got too much sentimental value. Everything else, I'm like, nah, this can go. And I don't care.

What's so sentimental about it?

So I had placed like a custom order for it, but it was through a dealership that only got one allocation.

Okay.

And I finally got notified, hey, they're going to build your car, but they're going to build it after the paint color you've requested is discontinued. I was like, f***. So they said, you can either cancel your order or pick a different color. Well, I didn't want to do either. So I messaged a buddy that I knew that worked at GM, and he was like, all right, let me see what I can do. Like a week later, I get a call from the dealership again, and they're like, hey, I don't know who you know, but your build date's been moved up six weeks, and your car is gonna get built. They said, in 25 years, I've never seen this happen. Like you don't, you can't mess with the plant. And having worked in an assembly plant, I know that. The plant is this whole other entity of like, they don't give a s*** about what anybody else says. So come to find out, my buddy that worked at GM contacted this regional sales manager at GM, who contacted the Corvette Customer Experience Group, and told them what was happening to me. And they went and got with the plant, and they audited all of the plant's builds. And they found that there were like two dozen sold orders that were all being pushed back because they were going to dealers that only had one allocation. So the plant was pushing back these solo allocations in favor of building five or ten cars for a dealer that was getting all of them. Those five or ten cars were going to go sit on a dealer lot. They weren't customized orders for an end user. So they raised a fit and had the plant reorganize their build schedule. So that's why if you go back and look at the build schedule, they only made like 57 Admiral Blues ER1s. I think like 25% of them were built in the last two weeks that that paint color was available because they all got pushed up. Wow.

So it could have been a rare color. I do not meddled in it and some guy who had the first one was probably.

Yeah, it's still the rarest color that they built. That was the lowest production color of that car was Admiral Blue. So that's why I'm like, man, I can't get rid of this.

Yeah.

I wonder how many pissed off conversations ended up being the result of that, by the way.

I don't know.

Doesn't matter.

But I mean, it was a cool thing.

That's awesome.

Cool stories stick with you.

Is it a manual, too, or no?

No.

It's the seven-speed auto or whatever, I think.

Eight-speed auto. Yeah. I stopped caring about manuals a long time ago.

Yeah.

I mean, from a development standpoint, I wanted the most complicated combination that you could get, which means now you need another module in play. So.

Sure.

Like, I don't know. I don't get anything out of driving a stick anymore.

Sure. So what are you guys currently working on that? What's coming up in the next year or two? Anything worth keeping an eye on?

The port controller for Global B cars. That's what we're trying to ramp out here in the next two months or so. OK. Which that's been it's another step on the staircase of difficulty. Sure. We're working on a brushless fuel system for the C7 Corvettes that uses, you know, an actual bucket. And because I don't believe in just hanging a pump in your tank with no sump.

I'm a road course guy and that has screwed me several times.

So we're I've already got one in my Z06 and it works. It's got two brushless pumps. We're using Audi controllers for it, but we're actually working on something similar to what ID does, where they can run a single brushless pump on crack basically. We're going to try to work through that. Just like everything else we do, it's all plug and play. Part of my ethos is I will not cut a wire. I won't do it. I hate it. I'll de-pin a connector if I can't get a mating connector, and I will put those pins in something else that works. That's as far as I'll go. I will not cut wiring to do anything. So anything you buy from us, anything you get, you're not splicing wires, you're not doing any of this hooptie crap. It's plug and play, and we take that through every step of the way. So on this fuel system for the C7, we had to build this whole wiring harness. We had to have a device that converts CAN data into a PWM signal for the brushless controllers. And then it's like, all right, well, now we got to go through the body because you have to mount the controllers inside the car. It's like, all right, well, now we have to seal that hole we've created in the body. So now we made our own bulkhead for the harness because we've got CNC machines and stuff. So we try to think of everything. So when you get something, it's not just thrown together. There was a lot that went into it, a lot of cussing and a lot of time and stewing and just waiting for that aha moment. So that's what a lot of time goes into is trying to provide something to an end user that is complete. Sure.

How many people do you guys have working there?

What's up?

How many employees do you have?

