192. Jay Meagher on Engine Building, the Next Generation, Land Speed Racing, and Supra Updates

This episode is brought to you by 6XD Gearbox. More on them later. Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And I'm here with my Ford Loving Co-host, Dan. Mr. Gunnett Garage. We are here at RS Garage, and this is what I've been wanting to do for a while. I think for the last two years. So a little bit of background on me, which I didn't tell you before we started the show. So right around episode 67 of this show, I realized I don't know s*** about s***. We had somebody on the show who was a head expert, and I'm like, man, I should really learn more about cars. So I'll be talking to people who work on cars. And you and HPA were the two where I basically went down a deep rabbit hole of watching videos almost every single night, two, three videos, just to have an understanding of cars in preparation to interview Aaron Miller, who was episode 98. So this has been an episode I've been really excited for for quite some time. Nonetheless, we're here with Jay Meagher. One of the things that we wanted to talk about was the future of this industry. How do we get more people my age or younger involved in vehicles, especially in a world where, for lack of a better term, everybody has soft hands? Yeah. Yeah. So why don't you kind of let's kind of just kind of start with that, see where it goes, because people have already seen your interviews with the other podcasts and other topics that have been discussed.

No, I think that talking about the kids is a good move. When you think about the sheer numbers of it, it's easy to say that it's over. You know, like there's no kids interested in this. You know, you go to a sport bike dealership and they're all 400 cc bikes. Like there's no more 600, 750 liter bikes. Like the speed industry is played out. The technology is replacing it. And I would probably argue against that because even when I was a kid, most of the kids my age weren't into this. And as a whole, there's the people that are into cars aren't terribly strong in numbers when you compare it to animal lovers, fitness, gun lovers, couch potatoes, sports fans. Like we've always been a kind of a smaller demographic. So even just the other day when Sick Week was here, I went out to Orlando and just was like watching the scene. And there's a fair share of young people in it. It's probably just the same small in numbers that we've kind of always been. You know, because if you go back to your memories of high school, how many kids were in it the way you were in it? You know, when did your attraction to cars start? You know, for me, it was really early on. Yeah, like the other night, my daughter said, what toys did you play with as a kid that you can still buy today? And I'm like, cars, you know, because that's what it's always kind of been. You know, I never had an interest in sports or anything like that. It's just cars. So I think that we have to first understand that in total numbers, the industry is on the smaller side and people come in and they go out because, you know, you having come to do this thing and then maybe you settle in to a family and you don't have the money to do it and then maybe you come back or maybe you don't. You know what I mean? Like I got guys that are like my age that are building the cars that they wish they had in high school and they're searching for these cores. You know, probably one of the major concerns I would have is the cores as far as the cars go because I grew up where you could get a Fox Body Mustang or an F-body Camaro or a Honda Civic or an MR2. They were all cheap cores.

Yeah.

So as we move forward, what will the kids play with as far as cars because the 90s stuff is going to be really old by then. And when you get past say 2015 or so, like it's expensive. The cars are, you know, a lot of tech, a lot of your flash tuning and then maybe not, right? So the cars are changing, but I think the kids are just as small as numbers as they've always been.

Yeah, well, I think it's difficult, right? It's like, for example, one of the engineers at Carp Boy, like he just recently got himself a WRX and it was like it got hit. It was blown up and all that stuff. It was still like $7,000, $8,000. It was a 2015 WRX or something like that. And it's like that's a far cry from the baguette's $700 Camaro. Or like some of the other guys, what was it, the S13 yesterday, he got that for like a thousand bucks. So it's like getting into that is just, I think it's a very different world in that regard.

Well, but the Subaru is an interesting thing because you could buy, I look at them, I just, I'm always like looking at the market. And you could buy a bug eye car, it just so happens to need rod bearings, pretty cheap. You know what I mean? So it depends on how hard you want to jump into the water. You know, if you say, hey, I'm gonna buy my first car and build the engine, you know, that may make it a steep learning curve, but you can get into some play, you know, because I see those cars selling pretty cheap. But yeah, it's, the cores are gonna be a problem, finding the cars, you know, I could buy a $500 Mustang. I bought and sold quite a few $500 Miata's, you know, you'd buy them with a dead battery and you put a battery in it and air the tires up and sell it for a few grand. So I was really spoiled through my 20s with access to cheap cores.

Well, you're also in an area where, so one of the things we run into where we're at is they rot away before you can even, so a lot of people didn't, you know, like I come down here and I'll see a 90s F-150 and I'm like, oh, I'm all excited that the wheel wells aren't rotted out. And the one thing we have going for us is it's, a lot of those things were mass produced. And if you don't care about it having had been a GT or whatever, then you know, you can go from there, but I don't know if they're gonna have the interest in it.

I think, you know, I just spent a week out in LA and there's a lot of old cars that you would probably just bug out because like they're definitely rotted off the road in your area. And it's the same thing, man. The kids are out there. They're just, you know, few in numbers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember getting excited when I saw a 90s Ford Taurus. I was in Colorado or something. I was just telling him that story the other day too. I was like, those are just gone where I'm at. Yeah.

I saw, I could, I could, there has to be an Instagram page of like car spotting in LA because it's like, there's a Ford Tempo. It's like, when's the last time you saw a Ford Tempo?

Right. Exactly.

Or a Taurus wagon or like, you know, just stuff that falls off, like countless amount of Nissan hard body trucks. It's 6 a.m. you're on the 405 and some dude just headed to work in his 80 something Toyota pickup truck.

Yeah.

You know, like you don't even here. You don't really see those on the road as much as you do out there.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. Climate definitely has a lot to do with what's what's going to stay alive on the road. Yeah.

Oh, it's like every time we go down to Texas, UK is like we're shopping on Facebook marketplace for Dan.

Oh, yeah. I'm always looking for trucks. The trucks are big money up or we're out. If you can get, you know, some 90s pickup trucks and bring them back.

Yeah. Rangers is one that's always on your radar.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a big one for you.

Yeah.

Well, OK, so you've established the history with the various platforms you worked on, but what's something that's, what do you think is going to be popular for my generation? Right. Like if you were to tell somebody like, hey, go get yourself one of these like 2015, whatever's. Is there something that sticks out to you?

Well, the Coyote platform is it's a good running car. It's got a ton of mods available. They're pretty reliable. They have closed-loop fueling from the factory, which is a huge benefit if you're going to put a blower or turbos on it. So the Coyote platform, I think, is is somewhere that's really easy to reach into. Four-cylinder stuff. I think it's a bit harder, unfortunately, because if you get into German turbo four-cylinder stuff, I think the expense goes up quite a bit.

So I can actually speak to that. So me and my brother both had Mark 7 GTIs, right? Mine was modified, his was stock and has had a warranty. So his transmission eventually went out. And even though the car was like maybe a $10,000 car, the transmission all said and done was like 12 grand.

Yeah.

Like going through the dealership and all that, obviously not sourcing. That's tough.

That's tough. And it really shows my age because I didn't have to deal with that stuff. Like you could buy cheap parts and cheap cores. And even in like, I think that's what made the Honda market so big.

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Is there was just a lot of resources for parts, where you can just get parts, you know? And even, there's some kids that come around that they have 90s Honda stuff, so it's out there.

Yeah.

But I think the box will be hard to check. What do you want? Can you afford it? Can you work on it yourself? What's the aftermarket support like? Do your goals for the vehicle line up with all of that? So maybe as you come into this as a hobby, you have to maybe have a little guidance on what could have a good outcome. Because if you have, if you want a 600 horsepower Mini Cooper, you may hit yourself in the head a lot of times before you get there and it may cost a lot of money. So you just have to pick a path that's digestible. So that's probably a decent subject to try to educate younger guys on. And going back to that Coyote market with those trucks, I mean like a Whipple on an F-150. It's like, man, that thing is powerful and fast and easy. And like that market really gives it up. And then the LS market is just equally available. So I think maybe what hurts moving forward more is the small engine stuff, because what car do you get that you could really get involved in that's affordable?

So we actually had somebody on the show that was big into EcoBoost space. Those are apparently taken off. What did he say? You can get an engine for a few hundred bucks.

Yeah, you can get a 2.0 Ecotech out of a Ford Edge, and they're cheap to get. Is it Ecotech or Ecoboost?

Yeah, he said Ecotech.

Did I? Yeah, Ecotech. Those are killing it though, too, aren't they? The Ecotech stuff?

Yeah, but I think they're a bit older now.

Yeah.

But that engine was, if you go back in the sport front wheel drive racing, back in that Nopi era in NHRA, they had a lot of Ecotech stuff that was wicked fast. The EcoBoost, I haven't read a lot about it. I think that there's some head gasket issues that come in play in some of those engines.

I've heard that too, but the guys that we talked to that build them, they seem to feel there was not a big deal.

Yeah, they put them in drift cars and they actually live surprisingly. So I should go back to listen to that episode actually. But no, I think that's the biggest thing as it comes down to availability. If I, granted, I'm kind of an outlier because if I was doing this podcast, I would still have my Mark 7 GTI and I'd be having fun with that. The only reason it is is because I want to do the responsible thing and whatever. But that's the platform. I was looking at Facebook Marketplace, it's like eight grand for the car. It's not too shabby.

Yeah, but you were also, one of your biggest concerns was you were worried about it being over 100,000 miles and the reliability being there. So that's awesome.

And the trans is getting ready to get to the coast.

That's kind of a sad thing to think about. When you told me that, I'm thinking, I have no problem buying cars with 130,000 miles on them.

That's usually what you're saying.

So I feel like that's kind of a sad thing that you got to think that this car is end of, well, not end of life, but it's going to start becoming a money pit at that point.

Well, you have to, you hate to sound like somebody's dad about it, but if you're young, 17, 18, 19, getting into the workforce, maybe going to college, finding a trade or a path into a career, having your $10,000 transmission expire really wrecks a lot of what's going on. So yeah, that'd be an interesting kind of a flowchart of which cars to pick that you can afford to not only modify, but they don't require an A-Tech level to just work on the thing, you know, because that's another component of it. And then aftermarket support and access to good information.

What do you respect in the industry when it comes to good information? Like if there was somebody that you had to guide, again, a sub 30 year old to like, hey, you should go watch this guy's stuff or learn from this person. Does anybody come to mind?

Not really, but it's it's not because there's not a lot of great options. It's because I don't.

You don't have to watch it.

I don't watch the Internet. I've listened to some young guys talk about ChrisFix.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris, ChrisFix.

And when I listen to them talk about it, I'm like, holy crap, that guy's a great resource, you know? But I think that there's. There's a lot of I've stumbled into some older guys channels, and they're they're great. You know, like it's a that's one of the really big upsides of the YouTube community is there's a lot of people that just post information to be helpful, you know, like that. That's pretty neat. If you if you have a problem with something, you can go on YouTube and some dude may have made a video on how to solve your problem.

And that's usually nine times out of ten. For sure, there is. I use YouTube all the time to figure something out.

Yeah. Yeah. No, we are. We had a appliance at home break and I was like, well, let me just look.

Yeah.

It's like, OK, it's one of two things. These are the two things that fail on this device. You know, and I'm just being the control board, you know. So that was pretty cool to just be able to dig right into it. You know, so I think there's a ton of support, a ton of support. Just, you know, it's kind of segments like when someone calls me and they say, hey, I can't get any help measuring push rods on my LS. It's like you didn't even try. Yeah, you didn't even try if you can't figure out how to measure push rods on a V8, you know, push rod engine. It's like super simple, you know, thing to do. It's like you put it in YouTube and see, see what you come up with. You know what I mean? But sometimes it's just a matter of fishing around because you might you also have to find someone that communicates in a way that you can take it in. If someone has the very best information, but something about them doesn't jive with your palate, you they may not be able to be a resource to you. When I am out in public and someone comes up to me and says, man, you helped me with this thing, it's like it was cool that they were able to pick up what I was putting down and fix a problem and move forward. I'm sure there's a lot of guys like me in that regard that have helped others. I watch there's a dude in Colorado that does diesel repair, and I'm not even really into diesels, but I'll watch because he does such a good job. I'm like, oh, that's cool. I'm not going to work on diesels, but it's neat that that guy is really laying it out there.

I watched ChrisFix the other day swap out a battery and a Prius. I have no intentions to ever own a Prius in my life, but I watched the entire video and I have no idea why I did because it's not on my radar of things to buy or fix. But yeah, you're right. It was intriguing. It was ingestible. It was entertaining.

I should watch some of his stuff. If I go home and I turn on YouTube, it's normally like the Goodwood. I like watching those vintage races at the Goodwood. That's something. I don't put a lot of time in the TV. I tell my wife when it breaks, we're not going to replace it. We're just going to go dark for a little bit.

Who do you learn from nowadays? Because I think in the Street Off episode, you're saying you're on the back half of life versus the front half. Do you still find yourself learning a lot?

Oh, yeah. The past couple of years have been a tremendous amount of learning in not only business and business ethics, the darker side of business. That was something that I got some education on. Then hardware, I've been going out to ARP and learning about hardware. And it's been really, really cool because hardware is, you know, there's some fasteners like you get two rod bolts. You don't have a spare. You know, if you have a lug nut, if you if you break a lug nut, yep, like, OK, fix it, maybe fix it. But you don't need to fix it right now.

Yeah.

