195. Zach Denney on ECUMaster USA, Tracking Cars and Developing Strategies For Drag Racing

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 we are back in Texas. I'm so happy to be in Texas. I'm here for Texas 2K, obviously, so that's the big thing to be here for. But nonetheless, another reason I'm here is for our guest today, Zach Denney. Go ahead, tell us a little bit about yourself, ECU Master USA, and all the fun stuff we got going on here. We were just hanging out for about an hour, hour and a half. There's plenty to talk about here, so just go ahead.

Yeah, I guess kind of go all the way back, origin story with my automotive habit. Grew up reading road and track. My dad is big into journalism and poetry, but also engineering minded, and so he kind of like blended the two. So we always had good car magazines. There were some great writers in the 90s and the 80s. So I kind of grew up on automotive journalism and fell in love with cars. Might always had a project or two laying around and kind of fell in love with the storytelling and the experiential aspect of cars. And then, you know, I got obsessed with statistics and the Viper first came out. I could tell you every stat about it. And, yeah, as soon as I was able to buy something to work on, in fact, it's actually in the background on that lift right there is my first car is that 1990 Super that I've had since like 2000. Yeah, just, you know, we kind of worked on stuff because we had to, because we had, you know, not as nice older cars and a bunch of Corollas and stuff that we limped and stuffed oil into and poured oil out of and burned oil and did other things with. But, yeah, just lifelong automotive enthusiast, kind of ran in the family a little bit. But I've taken it, I think, quite a bit further than anybody else in the family has.

To say further is kind of an understatement. All the stuff in here is kind of like, I'm over here just looking at, you know, what year is the ACR 16?

Yeah.

16. Oh, yeah. Press card. That's right. So you got the press card and you said, let's start with Civics.

Yeah.

What's the story with those?

I'm just an idiot. I really like. And so, and again, like, I think that, you know, we all get nostalgic for certain times in our lives. And I got to listen through some really special, I think inflection points in the automotive hobby, where, you know, I was already in the street racing scene when Fast and Furious came out. And so we all kind of made fun of it a little bit because obviously it's Hollywood. It's not entirely realistic, but it got more right.

Are you street racing at that point in your life?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Don't tell my parents.

Yeah.

But it's just why I'm the fourth kid. I have three older sisters. And the fact that they let a 17-year-old leave the house on a Friday night with a, you know, not fast, fast car, but not really tell them where I was going. We didn't really have cell phones. I was just kind of like a latch key kid at that point and say, hey, I'll see you all tomorrow. And yeah, but that was you know, the tollways were pretty new in Dallas. Dallas is not as populated as it is now. And that was back when like a Stocktwin Turbo Super with the wastegate line pulled and some toluene mixed in with pump gas and a little Marvel mystery oil. I think that was, you know, I broke my 200 mile an hour cherry on, you know, President Bush phrasing George Bush tollway.

That's crazy phrasing.

Yeah, but like that a Stocktwin Turbo Super could even like touch 200 miles an hour is wild, took a long, long time. But yeah, but I was able to, you know, I was already in kind of the scene at that point. And then the movies came out and really just added fuel to the fire. And then, you know, the 90s tuner scene had been around. But really, that was a huge inflection point. And so, yeah, I just I'd never seen somebody build all three of the heist civics. Right. I always thought they were kind of like the least appreciated car in the movie. And I've seen people build like one. But the visual impact of seeing all three of them with the underglobal airing is pretty funny. So I need to actually we need to shoot a commercial for ECU Master with those, and I'll probably sell them off to somebody to enjoy them, because they'd be so cool. Yeah, it just takes a lot of room to store them. I mean, it's a pretty big warehouse or shop or, you know, play garage to store all those.

So they're all built to like us. How exactly are they built?

The same way the movie cars were, which is to say not at all.

OK.

Yeah. So like if you I think it was Craig Lieberman, he kind of gave the rundown on the high civics. He's like, yeah, they had like back then even like a fifty dollar eBay exhaust and like maybe coil over sleeves. And they got some wheels that nobody could sell because they're like a weird gold color and they had a whole container full and they couldn't sell. I had to like make some inky's look like the wheels that were in the movie. But yeah, there's like nothing done in like a fifty dollar eBay muffler. Like some of them were automatic, some were manual. Some were repainted from whatever to black. And then some had sunroofs, some didn't. So it's kind of like there is no original car because none of the originals were all the same.

Right. Brought to you by eBay Motors, right?

100 percent. Even back then, right. They like ran out of budget all of the hero cars. And so the highest cars were like last in line. They got like $50 eBay Mufflers and that's it. Probably didn't even get an intake.

So you said, how old were you when you got the, that would be a Mark III, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bought that when I was, I can't remember if I was 16 or 17. Okay. But like, yeah, I think they're year 2000.

So you've kept it all these years. How many miles are on at this point?

Not as many as there should be because it's been a lot of time broken.

Yeah.

And there were several years where like, you know, I started engine swapping it from the 7M to a 1J and life just got in the way with college and work and whatever else. And it kind of sat and got dusty for three or four years. So it's had periods. But it's kind of cool that like, you know, I've seen a lot of people regret selling their first car. And I've read that story enough times. It didn't really. It's a mark three. If it was a mark for there would have been plenty of points in my life where I could have used the money and it probably would have been sold. Right. Because those cars have been way more valuable. The mark three. I paid actually twenty seven hundred dollars for that. Found it in the Dallas Morning News back when print ads were a real thing. And then sucker my dad into going with me to look at it. Some dude had clearly just bought it at auction. Still had some other dudes like name tag in the back named Bubba. And I get the car, start putting a stereo in it because I was a big stereo nut and found like five hundred forty dollars in 20s stuffed into the console. OK, that's not 20 percent refund on it because some guys, you know, the world's worst weed dealer.

So yeah. So at what point does ECU Master come into I mean, we're jumping way ahead at this point, but and we can come back at some point. But at what point does ECU Master come into play?

Yeah. So I went back to engineering school in my late 20s. OK, jumped on the formula SAE team like the founding year for the University of North Texas for Texas. North Texas started as Texas Tech and started engineering school there and then switched to UNT later, then dropped out for a while and worked in racing shops and other stuff. But. And then, yeah, I had an internship at Peterbilt. I was working in their electrical engineering department and, you know, kind of realized like the starting offers weren't amazing and I was stuck in a cubicle and nobody really wanted to be there and you didn't get to do anything like, you know, making tail light harnesses for a Peterbilt is only exciting for so long. But I was doing all the electrical for the Formula SE team and I used like a very do it yourself ECU and it was not great. The documentation was really like hard to decipher and, you know, I was like, there's got to be something better that doesn't require as much fiddling as this. Like I don't want something that's this, I shouldn't be getting inside the ECU to adjust something physically, right? Should be able to do that with a keyboard. And yeah, just on a whim, like some guy had mentioned something about like a piggyback that was made by a company called ECU Master. And so I looked at the company, I was like, oh, they have a standalone. So I looked at it and like started digging a little bit, send them a nice email. Yeah, I think one of my friends, I convinced them to get one and they started playing with it. They liked it. And then I got one. And then basically with a $40,000 loan from my brother-in-law, he bought in, small percentage of the company and later let me buy them out for like, not much at all, basically. Just kind of a, we wanted to get you going type deal. Yeah. Started running it out of a bedroom and a house I rented for college and debt. And yeah, like, but it all started was just like, hey, I want to be your guy in North America. Can I be your guy? And that was basically it.

So, well, I'm actually curious. I've never asked this question before, but of other people, but more so, how does that kind of international relationship work? Do you basically just oversee all of the states or like, how exactly does that, I guess, work overall?

Yeah, so from the beginning, you know, if we're putting up money to invest in this thing and spend money on marketing and everything else, we wanted to have some kind of contractual territorial agreement. And so that was a big deal for me was to get, you know, exclusive distribution for North America, because, you know, our Canadian friends have the same interests we do. They just get to import cooler stuff earlier than we do.

Was it 10 years?

15, I think, for Canada and then 25 for us, yeah. So yeah, I wanted exclusive distribution with the territory agreement, because if we're going to invest real money, like you have to be able to make sure that, you know, nobody's dumping or trying to steal your, you know, somebody opens up shop in the other side of the country, that'd be a huge, huge blow. Yeah, so that was a big deal. But yeah, we've worked hand in hand, like, you know, they respond to our needs and, you know, we're talking to customers every day, so they appreciate the insight we give them. And also, as you've seen, walking through the facility here, we make a lot of products that are kind of bespoke for this market to meet the needs here. So we are a manufacturer, but we're basically a value add distributor.

Gotcha, okay, so let's touch on that. So you're obviously doing a distributing side of things. Kind of go into the details of everything that you do as a kind of like a value add. The old untested mics.

Yeah.

But yeah, what are the additional things? So you're distributing for ECU Master at this point. What's the rest of, what are the rest of the things that you're doing out of this facility here?

Yeah, so we actually distribute for three companies. We talk about ECU Master the most because that's the largest in revenue. And that's the one that we make the most value add products for. I'll get back to that in a minute. We also distribute as of, you know, just for just over a year now, Delta ABS. So it's a motorsport ABS system. And that one's really, really neat to me because there's not many other products like it, right? Our biggest competitor there is going to be, you know, like a Bosch Motorsport M4 system, which is twice the price and not as easy to buy. People don't have them on the shelf.

How does it compare, actually? I'm actually curious. Because Bosch is all I've ever really heard of before. Is that... I understand nothing about that market, but kind of go into the details on how those compare, I guess.

Yeah, so it's a fundamental difference between motorsport ABS and street car ABS. You know, car makers don't want to get sued. So they're not trying to stop you as fast as possible, despite what you think. They're actually trying to keep you straight, right, and keep you stable. And the car doesn't do weird things. But if I'm in a race car and I'm pitching the car in and I've got some slip angle, I want it to keep maintaining that slip angle if I get on the brakes. Ideally, right. I don't want it to yaw me around and do weird stuff. Right. So motorsport ABS has a different mission, which is we're just going to get this thing stopped as fast as physically possible. So completely different programming there. And Bosch stuff by every description, explanation, experience I've heard is fantastic stuff. I think that I've seen some data overlays and our stuff works just as well. And then the actual physical hardware of our ABS block, it actually has larger accumulators, so it has a little more reserve capacity in terms of volume. So if you have a very large volume braking system, you can actually overrun the ABS. You can actually push enough fluid through it that it cannot accept any more capacity and release the brakes. So you can actually overdrive ABS. In some situations, it's not common, but in terms of physical differences, that's probably the only one I could think of.

Okay. Okay, so Delta ABS is what it was called? Okay, so you distribute for them, and then what's the rest of the...

And then Verkline is another Polish company. So ECU Master is Polish, Verkline is Polish, Delta ABS is in the UK. Okay. Verkline, they do tubular subframes, like I would guarantee that every Fast GTR at TX2K right now has a Verkline subframe in it for our career. So on that car, they don't change the kinematics, but they do shave about 50 pounds off the car, and they allow you to actually remove the transmission without pulling the whole subframe on the rear of the car. You get a little more access to stuff. Different applications have different kinematics. We have a drag subframe for the A90 Supra, road racing subframe for the A90 Supra, arms. We have a 15-inch kit for the Lamborghini R8 platform, so you can run strange carbon brakes and 15-inch wheels on that one that's like billet uprights and arms. It's really, really gorgeous. Anything from like rallying to road racing to fast straight line stuff, Vercline does tubular subframes and components for that.

Okay. Is that all distributors? Or do we miss one? You said there's a fourth one?

Okay.

So, but also you're doing your own development on the side as well, right? Because I saw a bunch of 3D printers back there, which even the latest edition, the HDD is a new one, right?

I think so.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, whatever. But so you're doing a lot with that. What does the development look like for you? What are you making out of here? And what's that all look like?

Yeah. So when we started, the first plug and play adapters we made were god awful to make because we take sometimes I would even buy a stock ECU because I didn't know how to buy the connectors yet. I would desolder the whole connector off of the thing, straighten out every terminal, hand solder a wire to each terminal that needed one, and then use like a hot glue gun and hot melt adhesive to pot the thing, then terminate each of them where they needed to go, and then check every single one of the multimeter. It took hours and hours and hours to make a plug and play. They didn't look consistent. The lengths were hard to get consistent, wasn't ideal. And then now we 3D print housings out of carbon fiber reinforced filament. We do a little heat inserted brass threaded inserts. They assemble nicely. We are they're all done on a board. We have a pretty nice way to not quite automate, but really reduce the labor in the soldering process. And then should you are automatic cut strip crimp machine, I could spin out the leads for a plug and play. They can make like 3000 of those an hour without a lot of oversight. And then they're all like precise to like a tenth of a millimeter in length. The crimps are perfect. So yeah, but, you know, and in the beginning, it was just, you know, where do the wires need to go? That's how you built a plug and play adapter and you kind of threw it under the dash somewhere and zip tied it to something in a way you go. And then now what we're doing, like our side by side products that we've done recently, we'll 3D scan the firewall, make a 3D printed housing that drops exactly on the firewall, use this factory hardware. The ECU bolts straight to that. The harness is neat and tidy. It just like doubles up and connects. And my goal for our side by side stuff is you should be able to install a plug and play standalone in about 30 to 45 minutes.

Which is just crazy to me, yeah.

And then it starts up in idles like normal, but then you can add as much as you want to, right? You know, second rail of injectors, flex fuel, boost per gear, boost per speed, different maps, rolling anti-lag, launch control.

Yeah, touch on that, because we talked about that a little bit off camera. So basically, you spend 30, 40 minutes throwing a standalone in there. And then you guys provide this map, or is that against something that was developed in Poland?

Nope. And anything branded WHP, we make here stateside.

Gotcha, okay.

So those, we have a 3000 horsepower mainline hub dyno.

Yeah, that's right, I forgot to ask you about that.