Including myself, there's eight people at the shop.

Okay.

So not super big. I mean, this is the most employees we've had at any point. So we get along with without.

Well, YouTube is a separate thing.

Too much conflict.

What's the plans for the ZR1X?

I don't know.

They're digging in. I don't drive it. Play with it.

Probably collect dust.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't get much out of driving anymore. St. Louis' car scene sucks, though. So there's that. No, I mean, if HP Tuners unlocks it, I'll poke it with a stick and see what I can do with it. And sure what we can develop, you know.

No interest in the ZR1, no normal one.

Well, I mean, it goes back to what I said about, you know, like my C7 ZR1. I want the most complicated iteration of the car.

Fair enough, yeah.

So, you know, throw in a hybrid drive.

Yeah.

That it's just another variable to manipulate.

Have you played with the e-rays at all, then?

I haven't personally, no. But again, I don't care for those cars.

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, because basically it's stinging with the hybrid.

It is, yeah. That's all it is. But I mean, we're, you know, we're going to have the port controller for those and maybe I'll buy another C8 if we want to just vet everything out. But like I've got my Blackwing, so we'll put port control on that and flesh it all out there. Because at the end of the day, it's it's all the same architecture. Like GM, the way they have everything set up, like they're really just going through and either turning stuff on or off, whether or not the car needs it. It's all the same under the skin.

OK, that makes sense.

Any other platforms you looked into or are looking into other than the V10 stuff?

No, like we kind of we went into the V10 stuff and we still sell, you know, products for it and everything. But locally, there just wasn't a market to really dig into them.

Like when we were doing that, it was such a booming thing for like, I don't know, 18 or 24 months. All you would see is people doing another twin turbo build on a V10 car. It's like I like a piece of that. And then as you get involved and you figure out that the market is not what it appeared to be, I mean, withdrawing from that sooner than later was a good thing.

I think that market started to boom. It was kind of a weird combination. Like MoTek released a full standalone setup for it. In the similar time period, DS1 had support for it. And then coupled with that was the whole crypto bro boom.

Yeah, sure.

So you had all these guys with a bunch of money that wanted a flashy car and wanted to make a s*** little horsepower. And then in a period of 18 months, all that went away.

It just kind of fizzled.

It went away and like, suddenly you just didn't hear people talking about it anymore.

Yeah.

It got real quiet, real fast. It was weird. And now, like, the only cars that are in shops are cars that were built by people who shouldn't have built them. Cause they're just getting fixed now cause they're all blown up.

Yeah. I would say, not that they did not sell plenty of those cars, but the amount of people that can afford that car and then afford to do that to it, that's a smaller number, for sure. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you can also argue that it's maybe the other way. If you can afford that car, you can maybe afford to do that to it, too. I could see it go both ways, but you're probably right.

I think the R8 was where that came more into play because the R8, just apples to apples, it's 150 grand cheaper than a Huracan, which is the same car. So like a lot of people had R8s. And then if you really wanted to turbocharge one, you could do it cheap, like 20 grand with everything you need. But it's like, what are you going to get out of that? Yeah, I would say the cost of what we did to the R8 was probably more along the lines of 50 or 60 grand between all the hard parts and the labor and all that stuff. And like the end result was 1,000 wheel horsepower car that drove like stock, had flex fuel, and made cool noises. I don't know that that same quality could have been replicated with a much cheaper set up and somebody out there would sure love to tell you that they can do it the same but cheaper. The same but cheaper is what everybody loves. But that's not a thing. It's not the same.

We had a friend that had one. He would definitely fall into that cheaper class. We were working on it in my shop. That thing was finicky all the time. He had a Gen 1 R8. It was like every time we fixed something, like another light or sensor came on, another thing and then getting parts for it was expensive.

The popularity of whatever you're going to mod comes down to who's supporting it. The Audi stuff is really cool, because DS1 has got two really smart guys backing it. The GM stuff with HP Tuners and now the Ford stuff, you can do almost whatever you want, because you've got good support there. But then other cars where you're restricted to these add-on boxes and s***. I think back to when I had a Super AFC on my Eclipse, I'm like, why are people still doing this s***? But that's all you got.