But when you're dealing with it, critical engine hardware and there's no room for error, you know, head head studs, head bolts, main studs, main bolts, rod bolts, like that critical engine hardware. And you get to learn about what goes into that stuff. And all of the QC from the time the materials show up to the time it goes to boxing, pretty fascinated with hardware. And the guy that owns ARP, his name is Mike Hozapal. He's just like, he took over his father's business. I mean, he's making hardware, you know? So anytime I can get with him and he can just talk to me and I'll ask a question about threading or something like that. And he just like delivers so much information. So yeah, I'm learning a lot about hardware. There's some things that I have gone back to still, you know, kind of like refreshing on. And it's kind of fun because there's a quote I like. It's like, the problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer. And when you are dealing with an engine failure and you're trying to help a customer that's had an engine failure, navigate it and you know the answer, but you have to work them to the point of them seeing and understanding the answer so they don't have the same problem again. That's been something that I think gotten better with because in the past, I would be like, this is why it broke. And I'm not going to convince you this is why it broke versus now. It's kind of like a game because again, everyone takes in information differently that you may have to navigate through their psyche to get them to say like, so they have that aha moment. You know, everyone has like, once you have an understanding of something, it's then you can really start to ingest information. But until you have an understanding of it, they're just like words that someone's trying to load into your brain, and it doesn't work good. You know, so, yeah, I don't think I... Definitely not done learning. I, with this race car, it's going to have a clutch, and I've never had a... My Mustang has an adjustable clutch, but it's just kind of like works, you know? Versus this car is going to like be a whole new learning curve, you know? Like, that to me is pretty exciting. So that's something I look forward to. But you know, the basics, I've got a lot of my basics down by now, you know? It's the same job for all these years. So it's not, you know, basic engine operation, engine management, you know? That stuff's all stuff that I just roll through my days with.

Is there a part of it that's your favorite from start to finish on a car?

I like engine building.

Yeah.

Yeah. I like engine building. I like engine tuning. But engine tuning is tough because you have to probably going to travel more and you probably have to navigate more of people's vehicle problems because the vehicle, you can only fix so much in a day. Sometimes when I do travel work, I'll find myself saying like, okay, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. I know the day is not going to go the way I thought because these are these problems that we're dealing with. But I'll just give them the best I can out of the day and we'll come back to it. So, you know, that type of work isn't, it isn't as easy for me as engine building because I can just come here, put an engine together. It's pretty simple, pretty simple day for me. So the tuning stuff, like when I talked to that guy, Shawn, your friend, and I talked to my other friends that do tuning for a living. I'm like, I don't know if I want to navigate that. And I could, and I do for a few clients, but they're grownups. They have really, it's really easy to set good expectations and say, like, this is how much time before you're, before you get what you want. So we have to invest this amount of time for you to get what you want. And they're like, okay, no problem. But when you have someone that wants to show up to the dyno and spend 12 or 1500 bucks to get a tune, it's like, well, we still gotta go to the track. We still need to sort it out. You know, that begins to be a lot of time. You know, like I joke with at the beginning of the year, I asked Jobe, who tunes Brett's car, can you keep track of your time on that vehicle this year? Just to know how much time went in to the tuning process, because at the end of the year, it's probably 100 hours. Yeah, you know, because you're in. And if you're going to win, you're going to you're going to invest that time. It's just the way it works.

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Yeah, I think that the tuning part of it is, I'm very much interested in it, I enjoy it, but I think I enjoy it more of my old own stuff, you know, than working for people.

On the hardware side of things, so we got to, funny enough, he's wearing an AMS shirt, but we got to tour AMS, we talked a little bit about hardware on our tour with them and on the podcast. What have you learned from ARP? What are some of these things that you've learned?

Well, installation is quite an obstacle for many. And just like Martin had cited a couple years back, when people get that washer turning, and the nut's turning on the washer, and the washer's turning on the head, if the guy doesn't have any sort of feel, you'll just break the bolts, or you'll break the engine block. Like I was in a machine shop last year, and the dude was putting mains in a Lamborghini engine, and I heard it pop. And you're like, that's five or six grand. Plus all the time, just gone, because the fastener was overtorqued. So there's a certain angle from start to finish. If you go over that angle, something's not right. So we started to put together some educational videos on stuff like that, because if you got a guy that's up against the firewall and the inner fender, and he's got that on a V8 engine, you're dealing with these bottom row head bolts, and he's just moving the torque wrench a small amount, he'll just ratchet the bolt off. So you got to say like, hey, from the time you've snugged the bolt up to torqued, there's a certain amount of degrees. So if it's your first time and you don't have a very good feel for it, get yourself a paint marker, mark the head of the bolt. If you're over 85 or 90 degrees, it's like maybe reevaluate what you're doing, or cleanliness of the threads that are going to accompany that fastener. Did you clean it out? Is it old? Is it full of crud? Like things that change the torque. And you look at some fasteners on like aluminum engines where the engine warms up and it'll just grow in a three or four thousand pounds more clamp load. Well, is that right for the engine? Because everything on the flange surface has to mitigate that clamp load. And if you are applying too much clamp, you're just getting more distortion. You're getting more distortion. It's distortion in the valve seats. It's distortion along the deck. The gasket can only cover for so much. Ideally, you'd have a balance between clamp load and distortion. Well, that takes a little bit of time to sort out. So you have like Marco at Magnus sells a gasket paper that you put the paper on the deck. You torque the cylinder head up, take the cylinder head off. You look at the paper. Like how much distortion are you getting? You know, it's stuff that I think I saw at HKS maybe 20 years ago. It's not new tech. But if you're trying to solve a problem, you know, is your problem. Do you have too much faster? Like there's a guy I talked to earlier. He said, hey, I'll make two runs and my head bolts are loose. And like what size bolts are they? And he's like 9 16. I'm like, what are you talking to him to? He's like, you know, 120. They're like, well, they're not the the faster is a spring. You've got to get it like wound up under energy. So as the engine's expanding and contracting, it doesn't just get loose. It's like under torquing a lug nut. Yeah, you know, except this is a cylinder head. You know, so that guy, he needs smaller hardware or undercut hardware to allow the faster to get more activity. You know, like rod bolts are a big thing. You know, bolt stretch, that's a conversation, everybody, you know, you want to talk about bolt stretch. Well, what were the rods stretched at when they were honed at the manufacturer? Because if they were honed at 4,000s worth of stretch, but the instructions want 6, 2 or 6, 3, and you pull the bolts up to 6, 2 or 6, 3, is the housing board still around? You know, so like, what were the components machined at? And did you check before you took them apart? Like, there's a lot of open-ended conversations that you have to kind of like navigate, you know. People in some of these forums, like on Facebook, where there are younger guys coming into it, and you read some of the mistakes that they're making, and they're just fundamental, basic mistakes, it's kind of exciting for me, because I did a lot of that work in my early career, and I could almost just do it again, because now the game's changed. The guys that I taught how to do stuff, they've moved on. So it's a whole new group of kids to say like, no, no, no, you can't do it that way, you know. So that part's pretty cool, because it gives me another kind of a shot at it as I try to grow my company, you know.

I always think about when you talk about metal, expanding and contracting is if anybody's ever driven a car with an exhaust manifold leak, when you first fire it up, it's super loud, right? And then you give it a few minutes and normally it calms down because everything kind of expands and it fits tighter now again.

Oh yeah. I've had a Jay-Z in my car that I was messing around years ago. And I'm like, I wonder how much I can hang the piston out of the deck before it hits. Yeah. And when it was cold, it would hit, it sounded terrible. But I raced that engine for quite some time. Once it was warmed up, it wouldn't hit anymore. It never knocked the bearings out of it. And I made 11 to 1 compression, whereas if it was down in the deck, it would be closer to 10. So there's expansion, the heat, how it changes. These guys that had those early head stud kits that the washer was too small, and you take that engine apart after years of service, and the washer is now burrowed into the head, 30, 40 thousands. That's how much that thing's growing and changing. It's like, it's neat to see it, you know? Or if you start to nerd out about heat treat, you can get a Chinese head stud and overheat treat it. It'll get hard, but then it gets brittle. So like got to ARP and we'll run fasteners and stress tests and basically just pull them apart. You know, and you could see how they fail and when they fail and inferior metals that were overheat treated to get the hardness, but then they got brittle. You know, so even heat treating is wicked cool. Because when you cold work apart or hot work apart, like to change the shape of the head to make a bolt head out of a round piece, you upset all that material and then you heat it up and it like finds its way back, not in external shape, but in an internal organization of the atoms. You're like, what? Like weird science stuff, you know? So, yeah.

What about the other way? So I have in one of the cars, I have a cryo treated crank, making them very cold. Is that, I don't know, it was in the engine when I got it. So I just went, okay, sounds cool.

I think that there's a lot of niche things you can do to an engine. The WPC treatment, where they, it's like very fine media that they blast on the part until it smooths it out. There's cryo stuff where like, you have guys that they're intelligent, avid road racers, and they cryo rotors because the rotors last longer. So it's like, there's definitely something there. I think that one of the things that is a bit of an obstacle is like the send it community, where you're competing with a made up record or a power number in your head and you tear your stuff up. Well, it doesn't matter if it's cryo, it doesn't matter. If you're going to abuse the thing to death, just build it as cheap as you can because you're going to tear it up. But if you're going to do neat stuff, looking at some of those advanced treatments, they add expense, but you can make a neater engine out of it, you know?

Yeah. Going back to some of the fastener stuff, so obviously you've learned some of these things. Has it changed any of your day to day here or are you still kind of relying on the things you've learned already?

Yeah. Yeah, I was... I remember putting... There was a rod manufacturer that I used a lot and I remember calling them, I'm like, these things don't tighten up well. And I remember just like how they felt and it was the washer spinning, you know? So it's amazing that I never lost a rod bolt because the bolts were overtorqued. You know, it said 75 foot pounds, but once that washer turns, it's like anybody's game. So like there were times that I would feel it turn, I would stop, back it back down. But if I were looking closer at it back then, I'm sure that I ended up with some rod bolts that were, that should not have been used. But you're dealing with a pretty good material. When you take a fastener and you overstress it, a quality fastener, it'll live on the machine overstressed for a pretty long period of time, you know, before it finally fails. And they also have like a cycle machine where they just take a rod bolt and it just sounds like brrrrr, but it's the rod bolt. Pull, relax, pull, relax, pull. They'll run a rod bolt for like a million cycles. And they mainly will fail if they're not tight enough because then it allows them to move versus when they're at target stretch, they have more stability, you know? So it has changed my care for fasteners. And threading, you know, threading is a neat thing because if you look like a mil-spec bolt versus like an ARP bolt, there's a lot of specs that even though it's mil-spec, you're talking about your basic ARP hardware would be like five times better in the threading section because of their specification, you know? The turn diameter of the part before they roll threads into it, you know, they roll threads after heat treat, it makes for a stronger, faster, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's just like those guys really have perfected the game. So for me to come into that party pretty late, I just get to download a bunch of information, yeah.

Well, obviously, you're learning some things. I keep saying the word obviously today. That's my word of the day. If everything is so goddamn obvious.

Yeah, why are we even here?

Yeah. So you're doing the fastener stuff, you're learning a lot there. I'm not familiar with this car very much. Like again, like I, I kind of dabble in a lot of little various things, but I'm not deeply invested in a lot of things. So what's the history of this car and why is it so special?

This car is, well, it's a Supra, which I think makes it special. Well, we got to the, when I, when I had my old place, we had this other white car. As we were going faster with it, it started to require putting preload in the four length to make it straight. And the smart guys will say, that's a dangerous game, because eventually the car unwinds and crashes. And also, you know, the other guys, my old partners, they didn't really, not taking a dig at them, but they didn't have a lot of experience racing a car. So when I got in that old car and ran it, I hadn't, I drove it initially, then I stopped driving it and Geo was driving it. And then I got in it one day because Geo couldn't drive it. And I was like, this is a heap of s***. Because your head was up against the roll bar. Like you're just all wadded up in this thing going sixes. It's just not safe, you know? So back then it was like, man, we have this business. We all care about each other. Can we have a safer car? So, you know, that car, to fix that car would mean cutting it all apart. So we just started with another car. So Larry at Drag International had a core car. You know, we didn't use a ton of it, but brought it up to Doug at Precision and PA, and he built this car. He had just built Joel Grannis' car, and it was like, well, what would you do differently? And do you want to build another one? He said yes and yes. And it was just a four link. It's just a lighter, safer, lighter, safer car, you know? So I'm not going to, I'm not going to race it real dumb. I'm not going to put 100 pounds of boost on it and work on it all the time. But even with a 94 millimeter, it'll go over 200. And if you run it at 60 pounds of boost, you don't have to work on it a ton. I don't have any interest in working on it a ton. I got stuff to do. But to be able to make a run in a stick shift Supra that goes sixes, to me, that's like pretty cool. I'm going to get one of those Liberty H-pattern dual counter shaft boxes for it, because that will make it pretty reliable. Like the TVD6s, if you miss with the TVD6, you're buying parts. So I already played that game with my Mustang with fixing the same transmission over and over and over again. And for like 15 grand, you can buy a gearbox that just doesn't break. And if you want to change gear ratios, you can do it right there on the ground. You don't even need to press. You just knock it apart, knock it back together. It's very simple to work on. It's the same transits in the streamliner. And they just work really well. Yeah. So this car will be probably the same 94 millimeter, a little bit of nitrous, Liberty box, and whatever it runs, it runs.

