186. Chassis Setup, Data Analysis, Race Engineering and Driver Feedback w/ Robin Roemisch

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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. I'm so sick of saying that this week. I should do a new intro. If anybody has any intro suggestions, please, dear God, give me more. Dan, Mr. Gunner Garage. And today we are with a weight transfer enthusiast. I love that part about your bio, it's so fun.

But we are here with Robin Roemisch.

So real quick, just give us a quick breakdown of who it is you are, what you've done, what you do, and we'll just go from there. This is really quiet here, but this is the quietest it's been all week here.

It's nice and quiet, actually. I thought you guys did this strategically, so it wouldn't be inside with the noise, but it works out.

That was the plan, actually. Yeah, that's the main reason I did it.

Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Happy to be here.

Yeah, we've been talking for a few months now.

We have, we have. I've been a big fan of the guys you get on this and the conversations you have.

Who was the first person, and how do we get in touch?

I commented on Greg Banish's one, I believe.

The Banish effect is real.

I've been following that dude for a long time. He's absolutely brilliant. I read his books years ago. The guy is just awesome. I have an OEM calibration background, so that kind of tied in. Oh, cool. Hit you guys up, and here we are. Yeah, I own Corsa Logic Motor Sports and Electronics Consultancy Company. This is my 10th anniversary, actually, this fall.

Congratulations.

Somehow I've stuck around for this long. Background in sports car racing, like I said, some OEM calibration, engine management, tuning, calibration, et cetera. I like to make things go fast with all the data and all the tools that I have available to me.

So what was the company name in Corsa Logic? Corsa Logic, okay. So is that more you like consulting for teams or what exactly do you do, I guess, day to day or year to year or whatever?

So it depends. I white label a lot of EFI software. So a company will come to me, they have a project in mind, they have some platforms in mind that they would like to work on, and I will kind of shepherd them through the process of how to work with Bosch and Siemens engine controllers to either meet an emissions goal, a power goal, or different hardware, aftermarket turbos, chargers, that kind of stuff, kind of doing a lot of reverse engineering and figuring out how to make these cars work with stuff that they were not built with at the factory. And then during the IMSA season, I work for various teams doing consulting around setup, you know, how do we read the rule book, right? How do we look at what this car can do inside the rules? How can we make it better? Let's look at places to improve. Are we pushing the envelope in every single area? Do some driver coaching. I do some kind of, you know, basic kind of, how do we get from here to there? We're now P10. We'd like to be on the podium. Where can we improve? How can we find efficiency?

Sure. What's the biggest efficiency people miss out on? Is there like a common trend you see, or is it different for everyone?

Man, it really depends. I would say, like I started with, read the rule book. You know, figure out where you are. Are our dampers open? Can we do some valving? Can we change intercooler? Do we have to use the parts that are coming from the manufacturer? All these little tiny things add up. You're never going to find something that gives you 20 percent, but you'll find eight, two percent things. Right. And that's kind of what pushes it forward.

OK.

From the racing standpoint, man, it's like you're out there and you're looking for tiny little bits. A guy that goes out and go, oh, I found two seconds. Yeah, you might have found two seconds, but you're probably still four off. Once you're there in the window, you're looking for tenths.

Gotcha.

How do you know where would you be looking at the people that are podium then? You should be shooting for that number. I mean, where do you set the bar?

Yeah, I mean, obviously that's the target, right?

Yeah.

You never quite know. Especially in IMSA where, and we can jump into this in a little bit, where you have homologated cars. Didn't used to be like that. My first year in IMSA was 2009. And back then, these shops, these teams were building their own cars. You go buy a 911 off the showroom floor, you strip it out, you put a cage in it, you build it to the rule book. But now everything is homologated. And this switched over in about 2017. And now you go to the manufacturer and you go, I would like to run one of your race cars. They go, cool, here's the cost. Here's the spares you need. You have to buy all the stuff from them. The car shows up, body and white. And you're kind of painted into a box now of everybody's running the same stuff. So it's a little bit more difficult to find an advantage and to find that way to distinguish yourself. And back when you used to be able to do your own engine programs, right? You're building your motors, you're changing all this stuff. Now it's all sealed, right? IMSA puts a tag on that motor, you can't open it up. Oh, really? It's very, very difficult now to find an advantage. And I had to change the way I looked at this stuff because back then I was doing the ECU programming for the teams. We were doing motor programs, we were doing dyno testing, where all this stuff that really used to add up to make a difference, now you can't really do that anymore. So I focused a lot more on the chassis side, the setup side, because all that stuff is still free. You can either paint yourself into a corner with a terrible setup on the car, or you can get it dialed in and have the driver love it. That's something that I've developed over the last seven or eight years where I never really used to do that, because I was more focused on the mechanical and the engine side of things. But now since all that's locked down, you're really kind of stuck.

That's where the name comes from, weight transfer enthusiast.

Correct.

Is there any limitations at all on the chassis side, or does it pretty much go wild?

It's pretty much go wild. Dampers are some control in TCR, the class that I ran last year. Dampers were open. So the car we ran is a Honda Civic TCR FL5 Chassis. Dampers are open in TCR. So we went from the KWs that the car came with to an Ohlins. Oh wow. Which we had experience with in the past. I love working with Ohlins. The guys are great. The dampers are awesome. And we found a good bit of gain and not just speed, but controllability, tire wear, driver feedback, that kind of stuff. So depending on the class you're running and the rule book, again, read the rule book, it's kind of open. And that's kind of open to your interpretation. They may not have something in there about, here's the wheel bearing you have to use. But if you go find a wheel bearing that gives you another 2% free rotation, hey, let's take it. Let's go do this. So the homologation has changed sports car racing. In my opinion, for the better, it makes a little bit easier for everybody to compete, but it also makes it a little uncool. Cause now you're just buying a race car and racing it. Whereas you used to fabricate these things and really build them, you go down the paddock, you look at all the different cars, everything's a little bit different. Two 911s next to each other. This one's built a little bit differently than that one. This one might be a little more cheated up than that one. And now it's kind of all smiley by the book. Sure, most standardized. But there's still ways around that, yeah.

What about data, right? So you just mentioned going from KWs to O-Lens. As you mentioned, you're big on the data side of things. What does that look like? What are you looking at when you're comparing those two sets?

So in TCR, we can run shock pots. So I have damper travel, damper speed, history system in the damper, all this different stuff that you can look at. And getting that in the window where you're maximizing your traction at the right height that you have while not overpowering the tire. Remember, this is endurance racing, right? Our longest race is four hours, the shortest is two hours. So the tire, through that stint, we got to a point where at the end of our stints in this car, the tire still looked amazing. We'd just throw fronts on, we'd leave the same rears for the whole race. Because the tire wear was so good because the damper is in control of the tire, it's controlling that weight. You're not scrubbing it, you're not throwing a bunch of weight side to side. It's not bouncing up and down and causing graining. So maximizing that tire life throughout the stint was key. Okay.

How often are you changing those settings? Would it be throughout the day, from track to track or?

Definitely throughout the day. Okay, so IMSA, we have two hours of practice, basically, per weekend, which is not a lot. So I have a pretty strict run plan of we're going out, get the pro driver in the car, let's see what we got, and then make changes from there. And so I'm making shock changes, ride height changes. Some of the things on that car are a little difficult to adjust, like a front sway bar change takes 25, 30 minutes. So you're not really gonna be doing that on the pit wall. So you're looking at the knobs you can quickly turn to get the car into the window. Tire pressure, rake, ride height, that sort of thing. And finding those little advantages in a compressed timeline, and that's if there's no red flags. Somebody goes and throws it in the tires and takes 30 minutes to clean it up. Now your run plan's 30 minutes short. Right. So you're already on the back foot. Yeah. So there's not a whole lot of time to really dig into that kind of stuff. We did a lot of testing last year. Just open days, right? We did go to Sebring and we just spent two or three days working on stuff, trying things.

Is this for your various clients or one particular?

Last year, this is with KMW Motorsports.

Oh, yeah. That's right. The Honda?

On the Honda. Team out of Pompano Beach, Florida. Just two awesome guys. Sure. They've got a long history that I didn't really know about. Kevin Wheeler, one of the guys, the owner and Lewis Malone. Kevin, these guys in the 80s went to Daytona with the 911 that they bought with a bunch of credit cards and they just went into credit card debt and did really well at the 24-hour and then paid off all. You can't do this kind of stuff anymore, right? Back then, it was a completely different game, but they're both really, really strong racers. They understand exactly how to prep the car to show up and they're competitive as hell. It was a really fun year.

Sure.

We ended up P8 in the championship, three DNFs, so it was pretty strong considering. Sure. By the end of the year, we had a really good race car. So proud of the progression that we made with it.

Sure.

What's your favorite program you've been a part of since you've started this venture?

Oh man, I would say one sentimental. So I worked for a company called Revo Technic. This is a UK based company. And we partnered with a company called Stasis Engineering. Those two, we put together a world challenge program in 2013 with a VW Jetta. So front wheel drive Jetta, two liter TSI motor. And that was again, back when we were building the motors, doing all the fun stuff. That was a little labor of love because we didn't have a lot of budget. I was driving the truck. I was prepping at the shop. Yeah. I was on the box engineering the car. It was just, it was a lot. That was probably my most favorite just because it was so hands on and so involved. Sure. 2019 with Compass Racing, we brought in the McLaren 570 GT4 to IMSA, which was an absolute dream of a car. And the, you know, we rolled it off the truck at Daytona in one Daytona. And you're just like, okay, this is good. Like we got a good year ahead of us here. Had some real good success that year, had some real bad luck. But that was one of my favorite programs to be involved with. I like the sport because it's about the people, people you work with, the teams you're with. It's when you're with the right crew, it's awesome. Sure. Even if you've got a great car and you don't like the people you're working with, you just kind of wait for, wait for Sunday afternoon to roll around and be like, oh man, I want to go home. So it's more about the people to me and the experiences you build in the sport.

So how did you get started in all of this?