It is funny to see everybody roll the clock back when Global B wasn't unlocked, and people are just fooling sensors and stuff to try to get it done, because they want it so bad.

I remember people, like the C7ZR1, people were putting air intakes on and trying to put pulleys on and s***, and they would literally space the map or the mass air sensor out of the intake tube so that it was in a slower portion of the airflow to read less air to lean the car out. F*** that.

Pioneers.

No, but like, you know, I didn't buy a Global B car until they were unlocked, because I was like, I don't want to do this. This is stupid. But as soon as somebody said, hey, here, now you can do it, right? I was like, all right, I'm on board. Let's do this. That makes a huge difference in whether or not a car is moddable.

Do you think that's going to get easier or harder as we keep going on?

It's going to get far worse.

Yeah. Far worse.

It's already far worse. I mean, now you're having to send stuff off to get unlocked because they have to break the security. But even take that a step further, the control strategies in this s*** are getting more and more bonkers. So 20 years ago, you had an actual VE table in a GM ECU. Then it switched over to virtual VE. Well, now you've got some equations that represent your speed density table. And I get why they did that because now you've got all these different variables where it's like, okay, well, now we're doing cam phasing. We're doing intake cam phasing, exhaust cam phasing. You can't realistically do that with lookup tables. Lookup tables are really slow in code. Like equations are much faster. So maybe they were up against processing limits. I don't know. Take that a step further. Now it's all this neural network b*******. That's far more complicated. Now you have to train a neural network. You need somebody to have a tool for that. Luckily, HP Tuners has a tool to do that. So again, they enable you. But the complexity of how they're controlling everything is just getting worse and worse and worse. And I don't know if that's because of, you know, they think they're gaining something out of having such a finer, maybe not finer, but broader level of control. Or is it just obfuscation where you're trying to make it so complex that when people inevitably do break your security, they're looking at what they have to do, and they're like, this is too complicated.

Yeah.

It's like I said, you know, they've got a team of engineers doing this stuff and resources, and they're the ones creating it. Like, they're not having to reverse engineer it. It gets harder and harder and harder. And the problem is technology is exponential. We are not. I mean, people are stupid, relative to the technology in these things.

Right.

I don't think we're going to keep up. Without severe leaks, which, you know.

Which would be really helpful.

Yes.

For everyone listening.

Please email me, daviddsxtuning.com, if you have information. But no, I think you're going to hit a wall, and I don't necessarily think it's going to be security, and maybe it will. You know, I don't know. I think it's just going to hit a point where it's just not feasible to tune your car.

Right.

It's going to be too hard. I mean, I know what I know. And like I said, I look at what's in these ECUs, and I'm like, mm-mm. There's too much going on. Like, knowing me, I'm going to want everything to be right. I'm going to want to go through all this s***. Like, before you know it, you're 200 hours in, because you're trying to make everything perfect. That's like, it's not going to get better. You know, they're not going to revert back to, you know, some real simple ECU. Like, it's going to get more complicated, because technology gets more complicated.

Yeah.

And they're going to exercise that.

Well, even all of this connectivity stuff, too. I think a bunch of S650s, they just unlocked those not that long ago, and then they had some tunes get wiped out when Ford would send an update because everything is doing all this over-the-air stuff now, too. So, let me get to the point where they can zap it right out of there anyway.

Well, and you have to wonder, are the OEMs going to build in their own back door where they can just be like, well, we're just going to blast over this, and too bad. I mean, there's any number of things they can do to just step on your toes, whether or not they're going to exercise it is another question. But they don't want people messing with their warranty. Back when the Global B stuff was first rumbling about being unlocked, a buddy at GM was like, do this is messed up. We're getting blown up LT4s coming through warranty with tune files that don't match the CVNs. It's the check some verification number. They don't have valid CVNs. These aren't supposed to be tunable. Somebody is out there doing it and blowing them up. GM doesn't want to deal with that. I'm sure they voided all of those because they're like, no, you did something and it's not supposed to be this way. And that's how they exonerate themselves. But they're gonna pass it off as security and they don't want you violating emissions.