Yeah.

Is that what you're running in the Mustang, is it T56?

No, the Mustang has a Liberty LC 5100, which is a external rail, fifth gear, one to one gearbox, and it's a dog box. So you use a strain gauge to shift it.

OK.

It's wicked cool until you're going 60, and you're like, I really want overdrive.

Yeah.

So I have I have a TVD6 to put in that car. I just selfishly I want to take it to the track with that Liberty box in it because it just rose gears. Like it's just an external rail trans. The way the shifter feels, it's really neat. So it adds a bit of effect to the driving experience. But not having overdrive is not cool. I drive it. If I drive that car to work, it's like surface streets and literally goes like 55 miles an hour. It's like 3000 RPM.

Yeah. So I did that in a Fox, just putting 373 gears in it and then driving around and then get it on the highway and cruising. I was like, it was a little peppier, but it just wasn't the same highway speeds.

No, the T56 Dogbox, it really has its place. And I have a few customers that they have like Restromod type cars. And the split personality between the H pattern routiness with the non-synchronized, and then you go to fifth and sixth and it's quiet, smooth. It's like, if you wanted a eight second, nine second, 10 second car, it's like, that's the move. But if you get into faster stuff, it's just an expense game. Racing is really expensive. So if you are tearing up parts, your funds going, your money is going down and your funds going down. And like when I parked my Mustang back in 13, I broke two faceplated Tremec 3550s in one day. And I was like, this thing's parked. And that's before the TVD6 stuff was really an option. So that's why I bought that LC5100, because if you have like a thousand horsepower car, the training just doesn't break. It's plenty tough for that type of work. Yeah.

Or you can get yourself a 6XD.

Oh my.

That is such a shame. Sequential.

Shameless plug.

What will a 6XD live with?

You let us know. They haven't found the limit yet.

So they live in the Vipers well?

Yeah.

The Vipers. Yeah. So 2,600 horsepower Vipers. So they have two variations from my understanding. They have the standard and the extreme. The standard, I think, what did he say it was rated for?

Like 1,200 or 1,000? 1,200 foot pounds, I think.

Yeah, I think that's what it was. But yeah, they've been in the 2,600 horsepower Vipers. No problem so far. Yeah. So yeah, it was a fun episode. Then we learned a lot on that. I do want to fly down to North Carolina though, because I think I need a further education, because I think there's so much. Transmission is just so mythical to me still, even though we've had what, two or three transmission experts at this point.

Yeah, we had a automatic transmission guy on too, and that's still a world that...

Yeah, but where's the fun zone, right? Because this is a competitor car, but we see that so often. It's like, oh man, if I just stayed a seven second car, an eight second car, I would be so much happier than going into this, just chasing this. Where's the fun zone for you?

For me, I think that in a street car, it's around a thousand. Like my Supra makes around a thousand, 18 inch tire, around 90 miles an hour on decent roads. You can put it in and it's fast. And they just changed the laws down here where, I think if you're going over a hundred, you go to jail, which that would suck, you know? So now it's like...

I should have checked that before taking this.

Oh man.

We were flying here, dude.

Yeah. No, I'll take my Supra out and near me, there's some concrete and you roll it through second, put in third. It's like going to jail. And I'm like, oh man. Cause before, like you at least could run it to the top of third. So even that car is a bit much, but it makes a really wide power band. It's lit by mid 4,000 RPM. It's great the way it is. This car, I think that, I think it'll go in the sixes and that's how it runs. You know, like it'll be plenty of work to get the clutch sorted. That in my past experience with these engines, that 1800 horsepower range, like they live pretty well. If you don't miss, if you don't over time them, if you over time and they beat themselves to death, but any engine over time will beat itself to death, you know?

So is that what it takes to go sixes in these, by the way, is 1800, 1900 horsepower?

Man, I, the internet has really put some big numbers on the board the past few years. I think that I think that 1800, depending on the vehicle weight, like this car, with 1800, it'll just, it'll be fast. It'll go sixes, it's no big deal. Cause you also have the, the weight's the big thing, right? So the heavier the car is, the more you've got to make. And then how's the vehicle geared? You know, does the vehicle launch efficiently? Stuff like that, you know? But yeah, 1800 horsepower, I think is plenty to go sixes in this weight.

Yeah, that's what's that. When it comes to, we're starting to have more import guys on the show, which is again, just the nature of the show, which is we haven't had a ton of import guys. So it's all very mythical to me. So I was just curious there. Are you going to be running kind of like, who's helping you with this? Is it going to be the guys that work here at the shop?

Yeah, so this shop has two race car projects right now. It has this car. And then right behind this car is an 81 Corolla. That's a chassis car. And it's going to get a K-series and a Liberty Box. And I hope to have a group of young guys that they can kind of like become their project. Where they get it tuned up. But ideally, they can go to the track on their own. They don't need me. And it will just be a seven second thing. And that'll be it. But one of the young men works for me already. And the other one comes in Moonlights. So that will kind of become their toy car to play with. Yeah.

When it comes to employees, because this has been a discussion on a recent podcast, which we did not air, unfortunately. But you said you have how many guys here? Six, seven?

Eight now.

Eight. How do you find good work? That seems to be a reoccurring topic for every shop owner we've had on the show. How do you find good employees?

Yeah.

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

You have to pay. So you either have to get guys that are green and they don't know a lot, but their ethics are good and they want to learn. And those can be had relatively affordably. If you want an ATAC, that you can say, I'm going to hire a guy that's better than I am. He's just going to focus on getting the work done and he can do everything I can do. And he doesn't have to deal with the phone. He doesn't have to deal with the email. He can just focus on his work. The guy's kind of a buck and a half guy nowadays. So I think that that's really a hard thing for a shop owner to understand because there are, in every city, there are dealerships. And in every dealership, there are guys that are team leaders. They're highly proficient at their work and they're making over 150 a year. So I think that if the shop doesn't have a labor rate that can support that technician, then the owner is his own problem because he's going to say, I can't find anybody good. Like whenever I hear someone say, I can't find anybody good, depending on the caliber of the individual, I may just be like, yeah, it's stuff out there. You know what I mean? Because I don't really want to get into it. But for me, there's a lot of really high quality people out there in the industry. You just got to pay them. So if like our shop rate here is 175 an hour, which I think is cheap for what you get, because we really only get about 80% of that on the ticket. You know, we don't build like a doctor or a lawyer. But the technician can make 30, 35 bucks an hour like that, which isn't fantastic. But in a year, I'll bring them to 50. You know what I mean? For me in this business, my aim is the same as I did before, pay people well enough that I can take the load off of me and the business can grow. So that's, you know, in my old business, I was never someone that didn't want to pay someone what they were worth. To me, it's like you get what you pay for. So if you're going to have guys you can count on, not look over your shoulder, trust them, you probably have to pay them more. You know, so if a technician gets 50 or 60 bucks an hour, but he can put a quarter million bucks in the business a year, is that a bad thing? Not really.

You just hit the repeat button, like keep giving me more of these. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, for me, my main problem right now is just space. I'm in two small bays until I make a decision to get into a building. You know, this is kind of where I'm at, where we take on, right now there are two car projects here and there are two waiting. And that will bring us into the middle of next year for car work, you know. So if you call here and you're like, hey, can you put a clutch in my car? I broke my engine. I'm like, ah, I don't want your car. Sell it, build the engine, sell the engines, work on a couple of cars, because the customers that we do have are, they're not clock watchers. They trust me. And then I just build them fairly and make some money in the process.

The Corolla you have though, that was another shop car? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, that car belongs to a dude that just wants to see people do good.

Okay.

So he said, hey, do you want that? Can you do something with it? I'm like, I bet I can get a group of young kids around it having a good time. He's like, I like everything about that. So he gave the car and the trans. And I mean, it's pretty nice. It's nice stuff, you know? But for me, the main aim is to get that into the kids.

When you say kids, how young?

I think to me, 20s. When you're in your 20s, you're so...

You called me a baby when I came in here.

Well, I'm not trying to talk down to anyone.

Right.

I like what you're saying, though.

But most of us in our 20s, there's so much that we just don't even understand. We don't know. To me, that's a good opportunity to teach people at least what I believe is correct. You know, so you don't overcharge people. You don't take from people. If you make a mistake, you explain that you've made a mistake. You don't hide your mistakes. You know, you become good company. If you become good company, you're highly employable. You know, like some people are not highly employable. I've met some really sharp guys that there's no way I could give them jobs because they're so prickly that it'll take half my day just to just to navigate their personalities. I don't have time for it.

Toxic A's is what they're called.

Well, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they they can be highly effective. I was I was one of them and I worked with one of them at the same time. And sometimes we would spar. And it was I mean, we was gotten our a**** fired. Oh, my gosh, we would not made it at Chick-fil-A for a week. We were so, you know. But now we grew up and grew out of it. But we're just, you know, like some of these kids, especially technicians, some of these kids have rowdy lives at home. So you have to be able to navigate that and not hold it against them. But there's a standard like here's the boundaries. If you go outside of this, you can't work here. So that's pretty simple to set up as we onboard, you know.

So other than the projects, then you're also kicking out some engine builds? Is that kind of like something you can get in and get out?

Yeah, engine builds are easy because I'm not the store of the car. And I bring in, either bring in new dark blocks or Virgin Lexus cores, build the engine, give the engine to the customer, help them navigate startup. If the customer is real cool, I'll take their car in, start it up, tune it up for them, give it back to them. But I have my set price on that. And some of those guys just say, like, hey, I want to do that. I don't want the headache. This is your engine. Let it be your problem. So that's a lot of how I'm generating revenue right now. It's just building engines. Okay.

And is there, I mean, are you just specializing in the 2J stuff or is there, I mean, where's your limit?

There's a couple of 4G63s that I've worked their way through the door. There's a VK56 here. There's a couple of V-Series engines. It's mostly the customer. If the customer is cool and the project is cool and the guy understands what he's getting from me and I understand what I'm getting from him, okay, sure. You know, I don't have a problem with that. You know, I don't want to spread myself real thin because I got about three days a week that I can work on engines and then the company needs me for other things. Because we have a full-time media guy. If I'm working on engines all week long, then Luis isn't helping me generate sales content to generate sales revenue to move the company forward. If I build engines for a living, I don't need to have much staff around me. I just need one guy. But the company doesn't really grow that way. So now there's a few guys in sales and we have implemented the NetSuite software. So now we can process sales. So processing sales, that's what set me free before. So that's what I'm going to do again. I don't have any other tricks up my sleeve.

Right. Yeah. If you have the core here, you have all the parts sitting here, you've probably done enough of these. Let's just say it's a 2J. How long do you get, like, how long you have the engine for?

How long do I have the engine for?

How long do I work on the engine? Yeah. Is it like, let's say we're building one, we're starting with all the parts. Everything's here, but it's in the box. It's sitting on your bench. Two days?

Yeah.

Okay.

There's a day of all the engines I process, they're measured by two people at the machine shop. So I work with a machine shop called ACH and with Mark Mazurowski at Mazworks. So there, they have checks in place. I come, I check my numbers versus their numbers. Things line up, assemble the engine. It's a two day process. Okay. Yeah, so I, even though they've, even though they do their checks, I do my checks. So the customer gets like, if the customer screws the engine up, it's like, okay, well, what did you do? You know, this is kind of a bumpy subject because there's a lot of guys that can build a quality engine, you know, and you can give someone a quality engine, and if they hook the oil filter out backwards, it's a dead engine. If they don't keep quality oil in it, it's a dead engine. If they over time it or run it lean, it's a dead engine. But the components speak of their death. You know, you don't look at a, if the rod bearing had the right vertical oil clearance when it left and everything was put together right, and you ran the thing out of oil, just ran it out of oil. You know what I mean? Like there's, this past month, I had my first like bumpy incident with a customer where they elongated the pin bore in the connecting rod. Well, an aluminum rod, if you're rich and over timed, you'll elongate the pin bore. And if you pick up the phone and you call MGP or R&R or GRP or Corrillo, anyone that's making aluminum rods from like, hey, I elongated a pin bore, they're like, better back it down a little bit. And this guy didn't want to hear it. So you're like, hey, I know you don't want to hear it, but can you please back it down so you don't break it again? Because you don't need to break it three times to figure out you're over. When you're making 10 horsepower per inch, you don't get to miss by a lot. You can miss by a little bit and it's dead. And unless you have cylinder pressure sensors, all you can do is look at the component and say, okay, the rod bearings flattened out, the pin bores elongated, the engine's over timed. Or you're operating the engine at too low of an RPM, which these little engines, when you pull a little engine down below, it's like usable cycle time and the engine is loaded up with too much torque, it'll tear up. You wouldn't want to make 60 pounds of boost at 6,000 RPM. It'll just spit parts out of it. You want to bring that load in as your cycle time goes down because your RPM is up.

I live in the coyote world. That 60 pounds of boost, you already screwed up. Unless you're this guy.

Well, when I was working on Brett's car, we laughingly said, I wonder what 60 pounds is going to be like. And we had some gasket issues around 50 pounds. And all we did was move from an ARP 2000 material to a custom made 625. And it was like good for another 10 pounds. And then started to find the end of the mains where the block just that engine, those engines work hard, but they've got some rough angles in them. They work hard, you know. But yeah, 60, they're above 60 pounds now.

Yeah.

It's doing its thing.

Not any of the ones that I have, but yeah.