Yeah, so we bring in every vehicle, we baseline it, we measure all the sensors. If we can get the data sheets for the sensors, great, we'll use that, but even if we get the data sheet, we'll verify the sensors and make sure they're within range. There's a lot of CAN bus reverse engineering that goes into it now. Fortunately, once you do a couple of models from a manufacturer, if they're really nice, they don't change too much between models. If they're CAN-AM, good luck. They seem to have a different engineer doing different things on every single model. It just depends on the application. The Polaris' are pretty easy because it's a CVT trans, right? So you need to know what gear it's in because we'll dumb down the throttle scaling in reverse. If you don't have your seatbelt plugged in, we'll dumb down the throttle scaling or limit the speed. There's differential control, the different four-wheel drive modes, all the lights integration with the dash. So now it's not just the point-to-point wiring that's a big part of it, but now it's all the CAN bus integration, making the thing run right in all conditions. If we're not fighting the same constraints as an OEM, we can usually make it cold start a little bit better and drive a little nicer when it's cold. But yeah, it's really nice to have a very, very good baseline. I think I told you like you could, with the PRO-R on our dyno with our unit, the stock ECU versus ours, like you make a couple of pulls, it's gonna be within like basically one to 2% power output on either one, if with it calibrated the way it is. So we really wanna send the base map out being something safe. Somebody can optimize it from there for their situation, but we're not gonna go nuts on 93 octane here if somebody only has 91 octane available where they are.

When you get to a certain level in a build, whether it be drag racing or drifting, road course or just the b***** street car, you'll have to upgrade your transmission. And when we're talking sequential transmissions, there's no one on the planet with a stronger gearbox than 6XD. And the proof is in the pudding here folks, half the FD field is rocking a 6XD and even 3000 horsepower Vipers have not been able to tame the best that 6XD has to offer. So if you're ready to take it up a notch, go to 6xdgearbox.com and when contacting them to place an order, use code MINNOXIDE5 or reach out via socials to figure out how one of the baddest transmissions on the planet could fit in your build. Let's get back to the show. When did you get into that market?

Probably almost two years ago.

Okay, that market's just exploding right now.

It's super fun. You know, we touched on an aside conversation that the street car stuff is out of hand, right? Like there's no, and I hate to be the one saying this because I'm normally the guy who would try to justify anything, but a couple thousand horsepower street car, where do you use that and when and why? But a 350 horsepower side by side with 30 inches suspension travel, you can pack the whole family and go jump over stuff like hell, yeah.

It's kind of cool, right?

Exactly. It makes a great vacation. Like you can use all your safety equipment, wear helmets, wear gear, put a good roll cage on it. Like you can mitigate safety and have a lot of adventure and fun and get a lot of thrills that, you know, as much as I love street racing, it's just not what it used to be.

Do you think 10, 15 years from now we'll be having a conversation about 1000 horsepower side by sides?

They're already existing.

Are they? Like pretty regularly?

I know, again, I know. Not a time, but you have to understand like, you know, sand rail has been around forever.

Oh true, yeah.

They're hanging, you know, big blocks and LS is off the back of these things with a couple of turbos hanging off, wheeling all the day long. But side by sides are kind of just a cheaper sand rails, you know, it's production based. So it's just a cheaper platform. But one of our dealers, they've got a pro-R motor. This is Leroux, it's pro-R motor, XP 900 rails. I think it weighs like 1600 ish pounds. And with a compound turbo setup, it made like nine something and they might've turned it up since then. And like a shocking number of stock parts in it, actually. I mean, stock blocks, stock head casting, stock differential, you know, like really a surprising number of stock parts. But yeah, we're already at the 900 mark and probably a little further out of it. That's a two liter engine.

Yeah. And speaking of light cars and lots of horse, well, not lots of horsepower. So what was that thing on the lift over that purple thing with the Crown Royale thing? What would you say that was called again?

It's a Diasio D962.

Okay. So again, there's a lot of variety here. ACR, we got chasers, we got RX7s. How do you get into something like that?

So that was a friend was going out of racing sale.

Okay.

So I had already purchased his FD years ago. Cause again, like he just didn't, you know, he didn't like working on cars. And if you have really obscure road race s***, like you kind of need somebody to work on your stuff.

Right.

And so he just kind of lost interest. And he's like, you know, I have as much fun putting sticky tires on my daily driver came in. I was like, yeah, that's probably a better option is like an all, all in one car. So he basically like, you know, it needed some love. And so I bought his membership to the track and a lift and part of a spec Miata that we all shared in the Diazio is like a package deal. But I had to go through it. Well, made one of my one of my employees go through the whole fuel system because I traded in a shifter car for the labor. But yeah, it's a little sports racer. It's high boost of power. They originally had a Yamaha motor. But yeah, it's like a two lateral G out of the box road race car. Then I'm probably going to get it running, make a couple of laps and like sell it because I the the there's a lot of fussing with a car like that.

The wing on that thing is stupid, by the way. It's huge. It's like a dinner table on the back.

I don't know how to drive an Aero car on track properly. I don't really want to learn. I'm at the point where I'm very OK with my limits as a driver. I have fun going out and doing drifting, but do I want to win SCCA regionals or nationals? I have zero interest in being that guy.

Well, it seems like you tick every box. You got drifting, you got drag racing, you got road course, then you also got JDM and American and all that. A little bit of German in there too.

Well, the drag racing is new for me because I've never done any really. Yeah, so I got a friend.

What was your start? Was it road course or drifting? Where did you land when you were younger?

It was just fast street cars.

Just fast street cars.

Yeah, it was just like trying to street race on George Bush was kind of where I started, which doesn't require a lot of driving skill, if we're honest. And then you start doing some like Lemons racing and road course stuff. But that was kind of it. And then got the drifting bug because I enjoy the car control aspect of drifting. I think that makes you better at every discipline in racing. And it's not so serious, right? People take track racing like Trevor is trying to win a track day. You don't want to track day. But Lemons racing is fun because wheel to wheel racing is really fun. Track days are not as fun to me because it's not really wheel to wheel. But drifting is wheel to wheel. But it's not competitive unless you want to join the competition, right? So I think it's that wheel to wheel aspect without it being too serious. It means a lot of fun for drifting.

Interesting. I always like to hear people's takes on that sort of stuff because everybody kind of has like their favorite sport that they land in. And like you'll die by drag racing, you'll die by roads or circuit. Like it's just kind of all of it. What was your first drift car?

It's actually it's on the trailer right now. We're going to take it to TX2K tomorrow. It's what year is it? 2003 thrift DC.

OK.

So the DE didn't make any power, but it had nitrous. So at least 75 shot would wake it up. And at that point, when I first got it, it wasn't even like didn't have an angle kit. They just cut the the steering stops on it to get a little bit more. And it's pretty learning on a car with very low angle is challenging because your margins are razor thin. If you throw Wisefab on something, you have 70 degrees lock to lock. I'm sorry. It doesn't take a lot of talent up front. It's fun later. But I really think that starting with some constraints is better. And that's kind of what I did.

That's everybody. Everybody we've had on a show that talks about drifting says just basically just get like a seat, if anything, just start with the basics and then ramp up from there.

And I have the conversation probably eight times a year where somebody comes up, I want to get into drifting, I want to build something unique. Like, I'm going to stop you right there. Those are two conflicting statements. Do you want to get into drifting or do you want to build something unique? Because if you build something unique, you're not going to learn anything about driving the car. You're going to be stuck building a weird thing that may never work. If you really want to get into drifting, buy something that anybody has parts for. Anybody knows how to drive and set up. It's sustainable. It's a good platform. Like, go get you an HR 350Z and put a small angle kit on it and go to town and hot lap the piss out of it.

So then again, bouncing a little bit all over the place. But how do you develop through like your 20s? And obviously you went back to school.

Yep.

How does the car side of things develop at that point? I mean, how do you progress from the Supra?

At that point, I didn't. That's all I had.

OK.

So, I mean, I think when did I get a daily driver? Probably way too late.

Are you daily driving the Supra for a long time?

Yeah.

Really? OK.

I have a history of daily driving really terrible stuff. Yeah, it's a theme. And I think I might have had a crappy forerunner for a long time. And I say crappy because it's like one of the bad years. And then had an 86 that I daily drove for probably two years. No AC, no power steering, no nothing. And that thing was fun. But it was like just cosmetically too bad to like make it good again. So I sold that down the road. And then I had finally got a Tahoe, you know, with whatever credit score I had at the time, convinced somebody to give me a lot. I think I had to print off a fake pay stub because I was self-employed and they didn't think I had any employment. So I got a Tahoe and that was kind of like the do-all vehicle for a long time. Yeah, but the Supra was just always in the background. And like when I started the business, I kind of made that our showcase car a little bit because I had an ECU on it and a single turbo. And, you know, it made decent power. So I kind of campaigned that and paraded it. And then it's, you know, it's made appearances here and there.

And what time frame would that roughly be like Tahoe time frame? Well, when did you start the business, I suppose?

2014.

So things start ramping up from there. And was this technically your first business then?

Yeah. Okay. I mean, I had a shop in my early, early twenties that I tried to run. And, you know, apparently starting a business without money is not the best way to start a business. And that's kind of where that ended up. You know, so I was doing like, you know, some mechanical work and, you know, it didn't have a customer base and just didn't have any capital. So it was just kind of a, ended up being kind of a play shop that just didn't work. So yeah, it was my first real attempt at a business, yeah. Okay.

And then, it's 2014 in this area. So how do things start to scale? And before, I guess, did you start venturing in and adding these other things to distribute for at that point? Or is it just heads down, just all ECU Master for a long time?

So I've always looked for other things to distribute, and it's only worked well a couple of times. And so we tried, I went to Taiwan and visited a company that made gauges and a company that made like the throttle boosters. They made those, like kind of like Pedal Commander and all those types of products. But they made it before Pedal Commander did. I was worried about some licensing issues there because somebody had a trademark or a patent on that technology. And then there's a brake company over there that did big brake kits. But I kind of quickly realized that the best thing running was ECU Master for scaling that and putting all my energy into that. And then much later on when I had employees and I could focus some energy elsewhere, picked up Verkline and then Delta. Yeah, and those have done really well because they're complimentary businesses, right? Delta is an easy add-on because an electronic anti-lock brake system is in the same vein as all the other electronics that we do.

Kind of like these things that are just, yeah, all together.

Right, the customer base, the VIN diagram is a circle for the people you're selling to, right? It's a direct overlay.

I'm curious, actually, like when it comes to your customer base, is it mostly like, where do most people land? Is it drift community, drag racing, street car again?

Well, according to the EPA, no.

Oh, fair enough.

Yeah. I honestly don't think we're doing much of anything that ends up in a car anymore anyway. You know, all the stuff's so old that's going to be just a dedicated track toy for most people. So and that's where the side by side stuff has been kind of a big growth sector. We're seeing a lot of Restomod stuff, actually.

When you say Restomod, JDM side, American, both.

Mostly American because that clientele has a lot of money.

Right.

Right. I think most Japanese car enthusiasts are not old enough yet to have blank check type builds.

Like 10, 15 years behind, maybe.

Well, we talked about sound performance. They're doing a lot of like, you know, subframe off restorations. But then again, those cars are modern enough. You don't need to do, you know, our PMU's power distribution man. Like you don't need to solid state power distribution in a street car on one of those. But something from the 50s or 60s doing PMU's and keypads and switch gear and all that, like doing that clean sheet electrical makes a lot more sense than something from the 90s. But yeah, we're seeing a lot of really high end rest of odd stuff for a lot of power distribution dash displays. A lot of the direct injection stuff is going pretty interesting, like higher end builds like that. So I think it's nice to see that as the product line matures, so does kind of the clientele and a lot of these things. Obviously the entry level stuff, we've got sub thousand dollars standalone ECUs with the wideband controller, with the four bar map sensor, with the igniter on board, like that still has huge value to the guy building something in his shed, right? They could make 12 bucks an hour and still afford an ECU if he's living with his parents. But that's what I was as a kid, right?

Right. Can you explain to me, again, this is something that I don't understand very fully. Why is it that some ECUs, like they're known as, like, oh, you can't do DI, like they, for example, like Subarus, like it's either you're going to do stock ECU or basically go full-on mo tech. For example, I never quite fully understood, like, why is it there's limitations for various ECUs? Are you able to elaborate on that at all?

Yeah. Direct injection is a completely different animal. OK, so port injection, you can get a lot wrong and it still works pretty well. OK, with direct injection, not only is it's completely different hardware to drive the injectors, a very different voltage and you're driving. Yeah, it's several multiples of the voltage of regular. Port injector, and then the actual pressure across the injector varies so much that if you don't have a very, very detailed, we'll call it just a roadmap of how much fuel is injected, every pressure and every pulse width, then you're going to be completely lost. And then also you're controlling the pump, which is while you're varying pressure with the pump, and then you need to know what the injector does at every pressure and every pulse width. OK, with port, you can be pretty wrong about a lot of that because your pressure doesn't vary. It's reference one to one with manifold pressure. So as you add boost, the pressure across the injector in a good port system should stay exactly the same. So your data only has to be kind of right at one point, and it could be wrong everywhere else, and that's fine. As long as you don't have a fuel pressure issue, you're not going to see it. And then DI, you have to be very tight about the windowing. There's just a lot more to it. And so you have to characterize everything in the system, meaning that instead of just reacting to things that happen, like, oh, we're going to turn on O2 feedback and kind of u***** everything that we did. With DI, you kind of have to be way ahead of that and have everything characterized beforehand and then trim it slightly afterward. So it's a lot more work.

I imagine it's just a little bit more expensive to make as well.

Yeah, there's a lot more hardware involved because with our system, you have the separate DI driver. With some ECUs, they'll have a DI version and a port version. The guys at ECU Master chose to do just the same ECU and you just add the DI driver that has the pump control and the high pressure injector control.

Okay, so then, okay, so you're able to do both then?

Yeah, so yeah, with the Pro 8 or Pro 16, you can do a split of port and DI on either one of those.

Okay.

With the 16, you can do eight port, eight DI. With the Pro 8, you can do eight DI only, or you can do four port, four DI. Our DI driver will do eight injectors and two pumps on the gas side.

And then, again, showing how little I know about this, but then you're able to do both as well, because there's cars that use port and DI.

So you drive the port injector straight off the EMU, and then the DI injectors will be driven off the DI driver.

Okay. That makes sense. I always had that question. I'm like, why is that a limitation?