Sure. That's what my take on it was that it was the government cracking down and then that they can't make it easy for them to.

I think that's the fun story to say like we're not behind this. But I think the reality is they don't want people committing warranty fraud.

Sure. Okay.

I get it.

We met someone that was doing all the warranty stuff for the 08, 09, 2010 Vipers or whatever. Back then, there was just a bunch of them just coming back for whatever reason. And yeah, he was a... You remember, he told us the story or whatever, just basically making sure that whether somebody got a warranty or not sort of deal and voiding them.

So well, they can go back. I guess even if you flash everything back to stock, I mean, they can go in and see how many key cycles and all kinds of stuff have been.

Correct. So you used to be able to flash it back to stock and it would look like it was okay. And then they started keeping it like, I think GM was keeping the last 10 flashes where it would show the ID of the operating system and the checksum values for it.

Yeah.

And then people figured out how to cheat that and override it. But they're going to keep building in protections for themselves.

Do you think it's going to hurt the enthusiast market on that if they keep doing that stuff? Are people just going to not give a s*** and stop buying them?

I'm sure it will affect new sales. I mean, I have to assume that I would bet people to roll back and we go.

We just go back to... Which could be really beneficial. Yeah, you just go back to moddable platforms that are supported.

Well, I mean, the thing that's getting really popular now is all the resto mod stuff. That's what everybody loves. Yeah, I got the modern drivetrain, but it's in an older car, and now you're completely unrestricted. I mean, that's an ideal scenario for a lot of people because the aftermarket, with the creature comforts, now it's not a big deal to put power windows in a 69 Camaro, you know.

You can make an older car, behave pretty close to a new one, like either that or like MoTak and places like that benefit, because then they'll just make full packages, standalones for things.

I've seen that too, but as I feel like the CAN bus stuff starts to get more complicated too. Like in a Dodge, especially, if you unhook the cigarette lighter, like your car is just basically a brick.

Yeah, CAN is definitely daunting until you have your like Rosetta stone type moment with it, where suddenly it clicks and you understand it. Luckily, I hit that point a while ago. So I just started messing around with the CAN FD bus on that Global B car. And then you quickly realize, all right, well now this is a problem. Some of these messages are authenticated, which means they're basically just jumbled and garbage. Like you can't do anything with it. So that's a problem. I know that's a big problem for MoTek. It's why they can't make a stand-alone replacement in a C8 Corvette. I mean, that's going to cock block a lot of people, for sure. But I think like the previous gen platform that runs on the E92 ECUs for all the GM stuff, like I think that will be a really common thing for people to try to use in other platforms because you can manipulate it. It's not really protected. You know, you can kind of do whatever you want. And it's the most modern iteration of the hardware. You look at an LT2 and a C8, it's not really that different from an LT1. There's nothing fundamentally unique. Hell, you could probably put an LT2 in something else. You know, I'm sure there's nothing that special. Now, take like the LT6 or the LT7. Obviously, that's a problem, but somebody will figure out a way to run that thing on some other engine management system. So you can have the cool hardware on something you can tune. You know, you may not get all the features that GM's got, but people probably don't care.

Get you close enough? Yeah.

Close enough is what everybody shoots for. That's why people are like, no, you got to give it some gas when it's cold. It's like, well, no, you shouldn't have to. But like, if you're OK with that, then fine. Just don't tell people your car drives like stock.

Is there something that if you're in a tuner that you should look for to have an idea if it would be like a cold server, OK, this tuner is pretty decent? Or is there...

Yeah, what do they drive?

OK.

Do they have something similar to what you're trying to show up with? Because if they do, they've probably put a lot of time into figuring some s*** out. Like, I am a huge proponent of do your own development work and do it on your own car. Like, don't experiment on somebody else's car.

Right.

Okay, so you got some guy that rolls up in a 99 Chevy Silverado, and he's like, yeah, I can tune your C8, get it real squared. Like, no, f*** you, man. Like, I don't want to know who you learned on, what you had to go through. Like, again, it kind of goes back to, you know, people think just because they have the software, they can do whatever. That's just not how this works. Like, there's time involved in figuring this out. I think it's a disservice to figure it out on somebody else's car.