Well, even 25 pounds on a Coyote is fast.

Yeah.

You know, I work on a guy's car that he runs it in stick shift and it's not that much boost, you know, for how fast the car is. It's a big engine though. Relatively big engine compared to the stuff that I normally work on.

Right.

When you have a little engine, 120 inches, 180 inches, you know, there's a lot of manifold pressure involved to get it to go.

What do you do? So I went through an engine build process. I did some of it myself. I did my timing, but I had certain things bolted together, people that have way more expensive torque wrenches and stuff than I do. Just whatever. And it is a very nerve wracking thing when you look at all the moving parts and you're thinking what you're going to about to do this thing. And to prime the engine, I took a yard sprayer and filled it with oil and put it into the oil pressure sensor thing to get all of the oil. What do you do for one of these things to prime something before you?

You have assembly lube. The assembly lube, this is a great question because I've been watching some propaganda on it. Tomorrow morning, when I fire up my Supra, it'll be four or five seconds before it makes oil pressure.

Okay.

Every day. That's life.

Yeah.

So there's oil around the area that's protecting the components. When you move to auto start stop engines, a lot of them went to a coated bearing because they were start stopping enough that eventually the bearing wears out. But if you build a new engine and everything is right, it has assembly lube, you start it up. Okay. You limit the engine speed. Like if the computer will let me set the limiter to 600 or 700 RPM, I'll just set the limiter, fire it up. It'll just ride the limiter. Once the oil pressure comes live, move the limiter up and start my break in process.

Okay.

The other thing is back to the send it community. These guys aren't breaking the engines in, and they'll say something like, well, top fuel doesn't break the engine in.

That's a controversial subject too. So yeah, I'm glad you're getting into this.

Sure, but the engine, those guys can afford to tear it up.

Yeah.

They have that engine has one purpose, go from here to there, get torn down, do it again. So if you have an engine that you probably spent money that you didn't have free, you know, you're strung out already. Does it hurt you to break it in? Not really. You know, at least give the thing a chance. Put a hundred miles on it or something.

Okay, so what does proper breaking look like to you?

It depends on the tolerances. You know, people say like, oh, I, my tolerances are are perfect. Well, it's like, well, perfect doesn't really exist. So if the tolerances are, say, inside half a thousandth, you know, that's pretty tight. You can you could there'll be guys in the comments that say, like, everything I do is within two tenths. And so, well, the crank varies a few tenths. The rods can vary a couple of tenths. Tolerances stack. If you're on the tight side of things, familiarization period is your friend because it takes time for those parts to acclimate. You know, like, the piston is a different shape when it's hot than when it's cold. Everything is a different shape when it's hot. The crank doesn't change a lot, but the block, aluminum block, that stuff moves around. You know, you have, there's a fair share of engines that you'll put the crank in the mains and you can't turn the crank until everything's tight because it just won't turn because that's how much shape change goes on. So a break-in period, what I tell people to do is fire it up once it's got a little pressure, it's not too rich, it's not too lean. Get a look at, do you have any leaks? You don't have any leaks? OK, great, if it's a flat tap it engine, like it doesn't have a roller rocker or roller cam, get the engine speed up to 2000 RPM, just let it sit for 25 or 30 minutes, just let it run. You know, and then from there, if it's a race car and you cannot, like there is no place to break it in, just let it run more. If you are, if the street car where you can go out and drive it, like, hey man, you just got your car running, be excited. Yeah. Go out and put a couple hundred miles on it, you know, like it's not going to hurt anything to let it familiarize.

You're right, moving under its own power is already like a huge accomplishment, right? Like after you had something completely torn apart.

And if it's tight and you give it a little bit of time, you open yourself up for error. Like if you if we had a I think you guys came here in a Kia, if we had a brand new Kia, zero miles and we have a hundred thousand mile Kia and they both have fresh oil, if we brick them both, the higher mileage engine has a higher rate of survival because it's it's already been dancing with all those components. Yeah, like, like, I don't know. I don't know about kids your age, but you used to brick old cars. You know, I'd be like, I wonder how long it'll last. And these cars would spit the cooling out of them. Shut the shut off. Just come to a stop. And then you go back half an hour later and fire it back up. Then we'll run again. You know, like engines are pretty forgiving if you just do the basics, you know, but you have to like. Um, I think that oil coolers and remote oil filters strike a lot of people down because if you get a Chinesium oil cooler, it doesn't flow and you'll put a restriction in the oiling system and not know it. You think you you think you did a good thing and the engine dies. Or if you have a remote oil filter and you hook it up backwards and you start the engine up. And the engine doesn't die. So you're like, whew, that was a close call and is dead in 200 miles because it just didn't die right then, but you've started for oil. You know, but the priming game, if the engine has assembly lube in it, you know, well, OK, can we look at what, say Ducati or BMW or Porsche, like any of these guys that are building high-end engines, what do they do for break-in? Can we mimic that and let that be OK? You know, because the piston has to familiarize itself with its owner to be in a shape to not scuff prematurely. Like, if you take an engine that's fresh and you run it hard and it gets to scuffing, it's like, well, it didn't have enough clearance. Well, would it have been better off in 1,000 miles? Maybe, you know? So it's like, does it? I'm not saying go 1,000 miles, but a couple hundred miles is like, it's your money.

Yeah.

You know, protect your money, because even if it wasn't money, and you still got to fix it, all that time, to find all that time outside of your job and all this stuff, I just, for me, it's hard to argue that it's not important, you know? Like, I've had people before, like, well, I want to run it this Friday. I'm like, well, go circle Orlando, put a couple hundred miles on it tonight, I'll see you tomorrow. And some of the guys would do that. You know, they would just get on the highway and drive it all night, come back.

Right before the rally, when I got my orange car rebuilt, I went to, like, Southern Minnesota and back just to make, like, I was gone for, like, three, four hours just driving around, trying to get it, yeah.

Did anything break on that rally?

No, but I had rolled the O-ring, so I had a boost leak in the head unit of the Whipple. I had got back and I put it up on the rack, I had a wheel bearing that was, it's very rare that you can totally rip something apart and put it back together and you take it out and in that first hundred miles, there isn't some sort of issue.

Yeah, well, do you...

At least for, I guess, you've been doing this professionally for a long time, so.

This is the do-it-yourself-er space, you know?

Right.

So part of that, today, this morning, I talked to a guy that he's got a vintage Porsche and he's playing with it, and he's explaining me what he's doing, and in my head, I'm like, oh, you're tinkering. But he's having fun.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, it's not just spending money to make more power. There's a whole bunch of things you can tinker with on your vehicle. That if that's what you're into, it's a pretty good time. Yeah.

What about seeding the rings? So I was also explained one time again during my break, and I was asking all kinds of advice that that is better done under like vacuum. So you would take it up to a certain RPM, drop it in a lower gear, and just kind of let it bring itself down.

So you have... If you go back in time, there were rings that were a softer material, big, thick rings that they acclimated to the cylinder wall over time. And as you moved into, like, I guess the 90s, you get into these nitrated steel rings. Well, the ring's not really wearing. It's hard. It's harder than the block. So if the cylinder finish is correct, most of what's gonna happen happens, you know, the first few minutes of operation.

Okay.

Like, I've had guys that they call and they say, it's smoking a little bit. I think the rings haven't seeded yet. You're like, it's wrecked. It's wrecked already, you know? And in the past five or six years, there's been kind of like a bunch of information has come into the space about profilometers and cylinder wall finish and the ratio of peaks versus the ratio of valleys and how to make a better cylinder wall for different fuels. Because a direct injection cylinder can be different than a methanol cylinder because the methanol is washing the oil away, so you want more valley. But if you have too much peak and too much valley, then the valleys, the peaks fold over and the engine pumps oil out of it because you don't have enough thrust. So there's a lot of guys in the past few years that have really got their a**** handed to them, changing up what the old dudes had sorted out a long time ago. If you could find some 60-year-old guy that hones with oil and he's got a good program, it's a good program.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I've lost a couple. I experimented with my personal stuff. One of them had 1,000 miles on it and it just was pumping oil, fouled the plugs, it's junk. When I brought it to my resident old guy at the time, he just called me stupid. And I'm like, yeah, but there's all this information that says it's going to be better. Yeah. And he was like, you know, so, you know, if the sonar walls are honed correctly and you don't put some thick, nasty oil on them, because most modern rings are fairly thin. Second ring is a Napier Hook. These aren't big rings like you had back in the 60s and 70s. Like, they can only clean off so much oil. So if you have thick oil that that Napier ring can't clear, it's going to push oil. You know, so like, take your new engine, break it in, you know, with some respect for the money you've spent and the time you've invested. Run it for a couple hundred miles. Pull the plugs out of it. Are the plugs dry? The plugs should be dry. You should not have oil migrating. Pull the dipstick out. Is the dipstick clean? Because it should be.

Yeah.

You know, like when you have engines that don't seal well, the oil gets dirty quick. The spark plugs will get some oil on them. Like, you know, it's, uh, I had a car come for tuning a few months back and. The guy's like, I'm like, this thing's junk. They're like, no, it's not junk. The engine builder said to run it until the ring seat. Put it on the dyno and run it and the rings will seat. And I think put two quarts of oil through it in like six runs. And I said, I think we're done. Yeah. The plugs were oily.

Yeah.

You know, all the signs. But, um, I've never seen an engine come around. If it's not sealed up, take it apart.

Yeah.

You know, it, you know, like you. When I was racing the other white Supra at my old place, I'd make my first run. I'd watch the pan back. I'm like, looks like the first run. I watched the second run. Everything was stabilized and it would stay there until the thing was junk. You know, like the it happens pretty fast. You know, you're not going to drive something for 100 miles and have it get better unless you've really put some thick, nasty stuff, like thick oil on the rings, like those guys that dip the dip, the piston and oil, and there's just oil everywhere. You know, like the piston doesn't operate that in the engine. You've got some splash lubrication, but it's not just dushed in 50 weight, you know? So you could you could get yourself into some cleanup in that scenario. But for the most part, you know, the engines come come around real quick nowadays.

OK, yeah.

You mentioned something there about the old guys in the industry that, you know, figured stuff out way back when you're doing a lot of this. Why am I blanking on a name? Oh, my God, this is a derp moment to high speed stuff. What am I buying?

Oh, the land speeders. Oh, my God, dude, I was like, you can edit that out.

No, I'm keeping that in there. People need to know that you're not perfect. Exactly. No, because like all summer I was I'm sure you're familiar with like super fast Matt. Yeah, I love all summer. I was watching his stuff. And then I then at that point, I discovered it's you're into that stuff. I'm like, oh, this is funny. But anyways, what I was getting at there is a lot of the guys that are into the land speed stuff, there's a lot of old guys out there. My first question. Well, second question is why. But more importantly, what have you learned from these guys who have been around for so long, especially around motorsports as a whole? Is there some stuff that's kind of like, I guess, that's getting passed down to you?

Engine wise, not really. Nitro Methane. Yeah. There's a lot of guys out there that really understand how to successfully use Nitro Methane. Tuning. Fuel Injection. I'm a pretty big asset to them because I've been doing that for a couple of decades. Mostly, it's life lessons. Okay. Imagine, like for me, my parents have passed, so I don't have that interaction. But out there in that Lanspeed community, it's like, you got like 10 dudes that are all good people, great people, and they're no longer squabbling over money. And they can share with you a lot of what's to come. So there's a lot of like life lessons that I get out there. But as far as the car stuff, aside from sitting around highly intelligent people and rolling through, because all of those cars out there are experimental racecraft. There's no, there's not another one like that one. Each car is its own experimental race car. So the handling of the vehicles, the stability of the vehicles, you know, that's a lot of like unknown, where it's like you got a car that say it, they'll say like that car spins over 200. Sometimes the cars just do, you know, like if you have a body that's just wrong, they're not very stable, you know. So I raced, I raced and these other guys with me raced this little Datsun and it's like 88 inch wheelbase. So it's like, don't go 250. Well, my buddy Red gets in it and he goes 250 and he's like, felt pretty good. I wonder if it'll go 260. It's like until it until it flies to the air and kills you. You know what I mean? Like. So that stuff, those those vehicles are pretty wild because they're all experimental. You know, there's no when you when you when you no matter what car you're into, what road car you're into, you can find someone and ask a question because someone else has done it versus out there. A lot of those cars are just weird cars, so they don't have the the data set. You know, you get an engine data set, like say there's four or five cars that all have Jay-Z's that I built and tuned. And it's interesting because this one has a little bit different cooling system. It lives a little differently. You know, like the you're combating the heat a lot out there. You know, in drag racing, you only have to combat the heat for an eighth mile or a quarter mile. But when you're out there and you're combatting the heat for a short course, it's like 1.3 miles or the long course is five miles. You know, like you've got to have your act together on cooling to keep it alive.

I really want to go down this path because I don't know your history on this. So when did you get into the streamliner stuff?

Well, I went out there in like 11 and I was really kind of blown away because the idea of getting in a car and flooring it for miles is pretty cool. And I'd taken my Supra to half mile events before and I'd run it in half mile and it was pretty fast. You know, I think it went 200 before and a half. So it's fast. But then going out there and like, OK, you can go how fast? So the attraction was pretty strong. So I just built an engine for these guys because you build an engine will let you drive the car. So I built an engine, got to drive the car and it was wicked cool just because you're in it so long.

Yeah.