Yeah, it's just way different voltages, different control strategy. So you can't use one. You can drive a DI or a port injector from the DI output, but then you get into weird windowing events because the way they drive the injectors is slightly different on top of just the voltage differences. Then we're doing diesel direct injection now, which is super cool. So that market is just bonkers and I'm very new to it. So I'm not going to try to explain anything that I don't know about yet because we're going to learn that after some of our customers educate us a little bit. But those will do eight injectors and three pumps because those guys, in fact, one of them I was talking to this week, he's, you know, one of the leaders in that world makes injectors. And on I think just six injectors and one turbo, they did a 3,000 horsepower. And this is no nitrous, no propane, no like crazy adders. Like most of this is like triple compounds in the level or whatever. Single turbo, nothing like made 3,000 horsepower on the nose, which is just nuts to me.

OK, what do you mind me asking what platform? What are those Cummins Cummins? OK, I'm having a Cummins guy on Saturday. I'm going down to Unrivaled. OK, yeah, somebody introduced me to him. I'm like, all right, let's talk about diesel. I'm kind of just throwing myself head first into stuff where I just have limitations on it. I just want to learn about it. You know what?

It was crazy because you show me the video of the pull and it revved to like 5000 RPM, which. For diesel, that's that's getting it. So, yeah, I'm excited to see again. I at this point, I kind of like just kind of peeking through the curtains and seeing what people do with our stuff. Right. In the beginning, I think what I wanted to do was kind of push my car harder than most of our customers would to prove the platform and give them confidence in the product. At this point, so many other people have done way cooler stuff than I've ever done that I can kind of sit back and just like enjoy seeing what people do with our products. It's really fun to watch some of the crazy stuff out there.

Do you have an example of anything crazy that people have done with your product?

One of our dealers just did like a collaboration with Beul to build like a 350 or 450 horsepower kind of like tag team factory prototype effort, just like monster of a motorcycle. I think it was like 13 or 14,000 RPM. What else? We've got one of our dealers. He just showed me a video the other day of doing is like a one generation old NASCAR motor, and he was doing a bunch of per cylinder injector trims because everything was just wonky with the airflow. And he was doing a lot of trims. But the thing is, you know, I think he left it at like 9000 plus RPM for a good long while because it's being a land speed application. And they just wonder. And the thing is just happy all day long at that RPM is built for it. But it's just fun seeing just weird bespoke stuff that our products end up in.

What's the weirdest thing that you've seen your products in? Oh, land speeds one does like that's just crazy to me.

Land speed is cool. I don't know. I've heard back from a lot of people that have done a lot of land speed stuff. That's such a niche market, right? There's just by volume. There's not a ton of people. But the one he's doing is actually a pretty cool one. It's I think a super bird chassis with like a modern V8 and some like I think some state or government entity is sponsoring it is some like anniversary deal. I'm like, cool, like great use of our TAC dollars, but I'm happy to see it something cool. Glad to use this our stuff.

What else?

Back in the day, there was somebody in I think Poland or somewhere in Europe that had we I looked at the change notes for some firmware update and I said, you know, twin engine sync like why are we synchronizing twin engines? And I asked Kuba about it, Jacob, who owns ECU Master, he's like, oh, it's for this Opel Calibra. And if you know what an Opel Calibra is, it's kind of a forgettable car and they had Google it real quick.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I couldn't because I don't know what a stock one looks like. I've only seen this like heavily modified. And so basically a a shell draped over a couple of subframes at this point. OK, am I right? That is like a forgettable s*** box. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know why it reminds me of like Thunderbirds or like a Mercury Cougar from the 90s. But some like forgettable, like front wheel drive. Yeah, hairdresser car basically, right?

So it's a twin engine set up in that.

It's I was like, why do we synchronize two engines? He's like, oh, watch this. And I think the interior shot started with like, I'm looking at the shifter and it's like a cable shifter and I can see the cables bolted to it. But I'm like, yeah, there's two there. But why is there also two from this way? And it was two VR six engines, one front, one rear, two sets of shifter cables to the same shifter. I guess he had to tan the master cylinder for two clutch masters. And it was, yeah, twin engine made like, I don't know, 12 or 1400 horsepower, because each engine only has to make 600 or 700 horsepower. But he basically created a firmware that matched RPM in the front and rear engines to act as like a virtual center differential. So like if the front axle, which is going to have less traction if you're transferring weight, as soon as that started to light off the tires, there's a limit RPM, so those didn't just go to the moon. So you could actually shift them both at the same time and not have the wildly different RPM. But I was like, virtual center differential for twin engine, VR6 Opel Calibra probably goes on the short list of weird applications.

That's definitely weird. That's insane.

But they don't have any good drag strip. Basically, every drag event in Europe is like a no prep event because it's some airstrip that they got licensed to use for a couple of hours.

I have a handful out there from what it sounds like.

Right. So it's just some dude on some hand-me-down slicks that just is going to do everything he can to get some grip and apparently got down.

Dude, check this out. So there was a guy in the show I had at a PRI. He moved here from Austria. And he was telling me is like you're not even allowed to like install it, like change the tires on your car. Like if the car came with 235s, it has to stay 235s. And it's like they actually inspect that insanity.

Oh, I would go and I would have to leave.

Yeah. That's why he moved here.

No, and there's just too many things that I want to do with a vehicle. And that, yeah, I couldn't do it. But there's also stuff like the Stockholm Open. Have you seen any footage of that?

Is that the thing that Kyle Loftus goes to every year? Yeah, I've seen it. Dude, that crazy, it's like a crazy, crazy like clown shoe car.

Right.

That thing is insane.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so like it's weird that in this vacuum of very, you know, government overreach heavy countries, there's also this group of outlaws that will shut down a whole highway to get like a whole bracket run, not just like a couple of races, but a whole bracket run throughout the night. And they'll, you know, it's some of the best street racing I think there is in the world. And those guys will all build drag cars for this. And I think Sweden actually has a lot more drag racing than most other European countries. I think they actually do have a couple of drag strips because I have a buddy who lives there, who kind of grew up doing junior dragsters and some other stuff. But, you know, there's still some outlaws out there at least, but some of those countries have zero.

Yeah, I think and maybe I have a small amount of people in the UK to listen to the show percentage wise, but I think they only have one drag, like official drag strip in the entire UK.

Yeah, I believe it.

Something like that. Have you been to Poland then?

Yeah, a bunch of times.

Okay. Well, yeah, I suppose. How often do you go there at this point?

I don't think I've been like just over a year, but usually yearly.

Okay. And then what does that typically look like? Do you do mostly motorsport related stuff, ECU Master stuff?

Just ECU Master stuff, yeah. So if I have my way, I'll go in late spring, early summer. I mean, it's just stunning there. So ECU Master is based in Krakow, which is the city center is super charming. The old castle is up on the hill, beautiful city square, the weather is stunning at that time. A lot of their architecture was preserved through World War II because it didn't get bombed. It got overtaken so quickly in the war that it really didn't suffer a lot of damage, except for Warsaw. Warsaw got leveled. But Krakow is still as it was. It's just a beautiful, charming city. Much like Prague. Prague is a really beautiful city. Yeah, it's just it's just gorgeous being there. And then ECU Master headquarters are now kind of on the outskirts of the city and like a development zone kind of near the airport. They're trying to like put a lot of businesses out there and encourage them to grow. And their factory is just stunning, very modern architecture, brand new PCB assembly line all in house. They just doubled their square footage. All the equipment's brand new, top notch. They've got, I think, 50 employees now. So pretty sizable operation at this point.

Yeah, it's been fun to talk to folks that are kind of in this industry, like, you know, competitors, obviously, but like just kind of hearing like it all kind of comes from a similar background. So I'm sorry, his name was Jacob. Jacob? Yeah. What was the last name? Kuba?

His nickname is Kuba. Every Polish person has a nickname and the real name.

Yeah.

So his real name is Jacob, but he goes by Kuba to most people.

Okay. So touch on that a little bit. I mean, you obviously know a little bit about the history of the company. How did the company get started back in the day?

So Jacob's first company was, he studied business at probably the best business school in Poland, but always learned and loved programming on his own. So programming was his hobby, but he studied business, which I think is an important differentiation because a lot of people end up with businesses and they don't know how to run them. They have their passion project and then they have to learn how to run a business. Thankfully, he had some training.

Mike, don't mind my limp dick, Mike, over here. Tomorrow problem.

Right.

Every time I do upgrades on the setup, man, it just likes to give me hell. It's always like the weirdest thing. Like I was like, oh, something else will go horribly wrong.

It's always like the ratchet strap that's been failing for four years, hangs on for four years. It's like half gone. Yeah. I get a brand new one and it snaps the first trip out. Yeah, there's something to be said. For something that half works, still works halfway.

Yeah, I know. Again, it's going to be me messing in the hotel. It's always something.

His first business was a video game design company and built it with a few of his friends. I don't know if they started friends. I think they're friends in college and started the company together. Then he just got really tired of the 100-hour weeks and the deadlines and pushing these projects across. He sold his stake in the company. I think he was just on the beach for a bit, so to speak, that he wanted to modify his car with his mechanic, who now works for him. He's like, yeah, I just need to modify a couple of signals, I think. He's like, yeah, I can build something that would do that. He built their first piggyback, which modified the mass airflow signal and the map sensor signal and adjusted timing. Then later on, he started playing around and built the first standalone. I think in his own words, I think he said he really wanted to start a company with like five employees with just a couple of friends. And he's like, and somewhere I f***** up. Now he has like 50 employees, but he's still very much a racer. He's got a what does he have now? He's got a really cool little race car. He raced many years for many years on track, but really loved circuit racing, competitive circuit racing. But yeah, so he's able to again work with a lot of people that were in that company with him. And then a lot of the guys he's got working for him are like, you know, Polish kart champions and Formula SAE guys and really brilliant, you know, programmers and engineers and researchers. And he's just got really, really neat people that are very passionate about automotive stuff.

Isn't there, isn't Poland where they make a ton of like carbon Kevlar sort of like drift kits too? Or I might be making something mixed up or whatever.

I mean, there's a few different companies in Europe that make them.

Yeah, there's like this crazy car that Mick Schumacher had. It was like that. I don't know if you ever saw the video of it. It's like this like E92, like M3, was it Eurofighter? Yes. Are they based out of there?

This is HGK, if I remember correctly. And they're not in Poland. I've forgotten where they are. Yeah.

OK. I'm getting things confused there.

But M-Sport is in Poland. They do a lot of really beautiful rally car builds.

OK.

And they're actually, they're the, what airport are they near? We basically land in one of the airports. And like, you can see they're like parallel to the airstrip. I'm like, oh, that's where rally cars come from.

Yeah. Isn't that where they made like the NitroCross cars?

I'm not sure.

I don't know. I'm not to look that up. Yeah, because there's like a ton of rallyers that come out of that part of the world.

There are. Yeah, there's a bunch of rally. And then obviously they had Kubica who was really, you know, they really had high hopes for him in F1 and he didn't, you know, his career kind of got cut short. But I think he still does a ton of rally. I think it was a rallying accident that put him out.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, they're very, very passionate people there. There's a lot of just like grassroots motor sports enthusiasm. But yeah, it's a really neat place to be. I got to go to a kind of a grassroots hill climb event there. One year when I went to make a trip over, and this is beautiful Polish countryside. I'm like, this looks like it's from a postcard. These little cottages and this twisting road through these green fields. And they just asked the farmers nicely if they could close down the road for the day, I guess. And so they did. And you know how we party here. Anywhere in the country, there's some formation or some variant of a redneck who brings their big cooler and their folding chairs. And this one, it was like that, except every just brings a bottle of vodka and they just split it between friends. They just like, yeah, hand around, take it. It's a lot easier to carry. I don't know why we're not doing that.

I don't know why we're doing 24 packs over here.

Their vodka is good. It's just past one bottle around. That's what they do. And so it's kind of cold out. So you just see like a group of friends, somebody pulls their hands out of their pockets and passes the bottle. But we're watching this hill climb and they do like, you know, a couple of like nice kind of road going GT cars that go up in a group and make a quick little pass up and they'd have some drifters do a couple of tandem passes up the hill. I'm like, this is a pretty cool little just like local grassroots style of that. But I think there's a lot of enthusiasm and passion there and certainly rallying. Like we have terrible roads in Texas for anything fun, right? If we had twisty fun roads, we'd probably have more rallying in the US. You know, some places.

Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, like most of this country is flat. I mean, you go out to like Nashville and like, or not Nashville, Tennessee as a whole or like Kentucky. Like, you know, that's where they're doing a bunch of these like rally events stateside, which is pretty cool. But yeah, this middle part of the country is just all flat.

Yeah, like, you know, I'm jealous of friends like, oh, this is my canyon car. I'm like, screw you, dude. I don't have any canyons. I got like dumb Texas roads. I have like some of the best cornering cars in existence, and I get to go straight on my commute to work with them.

That's the other thing you mentioned earlier, the track membership, whatever. What's your home track when you do circuit racing?

Yeah, Eagles Canyon.

Eagles Canyon, okay.

Yeah, so I grew up in Denton, Texas. So we're in Garlanders on the border of Dallas. So Denton is the top part of the triangle. Dallas is the southeast portion of that. And then Fort Worth is on the west side. So Denton, Dallas and Fort Worth make a triangle. And then just north of Denton is Decatur.

Okay. Do you ever make it out to Dakota then?

I actually haven't. I probably should this year because it's gonna be closed down for private use, but I've driven like a parade lap in a drift car on Coda and I behaved very well. Did you? I shouldn't have. But but I've driven like mid time attack. We'll do like drifting is kind of a little like in one of the side lots to have drift ride along. So I've done that, but I got to make one parade lap, but I haven't raced that track. But unfortunately, that's probably going to go away for us privateers.

Yeah, just because it's kind of getting just outrageously expensive or private or there.

Yeah, they're going to make it a private club, I guess. And so it's not going to be open to the public. So we'll see what happens next year.

Yeah, I'm curious on how those private clubs work. Because isn't it also like a quarter million dollar a year membership sort of deal or?

