182. Racing at Le Mans, IMSA, Race Engineering and Strategy w/ Brad Kettler and Britt Casey Jr

This episode is brought to you by 6XD Gearbox. More on them later. 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. That's right. Mr. Gunnick Garage for day two of PRI. This is our fourth one today. We are just grinding at it today. But we have a special returning guest with Britt Casey Jr, who brought a friend, Brad Kettler, which first of all, nice to meet you in person finally. These conversations leading up have been fun.

Same here.

This is the first podcast I watched, not one, but two documentaries in a row for. So I'm very excited to say the least. So first of all, just tell us a little bit about yourself, how we got to where we are at today, and we'll just kind of go from there.

Well, how far back we going? We going way back?

As far back as you want to.

Well, okay.

When did cars enter the photo?

What's that?

When did cars enter the picture?

They were always there.

Okay.

They were always there from the beginning. My dad was a gear head, and he had a really healthy love of cars and motorcycles. And both of my grandfathers were kind of amateur restoration guys and so forth. And my one grandfather on my dad's side, he was a recovering alcoholic, and the car hobby was his outlet to stay sober and so forth. And so, as his grandson, we did all kinds of projects together, and a lot of like early, not brass era cars, but like 30s and 40s cars, which accompanying him to all kinds of specialty shops all over Indiana. And, you know, around Indy here, people that were engine builders, gearbox builders, you know, going to these different places and being exposed to all that stuff at a really early age was just fascinating for me. I loved it. And, you know, they, you know, I got to meet people that were, you know, you know, off the engine builders, you know, from the 50s and the 60s and guys that were aluminum panel beaters that, you know, flame welded aluminum bodies and made Indy cars out of them that way and stuff. And really was lucky to get exposed to that kind of stuff.

Sure.

And it really lit my imagination up and and it just kept going from there.

Sure.

Yeah.

So take me up into like where did you end up going to college? Did you end up? What did you end up? How did your career begin?

Well, I mean, my parents was born in Lafayette, Indiana. And my dad, my dad was a was a graduate student at Purdue there. And he started out as an engineering student and he ended up an English professor. So that's a little bit of a turn, you know, a little bit of a turn the other way. But like I said, he had a really healthy, you know, love of cars and motorcycles and stuff. And we consumed what media was available back then, you know, occasional SpeedSport News, definitely Road and Track magazine, you know, Cycle World, you know, anything Peter Egan wrote, you know, stuff like that was a big factor. And we moved to Oxford, Ohio, where Miami University is when I was very little. And from there, I just, you know, I wanted to, you know, cars fascinated me. They always did. And from the time I could drive, I had a job in a gas station and, you know, never did pump any gas because once they figured out I could fix stuff, they had me back in the workshop exploiting my low wages and ability to charge a lot of money for what I was doing. And I just ended up, you know, working in gas station workshops and so forth. I did some ag work as a kid, which exposes you to all kinds of different crazy machines and diesels and all kinds of ways things are done. And then I ended up in a Chevrolet dealership. My first, this is a way back for a lot of you people. You may not even remember. I did Vega engine recall. Okay. So if you guys remember the Vega, at one point in time there was class action lawsuit and they all got new engines put in them regardless of what kind of a piece of junk the car was. If you could drag it to the dealer, they would put a new motor in it for you. I mean, most of the cars, they didn't have floorboards left and all that. But they drag them in there and my $12 flat rate hour job was to put new engines in these old junky Vegas and satisfy the recall and so forth. That's how I really got started at the GM garage. I took some training on the Grand National, on the Buick Grand National and I was one of the few young men in the dealership chain that was like not. Most of the old guys at that point in time were not on board with learning about fuel injection and electronics and so on. They were just not. So I became the de facto kid that they sent to the trainings because somebody had to go. Sure. So I took some training on the Grand National and on the sequential fuel injection system for the 3800 Buick. When that was a new thing, I mean, when cars did not have fuel injection. Right.

It was the fastest production car at the time, I believe.

It was.

Yeah. Vegas, the Grand Nationals, that's a good job.

Well, once I got my foot in the door at the dealership, they realized I could do it.

Right.

And they kept me pretty busy. I got most of the ugly jobs. I got school buses and the oil delivery trucks and the stuff that you had to work on outside sometimes. That was the stuff I got to do. But I kept plugging away at it. And the environment that I was in at this dealership in Oxford, I was in an annex building with an old kind of hot rod guy named Ronnie Case and Ronnie's still alive. And because we were in an annex building, we had some extra space. So I had a flat stall where I could work on my stuff. That was just given to me basically, I could use. And I built a, with Ronnie's help and so forth, built a Chevy 2 drag car and early Nova, little body Nova, and did subframe connectors and stuff in it. And built a series of different little 327 based different recipe engines and gearboxes and so forth. And you know, everything dyno-tude and by the butt, you know, electronics anywhere. And I was pretty successful with it. I was pretty successful driving the car and.

Well, the Chevy 2 was kind of like where the Fox body is known as a great chassis, right? The Chevy 2 I believe was the same.

It was. It was a little light car, had little skinny doors. And they were pretty well constructed. They were pretty stiff. And if, you know, at 300 horsepower or so, they didn't have enough power to really twist them too hard, but the chassis had enough rotation and have enough flex in it that they would bite pretty hard. And, you know, once you figure that out with them. And my big experiment, the thing I was fascinated with back then was how to shift it faster and how to shift it wide open and so forth. So I built a whole series of different Saginaw transmissions with the synchronizers ground off and worked on them to where I could flat shift the thing. Basically, where I could put it right where it would float the valves and on the initiation of the valve float, I could shift it. And, you know, when it was pulling hard, I get my hand full. I had a Vertigate shifter. That was one of my most expensive pieces in the car because I had a Hurst Vertigate shifter, which is a three-speed shifter. And I got where, you know, with the Syncros kind of done that way, treated that way, where I could load it up and really pull on the lever. And when it was pulling hard, when it got to the valve float area, you could pull it through. It would shift. And it was like a very primitive kind of stutter, you know? I mean, it was basically a misfire based on over-revving the thing, but it worked. I mean, you know, it worked.

It basically had like an early shift cut.

Yeah, yeah. And with a little practice, you could really hit it right. And it was fast. I mean, it was a good way to do it. You could shift it and leave the throttle wide open, you know, when you pulled it through. And it worked pretty well. I mean, you had to be committed to it. And you had to, you know, your bicep had to be tense. I mean, you had to have a lot of load on the lever. And when it unloaded the drivetrain, you could shift it. And so anyway, I got pretty good at it. I made a lot of runs in that car and got pretty fast with it. And, and ended up winning a little Southeast Regional Matchup Championship kind of thing. And my dad and my uncle were there and a guy walked up to the, was on the trailer. He wanted to buy the car. And I asked, you know, I looked at my dad and he said, you know, he smoked a pipe and stuff and he packed his pipe and he said, unload it because we probably had $3,500 in the car. Oh, yeah. You know, maybe a little bit more. All the engines were built out of, I bought an interchange thing. It was a McAllister's Guide to Small Blocks, and it had all the different interchange possibilities and scoured junkyards and stuff for the right cylinder heads and the right camshafts and the right stuff. There was no summit racing, and I don't want to sound like an old fart to say, oh, back in my day, we couldn't do all this stuff. But we didn't. We didn't have any of those things. And so you really had to search for kind of the resources to put some of these combinations together. And a few of them were quite potent. You know, they were good. And I still know that a Kingswood station wagon with a 400 small block in it has a steel crank in it. Then none of the other ones do, but that one does. And it's got three freeze plugs in it. And you know that that's a 400 with a steel crank and so on. This is the kind of gold you'd find in the junkyard. You'd be like, oh yeah, we need that. We need that part.

I miss those days of the junkyard. Sorry to cut you off.

Yeah, I mean, I do too.

I would go with my dad and the one I used to go to, you could drive into still, right?

Sure.

And then it got to where now you got to walk back. And now it's all, you show up at a desk and they pull the part for you.

They pull it for you, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of stuff walked out in the toolbox. We all know that. There was plenty of little window crank handles and clips and hardware and stuff that never got bought back in those days. And I mean, that was part of the whole program. But I love junkyards. I still do.

Well, I can spend all day there. The random things you find under seats and things. Yeah, it's just a lot of fun.

Oh, yeah. And I mean, Bizignante, his junkyard gold thing, there was some things on the Speed, not Speed channel. I forget what channel, MavTV, maybe.

OK.

He did some vignettes of some different junkyards out west and would walk them and like pick out the weird things that are in here and then talk about what they were and so forth. And I found it fascinating. I've always wanted to go to that DVAP, that Desert Valley Auto Parts, the one that's like 2000 acres. It's out in like Nevada, Southern California out there somewhere. The Fryburger and those guys are always like talking about the DVAP Auto Parts. And I've never been to it, but I always wanted to go there and just to see it because I think junkyards are fascinating.

Oh, absolutely.

They really are.

That's an awesome bucket list item.