That you, the perception is way different than what you're used to. You're used to getting out of the throttle because you're breaking the law because you're going through the traps at the drag strip. But when you go out there, it's like, you know, you go a mile, 200 plus miles an hour or 300 plus miles an hour. It's wild in a different way. You know, it's pretty crazy.

So if I'm understanding correctly, you built an engine for someone for their... So what was the, I guess, the car?

The first car was Greg Waters' 369 Roadster.

Okay.

So it's a Roadster that this guy named John Romero, who used to work at AEM as one of the engineers, he had already put a 2JZ in it.

Oh, okay.

Because it was, because they were tired of blowing up the small Chev on, you know, the small Chevy was only going to go so far, whereas the 2JZ would just give up a thousand horsepower. So when that engine was worn out, they said, hey, will you build an engine? So I built an engine. That's what kind of got me in the seat. And then from there, there was a streamliner that they were going to put a diesel engine in, and that project had kind of fizzled dead. So it was like, well, if I build an engine for a streamliner, they'll let me drive the streamliner. So that's what I did, which got me in the streamliner, which got me up over 300.

What's the fastest you've gone?

385.

Holy s***. At what point of 385 did you go, this is insane, I shouldn't be doing this?

Yeah.

After 200, after 300?

After 300 in the liner, well, you have to first acknowledge that you're chasing the dragon.

Yeah.

Because your first time over 200 versus your fifth time over 200, like at 200 now, you're like, it's kind of boring.

Yeah.

You know? But last year when I ran the liner, my friend Chris had crashed and died. My kid was like, when are you coming home? And I'm like, about to go drive this car going fast. Yeah, the parachute, the tether that the gathers up the parachute, it broke. So it's like 350 miles an hour. I open the parachute, the parachute broke off and I had to roll down to below 300 to open the other shoot. Because if you open this, the low speed shoot going too fast, it'll tear off too. And now you've got no brakes. So in the course of a week, I lost a dear friend. And a fuel line blew off the fuel pump. It blew out of the fitting. I called the manufacturer. I said, dude, this thing blew out of the fitting. Filled the whole belly pan of the car with methanol and it didn't catch on fire. So I was riding deep in the luck. And then the shoot came off. And I was like, you know, intelligent person would have probably just gone home. And I was like, well, I'm already here. I'm going to do it. But it could have been the course of the week, could have been, could have just been the experience I was having. But it was going that fast was, was it's very unsettling.

Yeah.

Yeah. And when you go into the last mile and you're already going like 350 miles an hour and you, you know, you kind of. Run it to the end, man, it's it, it, it, I don't, I jokingly told the guy that owns the car, I'm going to sue you for for wrecking my head. He was like, your head was already wrecked. You had to be crazy just to get in that thing. And he's right. You know, so that for me, I really thought I wanted to go 400 miles an hour, but I'm totally cured, totally cured. I'll go to El Mirage and I'll run that little to Jay Z Datsun. And I want to. That's a drag race. The El Mirage is like a 1.3 mile dirt drag race. It's really fun. But the high speed stuff. I'm done with that. That's yeah. It's not.

So this past summer was your last.

Yeah. Yeah, because I wanted to do it. You know, I wanted to do it from an engine builder standpoint and from a tuning standpoint. It sure is neat to put 45 pounds of boost in something for a mile straight. Yeah, it really is neat to to run these engines and figure out how to make them live well. You know, like when I got done with my run in the liner and it's, you know, I got the car stopped and I just flipped the throttle and I look at the pan vac and I'm like, this thing's fine. And you're like, that's pretty cool. You know, you built an engine, you tuned an engine, it lives, you know, because most in our drag racing environment, like I was at the track a while back and the person said, I don't know what happened. It burned a piston out of it. I run it like this all the time. And I said, you run it like this all the time and it burned a piston out of it? I said, what's the mixture? He told me the mixture. I was like, I said, do you run an eighth mile normally? He said, well, yeah. So you're running a quarter mile today. He said, yeah, I'm like, you had an 800 foot tune up, you know, in a 1320 foot race and it overheated and died. You know, it's like out there at Bonneville. You get to learn a lot about heat mitigation. Yeah, you know, and it's it's cool. Like the liner engine, it's we're not going to service it. It's going to May, the May meet, and the guys will run the car at the May meet and it'll be fine. You know, and that's pretty cool because that's a stock. It's a dark block. But like just to get a sonar head through that, you know, a sonar had to live through that type of stuff without much heat. Now, if it was running 60 or 70 pounds of boost, I'm sure it would be a hot mess because everything's changing shape so much. But 45, 50 pounds of boost, it's like they're really pretty good engines, you know? Most of those Japanese engines are pretty good engines. Yeah.

What's that time frame look like for that many miles? So how long are you in the car for?

60 or 70 seconds.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's insane to get what you think about it.

Yeah, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think the I have a race time that I put in the in the runs we post on YouTube. I run the race time that way people can see how long it's wide open. But you know, some of like some of those cars come right up on the pipe. They have VVTi. They're lit at 5000 rpm just on a tear. The liners got twin 6466s. It's lazy. So I think it goes 130 or something in first gear. Geared really tall. And it it probably has turbo lag for like 25 seconds or something stupid.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I do I like road course stuff, so I have to I beat the s*** out of my car for 30 minutes.

Yeah.

Because you're out there. So it is a it is a different game and cooling is all of it. Right.

Yeah, it's all of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's you're on it. You're off it.

It's yeah. One of the things I've been working on in my Supra is one of my goals for the summer is to post my air conditioner pressures in the middle of the summer, because that's kind of like that's it.

Yeah.

You know, can you maintain coolant temp? OK, cool. Can you maintain reasonable air conditioning with a five inch intercooler in front of the condenser?

Yeah.

You know, so I've been I've been beta testing parts. They're on the car, but I won't know how good or bad they are until summer comes. And like, you know, you mess around with water flow. The head gasket is a bit of a regulator for water pressure in the block versus the head. So increasing water flow and then increasing the passage size to move more water through the system. You know, it's it's been pretty cool to take the Bonneville stuff and start to put it into street cars.

You know, how does that compare? Right. So another thing I was thinking about is, you know, you go back to your eighth mile versus quarter mile example. So you got a quarter mile car versus the streamliner. Do you have a different philosophy approaching both? What do you how different is your engine program between the two, for example?

Less compression.

OK.

Yeah. I think that if you could look at our scene over the course of 20 years, the trend for high compression came in and then the turbochargers got better and the intercooling didn't necessarily get better. And we started to hammer parts apart and then we lowered the compression again. You know, like there's some guys that race these engines at a high level. And if the gearing isn't right, where the engine can can be in a usable window. Like if you have a 2JZ with a five speed, your engine durability is higher than a 2JZ with a power glide. And if you have that power glide and it's high compression, and it's got to sit there around 6,000 RPM when you make the one two gear change and just get murdered for 200 feet before the engine starts to climb up. You know, like you could save some money with lower compression. But I don't think that the masses are ready to adopt that because there's some power to be had in compression depending on the pressure ratio the engine is operating under. You know, if you have, if your compressor is limited, you put compression in it until you run out of fuel. Well, if you're using ethanol fuel or gasoline fuel or methanol fuel, that all means a different compression ratio and different timing numbers to make it all jive. But I think that will trend back down because realistically, what can you afford? Like my Supra, it's traction limited. We could go for a ride and I'll have two fingers on the steering wheel and a couple of fingers on the shifter and B-row and gears. You're like, this is pretty cool. And then I'll hand you the data log and you're like, holy crap, the computer was doing all that the whole time. I didn't even know. You know, it's like, does it need all that power? You know, you can turn it down, you know, you got to limit the throttle in the lower gears and things like that. Does it? Will the next engine in that car be 10 to one? I don't know. I'll probably just make it 8.5 to one second, beat it on a pump gas because I'm still going to make 1,000 horsepower, which is all the 18 inch tire wants to cope with anyway, you know. So compression ratio is something I think will trend, you know, will trend back down. Small bore engines have different thresholds than large bore engines because if you look at videos of how the cylinder loses control, it normally propagates at the highest speeds in the chamber. So, you know, if you have a big, like a big two-valve engine that has huge flat areas where the piston is coming up and all that, it's getting sheared off of those two plateaus between the head and the piston, it's like, it's going to be more knock prone than an engine that has slower chambers, you know? So, compression ratio is kind of a thick topic.

What's high compression ratio on a 2J versus low compression ratio? Let's say I'm running an E85. What would be, I'm not running methanol. I think that if I'm having you build a street car with E85, what's my compression ratio going to be?

Like, hey, are you going to marry E85? You're going to marry it? You're not going to beat on your car on pump gas? Because your turbocharger and your header combination may not be able to make a low enough boost to use pump gas anymore anyway. So if you're, if you can't make less than 20 or 22 pounds of boost because of your header configuration and the turbine flow, just make it 10 to 1. And a lot of these engines, you can just put a flat top in it. Flat tops work really well.

Okay.

Yeah. So it would be a flat top game, gets you right around 10 to 1 on a, depending on the stroke of the engine.

And this is, so now I can run flex and I could put either or in it, or I might, I now I'm married to E85.

You're married to E85.

Okay.

Yeah. It's a heavy car. You know, if you, if you want to play smart, you follow the lead that the factory engineers gave you, which you could have a super with eight and a half to one compression. If your tuning's pretty good on gasoline, you could run 18, 19 pounds on 93 octane, which will yield, you know, if you have like, say, a 70 something millimeter turbocharger, it's going to make 650, 700 on pump gas. It's pretty good. And if you have the right, if you have the right setup, it will live like that. You know, it's been done 15 years ago. It was just fine. But if you have a 10 to 1 engine on pump gas and a Supra, you know, 14, 15 pounds of boost, you have to run it really rich and run the timing low to keep it from detonating. Once it detonates, it's just going to kill it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So where's your reward? You know, you're going to spend 10 or 20 grand building an engine. What do you need the engine to do? Does the engine need to give you a few years of service where you're having a good time and you could spare 20 or 30 horsepower? Maybe you just follow the factory's lead. The factory is not dumb. They wanted to keep that car out of the service drive blown up. You know, so the Evos and the Supras and the Subarus and all those engines, they were, you know, low compression engines from the factory.

Oh, yeah, it's OK on a Mark IV right from the factory. What is compression?

Eight and a half.

Eight and a half.

OK.

Yeah.

And it was fine. You know, like I had I had guys when I first started working on those cars with 76, 75 that, you know, they would make almost 700 wheel and they lived just fine. You know, if you if you, you know, if you look at the tuning on, it's been discussed, I'm sure. But if you look at the factory tuning on an Evo or a Subaru or a Supra, like they get really rich as they rev up. You know, you ever seen the wideband traces where it's like 4000, 5000 RPM, it just goes and buries the wideband. Well, that was to keep it alive. It's just coolant. The fuel is the coolant. So the first thing the tuner guy does is lean it out, makes 40 or 50 horsepower more and it's dead in two weeks because it couldn't manage the cylinder. You know?

Yeah. You mentioned that you're done chasing the streamliner dragon. What's next for you? Is there another addiction?

Another dragon?

I tell you, that damn... When I was racing with Brett, I got really unsettled because the car was getting so fast that I was like, I don't want to be at the track and lose a friend. And then when I lost Chris, it was like, well, this is dangerous too. And then all of a sudden, drag racing felt really safe again. So I think just going back and doing some drag racing will be just fine. You know, I half-a** think about taking my streetcar Supra to half-mile event. Maybe. You know, just because I would like to go.

That's the one you went 200 in already, in your half-mile? Okay.

Yeah.

Real quick, just pull this towards you a little bit. I'm losing you. There you go.

What I know now compared to then, I wonder if I could go to 10 or something. It would just be cool. You know, because that car, I don't know, that's kind of my weapon of choice. I really like the Supra. I have a Civic. I have two Civics. I like those two. But the Supra to me is like, you know, even trumps the Mustang because it's it's just turbocharged Japanese 90s car, it's just cool.

Is there something else out there that's on your radar? Or if you, let's say you pulled up your Facebook Marketplace, what's the next one look like? What are you, is there something that's catching your eye that you would be interested in playing around with? Is it a Coyote? Is it, what do you think?

I have a push hard engine in my Mustang. And I wish, I half-a** wish it was a Coyote.

Yeah.

Just because push hard engines, you have some lifter liability. You have to run a lot of valve springs. It's an intense engine to maintain. Like I had a customer's car a few weeks ago. I dropped off at alignment, picked it up, drove it 100 feet, heard the sound of a broken lifter. And that's it. It broke a lifter. And you, the best people are working on the valve train. And it's got the best components. And it's got a broken lifter. It's like having a coyote. You just don't have to really worry about that. So maybe a coyote car, but I have, there's a Mustang project that I'm involved with these young kids, like teenagers. And I want to put a bear in the car because I want to start off at like seven or eight pounds. And as the kid advances, we can give him more power. So I think the bear thing is oddly cool to look at.

That was been on my radar a couple of times.

In a Fox body, you know? But outside of that, it's hard for me to really pick a direction because I already have too many cars. So I have to sell a car to get a car. I can't put in another car in my house.

Right.

Well, you can get China shipping containers like this guy.

Yeah.

No, I have... This car is going to be a fairly cash heavy thing. And as I pick up work with ARP, I can kind of offset that and get this car running. But my household and my age and my income position and my future and all that stuff, it's like, I don't really need another hot rod.