Always been a car guy. Always loved anything with wheels. Loved mechanics, loved taking stuff apart. Started school at Appalachian State. Went for mechanical engineering. Didn't finish, left, took a job with a British company called Revotechnic. Went over to the UK for a good bit and learned a lot about engines, a lot about OEM ECU remapping. We sold a lot of software for Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Bentley. So I learned how to look at something, look at a goal and maximize what the car could give through all the factory ECU protections, routines, all the stuff that's in place. One of the reasons I brought up Greg is because the OEM guys at that level are unbelievably smart. And the OEM guys are painted into this little box of it must do this for this long under this warranty. And we don't have to play in those boxes. So I got a lot of respect for those guys. We're maximizing what the factory leaves on the table. So I worked for them for quite a long time. And then I started doing a good bit of their development and test driving. So from a standpoint of let's go, let's go, let's go out to the racetrack. Let's go out to the UK. It was great because we had a lot of old air bases showing World War II after they quit using these things. You can just go out and find a two and a half, three mile runway. So we'd use one called Bruntingthorpe all the time. Going out there with a car and something you've been working on. Hey, let's see if it'll do 180. Let's see if it'll do 185. What can we get to? Learned a lot about driving for data. I got a karting background. I've done some amateur racing, but wheel to wheel versus driving for engineering is two completely different things. If you go out on a track and you're trying to test something, I don't care how fast you can go. It's can I do 15 laps of 129s back to back to back to back and then take that data, take that feedback and turn that into something that you can improve on. So there's two, I think, completely different schools of thought. You can be a great driver and be terrible at racing. You can be a great racing driver and not give good feedback for an engineering standpoint for parts or improvement, too.

A touch on feedback, by the way. You've worked with drivers then, I imagine. Is there sometimes too much feedback? Is that a skill you had to learn?

I would say not too much. There's the wrong kind of feedback.

Sure.

Like when my wife is trying to tell me what's wrong with the car? It's making some noise.

Yeah. Drivers are interesting creatures, okay? They can give you, depending on their mood, the right thing or the wrong thing. It's up to you as the engineer to interpret this and turn it into an actual improvement.

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Okay, I'm on the radio. My guy's like, this thing's pushing, it's terrible. Can't get it to turn. All right, I know what I want to change, but the feedback that the driver gives you, I've had guys that go, this is terrible. I can't drive it. And then the other driver will get in and go to second faster. Okay, it's not you, it's the car, but it's also my job, especially in endurance racing, with two different drivers to make both of them happy. In IMSA, we have a pro and we have an amateur. So the pro guy is usually the one that's getting paid to be there. The amateur is usually the one footing the bill for the program or bringing money. And so you've got a paying client that you've got to make happy as well as the pro driver that's going to finish the race. So it's a balance of setting the car up for long run tire wear, not killing your amateur guy, because that's not good for business, and giving the pro something that at the end of the race he can fight for a win. So it's kind of this little triangle of balancing all that stuff together to get a competitive package.

Wait, so is that how IMSA works? Do you have a pro and an amateur?

You do, yep.

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

So in some races like Daytona, where we have a four-hour race, we'll bring in a third driver. Most races we have two.

Interesting. And that's across the entire field.

Across the entire field.

Okay.

It's determined based on your driver rating. So your FIA driver rating. So IMSA's rules maintain that you need to have like a bronze or a silver with your gold or platinum. You can't have a car stacked full of two platinums. So they try and balance that out.

That's really cool.

It's a hot topic, man. A lot of people hate it. A lot of people love it. It depends on which side of the coin you are on. Yeah. What it allows is you can be a driver that's a bronze and you can be really fast and everybody wants to hire you or everybody wants to bring you into the program. Whereas if you're a platinum guy, you can be great, but if you've already got a stacked car, there's no work for you. And it's changed quite a bit because the market in IMSA used to be, you got a guy that wants to go racing and he'll hire a really fast guy and they'll put a car together. Now it's, I'd love to hire you, but I can't because it doesn't work within the rules. It's, I think a little bit bad for business because the guys with the money should be making these decisions, not the sanctioning body. However, it makes for good racing. IMSA gets a lot of hate for that kind of stuff. FIA is really the reason behind it. The guys in France make these decisions, not in Daytona Beach. But I think IMSA does a fairly good job of balancing all the different manufacturers and different cars in these classes. BOP is what they call it, Balance of Performance. So they'll look at these cars across the field and go, okay, the Audi weighs this much, the BMW weighs this much, how can we create parity so these two can race together? They'll use a combination of fuel capacity, weight, ride height, turbo boost at different RPMs, restrictor plates on normally aspirated motors, things like that to kind of bring everybody together. And if you look at the racing this year, I mean, you've got six or seven manufacturers all battling within a tenth of each other's poll.

It's such, it's the tightest racing ever.

It's unbelievable, man. You watch these GS races and these guys are just going at it for two hours in multiple different cars, turbocharged, normally aspirated, you know, all these different kinds of combinations that the series is able to put together and throw them on the same track and have wheel-to-wheel racing. It's really cool. I think it's the best racing on the planet.

Is it, do you mostly focus on IMSA then, or do you have other other focuses as well?

IMSA, SRO, SRO is the kind of the competing sanctioning body. Those two are fairly similar. You can run all these homologated cars in either. So if I know how to make a GT4 car go fast, I can do it in either series. Okay. SRO is more kind of sprint racing. You'll still have a pro and an amateur driver. IMSA is a little longer, more endurance focused. It kind of depends. IMSA is a little more expensive. The budgets on these programs is crazy now.

What are the budgets typically?

When I started in 09, you could field a GS car for $250,000. Now that's a million, million, two. Holy cow. And it's just the amount of personnel it takes to show up at these races and be competitive. Flights, hotels, get the rig there. Have another rig full of spare parts. Have a spare car, et cetera, et cetera. You need your pit box. You need your radios. Everything adds up to just such a crazy number now. And back to the homologation thing is before, if you had a car that you could build inexpensively, that's great. But now that's the same price to anybody going and buying it. Our Honda with spares, that's a $300,000 touring car. And it's very, very difficult to jump into this and be competitive because you have to find those economies of scale along the way. If you can run two or three cars, you're saving a little bit money, but then you need more personnel, and it's a lot.

Do you think that's hurting the sport or going to hurt the sport?

I mean, our field was full at Daytona last year, right? It sold out entry goods. No, I don't think so. Is the barrier of entry high? Yeah. You want to do something different? Go run WRL. Go run something else. IMSA has always been kind of the pinnacle of sports car racing in North America. And yeah, there's a barrier of entry to it, but I think that keeps the on-track product really good.

Okay.

How do you know Britt Casey? Britt and I worked together at Compass Racing when he was driving their Audi TCR car. Oh, okay. Britt's an awesome kid, man. He's one of those drivers that he has the skill, has the business sense, has the PR and marketing sense. He's a fierce competitor behind the wheel. He ticks every single box and stories all the time doesn't have the funding to continue to keep pro racing. Sure. If you're asking me who I would put in a car like that, Britt's top of the list, and it's one of those things where this sport is so difficult to break into. You want to be good at soccer, you go out and you get a soccer ball and you practice all day. You want to be good at racing, how do you start? Oh, you need a cart? Okay. People spend $200,000 a year carting now. Yeah. So it's this barrier to entry that unless you really have that way into the sport, it's so tough to know who's good and know who's not. Yeah. How many Max Verstappen are running around out there that we don't know about? Because they never get a chance to show their skills in something.

Yeah.

It's tough.

Well, speaking of Formula One, obviously you and I had a discussion a few weeks ago when McLaren got disqualified. One, how does that happen? And obviously, it's going to air months after McLaren has already won.

Yeah.

But how does something like that happen? And has it happened to you?

Yes. I've lost pole positions for being one kilogram underweight. I've been busted for ride height before. The thing with that McLaren thing, they have an entire building of people in England, real-time watching this stuff happen. And I guarantee you as soon as that car hit the track, because remember they had limited practice because it was wet. So as soon as that car hit the track and dry and started generating more downforce and more grip, and they started wearing that plank, they can see this. They've got laser ride height sensors in those cars. They've got strain gauges on all the suspension arms. So they're knowing, they're like, oh man, oh, right. What are you going to do at that point? Nothing. You go out and you just hope that it doesn't matter. But if you look at that, they had their one millimeter, I think 0.9 millimeters under the limit for ride height and that wear block. That's almost 10% of the allowed 10 millimeter plank to wear. So it was a pretty big error. But you're looking for these small things, right? In Formula One, even more so than sports car. These are tiny little margins you're playing with. So if you can find 1%, 1% is what? Maybe half a 10th. If you get half a 10th, you're three or four positions up.

Exactly.

Formula One is just such a game of balancing that kind of stuff. Sports cars is too, but we work in a much larger window.

Sure.

Because they're again, production based street cars at the end of the day.

Yeah.

Well, one of the things I kept seeing is like, well, they use the $50 tool to measure it. And I'm like, does it measure it still?

Does it measure it still? Yeah.

How accurate do you need to be?

Right. How good are your calipers? You better have three other sets to make sure this is right, though. I mean, the FIAs, they roll that thing across the bridge. They'll start inspecting it. I think for both cars to get bounced for that, it was just a fact that they did not have enough runtime in dry conditions to really evaluate where they're at. But nobody else got busted either.

Well, exactly. I mean, there's nine other teams here. Yeah. So I remember one of your comments was like, yeah, whoever set that up is sweating bullets right now.

Because you knew it. Lap one, when that car was throwing sparks and nobody else was, I was like, wow, it's interesting. And you know the guy in the box is just, oh boy, like, what now?

Right?

Right. Just hope nothing happens, right? Hope you get lucky.

Yep.

Was that Vegas?

No. I think that was Vegas, right?

I think so.

Yeah, Vegas.

So do you have any involvement with F1 stuff as well? Then I saw you do something a few weeks ago. I just didn't know what it was.

I work for a company called Expert Hosts and they basically handle all of the VIP kind of paddock club suite access for a lot of the sponsors. So AWS, CrowdStrike, all the big F1 sponsors, they bring 10 or 20 of their VIPs and they'll have guys like me take them around. We run a pit gantry on the pit wall so they can bring their VIPs down and sit in the session. I'll have them on the mic with me. We'll have the timing up on the screen and I can sit there and explain to them what they're doing with tire strategy and how they're working the run plan through the run groups. And for someone that's never been to an F1 race, or even if they have, getting that kind of access is really, really cool.

Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Yeah, and the networking and the people you meet at these events is wild too.

Especially like the big sponsor.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I was sitting next to Mark Benioff on the pit wall from Salesforce. You don't get that access very often, but yeah, it's an interesting little set up.

So you kind of have a deep understanding of pretty much, I guess, all the main ones, right? So you got IMSA, F1. What other categories do you pay attention to or have any interest in?