Yeah. So I built a lot of my early cars based on that because one, I didn't have any money and two, that was what was available. I mean, JEGS in Columbus really emerged as a speed shop that you could reliably get stuff through. I mean, this is like we're well into the late 80s before that happened. Before that, you were just on your own, figuring it out and so that was a lot of it. So then I left the GM garage and I became a Mercedes-Benz mechanic. I worked on Mercedes-Benz as a line mechanic at a dealership in Cincinnati there in Fairfield, Ohio. I really loved that and I loved German cars. It really got me going on German car branding stuff. I worked on a lot of the used cars, the Porsches and so forth and that really got me going. And really appreciating what those cars were. And that led, that opened a lot of doors. The Porsche thing, that car company is single-handedly responsible for a lot of motorsport people. Coming from a background, racing and building those things and myself as well. So there, this was right when we were starting to get some technology in cars. We were getting ABS brakes. We were getting really decent fuel injection systems and stuff. And cars that had some pretty decent performance. And I remember going to the tech school on the 300E, and they explained to us that the top speed on the thing was 147 miles an hour, which we all called b******* on. But they would go 147 miles an hour. I mean, that's the first thing. The first one that showed up at the dealership was like me and the service manager. We were down Route 4 outside Fairfield to see if this thing would go north of 145 miles an hour. And it would. And we were like, respect. You know, we are really getting somewhere. This is something. Yeah, it really was. It really was something. I mean, it was mind-bendingly fast because you got to remember, you know, the cars before that era were all these popcorn popper diesels that had, you know, 65 horsepower and they go 82 miles an hour on the wood in, you know. So, you know, Mercedes was wasn't known as like a performance brand in that respect. And it was just starting to emerge that way with some of the alloy V8s and some of the stuff that later on turned out to be quite cool. But yeah, the 300E when I took the tech school and then I came back and I said, I don't think this is, I don't think this car will do this. And then it would. They would. They could do it. So anyway, that was a big jumping off point. And from there, I met some people that got me into building road racing cars. And, you know, the Smith books, Prepare to Win, Tune to Win, those things, you know, studying those, those books and reading about that. And then later reading on track magazine, you know, looking forward to that coming every month. So I could catch up on what's going on in all the motor racing scenes and so forth.

And it was around what time period at this point?

Mid 80s, mid 80s, 1985, 86, something like that. And then in 87, I started a job at Essex Racing in Cumming, Georgia, working for Michael Gouet. And and it was off and running after that because he had a lot of programs. He had, you know, club racing programs, rental programs, prototype stuff was, you know, C2 prototypes, like they call them, you know, sponsored by Camel. So they call them Camel Light Cars. What was it called? They were Camel Light Cars. Oh, yep. Yeah. You know, because they were sponsored by, you know, tobacco money and all that stuff. And but it was a healthy time in IMSA and around Atlanta there, there was a lot of prep shops. Jim Downing had a prep shop there. And he was famous for Mazda and particularly Rotary's and a lot of Rotary cars. And Phil Creighton had a prep shop there. There was composite people there. Spice Engineering was there, which later had a really very, very good, you know, road racing chassis, prototype chassis that they sold. So there was a lot of a lot happening in that area. There was a big buzz. And there was NASCAR teams, the Eliots were there. You know, there was some other things. So it was a good place to be if you're interested in the racing world. And I started there and I, you know, didn't look back for a long time. I worked for a couple different companies. There I worked for Phil Creighton for a while. There, a man named John Eversley, who's Ryan Eversley's dad. He had a big restoration shop in Atlanta there. And I worked for him for a long time. I got exposed to a lot of really, really high end Porsche stuff, 962s, 935s. And, you know, got a chance to learn a lot of that craft from some real gurus. And Franz Blom was there. He was famous engine builder that built a lot of 962 engines and so forth. And he was there in Tucker, Georgia. So there was a lot to look at and be part of. And it was, as a young man, it was a cool, cool spot to be. When you went to work every day, you went to work every day. You didn't know really what you were going to see.

OK.

You know, John shop was on a little dead end street in Tucker, Georgia there. And it was also at the end of that dead end street was FAF Ferrari, which was a very big active Ferrari dealer at the time. And then there was another man there. I don't remember the name, but he did Lamborghinis and Porsches and did all kinds of things. So the little dead end street was really a rollout test track for all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, you're on your way to lunch. You don't know what you might see coming down the road the other way from you.

I keep in mind this is like late 80s, early 90s IMSA, which is those cars were. Cool. Like, yeah, yeah, things were flying like, yeah, way faster top speeds than what we have now.

I mean, well, the rules weren't there. I mean, if you could come up with it, you could do it.

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And you know, there was, there was, you know, IMSA was, was fairly powerful at that point of view. It was powerful enough that when like, when you look at even like the 962, you know, everybody talks about the 962 Porsche, but there was a, there was an, there was an American only, IMSA only version of that car, one whole separated version of that car that maintained the air-cooled two-valve engine and so forth, way past when all the Group C cars were, were water-cooled and, and four-valve and all that stuff. Just, you know, to, to be eligible for the American rules, it had to have a stock block style motor in it with a two-valve engine and maintain the air cooling and stuff on it. Some really great stuff, but like, you know, the sanctioning bodies at that period is very much kind of like what they still do today. They couldn't get together on the rules across the ocean. So, you know, there wasn't a lot of, you know, if you raced in Europe, you raced this kind of car, and you raced in America, you raced this kind of car, whereas there's been a lot of energy put towards racing the same car, you know, and for a little while, with like the American Le Mans series and some of the other stuff, the cars were quite close. They were still, you know, they had different BOP and so forth, but they were still very similar, similar cars, and this is the right idea, because this stuff is too expensive and too bespoke to have two completely different models of racing car when your whole business is based on selling six of them. Or eight of them, or something like that. I mean, it makes no sense, and yet the segregation stayed, you know, for a long period of time. And yeah, it's, you know, racing the Audi, racing the R8, we were able to race the same car overseas as we were here in the United States. But a substantially different specification, substantially different, you know, restrictor package, substantially different fuel cell size, different aerodynamics, different wing widths, you know, different bits and pieces. So yeah, it was the same car, but you had to have a huge package to convert it from one to the other. It wasn't like it was the same car, you know? There was still a lot of separation there, and for no real reason, you know? So anyway.

Outside of just rules?

Outside just the way the rules fell. And you know, you jump around here a little bit, but you know, the Audi, you know, it had a completely different power package and aerodynamic package on it in Europe than it did in the United States in 2004 and 2005, requiring us to have a completely separate series of bodywork and wings and fitted parts and engine pieces and all kinds of things that were not relatable.

Sure. Well, that's all very cheap to do, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really inexpensive. It doesn't take up much room in a truck.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Every single thing on those cars requires a new mold design to create, which is the meanest thing about that, like as a team.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, you know, working for Mr. Mirage, God bless him, one of the very greatest, you know, men I've ever worked for and or even known. I mean, just a fantastic guy. And he allowed us the level of preparation that gave us very strong opportunities. And, you know, when we went to when we would go to Le Mans, we would go with with eight sets of bodywork. So we had a set on the car and three in the background. Yep. Right. Or 2.75, as close as we could get to three complete sets of things. And this takes a lot of orchestration to keep all of this stuff in the same specification, to have all the weights recorded, to have all the graphics matched up, you know, and have them where they'll interconnect, where you can change the parts at random with each other.

I guess I never even thought about that, the graphics alone, oh my gosh.

Yeah.

And the different weight variations between different sets of bodywork.

Sure.

It's a big effect at 220, you know what I mean?

Yeah, sure. Well, that and legality-wise, Yeah. you know, if you qualify with your best stuff on, let's say, and the car's, you know, you're ballast in the car and you're targeting 902 kilo or 902 and a half, which we would only, you know, we would have the cars a little bit over minimum weight, but as little as possible, as little as safe, you know, safely possible. And, you know, say, for example, you have an accident or something happens and requires you to change a couple of pieces of bodywork together. You got to know what all those weights are. So your combination is not 899. So your combination is not 899 when you get to the end of the, get to the end and you get on the scales and get dequeued for a kilo, right, which has happened, not to us. It only happened to us once, but it does happen. And it's just a lot to keep track of. And we would, especially speaking about Le Mans preparation, we would, the noses on the car would all be first off, Mr. Mirage was a fanatic about the appearance of the cars. So he, we didn't wrap anything. Everything was painted.

Oh wow, okay.

And he really didn't even care. It wasn't even about the weight or anything else. It was the way it looked. And to him, no wrap at that point in time could match what well done paint was. So we painted the noses every two to three events. So if a nose got used more than one event, it got stripped and painted. Oh really? Yeah, and so he explained to me when we talked about the economics of this, he said, Bradsky, he called me Bradsky, he said, that's why we employ painters. So I want them painted. So if they're chipped or whatever, to a point where it didn't meet his standard, they were stripped and painted. And when we would do the Le Mans preparation, we would seal the noses, seal the carbon, add all of the graphics over the sealer, back mask all the graphics, paint the noses around the graphics, and then clear coat the entire thing so that the graphics were integrated into the finish. There's no bump, there's no ridge, there's no anything. And it was worth three or four K. Really? Top speed. Yeah. I mean, it was worth it. I mean, it was 120 hours per nose of work to get them like that. But that, you know, if it gives you 4K on the Mulsanne, that's 120 hours seems like a small price to pay to get that out of it. And so when we would go with eight noses prepared at that level, I mean, you can just imagine the cubic hours that went into preparing all this stuff. And it was a great time. He was a great guy to work for. And he just wanted to make sure that the time and the resources that we put into the cars were... We got something back from it. It wasn't just, you know, we could spend the money we needed to spend, but we needed to show some kind of result.

Right.