That makes sense.

Especially because I have customers that are like, hey, do you want to do this? For me, there's a long standing call. It's like, do you want to do an NSX with a K Series in a sequential? Because I want to build one of those. So I have two customers that are like, well, I'm waiting for the market to do this. Once I can get this, then I'll shed the cash out to build that car. I want to build one of those cars. I've always kind of been interested, but I'm not going to sell one of my cars to do it. I like my cars. Yeah.

What kind of progress has this car seen? First of all, when did it come back into your possession?

When I left Real Street, this was part of my deal.

Okay.

So it was like, it was a messy situation, and I figured if I took the car with me, I could use it to either restart a business, or if I got pinched on cash, I could sell out of it. Because it ate about 300 grand to build it, just to get it to here. Now it's like 50, needs to eat 50 grand and it'll run.

What time period was that when you took the car? When did the car first hit the lift, I guess?

In the 20th. I think my last year there was end of 23, and it just sat. I put it in my garage at home. I didn't even look at it. And then I figured out what I was going to do, open another company, take it real easy for about six months, just so I can keep my head about me, because a lot had shifted. That was out of my control. And then this year, maybe for the past three months, been feeding it some cash. I ordered a Clutch Q3 last year. It's on the way. It's not done yet. I waited on that trans deal, because I didn't want to buy a TPD6 and then break it and have to buy another one. So I talked to Craig Liberty at the beginning of last year. I'm like, hey, what do you think about this? He's like, I'm actually going to build an H-pattern dual-counter shaft trans. It's not going to be clutchless. I'm like, okay, great. So just in the past couple of months, it's been, you know, I feed it a couple of grand a month. I can only afford so much right now. I'm not making a ton of cash. So right now, this car eats two grand a month. That's what I can afford to feed it.

Sure. And right now, you're kind of, you're on a, you have intentions of competing at Texas 2K, correct?

I won't go to, I want to, the first time I run the car will probably be FL2K.

Okay, so October next year.

Yeah, because I don't have the October of this year. I don't have the money to, I mean, you know, I'm married with kids. I'm starting a new business. Like there isn't, there isn't, you know, like there's just not a lot of cash to burn. And I'm not, I'm not hell bent to burn it either. Because if I, if you said, well, hey Jay, I think you could accelerate your curve with RS Garage if you sold this car and used that money to finish this car and you started creating content with it, I think you could speed up your process. I'm like, you know what, man? A lot of my life has been spent on other people's timelines. I think I want to just steer the ship for a little while, have some fun, not take it too seriously. I come to work, I do my work. The business is already starting to snowball. So why don't I ride that for a little bit before I... Because what I'm not going to do is get myself pinched. I gave up a good amount of money to be able to make my own choices.

Has that been a frustrating situation to... And I don't know how it was when you first started Real Street. Is that been a frustrating situation to go back to after budgets you were probably used to working with, and be like, I can only spend three grand or so a month on this or...

Not really. Not really, because my life is rewarding in a different way now. That when I was younger, the business really ran my life. I had women come in and out of my life that were like, you work too much. And I was like, whatever.

Yeah.

Later, you know. So now it's different, because I have kids and I have a wife and I have a really neat house. So RS Garage is more of a thing that's in my life. But it's not it's not like Real Street was. Real Street was like my my I was obsessed with work then and I'm just not. So it's a really good lesson for a person like me to learn, because I don't throttle out. If I wake up on a Saturday morning and there's nothing going on, like I just come to work. I like work. I like my work. You know what I mean? So for me, I don't have, you know, my hobbies is my work.

Right.

So, you know, I have to throttle that and it's easier now that I'm older than when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was it was just I worked too much.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was rewarded for it.

Right.

You know, not a lot of guys got to, you know, not a lot of technicians got to get in that position. So it was rewarding. But I don't I don't I won't obsess about it again. It's not it's not worth it, especially because having learned that a lot can change that you have no control of.

Yeah.

So it's like, holy crap. What a great lesson that someone can just take from you. And you just have to be like, well, you know, not going to let it ruin the rest of my life. Just have to deal with it. You know, so it's pretty good lesson.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to say over the last I mean, you've had a very turbulent two or three years here. Yeah. That being one of the lessons. Is there any other lessons that you can give to pass on to learn to identify the bears and the snakes?

There are men that will raise their voice and say too much and be aggressive and be relentless and be a real big pain in your a** and learn to identify that man and understand him, but also learn to identify the snakes because the snakes will slither around and use fairly perverse tactics to get what they want. And I would much rather work for a bear than a snake because with the bears, you at least get to see it come in. You can make a decision. With people that will lie to you or take advantage of you. Like, hey, you got a new watch or you got a new car, but I can't get a raise and I've been doing everything great and it's by your review and you're not going to move my pay because you say you can't afford it, but you've got a new watch or a new car. Like, maybe that's not the guy to work for. You know what I mean? Like you'd like to work. This is supposed to be fun. You didn't sign yourself up for some b******* career that you're going to... Like, gone are the days of working for a pension and all that stuff's over. So the best you can do is work for a forward facing people that you are appreciated, that you appreciate. There's mutual respect in the transaction. So I think that mutual respect is something that most young people, maybe they've got their hand out and they think that the... I met some young people that they're fairly unemployed because they think that the job owes them. And the worst thing you could do as a young person is think the job owes you. The job is something you're investing your time in, in order to get a reward. And the guys that invest themselves with a positive attitude that are willing to work hard and willing to learn, they're going to move up. So if you're going to be a mechanic or an electrician or a plumber or a trim carpenter or you're going to service septic systems or whatever that is you're going to do. You know what I mean? You're not going to college because you've got a bunch of college friends that don't have jobs and they have college debt. So you're like, well, I don't really like that path. So they move into this trades, just work hard and work for someone that, you know, you never know whose succession plan you may be a part of. There are places in our industry that haven't been swallowed up by private equity that their succession plan in place that the people that work hard are going to end up being the next phase of that company. You know, not everyone has a son or a family member to give their company to. So like some of these guys are relying on their right hand man ends up being the next guy that runs the company.

You know what breaks my heart? No, it's not the 2% female demographic. It's the fact that 80% of you guys are not subscribed and following the show. So go ahead, hit subscribe or follow. And of course, if you're on YouTube, hit that bell so you are notified when we drop a new episode. Let's get back to the show.

I've seen people with kids that end up selling to an employee or goes up because the kids have no interest in it too. I mean, it's not always a hand down situation even when you have somebody to hand it down to.

Yeah, that's totally a possibility. You have to become an asset to yourself and your employer if you're going to excel. And if anything, I would argue that it's easier for a young person to excel nowadays because a large amount of the peers are not trying. Like these kids, they don't understand the potential they have, so they're not using their potential. They're just kind of like moping around, complaining about their bosses. It's like, well, maybe you suck at your job, you know, like they give it. You have to learn to ask yourself, maybe, you know, like, is something difficult? Well, maybe. Is it you? Well, maybe. Could you do it better? Well, maybe, you know, like it's not you're not going to get, especially because not a lot of us have this whole thing sorted out. If you really think you know, you may be wrong.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? You got to leave yourself a little bit of space to explore other options.

If any where, so I've gotten everywhere, I have just off of work ethic and I've not advertised my business and I've done anything like that. And my whole thought process always was, if I had a boss I didn't like, my goal was to be their boss. So then I wouldn't, you know what I mean? Like you're not going to change somebody, you're not going to, you just, it's a reality. I'm trying to teach my kids that too. They'll get into situations where they meet somebody who's combative or they're whatever and it could be a teacher that they don't like or something like that. I was like, but they're in that position and you can't be combative to that because it's not going to get you anywhere. Your goal is to learn how to navigate them and or navigate around them.

Learn how to navigate them. You know, that could become your biggest asset in the workforce is navigating personalities. As long as the person isn't sadistic or isn't, it doesn't have any real deep-seated issues. If they're coke heads, if they're fat coke heads, forget about it, man. Get away from them. You know what I mean? There's nothing worse than a fat coke head. But if they're-

That's a t-shirt opportunity if ever.

Yeah. If they're just like normal d******* like everyone else, like all of us, you're like, well, can I learn to navigate that personality? Is there a lesson to be learned? Is there something I can take from that'll make me stronger on the next job? And sometimes the answer is no. And sometimes the answer is yes. But you at least gotta ask the question, or you're not gonna move forward in the workplace. There's gotta be a fair share of kids that don't understand that yet. But no, it's not gonna be easy all the time.

No.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

That's probably the two biggest lessons I've had in the last, I think the last three or four years have been the most turbulent for me as in growing up, is one, it's not gonna always be easy. I had to eat a lot of s*** the last few years, and that's just part of it. But the other thing is learning how to learn. I didn't learn how to learn until maybe around 21, 22. I'm like, oh, there's a lot of s*** I don't know. And that was probably the biggest thing to change my life, is just knowing that I don't know s***.

Yeah. Well, you have to be able to, sometimes you're dealing with an immovable object. So you find the people in your life that have wisdom, you explain the situation, and then you listen. And there's a chance that you've gotta leave the situation you're in to get a better situation, or it's you. There's only so many options. Most of us don't have problems that are unique to just us. Everyone's dealing with the same kind of problems.

I get that too. Some people are being like, I've been through this, I've been through that, or I've had this many boyfriends, or I've had this many jobs.

Boyfriends? That's crazy.

Just whatever. Let anybody explain. Girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. And I'm like, well, if it's been this many times, repeated this many times, there's a common denominator in this situation, and I'm telling you that it's you as the common denominator.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's, you know, a lot of us, we may date the same person with a different social security number, different body, same personality. We may do the same thing with our cars. Like some of these dudes should not be working on their cars. You know, you really can really set yourself back. There's a guy that I've been trying to help. He's got a really nice car. And he's just dealing with the wrong engine builders. And it's like, man, for two or three grand more, you could have your car and it would just work.

Yeah.

It's like, what's what's it worth? You know, and now after he's lost his last engine, he's like, OK, now I understand. Because if you can afford to get what you want, then get it. If you can't afford to get what you want, then you should learn how to do it yourself. And that there's going to be some learning curve. But there's, like I said, a lot of information on the Internet that you could not screw up bad. You know, if you just follow some steps, you know, I I would like to go like I got a couple of friends that have different shops. And I've been pipe dream in a little bit about like go there on a Saturday. I'll take, you know, find me 10 guys that are under 25 and we'll just put an engine together. I don't, I don't even want to charge. I'll just go do it just to teach some kids. You know what I mean? Like that would be pretty rewarding for me. So I've been talking to a friend of mine about coming to a shop and doing that because he's got a lot of drifters around and these kids just tear stuff up and then their s***'s broken for way too long. So it's like, just go there and just do some hands on training and maybe speed those kids up a bit. You know, that would be pretty cool for me.

Yeah, if you can get the right person to show you something that just clicks for you, it can make all the difference.

Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah, and in my next 10 years or so, there's a lot of stuff I can teach a younger person. So I don't know how to, aside from the YouTube stuff, I don't know how to maybe monetize that to make it where I can afford my life. But I've had guys that have come down and just bought a day for me. Like, hey, what's your day rate? It's like, well, it's 1500 bucks. That's what the day is worth. If I'm building an engine, that's how much I can make for myself. If I go to a car, that's how much I can make for myself. If I want to teach you how to do stuff for the day, that's what it, and like, can I have this date? And the guy's just come down and you spend a day with him and he's happy and he leaves better off. And it may sound like a lot of money, but what if the difference in that one day helps him build his first successful engine when all the money's cheap? Because when you wreck a bunch of parts, like cost more than 1500 bucks, like bad tuning or bad engine building, it's a lot of money. You know, so... Yeah. But I think teaching would be pretty cool. But I'm going to do some beta testing, like beta runs and see if it can work just helping kids out, because that to me is pretty cool.

What does the structure of that look like? Like, are you just going to show up at your... I guess that is the beta run, is showing up to your buddy shop and doing a...

Hey, find me 10 kids that you would invest time in, and I'll put a Honda in a box and bring some mics, and we'll just go through the basics.

As in there's 10 kids watching you build one engine.

Yeah.

OK.

Now you come over here and you measure this.

OK.

How come you're not getting the right number?

OK.

Like, find out why you're not getting the right number. Like, work through that with them. You know, most guys, if they've never used a mic, you know, I don't know if you ever used mics before, but like, it's a it's a bit of an art, you know, it's a bit of a thing. Like you learn to use the tools, you know, like the first time you strike an arc on a welder, you may not be good at it. You know, it's a practice game. But just giving them some basic go, no go, because with go, no go, you could service a vehicle at a dealership without mics. So if you you should be able to build an engine, if you buy quality components, like a lot of these components, they come out of the box, they're really good. You know, like I'm a big fan of the BC stuff. Take a set of rods out of the box. It's like, you're lucky to find two ten thousandths of an inch variation. That's freaking great. If you go back 20 years, it wasn't like that. The offshore stuff was not that nice. Now the offshore stuff has gotten as good as the reseller demands it to be. You know, so you could build a good engine, even if you didn't have mics, if you just have a clue, you know.

So let's say, how important are the tools, right? Let's say you didn't do that. You wanted to get into this. Can you get by with a Harbor Freight torque wrench and some basic stuff like that? I mean, do you need to invest in, you know, do you need a snap-on digital torque wrench, or is there good micrometers?