I love World Rally. I love MotoGP. I'm a motorcycle guy. I've always been. I think anything on two wheels is cooler than four. Okay. So I pay attention to MotoGP. I watch a lot of that. Those bikes are nuts. If you look at a Formula One car and then an IMSA car, the same thing is like you look at a MotoGP bike compared to a normal MotoAmerica bike or something. It's insane, man. These things are just wild.

We got to go to MotoAmerica at Brainerd sometime. I was there for that. Oh my God, that is intense. You're standing right at the corner, and they come flying by it.

No, bikes are wild. I'm fascinated by the physics involved on a motorcycle. The way the tire works, the way the dampers work on a bike, it's totally different than a car. It's super cool stuff.

Have you done any engineering for any of that?

Never, never. Any interest? Sure, yeah, absolutely. Other than tweaking my own bikes to make them go better. A damper is a damper, and one of the things I love about chassis engineering is if you've got, basically, whatever you're running, you've got four black tires and a steering wheel. And everything you're doing with that is the exact same. I don't care what it is. You're controlling that weight, you're controlling the tire, you're controlling that grip, you're giving the driver the best tools as best as possible to go out and achieve a goal. And so I don't care what it is, whether it's a rally car or whether it's a F1 car, anything, you're still bound by the same physics as the guy next to you.

Sure.

Pit box, so it's it's fun.

What about on the, I guess, what's the most, or I had this question earlier. What's the thickest rule book that you've had to work with?

IMSA GS is pretty thick. IMSA GTD and WeatherTech is thicker. These cars, it's the series above the Michelin Pilot Challenge, which is what I prefer to race in. WeatherTech, the GTD and GTD Pro classes. 2022, I was a Rick Ware Racing. We were running an NSX GT3. Got to work with one of my best friends, Ryan Eversley on that program. One of my good friends, Marcus De Leon. We had a really good lineup of drivers, engineers, everything. It was a really solid program to run, but man, GTD is another level. The budgets that you're working with, the cars, the parts you need, the GT3 cars is a different animal than a GS car. It's all standalone ECU, all running all Bosch Motorsport stuff. You've got tire pressure monitoring stuff. You're not allowed to in the lower series. Telemetry, real time telemetry, so you can sit on the pit box and know what the car is doing. We were working with about a $2 million budget racing against guys like Lexus with factory money. They're spending six to eight. The numbers just go up exponentially in WeatherTech, but yeah, that rule book's big. They run torque sensors now to help with the BOP. So it's actually an induction sensor on the axle that gives real-time torque readings to IMSA so that they can sit there and manage how the cars are running, manufacturer to manufacturer, power plant to power plant. And those things are 150K. Holy s***. And you need to spare, right? It's just 300. Yeah. It's wild.

No, it's crazy how much money can go into that sport.

Yeah.

100%. So, OK. So, so GTD is the top at a food chain in any sense?

Or GTD Pro is technically the top for a sports car based kind of thing. They have hypercar, you know, the prototype.

Yes.

Closed cockpit stuff as well. The Cadillacs and the Porsches and. Yeah. But if you're thinking about sports cars, it looks like something that you can go by. GTD is the top.

OK.

And the thing about that class, man, is like we would work so hard and we'd go out there and throw down a qualifier. And you're like, I don't know, maybe a 10th off. That's your P9.

Right.

And you're just like, where do I find this? Like, where do I get that? And it's what do you get it? A lot of money being spent on a lot of testing, a lot of, you know, chassis rigs, eight post shakers, a lot of SIM time, a lot of all the stuff that, you know, the smaller teams don't have the budget for to eke out that tiny little bit of percentage in game.

So in this instance, okay, so this is a team, NSX, for example, they bring you in to consult, and then you're basically helping. Where do you fit in? Like, what roles are you taking on?

So that year, we had a spotter and a strategist. I was doing some of the, most of the data engineering, performance engineering. So there's kind of a couple of ways you can do this, right? You can be one guy that does it all, which is very hard to do. You can be one guy that has a good guy that he works with, and you can kind of team up. And then you can kind of focus on one thing. So a performance engineer is basically not handling a ton of the chassis setup and basically set up, set down, working with the car chief, all that stuff. Performance engineer is basically taking all the data, crunching all these numbers into actionable insights and going, here's what I noticed. Let's try and improve on this. And then the chassis engineer will take that information and try and make those graphs look a little better. So that's what I was doing that year. So it was mainly just data engineer. I was responsible for all the electronic systems in the car. So making sure the data loggers for the series are working, the Bosch Motorsport system in the car, making sure the engine's happy, all that kind of stuff from a computer and electronic standpoint.

Is it common or important? One of the things I thought was unique about Brit is he also understands a lot of that too, right? So how important is it as a driver and how common is that? Because that doesn't seem like something that's too common.

The best drivers, in my opinion, have some sort of engineering background. If you can understand what's happening to the thing that you're in and why it's doing what it's doing, you're gonna be faster. And you're gonna take care of it better if you have some mechanical sympathy. The guys that get in the car and just go balls out from lap one and never really listen to it, never take care of the tire, never take care of the gearbox. The guys that don't have the sympathy for what's inside and how all that stuff works together and what the damper is doing as you smash the curbs in a turn two at Road Atlanta. These things add up to a much more rounded package and Brit's one of those for sure. And I mean, if you look at most of the good classic sports car drivers, these guys all had some sort of engineering background, because you had to back then, right? You'd show up to the track in the 1970s in something, and nobody else is doing that stuff for you. You gotta know how it works. These days, if you're a kid and you're talented and you show up, you've got a driver coach. You've got somebody working with you. You've got an engineer that's helping you through this stuff. Back when you had to do it all, you had to have the engineering background to do it. So yeah, definitely a rounded package is ideal there.

So you're not necessarily saying go to school for engineering, but I have an understanding of how the vehicles work and all that.

If you can explain to me why a damper is doing what it's doing and how the tire influences your grip. If you can explain how rake works and how weight transfer works, those things are fundamentally in the back of your head. While you're behind the wheel, you're going to be a better driver.

Yeah. Some people just have, I've noticed it as my experience, even having employees at my business and doing stuff. Some people just have that mechanical ability or to look at something and understand the parts and pieces of it. Some people just can't. It just is not in there.

I will flip that also backwards. I've worked with dudes, they have no idea how a car works. They don't even care. Some of them don't even like cars. They're just good at driving. And that's fine, too, if you could pull that off. But I think the best balance is a driver that has that engineering background, so he can get on the radio and he goes, I think the left front damper is blown because it doesn't feel right. It's got a different response when I go left versus when I go right. Those kind of being able to pick up the minutiae of that stuff is really what distinguishes you, in my opinion.

What about you? Do you do any driving? Have you ever tried to get into the driving world?

Not for a lack of trying. I do hold a competition license. I've done a bunch of amateur stuff. It's such an expensive way to waste the money that I make in racing that it's tough. I enjoy the amateur stuff because you can go out with a bunch of guys in an inexpensive car and have a good weekend. I don't have the money to dabble in IMSA or do any pro racing at all. I'm working on my Nurburgring permit. I want to go do some NLS and VLN stuff over there next year, which is my goal right now. If you've never been there, you got to go. It lives up to all the hype that anybody ever says about it. It's unbelievable. It's the most ridiculous place on the planet. Makes every other racetrack look like a mini golf course. It's just wild.

Okay. If that's the real golf course, what's after the ring? Top five tracks for you.

Top five tracks. VAR, number one. I love that place. It is absolutely gorgeous. Nestled in the hills of North Carolina and Virginia, right on the border there. Kerrigan Smith, the guy that runs it, is just a phenomenal dude. He makes sure everybody that goes there is having a great time, has everything taken care of. The facility is just awesome. And the track, I think, generates some of the best racing on the planet, really. You've got a ton of elevation change. You've got great passing zones. You've got fast corners. You got slow corners. Everything put together is just awesome. After that, I'd say Road Atlanta. Road Atlanta is just, it's a, poof, you do a fast lap there and something quick and you are hustling, man. You never get a break there. You got a big long back straight away. But other than that, you are working that entire lap and it is a hustler track. If you can go fast there, you've got something. I'd say Road America after that. Road America is just awesome from a speed standpoint. Your average lap there is just so fast. Your commitment is so high. You come to the Kanken in a GS car at 130 something miles an hour. It's just a rad place.

That's the craziest part to me.

Well, I have probably the most laps ever at any track is at Road America. And yeah, you can see... What do you drive there? 2021 GT500.

Okay. Yeah. So you know commitment.

Yeah. Right. It's a lot of power, but it loves that track. Right. And when you come past the kink, all of the war wounds on the wall there is, yeah, it makes you a little, it makes it more nerve wracking when you see all that too.

Yup.

Yeah.

It's a great place.

I love racing there.

It's one of my favorite places. The fans are great. The beer is good. The sausages are good. It's just a great place to go racing for the weekend.

Well, I'm a Wisconsin guy. So, yeah, I appreciate all that.

I knew I liked it.

Yeah.

That's good stuff. Other than that, I would say Sebring.

Okay. That's gotta be a fun track for you to just dabble with and set up on.

It's a pretty cool track. It is dead flat, right? It's an old runway. The surface is horrible. It rattles your teeth. It destroys the dampers. It rips the tire apart. But what a challenge to make a car fast there, right? So I've always liked that place because if you can get a car to handle there, any other track feels smooth as glass in comparison. Sure. And I know you had Brad Kettler on, and he'll tell you they used to go test there, and they'd run two 12-hour race distances and just see what shook off the car because it's just so violent, right? Yeah. It's a cool place. The history there, you're walking down the pit lane, and they've got all the banners up above your garages from the 1950s and 60s. Just super cool history there. Middle of nowhere in Florida, I'm a Florida native, kind of sentimental to me. So but yes, he brings a cool place. Laguna Seca is just awesome.

Okay.

Beautiful.

He didn't care to have many. He didn't really care for Laguna Seca yesterday. Brad.

Oh, really?

But he's like, he can appreciate it. But he's like, I like more of the long straight stuff.

Laguna is a challenge. The surface there, because of all the sand, it's right on the water. The surface is very, very polished. And then every couple of years, they'll go in and kind of resurface it. And you end up with a track that is very different from one race weekend to the next. So you can go testing at Laguna, and then you can show up to race there three weeks later, tracks totally different. So it's very difficult to read the way the track rubbers in, the way it grains the tire and wears the tire out. So you can end up with a lot of tire degradation, where in an endurance race, you go, why are we out of tire at 40 minutes when last weekend, we got an hour 10 and it was just fine. So it's a real challenge to make a tire work at Laguna Seca.