Yeah. Don't waste it. You know, we need to see something back. If we go on the shaker and spend a couple of days on the shaker rig, you know, we want to see a result, you know.

Well, the guy we had on just before this was talking about... They have an engine program they do for IMSA and Trans Am. And he said the amount of engineering and money they'll spend to get two or three horsepower is... It doesn't seem like a lot, but it makes a big difference in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been doing... I taught a little bit in the Motorsport Technical School when it started here in Indianapolis. And we'll probably do some more of that. And in the process of taking some of the students on some field trips, we were able to visit some IndyCar shops. Oh, cool. And in XTRAC and some other vendors. And looking at, you know, in the modern IndyCar world, you know, what's a substantive difference between two cars on the grid? It might be quarter percent, half a percent in efficiency someplace. That's it. That's what they're looking for. Dragging the wheel bearings, how little gear oil you can run in the gearbox, you know, how far loose you can make the tolerances on something to free it up without running into failure point. And that's where they're focusing so much. You know, you guys coming from the drag racing world and so forth, that, you know, that world ebbs and flows in fairly big swings on horsepower and so forth. But in, you know, in the IndyCar with a spec chassis and only two specs of engine to go by, there's not much headroom in there to find things. Right. And, you know, so they're really focusing on, you know, efficiency in the dampers and drag in the gearbox, drag in the uprights, you know, parasitic drag body wise and so forth. These are all the little nuances that actually give the cars some competitive difference between them. But it's, I'm telling you, now, in today's world, it's minimal. There's just not much that separates them. So it's cool. But, you know, you have to feel like that the imagination and the spirit of innovation and imagination is quite damped down in that world because there's just not much you can do, you know, with those cars. So you have to be so, so, you know, on the spec in order to be legal.

So let's go back a minute here. How did you end up at Audi in the first place? You don't use a computer from 2006. So why should you build? Why put thousands of dollars into your project only to be limited by a stock ECU that's over a decade old? Even some OEM calibrators are impressed with modern day functionality of standalones featuring advanced launch control, traction control, and of course, for those who aren't fans of unscheduled rapid disassembly, engine protection features. Go to ToonByShawn, shawn.com, look at some of the plug and play kits available and various Haltech goodies you can save 5% on using code Minnoxide. Not a bad idea to shoot him a message either. Link in description. Let's get back to the show.

Well, we... So, first off, in order to get even considered in those circles, this came from... I ran a race team in Cincinnati. It was called Roar. It was owned by a man named Jochen Roar, a German. And his company built dredging machines. And I worked for him, built cars for him, did some Cup cars and some GT2s and GT2 Evos, et cetera, et cetera. And ended up with a Gen 1 GT1 car.

A GT what car?

GT1 Porsche.

The Carrera GT1 from the 90s, right? H-patterns.

So in 1997, we imported that thing. It was actually from the Rook brothers in Leverkusen where they had it. And Jochen made a deal and we brought it into the United States. We imported it. We had a pretty good relationship with Porsche Motorsport at that point in time. And we were able to get a hold of a lot of information and stuff to help us. Anyway, we brought in this Porsche, painted at school, Hertz rental truck yellow, put a crazy graphics package on it. And it was driven by a very young, not very well known in the United States, Scotsman named Alan McNish. Yeah. Right?

What was it?

Alan McNish.

Alan McNish?

Right.

He's a legend. He's a legend.

He's a legend in Audi and in many racing circles. He's incredibly talented, very determined Scotsman. And he races fiery. He's got a fiery attitude in competition and so forth. And I mean, he's a winner. And so we ran this car in 1997 for him in second half of the season, and we won every race we entered with it. And so this got the attention of Dave Marash, man I mentioned before, in Florida, because he was coming up to buying a GT1 Porsche. So we ended up racing them head to head at Daytona, beating the South Florida team soundly. With a Black Sheep Squadron from Cincinnati. I mean, we're talking pretty Black Sheep operation here. But some very, very talented technicians that worked with me, that I actually worked at the Porsche dealership with, a fellow named Brian Copanz, is a gearbox specialist and a very talented mechanic. And a very young John Wright, who ended up having a team in IMSA, Wright Motorsports from Ohio as well, that they've done a lot with GT3 cars and so forth. Anyway, we were on this team. We beat the South Florida team, got some notoriety. We got a factory car the next year, which was a kind of an off-cast, beat up old car that they tore up at Spa somewhere. And they last minute shipped it to us and got it ready to go for Daytona. And me and Bobby Greene, I'm still do stuff with Bobby. In my little brick shop, Britt knows the brick shop. My compound's a weird collection of eight little mismatched buildings that were all built for something else, but we use them to do cars in. Well, the truck shop's pretty purposeful, but everything else is just kind of an adaption. Anyway, we built a lot of this GT1 in the brick shop. We took it to Daytona. We were successful again with it, and we were on our way. So, Roar finished up operations, and then I was hired by Champion to work for them, run their GT1 car. Now, at this point in time, and it's a long lead in to your question, at this point in time, Porsche was still considered that they were going to be in the P900 world, right? Okay. Just recently, and I'm talking about the last four or five months, there's been pictures emerge of what would have been the Porsche Le Mans car, the P900 car. So, this car was a top secret Skunk Works project, and, you know, I'm amazed that for over 20 years, nothing ever emerged about that car, because it was a running P900 car with a V10 engine in it. It looked a lot like the Audi, looked a lot like the R8, but they somehow managed to keep it completely closed and completely out of the press. Well, this car was developed, and the project was killed by Dr. Vietaking, and it fully looked like Porsche wasn't going to enter into the P900 world and go back to Le Mans, right? So working for a man who owned a Porsche dealership and so forth, this left us no avenue to go forward. So we built a car with Porsche's support, which was one of the worst race cars I've ever worked with. It was a Lola, was a B2K10 Lola with a Porsche engine in it that had the drivetrain basically from the GT198, the Le Mans winner in 1998. It had this horrible, synchronized sequential gearbox. It was a good gearbox, but it shifted incredibly slowly, was hard to handle, the guys hated it. And the car never had the power it should have had. It had a very bad rear weight bias. It had weird aerodynamics. Sorry, Lola guys, it's an ugly race car.

It's unbelievably bad looking.

It's an ugly race car. And it's one of those things that, it's one of those things that like, you look at it and you go, hmm, you know, I hope this works, because it's...

This? No, no, no.

That's a pretty Lola.

Oh, I can use my phone.

That's a sick, that's like a 600.

I was like, I didn't think it looked that bad, but maybe...

No, no, that one looks like a winner.

No, no, just type in, type in champion.

It would have been funny if you were just like, oh, disgusting, and then show that one.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, and you know, this was, this was a project we took very seriously. So we had the opportunity with a major manufacturer.

Crazy looking. Oh, okay, yeah. It's got lights in the middle of it.

Right.

It's very crazy.

It's very angular.

Yeah. And it looks like a Pontiac Solstice.

Yeah, yeah. That's just cruel. It is very angular. Oh yeah, that's it.

It's like Daytona. That's it. Looking on a good day.

Can't get Daytona.

Yeah, on a good day.

And we rubbed on this thing and we loved on this thing and gave it everything we could. And it showed little bits of potential.

Okay.

Here and there. But overall was not a good car.

Sure.

And it wasn't ever gonna be a winner. When you put it up, it literally raced against the first R8 in Sebring. The R8 LMP car. The R8 LMP car. And you're talking about different level here between these two cars. And they were both current flat bottom P900 cars. One with a huge future in front of it and one with no future at all in front of it. So we abandoned that and we went to Audi because of it, because there was no option for a Porsche. We wanted to race a Porsche, but there was no option there. And that's originally what put us in that situation.

Gotcha, understood.

And so we made a deal with Audi to buy the first, it was a four series LMP car. 405 was the chassis number for it. And it was a year old works car that had been driven by Capello and McNish and those guys and so forth. And we'd watched it in action and we knew what it was capable of. And so we ended up with this as a team. Now we were already a pretty well formulated team, but we had worked so hard in the development side of trying to develop a car that was really never going to go anywhere, that we weren't really completely where we needed to be sporting wise. Because first off, the car was a disaster. So we were usually worried about it just running, right? Seriously, just running and working and not misfiring and changing gears and not handling too atrociously and so forth. And this was the target. And then suddenly we get this car where if we followed the lead that Audi Sport was giving us and worked within the setup parameters and so forth, we had a very real chance of doing well with. So it completely, because now as a team, we weren't worried about the car. Now we had to worry, we'd never led a race before, right? We'd never been in the hunt in the final hour to be thinking about pit stop strategy for shortest fill time or when we were going to, how we were going to do it. So we were kind of learning this after we got the car because the car was no longer the weak link. We were. And so as a team, we advanced quite quickly and we nearly won the second race we went to. I mean, we got really, really close. And and we opened some eyes and people were like, you know, these these guys are actually going to be real.

Attention. Yeah.