Who knows? I mean, Eagles Canyon, it's not inexpensive, but it's accessible to people that can justify using it a lot. But it's a beautiful facility. Toyota has put a bunch of money there into sponsorship because they're corporate headquarters now in the area. So they use it a lot for events and stuff. Yeah. So yeah, all the track cars, they have a couple of supers there and a couple of Toyota products out there to do corporate training and events and stuff. So they've got a partnership with Toyota. So I think that that's helped too, they can invest more in facilities. They also have off-road courses. You can actually do short track side by side racing, which is, oh my God, that is a riot.

I'm guessing you've done it quite a few times.

I got to ride Shotgun with one of the Miller brothers and they're on the podium for anything side by side related. You think a normal side by side, but lowered wider on grooved Hoosiers on a prep dirt surface and a mixture of the physics of off-road racing and jumps and drifting and circuit racing, all of the above. You basically jump something and then pitch it sideways and you have an incredible amount of grip on the dirt. Yeah, it's a ton of fun.

I'm going to have to look into that a little bit. I'm at this weird point in the show. I'm about to cross 200 episodes here soon, so I'm thinking of just expanding my horizons. I'm like, that sounds like something cool I'd like to get into.

I said, hey, look, don't be shy. I don't want you to wear out your equipment, but I'm very comfortable in a race car, so do whatever you want to do. You want to go have a good time. And so as I'm getting out, I was like, let me go sevenish tenths. He's like, yeah, about that. I don't know what ten tenths feels like because I felt like that was pretty aggressive.

Oh, I had another question. I'm going to lead with this. What's the craziest thing that you've done driving wise and experience wise, whether it's drifting, drag racing, circuit?

I'd say probably the... I mean, just like jumping into wheel to wheel racing, like a Lemons race with a very... Nobody has a well... There's actually a few guys that well-prepared cars and they're just lapping everybody, but without a lot of training or here's what to do, here's what not to do, just jump into wheel to wheel format. That was pretty wild.

Is that... Would that be 24 Hours Lemons? Uh-huh. Did you have a team of guys and you share a car? Yeah.

That was in my mid-20s before I went back to engineering school and basically a guy whose car had worked on it, he said, hey, I'll buy the parts if you put in the labor. I said, deal. Easy win. So we put together actually an 87 Supra. We put a GE VVTi2J in it. And the car was kind of terrible, but it was fun. But yeah, it was a great time. I got to drive Texas World Speedway before it closed down. And one of my buddies negotiated. He's like, hey, like whatever happens, I want the sunrise stint. It's like, I just want to see the sun come up in a race car, like bucket this thing. I was like, damn, I should have called that one. But I was in the dark and we had good lights. And there was a turn at Texas World Speedway where I didn't I hadn't memorized the track layout. Also at 3 a.m. when you're exhausted, like nothing makes sense. And so I kind of like turned too early and shortcut one of the corners. I just remember kind of like getting airborne a little over the dirt and then seeing three more cars behind me. So boom, boom, boom.

They just followed you.

I had the good lights. Like nobody's going to try to pass you and be blinded by you for X number of laps. Right. So it's way easier to just be behind the guy who's like mediocre fast and just use his lights than it is to do anything else.

So most people don't even have lights.

They had lights. It just weren't good. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you're going so fast in the dark and we're all tired and like that you were outside of College Station, which is where A&M is right. So around the country, it's like there's no light, right. And the track lights probably weren't much and they weren't on the infield. They might have been some of the on the oval. But yeah, that was that was an experience. And then I will say this, like probably the first time I like grabbed fourth gear in a drift car before entering. I was like, this is like we're committed now. Like you can't like tuck tail and break at that point. Like you're just committed.

Where was that and what car was it?

That might have been, depending on the car, that would have been like maybe Texas Motor Speedway on the infield. They basically have like an eighth mile drag, like run up before the entry. And so that was a pretty eye opening for just for how long you can be, because you can always sneak up on it and just start accelerating later, like get to the top of third and kind of hang out and then enter. But when you start using all the track drifting and all the room to accelerate, stuff gets wild pretty quickly. And then to level up from that, doing that next to another car is nuts.

What car were you in when you did that?

I went to my 350Z. Yeah.

Oh, OK.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

You must. You may have to have been moving at that point.

Yeah. And even if you're not, it still feels like it.

Yeah.

You know, just to go. You know, but to be able to confidently throw your car sideways at 89 miles an hour and just know that it's going to work out like that, that's pretty fun to sneak up to that.

I I just started. So I have a sim and I've always been doing iRacing. Right. But now I just got myself set up on a seto course. I'm literally I've done it twice. I'm trying to do get into drifting a little bit. I haven't respect for it. I didn't realize like how difficult it was.

But it's it's way more difficult in the sim.

In the in the sim than in real life.

100 percent.

Oh, I'm sure. Like when I used to like again, who hasn't gone to a party? Oh, we're from the north, right? So like we we have snow. We just go drifting in parking lots every winter.

Right.

Right. So I definitely yeah. Yeah. In real life, I had no problems holding an angle and all that. But it'd be different if I also had like a like I've never have done it like a 350 or 370 Z. Right. So it's like bucket list items eventually.

No, you should. And I think I hope at least a few people that they take nothing away from this podcast. Go find your local drift school. Spend two grand or 2500 and do a two day course. They'll provide you probably a 350 Z or 370 Z and the tires and the instruction. Just go do it. Don't build a car. Don't do anything. Just show up and get good instruction and learn how to drift.

Oh, this is a good plug. I've had somebody on a show before. I think it's driftmaps.com. I think it goes.com. And they like I don't know if you've heard of them, but they basically have like they'll post every drift event in the country, including clinics and stuff, too. So, yeah, maybe I should check out one of those things down the line.

Yeah. And there's difference. You know, clinics are good. But, you know, if you don't have a car, a clinic doesn't do you any good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's seeming like an actual school where they provide you everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's one here in Texas. Josh, what's his last name? He's got a bunch of three disease. I think it's called the Drift School, but he's in South Texas somewhere. Interesting. And then I'm in a blank on a lot of friends. My buddy Ian, he's got one in Colorado. And then Chris, he's got one at Eatown. So, yeah, I mean, there are several at different points in the country, but really the money compared to any other racing school is not much. I think the drifting in terms of teaching a car control, it doesn't teach you any bad habits. It's just going to put more tools in your toolbox and it's a ton of fun.

So that's a bucket list, too.

Yeah, but it's you know, but some of the most talented drivers I know, period. Grew up on drift cars and they can transfer it to other disciplines very easily because they have all the car control pretty nailed.

Well, it's kind of like if you look at like Formula One, like some of the best drivers came from like those like rally countries, just because I or like Nordic countries where just use driving on ice.

If you've never seen a dry road, you're going to be a really good driver. No, but it's no surprise that like some of the most dominant drivers and you know, I think James Dean, most people argue is probably the best drifter in the world right now. He's from Ireland. They don't have a lot of dry roads for a lot of the year. And then like a lot of the most dominant drifters in the world are from Ireland right now.

Tuning, because you get that was a question I wanted to ask you earlier. So you got the main line here. Who does the tuning here?

So I used to do some. I don't really anymore. Like I can tune a car. I just don't like it. Is that what I had to say?

No, it's fair to say. Everybody falls into one camp. Everybody hates something.

You know, my my grandmother, when I was in engineering school, I really loved thermodynamics and combustion. And, you know, I really love that. I have a very good theoretical understanding of it. I don't really love sitting on a dyno all day. What I love now and the part I get the most gratification out with the business is hiring really good people and learning how to be a good manager to them and let them do what their strengths are and, you know, try it, try to get them the tools they need. And it's really fun to give talented people a fun subject to run with. And like, luckily, it's pretty exciting subject material. So, you know, when I get like a brand new side by side, say, hey, it's got zero miles on it, go reverse engineer, make a plug and play adapter and put a standalone on it.

It sounds like such a cool job.

So it is. It is like I don't want to sit there and reverse engineer CAN bus messages all day. Yeah, you know, and that's I've not spent enough time learning CAN buses. I probably should. But, you know, I can tune stuff, but I'm not as good as somebody who does it every day. So really, Chris, who works for me, Chris Robertson, he's one who does all the dyno work and development, and he's, you know, super methodical and he'll baseline everything and take as many measurements as he can on a stock car. But, you know, but if I hand him something that's a built motor and an aftermarket turbo and a different set of cams, like you don't have any playbook. You're not copying your reverse engineering or, you know, validating the stock programming on that. You're starting and he does great with that, too. But he knows how picky I am with cold start and tip in and drive ability that, you know, he's going to hear about it. And, you know, it was what was it the other day? Oh, it was one of my employees had like a, you know, something that doesn't have our ECU in it. It's like a flash tuned stock ECU and something and it cold started really poorly. And Chris walks out of his office. He's like, what is that? I was like, oh, it's selling. So it's just like, oh, thank god. I was going to hear about that. But but you can tell when a car drives nice and when it doesn't. And the thing is, some people will tolerate as just, oh, it's just a tuned car. Like, no, no, it should drive really, really well. We have so many tools at our disposal now with drive by wire, with the variable cams, with good injector data, with good fuels. Like you don't have to suffer in fast cars anymore. Like, flat out.

That was one of the things. So in my previous car, I had a Mark 7 GTI, and I used to have an off-the-shelf tune on that, because, you know, whatever, just classic stage two, whatever stuff. And then I got a custom tune done. It was just really fun to, like, you know, work with the tuner at Ratified Motorsport, you know, which is where about 50 episodes of this podcast were done out of their shop. So that's kind of cool. But I got to, you know, learn a lot from their tuner there and just kind of get an appreciation for all this stuff that people kind of forget. But yeah, it's classic every single Facebook form. It's like, oh yeah, you know, that's just race car stuff. That's the big excuse.

And, you know, where were we? It was many, many years ago. And someone goes like, yeah, it just starts on the third travel. No, no, no, no, no, no. It should start on the first attempt. And hopefully after just a couple of revolutions, if that like, I was like, let me take a peek and, you know, just needed more cranking fuel or something dumb. He's like, oh, God, I was like, yeah, this is how cool it is. We don't have to like take apart a carburetor or twist a screwdriver. Like we can look at a data log and, you know, try an A-B test with changing zero mechanical parts. Like we're pretty spoiled with what we can do with a laptop these days. And now like we've come full circle and people are trying to actively ruin it with ghost cam tunes and making it actively miss fire and this and that. Or let me make it pop and burble.

It's funny, I've had only a very small handful of folks on the show that were like tuning, you know, from the carburetor days and made that transition. Like when they were doing as a job then and then on to, you know, like the same stuff. But it's like it like be like, oh, yeah, why is that guy got a laptop in his car? Like, I mean, I imagine that probably happened before you probably got into cars, didn't the transition to having a laptop in your car to tune?

Yeah, because I grew up on like alphabet soup with the super days. OK, it'd be like an Apex SAFC on top of an HKS VPC GCC.

I'm not pretend I know what that means.

Yes, no, that's why it was called alphabet soup. Right. So we're taking the VPC Vane pressure converter, I think is what HKS called it, which basically took away your mass airflow meter and made it speed density.

OK.

And so like all the big turbo guys, you go single turbo, you get rid of the mass airflow meter. Right. And then the GCC was there like tuning computer that went with the VPC. And then but everybody just put it in an AFC from Apex because you have the little wheel of the blue screen that looks like almost like the dolphin display on the pioneer head units. And then, yeah, I just basically stacked piggybacks on piggybacks and somehow got to remember one buddy's car. We went to the Texas mile. And he got kicked out because he did it in like flip flops. But this is when like ethanol was available, the pump. But we didn't have like really a lot of ECU's that could do flex fuel. And we didn't have ethanol content sensors, I think, really. Maybe a couple of people had. But he basically had a wideband and a VPC, AFC, GCC combo. So you'd actually have to like retune his car to start it and then immediately change it back to the settings to make it safe while it was like making boost. So every time he like restarted the car, refueled it, we had to like retune it. And then he got kicked out for having flip flops. And I think that was a year that like maybe SW, like he blew his car up or Tommy Bond blew his car up. And then he took their sticker and put it on his car so he could go run one more time. And then got kicked out for real, for real. But I think I want to say he went like something stupid, like 180 or 190 something on like the piggyback alphabet soup. And we just didn't know any better. Like we didn't know that that was absolutely probably not the right way to do anything. And we just kind of got away with murder on stock ECU stuff back then.

That's another event that's not around anymore, right? Texas Mile or is it?

No, it's still around. It's just terrifying to me. Everything's so fast, like I don't even want to really do a half mile event with the speeds these cars can do.

Oh, it's insane. Like you look at like UGR and they're doing, what did they do last year? 260 something, I think, in a half mile?

Zero interest in that zero.

Yeah, that's that's insanity to me.

Like, I don't, are there any tires, like racing tires that have actually been validated at that speed?

That's a good question, that's a good question.

But it's like, you know, I know with, like with the Viper, like the ACR, like think about, so the aerodynamics, it's, you know, almost exponential, the way the load goes up.

Yeah, all that load on the rear tire, yeah.

Like, was that wing ever meant to do 220, 230? Like, is it just going to like break through and crush the car, and then what happens to the dynamics of the car if that falls off?

God forbid you get one of those, well actually, you know, you're in the Viper forums, God forbid you get a knockoff wing.

So, I've made a lot, probably a few enemies, just because I'm pretty outspoken against people cutting up perfectly good Vipers. Oh, and my beef isn't actually that they're like stealing the thunder of the ACRs. I think ACRs are special, I own one. And I think they're neat. Like, I don't really have a big problem with somebody cloning something, but you're cutting holes in that front clam shell to put vents in the car that weren't supposed to be there on that car. You're drilling holes in the carbon rear trunk lid to put a wing on it, and you can't go back. You can't patch carbon fiber. And they've done it.

Is it rear trunk lid carbon?

Yeah.

Is it on the GTSs as well?

Nope, carbon on everything.

Okay.

They're all carbon.

Okay.

And then, yeah, but I just, I take a little accepted grant. It's not my car.

So you got blocked by him, didn't you?