Is that kind of what happens in F1? Like somebody will have like an amazing P1, P2, but then once you get to the actual race, it's like, what happened? Like, why are you in the middle of the field all of a sudden?

F1, I think should be a little bit more transparent about the way that they do their tire compounds because they have, right, soft, medium, hard. Those three change depending on where they're at.

Correct.

So it's not always the same compound. So when they go from track to track and you have two cars weekend to weekend that might be running the medium tire and the medium tire is fine. You go to the next weekend, now the medium tire is no good. It's hard to really, I think from a spectator standpoint, understand that. But managing that tire wear is the key, right? The race isn't over till the end of the race. I don't care if you've got the fast lap halfway through, which rarely happens in F1 because of the fuel burn. But end of the race, can you battle? Can you make up a second and a half gap at the end of the race? If so, you've probably got a decent setup and you probably took care of your tire at the beginning of the race. These are the things that the strategists are looking at on the box, the performance engineers are looking at. How can we maximize when that tire comes into its peak and we get the best out of it for that period of time until we can.

Sure.

What's your background education-wise?

I did some years of mechanical engineering at Appalachian State in North Carolina. Sure. Then, man, it was rough. Funnily enough, I was never really a math guy.

Okay.

Applied math. Thinking about this stuff now, I love it because it's something that I enjoy. It's applied. It's applied and it's a goal. Sitting through calculus, sitting through stats, all this stuff that you need for the background in the sport, I hated it. Now that I'm doing it for a living, I don't mind it at all and I'm actually decent at it. This is funny because I was never good in school, but when I got out of that bubble, it was a lot easier for me to work with.

You're applying it to something that you're passionate about, so it makes it as a whole other animal than learning it out of a book or off of a chalkboard.

I'm lucky that I work in the States where if you're good at what you do in this sport, nobody really asks you these sort of questions. In Europe, it's much more where did you go to school, what's your degree and that's the only way we're going to hire you. There's many colleges that teach great motorsport engineering courses in the UK and the EU. We don't really have that over here. There's a lot of formula SAE and things like that here, but doing this for a living, doing this as a business is not really considered a career path in this country where it is overseas. So it gives it a different spin on what you can do in either paddock.

What about when it comes to NASCAR or IndyCar? Do you think there's still more of a path there?

Yeah, I think so. Man, NASCAR is... I have so much respect for those guys, both from the drivers and the crew chiefs and the engineers there. It is so wild to me what they make those cars do, and the tiny little tricks that they've learned over 60, 70 years of doing this stuff with 800 horsepower and a big balloon tire and making it go in a circle as best as it can. That racing, to me, is fascinating. Everybody gives it a bad rap. You watch it on TV and it's like, oh, you're just running in circles for two hours. But the splits from the top 20, you got really good drivers that go and try a cup, and they've succeeded. They've won races everywhere else, and they're like P24 and Cup. And it's such a very, very, very specific discipline that those guys are doing there that it fascinates me. I've never done it. I'd love to work in some sort of stock car racing. And you know those cars now are basically a GT3 car. That chassis is made by Dallara. It's a sequential box now. It's basically a GT3 car. If you haven't watched it, you should find this documentary about Hendrik taking one of their NAS cars to Le Mans, where they basically went in and said, all right, the rule book's now kind of open. What can we do with this cup car around Le Sarthe at Le Mans? And the entire journey is just awesome.

What was the name of that documentary again? It was, I think it was-

Oh man, Road to Le Mans, I believe it was.

Something like that. It was, this is a car that looked like a massive monster truck-

Yeah.

Amongst the whole field. Right, the Camaro or whatever.

You see it come around the prototypes and it just looks like comical, like some AI image of a race car that's not supposed to be there.

But it was like, people were like, it doesn't make sense as passing me or whatever, too. Like that was, you know, one of the funny things.

It beat half the prototype field. I think they retired with the gearbox issue, something before the end of the race. Yeah, correct.

Yeah.

What a cool experience and exercise in what could be.

I haven't seen it, but I'm familiar with it.

I'll check it out.

There's a lot of press around this.

It's great.

It's fantastic. They had Jensen Button in the car.

Oh, that's right, yeah.

Yeah, it was super cool.

That's cool. What was that beeping? That wasn't my camera, was it? Okay, I freaked out.

Might have been a GoPro over there.

Yeah, I was like, wait a second. That doesn't sound like my camera. No, what I was going to say is, that's a really reoccurring theme on this show. Anybody that's been involved in any high level of motorsport, they're like, man, those circle track guys, they got it the hardest.

So if you don't believe me, go walk around this show and look at some of these dirt track cars. The wings hanging halfway off here, the tires are 25 degrees worth of camber offset. Just the weirdness of making a car work in a small circle like that, especially on dirt, is super, super cool. And the guys that are good at that have been doing it for so long because all that stuff is, you know, those little short tracks in the middle of nowhere, these backwoods guys rolling off their trailer and sticking it in the pro main and winning the race. I love stuff like that. It's super fun to watch.

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You know, after we talked to Dustin about all of that, I went to Knoxville, like literally the next week, Knoxville, Iowa, and that track, it is. It's like the Stock Car Hall of Fame or something there they have. And that track is literally in the middle of town. And he's right. There's no pits. So they have to use everybody's parking lots all around town. And I could see where that would be intense.

Wait, is this after we did our podcast with him?

Yeah.

You went to Knoxville? Yeah, for work.

So literally after we talked to him, I went to his town of Waldo and Wisconsin drove through it.

Oh, right now it's in Waldo.

He says, everybody makes that joke. And when he told us, Harrison and I just stood there. And he's like, he waited for us to say it.

He could have believed it.

What are you talking about?

And then I went to Knoxville. And yeah, we're definitely have to go check that out.

It's not Knoxville, Tennessee.

No, it's Knoxville, Iowa.

That's what it was, yes.

Iowa.

Yeah, it's been a long, long few days. I forgot about that. Yeah, no, that's... Do you think it's easier for circle track guys to get into road course or road course guys to get into circle track?

I think circle track guys to get into road course. You've got the fundamentals of how to make a car work. I think when you take all of these strange tricks that you have to do to make a short track car work, and then you just kind of start from square one, you can probably make a road course car work and you can understand how to go that direction. I think going the other way is probably harder because I've got years and years of years of experience doing this one way, and now you're telling me I have to run 200 pounds across weight in the car and things like that that just don't make any sense to any kind of road racer to go in that direction, but.

I have to ask the question, you know, which question is coming. Have you read Adrian Newey's book?

I have. I have. It's awesome. That guy, his mind is very interesting to me because he's got such a complete package of what makes a good car from aerodynamics to mechanics to weight distribution, to all these different things that go into that. And he's one dude, usually takes a building of guys to come up with this sort of stuff. And guys like that only come around every couple of generations, you know?

Yeah.

Well, you, what are your thoughts on him going to be a principal at Aston?

I think it's great. I mean, I think he's been around long enough where he can pull that off. I think he's probably going to get a little bit frustrated from some of the team principal duties that come along with that. You know what I was thinking? If you've been a designer locked in your room for so long and just building stuff and improving stuff, now you got to do PR and manage a bunch of people.

He's going to be in the public eye even more.

Exactly. Yeah. I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch. I'm also looking forward to these new regulations in 2026. You're basically, everybody's starting again fresh slate. Last time when these rules changed, Mercedes were the ones that figured it out first. They nailed that powertrain. They had the reliability. They had the power. They had the rulebook advantage. They maximized what they had from the very beginning. I'm curious to see if they can do that again with this new motor package, this new chassis. All the new regulations is going to be fun to watch.

Well, yeah. Then obviously, Red Bull in this current era figured it out for the most part. Although, I did enjoy this era. I'm really excited for the next one.

I mean, dude, if you look back to, jeez, I don't know, 15 years ago when Ferrari would win races by three or four seconds every single weekend, and then Mercedes would win 10 in a row, and it's just the same stuff over and over. Look at the last five or six F1 races. You got seven or eight different manufacturers in the top 10, all within a tenth or two. It's just great racing. I don't care who you are. It's just awesome stuff to watch. I love the drive to survive effect. I know not a lot of people do. All the new fans and fake fans of F1. Dude, I love it. A rising tide brings all the ships up, or whatever, I just dangled that phrase. The more people watching racing and the more people aware of motorsport is better for all of us.

Well, I mean, who cares if it just put it on your radar, right? I mean, at some point in time, somebody was a fan of it from the start. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah, it's like you weren't fully in the know when you started watching either. It's like, so for example, like I watched Drive to Survive brought me and my dad together to watch F1 every, almost every single Sunday ever since.

Share that memory to you because my dad used to record all the races in the middle of the night for me.

Sure.

So when I was younger in the 90s, we'd watch them Sunday mornings. Yeah. It's such a bonding thing for us.

Well, so he used to watch Formula One back in the day, and then obviously, career took off and all that stuff. And then Mike just didn't watch it. He watched it in the Schumacher era, right? So it's like, took a break from that, and Drive to Survive came and it's like, oh, then we watched all of it, then we started watching it and we have an understanding of stuff. I think a lot of people are just quick to hate on it. It's kind of like, let's say you discover a new band.

Exactly. Oh, I've been listening to them for way longer than you have. Right, who cares? It's good music, right?

And then they get big. Same thing, same thing. They're not the same anymore. They were better when they were small, and it's like, oh man, shut up, lads. I don't know. I don't talk to those kinds of people typically.

It's like the gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping, you want to be cool, instead of just appreciating something that's awesome. I will say, though, that the ticket prices and the merch prices and all that stuff is just gone, man. It's gone. You want to go to Miami and watch the race, it's 700 bucks a ticket now. Vegas is double that. My first F1 race was 2007 in Silverstone in the UK.

Awesome.

And it was like a 55, 60 pound ticket.

Yeah.

And now those are 500 pounds, 600 pounds. It's, I understand it, it's popular. It's like, now NFL games, the Super Bowl, those are big tickets, right? But I think it's keeping a lot of people away from witnessing what this stuff is like in real life, which is way different than what it's like on TV. When you're there and you can smell the cars and you feel it in your chest is just completely different than watching it on Netflix.