Yeah. And Mr. M was very clever that he put me. He basically put me in the testing program with Audi as a gimme. So like he said, look, if my engineer, Brad can do anything on whatever the testing jobs are, put him in and I'll pay his salary. I'll pay his travel. I'll take care of him. But I want him inside the project. So he's learning on the development side. So I spent a lot of time in Germany and a lot of time on the test team. And I got to know the people in Ingolstadt, the development people, the engineers, designers and so forth. I was invited to their house for parties, went to Oktoberfest together. I mean, it was an immediate match because the philosophy from these people was so much in line with my own that I felt like I was home. I really did. I felt accepted, I felt heard, and I felt valued. And subsequently, I got put in a lot of the development stuff, and particularly tires. I did a lot of tire testing and did a lot of stint running and report writing based on tires and so forth. And this was a massive advantage to us because as we started to race the car ourselves, every time I went to Europe and came back, I brought another thumb drive full of charts and graphs and arrow maps and all the things that you could glean by face-to-face interaction and by saying, hey, can I have a copy of that? The kind of thing you'd never get in an email if you ask for it. But if you're there and you're looking over the shoulder of somebody and say, you know what, that's really interesting. Can I have a copy? Yeah. Boom, boom, boom. So our data stuff began to develop very, very quickly from that point of view. And it was just really smart business on Mr. M's behalf to put us in a relationship with those people to where by the time we were there the second year, we were already insiders.

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Yeah, they had no hesitation sharing stuff with us. They liked coming to race in the United States. We had a lot of real bangers of parties and celebrations and going out late at night, making relationships, staying out drunk in the bar till 3 o'clock in the morning with them. Sure.

Is that an invite, by the way, for tonight?

No, not tonight. But it really cemented a lot of things. And Audi Sport wasn't that big at that point in time. It was like 250 people. Oh, wow. Okay. And it was in an old kind of grocery store provisions building that was off the actual edge of the factory there in Ingolstadt. So it was in kind of this weird, this old building with terracotta tile floor in it and stuff. And it was an old provisions distribution building for a grocery store was what it was. And it had been converted into a workshop. And it was charming. You know what it lacked in sort of ergonomic convenience? It made up for by being cool. Right. And it was a big deal for us to get to go there. And so the first car that we built, we took an away team and went there. And it was Marcus Hazelgrove and my friend Bobby Green. And my good friend that's working in my workshop today, Greg Kiwi Martin. Our departed friend Keith Bransford, Gearbox builder, Keith the Big Kahuna. And so we went as this little group. And Greg Laird is our wiring guy. We went in this little group and the Germans saw that we had all of the specialties covered. We had a really strong number one guy. We had a really strong engine focused guy. A really strong gearbox guy, strong data guy. I was their engineer. And they saw that we had all these bases covered. And so the information really started to flow. And we became, I feel kind of favorites of the guys from the factory because we were kind and humble and appreciative. And being in the customer racing business on and off a couple of different times through my career, I can tell you for sure that some people, you can't help because they already know more than you do before you even start trying to explain anything to them.

It's a lot of people.

It's a lot of them. And it's usually those people I'd have very little time for because you know, they don't know s*** from apple butter and they won't listen to you. Right. And they won't listen to you and they know everything already. So why are we having this conversation? Sure. And so you give somebody, you sell somebody a GT3 car and you give them, when they ask you what it was, a reference setup, and you send them the spa setup sheet from the factory car that won the race last year and they tell you they don't think so. Right? They know better. That'll never work. Whatever. It's like, how do you know? You've never even run this car a lap on a race track and you're telling me what will and won't work. Anyway, I don't need to go into that. We were the opposite. A very common. We were the opposite in terms of the way, this is somewhat, I controlled the narrative by saying, we are gonna learn these people's way. We're gonna, if they do it, we're gonna do it. If that's their start process, if that's their measurement process, if that's the process that they use to get where they're going, that's what we're gonna do. We might diverge from it in our own way once we understand it completely, but until that point, what they do, we're gonna do. And I think it was refreshing for the people at Audi Sport to see that we were actually appreciated what we were being given and that we were gonna follow instructions and be good stewards of their, you know, because we're racing their car now. Those guys that built and developed that car, they don't want to see their car put in a bad light because the team's doing a crummy job, not listening, making their own parts, whatever it is. And we made sure that we were not those guys. And the Brits, they couldn't really do that. The other German teams really could do that. Not this Brit. Not this Brit. But the Brits. And I'm not picking on- One T in that one. I'm not really picking on my British colleagues because they're very, very talented and so on. But by their own actions, they did some things that were, you know, they got what they deserved. You know, when they did some of these things. So anyway, we really hit the ground running with the people in Ingleshead. And it was a very heady time. It was a very good time. There was a lot of development, money, R&D. There was a lot of things going on that were really pushing motorsport forward. I mean, you got to realize that, you know, the R8 LMP car was one of the first cars that had DI on the race engine.

Oh, okay.

I mean, this was considered revolutionary, right? So this is 2001, right? Before that, cars didn't have DI on them. People didn't know what DI was, you know? So, you know, knowledge about tuning them and building them and so forth was all very, very new and experimental.

Well, manufacturing and even the injectors themselves at that point, right?

Correct.

I mean, just the ability to control those kinds of pressures.

Yes.

Where it was unknown.

We just had Anderson Dick this morning on a show, CEO of FuelTech, and he was discussing controlling DI and all that with their ECU and all that. So, it's a fresh topic for us.

It is. And even though now, you know, every production car, you know, you buy a Kia Sophia, it's got a direct-injected engine in it now. So, it's everywhere.

Yes.

But in those days, it was considered to be really an eye-opening thing. And when we did the percentages, when we did the efficiency percentages based on Le Mans, it was, I won't say how many percent, but it was north of 10, right? Wow. Compared to a port-injected engine.

Yeah.

It's another lap, if not two, out of the same amount of fuel.

Wow.

And so it was a big departure and it was a huge advantage. And it was an advantage that Audi really went for under the superb guidance of the company of Mr. Buretsky's department, the engine department there, one of the best engine departments ever. And they were able to make it work and make it work in a way that was, that was a big, big advantage. And the rest of the world hadn't really caught up with all this yet. The rules makers didn't really realize how much of a difference this DI thing is going to make and how much they're going to have to basically handicap the cars and change the fuel levels and stuff in them to get them to be right. And I don't know if you guys remember in sports cars, there was a Cadillac P900 car. It was based on what they called, it wasn't really a North Star engine. It was a McLaren based engine and so forth. But there was a Cadillac that was a quite good, quite good car. There were some early ones that were kind of ugly, square chunky looking double hoop things. And then there was some pretty good looking, you know, the Cadillac actually had a pretty good LMP project and actually had some real drivers. JJ Leto drove one and so forth. But they never, even though it was GM Powertrain, they didn't, they never had a DI engine.

We're in the middle of a podcast, but these guys are Autobahn members. So yeah.

They never had a DI engine for this car. And so they left that 10% of the fuel on the table and didn't win anything with it. Not that it wasn't a decent car, it just couldn't compete with the Audi that could run that much farther.

Yeah.

Is that pretty much standard now, probably?

The DI?

Yeah.

Oh yeah. 100%. 100%.

It sounds like somebody fell down the stairs.

I know.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And I mean, it's a, you know, it's the system is so adaptable and the drivability is so good, you know, with it, that there's no reason to not have it. And, you know, just to give a little statistic here, when we started running the DI engines in the five and the six series Audi LMP car starting in 2001, 2002, we could do a 90 liters, we could do 13, 13 laps. Now, the 13th one was really based on a decent behavior of the driver and saving a little fuel in a couple spots to get there, but if they would do that and save a little bit of fuel that we could get 13 laps on 90 liters. Now, fast forward, let's say that's 2002. You fast forward that to 2015 with the R18, with the 3.7 liter TDI diesel and the hybrid drive and you're doing 13 laps on 54 liters, right?

Almost half, almost half the amount of fuel.

Right. So that's, just that alone is incredible, the amount of progress that we made.

That's just one efficiency, it doesn't even include the rest of the car.

Doesn't include doing the same lap time, you know, having a lap time, you know, pocket of 3.18, 3.20, something like that, three minute 20 or so around Le Mans and being able to do that 13 times on, you know, 55 liters of fuel. It's a big departure from doing the exact same time and distance on 90 liters of fuel. And it really was cool. You know, what we were doing there, we were improving, we were keeping the speed and so forth and improving the efficiency at every step. And it was fun to be part of.

Can you do me a favor? What was your first experience at Le Mans? What did that feel like? What did that look like? What was it? Was it pleasant?

No, no, not at all. Sure. I had had some exposure to it in the 90s, but didn't really, never worked for anybody that was... Even going back to when I worked at Spice, there were some attempts to go there and to... Back then, you had to go and test and qualify and race in, and we had a car at one point in time that we tried to do that with and failed. Sure. So made the effort, didn't make it. So that's an experience in and of itself. But it's gonna be 2001 with the first R8 with Champion, which was a really first legitimate me in charge with the clipboard and trying to figure out all the nuances of this place. And it wasn't pleasant. No, it was us being compared to, I mean, automatically as Americans in a European, you know, European kind of culture over there, we don't know anything. Just because we don't know anything, they... Sure. Yeah. Fact is we really didn't know very much. We knew how to run the car and so forth, but we didn't really understand the nuance of the track and we didn't understand the nuance of dealing with the French and the particular procedures about the way things happen there. So we learned really fast, but it was, that was really the first valid experience is 2000 or 2001. Okay. And we entered in that, we did very well in that race, but we also ended up in the gravel trap and man driving the car didn't follow the getting out of the gravel protocol.

What's the protocol? Just curious.

Make sure you're in first gear.

Just to not spin it too hard.