Micrometers are tricky. If you buy junk mics off of Amazon, all you did was waste your money. Okay. There's a local guy that I, he's making this recreation, and I go and help him, and he bought junk mics. It's amazing. You open the box up, it's like, you know, a hundred bucks, and it's like, holy crap, look at all this stuff. It's just junk.

Yeah.

You know, so I would say don't buy mics unless you're going to buy quality mics.

Okay.

But if that's the case, then you, you pay your machinist. Hey man, I'll give you a couple hundred bucks in time. Can you just make sure this stuff's all kosher? And most guys will take your money, you know? Now, if it's four or five hours worth of measuring, which it very well can be, you're going to have to pay the guy for that. But like the machine shops that I rely on, they have self checks. So theoretically, the bore size is right. Two guys checked it before it left the machine shop. There are some bearing manufacturers that have a hard time with holding tolerance. But if you get like a cleavite or an ACL, you could have a box of bearings that are all inside of two tents. Some of the other bearings, like it depends on where they're produced, you can get yourself in trouble because you could have a bearing shell that's got more than half a thousandth on one bearing shell. Like that's junk.

Yeah.

You know, so you got to pick your parts. But you could do it. Like the other thing I thought about is making kits where someone buys a kit, bearing clearances and everything's already been measured. Hey, you want to put your engine together at home, clean it, put it together. Good luck. Some guys want to do that, but they don't have the tools. So you could sell them a kit. But again, going back to dealership stuff, if you pick up your Honda service manual or your Toyota service manual and you just follow the instructions, you could fix a car at the dealership. If you got to put a crank in an engine, you could do it just using the service manual. The technicians weren't given mikes. They were given coded bearings. And if you did it right, you ended up with a fine engine. So it's possible. OK. Look at your Ford. There's a label on the crankshaft. There's a label on the block. Gives you a bearing by the bearing. It's got it's got at least the factory bearing specification.

That's what I tried to do when I did mine. It was either that came from Ford Performance as an upgraded part, or I used OEM as much as I could as possible.

Did the engine live?

It did. But I had a separate issue. I had a dual fuel pump that I had a pump go dead. And I wasn't monitoring fuel pressure, which is something I probably should have been doing. Yeah. But I wish there also could have been a way that I would have known that I had a dead pump, you know, a little light, something, it was a blown fuse inside of a fuel controller. Yeah. And the only way to know that the fuse is blown is to pull the fuse controller or the fuel controller apart, unhook all of the wiring and then look inside of it.

Yeah. So multi fuel pump setups are tricky like that. AEM used to make a 30-4900, which it had like a if the engine leaned out, it would open a relay or close a relay, which would shut the engine off.

Yeah.

And it's like, I don't know how that I don't even know if they make it anymore. It's been so long, but that was a really neat product. A simple device for a guy like in that situation, and it would save his engine. Yeah.

I went to a single brushless now. So I mean, if it goes dead, it should, in theory, just stop the fueling.

So well, yeah, you'd like to know.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Lean outs suck because an engine could be lean enough that it doesn't die right away. But the heat really picks at them. If you have an engine that's lean, it's very easy to propagate knock versus an engine that's rich.

Yeah.

So, you know.

I can't trust people who look at gauges.

That's one of the things. During intense driving situations, a lot of times I'm not looking down. You know what I mean? Unless I put it in a heads-up display of some sort, or it's there, it beeps at me, or screams at me, or something, then that could be a different situation.

Well, you're road racing, so you could buy a dash and set up some warnings in the dash, and that would save you a bunch of money. And when you leave the road course, you take the suction cup off the windshield, and you put the dash somewhere, and that way, at least when you're on the track, you have over temp warnings, you have oil pressure warnings, you have lean out warnings. You could have all that stuff in a basically competent dash.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Otherwise, it ran great when I first got it together. And it took me a year and a half before that situation happened to me. It was...

Well, that's a successful engine.

Yeah.

I mean, if they're going to die, they die pretty quick.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? If you put together an engine and it goes a few thousand miles, it's going.

Yeah.

If you put an engine together and you've screwed up, it's dead relatively quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I... Anybody's ever timed a mod motor for Ford or a Coyote? It's very... You look at all of it, it's very intimidating. But I mean, a few YouTube videos and some things, and it was actually quite easy. But it is. When you're looking at all of those chains and tensioners and cams on either side, it was a bit daunting.

You know, there's a few things that the end user... It's easy to get intimidated by.

Yeah.

Like there's probably one of the most asked questions is about Ring Gap. People are really obsessed about Ring Gap because it's something within their control. But it's like just... It's not hard, you know, to be in this range, you'll be fine. If you overheat the cylinder and it touches the ring down, then you need more Ring Gap. But otherwise, these rules that have been around for decades will keep you safe. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that one of those deals where it's better to be over than under?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Almost everything in an engine, you're better over than under.

Okay.

Yeah. I don't know who came up with it, but Ben Strader at EFI University said years ago, if you're tight, everybody knows, if you're loose, nobody knows.

Yeah.

Yeah. And there are some engines that, they have to be run loose. If you have an engine, like a big tire car that can shake the tires, you know, you have four or five thousands worth of oil clearance on the mains and it's fine.

Yeah.

You know, I've had engines that had worn out crankshafts where the bearing clearance is, you know, five or six thousandths. And the engines, they live, you know. Is it ideal? No. You know, because at some point it will hammer. You know, you can't be so loose that you're going to hammer parts. But if you're tight, it's easy to get in trouble, especially if you have... Not all piston manufacturers have it sorted out to where when the piston starts to overheat, where does it touch down on the cylinder? And some of them scrub the cylinder differently than others, you know. So you can make a mess out of an engine if it's tight, whereas like a little bit more clearance and it's fine. Like if you go listen to an engine that just runs methanol and no water, like listen to it when it's cold, it sounds like a box of marbles, you know, just rattly piece of junk. But that's what it takes to go to the starting line with almost no temperature and make a lap without touching parts down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is there one out there? I don't know how many engines you've built in your time, but let's pretend that you want to try it, right? Do you just go get like a 5.3 LS? Is that a good place to start? Do you start with a 302? Like, is there if you want to just get the basics, you want to play with an engine and build one? And is there a starting point?

I feel like I've never built an engine. What would you suggest? First time. Get an LS.

Yeah, they're easy. They're cheap. There's a ton of support. There's only a couple things you could screw up. That'd be a fine place to start.

What's the worst one? Anything BMW or Mercedes?

Yeah, anything that's expensive. When you start buying expensive engine parts and you miss, it's like, you have the guys that are recycling money with those new BMWs. I mean, they're spending a lot of money to blow stuff up. You know, it's like, you know, not fun. You know, I helped a local guy that he wrecked a new BMW engine, and it was sad, because you're like, it's a lot of money to lose.

Yeah.

You know, you don't want to... At no point during the exercise was I like, you know, I think maybe I said like, man, I'm glad I know better. Like, you cannot, you cannot make all those mistakes and get away with it. You know, it just doesn't work. So you have to be ballsy enough to get yourself involved, but smart enough to not wreck your own program. You know.

What's the most expensive mistake you've done?

On cars or business?

Cars, yeah. Oof.

Let me think.

And there's a handful of them in all this time. Somebody that doesn't like me, I'm sure I could fire this list off. Um, man, I left the crank loose once. I was at work and I was putting a Jay-Z together, and I checked the thrust, and the thrust clearance was good, and I got a call that my mom had passed. And I left, and I came back. I didn't tighten the other mains up.

Oh.

And the rear main was leaking because the crank was floundering around in there. That was probably my worst. That was probably my worst mistake. When I was a kid, I think I wrecked a Mod Ford because there were a couple of different crank bolt lengths. And if you used the crank bolt that was too long, Ford had a two-piece, bank one sprocket, bank two sprocket, then the crankshaft sensor reluctor. I think I used too long of a bolt and the stack wasn't tight and it wrecked the crank sprocket. I think I was probably like 22 or 23 years old. That was probably expensive. But yeah, not a lot of stuff. You know, you tear some stuff up. Like I tore up, I got a video of Jared Holt's car sideways on fire through the traps, kick the rods out of it. But in my defense, I said, hey, this thing's done for the night. Like, can we go home? They're like, oh, let's run it some more. I'm like, we should go home. We ran it one more time and it kicked the rods out of it. But I didn't crash it, which was great. But yeah, just one of the things you have to understand is you're gonna screw up. It's facing your mistakes. If you screw up and you lie, worst, just screw up and say like, oh s***, I screwed up. Like, how do we fix this? These are cars. This isn't making a bad call in an operating room. It's a fricking car, just fix it. It's not a big deal.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like I have I've sent more stuff to the paint shop that I have screwed up. I mean, I have. I have screwed up stuff that had to be repainted because I damaged it. You know, I got in the car one day that didn't have a master cylinder in it when I was a kid and drove it into another car. So it's like three or four grand that I had to pay to get these two cars fixed because I didn't check the, you know. Now, when I get in the car, I'm like, I check the brake pedal before I put the car in motion. It's an old habit, but it's like, you know, if you get in an old car that hasn't moved in six months, you better pump the brakes before you go to move it because it may not stop. You know what I mean? Like just stupid s***. But I think that a lot of people screw stuff up like that. It's just don't lie about it. You know what I mean? Like it's not, it's definitely not worth lying about it. You just, like when pride gets in the way, that's probably the biggest actual mistake. Your mistake may have been made in ignorance. And when you make an ignorant mistake, you learn and you do it better the next time. But if your pride and your ego gets you in a situation about lying about what you've done, ugh, don't do that. Stupid. That's a stupid move, because that's going to cost you character over time.

Yeah. Speaking of character and reputation, how have you managed to... Everywhere I go in this country, everybody has good things to say about you. Whenever it's come up in conversation or whatever, how have you managed to have not just a local reputation, but nationally, maybe even globally?

I think one of the things that works for me is I really don't give a f*** about what you think about me. I don't mean that in a negative light. I mean that I'm just a dude going through life. I'm not better than you. I'm not worse than you. We could probably become friends because we're into the same thing. I don't come to the conversation trying to defend myself. So when I meet someone and I see that they're defending themselves, I normally can work through that pretty quick and I could befriend someone because I'm not competing with them. I think probably one of the things that's helped me the most is maintaining my reputation and character alongside of each other because if you have, you could have a really good reputation and a really s***** character. Yeah. I mean, there's some guys that they really have a big spread there and it hurts them. And I just haven't and I think it's because I'm into the cars first. I didn't, I wasn't trying to impress someone. I wasn't trying to be better than someone else. I was just doing my thing. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I get it. I get, you know, I get, wherever I go places, I'll run into someone and it's just like, it's just cool because I don't put too much into it, you know? I know what I don't know and I know what I have practiced and it has worked well for me. So I just share what I've practiced and what worked well for me. And that seems to work, you know, like from an aspect of now, it's more important than ever because now I have to use my character and reputation to redevelop another company. So now it's like, man, if I ever have to take my podium speech, don't worry, boys, that thing is written. It is so tight. I've got a down pat and it'll be funny. But I just didn't, I just, it's not worth doing bad stuff. Like I've screwed up, but it's not worth doing bad stuff. You know, like, what's the, there's no win in it because you, one of the things you want as you age is to be able to look yourself in the eye and be okay. Like the people that can't do that, they get in real trouble. I mean, you get some guys that are in real trouble because they've hurt themselves over screwing people around for money or screwing people around for power. Like those guys got problems. For me, it's just like, I never much worried about it. You know, I saw what respectable people we have in our industry and I asked them how to do it and I followed their instructions.

What are those people, by the way? What do you respect the most in this industry?

I really hold Kirk Miller in high regard. Kirk Miller ran AEM for a number of years and he has taught me a tremendous amount of stuff. Job Spetter Sr. is an incredible, incredible person. You hit him with a question, he hits you with the truth. And you're like, okay, I'll just listen to him. You know what I mean? Like there's some of these things. It's just like identifying what the answer is. You know, one of the things that's gotten us in a lot of trouble is you got a question, but you don't like my answer. So you're just going to find a new way to ask your question. And your question goes unanswered because you don't like my answer. So I don't play that game with myself. You know, like, just like navigate, like I can go talk to if I call Kirk or if I call Job Senior and I hit him with something, I'm getting, I'm getting the answer. I don't have to look around. Like, that's a fricking luxury. A lot of these guys I raced with out in Bonneville. Same way I hit him with a question. They hit me with the answer. It's the answer the wisdom provides. You know, so it's like, you know, I'm very fortunate to have some people in my life that have actual wisdom.

I think that's a good note to pop the usual three on.

Sure.

Yeah. And then do a Minnesota goodbye as always.

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

OK. The daily driver doesn't need a backseat.

It's completely up to you.

Porsche 911.

OK.

The show car.

Just like the latest 911, like a Turbo S, a Carrera.

No, I didn't mean I would. I used to daily I had a GT3 my daily that and it was just wonderful. Probably do something like that again. Show car. What do you mean show car?

We usually explain it as something you take the kids or family or a wife to go get ice cream or out on a dinner date or something or go to a car show and park and sit with your new balance.

I got a Toyota Super Turbo. I'm pretty happy with it. Because outside of that, it's a Ferrari F40, it's a McLaren F1, it's the cars you can't really do anything with but stare at.

I mean, you do have an unlimited budget. This is all a dream here.