I don't know if I did, but like, I'm pretty outspoken. Like, they're not validated parts either. Like this, OEM parts are at least OEM parts, right? Yeah. But I just don't like putting holes in, and they did it to a couple of really special colors too. Colors that there's only like 30 or 40 of, maybe even less. I'm like, don't put holes in like the special color. Go find a black base model, and like put holes in it all day long. I don't care, right? But still like, yeah. It's just like every Gen 3 Viper seems to have an extruded aluminum wing on the back of it too. I thought they needed holes in them.

Again, I'm not gonna yuck anyone's yum, but like, for example, like that one, I'm sure you're in the form, you saw the color shifting Gen 3, and they threw like an APR wing.

It was like the convertible Gen 3, but then they threw like, that's the whole playbook for Gen 3, yeah.

Yeah, and I'm just like, it's like a 1200 horsepower Viper, I think it's like a Mutt, if I remember correctly, it had like a UGR kit, but then it was tuned by Enthimoto or something like that. Anyways, point being, I'm just saying, you're thinking like, what's gonna happen when that like wing, that APR wing that you just threw in the back of that car, and you're doing like insane speeds, like what's that gonna turn into? That car was never designed to do that.

Imagine the public outrage of Sydney Sweeney got fake boobs.

That's a crazy take.

But I think that the Gen 5 Viper stands on its own merit. If anything, I like adding the TA 1.0 arrow. That's just a carbon lip spoiler.

It's classy.

The two carbon front. It's tasteful. It's a little different. It adds a little contrast, but it's very, it's OEM plus, literally OEM plus. I think that adds something to the car, and you don't have to put holes in the car to do it. Worst case, you put some holes in the underside of the bumper, who cares? Right? You can get another bumper cover, but I think that's tasteful, but the car stands on its own merits. One of the prettier cars made, I think, personally.

Oh, yeah, the GTS, for example, my brother was talking to you about this before the show, but there's a black GTS in my dad's dealership, and it's like, it really is a really nice car. If you took off the white wine stripes and just a black GTS, it just looks sharp.

No, I'm gonna start a new business and call it Gilded Lilies, and I'm just gonna do, have you ever heard the phrase gilding the lily?

I don't know if I have.

It must have been Shakespeare because he came up with, I think.

I don't know if I made you think I was a Shakespearean.

Yeah, right. So basically like a lily, pretty flower, right? Gilding would be covering it in gold.

Yeah. OK.

Yeah. But it's adding something. Something is already inherently beautiful. But I want to start like an automotive enhancing shop and sell accessories only for stuff that's already good and call it Gilded Lilies and just help people like Mansory Kids for everything. Oh, God, Mansory, that's I'm just going to do tacky s*** for expensive vehicles and I'm probably going to get rich doing it.

You probably will.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, Mansory has like a really cool car, like one in 15, one in 20 cars. I'll be like, all right, fair enough.

Yeah.

But then there's some like I don't know if you ever remember the MC 20 kit. This is the one that broke me. It was it had like a double diffuser. So you had a diffuser and you had another diffuser under it. And it was just like this podcast has broken me. Like I started talking to a lot of people that do stuff for a function.

Yeah.

Like I really no offense to anybody. That's just into the show car stuff. It just like wheels and coilovers. And then I was the conversation go. Right.

Yeah.

Like so I have an appreciation for functional stuff. And that just broke me.

You know, it's funny is that I've hated show car stuff for so long and not all of it. I think the very high level like like people trying for America's most beautiful roadster or what's the other ones where they do the top eight and people try to get it. There's a Riddler, but these people will build. They'll spend millions of dollars building a one off custom car. Every panel is hand beaten there. They're never going to see public roads, unfortunately, but they're stunning. And I love the craftsmanship. That's the kind of show stuff that I've loved historically. But have you are familiar with Ultrace? It's in Poland.

What's it called?

It's a car event called Ultrace. Like combine like the words ultra and race.

You're probably going 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 hydro 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.

So I have not been in person. I need to go. But some of the show cars they have there are very tasteful because it'll be stock body, but really aggressive, beautiful wheel combination, not just danced out in a camber, but just really tastefully done stuff, just beautifully restored with tasteful modifications. Some of it's a little wilder, but it's such a cool event because I kind of hate that a lot of the watercool Volkswagen guys have kind of ruined car shows for me, period. And I think we've probably seen some of that. Most people would agree. But yeah, but it's really cool because it's this even the teaser video. I think they spent like 80,000 euros just on the production of their like teaser video to like sell tickets in advance. And you should watch the video. OK, yeah. But they got what was it? I think a Bugatti EB110.

OK.

And that was the hero car in the teaser. But then they used digital editing to clone it to where it looks like every car in the parking lot, the employee parking lot, everybody had an EB110. And it was convincingly done. And they had like all these action shots of the car, like a car that nobody gets access to. But anyway, pretty, pretty cool stuff. But yeah, I need to go to that event one of these years because I've had a couple of friends go there. And they sold like 50 grand in t-shirts over the weekend. And they would have sold more had they had more people to help run card scanners to sell more t-shirts.

But it's crazy how many t-shirts Peter sells at Texas 2K, by the way, has such an insane amount of shirts.

I wonder if he sells more than Kyle does. Oh, 1320.

Dude, well, every year. So my go-to stops at this point. That's a good question, Hugo. I think T1 and AMS, I like to swing by. AMS has always had historically really good merch. Yeah, for the last three or four years, I always leave with some AMS merch or whatever. 1320 is another one that I stop at. But yeah, no, I'd be curious. I feel like everybody wants to text this 2K shirt. Everybody texts me every year. It's like, hey, can you stop at a tent? I'm like, dude, I don't even know if I'll be able to stop for me.

Yeah, no, I'm not running errands for you and waiting in a line of people.

I know, I hate to be that dick, but it's like, dude, like I'm already like, I'm here for such a limited time.

Right.

Yeah, I don't want to go way in line. I'm gonna go there, sneak in, get out.

I'm sure you can just buy it from their website too.

I think there's some stuff you can and you can't. I don't know. Whatever. I think the 1320 stuff. Yeah, you can buy. Yeah, yeah. 1320, absolutely. Just get on the website. But no, it's cool. Again, I love the vibe of Texas 2K. I almost didn't come this year, but I knew I would regret it if I didn't. So are you gonna, do you have to detract first thing in the morning then?

Yeah, I'll be there. I think the Spectator gates open at 10.

Okay.

So we'll be set up and ready to go around then. No, but I want to say I've been attending TX2K since 2003.

Yeah. What was the first year?

2000.

Was it 2000? Yeah, yeah.

TX2K, right?

Right. Because I was doing a little bit of, actually I wasn't going to say, I'm not going to say I was doing reading. I saw a video about it, like how it started. Like he was trying to do.

Just supers at first.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was like small enough that we didn't have like a group dinner. We did like a scenic drive and they had like a little dino day. And then the drag strip is open and everybody ran like, you know, 12s in 800 horsepower cars. But there weren't that many 800 horsepower cars back then, right? Like I think I knew like one person with the stand alone in 2002.

What was it? AM back then or something?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I might have known one person had like an electromotive. This is thrown away back. But I remember the earliest years would be like the best western and whatever hotel faced it. And so there's two like facing hotels. There were the two host hotels and one had a better breakfast. So we'd all stay in either one, but we'd all end up in breakfast in the one hotel instead of the other. People would like, who was it? One of the guys would wheeled in his drag radials and his big five gallon drums of toluene he got from Sherwin Williams into the hotel and the dumb waiter into his room. But yeah, it was just kind of the wild west. And then it became Supers and Vipers, then later Supers and GTRs. Then it was at Hennessy for a long time. And then it was in San Antonio one year. Anyway, it's been a whole long saga. And then it became just the world series of fast street cars. It evolved into that over time. But yeah, but it was very small community. It was just one model community for a long time. And I still see some of the people there that I saw those first couple of years.

I wonder, do you think that's why every every Viper owner I've talked to has a serious appreciation for 2J cars?

Yeah.

You think that might come from them?

OK, but I think maybe you've dealt with a lot of Viper owners who own them for the right reasons.

Yeah, true.

Not that there's a wrong reason to own a car. But I think if you're like a performance-oriented enthusiast, you're a little more platform agnostic and you're not going to like die on like all of my cars are pieces of s***, every single one of them.

Actually, well, I ask you, does your Viper have the door problem where the door won't latch or you not run into that?

Don't don't tell it. That's a thing. It doesn't know it exists. No, currently the the trunk release button is not working. OK, so there's something I have to use the remote. But yeah, it's but no, but every car has things that are terrible about it.

Yeah.

And there's no hill I'm going to die on to defend any car from anyone. Like, all right. Yeah, they're all pieces of s***, right?

You're so few far in between in that, though. Most people just pick a camp and they stick with it.

Yeah. Well, I have an FDR seven like, oh, those those rotaries are real. And I'm like, yeah, and it is a rotary still.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's like a ported V mount, single turbo rotary. Like, it's not stock, but.

So making like what, 350 ish?

That's it. It's exactly at 350 right now. And I kind of don't want to turn it up because I just it's so fun at that power level. But they are so cool and they're quirky. But like, I like quirky cars, right? This is why I own several, because not one car I'm so far past. And again, when I was younger, I wanted to make my Supra the perfect car. And then once I got over that, cars got a lot more fun. That now it's like, cool, this car is good at this. This one has an amazing shifter field. This one, the steering weight is just perfect.

What car has got the best shifting field? I'm curious.

Probably a tie between an NA Miata.

Okay.

And the FD is really, really good. I don't know if the shifter is stock. It might be, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact they have a power plant frame.

Okay.

And so the transmission, the back of the transmission is tied to a big brace that connects to the differential. It's like a big like truss that connects the engine transmission and the differential all together. So the whole drivetrain can't rock a whole bunch. And I think that makes it feel a little more precise because you don't get as much left to right play or fore-aft play in the shifter as the drivetrain bounces on loads, moves up and down. But also Mazda just nailed it with the Namiata. I'm sorry. Like you're not really a true automotive enthusiast unless you can drive one. And it might not be your favorite thing in the world, but you can appreciate how brilliant that car is.

I made a post on Facebook a few weeks ago. It's like there's nobody that you just can't hate on a Miata.

No. Yeah.

Unless like one guy comments is like, oh, I'm too big to fit in.

I'm like, yeah, that's a fair complaint.

It is.

That's a fair complaint.

It's like for the sake of like a track car, just having a good time. Like I'm six four. I could I probably wouldn't be able to fit in it comfortably.

Right.

But like, you know, throw me like, you know, a seat lowering kit or something. It becomes a lot more reasonable. Like Vipers, I can't fit in them comfortably without like I can drive one. But if I wanted to put a helmet on, I would have only a seat lowering.

I've got a Recaro podium in mine on fixed mounts. OK, you'd probably be better off in that one. Yeah. But no, the ergonomics of a Viper, like they're really hard to get in and out of. You feel like you're driving something. I don't know what kind of a spaceship your a** is on the diff. And you've got a long a** crankshaft and nose ahead of you. Like it's kind of weird in every dimension. Like once you're comfortable with it, you're comfortable with it. But no, but like, no, I won't defend any of my cars beyond. You know, they all have quirks, but that's what makes them fun. Like in this conversation with a friend the other day, I said, I think the reason I'm not really in love with the Porsches is that they're kind of really good at a lot of things. Like there's nothing that's quirky enough for me to find them endearing.

Yeah, they're too perfect. You kind of like, there's something about like, I don't know what it is. Like just, I don't know how to say this, but I sound like a dickhead, but like the super pretty girl, but has like that weird like mole in the one place or whatever. Like, you know, it's like kind of like that one little like feature, like defining feature, right?

Like Sydney Sweeney, if she had fake boobs.

I don't know if that's a defining feature. You'd have to talk to her plastic surgeon to know that detail, but no, like just some defining feature. Like for example, like, you know, it's like when I look at like Instagram, like highlights of like certain podcasts or whatever, it's like some, like I'm the guy with the glasses or I'm the tall guy or whatever, like that defining feature, like same thing applies to cars. What defines a Porsche? Oh, it's so perfect, you know?

Yeah, I mean, the engine hanging over the back axle, but I think their best cars are the ones where the engine's like ahead of or on top of the back axle, right? I think a lot of people generally agree, like the GT4 RS is probably like one of the best Porsches made, if not the best. And it's, you know, it's insulting to a GT3 RS owner, but also the GT3 RS is special in its own right. But no, but I also, I will say this, I've not driven a front wheel drive car on a road course that was set up for road course racing. I think I would enjoy that if I could to pedal it and make it rotate and do certain things right.

A front wheel drive car?

Yeah, I think rotating a car is what the fun factor is. And hence the drifting. But I had a GR Corolla and it was good in a lot of ways, but it was very understeery on track. I think if it had way more rear bar, I drove a GR Yaris in Poland. Ton of fun. That car was great.

And I think they're insane right now, too, like what they're doing in Australia with them.

Yeah.

Insanity.

Yeah, but it's a great car because it would rotate, right. It had a short enough wheelbase, enough rear bar and spring rate. Like you could get it to steer a little bit. Otherwise, I think all wheel drive is probably not for me in terms of that. We'll see. I have a 32 GTR that's been in pieces since I bought it. I bought it in pieces and I've never done anything with it. We'll see if I like it when it's done.

They'll just send it to Whistling Diesel. He'll take care of it.

Right. Oh, God.

Yeah, that's a crazy video.

He'll sort it out.

Yeah. What made you go the main line route, by the way?

So Tony from T1.

Oh, OK. Yeah.

He had phenomenal experience with him. And, you know, he's somebody I can trust to be a straight shooter. You know, he's not always the most chatty individual. If you've ever talked to them that he's not yet.

No.

Yeah, he's not. He doesn't waste a lot of words. But, you know, I can take him at face value if he really likes something. But it was not just him. I talked to a few people and then there are other competing dinos, but not anybody that personality wise, I really want to do business with. And the product speaks for itself. It's very repeatable, very configurable. We've actually got their new CCS upgrades, like an all new control system we need to put in it, because ours is a couple of years before that. But yeah, just a really high quality product. Their support is at the drop of a hat to help you out and get whatever you need done. I think what really sold me is that Tony, I think, was prepping for ATX2K and he had maybe a prototype version of a very high power dyno that they just come out with and something broke. Somebody got on a plane from Australia, flew the part over, fixed his dyno, so he could get all the cars tuned leading up to TX2K. I'm like, okay, that's customer service. That speaks volumes about the kind of people that are involved in this company. And if I want to have a tool that I rely on to operate my business on, that's the kind of people I want to do business.