Before you smoke the clutch, trying to get out of there in third gear. So that was one area where the, one area where the Audi, the Audi had a very still by today's standards, a pretty diminutive carbon clutch and an extremely good clutch. But the design philosophy of this clutch was to race Le Mans with it. And that means that probably launched out of the pit lane, including qualifying and everything else, 40 times, 45 times. And that was all it was meant to do. Sure. 40 cycles. Get the car going that many times. And so it was fairly small and fairly delicate in those terms. And I mean, you couldn't break it by running the car hard. It was impossible. It would last forever. But abusage, riding it, slipping it in the wrong gear, and it's over like immediately. Like immediately.

Oh, really?

So we ended up in the gravel trap, and he managed to get out of the gravel trap in third gear. And when the wheels hit the pavement and got some traction, it slipped the clutch, and that was it. The car lost all its drive, and we couldn't make it back to the pit lane.

Damn.

And that was our first experience. That was about eight hours in.

Sure.

And it didn't happen to us again.

So what was your first happy experience?

First happy experience was actually, was actually at the pretest for that first race.

Okay.

Coming away from it, splitting the factory cars with our qualifying time. With what? With our qualifying time, split the factory cars. We were P2 at the end of the pretest thing, which was a huge eye-opener because we were ahead of one of the factory, the Yost cars behind us. And kind of a lot of eyebrows went up like, wow, these guys are actually pretty fast.

And that's a huge deal just for context and the listeners. I mean, if you're shown up as an American privateer team into what would be the German factory team's backyard, right? You know, essentially you assume they're prepping their car better, they have a better driver lineup, et cetera, et cetera, better resources as the factory. But to fly over the ocean with shipping containers with all your equipment, go to Le Mans as a single car team, single car team and run right in between both of those cars, that is like, we're on it, we're on it, we're in there, we're in the window.

We knew we were on the setup and so forth. And I like my style of setting up a car and so forth. I like fast racetracks. I don't like little twisty bull rings and little low down force like Laguna Seca. Everybody loves Laguna Seca, but I don't. I mean, it's a cool area and so forth. Everything about it's great, but you know, it's 140 mile an hour racetrack. Sure. You know, when you get to the end of it, it's a low grip, slippery, low speed racetrack. Yep. And that's not really what I like. I like places like Spa, like Road America, you know, where the car gets in high gear and it pulls for 10 seconds, you know, places where the, you know, I like places where you can run lighter arrow and so forth and play with the balance of the car by lightening the arrow on it and really getting it to free up and show top speed and so forth. I love top speed racetracks, places that are fast. So I really, right away, you know, because Le Mans, there's so many corners and everything, you can't really tailor a car for somebody for a particular, you know, it has to be good through the Porsche corners. It has to be good on the, you know, the exit of Mulsanne has to be good in the Indy and stuff. And those are the, really the trends that you look for and the top speed, because you can't tune it for every corner. It's just, there's too many. And so you try to tune it for these places that are in particular challenges for the car. And, and I love that. And you know, I love it when they go 325K. I mean, that's, you know, it's awesome. You know, I always, I always liked it. And I like tuning the car to get, to get that additional top speed out of it and so forth.

So touch on tuning a car for, for a weekend, right? What does your job consist of, right? Because as an engineer, right? So can you just kind of break down what a normal, like let's say a test day, what does that look like?

Well, depends on what you're, depends on what you're there to do. I mean, if you're there to develop something for a next event, you're going to have something that you're going to focus on. Say you're going to race at a street course, you know, where there's a lot of manhole covers and different types of pavement and stuff like that. You're going to work on a setup that has a lot of, where the suspension is very lively and so forth. Your job as an engineer is one, is first to pick the setup that you want to start with, right? And that's really critical and that's where keeping good notes and understanding where you're going is important. It's always good if you have a last year's report, read it because there's going to be a nugget in there that you're going to forget. And it's something that's going to pop up that you swear you'd remember. But when you read your own report, you're like, oh, I wrote this and I still didn't remember that. And so to pick the right base setup to start with and to really understand your tires, going into it. What you're hoping to accomplish with the tire, which type of spec you're going to use, where you're going to start with your pressures and work on in the initial phases of the test day of the run to work on establishing a good baseline. And by that, I mean the proper tire pressure. Make sure you don't adjust anything on the car until the tires are hot and you really understand what you're doing. A lot of people have a tendency to start clicking on things and moving things around before they get there, before they get to that point and you just end up chasing your tail. I learned from a very, very clever engineer named Joe Hausner, who was a development engineer at Audi. And he basically wouldn't do anything until the drivers had really driven the car, got the pressures up and got the pressures in the right window and so forth. And then representative lap time and comments and so forth, he would consider changing something. But up to that point, they would say, I got this just absolutely blinded cross arm understeer and so forth. He's like, yep, okay, you know, keep going. It didn't register to him. I mean, it did, but he didn't react to it. And I learned to kind of slow my reactions down very similar to the way he did and make sure.

Make it less impulsive?

Yeah, be less impulsive and to try to get the bedrock things right, right? Try to get the bedrock things right. You're not hitting the ground too hard, you know, you're not, you're not leaping off of curbs in a way that's uncontrollable. And to get the tire pressures in the window and then start looking at the nuance of the way the shocks are working or whatever. And, you know, I'm still very much of a throwback and now quite an anachronism in the race engineering world because when I, even working with the Audi, the Audi had a terrible data system on it. It's virtually non-existent. It was based on a laboratory software. It was a great laboratory software but wasn't very usable in the field. And it had the data logger held these big giant data cards called PCMCIA cards. I don't know if you've ever seen one. It's about the size of a playing card and about, I don't know, two, three millimeters thick, has its own battery in it and so forth and holds a remarkably small amount of data, right? And only a few channels and very little of those channels in terms of, so depending on the size of the racetrack and the sample rate, it could be two to three laps of information and that was it. So it wasn't like you could sit there and look at a big trend, a scatter graph of what happened over 25 laps, you know, lay it all out and print it and whatever. You had to use these little snippets of things. And we still used, you know, we painted the underfloor, you know, the skid blocks with, you know, with paint, see how hard they're hitting and where. Oh, sure. And so forth. And so because the car was very kind of tactile from that point of view and didn't have a really great data system, it, in the beginning, it really matched my kind of style setting up sports racers and things, you know, in the old days with no data system. So you talk to the driver, you looked at the zip ties on the shock rods and a couple other things and skid blocks and you made some decisions based on that. And so it, the R8 and I kind of suited each other, you know, in that respect and the data system wasn't that good. So we ended up just kind of using the data system to sort of validate our feelings.

Yeah, yeah.

Instead of leading the conversation, it was more of a validation process. And then our engineer at the time, Marcus Hazelgrove. Do you know Marcus?

Yeah, he worked at another championship in the US after he was done with Audi. Yeah, I do.

Marcus, nice guy. Marcus is a genius. We're still close friends and so forth. Well, he was able to write some channels to use Excel to break down a lot of the data on the car and create some graphs that were actually sensible to help us and in particular histograms. So he was able to come up with a math channel that could interpret all the histogram information through this primitive data set and then make it viewable and comparable using an Excel program because he's really, really strong with Excel, right? And so he literally made histograms and we would look for a certain curve, certain kind of bell curve for the histogram. And what we discovered was when we got the shape the right way, that's where the grip was.

Okay.

So we started to use those tools to find the grip. We could get close with the driver comment and then we could home in on it looking at the histograms. And we had several different styles of histograms, some with, I think, six or eight or ten bends, and some with two bends, bump, rebound.

Okay.

Right.

Sure.

And you can see the percentage of time the car is in both.

That is incredibly valuable at this point.

Very, very valuable and very, very elemental.

Yeah.

But what goes up has to come down, right, in terms of the suspension.

Oh, sure.

Yeah. Right. So, you know, ultimately everything has to return to its zero position at some point. And so we use these tools, you know, very, you know, a lot. And again, Marcus was super critical to that operation. And he even impressed the people at Audi. They were like, I can't believe this guy can pull this stuff out of the information because they're paying full time staff people all the time to develop, you know, algorithms to look for things and so forth. And here comes this this British kid from a customer team, not kid, but young British guy from a customer team that develops this absolutely genius channel that allowed us to look for where the grip was. And it was a valuable tool. It really worked very, very well. And it helped us. It helped us find the sweet spot in the cars. And our cars were usually quite fast, you know, because we again paid attention to the bedrock details and the base setup stuff and then tuned it with with real knowledge. Sure.

When you talk about tires a little bit earlier too. So, you know, I'm sure a lot of goes into figuring out what to use. Are you changing tire compounds per track at all? Do you have, is there a brand that you guys are using that you found that you really liked?

Well, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to race in sports cars, you got to run Michelin's. I concur. Because it's just, there's a reason. The products are just incredible. And the engineering that goes into the products and the development that goes into the products, it takes a while to really understand the depth of how strong this company is, because of the chemistry and the supply chain materials, the consistency. I mean, it's just, what can I say? I mean, yeah, we would use different, we would, you know, in the early days, we would have three or four choices of construction slash compound with the hot weather and, you know, medium and soft, and then a couple of different construction profiles that we particularly liked or whatever. And this was usually developed at a early season test. And, you know, we would do a lot of reference testing, which would be basically five lap performance runs in between long runs. So what we would do is we would basically, we would get a good setup on the car, get the car handling well and riding the bumps well, not hitting the ground to get the aero balance, you know, where it needs to be. And then we wouldn't change the car except for the tire. And then we would, we would cycle all these different aspects of tires through and look at what that, what their influence on the car was based on that. And it's very, very, very illuminating. It really is. And, and Michelin had a pretty stratified way that we went about it. And in a lot of times the tires were kind of unknown to the driver and in some ways unknown to the engineer as well. So that we would, you know, it's just tight, you know, test set six in, you know, here we go.