I will say, I do enjoy watching it on TV. I went to the Miami the first year.

Yeah, because you can't see anything.

Yeah, right. I do enjoy being able to see stuff. Although I like the big TVs in Miami. That was kind of cool. I don't know. My bucket list is to eventually go to Silverstone and then also go to Goodwood and make that like a 10-day trip.

Goodwood is the coolest automotive event on the planet. The Festival of Speed is wild, dude. You walk around and there's like just the most ridiculous stuff you've ever seen from historic to experimental or prototype or race winners. It has everything. And the drivers that show out for it. I remember I walked up to the start grid there and David Brabham is just sitting there with his like 1962 Jaguar that he won all these championships in. We're just having a chat, right? It's just an amazing place. Super, super cool event. If you haven't been there, you need to go. It should be on the list.

That is 100%, like a bucket list item for me. Because again, obviously you see all the hypercars.

And you're racing up some guy's driveway, which is the coolest part. It's not a track, it's hay bales and concrete walls.

Is it actually technically someone's driveway?

Yeah, so Lord March that owns that estate. From the bottom to the top, his mansion is on the top of the estate and they race up a certain section.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's literally everything though. It's like the experimental stuff's cool. Because one of the things I've grown to appreciate in this podcast is like when somebody makes something. Not a stock car, but beyond that. So what does the next year or two look like for you? Like what exactly are you pursuing, particular teams you're working for?

Man, so hopefully, it's a little late in the year to be still sorting this out, but hopefully I'll be on the grid at Daytona in some capacity.

That's really late in the year.

Nothing's signed yet. Yeah, KMW has taken a year off. One of our drivers is dealing with some stuff and wants to come back, but not running this year. I left Road Atlanta thinking that we were going to continue on that same program. We're not, so I'm scrambling to throw something together, but it usually works out in the end.

Sure.

By this time, it's hard. In December, everybody's got an engineer for next year. If you don't, you probably are scrambling on the other side too.

Yeah, because the season starts in January, right?

Yeah. We go to the Roar, what is that, second week of January, and then 24th is the week after. Yeah, yeah. Man, that two weeks in Daytona is such a fast-paced, but long time at the same time. You're at the track for those two weeks pretty much straight. I usually stay down there through into the 24 weekend. Oh, sure. By the time you leave, you're like, jeez, I spent the whole month in Florida. It's rough. We had a bummer of a Daytona last year, man. We were in the Civic. We were the fastest TCR car at the end of the Roar, so we're P1 in the last day of the Roar. So stoked for the race. After being there for an entire week, working on the car, show up for the four hour race, we got crashed out lap four. Just three corners on the car, broke the gearbox, broke the motor, car caught fire. It was a big one. And so to start the year off from that was just a little bit of a tail between your legs, like after having such high hopes, being so fast at the Roar. But yeah, we'll see what happens this year. I'm going to continue to try and stay in IMSA. There's some SRO stuff I'm looking at as well. I prefer IMSA. The people in the paddock and the people I've been working with for years and years and years, it feels like family. SRO is a little more transient, a little more come and go, smaller teams, but it's still good racing.

How did you end up in IMSA? I don't know if you got into that.

So one of my good friends, John Miller, was driving for a team called BGB Motorsports down in Daytona Beach and they ran Porsche 911s. Back then, it was called the Grand Am Coney Challenge Series. And I got introduced to a man named John Tisi who ran BGB at the time. And I knew nothing about racing, man. I knew a lot about the mechanical engine side of things, a lot about the calibration ECU side of things, could make power on the dyno, yada, yada, yada, but I didn't know anything about racing. He knew a lot about racing and didn't know a lot about the ECU side of things. Back then, the stuff was open, so you could do your own motor programs. And so he brought me in to kind of help with the calibration, and monitoring performance of these. Back then, they were 3.6 liter, flat six, 11 engines. Man, and I just, I took to it, and I loved it, and it just never left. I gotta thank him a lot for giving me a shot when I didn't know anything. We were up in Travier, Canada. We used to race outside of Montreal there, it's actually closer to Quebec City. It's a street course. And man, those local fans are amazing. They're just sports car nuts. And we go up there once a year for the Grand Prix of Travier. And I remember I was doing something with the ECU and I'm walking around the outside of the pit garage and I'm like screwing it back together. One of our drivers, Craig Stanton comes over. He's like, what are you doing? What man? What are you talking about?

What are you talking about?

Not supposed to be doing the stuff at the track and messing with the ECUs. And I didn't know any better. And I'm walking around, like showing this off, not showing it off, but not hiding it, right? Things that you don't think about when you're not involved in competitive racing, when you just do this stuff for street cars. No, it was a totally different world for me. And learning what makes a car live at the racetrack versus live on the street, two totally different things. I crack up because some of these guys you have on the show that I respect and amaze with what they do with a 1,500, 1,800 horsepower street car. And even if they do like an eight or nine second dyno pull, here's my dyno sheet. Cool, now do that for four hours. Yeah, right?

Yeah, no shy.

And it's just wild the difference in the thought process behind how can we make this better, but it's gotta last. There's nothing worse than a DNF or a blown motor. So I don't care if you can find another 10 or 15, if it doesn't last and you're on that edge, you're screwed. One of the things that I like to focus on more or so is like fuel mileage, right? Because in IMSA and these endurance races, we've got, like this year we had 80 liters was our BOP number. We had about 79.5 usable. So we had a half liter and then we'd start to get a bobble or something and man, we ran out at Sebring on the cool down lap. Took the checker, three corners later, we're out of gas on the side. That's how close we have to run this stuff. So if you can find a four or five percent fuel economy bump somewhere from either a different driving style or a different style of calibration, it goes a long way into being competitive because in endurance racing, it's about the total package. So if you all of a sudden get 20 kilograms lighter, you might lose 10 or 15 horsepower and that stuff will kind of balance it out. So if you can maximize each little bit of that, you can be a more competitive package, even manufacturer to manufacturer.

Interesting. That's what Brad Kettler was saying yesterday too, is like going DI, it's like you get to 10% more efficiency and it's like you could take however much out. Yeah, that was our longest podcast, probably this week or second longest, because again, tight schedule.

There's a lot up there in that man's hat, dude.

We didn't even crack the surface.

He is a fascinating guy.

I have never left a podcast thinking like, oh my God, we didn't even start, ever, like in all of our episodes. Like that was like, we have a lot more to talk about.

I worked for him in 2017 for Audi Sport Customer Racing. I was handling some of the customer technical support side on the TCR cars when they first brought them to the country. So these were the RS3 and Audi VW GTI TCR.

Okay, this isn't like the one that Brit raised, correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

What is that one, okay.

Yep.

Because they won the first year, right?

Yes. That's when you were involved? I was working for Audi Sport at that time, not for Compass, but I did work for Compass for many years.

Gotcha.

So he was in that program. One of my friends, Marcos, was engineering that car. He just deserved it of that championship. That was a tough, tough championship. Because those cars, for the first time in IMSA, really in touring car, those cars were spec. Now, everybody's kind of working with the same stuff. So to find those, but find that little bit to distinguish yourself was really tough. Right. With those cars, when it started out, it was almost a street car. The transmission was the regular DSG that you get in your normal GTI. The motor was really not much done to it. It was a fairly stock engine. It was impressive to see the abuse that they would tolerate. Now, that same Audi TCR car has a Sadev real sequential box in it. It's a much different package than when they first brought those over, but really cool little package. I was really comfortable with those because of all the two-liter Volkswagen stuff that I did with Revo in the UK. We did hundreds of thousands of those motors, and I knew exactly how to make them tick. I was not trying to impress Bragg Kettler, but one day we were at VIR, and one of the cars was going by, and all these cars ran an IHI turbo, and these turbos would last a certain amount of time. They'd have an electronic wastegate on it, and for the first time with a Volkswagen, you could actually overspin the turbo. Most of the time, the wastegate cracks open. The thing is, hey, it makes what it makes. The car came out of Oak Tree and going down the backstreet, and I was like, he's gonna lose that turbo. Three laps later, lost the turbo. Brad's like, how did you know that? I was like, oh my god, did I just impress you? Like, it really made me feel good. But yeah, he's an interesting cat, man. He's got stories for days, and the ones he doesn't tell, I just can't imagine what they're like. Being involved in that era of prototype racing is just fascinating to me. I remember those cars at Le Mans. It was the first year I ever saw that car run, and it just goes by you, and you don't hear it. You hear the tire, you hear the gearbox, and you hear the arrow. And I've never heard a car where you can hear the arrow moving over the car, and it's almost, it sounds more like a jet than it does an engine. It's just a wild piece of equipment. And then in stark contrast back then, you had the C5, C6 Vets, right? Right. That were the loudest thing there by miles, and so you've got this absolutely silent bullet. And then this thing that you hear four corners away. Yeah. It's just awesome stuff.

What about, what do you, do you have a car? And what is your favorite car that you've driven on the track?

I just sold my Cayman. I had a track prep Cayman.

Okay.

Diff, gears, JRZ shocks, half cage. Basically just something really fun, inexpensive to run. I sold it because I want something with a real cage in it. I was not taking my own advice. And I tell this to guys that I coach and guys that I work with when they're in their street car and you're starting to get to that point where you're getting confident and you're starting to get to that point in cars, especially these days that are just so incredibly capable and fast, you're over your skis a little bit. If you're starting to do like a two minute, two minute five around Daytona in a car without a cage in it. And I was doing two 12s in my Cayman, 159 miles an hour across start, finish, 145 into the bus stop. And I'm like, I'm not listening to my own advice. So I'm looking at a bunch of different stuff. I don't know what I want to get to replace that, but something's coming soon.

Yeah. Anything in the running ideas?

It's going to be another another Porsche, most likely. I'd like to buy probably some sort of 911 race car. Cayman race car. I don't like building things myself because you waste way too much money.

It's much better to buy and buy. The bargain you get is way better.

Yeah. But yeah, I'm a Porsche guy. I love the way they drive. I love the way they feel. I love that a driver becomes the defining factor in a Porsche, where the car itself isn't really anything that amazing. But the feeling and the confidence that it gives you, I think, is unlike most other cars. The way you can make one of those things dance when you're really on it, it's a riot.

So one of my friends, he's driving a GT3 Cup car or whatever. He's actually just signed. He's going to be at Daytona, I think.

Oh, yeah. In Sprint Challenge.