I see that happened a lot, though. Yeah.

Who do you respect as a tuner in the industry, though? Is there anybody in particular that comes to mind? No comment? Okay.

I like Tony Palo. He tuned my Huracan.

Okay. Hey, that's a fair answer.

I like Tony. I mean, you know, there's obviously people on different platforms that are really good at what they do. You know, Mitch McKee with, like, the Audi stuff. Sure. It's because he's writing half the f****** code for it. Anyway, you know, John Reed, smart guy, Shane Tecklenberg. Super smart guy. But like, beyond that, like when it comes to GM outside of myself, I mean, the people that I would trust to do it, nobody even knows their name.

Okay. Fair enough.

Because it's a very underground, like, you know, sort of underground society.

Sure.

But, you know, the people that know what really lies under the surface don't necessarily want to be known, you know? But then there's a million people out there that would love to just chest puff and survive off of marketing as opposed to merit. And, you know, I can do a good job on this. And, you know, somehow they successfully suppress every unhappy customer. And it's a weird segment. Yeah, I don't like it. But that's my two cents.

Because it's one of the things I saw on your website. That's one of your phrases like marriage, not marketing. Is that my saying that right?

Yeah, I fully acknowledge the power of marketing. And I do that because I see people succeeding that shouldn't.

Okay.

And that's depressing. And like, I don't ever want to be like I couldn't sleep if that's how I was. You know, sure, I would rather know that I have done a good job. And I'm not I'm not going to say I did the best that I can do. So I think that's a cop out. I think that's just an excuse when something doesn't work. You know, I'm doing the best I can. Like, well, if the best you can doesn't work, you shouldn't do it.

Okay.

Either quit or go learn. I choose to go learn.

Okay. So we kind of know what you guys got for shop cars and stuff. Do you have any cars or?

I doing the shop cars, doing this for a monster truck. Yeah, doing this for a living has beaten car culture out of me completely.

Yeah, it's not a hobby anymore.

No, it's very much work. And you realize it's kind of like being the handy guy in the family, where no matter where you go, people are always asking you car questions or asking you for help. And that's OK until it's the same conversations with the same people and nobody's helping themselves. So I mean, I went across a very broad spectrum of cars over the last 20 years. I mean, I had Corvettes, Camaros, Viper.

You should have kept your Viper.

Yeah. Yeah, I love my ATS-V. I just exited that. I had some Audis, which I liked all those. But like it just became a time where all I'm using it for is to commute anymore because I don't want to spend Saturday at Carson Coffee having the same conversation with the same people all the time.

Not again.

The St. Louis community is really, really small. Like it's super condensed. So it's basically you're just running the same people all the time. And when those people are your friends and your neighbors, I talk to you all the time anyway. Right. So yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't know any other thing. Like I would assume if you're a tennis player, you play tennis for a living. I don't know that you do it every weekend then afterwards. Right. Yeah.

So it's kind of like unless it's practice for what you're actually.

Yeah.

You're not going and doing it for fun.

And I still like cars like come into this. I'll get the bug and I'll be like, man, I'd like to do another car. And then at the same time, it's like, I don't know. You know, I tried taking my kids to like cars and coffee and stuff, and they like it for 15 minutes. You know, if I could get one of them really into it, I'd probably dive back in.

I took my son for a ride, my Huracan, and he fell asleep. I was like, all right.

That's pretty much it.

Thanks, buddy.

No, I still like it. And I like the brands. I like to see new cars that are coming out because I'm like, man, that would be really cool. But in knowing that the future is, oh, I probably can't modify that. You know, it's like, well, I kind of want it less than. Sure.

Well, yeah, I think the whole thing about modifying a car is like making it yours. Yeah, I think that's why people modify them. Twin turbos. Yeah, you know, like I mean, my dad, he had like a 57 Chevy and he was showing me pictures of it where he like added extra slats in the front grill. And I'm like, why are you giving me s*** about modifying my car when you used to do the same s***? You just you did it a little different. You know, he's telling me about how like the cool thing used to be to put a blue light in your brake light so it looked purple and all this s***. And I'm like, no, that's still what people do. People just like they like some little trinket that just makes it a little different.