Right.

And do five lap performance run. We would match the, the fuel load in the car. And so that we could literally change nothing about the car except for the tires.

Okay.

And then look at what the influence was there. Repeating your reference run, your reference performance run, every fourth or fifth run. So say, for example, you have a, you know, just pick one out. We have an M compound that's your, that's your baseline. That's your reference. It's kind of like your control and experimental group, you know, in a scientific experiment. So your control is going to be this tire. And every fourth or fifth run throughout the day, you're going to do another five lap performance run on that tire. So you're going to say, you know, reference run, experiment, experiment, experiment, reference, reference, et cetera. And that way you see as track conditions change, atmospheric, ground temperature, all this other stuff changes, you see an influence on the reference and therefore the influence on the experimental group. And we would, you know, the guys would come in, stop in the pit lane and we would have a small clipboard that would be for their general knowledge, you know, understeer, oversteer, bump compliance, curbs, et cetera, et cetera. And just a very, very short basic, like plus minus thing, time of day, next set. So again, do it over and over and over. And then at the end of the day, you would do a summary and you would basically give the drivers the opportunity to speak to each run a bit more in depth. When they're in the zone and they're in the car and the visor's up, you just want to bang the next set on and send them, right? You don't want too much sitting around talking, letting the car cool off. You know, you want to go, you want to hit it, hit it and hit it and hit it. And then there's time to talk about all the different shots that they took, you know, and you know, what used to amaze me, especially like people like Tom Christiansen and and JJ Leto and Alan McNish and so forth, these really high pro guys that you could go. They might drive, you know, 15 sets of tires or 20 sets of tires in a day. At the end of the day in the debrief, they could pretty much tell you, yeah, I missed the apex on 13 on middle of that run, you know, I clipped the curb too hard, you know, I did this and that. It's like a pro golfer breaking down the scorecard. Sure, yeah. The shots.

It's a big separator there.

Yeah. The big separator. The shots that they hit fat or whatever, you know, they misjudged use the wrong club or whatever. You know, just like in any other pro athlete, these guys could recall those laps and say, no, they don't know the number, but they'll tell you, man, partway through that run, I, you know, I made a mistake here, I got two wheels in the dirt, et cetera, et cetera. And it was this testing protocol was really, really effective. And we would usually come out of each test with a direction of where we were gonna go with the next phase of tire. Sure, yep. And, and it gave us a pretty big advantage as a team too, because as we ran the different constructions very early, we could get a pretty good idea on what to do with spring rate and damping and so forth, by looking at the construction of the tire and the way the tire behaved, you know, on the, on the racetrack. And I loved it. I loved doing the testing. I loved writing the reports from it. I got quite good at doing the analysis of the tire. Basically, you know, they used to joke me about having a trained thumbnail, you know, because, you know, I'd push my thumb into them and you can feel the construction. You can feel the compound. You can feel the way the cords are wrapped. I mean, I don't know exactly what I'm feeling, but I know, you know, that I-

Like trying to pick an avocado out at the grocery store?

Yeah.

Yeah. I've never seen him pick a bad one out.

But I got pretty good at understanding what I was looking at. You know, being able to see traction stress, you know, being able to figure out, you know, braking stress. I mean, you can look at different aspects of the way that the tire looks, the way the chemicals are migrating in it, just even the color, the color on the surface.

Oh wow.

And the amount of glisten, you know, how much solvent entrapment is in there, how much is coming out. I mean, you can really understand a lot more about the tire if you spend a lot of time kind of rubbing it between your fingers and smelling it and kind of understanding.

You know, Matthew McConaughey.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, it really is. And it's kind of an intangible skill that I don't think they're ever going to develop a machine to be able to do it.

Right.

When you see it and when you see a tire that is in good aspect, as you would describe in a Michelin report, it's obvious, yet I can't explain to you really what it is. Right.

It's true. He's taught me a lot about this stuff.

It's tough. And you just got to learn to kind of trust your instincts.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of it there. And the one great knock-on effect to this knowledge is what it can give you when you go to the take-off rack where the tires are all getting changed and you look at what your competitors are doing.

Yeah.

I'll show you.

And you're like, well, we're not going to have to worry about these guys. Have you seen the amount of garbage on their front tires? You know, they got graining from the center line. They got traction stress. They got ABS problems. They got flat spots. You know, they've got rim walk migration. You see all this stuff and you see who's really in trouble and who's hitting the ball, you know, right, and doing a good job with it. And all that information is just sitting there on those tire trolleys for you to look at. And if you have a good idea of what you're looking at, there's a lot of info there. Sure.

I can attest.

Yeah.

I did a race this year where, well, I've done a lot of races this year, but one of them, I won't say which one because I like these guys, but I looked at my tires. I guess I'm not really going to say how. BK is going to know how. He taught me how. But you can know when you're starting too low on pressure comparatively to other sets. And I was like, yeah, you know, I'd probably say it's about two pounds low. You know, I gave it a number. I was confident enough to give it a number. And yeah, it was two pounds low. I knew the entire time though. Like you knew that the tire had started from a lower pressure just based on what it visibly looked like after the session. The wear was different. And it was, if you know what you're looking at, you're like, yeah, I mean, it's like five seconds.

You can see it. It's pretty obvious. Yeah, it's pretty obvious. And like, you know, things like traction stress and like, you know, braking stress and so forth, they're quite obvious because you can see, you know, the way that the way that I'm sure anybody, any of the tire engineers that are going to listen to this, are going to say, listen to this b******* this guy's saying. But it's true.

We get a lot of tire engineers on the show.

It's true. You can see the migration of the compound and you can see when, you know, it was a big, big revelation in tires. And I'll probably get the innovator of this completely wrong, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it anyway. Bridgestone, back in the 90s, developed a kind of a long link carbon molecule.

Okay.

And they were credited for really developing it. And what this allowed was the molecules inside the rubber and the compound was we were able to get longer molecular linkages, right? Longer chains of molecules hooked together. And this gave tire a lot more strength and a lot more ability to absorb abuse and other things. And of course, this has been used, you know, all across the tire world now. And is, you know, completely part of it. But when you look at it on a racetrack level, on a tactile level, you can see when you're getting, when the tire is getting ripped apart, when it's getting stretched and stressed and torn, you know, it has a different look to it. And that's what you learn to look for. And, you know, traction stress is usually pretty obvious. You can see all the, you know, all the surface all bent over one way. You know, graining or cold graining is usually identified with a center line that develops in the tire, which is the overlapping part where the two, the two plies are laid over each other before the tire is cooked. And that line will emerge. You see that in Formula One and stuff too, when you can see the front tires on the cars, when sometimes the commentators talk about it in their graining.

All the time, over the radio and all that. Like you mentioned earlier, it's like, oh, we don't have to worry about this guy. Like, they'll always be like, for example, Lando's Norris' front tires.

You see his tires are all grained up and he's got way more steering angle. He's breaking the grip all the time. He's in trouble, right? He's in trouble and he's just holding on, waiting for the next pit stop to try to get the, you know.

Just praying to make it.

Yeah, trying to make it. And, you know, Formula cars are an advantage because you can see the tires.

Oh, sure.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because you can see them in a really astute driver and so forth can kind of understand when that's going on and when it isn't. In sports cars, it's a little bit more difficult.

Sure.

And you have to know what it feels like when they're graining and so forth. Then you have to know what to do at that point in time. The other thing that's really big in sports cars, talking about tires is for the drivers, if they need they almost all of them will have some sort of process that they go through to clean them.

Okay.

Right. To basically scrub the excess rubber, pick up rubber off of them. And this will usually be a spot on a racetrack somewhere where they actually break the grip on purpose, where they actually meet the mechanical limit and then break it so that they slide. And to try to scrub the pickup off of them and clean them up. And guys that are really astute in sports cars are good at doing this. And they're good at knowing when they need to do it and how to do it. And they usually figure this out during the practice days and so forth, where there's a spot where they can safely charge a corner and break the grip and kind of grind on the front tires and clean them up. And like racing at Road Atlanta, Petite Lamar, Turn 5, the uphill left-hander with a soft curb there, you know. Yeah. So you go down through the S's and when you start up the hill, when you start up and you kink left there, there's a little low curb. It's not a gator back curb, it's a little low curb there. And it's got a different surface because it's a transition for the driving school there and it's real rough and porous. And it's a safe spot where you can charge that corner and break the grip on the car. And you're not really in danger of flying off the racetrack or hitting anything. And even if you go over that little curb, it's a gentle curb. It doesn't hurt anything. And once every five laps, if you run in by yourself, charge that corner and grind the fronts up a little bit. And then the charge comes back, you know, the livens it up, the livens it up because there aren't a lot of right.

There aren't a lot of left hand corners at Road Atlantis. You don't really get the right front to flare up on temp very much. So if it like is struggling on temperature, even under green flag and you purposely scrub through five, you can kind of wake up the whole car sometimes.

Right.

OK.