That's crazy. Like I get pissed off having to respond to an email sometimes that you're telling me to fly across the world.

That's not an easy flight. That's a terrible flight.

It's miserable.

Yeah.

Like actually, I saw in Australia, it was the biggest plane I've seen in my adult life. It was like one of those going to Australia planes. And I'm like, man, what's that? From here, it's probably, what, 16 hour flight? 18?

I mean, yeah.

Something stupid.

It's terrible.

And to fly with a car apart, man, that respect. That's crazy.

No, but they're super good dudes over there. And then, yeah, it's a reliable tool and it's done well. And I think that's why you see them at so many of the very highest end shops is because word travels fast. Everybody talks. At the point of the stick, everybody knows each other. And yeah, that's kind of, I think, the tool that a lot of us have agreed on.

So when did you start? Did you import all these yourself then? Or did you have?

No, I've never imported a car, but in fact, a lot of them just came from the same friend.

Okay.

So Aaron Losey, who runs Lone Star Drift, he and I have an unspoken agreement that's when he needs cash and he has extra cars. I'm usually the sucker he can rely on. So yeah, that's been a couple of... When I bought the one that's behind you or to your left, that one was like a stock automatic 1J, bad paint, nothing special about the car, little beat up and then now it's a 3.4 ported head, 264 cam, VVTi, 6466 turbo with a T56 Magnum and pretty ignorant drivetrain. It's a great combo, like big, big motor, small turbo, very responsive. And I built it thinking I was going to drift it and I was like, Oh, this is a little too nice. Because I can't get like door skins or doors or quarter panels for that car stateside. It's not even a chaser, it's a Mark II. So they're a little less common, same platform, a different G metal. So I just kind of like that's just a dumb, fun streetcar at this point, because it's a little too nice for drifting.

Just 3D printing everything nowadays, man.

Right.

That's kind of I'm excited for that whole like the repops that are going to be popping up in the next five, ten years.

We're already seeing it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or just like design as well. Yeah. No, that's super exciting stuff.

And we're using 3D scanning to a pretty large degree.

What do you use for a 3D scanner?

I think we have an Einstein.

That's what we just got. It was like a camera. Which one model it was, but it was super cool. We were messing with it yesterday for some filming. And man, it's just crazy how far our technologies come. Like when we were doing like we're doing something on in the car. And it's like we didn't even put a marker down. And just it was crazy like how accurate it was. It's like the blue lasers or whatever.

No, I don't love the intros that you wouldn't download a car. And then kind of, yeah, I think I told you earlier that like, this is completely off topic. But there's a guy who designed like an AR component based Gatling gun. Yeah, completely. Except for like the metal parts, 3D printable. And there's even one like feed ramp in there. He's like, yeah, I just need a 3D print this out of stainless. Here's like 12 companies that can print that for you out of like centered stainless steel.

OK, I was going to say, like, why not just print it out of like?

Yeah, you can print it out of plastic. It's just going to wear out very quickly. He's like, you know, this wear item, this really needs to be metal. You order a bunch of bearings off of like Amazon and AliExpress and like a thousand bucks later and some printing. You've got yourself a Gatling gun that uses AR components. But the fact that like somebody, you know, they've coupled their inserts and mounts for gauges and that car actually has a 3D printed dash mount in it for our seven inch dash company out of Australia called Mako Motorsport. They do really nice, like solid ABS plastic, and then they body work and finish it and paint it. So it looks I mean, it's a solid plastic part. But you look at the backside. I was like, guys, are you using like a five millimeter nozzle? Normally these nozzles on a 3D printer are like point four millimeters. Yeah, point six is big. He's like, yeah, I mean, that's like five millimeter nozzle. I'm like, like the amount of filament that things chewing through. But, you know, to print those parts solid in that scale, like they have to have a big, big nozzle and they just sand it. They're not doing super high tolerance. OK, right. So they're they're knocking down the finish after the fact. And you can even do acetone vapor smoothing with ABS plastic. They may be doing that for some of the finishing. But yeah, like if they had to build a mold or a tool or fiberless component to do all those parts, like they couldn't do a custom one off part for you like they can you can pick any dash in the world and put it in that car and they just drag and drop the file, do a couple of tweaks and away you go. So it's really cool to see how much more democratized modifying cars is there even like a tweeter mount or a speaker mount or like all the things that I did in the old days with fiberglass and tons of filler and bleeding hands, you can use your phone in some cases.

Yeah, I noticed you have some audio stuff back here. Did you have a big audio phase at some point?

Still kind of do. I like to buy vehicles for daily drivers where it's just good enough I don't want to mess with it like I daily drive an IS 500 in the factory sound system. That's it. Like it actually has pretty decent representation down low and it doesn't make me itch like I'm not like a super huge audiophile in cars because they all sound terrible because cars. No, no, no. But cars inherently are terrible, terrible for audio, right? There's so much background noise that, you know, you can spend one hundred thousand dollars on a car stereo system and a good five thousand dollar home stereo is going to blow it out of the water. It just is the nature of being in a little metal and glass shell. I like to have a little base and have most of the highs and lows represented. Plus, you have older cars, like all my 90s junk. Everything needs a stereo.

Right.

Sorry. Like they have so many rattles and squeaks. Like I'm going to go certifiably insane. I'm going to rate guns based on mouthfeel if I have to listen to the squeaks in those cars. That's crazy.

What's your most rattly, squeaky car?

Oh, God. Probably my 350Z drift car because it's like.

I can see that. Yeah.

It's like a solid mounted subframe and really aggressive differential. And those axles are probably not doing great, but it's the you steer and go go go go go go go go go go go all the diff loading and unloading all the slack in the CVs. And, you know, it's it's fun that that car like it works because I'm not I'm not driving that car long distances, but surprisingly, they actually have decent for. And then also like the cage in that car just creaks, which is a little disconcerting. Oh, yeah.

Just a little bit.

Yeah, that's probably the worst one. Let me look around. Oh, God, probably. Well, no, I haven't driven the DSM enough.

To the one G that was in the back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've really put any miles in that because, yeah, I just have it. But yeah, I probably the three DZ drift car is probably a safe bet. Bizarrely, my 3500 Ram dually for the business has a more solid interior than my brand new Lexus IS 500. Like the door panels rattle more in the Lexus than they do at a crappy plastic 3500 Ram.

Well, here's the 3500.

25. Lexus is 24. I say it's brand new. I mean, it's two years old.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's just funny that sometimes the cheapest stuff is most solid.

Yeah, yeah. No, these new Rams are pretty nice, too.

That pulls great. This is the six speed, yeah, the ICE and six speed. I wanted the ICE and trans, not the Dodge trans. And now they have the 8HP in those trucks, which is rowdy. Yeah, so that'd be super cool.

But I have been very pleased.

Oh yeah, they should be. And you're saying I'm not. I've had every one of the big three for tow vehicles. I had a Super Duty with the 10 speed single wheel, and I had a Denali with the 10 speed single wheel. The dually is so much better for towing just for stability. And also I have the overhead rack and put a side by side on top, which is stupid, but I have like an inch and five eights for your sway bar. So it's fine. It looks really, it's like 13 feet tall.

Yeah, yeah. It looks crazy.

It's real stupid looking.

It gets attention though.

And that's it.

It's great for marketing.

But again, I love that some of the best creations are cause like, f*** the government. So in California, the speed limit for any trailer whatsoever is 55 mile an hour.

Oh really? Okay.

And so some off road guys like, well, f*** you. I'm just going to put it on top. It's not a trailer if it's on the back of the truck.

That's crazy. I didn't know that they were limited to 55. I remember my first year coming down to Texas 2K and there's one of the guys we had was trailering a Porsche down and it was like 95.

It's just like fished.

That's just crazy to see, man.

Yeah, no. So I pulled my I have a bumper pull. OK, RV, which has to be a bumper pull because there's a side by side on top. But I took that King of the Hammers. That was a great set up said the pro are four seater turbocharged makes like 350 of the tire. It's like 30 inches of suspension travel. I have no business with any machinery of that level. Like it's just way too much confidence. Given from that set up. And then, yeah, there were only a couple of moments I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like coming into a little like banked corner. But the thing, the corner is surprising the flat, even with, you know, 3000 pounds of stuff on top.

Right.

So I'm sure Ram is going to-

Did you go to this year to King of the Hammers as well?

Yeah, it was so sick.

Is it as crazy as people make it out to be? Like, is it one of those like, you can't talk it up too much sort of things? Everybody I've talked to says it's amazing.

It's amazing and it's amazing at scale, right? That I think a lot of events, you know, and this is no disservice to CX2K because I think it's a great event and it gets a lot of great people out to do really cool stuff. But the event's so big now and there's the ratio of people participating to the people spectating is very low right now. There's a lot of spectators and not a lot of participants, especially the dollar amounts that it commands to even get in the show. With King of the Hammers, everybody is a participant. They all bring out whether it's a ratty old ATC 73 wheeler they inherited from their grandpappy and it's only going to start on the seventh crank of the rope. They can still go and play with everyone else that has brand new a couple hundred thousand dollar or half a million dollar or three quarter million dollar trophy trucks. Everybody gets to go participate in some way. So I think just the level of enjoyment out there and everybody's out camping, having a good time, you're not going to meet anyone out there that's unhappy to be there. And I think like 80,000 people in the desert doing that with like, it's basically like Burning Man with Motorsports.

Yeah, that's kind of what I've heard.

And that's like a great combination. And everything's, you know, aside from doing really, really dumb stuff, it's legal to go as fast as you can physically go on your side by side through the desert and push it to its absolute limit where like streetcars are so fast now, you can't push limits on anything on the streets without putting yourself and many others in danger.

That seems to be a reoccurring topic like everybody, especially again, I've developed quite the specific streetcar niche on my Facebook over the last few years and it's like everybody kind of agrees like it's just kind of stupid fast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything's doing like mid twos, low threes, 61 thirties.

We are so desensitized to how fast that is.

Yeah. Well, it's like I took a break because like one of my friends had an Enthmodo build car, right? And it's like just clicked off like a super low three or whatever. And it's like, I got used to it. Like there was one video and like they took of me. He's like, man, it looks like he's sleeping in there. And I'm like, no, no, I'm just enjoying the ride. But it's like it's stupid fast.

Yeah. Well, I think that as we've this is part of the control side, too. That is, we've done really well with traction control and power management and keeping these things safe.

Like you guys love to take all the credit. Do you see you guys? What about the tires and all the others?

Yeah, but they're making the most of the hard parts and really. There's no driver in the world that can manage power as effectively as a computer can.

Same with 100%.

We have this argument often where someone's like, oh, I can drive fast on ABS. Like absolute b*******. I'm so sorry. Like how many brake pedals do you have? Do you have four of them? Because a computer does. And it can sense within a portion of rotation, if that wheel is stalled, if it's decelerating, like you don't have that data, I'm sorry. Like you don't have four brake pedals. And you also can't vary the brake pressure left to right when you load up the car or load up the front, whatever it is. So there's not a human in the world that cannot break ABS. I'm like, Oh, F1 doesn't have it, because they're not allowed to. F1 would love to have ABS. In fact, years ago, there was, I think some murmurings that somebody had figured out how to use the Regen as a form of ABS. And then before that, do you remember the front differential that got banned?

It does ring a bell.

So as cars have no like, they're not four wheel drive, but I think it was, what team was it? But they put small axles and I think a differential between the front wheels. I could be totally wrong on this. I think I might have read this on the internet, but they put a limited slip differential between the front tires to mitigate lock up. These are going to lock up whatever car, whatever tires on the inside generally. But if you can just connect them with the differential where one can't really lock up without the other, it's like poor man's ABS.

Right. Yeah.

But it's not really ABS. So anyway, but that's the thing where the computer just has way more control and at a way faster pace, it can cut the next cylinder that fires. If you lift throttle, you got all that momentum and everything else, you just can't make corrections as fast.

Well, going back to the Formula One topic, I think, was it when Schumacher was at Benetton or whatever? They were like, where is it? I don't know. It was late 80s, early 90s, I think. They were talking about like, oh, I can hear that car next to me has traction control. Like that was not allowed. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think it was Benetton. I'm blanking out. I'm getting the names mixed up. It's been a long day.

Yeah.

But what about EV stuff? Are you guys dabbling in EV stuff at all or not really?

I haven't messed with anything yet. We've had a couple of our products make it into EV builds. Like our power management units, they're just turning 12 volt circuits on and off. That's the most oversimplication I can do, but they can manage temperatures. They can manage any logic you want to program into it. It can manage any 12 volt system, really. Our keypads, our dash displays. You know, the CAN bus is so open on our stuff. You know, a lot of our competitors, it's either a pay to play to get the CAN bus unlocked or they just don't let you do anything with it. And our stuff being really flexible. We see like one component maybe making to do a build that doesn't use our whole ecosystem, but it maybe just can't because it doesn't have an engine or it doesn't have a combustion power plant or whatever it is. We'll see them using our power management or our dash displays or something. So, you know, they're not using our ECUs for that. But not to say they couldn't. But I don't know anything about that world yet.

What's your best selling plug and play?

I'd have to go back and look. It might be like the IS 300 GS 300 right now. Okay, yeah, and that's the one that we're actively developing. And we've been, you know, I really hope to have this out in the last year, but this is the deal with development. Like you don't know it's done until it's done.

It's never ending.

And so that one, Toyota uses really obscure network for their dash cluster communication and AC requests and all this stuff. And so you have to validate it, not just on one model, but multiple models over multiple year splits, and then do all the auto trans control, because we can control auto trans through the EMU Pro. So it's just taking time to offer something, again, like built to the level that our side by side stuff is, where it plugs in, and you really don't know if it's a stock computer or aftermarket until you start adding power and compensating for things that you've changed. But that's the goal. And then it just takes more time. And I'd love to release stuff faster, but I'd rather be really right and be a good advertisement for the company.