You know, it's also a very expensive hobby. Oh, you know, when you look at it in terms of like, well, what am I getting out of it? Because a lot of times you're not modifying the car for yourself. You're modifying it almost for other people. You know, so your car, you're lowered on the nice wheels and this and that and whatever. You make a thousand horsepower. That's not necessarily all for you. That's for you to display to everyone else.

And it's to be an attention for.

Yeah, yeah, basically. So I don't know. I had a good time with it for a long time, but now it's more family stuff.

Yeah. Out of everything that I could drive, I just end up driving my truck because I'm like, we'll have to ask what kind of truck. It's a 23 Silverado ZR2.

The first shop we've had a GM shop that doesn't have a Ford is a truck.

So like I can bounce that thing off a curb and.

Sure.

I don't care. Like, I don't care. I mean, it's a throwaway truck. Like, yeah, this is great. And it's big. So I don't have to deal with people being a******* when I drive. Like, if I want to change lanes, you're going to get out of my way. Yeah, this is perfect.

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You know, I just, I find myself always going back to that, because I mean, the Escalade is cool to drive, but even then you're like, am I going to get held up in Gunpoint and have this stolen? Like, that's a very St. Louis thing.

I was going to say, it sounds like a St. Louis problem.

Yeah, nobody very much. The St. Louis Welcoming Committee will...

Nobody's, nobody's stealing a truck on knobby tires, you know.

Unless you go to Texas.

Well.

Can't be sneaking up on you on that one.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

As we kind of wind down here, what was the hardest thing for you to develop? I think you kind of touched on it earlier, actually.

Oh, I mean, the Atlas, for sure.

How long was that development process for, then?

I first came up with the idea for that in 2018.

Okay.

And it, like, kind of slowly marinated. And I think I didn't really make a big push to develop it until I was more confident in my own skill set, and until I was confident that I knew the right people to involve in it. So, like, then it was a very rapid progression of, like, all right, we're going to ramp up, we're going to get this thing done, and it's going to be f****** awesome. Which it is, you know, not to toot my own horn, but, like, that thing just works. But it was tough to get to that point. Now that we're where we are, though, looking back, it's like, wow, that was really easy.

The, when you think about, like, what a capable piece of hardware it is, and, like, the time compression of how it went from an idea to being, like, an actual polished product is pretty wild, because however many years ago, it was conversations, I really want to do this. And then suddenly, from the time there was one on a bench with some injectors hooked up to it that were just running.

Just making noise.

Yeah. From the time from that to the point where it was in a car and being tuned was like, how did that just happen?

It was probably about six weeks.

Yeah, it was pretty crazy. So that was very, very cool.

But yeah, I mean, that was a journey for sure. And it's kind of like not done. And now I sit here, I'm like, f***, how do I top that?

Any grand plan on that or?

No, just...

I think it's just to develop in that space for now.

Yeah, I mean, we have to do there.

Yeah, true.

The cool scenario would be to deploy it to other applications. You know, I think it would actually have room in the GTR space just because of the automation of the fuel delivery and everything and how the math works and all this stuff. That's the crux of it. It's an automated supplemental fuel delivery system. So we keep track. And again, this goes back to having to figure out a bunch of math and s***. We keep track of everything the ECU is doing. And when the primary injectors hit their limit and they can't do anymore, we automate the whole process of how much fuel do these other injectors need to do. So even though a GTR's port injection, they still might need two sets of injectors because you can't idle that thing on a 2650. Sure. But I know there was talk about an application for Hondas to do it.

I don't know.

I mean, GM is what I know. So that's what I do. If somebody else wanted to say, hey, what would it take to do it here? We'll have that talk.

There are so many DI cars that need port that it's limitless. The amount of platforms you can go to, it's just finding the support in that space for it would be key.

Well, it just seems like we just did this Subaru podcast last week. Their only solution is basically be stuck at 400 horsepower or go MoTeC, and that's pretty much what they're limited at, with more options coming to the table, but that seems like an option.