And the guys that are really that are really astute at doing this, they will figure out a spot in any racetrack, you know, that this is a place I can pull this off. They also look for, you know, hunting spots, you know, oddball places to overtake by not running the conventional line, by being missing in the mirrors to make the guy in front of you look for you. And then all of a sudden you come whizzing in from an off-shoot angle, you know, because you've way run the corner out and squared it off or done something different. And so the guys that are really good, the guys that I worked with especially, would find somewhere that this is a spot where they can set somebody up if they need to. And that's fun, you know, it's fun knowing what that is and what they might do. And I'm gonna talk about a particular pass, and this will make Alan mad probably and JJ happy. These two guys were racing Hammer and Tong at the 2005 Sebring 12 Hour. I mean, Hammer and Tong. I mean, they were teammates, but there was no love lost between them in terms of-

That's your first competitor every single time.

In terms of competition, there was absolutely knife in the teeth every lap, you know, coming. And so just about dusk, JJ was behind, was behind Alan, and he'd been having a run at Alan for several laps and wasn't able to get it done. Alan is an incredibly hard man to pass. I mean, he just is. I mean, even if he's not faster than you, he's going to make you work really, really hard to get by him. Not dirty, but just difficult.

Yeah, both of these drivers are former Formula One drivers as well at this point, so they're dialed in fast.

So I don't know if you guys know Sebring, but there's a big long run down the back straight between 16 and 17. And 17 is an incredibly bumpy, double turn-in corner that goes under the bridge there with a couple of huge heaves in it and stuff. It's a tough corner. Car rides hard there, you got to have it in the right spot, and you got to be prepared to catch it, because it's going to bounce and move around and so forth. So JJ had been trying him a couple of apps, he's sort of conventional means, and he got a good run on him coming off of 16, and he went way out to the farthest extreme of the track, where Alan told me later he thought he'd spun or crashed because he didn't see him in the mirror. And he went all the way down on the very outside of the track limit, the farthest away from the walls he could get. And Alan turned in and made the corner in a conventional way and JJ drove an enormous arc, and went clear down into the runoff area around 17, and came and swooped in in front of him just coming off of 17, and missed him by about three feet, chopped across his bow, and ended up in front of him. It scared Alan, shocked him.

Yeah, naturally.

It's like he wasn't looking for him to show up there, and suddenly there's this, you know, there's this R8 in front of him that just, he literally wasn't in a position to be able to clock where he was coming from, because he was such a weird line, and it was caught on the, from the helicopter.

Yeah.

And you could see the big, long radius, and then the, the-

That is a crazy pass to make right there.

It was a crazy pass to make, and he made it, made it stick.

I had to find that footage after this immediately.

Yeah, I haven't seen this pass either. He's got my thoughts going.

He made it and made it stick, and, you know, and got down the road from him a little bit, and those guys were, they were, those cars were fun to race with those, with those level of drivers, because the car was so good by that point in time. By 2005, we'd been running that same car for five years, that same general car. We did a couple different versions, but the R8 in general was, you know, a car we were very familiar with as a team, and we could get it just right. And the 2002 version of car with the ride height control and the DI engine and stuff was a weapon. It really was a remarkable race car, and still is.

Yeah, still is.

I think, so first of all, I want to point out, this is a great tragedy of how short this podcast is. Even at an hour and a half, I think we could talk another 10 hours here.

I told you, I told you.

I told you we would. I knew you weren't kidding, but first of all, I'm gonna make Ohio as soon as humanly possible, because there absolutely needs to be a part two, three, four and five to this.

Okay.

Yeah, you guys gotta come see his shop.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, I do have to do the usual three. I know we can wrap this up, but this is absolutely phenomenal. I feel like we have to get the snow off the top of the top layer.

We haven't even got to diesel yet.

No.

But you know what? I can really appreciate the level of detail in all the stories you told today. So that was awesome.

Yeah.

But let's do our closing remarks and then we'll close it up.

Sure. So you want me to pop the question?

Yes.

All right.

Let's do it.

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

Track car being any kind of track you want. A racing car?

Sure. Wow.

I mean, for me, there's anybody that knows me is going to say it's an R8 LMP car. The 2002 version.

I mean, like the we've just been talking about for an hour and a half. Yeah.

Yeah.

I had to look it up, by the way. I don't follow that stuff very much.

I had to look up.

I had a researcher between the two of us.

Yeah.

Well, and I know we got to wrap this up, but I talked to just a little bit ago about ugly race cars.

Sure. Yeah.

And it's funny that through history, or at least through my history, when I come across race cars that are ugly, they normally are not very good cars.

Yeah. Sure.

But when they're beautiful, they usually are. Yeah. Now, I don't know what beauty's got to do with the way they perform.

They just took like a little extra step, right? It doesn't look like somebody just threw it together and yeah, they put some thought into it.

And I'll tell you guys, the first time I saw the Generation 4 R8 LMP, which is the 2000 version, I saw it in Engelstadt in the measurement room. And you can't see it now because I'm wearing a blazer and a long sleeve shirt. But I still get goose bumps when I talk about this. But I went in there and they pulled the plastic curtain back, the welder's curtain back, and it was sitting there on the ground. And it's about this high, right? It was all in black, in non-reflective black, wind tunnel black. And it was the baddest looking mother I had ever seen. And I was like, holy cow, look at this race car. And you just knew it from the jump. You're like, this thing, the way it looked, and just when you walked around it, you were rewarded with the proportions. And just every detail you looked at just seemed like it was so well thought out, it had always been there, right? And so anything in your mind that you can imagine in terms of perfection is what it looked like. Okay. And I still love them. And many, many, many days, closing up Champion Racing in the old days, being the last guy out of the shop and turning all the lights off and stuff. And I loved it when the cars were done before they were on the trucks. They were all done and aligned and graphicked and polished and sitting there on the ground and in their work stalls and turning the lights off and just having the security lights on at night and just looking at them and being like, good night, ladies. We're going to go make a big deal out of this.

And these cars are like...

They're very, very special cars. And they always have been. So I know that's a long answer to number one. Number two is a daily driver.

Yeah.

I'm a 911 guy. Okay. I love 911s. All years, all types. All right. I really, really like... I really am very traditionalist. So I really like air-cooled. And I would love to have a Carrera S, which is a wide-body, wide-body 993.

Okay.

So it's a turbo-bodied 993 without the turbo engine in it.

That's an uncommon answer.

Did we have one of those at Sonderwerks when we were there? There was a wide-body one there, wasn't there? No. No, that was a different answer.

The Carrera S is quite possibly the sexiest series of shapes of that, I think, ever. 997 is pretty damn sexy, too. They all are. But that 993 wide by the Carrera S, so if anybody wants to buy me one, I'll be happy to drive it.

I'll take the Turbo S. Yeah. I'll take the Carrera S.

I don't even need a turbo. I don't even need a turbo. Just a 993, just an air-cooled. Sure. I'd like to have one with a manual gearbox. Don't have to have, but I'd like to have one with a manual gearbox.

So, it's a little shifting.

Yeah. I have four Porsches now.

Okay.

One 911 and various other ones, but I'm a big fan. I love 911s. So, it's a daily driver, something like that is very special to me, no matter even if it's an old one.

It's kind of funny that I think about this all the time. They kind of, so they got that unique design to them, right? And it's been their look since forever, and still now, and nobody's really like copied it or anything.

It's because it doesn't make sense.

Right, kind of, right.

It's because it really doesn't make sense when you look at it in terms of development and so forth. Initially, yes, but after a while, no. And yet, it's so much a part of its identity that it would not be what it is if you changed it. Like I'm not trying to pick on Corvette, but I love the new Corvette, the mid-engine one. It's cool, but it looks like everybody else's car, right? And I really liked them when they were front center engine. Like a C7 with a 427 in it and stuff. That's a hot rod man. That's a cool, very capable, bullet-fast, neat car. Sure. It's unique. And it's a uniquely American, the way it sounds, the way it looks, the engines in the front middle of it, doesn't make a lot of sense and so forth. That's what I liked. I thought that, and even though I'm sure the new car is better in every respect.

It's freaking fast.

I know it is. I know it is. I know it is, but part of its identity is missing. When you get to be my age, that matters. You know what I mean? The tradition side of it matters. And I don't know, I just liked them when they were still kind of America. Hell yeah. You know, and they started to look like an NSX, which is obviously, you know, it's like all the street cars. They all look like raindrops now. So I mean, okay, I get it. That's where everybody's going. But I loved it when it had a kind of a unique thing. So what was the third car?

Show car, show car. Yep.

He's got a show.

What are we showing?

You take somebody to the ice cream shop.

Yeah. Oh, just a just a fun, just a fun show car.

Right.

Yeah. You go to a car show, you pull out your lawn chair and you sit there.

The Harvester tractor.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, I have you guys will see if you come out and visit me. Yeah, I have 42 cars.

Somebody told you, right?

I am not proud of that. And I'm trying to work on minimizing it. OK. And so forth. I love car a lot. I love everything about cars. Most things, but I love car history. And I love looking at the history of societies, countries, peoples through the lenses of the cars that they drove, what they built and what they had available to them. And I really, as a historical marker, I really like stuff from the 60s.

OK.

And from the 50s even, I love big American lead sleds. I have several Cadillacs.

Like the space race era.

Yeah. I love stuff like that.

That's cool.

So it's like a showy car. It would probably be some kind of, you know, something completely impractical and just odd.