Oh, 100%. I have such an appreciation for basically every company ever, because I've always been on the opposite side. Like I used to be the guy that was messaging people, like, oh, sponsor me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I'm on the other side of things. I get to see the development. What goes into it? Like the multiple, multiple iterations and delays with vendors and all that. And I'm like, man, like I have such an appreciation for that now. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's hours and hours and hours. And, you know, poor Petri, I mean, he worked on that. And like virtually zero progress for many, many weeks, trying to figure out where the disconnect was, you know, the code worked or it didn't or, you know, whatever it was and just kind of reverse engineering stuff. When you don't really have a tool, you're making your tools to reverse engineer this stuff, right? In some cases. So, yeah, but it's just, you know, it kind of takes cubic hours sometimes, right? If it's an easy plug and play where it's just wire to wire, like my RX-7, we made a really nice plug and play and we still haven't released it because we need to find a car with the sequential factory turbos and validate the control system for that, which we need even more active about finding a car to test on. But, you know, at this point, like, I really want to make sure that every factory feature is supported. So it's not an asterisk or somebody gets mad later because they bought it and didn't read the fine print. So it's just not worth the reputation ding to offer something that doesn't check all the boxes.

Yeah, I think I saw you guys are offering some sort of like B58 plug and play thing.

Was that the guys in Poland? So they they made a really, really good base map for it, and then they're going to build a full engine harness for it. So it'll be a swap only type deal or just straight race car. Because, again, that car has so much going on in terms of networks in it. Right. That's kind of a nightmare. But if you want to do like a full race application with a B58 and then if you want an 8HP, you can just do the turbo laminate for the trans side.

So you're saying with that whole setup, you could basically take the B58 and put in anything at that point?

Yeah.

Interesting. OK. Yeah, because I was curious about that. I was just like, oh, that's a cool application.

Yeah. And my thing is like, I think it's a cool motor. Do I think it's going to be a practical swap application for a lot of people? I don't know. We'll see.

Well, if you depends. I mean, if you're looking at like the Gen 3, are they at Gen 4 B58 yet?

I think it's just Gen 1 and 2, right?

I think the current generate or I think up to three. I know three for sure. It's three, right? Yeah. My assistant in the background.

It was like I hate VW because it's like every day somebody woke up and had their morning cup of coffee. They invented a new engine code.

Yeah. The engine helped me out in my car. But is it Gen 4 in my Golf? Yeah, it's on four, right? It's the EVO or whatever. So yeah.

Yeah.

But they were iterating over here. He says GM and we.

But it was like every day they come up with a new engine. And somebody is like, hey, is this plug and place you compatible with? God damn it. I don't f****** know. Like somebody just woke up and chose violence and changed the engine code. And like they might have changed like the spark plug heat range. And that was it. I just don't know. Cause I'm not like in the trenches VW guys. So I can't tell you what the difference is ours. We had to research that for our customers, but we don't tell people to go f*** themselves. But we try to help where we can. But man, there's so much tribal knowledge required in some of these platforms that it's just so deep. But yeah, they're working on the, I can't remember if they did the Gen 1 or Gen 2 first for the base map. Whatever generation they did, they're working on the other base map now. OK, and then we're actively working on canvas integration for 8HP control. That's still more limited than doing something like TurboLamic, which is like a real standalone for the trans. You can do whatever you want. And you're it's a lot more agnostic in terms of what generation of the trans you want to do. But I don't know if we're going to see the 8HP trend stay. I probably will, because it's a really great trans. But that's just it's a lot of work.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like anything that's good sticks around for a long time.

Yeah, and most of us have had one in a daily in something at this point where, like I had a 2019 Ram that have a, like we've all touched one at some point. So we know that they work and they shift well. It's not like the early bunch of speed automatics that were kind of never in the right gear. And then once we got past that hurdle, we're like, all right, this doesn't suck as much as we thought.

I'm excited for that whole B58 market, because like I had this conversation last year, I think. And it's like, think about the amount of cars that came with a B58. Like it's across the entire BMW line up. And especially again, if you look at like the Gen 1, it's like everything. It's insane. So it's like, when those start to hit, start hanging in junkyards, it's gonna be pretty sweet.

Yeah, and at heart, I'm still very much a budget conscious person.

Yeah.

And it may, some of the cars I have, it wouldn't look like that, but like everything has been purchased with budget in mind. Like I think I may have purchased the cheapest ACR Extreme ever sold in the USA, quite possibly.

How many miles are on this?

31,000.

Okay.

So it's one of the higher mile ones too. So, but I think the trick is that the guy I bought it from was the first registered owner, but it had like 10,000 miles on it from journalists. So imagine like the thing had a rough life. So if the motor is gonna fail, it was gonna fail at their hands, not mine.

Right.

So that motor is well proven. And then he put like another 10, 12, 14 on it.

That's so cool, man.

And I bought it for like a hair over 100.

Oh, really? Oh, is this before COVID?

Uh-huh.

Dude. Yeah.

Cause that's back when like a really nice, like super low mile and it was like 131, cause they were trading close to MSRP back then. But I think I may have like, I wish I could do this with other things. I think I've actually may have actually timed the absolute bottom of that market and got in.

Just before it took off.

And I was somehow still able to sell my 2013 SRT, like red on black for more money than I paid for it after like tripling the mileage on it. So yeah, I've done well with Vipers, but like this one's going to die with me. Like this is going to be a forever car, like the whatever money it's worth is immaterial because it's just not going anywhere. Just like my Supra.

That's awesome.

But that's a Mark 3, so it's not worth anything anyway.

I do like the Mark 3.

I do.

I like looks wise. And from what I heard, the engines aren't actually that all that terrible either.

Like the 7M is not the 7M needs completely gone through. And even once it's completely gone through, it has a lot of paper gaskets and it has three accessory belts. And so it's just, it's a lot of futzing around to make it like...

There's easier options for sure.

That's it. The Jay-Z motor was just a decades later clean sheet design and there are advantages to that. You cannot deny it. The 7M done well is a great motor, but you have to do it well and that means taking it all the way down. And that's just the reality of it. But the Jay-Z stuff is pretty hard to screw up.

Yeah, we're throwing out less. You know, like... Are you a purist?

Not that there's a wrong car to put an LS in, but I think there's definitely more right cars that LS is going to.

Are you a purist at heart or not, really?

Not really. No, I think some things I enjoy more, like would I turn down an LS RX-7? Absolutely not. But again, I think so much of the quirkiness and the charm of that car is in the rotary, that I think that at its best form, it has a rotary of some form in it. So it doesn't mean I'm going to look down on somebody because they put a piston engine in an RX-7. I don't care. Do you do you like they were, they're so cheap and have been, well, they were really cheap for a long time because a lot of them were blown up or just ugly colors.

I do look at the RX-8. I saw one for like 1500 bucks in Michigan. And I'm like, man, that ain't a horrible, because apparently the chassis is insanely good.

It's a great chassis.

Right.

And we have all the CAN bus info for those. So if somebody does a swap, all you have to do is connect the two CAN wires and the factory cluster works.

So are you talking about like a K-swap sort of deal?

Whatever motor you want to put in it, LS, JZ, K-series, like all your gauges work, you don't have to spend a bunch of money on a cluster. Yeah.

I think that's a market to watch in the next few years. I don't know.

I got to say, FRS BRZ, like this is a great chassis. I don't love boxer motors. Like, I'm not going to cry if somebody yanks one out.

Yeah.

Like, I'm just not. But I think that Toyota may beat us to the punch, but I think like I didn't love the GR Corolla because I felt like it was a little too heavy and a little too understeery. But that motor in an FRS BRZ should be insane. Right. It's a great because it would get weight probably off the nose.

You think it's that much weight?

It would probably be equivalent because it's adding a turbo and b*******.

Well, it's like also don't like with the three cylinder. Again, I'm talking out of my a** on this one, but it's like, don't you have to add a bunch of stuff to kind of offset the fact that it's like such an unbalanced.

Yeah, yeah, maybe. Yeah, but I just think that like that car kind of deserved a better motor.

Oh, 100 percent.

Sorry to also group people out there. But like there's a reason that IEG is printing money. And that's because everybody needs a motor.

Yeah. Well, well, at least with yeah, it looks like these from everything I've heard, the two floors have been amazing. I said like the whatever the early of the silicone.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Silicon Gate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like just it seems like such a big improvement over the two. Oh, yeah. Which is cool, because I really anybody that's like racing those FRS. I've seen so many LS swaps.

My nephew got one of the it was like a midnight purple BRZ. As is like go to college car.

OK.

And he's a brilliant student. Super, super good.

Slim microphone.

But just like, you know, in my early years, I would have been jealous if somebody my age got a brand new car. But like, he's earned every bit of that car. He's super responsible, great student. And yeah, it's a cool little car. I'm like, that'll serve you well for many, many years of life. And with the two four, it's pretty torquey punchy car. Like it's kind of like two four is kind of what it needed to get over the hump. The two I feel is just not quite enough.

There's a guy I had on the show, Schwartz Performance. He does like basically like you got like Rosa shopping a Schwartz performance like size wise, like for like restomod stuff, like he's up there.

Thank you all the Schwartz jokes from Spaceballs.

That's crazy. I haven't watched that movie in so long. Damn.

Classic.

Yeah, I need to catch up on that. But like the guy, like again, he has like all these track cars and he is like, you know, like he tracks bikes or whatever. But like he has this FRS, the 2013 whatever 14 FRS. And it's one of his favorite. I mean, granted now makes like 600 wheel, but like the guy tracks the s*** out of it. Like he bought that car, I think brand new. He's like, dude, this thing is perfectly balanced. It's just an amazing car. That's why I learned manual and technically.

Nice.

Yeah. Personally, like I see it between that or the Z4 because I had more time driving in a Z4, but like I technically learned how to shift in an FRS. So it's like, I don't know. But as we start to wrap up here, I want to talk about the car that's on the dyno right now. What's the story with that car?

Oh, yeah. So the one by the dyno, a friend of mine, John Dodson, built it many years ago. It's kind of the car has a neat story. I'll start from the beginning.

Yeah.

It's a 80 Malibu old lady blue, old lady blue interior, like blue on blue on blue, purchased new by two nuns, daily driven by two nuns for like 30 years. One of John's buddies buys the car, does like a, you know, a clean LS swap. It still has like the billet plate for the AC lines through the firewall. It's just like, you know, bolt on LS swap, makes it a fun little cruiser. And then John buys it and proceeds to, in his words, ruin it. It makes it proper, pretty rowdy race car. So it's a 427 dart block. I think it's an HPT, ProMod 98, Glide with straight cut gears, some kind of nine inch, you know, billet spindles and cool stuff up front and twin calipers up front and all the carbon panels in the back, but still has like most of the blue interior in it. Like the stock dash is there, the door panels and carpet. And then you look in the back seat and it's all like carbon sheet, but it has, you know, a funny car, halo cage that's all painted like 80s blue to match. It's the original paint on most of it. But anyway, just really, really cool drag and drive car. He campaigned it for years with some friends. He did a bunch of drag and drive stuff. And, you know, I think he was just transitioning out of that. And like his kids are building cars now. They're getting older. I say older than like, you know, early 20s and they're working with them. And so he's I think more interested in hobbies and doing stuff with his kids. Right. Instead of doing a bunch of drag and drive stuff. But I wanted a platform. So with the EMU Pro, we have all the inputs and outputs required for a drag car. We just haven't really ever prioritized the strategies. You know, like I said, there's zero drag strips in Poland. So this is something they can go out and like test all day long. So I'm going to have to kind of chip in. And I wanted something that was fast enough to need strategies for traction management and wheelie management and the timers and time based functions and all this and that.

So this is the test meal, basically CO2 boost control.

Yeah, it needed to be fast enough to need those, but cheap enough, I can hot lap it and not cry that I'm campaigning a pro mod that blows up every third race or needs a set of valve springs every three runs or whatever it is. Like the consumables on this car will be knock on wood, fairly inexpensive compared to really rowdy stuff.

But would you say it runs like seven fives?

Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's factory fenders, doors, quarters, roof, glass. Dash is all there. I mean, really, like, there's nothing cut out. Like I'm going to replace the window guides because the glass window is a little wobbly when you roll them halfway down. But yeah, it's a really fast car, like 750s at 180 something. Basically any track it's ever been to.

Who's driving it?

John.

OK.

Yeah. No, he was. You know, I'll drive it. Yeah. And I've not done really any drag racing, aside from like a couple of passes in my super back in the day. So the good news is we can turn it way down and just sneak up on it. OK. So I'll start with, you know, practicing 60 foot.

And just you're going to be the one that's going to be driving.

OK, I'll drive it. OK. But I just need to get practice with the workflow, like the controls and when to reach for the shoe. I just want to make sure that I'm not biting off more than I can chew.

Yeah. Yeah. But no, that's a that's an undertaking. It's one thing to, you know, go after a pass and be like, all right, here's the changes I need to make. It's another thing to be like, all right, how can I give myself the tools to make these changes?

Yeah.

Yeah. That's going to be interesting.

And I just don't have the bandwidth or the need. We need to develop strategies. I don't want to buy an untested car or build one. Could I build this car for what I paid him for it? No. Could I build a drag car? Sure, I could, but I don't have time to put into building it from scratch or have something very proven. He basically gave me the cheat sheet of like, here's all the suspension settings. Here's all the shock settings on the street. Tire pressures on the street. Tire pressures on the track. Shock settings on the street. Shock settings on the track. You know, here's how I ramped a boost in whatever. It's like I basically have the whole guide for that car should do. And so we can start from those baselines with our ECU in it. And then, you know, I just didn't have time to sort out a car. I need to sort out control strategies. So it's a big shortcut.

Well, I guess that probably answers much of my next question, which is what's next for you guys? What's the next year, two, three years look like?

I want to kick a bunch of people's teeth in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, you saw our full harness production line and super proud we're going to do that here in Texas. You know, I think my new tagline is going to be that if somebody is not telling you where they make their harnesses, that means they're really not proud of it. And I think that we've seen private equity buy out some companies and, you know, some of the structural changes in companies that are already publicly traded or whatever. A lot of our competitors are not run by enthusiasts anymore. I think it's going to, I hope it becomes more apparent. Not that I want their products to get worse, but I think it, I think people, I hope that people see that the decisions I'm making are from the perspective that I'm out there on the weekend using it too.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what I want people to see.