I think so. Oh, no, actually, I usually don't do this during episodes. I have to actually check now because I think this is a key thing to know.

You kind of answered your second question there for me. Favorite car I've ever driven was a 997 GT3 Cup with the old sequential in it. Yeah, and that is just such a raw just s*** your pants driving experience. Everything is happening all at once. The sounds it makes, like it's just violent.

Just going to be driving with JDC Motorsports at the Roar.

Awesome.

Yeah. So what's his name? Nick Pachanek.

Nick Pachanek. Okay.

Yeah, I think he's one to watch out for, man. There's a few guys.

That's a hard series. That is a really tough series. It's very, very difficult to do well in that. It's a lot of like a lot of X open wheel kids and karting kids and like younger talent in cars that love to go wheel to wheel racing. Yeah. Those cars are bonkers to watch. There's usually three or four wide bouncing off each other into one just like going for it. It's good stuff.

Yeah, I think it's going to be the GT4 or something. Yeah. No, I'm excited for that guy. He's over here collecting sponsors. He's finally doing some media work like I told him. I keep telling people, man, it's like, you got to get out there.

His Camaro is here too, isn't it?

Not all of us can spend daddy's money to go racing. Some of you got to go make it.

Yeah, that's exactly it. How do you know when a driver has it? You know what breaks my heart? No, it's not the 2% female demographic. It's the fact that 80% of you guys are not subscribed and following the show. Go ahead, hit Subscribe or Follow. Of course, if you're on YouTube, hit that bell so you are notified when we drop a new episode. Let's get back to the show.

I don't think you do until you work with him for a little while. I think that it thing is a very distinct combination of being able to take care of the car, make good decisions in the car. I don't care how fast you are, if you're doing the wrong things at the wrong time and ended up in the back of somebody or getting potted off. Being able to take care of the car and then being able to get out of the car, sit down with me and give me a good debrief on what you need to make you go a little faster and then go out to the front of the trailer and sign autographs for a half hour and talk to people and be great with the media and the PR. You can have it and not be successful. If you don't like doing that stuff and you're not good at raising sponsorship and you're not good at budgeting your racing dollars in the right arena or with the right teams, you're not going to go well. You can have it in the car and not do great in the sport. I think that's different from a lot of sports where if you have the talent, most of the time you'll rise to the top and get to where you need to be. Racing is such a complicated web of ancestral different things that have to happen at the right time in your career at the right age to get to that point. It's really tough. One of my favorite drivers in IMSA in the sport really is named Ben Keating. Ben is in his mid-50s. He's a Texas car dealer and he got into racing, I think in his mid-40s and he's won Le Mans, he's won Daytona. He is probably the most talented amateur driver in the field. He's getting faster as he's getting older and he didn't discover he had it until he did some track days in his 40s.

You might still have some time.

Fascinating story. The guy's awesome. Again, he's self-financing, right? Owns a string of car dealers in Texas. That's how he made the money to go racing. But you can do things in the sport career-wise. They either limit you or really set you up for success. It's tough to know which is which, especially at a younger age coming into a series like TCR, where this is probably your first time in sports car racing. You might have done some open wheel. You might have done some skip bar or dodge. You might have done some carting. You might have done some amateur WRL stuff or whatever. But this is probably your first foray into pro racing. So having the right advisors and mentors in your corner to make the right decisions matters just as much as how you drive in the car.

Do you see it often where they have it, but they lack in the other things and they just think it doesn't happen pretty often?

There's a lot of guys that are really fast that don't have the discipline for endurance racing. And they're better suited for something like a 30 minute sprint race, where they can go out and burn the car down and they're really good at that. They can go set some burner laps, right? But I don't need your burner laps. I need a second and a half off that for two hours.

Right.

Give me that. And to work that discipline in endurance racing is really difficult.

Endurance really intrigues me. It's something I want to try. We were going to start with something like 24 hours of lemons, right?

Which is a great way to start.

You know, just a given idea.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think I really want to try and hit that maybe this year or next year, just to see what that's like.

Endurance racing shows you that you don't know much about racing.

Right.

Because you're like, man, I didn't think that part would fail twice, right? It's just not things that you don't think about. You're all of a sudden running into, and then you're having to fix it and get back out there. Some guys have won those lemons races from like 15 laps down.

Yeah.

Right? Like on their second gearbox. It just works out that you can spend an hour in the pits and buy some weird thing with the penalties or this and that. Those are really cool to watch.

Maybe that's what we should do with the town car. That actually would be fun. Yeah. That way we could be comfortable.

You said a town car.

Yeah.

Oh man.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Yeah.

I'm in. All right.

We wanted to talk. Let's talk about that after this. Especially at this job. Maybe I could do something stupid like that now.

Yeah.

Sim racing. I want to talk to you about that. First of all, you said you have a pretty know-it-all sim rig?

I do. I built it during COVID.

Of course, like we all did.

I was bored. We weren't racing. We weren't at the track. All of my racer and driver friends were building theirs and we all got together. And I got deep into it, man. I was like, I bought one of those little Logitech wheels for the desk. And seven, eight months later, I've got an entire setup with the wraparound monitors and the force feedback or the load cell pedals and all this stuff. It spent like 10 grand on it. And it just went, it got so out of hand. I was like, 10 grand could have bought me a nice spec Miata that I could go real racing with.

That's what a lot of people say.

I have a love-hate relationship with sim racing. I think if you start on the sim, you can be really good in the car. It teaches you the fundamentals of what a brake trace needs to look like, how you can work on setup and feel the changes, how to manage your tire slip and manage that kind of stuff. Like it teaches you a lot of things that you would never get in any other arena because the stuff you can try in the sim with no consequences, you never do in real life. I think going the other way is hard. I've never been fast in the sim because I drive with my a** and with my inner ear and feeling the car, and you don't get that in the sim. And I lack so much of that feedback. Even with a nice sim setup, it's hard to get that. And the kids now that are coming up have only done sim racing, and then they get in a car and they're really, really fast because they're used to the things like listening for the tire because you don't get the feedback that you normally get. They're used to having that kind of vision of doing eight things at once. And work in a traction control knob and an ABS. Yeah, this is stuff that 15 years ago, 20 years ago, a guy gets in a car and goes on track for the first time. That's probably his first time ever dealing with that sort of foot, those sort of forces, that sort of driving. And now you can go from sim racing to real racing. And you see a lot of these guys doing this now. And they'll hop in the car and they're fast.

The guys out here at the sim arena.

Absolutely.

Allegedly, I haven't walked over there yet, so.

That's crazy.

I'm in that same boat. I can't.

I'm just not good at it.

I suck at the sim.

And there's nothing more just frustrating when I put in an hour and a half on the sim and some 14-year-old that's never sat in a race car in a life smokes me by 8 tenths. I don't have it. I don't have it. But I think it's a fantastic tool.

I like it to learn the track.

When it's used properly. Before I went to the ring the first time, I probably spent 3, 4 weeks straight just lapping and lapping and lapping and lapping.

That probably made it really fun once you actually got there.

It doesn't prepare you for the elevation change or the G-forces or anything like that. But what it gives you is, I know where the next corner goes. When you come over a blind crest, you're not going, oh, s***, you go, I'm committing here. I'm turning in at this point. For that kind of thing, I think it's really useful. I use it a lot for setup. I'll try different setup changes in the sim to see how they affect the car. I can show up to the track. Our TCR Honda is in iRacing, right? It's modeled pretty well, so I can sit there and try stuff and then show up to the track with an idea of the direction I want to go in the setup for the weekend. Is it perfect? No. Do I still rely on what's actually happening in the real life? Yes. But it gives you an idea of where we're probably going to go with the car. It's usually not too far off from what we run in the real life, so I think it's a very interesting tool. I don't put a lot of time into it from a competition standpoint because it just drives me nuts. I'm not good at it, so just going and running mid-pack in the sim all the time isn't fun for me, but I do like using it to learn new stuff.

Sure.

My buddy I just brought up that's going to be at Daytona or whatever, so I took a couple of months off of sim and I was beating him regularly. He would set a time, I'd be like, all right, I'm going to go break it, and I would regularly do it. I took a couple of months off and he gave me a time at VIR, and this is in a GT3 Cup car. I can't remember, it's not the most latest iteration, it was the legacy one. I spent, I think, 207, 280 laps trying to just catch this guy after taking two months off. I was like, God damn it, this guy got really good. That's when I realized, I'm like, this guy can drive. He's winning in real life. I'm like, all right.

Yeah, it's funny to see also a lot of pro drivers that either love it or hate it.

Well, Hamilton hates it.

Hamilton hates it. Again, I think when you don't grow up with that sort of foundation in the Sim, it's just like, it's not the same. If you grow up learning how to drive from the seat of the pants, from the feedback the car is giving you through the wheel, through the pedal, that is just, it's not that these Sim rigs aren't good. You've just kind of got a layer of diffusion on top of it. You don't feel that moment in the steering wheel where you feel the tire give up. You don't really feel that moment in the pedal, oh, there's the ABS. Okay, and you don't get that fine level of detail. And for me, it's like the G-forces. When I commit in a corner in a race car and that thing hunks over and then I feel it move a bit, that's when I know where I'm correcting and when I'm opening up and when I'm getting back to power. And you don't feel that in the Sim, even those massive $20,000 motion rigs over there.

Those are the cheap ones over there. They have a couple hundred thousand dollars there.

I don't even like the motion ones.

Just go buy a race car.

Because my car is not doing that violent s*** when I'm driving it. Like you feel the G's is what you feel, but the car's not going like this and jerking back and forth usually.

You could drive it harder.

Yeah. What I do like is I run a butt kicker on mine.

Yeah, those help a lot.

Yeah, so you can rumble strips and it'll get a little rumbly when you start to break loose.

But when someone's never driven a race car, they don't understand how violent and sensual the entire thing is.

Yeah.

The vibrations that you feel, the noises that you pick up, the impacts of the curbs, the engine note, if it changes a little bit or a brake vibrate, all this stuff is happening. And it's up to you to use all those senses to piece all that stuff in to what's going on with my race car. And I think that's part of I think when you say who has it, someone who can pay attention to that little bit of stuff to make the difference is really important.

Just the way the car smells sometimes.

Absolutely.

I have my windows down and I'm like, oh, that oil's getting hot.

Yep. Yeah, the Sim is a tool for me. It's not fun.

Yeah.