Yeah.

You know, like a, you know, like a 50s Pontiac convertible or something really odd.

I think of like an Edsel.

Yeah. Like an Edsel or like a Delta 88 or something. Not a not a Tri-Five Chevy, you know, and something. Maybe a big Lincoln. I love early Lincolns. Yeah. I drive a Lincoln now and I love I love early Lincolns because some of them are just incredibly bizarre the way that they're made and so forth. And so probably a probably big cruiser, big American cruiser of some kind, big lead sled of some kind. I have a personal car by my my have a 68 Cadillac. I call Buttercup and Buttercup. It looks like a stick of butter and it's literally the color of butter. It's very appropriately appropriately named that. And and I dream about having the money to put air ride and do a couple of things to this car, but otherwise leave it just the way it is.

Yeah, sure.

Right. Because I love that the one I like. That's one of my very favorites.

Is the name was Buttercup Buttercup Buttercup.

Buttercup is a 68 Sedan DeVille Cadillac. OK, the 472 engine in it. It's yellow top comes down on. Now it's four door hardtop. Yeah. No pillar. It's a very cool car. Yeah, it's no pillar. And it's got an avocado interior in it. OK, which is really odd. Really cool. It's very cool, but it's very odd. And that's what I love about it. You know, I just love that it's such a different thing. Very. And and I love the drivetrain. I love that 472 motor and that long shaft. Hydromatic. Awesome. Sure. Awesome. Yeah. I also have a drag car. I have a drag race car. It's awesome. It's also a 66 Malibu station wagon. That's that's an old drag car. It's got actually got an NHRA cage number in it from 1974. So it's been a drag car a long time. It's got a 545 big block in it and a trans break. And, you know, 16 inch rear tires and stuff. It's fun. It's really fun. It's scary. It's kind of it's kind of one of those old, crazy, scary cars with plexiglass windows and sure, you know, and it shakes and rattles a lot and is fast as hell. It's fun to drive. It's front wheels off the ground. Right. Launch.

Just being there, we can do a whole other episode just on the car collection.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, we will 100 percent begin back together.

Yeah, I have to.

But you have to answer yours as well. Even though you make it.

Well, that's OK. I like listening to the speed. Kettler. I might top through the last time where I think it was a Konigsegg. No, track car. I think I did say I said the art. You know, I said it was a 2016 R18, like the last chassis that they made a black one.

Sure.

That was my track car the last time.

So I guess five.

Yeah. The very last one they made thin nose.

Yeah.

OK. So are you sticking with that track car?

Yeah. No, I think I got to change because I got to change them all.

You get an opportunity now, so yeah.

I don't know, for a race car wise. Yeah, race car. I'd say like the Aston Martin, the Valkyrie, GTP car. It's pretty cool with the V12. Yeah. The V12 is cool.

By the way, I love that car too. Yeah. Just because it's so pure.

Yeah. No, no hybrid.

Everything about it is pure.

It's pure.

Yeah.

And I love that.

All right. I had to ask the question. Did you read Adrian Newey's book?

No.

No? Okay. It's a rare instance.

I would love to. Sure. I appreciate the man very much. I appreciate his old school techniques.

Sure.

His non-computerized.

Yeah.

I know. Just ride on a board.

It shows that engineering can be, I've used to talk to my young guys on the team and I said, if you close your laptop, are you an engineer still? Right. Do you still think?

Sure.

Yeah. Like an engineer, do you? Because you don't have to have a laptop to be an engineer, although many do, but you don't have to have it and you can still think like an engineer and act like an engineer.

It should be used as an aid, right? You should be able to come up with it and then use that to-

Right.

Right.

Yeah. I love the fact that he is so successful and has been so successful for such a long period of time, and still uses some very antique methods very effectively, and is one of the most important people in the paddock in terms of understanding the nuances of those cars.

Yeah.

So Valkyrie.

Yeah.

Valkyrie, GTP car, not the street car. Okay. And then-

Daily and Shell.

Daily, I said the last time is the 1929 Ford pick up my dad's car.

That one.

The purple one. Are you going to get her?

No. I'm going to say-

Which is cool pick up, by the way.

That's a freaking cool one.

I know.

We pushed it around the shop.

I'll go crazy to say the Mustang GTD from the video we did.

Okay.

Nice. Because that car was special and had a definitely different vibe to it than the other two, which was the GT3 RS and the ZR1. I like the GTD. I think it's special. It's a lot of money, but it stands for something. I like the way that the ride height changes when you shut the car off and open the door. It's pretty cool. For a daily-

A race car that's comfortable to drive around in still, and the money is no object, so who cares?

That checks that out.

Right. That's my everyday driver.

Then show car, last one.

Show car. What was my last one? It was a Koenigsegg.

You were 20 episodes ago, dude. I have no idea. Yeah.

I think it's a Koenigsegg CCXR.

You have to memorize these.

You had your mind. Maybe have that reversed, but my daily would be the new Mustang GTD for what it is. You guys got to see that in person if you haven't. But I say show car. I'm going to make that the 29 Ford pickup that my dad has.

Done deal.

Yeah.

I think that's the guy. Move that over.

By the way, I got to chime in here. And I love that the dark horse Mustang, the cup car.

Oh, the race car.

The race car. Yeah. They are with the manual gearbox. Yeah. I mean, it's so cool seeing guys your age that have to master those skills to drive a car with the manual gearbox, especially with the H pattern gearbox and so forth. I know it's a thing of the past.

Oh, yeah. No. All of my children will learn how to drive in a manual.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, when we, you know, when you watch old Formula One in-car stuff and so forth, I mean, even in the, you know, the pro-Cena era and so forth with the H pattern gearboxes and so forth, I think there's something a bit lost in the ability if you don't have to master that, you don't have to have the mechanical sympathy, you don't have to have the understanding and so forth that it takes to drive a car that way. And I think that there's a little bit lost in the whole thing. Yeah, totally agree. Just shifting it with paddles. I know it's faster. I know it's safer. I know all the reasons why we've done it. I was there at Audi when we developed it. I get it, you know, I get it. But I still there's something that I appreciate about it. And watching them, we were talking at lunch about, you know, some of the stuff for those, you know, those Ford Cup cars going to Le Mans. And, you know, watching this big, crazy, heavy Mustang be wide open throttle for, you know, for 30 seconds in between the chicanes and stuff is cool. I mean, there's something that's very cool about that. And there's something that's very kind of transcendent over time that still exists and it makes me happy.

It feels like a very modern manual car, even without the auto blip factored in. Like, I could have gone away with just pure heel toe anyways.

He's just so talented.

Well, no, that's just how I grew up. Like, literally.

He is. Let him not be too humble.

We try hard.

We will not be too humble here, but I've not met many young men his age that have all of the skills that he has. Oh, absolutely. And not only in his analysis of the cars and so forth and understanding about how the chassis are working, how to shift them, how to drive them, how to understand the power band and all this other stuff. I think a lot of it came from his Mazda time, where he had very little to work with. And the whole idea was to keep the throttle pinned at all times, no matter what, and use the momentum. And I think it was a great teacher for him and gave him a lot of skills that keep going. I mean, I'm really hopeful for Britt's future with Ford here and the stuff that he's going to be doing. And I hope they end up, you know... We'll see. I hope they end up sober enough to...

Well, we talked about that during his podcast.

Putting you in the hypercar, man. We're trying to win. That's what it needs.

Yeah, America.

Yeah.

Awesome, guys. We will definitely be doing a part two. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for talking for two minutes today.

Thanks for...

No, no, no. I love you guys' work. It's an honor to bring Brad Kettler on this show because this is a gift to the world.

I love stuff like this and I know there's some people who are going to say, what the hell is he talking about that for? But you know what?

No.

I don't care.

If you know, you know.

That's all you have to say. I love history and I love, again, if I can contribute a little bit to some history stuff, then those things are important because they get lost pretty quick.

Yes, they do.

There's some people inside US. Racing and so forth in Germany that I've said vocally out before that, man, a couple of these guys need to do an oral history.

Yeah.

There's some of these guys there.

That's the purpose of trying to document a lot of this too.

That did Le Mans 40 times. Holy hell. These people have something to share with you. A couple of the old farts there that I worked with on and off that were just fascinating.

I'm surprised this SD card hasn't filled up yet. It's at an hour 47 on this sucker. I mathed it out to 120 minutes.

Or no, sorry.

No, sorry, 75 minutes. So we're somehow getting the glory pass here.

Okay. All right. Well, very good. Well, thanks for having me. It's really cool to talk to some fellow gearheads and stuff. Yeah, let's do another one. Yeah, come out and come out and see my shabby, eclectic collection of buildings and cars.

I need to see Buttercup.

You see Buttercup. Yeah. And right now, we've got two R8 LMP cars in the shop that are both getting quite a bit of work right now.

Yeah, we'll swing by.

And there's a lot to look at there. And we've got a GT40 replica we're working on, a couple Cobras, an MGA. We're building an engine for a Trans Am, for a 57 Thunderbird. We're all over the map.

Can't wait to check it out.

We're doing all kinds of things.

Well, nonetheless, thank you, Britt. And of course, thank you, Britt. We'll see you all next time.

All right. Thanks for having us, guys.

Dan, thanks for existing. That's right. I forgot that last part.

One of the things I'm gonna add.

Awesome.

All right, fellas.