That's a bad-a** perspective too.

That, you know, this isn't not every decision. We have to make cost based decisions. I love to put Teflon wire in everything we make, but the reality is it's expensive. And if you don't need Teflon, TXL is a great wire for 99% of applications.

Can you actually touch on that? We talked a little bit about that earlier, but kind of go into that a little bit more. Yeah.

So Teflon is just a Teflon insulation, like motorsport wire, or you see it in motorsports quite a bit. You know, it's better at higher temperatures, but you're generally not going to see those in most, unless you're trying to do like DR25 sleeving and you need heat resistance for that and running components really close to hot things. But, you know, most harnesses like TXL is what's going to be in most OEM harnesses anyway. It's a very good, you know, fire retardant materials rated to high temperatures. I forgot what's like 105C or something. No, it's a good material. But, you know, in volume, when we're buying, we've got one drum over that has 40,000 feet of wire in it. So when you're buying 40,000 of something, the price starts to matter a little bit.

40,000 feet is insane.

Yeah, no, I just I just want to like tie one end to an end of a car and see how far we can drive.

Dude, what's that feel like? So what's this 5,000 feet in a mile?

It's like almost eight miles.

It's eight miles.

It's like seven miles in change of wire. It's I don't know if it's continuous. Maybe it's like spliced somewhere in the box. It's not one continuous stream, but maybe it is. I can find out with the multimeter real quick. It's connected to both ends.

So what are your thoughts then? Are you like, are you trying to lean towards like that sort of like manufactured in America side of ways or like, what are your thoughts on the whole? And this is a touching subject for some people.

Yeah, but it's kind of, it's kind of no, cause you know, ECU Master is a Polish company. Oh, true. Yeah. So that would be disingenuous, but what they make is made in their facility in Poland by very talented, passionate people. And you know, most of those guys who work there are enthusiasts. If they're not racers themselves, they appreciate it. And they love that what they make is going something really cool. Like they're bought in, even if they're not racing themselves. So I think that the more what we'll lean into is that it's made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, right? Okay, the owner of the company has a race car. He spends his weekends often at the racetrack. And just as I do on this side of the world. So I think that's the key thing. But, you know, for us, yeah, I'm proud that we make stuff in-house. It's cool to learn these techniques and offer something very high quality and control the quality very closely.

And that was the big thing that kind of pissed you off was like the lack of quality, right?

It didn't necessarily piss me off, but it was just shocking to me that somebody would make something and make it that poorly.

Okay.

Knowing what the end use case was for transportation and that's a big safety concern, if nothing else. So interesting. You know, it's just again, turns out it's easier to control it in-house than it is to rely on somebody. Depends on your part. Maybe I'm sure there's some great manufacturing partners out there.

But yeah, there's that too, right? Like that's something I'm also starting to get an appreciation for is like even if you're working with a vendor overseas, it's like it has to be the right vendor still.

But it's also too, I've been slow to hire and I've got really good people and we've done a lot of scaling with what most people would consider a skeleton crew. And at this point, I think we have really good procedures and methods and equipment and test procedures. And if we nail all the procedures, and I think that it'll be much easier to hire and train people and onboard them for manufacturing roles.

OK, so scaling is the next few years, hopefully.

And that's it. And then we're also we're going into so many more markets now with the direct injection this year will release for sure an LS and LT harness. I'd like to probably do the two, three EcoBoost harness.

Oh, OK.

So I think that's going to be that's a great little motor. It's lightweight. You can get it. I don't like transmission adapters if I can avoid them. You can get it bolted to a rural drive, six speed transmission. And I think that stuffed in some lighter cars is really cool and sustainable because they're new and available.

Yeah, actually, again, it's kind of cool. I'm starting to connect the dots. Up in when I was in Detroit, I had some guys on that literally focused on the EcoBoost. And I think their go-to solution right now, I think it's literally just Link. I think so. So that's going to be cool to have. Again, I love seeing more offerings on the market. So that's a sweet one. I saw you post something about the LT. I think it was, what was it? It was like a C7 going on.

Yeah, there's a six-gen Camaro behind me. So the guys in Poland are making a plug and play adapter for either a six-gen Camaro or a C7 Corvette. And we're going to test all the variants. And they've already got the trans control, the integration with the auto trans sorted out. The DI is extremely well sorted. Basically, like you get in the car and it rips. Like shift's great, engine works great. They've got an LT1 Camaro over there. They've tested it on quite a bit. OK, we'll do the LT4 stuff as well. That'll be like a straight plug and play solution. You can add port injection on top. Because so many of these guys have been running got off of piggybacks or just a s*** ton of meth injection and no power management strategies and really just sketchy, sketchy stuff at those power levels. So we'll be able to offer something really, really competent at a pretty fair price. So that's a good one.

How does market selection work? You remember when I said I was going to end this like 10 minutes ago? How does market selection work for you? Is it like, does the guy's in Poland making decisions? Are you bouncing ideas back and forth?

Some, because sometimes we need their help with something. Like doing a clean sheet DI application, we don't really have the skill set here to do that just yet. We haven't done enough of it to really tackle and clean sheet. They have a lot more equipment over there than we do. They have a couple of guys that have deeper backgrounds with DI stuff on OEM ECU sides. So they've handled all the DI stuff so far. We've got a couple of really good dealers who've done a lot of DI stuff, so we can rely on them for some things. And we'll obviously, we'll get better as we play with it more. We'll learn a lot more, but I want to learn my stuff, not somebody else's, genuinely. That's why there's so many cars here is that I don't-

This little handful?

No, but I don't like the customer being like, usually if I've tested, like if I hand somebody something, I've done dumber stuff with it, they probably will.

Yeah.

And in fact, I got to experience that on the other side that one of our really good dealers, he owns FTA Inc, which literally means f*** them all, which I love.

That's cool.

Yeah, brilliant tuner, great wiring guy. And we were king of the hammers. It happened to be my birthday. He's like, hey, we're going to go do something cool. Like, what are we doing? He's like, oh, we're going to go. It's coming to called Sasquatch Crawlers and said he's b***** rock crawlers, a 23 EcoBoost, 4L6D paddle shifted from the EMU Pro, DI by the EMU Pro. The rowdy one makes like 400 horsepower and 4000 pound things because like the front tires are filled with water all the way to the top. They have like 40 or 44 inch tires on them. They have a SADEV multi-clutch disconnect behind the transfer case. You can do front digs, four wheel steer, 45 degrees of steering angle, front and rear, front and rear pull down winches. And yeah, I was like, hey guys, should I like, I like to be really respectful of other people's cars, especially a customer. Like these guys are end user customers that have bought my products and I'm super thankful. They're like, there's legitimately nothing you do to this thing we haven't done. I was like, all right, I'm gonna take your word for that. So I'm just like crawling over rocks that are the size of a minivan and super impressive. But yeah, the DI side will grow for us, I think a lot. Then we'll get way deeper in the domestic side. The C7 platform, I think there's still people playing with that platform enough they could use good management on it. And then also we're putting LTs in everything now because LSs are drying up.

Yeah, I see it all the time in forums. It's not like as cheap as it once was.

No, no, and DI legitimately makes more power than port injection, no matter how people want to. How many times I want to argue against it. If you're not displacing fuel in the ports, you're making more power. Or excuse me, if you're not displacing air in the ports with fuel, you're making more power.

I'm actually maybe you can answer this is I've always kind of seen as like DI has like a kind of like a window and then kind of port comes back into play. Is that true or not really terms of capacity? Like let's say like if I like I've noticed, like, for example, I'm going to use the B58 or sorry, S58 guys, like they basically eventually get rid of DI system. They just go full on port, for example. Is that always the case? Is it just limited to a power window or how does that work?

I think there's a couple of factors there. I think a lot of that's fuel choice, too. OK, that's a methanol car. Direct injection is not like the benefits of methanol outweigh what advantages you'd see with direct injection, I think, or so negligible at that point. It's not worth maintaining two systems or dealing with the tuning aspect of that. You got to think, too, that a lot of those cars at that power level, if you're talking several hundred horsepower per cylinder, you can't do 80, 100 pulls on the dyno to dial that in. You're going to go to the track, you're going to rough it in on the dyno, go to the track and make a few passes here and there. You don't need a lot of knobs to tune. So I think simplicity is one aspect of it. I think the ECU hardware in play, if you need lots and lots of big injectors, you can't eat up a lot more to those channels with DI as well. So it becomes just a choice based on that standpoint. But I think we're seeing the DI systems, we're finding a lot more capacity there than we maybe had at first. A lot of OEMs retain port for keeping the valves clean. And those are great because then you add capacity with port, but leave the DI for the other advantages of it. That's fantastic. But a lot of the LT stuff we're seeing guys making like on just a Bailey breathed on truck motor high 600s with DI. And then like there's no 16 injectors to wire maintain like for most people, like most not straight line racing applications, but for most like road course drifting, whatever high 600s is a lot.

Oh, yeah.

These cases, right. Or even a fun street car. Right. The simplicity and fun factor of that. And you don't have to have terrible drivability or huge stupid camshaft. That's way more than you need. Like the sacrifices are dwindling as we get better with DI stuff.

That makes sense. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on before I pop my last question?

No, my actual final question. No, I just think like the big markets that I'm really looking forward to, like the diesel DI. That's a big one. Very niche. But well, I think we'll saturate that pretty quickly. And then, yeah, direct injection on gas stuff and then, you know, V8 drag racing harnesses and just having full harness offerings, I think will open a big window for us to every car I love has a crappy 30 year old harness in it now.

Dude, that's awesome. I'm excited for you. That's gonna be that's gonna be a party next. Yeah, that's cool. Well, at the end of every episode, I like to ask you as a guest to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget, OK, and it goes like this. You have to pick a daily driver, a show car and a track car.

OK. No consideration for operating costs. No, no, no. Dream car in every.

You could put two cars together if you want to. However you want to go about it.

God, I'm going to need a team for maintenance and probably all of these because I'm probably going to go with like just the the worst things to maintain. And if it's not my problem. So what is the daily driver? Yep, there's the first one.

Yeah, you don't have snow down here, so you could choose anything you want.

That's very true.

Lucky duck.

And I might just stick with my IS 500. OK, no, the genuinely partially because I can't modify it because there's nothing to modify. I did mid-pipe and exhaust and some BC Forge wheels and Swift Springs, and that's it.

You had to show me a picture of this thing after.

Yeah, it's a great car. But that was the stopping point, and I can't ruin it beyond there because there's not a turbo kit calling my name on the shelf somewhere. It just doesn't exist for those cars. So that's a great because I haven't really experienced any of the German stuff. I don't know if it's good or not. I'm sure it's great, but I don't have like lust after the German things that I haven't owned. So no, I'll do RS6 Avant.

Okay, this is basically a big RS6.

Yes, but I'll go with the stupid wagon, like the RS6 Avant, like I'll go with that, it's the ultimate daily. That's a good one.

Yeah, they're awesome.

Yeah.

I love the, this thing sounds insane. It's literally the same 4.0, just my brother says smaller turbos apparently.

Yeah. Yeah, we'll go with the dumb wagon. That's a dumb wagon.

OK. And then track car and show car, any kind of track, by the way, track car.

OK, we talked briefly about my friend that gets to tune the Mazda historically. Yeah, I'm going to steal his 787.

That's sick.

I mean, like you couldn't go to any track in the world and not be the coolest guy, even if you turn the slowest lap time.

Yeah.

Like, and I don't think that thing would get I don't think I'd ever get tired of driving that thing on track, also less terrifying than like the Porsche 962. Those things, I think, were legitimately frightening machines. I think the 787 was like not as much a widow maker. So, yeah, we'll go with that for the track car.

Then show car.

Show car. I'd say, but like. Man, probably for GT, but the good one, the 0506 course. OK, I had nothing against the EcoBoost cars, but I think that like I think part of the age I was in that car came out, just like with the Vipers. Like I was eight years old when the first Viper came out. That was super. I don't think that plays a brand.

I don't think there's going to be as many like the amount of people that had the 0506 GT as like the poster car. I don't think there's going to be as many kids that had that generation as a poster car.

Yeah. And this plays into like this is a whole other discussion we could have. But I think that every hypercar on the market is so disconnected from reality that they're less appealing.

Maybe, yeah.

There's no emotional attachment with hypercars to me anymore because none of them mean anything to me because they're so like...

Is it crazy that the Veyron seems like more attainable than anything that's out there?

Yeah.

Right. Like when you look back at it, it's like, oh, it's a million dollars. Now you're looking at three, four, five million dollars. Like, okay.

And what about any of them would draw me to any of them over anything else in that category? They're also such a grotesque display of statistics at this point. There's nothing endearing about it except for the Gordon Murray, like the T-50.

Yeah. Which is cool.

Yeah. That has a personality, but I think the rest.

I think the best cars are made with very tight constraints.

Yeah, let me look at the ZR1, the new ZR1. That was a long laundry list of constraints, and they somehow made it happen.

Right, and I think this is one of the reasons that NA Miata was so brilliant, is that they had so many constraints to fight with, right? To keep it at that price point, keep it simple, that's kind of what made it good, is fitting it all in the same place. That's kind of what made it good, is fitting it all in that box, it was such a brilliant packaging thing. But yeah, the Viper, I think the constraint was that they had like a 12 cent budget and some leftover McDonald's, and four dudes who were just gonna make it happen no matter what.

Yeah, that are some cool stories from Detroit on that one. On that note, where can everybody find you?

Yeah, so ecumasterusa.com. You can find us at deltaabs.com, verklineusa.com. All of our socials are everywhere on Instagram, Facebook, should be on TikTok probably. I'm sure we probably have accounts created. I just don't check them.

Sure.

My media guys do. Yeah, we're on YouTube for ECU Master, doing a lot more how-to videos here in the near future. But yeah, find us on socials, find us on our website, and hopefully see you at the racetrack.

Awesome. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. This is awesome. Thank you everybody for listening, and I'll see you all next time.

Thank you. Thank you.