Speaking of Hamilton, by the way, do you think he's done?

No, I don't think he's done.

You think he's got some more of them?

Everybody wants to drive for Ferrari in their career, right?

Right. You think he's gonna stay at Ferrari?

That was a strategic move for him. Yeah. He's making more money than he's ever made in his career.

Sure.

That car was a total bag of s*** this year.

Yeah.

Not his fault. However, I think Ferrari not taking what he can bring to the team from a development standpoint, because it was very late into that car's development. So they really, they were kind of up against, well, this is what we got to work with. I think they're going to get more value out of him next year than they did this year.

With the new regulations?

Yep. He hasn't forgotten how to drive a race car, I'll tell you that. The guy is a competitor. I hate watching him now, because he just looks so dejected all the time.

He looks sad all the time, man.

Oh man, he just looks sad. Every single PR thing he has to do, he's just sour face. And like, I hate that. I love seeing the old Hamilton. And I think that'll come back. These new regs are going to be great. I really think they're going to be cool.

I'm really excited for them. Well, what do you think is the most important part about the new regulations?

Man, it's always the powertrain, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, that really, it's, so Mercedes is selling to a bunch of customer teams, right? Honda is doing a customer program. I think the past-

Is Honda still going to be involved in the new regs?

Yeah.

Who are they going to?

Red Bull's doing their own now, right? Correct.

So they're going to Aston?

I think Aston, yeah.

Yeah.

I think the powertrain is the hardest part about Formula One. It's the only series in the world where you're building your own engines and building your own control systems to run those engines and writing your own software for those control systems to run those engines. It's wild stuff, man. Mercedes figured it out the best in the hybrid era. This is also a hybrid now, but they're the way they're- they're splitting it a little bit differently.

50% now, right?

Yeah. And so I think that's going to be a challenge where you've got teams where if they may not be as strong on the power side, the hybrid side, if they're good at it might be a little bit better. I think we're going to be running into, especially in a lot of tracks that have long straights. These cars aren't going to be making the max power. They're going to be derating. They're going to be charging the battery. It's a really weird kind of, are we going backwards sort of thing that I don't like about it.

There's some questions about that.

Man, if you could ask me what I'd want a Formula One car to look like, it would be a mid-90s Tyrell or McLaren or something, a small, light, big tire, just tons of horsepower. You know, these cars are a showcase of what you can do with the technology that you can develop and have available to you. And how much money can we spend? And what's the craziest s*** we can do? That's great. But when you're watching some of the stuff on TV and you have zero passes in 30 laps, because the cars don't work if you're behind somebody because the air wash and the tires go away. And it's just like, it's almost more of a showcase of the technology than it is the on track product.

That's kind of what it became.

And I think if we got back to something a little smaller, like if you look at Formula 3, Formula 2, those are great races to watch.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

So why can't we have any passing in Formula 1? It's just like, it's, I think that this year is probably going to be different enough where we might be getting back in that direction, but it's not really what it used to be. And I don't want, I'm not like old man shaking a stick here, but like when you watch some of those old classics run around, you go, holy s***, that's crazy.

Yeah.

06, 07, those cars, the groove tires, just unbelievably cool, cool race cars to watch.

I will say this last year and even last year, or sorry, the year to just finish in the previous year, has been a lot of good racing too, though. It's nice to see the whole fuel gang shaking up. William's coming all the way back up to the top again, not up to the top, but some life in there again.

Yep.

Are you excited for Cadillac?

Yeah, I am.

You think you chose right with the drivers?

I have two friends that are working there now. Okay. On the GM side, powertrain side. I'm very curious to see what they can do. I admire the tenacity of General Motors after so many US based teams have tried this to bite it off and go for it. I think it's going to be a hell of a learning experience, but I'm very, very excited to see where it goes. You've got two phenomenal drivers.

I loved both of them. I like both of them.

They're just two guys that have been around that know how to develop a car, and I guarantee you that's why they picked them. It's going to be really fun to watch. I'm very, very excited.

Those were honestly when they were selling Merch at Vegas, by the way, already. Were they?

Yeah.

I'm really excited for those. Those are the two perfect drivers. I was so happy when they announced them.

Perez should be on the grid for sure, and Bottas never should have left.

You think he got shafted by getting kicked out of Red Bull?

I think when you're in Red Bull, that's always on the table. The way Helmut ran those drivers, the way they would bring somebody in, give them a trial, and then throw them back and demote them to the other team. All that stuff is very cutthroat, and I understand the business that they're in. But no, I think Perez, I mean, look at Sunoda, right? The kids won tons of stuff. He's super fast. He can't quite get his head around the Red Bull, and now he's out. And you look at Perez and the stuff that he did to give Max those titles, he was an amazing teammate.

Minister of Defense, baby.

Minister of Defense, he is an amazing teammate. And that's what you need sometimes in those two car teams. And Sunoda won't do it. You know, you saw the last race, it's just...

Yeah, that was rough. That was like, basically, he's like, here, open up the door for him.

Ran him off the track a little bit. Okay, what's your take on that?

I think you should have got the penalty. I think he would have won still, but I think he deserved the penalty on that.

I think he did too. That was one of those calls where you're just like, oh, I want him to win. I don't want this to be decided by a penalty, but it's also, we have all these cameras at the track and these are the rules, right, that we all have to play in. Yeah, you can't win with that one. There's no, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

I think the comment that his dad was kind of, Norris' dad made was a little silly. It's like, people only remembered a champion on that day or whatever he said, I was just like, that's an interesting comment to make. You just beat a four-time champion.

Yeah, exactly.

Interesting comment. But hey, it is his day.

I've just really enjoyed this season. I thought everything was just phenomenal to watch. It's not been like that in a while and it was good.

I did want Piazzetti to win most of the season, but then when Max came back into the fight, I'm like, oh, I'm cheering for this guy. Piazzetti, by the way, HP Tuners. Yes, one of the drivers, yes. Adrian's a fan of his and all that, yes.

I remember listening, they're talking to her about that.

Yeah, yep.

But I'm trying to think, was there anything else I wanted to touch on?

They used to sponsor his car in F2. They ran HP Tuners on the car.

I was gonna ask you, F2, you know who I'm paying attention to? I don't know, how much do you pay attention to F2? Do you have time?

Sure.

I'm paying attention to Dina.

I will usually watch the F2 race on the weekend. I can't watch all of it, but I'll usually try and watch the F2 race.

Yeah, F3 and F4 as well or not really?

So I, what was it? Two years ago, F4 was a support series in IMSA, so we got to see some of the US F4 cars. So like Rubens Barrichello's kid, Montoya's kid, some of those guys were running. It was fun to watch, but no, I don't watch it on TV.

I'm paying attention to Dina Baganovich right now, because I'm a Bosnian. It's like, oh, we might have one of our own finally. Because there's not exactly a ton of billionaires out of Bosnia, right? So it's like, technically he's Swedish, I think, whatever, but I'm excited. Hopefully, I'd love to see, he's at Ferrari Academy.

You get good at driving those tractors in the snow and he learns about control, right?

Right, exactly. But yeah, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on before we start wrapping up here?

Let me just look at the little list I made.

Oh, sure, pull it up, Jamie.

Jamie, get that on the screen. Oh, man, I think we pretty much covered most of it.

Did you actually have a list?

I just wrote down three or four things that I wanted to hit, but I wanted to cover a lot of the BOP and how IMSA manages these manufacturers and all that kind of stuff that we did. So because I think one of my issues with sports car racing is for the casual fan to turn it on TV or show up at a race, it's impossible to know what's going on with all the different classes and all the different regulations, the different manufacturers, what this car can do, what that car can't do because it's in a different class, the strategy calls they're making, the decisions that race control is making that can influence the race, all that stuff is very, very hard to follow for a casual fan. I wish that it was a little bit more approachable. It's probably the strongest on-track product that you can find in motorsport right now. The racing is phenomenal, but it doesn't really get that much traction. It's hard to watch. You got to go get a Peacock or YouTube or all this stuff.

That's the biggest thing for me. It's like, I need to be on my sports all around now. You got to start Googling where you want to watch a game of any sort.

Yeah. I wish it was a little more approachable for the casual fan to not have to go, oh, that car is only not winning because they got hit with 30 kilos more weight this weekend. That's why everybody's mad. Those kind of things that, yes, we have to have in the sport and it does affect it. It makes it difficult compared to football, where the rules don't change. You don't have to worry about what happened this week compared to last week because it might be different. Those things are frustrating to keep up with for a casual fan that just wants to watch some racing.

Is there some outlaw stuff out there that literally has no rules to it? Basically, build it, drive it, race it?

Oh, man. Pikes Peak Hill Climb?

I was asking if you had done it in Pikes Peak.

Unfortunately, we lost the front-wheel drive record this past year. Held it for a long time. I'd worked with Rob Holland, who's a Colorado-based driver. He's an awesome dude. We had a TTRS, five-cylinder TTRS that was actually an ex-Nürburgring 24 VLN car. So, man, that race is... I've done it twice now. I don't really ever want to do it again. It is brutal. Really? You wake up at two in the morning, you get there, it's 15, 20 degrees. The base of the mountain is 9,000 feet, 8,000 feet. You're racing up to 14.1. The conditions to make a race car live and do that, oh, it's just wild. That TTRS ran a factory ECU.

What's that, a Bosch?

A Bosch 89 ECU. And man, I have never had to work so hard to make that thing just want to blow itself up because it has so many protections of turbo speed and barometric pressure correction and all these different things that go into making that car not blow up on the street. And then you try to run it to 14,000 feet, make some horsepower. That was a struggle to get that thing to behave.

So that was just the overall...

It's just a harsh environment, right?

Sure, there's no air.

You get up top and the driver finishes the run and they sit up there for another two and a half hours before they get to drive back down. And it's snowing or raining or whatever the hell it's doing up there. And it's wild. It's a crazy place.

Not to mention, the faster you go up that, the worse you feel, right? It's you can go up nice and slow, it's not that bad. But when you rock it up that thing...

14,000 feet, if you've never been there, is a challenge.

Yeah, we've done a few rallies up there.

I lived in Breckenridge for a couple of years full time, and I was sleeping at 9600. And it probably took me six months not to wake up in the middle of the night, kind of just, something's wrong, something's not right here. It's, altitude's brutal on your body, and the same reason it's brutal on your body, it's brutal on an engine. Everything has to try that much harder just to make what it was trying to make at sea level.