I know. I know. But I think these are timing built every 12 minutes. The Supra is pretty reliable.

We did have somebody ask if they get set aside some money for maintenance for their... Yeah.

I think it was Cooper.

Yeah, it was Cooper.

That's a question he would ask.

Yeah.

There's very many uniquely Cooper questions.

You know what? I keep my Supra because I appreciate the response it gets through a wide range of people.

Yeah.

It's their neat cars. Yeah. What was the last one?

Our track car. Yeah. And any kind of track.

Road course car or?

You pick.

Man, I think I got it already. I think I just take that thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, because it's like I if I lost after a race car, it's a pro stock. I really think pro stock is really neat. And this car in my mind is my Japanese pro stock car. OK, so I think I just I think I'm I think I'm all set. I think I just need that Porsche.

Yeah.

Yeah. White's fine if you're shopping for me. All right. Yeah.

OK.

Yeah.

Was there anything else you wanted to touch on? Do you think we got a good?

I think we got a good. Yeah. Yeah. I think we got a good. Pretty chill conversation.

Yeah. And that's the thing going into this. I was like, yeah, you already had, you know, when you go back to the real street stuff, it's been covered so much. Yeah.

I mean, the only thing that's left is the dark secrets. And yeah, I want to give those guys a little bit more room to get their heads right.

Fair enough.

When you're ready to tell them, you let us know.

Yeah. Well, it's just we're just people.

Yeah.

You know, we're just people at the end of the day.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like what happens in people's lives is they make mistakes and eventually they want to make amends. That's how it works, you know? And one of the problems with business in people is money has too much power over some individuals. And they got to work through that, you know? Like I operate at a luxury because I have old friends and my old friends, they operate outside of money. Not because they have too much of it. It's because it doesn't matter anymore. They operate in a time space. Two more years left, three more years left. Doctor said I was terminal six months ago. What does he know? You know what I mean? Like these guys are different. So, you know, I don't think I got to make a living, build this business, have an adventure with ARP, raise my kid, like pretty sad.

Yeah, when you put it that way, it seems like you think about things in a very binary way.

Well, there has to be some logic, because if not, you're going to get locked into the emotion of it. And the emotion can often lie to you. So you know, one of the things that the spedders have taught me over the years is like, just keep zooming out until you can get the emotion out of it. So if you're having a tough day, you're having a tough week. If you're having a tough week, you're having a tough month. You're having a tough month. You're having a bad quarter. Having a bad quarter. You're having a bad year. You know, like it's not hard if you can get away from it a little bit.

As we were landing, my flu into Orlando yesterday, I was looking down at the cars. I haven't got a window seat in a long time. I was forced into it, right? Bad choices. But I've not mixed it up every once in a while. But anyways, I was looking down at the cars. There was like 30 or 40 cars at an intersection. I was thinking, someone down there is having the worst day of their life. And I don't even know. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of opportunity to just be kind to one another because that that can change everything. You know, the when I was in Qatar for a week, a few weeks ago, and I was watching the scene there, I'm watching the men, I'm watching how they behave, I'm listening to them talk. Okay, okay, I got it. Come back home, land at JFK, and I'm like, holy crap, bro, this is like, we have no idea how spooled up we are. Like if we were turning 500 RPM 200 years ago, and 50 years ago, we were turning 4,500 RPM, well now we're hovering at 10 or 12, things are tearing up, people are tearing up, people are not holding themselves together very well. Like, America's spooled up, like America's got the knobs turned right now, and just learning to be cool with each other really helps.

When you say spooled up, you mean like people are just kind of running it at red line?

Yeah, you can't make enough money, you don't have enough time, you're possibly unsatisfied, whether it be with your physical appearance or your health or your relationships or, you know, how come that guy has this amount of money, the comparison? You know, it's like we're just racked in the head. It's like, for what? Just slow down a little bit.

So how does Qatar contrast to that? Like, just paint me a picture real quick.

The guys that have money aren't comparing their money to the other guy's money. And the guys that are in the service field that are working because they move there because they wanted safety. They don't want to deal with high levels of violence, so they leave their native country and they go work at a job that they're never going to get a raise. And they're going to live in a factory type environment. And the bell rings and they're out in the field playing soccer. They're free. You know, like we we have the spoils of excess for the past few decades and like starting to show. You know what I mean? Like in the youth, they can they complain about it a lot because the entitlement of of what the country provides, it's like kind of bites them in the a**, you know. A lot of unhappy kids. We have f****** school shootings, bro. Something right. You know what I mean? Like that's pulled up. Yeah. So over there, and I'm sure it's got its own problems, but at least in the two times I've been over there, or the times I've worked down on the islands, or the times I've worked in Mexico, the consumption model that we're all under here in the States, like you can only turn it so hard before people start to have a loss of mental clarity because they're stressed out. Like one of the people down on the cars, as you looked out of the plane window, the worst day of their life is probably over b*******. That's not going to matter in two weeks.

There's that too.

Yeah, but it matters now because that's what they're in. You know, like the psyche. Yeah, you know, you have things that captivate your attention. And there's a chance that a lot of what's captivated your attention is b*******. And you need to pull away a little bit, you know, take away a 16 year old's phone, like watch that nuclear meltdown. You know what I mean?

It's like take away Dan's wrist watch over here. Oh my God, I forgot my watch at home.

No, I've been checking it now and I feel really bad about it, but I have something going on.

Let me forget about it. It's really funny. Oh, yeah, please.

Well, I like it for the podcast because I have a family of four kids at home. I mean, this is they know when I'm podcasting, that's how they get a hold of me.

Yeah.

So I have somebody coming to my shop right now and my oldest is taking care of it and handling everything. And so I'm just monitoring from afar.

This dude's got a system in place. I respect it. Like he's got the best support system.

This is, what's the age split between you two?

I'm 26, you're 43, right? Yep. Yeah. So what's the male? 14, 17 years.

Does he teach you things?

I've learned a lot. I've learned how to be smarter with my money as a result. I've learned how to deal shop because of this guy. Yeah. That's probably the biggest lesson. I'm sure there's many lessons over the years I've gotten from him and the friends I've surrounded myself with, but I've always had friends 10 or 15 years older than me.

He has a lot of older friends, to be honest with you.

I realized through photography, I'm like, man, Sandy's, what's a good way to put it? Sandy's a m*********** spinning wisdom out here. Put it that way.

You know, I was at the track a few years ago and I was standing at the fence and I ran into this old dude that I know. He's a light-skinned black dude named Lee and he's a block mason, his career. He's physically unbelievably strong and he heard Brett's car do a burn out and he said that coyotes got them lungs. I was like, got them lungs.

You know, I said it's so smooth and everything.

So smooth. You think about like a four valve engine that just sings because it's got good airflow. You're like, it's got them lungs. Yeah. Yeah. That was a takeaway for me. I'm like, I never heard it. I never heard someone express the way an engine sounded based off of it's got them lungs. You know that I said, I'll take that. That's cool. Yeah.

Well, that no. Where can everybody find you?

RS Garage dot US. I am banking hard on. A following, keeping me in mind when it's time to buy pistons, rods, turbochargers, stuff like that. So this little place is the little place for me to work in peace and for me to build some engines and have some fun. And then we have a warehouse in Tampa that's housing parts. And Mo runs that warehouse and he's got to support staff there. And we just linked the two with software because he doesn't want to move this way and I'm not moving that way. And he was he was critically important at my old place and he's critically important at this place. And he's a he's a machine when it comes to slinging car parts. And and I hope that in the next few years, we can get this thing spooled up and start stabilizing my program a bit more.

What? So you feed anything for your car? Like I'll confess, I didn't do a ton of research on like what you guys actually do when it comes to the distribution side of things. Is there a particular niche you try to stick to or is it just a wide range?

Um, I don't want to sell spoilers and seats and body kits. It's the same thing I've always done. So if you need, if you're building an engine, if you're turbocharging an engine, whether it be an upgrade or an engine that wasn't previously turbocharged, we've moved the fair share of Whipple stuff. That stuff moves well into the Coyote space, clutches, fuel systems, stuff you need when you're modifying your car. You know, so I don't want to get real heavy into specific race cars other than mine because racers are on a heavy schedule and I don't need someone's Friday crises. You know, have a spare. If you got a race car, have a spare.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? But for the most part, it's just people that are the kind of people that have found me on YouTube, be the kind of people that I'm selling car parts to. You know, so if you if you've run across me in the past, like that was one of the really neat things. At my old place is, I had enough revenue through the sales that for me to engage in, if someone came to me with their problem, I could help them solve it because I had income. Now, it's a little bit tricky where it's like, you know, if a guy calls, I'll give them half an hour. But after that half an hour, I have to kind of say like, hey, man, I'm working for a living right now. I'm sorry.

But yeah, that's a tough one.

Yeah. So, you know, you either have to... And I've had guys buy time, and then I can engage in their problem. But even if you buy an hour and it solves your problem, what do you care? You got your problem solved. You know, but yeah, just trying to stay a technical resource and use that to create sales revenue. Sweet.

I have another quick one that I just drummed up real quick. So we talked about some Coyote stuff, and I know you've done some stuff with Brett. How much of a hand did you have in his car and which variation?

In the first car, some, and then it gets fuzzy. I think that may be the second car.

Okay.

But I'm not sure. Whenever the EPA stuff got weird at Real Street, I was told to not do tuning anymore. It was really just gay. It was like, don't go to the track and be seen with a laptop. There was all these dumb rules. About that time, Job was getting back involved and Job is hands down probably the best guy, if not in the country, in the world. He's a small tire race specialist. And so, when the three of us started dancing around that car, it was pretty fun. So it was like, you know, I think we went in the sixes and then Job started messing with it. And then that car was heavy. So another car came and that car was heavy. And then the third car came. I haven't done anything for the third car.

Okay. Yeah.

That's solely Job's better. But Job doesn't, Job's got a small client base. And they understand his value. And he's not at all interested in hopping on a plane to come work on your stuff. You know what I mean? Like, he's in it for the love. He's a car nut, just like most of us.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the current car, zero. The second car, I don't know. I honestly don't remember. The memory is fuzzy, right? But I remember that. Well, I'll tell you the same thing that anyone else that's done tuning for the past 20 years will tell you, like, it's hard to beat Joe. Yeah, Joe's the man.

OK.

Yeah. Yeah.

So but it was mostly for like a tuning aspect, an assembly, anything like that to OK.

Joe fast forward supplies the engines. Jim Brown did a lot of the fab work on the car back when I was helping. And then, you know, Brett had made the crossover into MoTak because he needed a MoTak because the MoTak is like the final solution. You know, if you. There's a lot of systems that are gotten really good and a lot of guys that should be really proud of how far the systems have come. But there's only one MoTak.

Yeah.

You know, if it's on MoTak, for example, I had a conversation with Shawn, but outside of MoTak, what are some of the other standalones that you think have come very far in the last decade?

Haltech has come very far, very far. I think Haltech has really done a great job turning that thing around, because when the Elite came out, it was like such a letdown. But they had their hands tied. They needed a complete rewrite. You know, it's business, blah, blah, blah, blah. But Haltech really is doing a great job. I think that FuelTech has done a phenomenal job. Understanding what their client needs and supplying it. I think that Emtron has excelled a lot in the past few years. Cyvex, I can't really speak of because I put the software on my computer once. I'm like, this is way too much engineering crap for me. Because really, the biggest problem with asking me that question is, I stand to gain nothing from moving away from the MoTeC.

Right. Yeah, because you're so used to it.

I gain nothing. I don't get into a better position by moving away from the MoTeC. So even my EK Civic gets turbocharged. And right now, it's got an AM Series 2 on it. But if I'm not going to put a MoTeC box on it, it's like I almost don't change it because it does all the things that a later model ECU will do. What you really need on a vehicle like that is drive by wire, and then you can have some torque request and manage the traction because it's just going to have traction problems. But again, I really appreciate what the other companies have done. And I think that they're kick-a** people at all of these places. But the MoTeC is just the MoTeC. They have this big, long head start, and they charged enough money to build the best stuff and pay the best people, you know what I mean? Like, it's like there's a cash, a huge cash of really talented people around that brand. And then if you also, if you buy a MoTeC, you get into the circle of some of the best racers.

Oh, the knowledge pool. You buy access to that knowledge pool.

Yeah, it's like, man, if you want to make it hard on yourself and beat your own drum set, go buy some weird stuff. But if you just want to like get close to talent and have that talent accelerate your program, you're like, what if you can pick up a year? You're going to say no to that? You know what I mean? So to me, it's just the MoTeC is the MoTeC. And it's fun to work with because it doesn't let you down. There's not the situation where you call and you're like, OK, I want to run this off of that. Like, ah, we'll put it on the list of things to do in the next revision. I mean, the MoTeC is pretty tight. Yeah. And there's developers that have made like Chris Delgado has software that he's developed in the past few years. Or if you're a nitrous specific drag racer, he has things for you that nobody else has. You know what I mean? Like some of the stuff is it and Shane T does the same thing. And, you know, it's just a neat. It's a neat platform. Yeah.

Well, on that note, Jay, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for existing. I find you at Gunna Garage and whatever Facebook.

All of our Mr. Gunna Garage and Mr. Gunna Garage.

Yeah. All that fun stuff. Thanks for existing.

What else?

I'm missing these intros. Thanks for your sponsors and I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm going to stand up because my butt hurts.

See you all next time.

Thanks.