I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, anything that's DI that needs PI, there hadn't been a better way to do it that I've seen at this point.

Removing roadblocks is a big deal. When you can do that, that's when you just open up a whole new world. So that's what we want to do.

What's the main roadblocks that come to mind? Just stuff being locked up?

I mean, yes.

In development.

But that's not a problem. We'll solve.

I mean, adding port, you'd start with hardware constraints, and then I guess if you knew you could add port injectors, then the software side and coding would be the next piece.

Yeah, like, you know, it's funny talking about hardware constraints. The big b**** fest about port injection is, well, now you got to have these plates that raises everything up and everything hits. And I filed a patent on a new method to do this, where we actually just modify the cylinder heads and we go straight into the intake runner with a special valve cover. OK, so we're going to debut that on our Z06. So it's port injection with no impact to your install height.

OK.

And that's probably going to piss a lot of people off and a lot of people are going to s*** talk on it just because there's no shortage of people that don't like me because I'm just honest. People don't like honesty, but, you know. People don't like me, and as a result, they won't like the products. Sure, I get it. And I'm like, that's fine, you know. Whatever.

When are you debuting that?

I don't know, whenever I get off my a** and put that car together. Like, we had to make this weird... And again, it's like, well, f***. Now we don't have room under the blower to run fuel lines. What are we going to do? So I designed this ridiculous piece that goes on the DI pump, but allows me to hook up fuel lines that don't hit the blower and don't hit the DI. I mean, the file name of this thing was literally stupid..sldprt. And then I posted a picture of it. People are like, that's cool. I was like, really? Like, this is stupid. This is a dumb solution, but I guess it works. And that's how a lot of stuff ends up. It's like just some wacky a** way to solve a problem. That people are like, I want that. All right, we'll make more and sell them. I'll take your money.

Have you stopped messing around in like Facebook groups at this point then? Or do you actually lean into it?

No, I mean, Dave 10 years ago was overly caustic. And I loved picking fights with people. And now I just kind of like, I watch.

Yeah. There was a time where I wanted to reply to everything all the time.

Yeah.

But now we just go to support the product. But the product really supports itself. Like there's such a good community around it because it was like kind of built for the people more so. Like, hey, this is built to make your life easier. People appreciate that. So now really we just show up to say, hey, we're here if you need something, you know, as opposed to trying to fight your own battles. You know, the court of public opinion is typically on our side. So we just kind of stay out of it.

I really only chime in anymore if somebody's got a legitimate question or if somebody's flat out lying. You know, and then it's a defense thing.

Right.

Other than that, I'm like, I don't care.

Even then, it's hard to get your... They're still going to kick back. I've tried to argue people too, but it's like hitting your head against the wall. It doesn't really do much for you.

Oh, yeah.

They're right no matter what you say.

I mean, Facebook is just a cesspool of misinformation.

Yeah.

And you can't do anything about it. All right.

Well, you want to rip it?

Yeah. All right. So at the end of every episode, we'd like to ask our guests or guests to pick three cars. I need a track car, a daily driver and a show car. You have an unlimited budget, whatever you want, build whatever you want. A track car, a daily driver. Yep. And a show car.

And a show car. Are you going to go first?

Daily driver is an Escalade V hands down.

Okay.

Oh, stop.

You don't want to worry about it getting stolen or what?

I mean...

Ideally, he lives in a different city.

Just carry a gun with you.

Audi RS6 Avant is the daily driver.

Okay.

He's an Audi douche. That's why.

I'm part Audi douche, but now I'm going to go all Audi.

To spite me?

Yes. What?

A track car? Sure. Oh. No budget? People were getting...

F****** canics like Yesco? Yeah.

No.

I just...

I don't know.

I don't know. I'm not in that space. Like, that's a hard one for me because I'm just not there, you know?

No.

I had fun whipping my... So, like, with the C701, I got to do driving school.

Sure.

That was awesome. Like, that's fun because it's still a little bit raw, but it's very controllable.

Yeah.

You know, it's not mid-engine, so it doesn't really feel weird. I mean, I'm just... I'm not a great driver, but I don't know. I'd maybe go C701.