Yeah. Well, we did Pikes Peak International Raceway below, and I couldn't get my, I think I was having a boost leak anyway, but I just, my car just wouldn't do what it does.

Your boost leak's cause you're at 6,000 feet.

Yeah, pretty much. We can't compress the air cause there is no air. Yeah. Yeah, it's totally different.

Yeah, and what people also don't think about is the effects on the air of the car, the effects on the cooling and the braking as well, right? So you've got less air, not just in the engine, but flowing over your wing, going through your radiator, your intercooler, your oil cooler, your brake ducts, all these things, man, add up to just being able to just, oh man, get to the top. Yeah. If you can get to the top, you're doing something well. Then to go win it or to go do well, I never unfortunately got to see it when it was still dirt because I think that would have been awesome. I've only been since it's been paved, which they did it for safety and environmental reasons and things, but I also think they made it a little more dangerous because now the grip levels are so much higher. Sure. Unfortunately, they don't run motorcycles there anymore. Rest in peace, Carl and Dunn. But I would have loved to have seen more of that because watching those guys, I got to see the last two years of the bikes. Well, those guys coming over those crests on the back wheel, all crossed up, just nuts, man. You look down off the edge of that and you just say, the balls, I don't know how you sit on the seat. Where does the tank go?

My kids are freaking out. We were just up there not that long ago. I was and I rented a like a Tahoe and I drove them up there. And yeah, the kids that were on the one side on the way there were like, it's pretty intense, but it's super fun. I like I would love to go spectate that event that's on my bucket list.

Yes, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

June usually, right?

Yeah, June, June, July.

Yes.

I think I'm pretty sure. Yeah, because I used to have it like the week, I used to run events like the week before or after it, I think. But so is that all encompassing front wheel drive record or a particular class?

Yeah, it held for a while. So that was, I think we did a 10, 1008, I believe. Yeah, Rob held that record for a long time. Sure. And the funny thing about that car is it was never intended to do this. It's a Nurburgring VLN car, right? Yeah. It's a high speed corner kind of set up. It had the wrong steering rack in it. So there's a VLN steering rack and there's a sprint steering rack. We had the VLN rack. So you come into some of these hairpins and he'd go and hit the lock stop and barely make the corner.

Yeah. Just like understeering probably.

Exactly. It was such a challenge to get that car to work there. But yeah, it was a fun program.

So what as you're climbing the mountain, the aero load just is less and less and less. So you just have to drive less aggressively typically or?

Well, the car has to adjust for bare metric pressure too for internally like that.

Yeah. So I basically just nuked all those protections out of the factory ECU and just let it try as hard as it can because we had a couple of spare turbos and if it blew up, we'd go fix it.

Yeah, probably spinning a turbo to the moon.

Oh my God, dude. I mean, shaft speed stock car is limited to like 115, 120 is usually about 180, 190. Yes, it was a stock turbo on that car. What is that on that? K26, can't remember. But yeah, everything just goes, I don't want to be doing this at that altitude in those conditions. But yeah, so the aero load changes as you go from the bottom of the top. So you set the car up. So it's biased for a little bit of oversteer at the bottom. So it bleeds that oversteer off and becomes a little bit pushy at the top. And finding that balance is really, really hard. Also man, like everybody's using tire warmers. Everybody's using tire warmers because you don't have a chance to get any heat in that tire. The asphalt never rubbers in, it never warms up. It's such a just specialized event to be good at. Sure. You should get a Tim Brescia from BBI on here. He'd be a great guy to talk to. He's done a lot of cool Pikes Peak stuff there with a lot of cool Porsches. He's had some really good success there.

What's he based out of?

He's at Huntington Beach.

Huntington Beach? Oh, that's another one for California. We might really have to do a California one here soon.

I'll connect to you guys. He's a smart m***********.

But you're saying it'd be too soon if you never went back there again?

Yeah. It's just one of those... Because it's a whole week, two weeks. The testing and the practice, it's like Le Mans, man. You get there in the beginning of May and you're there till mid-June and it's just like...

You've done Le Mans as well then?

Not worked it. I've been to Le Mans four or five times. I've never worked it. That's been on the bucket list. One of these days, it'll happen. But yeah, it's just the logistics involved with Pike Speaker are just a nightmare and you're never warm enough. You're never comfortable enough. Something's always broken. Everything always sucks. If you do well, it's awesome because it's such a challenge. But yeah, it's tough, man. It weighs on you.

Do you think those EV guys have a little bit of an advantage?

100%.

Yeah, a little easier for them.

Oh yeah.

That motor makes the same power it does at the top as it does at the bottom.

Sure.

It's exactly what an electric car was designed for. High torque out of every corner. Really good traction control, really good strategies like that. You don't have to worry about range. So you just nuke that battery from the bottom of the top. I mean, it's probably the best thing you could possibly do Pike's Peak with.

Sure.

Yeah, it's not something that's geared for internal combustion. Sure.

That's what makes a challenge exciting, I imagine.

Yeah.

Well, and then one of my last topics I want to discuss. So are you doing much tuning in general nowadays?

I do still do some white label stuff. So a couple of manufacturers, depending on the hardware they're running and depending on what they're selling, will bring me in to take care of the R&D and the development. And that's good because I don't want to do the retail and the customer support side of it.

Yeah, forget all that.

I handle the engineering. It's a good fit. Yeah, I still do a fair bit of that. It's probably less of my business now than it used to be. The manufacturers are getting just so much better at keeping guys like me out. It's very, very difficult. Like all the new BMWs, like I've got a B58 X3. You got to send that ECU off to Finland. They got to unlock it. You got to do all this stuff. It's not drive into the shop, throw it on the dyno, tune in anymore. It's a whole process. The dealers do over-the-air updates. You have your tuned car sitting in your garage. You wake up the next morning, you go out to it. It's on E85. It doesn't start.

Right, yep.

And you're like, what the f***? Oh, it just got a dealer update in the middle of the night. Now your cow's wrong, right? Like that kind of stuff, it's making it a real, real challenge to be able to support that kind of business and still make good margin on it. Cause there's so much other work involved than there used to be of just flash OBD, make three or four dyno runs, check it, make sure it's happy, send it out the door. That model's changed a lot. So it's, yeah, I'm doing less and less of that.

I think we're going to see these ECU, aftermarket ECU companies are getting their computing power, things are getting crazy.

Look at Cybex, right? Those guys, they come out with these plug and play things with a base map. Now all of a sudden, you don't have to deal with this stuff anymore. You plug it into your factory harness, you spend a day or two on the dyno, getting that thing dialed in and you're off to the races.

Well, they're getting way better at that Canbus stuff too.

Motorsport level, anti-lag, traction control, Canbus integration, your dash buttons work, your wheel buttons work, all that stuff like that. Ten years ago, a standalone was like, well, it doesn't start very well in the morning, like that kind of stuff. I've always, with calibration and tuning for me, I don't care what the dyno sheet says, it's got to drive well, it's got to be an improvement over what you had before. I don't care if it's 44, 45, 50 more horsepower, if it's a little rough around the edges and you get some part throttle surging, that stuff drives me up the wall. I did all the development on the software side for VF Engineering's supercharger kits for the Lambros and the R8s, so I did all their development for years on that stuff. Those cars, man, you could run that thing on 95 Ron, 91 Ron, piss fuel, anywhere in the world. It would run great, it would cold start great. You didn't get any lights on the dash. That was such a turnkey product, and that's exactly what Nick, who owns VF, wanted. He wants to be able to ship the boxes of these out the door all day long, and they go to Russia, and the guy puts it in, and he fills the car up or whatever, and it's got the factory knock protection in it, and it drives smooth, and it runs great. That for me is a bigger challenge than making a Dyno number, and it's always something that I've tried to focus on. Dyno numbers are cool, don't get me wrong. But you don't drive it on the Dyno, you drive it on the road.

You know what else is cool? A car that you can actually drive and enjoy, and it actually starts and runs.

Exactly, that sounds miserable. Well, sweet, on that note, do you want to rip the usual three?

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

Unlimited budget.

Unlimited budget.

Oh man, track car. Do I have to be street legal?

Dude, you do whatever you want.

All right, I would say a 911 Cup car. Sure. Just probably the coolest thing from a raw visceral kind of experience. Most recent one? I prefer the 997. It's smaller, it's got the old f*** you sequential box in it instead of the paddles. Is that a trademark? Yeah. The downshifts where you're just hammering that thing and blipping and like, it's just such a cool car.

Sure.

Street car, daily driver, probably what I have. I've got a B58X3 M40i.

For a daily driver?

For my daily driver. It's making 500 and change on ethanol and a downpipe, like reliable as hell. It's got a tow hitch. I throw my dirt bike on the back. And take it to the mountains. Snow tires on it for the winter. Yeah, it's like the M3 Touring we never got. That's what I'd have if we got it here, but we couldn't get it, so that's kind of the next best thing. What was the other one? Those are boring, they don't move.

What's that?

I said, those are boring, they don't move.

Yeah, they can move.

We're not talking Bluetooth drive shafts here.

Oh man, I would like to do, I love a nice old classic donk, like a 82 Caprice Classic or something, you know, with some... I grew up in the South, right?

Sure.

I want some alligator seats in that thing, I want some 24s, but I want it with like some gnarly Turbo LS, MoTec, 8HP Gearbox.

They're getting big in the drag racing.

I want to do the tech side of it proper, but have it look like one of those old school donks.

Yeah, sure.

I think that would be awesome.

Okay. Well, on that note, where can everybody find you?

At rromisch, R-O-E-M-I-S-C-H on Instagram, robinatcorsologic.com. If you're looking for any kind of consulting, coaching, engineering, anything like that, hit me up, please.

Sure. Awesome. And if you need any, this episode's gonna drop after January, so nevermind.

Yeah, I already know what I'm doing for next year by then, but hopefully. Ask me in February when we're testing for C.

Right, yeah, yeah, exactly.

If you guys are ever around an IMSA race, if the schedule works out, let me know. I'd love to have you there. Throw a headset on, listen to what I do. Watch what goes on during the race weekend. Sure. Yeah.

Well, sweet. On that note, first of all, thank you very much for coming on the show. This is awesome. I'm glad we finally made it happen.

Yeah, absolutely. Nice to meet you for sure.

And then, Dan, thanks for existing, and we'll see you all next time.

See you on the next one.

All right.