All right. So, you're locking in C701.

I'll go, like, a Porsche GT3 RS.

Perfect. I like this back-and-forth thing we got going. Yeah.

Okay. And then, what was the last one? The last one was a...

Show car.

Oh, show car?

Yeah.

Oh, that'd have to be a Restomod or something. Super bad boy.

Yeah, I'd go, like, El Camino on hydraulics.

Oh, no. I'll...

No, I don't know. That's just... That's not my space.

Yeah.

I don't know. I don't show cars.

What are you taking the kids out to get ice cream in?

My truck.

Give me, like, an Elandor Mustang. Like, what is that, a GT 500, GT 350, whatever the old boy wants. That would be sweet. But like, Resto Mod, some kind of modern power plant. That would be... I've always wanted to do a Resto Mod, but that's just time and ability that is...

Yeah.

Or in this case, unlimited money.

Yeah. Yeah.

That or, like, a really old, like, an old RX-7, like the ones with the cool, like, mirrors that come up.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yep.

You know what? All right.

All right. Show car, 99, 3000 GT VR4.

Okay.

I love those cars.

Have you looked at the prices of them?

Yeah.

Of course they're pieces.

I almost bought one recently, and I was like, what am I going to do with a 26-year-old Japanese car you can get parts for?

Exactly what you're thinking about doing with it.

I was talking to Aaron Miller from Enthmodo about, I was like, I kind of want one of those cars, and he's like, you should definitely do it. And then he's like, but you should not do it. He's like, it's a horrible idea.

Yeah, there is a guy locally to us that that was his thing, was the 3000GT VR4 was his platform, and he built them, maintains them, all that stuff. So he's routinely selling them. None of the VR4s, but he had a pretty cool one himself.

I had a Dodge Avenger. It was like the budget version of it.

Okay.

Yeah. It kind of resembled it slightly, but not really.

The cool looking round one that they had. I don't know what years those were.

For something to just sit and look at, that'd be my pick.

Okay. And which is it? You're locking in the Eleanor one then?

I think so, yeah. I think that'd be cool. Little bit of nostalgia.

Yeah.

Well, on that note, where can everybody find you guys?

dsxtuning.com. Or that in our, I mean, if you can find us on Facebook, that's usually where we're posting everything that's relevant. Recent with what we're doing, or if somebody's falling on the ice. Oh, we didn't post that.

No, but we will.

Maybe I just didn't want to get sued.

Somebody fell on ice, is what you said?

Oh yeah, our tech ate s*** hard. And it wasn't funny until the audio was on.

Which made it less funny and more sad.

No, it made it way more funny. He's okay. He's okay.

No, that was eventually going to be my follow up question.

Watching him crawl on the ice was... Sorry, Alex.

I want to know what your Instagram algorithm is. Like, what makes you laugh? It's got to be the most horrific s***.

I don't use Instagram, man.

Facebook Reels or something?

Facebook Reels?

Sure.

Oh my god. Facebook Reels for me right now is all art graders. All art, yeah. And then there's a guy who does the Tinder reviews. Have you ever seen that guy? I think his name is Chris Robbins. F****** hilarious s***. Oh yeah? He basically matches with people on Tinder, says super f***** up off the wall s*** to them, and then blocks them immediately or whatever. And yeah, I think that's about it for me right now.

Sure. Lately for me, it's been all the Tom Segura clips.

Tom Segura is good. He's funny.

Like the Dungeon Soup cartoons. Those are hilarious as f***.

The what?

Dungeon Soup. It's about this barbarian.

Sure.

I don't know that I've seen any of those.

Oh my God.

Nor have you mentioned them. They can't be that funny.

I mean, man, it's random, just random funny s***.

Sure.

I don't know that there's any rhyme or reason to it, and maybe that's the silo I got put in, is random s***.

Yeah. This guy's weird. We'll just put him in this category. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, he's got no ethics.

No ethics. Well, sweet. On that note, Dan, I got a garage. Thanks for coming on, guys. Yeah, thanks for having us. Glad we got to put together and, oh yeah, Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see y'all next time.

Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks.