196. Chris Patterson on 3000 Horsepower Diesels, Building Race Trucks and Ultimate Callout Challenge

This episode is brought to you by 6XD Gearbox. More on them later. Chris Patterson, how do you get a nickname like Mr. 3000?

Well, typically, you earn a nickname like that when you make 3000 horsepower, which I did. But I really got the nickname because I was the first one to make 3000 horsepower on a chassis dyno in the diesel performance game, like a roller to the tire, not an engine dyno. So yeah, that's probably how I got that name.

Okay. When you say rollers, actually, we're talking a little bit about this off camera, but what kind of dynos do these diesel competitions typically use? What brand?

That's funny. That's definitely a loaded question.

Okay.

In the diesel performance world, there's only one dyno that the whole industry says matters, and that's the Superflow 849, and it belongs to the Northwest Dyno Circuit. So every year there's a yearly competition in Indianapolis, and it's called the Ultimate Callout Challenge. And all the competitors come around and they basically see who can live the longest. It's a triathlon, sled pulling, drag racing, and dyno challenge in one weekend. So that's the dyno that's there, and that's where it's all considered legitimate.

So you call it a triathlon then. Are you, do you compete across the board? Or at least the last, you know, how long have you been competing actually? That's a better question.

We've been competing for quite a while now. I would say probably 2018 was the first year I was on a roster and probably had a decent shot at doing something good. And then the diesel performance racing is a very wide array. To say diesel performance, that's a very wide array. So what I was doing is what I call the triathlons, drag race, dyno, sled pull. There's some other segments you can incorporate, dirt drag, you can incorporate street drive and legality and rules, levels, fiberglass, full bed, you know, interior versus not. That's the big ones in the game is the three. And then of course, in diesel performance, you have sled pulling, that's separate. You have diesel drag racing like ODSS, strictly diesel drag racing. So there's a wide variety in the diesel performance world.

Of the triathlon, we'll call it, which one's your favorite? Which one do you feel like you excel at?

Like drag race, dyno, sled pull?

Yeah.

My favorite one is sled pulling.

We just cut there for a second, but you're referring to...

Which one is your favorite?

Yeah, which one is your favorite? The sled pulling is where you lean towards then.

Yeah, of the triathlons, drag race, dyno, sled pull, sled pulling is probably my favorite. It could be argued to be the most destructive. 30,000 pounds sled, six tires, 2,000 plus horsepower, 30 seconds wide open throttle, nothing will go wrong at all, right? But sled pulling is incredibly fun. Drag racing is fun, it's addicting, it's competitive, it's a driver's sport, you have to know how to drive, it's not all about the machine. But dynoing is the most controversial. I don't know if it's the most fun, every time I get on the dyno for the big power stuff, I hug and kiss my wife goodbye, say a prayer, because it's scary, dude. We're talking between five and eight nitrous solenoids, four to six bottles in the truck. I put those pistons in myself, back the F up, we're going to see. But below 3000 horse, dyno is easy and dyno is fun, it's very repeatable. After 3000, you're literally tossing the baseball in the air and hitting it with the bat at the right time, at the right temperature, at the right location, has to be a perfect scenario.

So one of the things we're talking about, so the first time you did 3000, what was that experience like?

That was quite interesting, you know, I can tell you a whole bunch of really good stories, but I'll try to keep it short. But we, we were in Ohio at the King of the Street Challenge. I believe this was like 21 or 22. I think it was 22. And we had lived all through this segments. And on paper, we had 2,500 horse to the tire that we knew it was going to do. And I was like, all right, cool, I got a plan. So I went to the host of the event. I went to the Dyno operator, I went to the safety coordinating people. It was like, oh, hey, I'm going to do two pulls. The first pull is going to do 2,500. And we're going to let it cool off for like two minutes. And the second pull should do around 3,000. And they're like, oh my God, no, this, this is crazy. It's going to blow up. Like don't, like, no, trust me, it's going to work. Well, then I had to get all the chiefs of the Indians, I had to get them all around it together. It's like, listen, we need to back these people up from here to here, from here to here, because we're going for it. And I rolled up to it. I was the second last to go of this heat. First pull did 2,518. I let it idle for a minute or two. And the second pull did 3,089 to the tire. And that was the first time that a diesel vehicle's ever made 3,000 on a chassis dyno. And my world changed. I wouldn't say for the better, but what I did do was I instantly called my wife and completely broke down crying on the dyno, tires still rolling, babe, I did it. I finally did something. And that was the first breakthrough that got us that Mr. 3000 that you asked about. That was the day.

One of the other things you're telling me off camera is that you kind of had to prove that too, though. It wasn't just a matter of just doing once and it counts sort of deal. At least was it within just the general community or what was kind of the overall reception of that?

I don't think it was received very well. And that's OK. There was definitely that night in that driver's meeting, the group of people huddled around that racetrack hours after it happened. There was some short people, some tall people, some thin ones, some thick ones. But a bunch of them said it would never happen again. And I was like, well, how do you know you didn't do it? And so we did. Six months later, we did 3,401 three days after Rocky Mountain Race Week 2.0. That was 1,500 miles.

Oh, so you did Rocky Mountain Race Week at that point, too, then?

I did. OK, I did. I wouldn't say I finished as fast as I could, but I finished the event, which anyone that's ever done a drag and drive understands what it's like to break the beams on the very last day. That's tough. We went through about six transmissions that week. It was interesting. But I drove on six Nitto 555 Drag Radials, and we swapped over to Hoosiers every day at the racetrack to four Hoosiers. We towed a U-Haul. We did. That was my first time to ever do a drag and drive, and I learned a lot. We had two trucks, and both trucks had filled blocks, so hard block. They say you can't do that either. I'm good at that.

I have so many questions now. All right. I want to stick to the drag and drive thing for a second. Because drag and drives have their own rules on how much you can bring with you and all of that.

Absolutely.

You said you did what, six transmissions?

Yeah.

Was there, did you just have six handy or how?

Oh God, no.

Okay, so how did that work?

I had three. I had three.

Okay.

You're talking like 15 to $18,000 transmissions. A 48 RE built to the hilt. That's the factory four-speed automatic that came in Dodge diesels. It's basically a glorified 727 with an electronic overdrive on the back. And Sancher shaft, 37 splines, solid input shaft, fat output, Muldoons, full manual valve bodies, all the line pressure. And I had learned a lot. You know, if you cook enough cakes, you figure out what tastes good and doesn't taste good.

So then where do the other three come from then?

Oh yeah, that's right. So we had three ready. At one point, I think we did two in one day at one track. It's so bad. Any real racer knows that you can pretty much overhaul anything anywhere. You could be a 7-Eleven gas station, put pistons in a motor. Like we've done a lot of stuff at O'Reilly's. And we repaired a few at the track. And then one time we were racing at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, which is about an hour from here. And we smoked the tranny about nine o'clock at night, pulled it out of one truck, cause I had two trucks running this event. And I had a thousand horse, 06 mega cab. And then the green truck was like 2000 horse and they were both solid blocks. And we put the transmission in the black truck, drove here, got here at midnight, stripped it down, left here at 530 in the morning, went straight to the track, put the transmission in, drove straight to Tulsa, broke it the next pass, put one in. It was that type of event.

So you were able to come back here for, when you were at Ennis, what'd you do when you broke it in Tulsa? Did you come back here again?

No, I think we just opened it up right there at the racetrack.

Okay, gotcha.

Yep, it was bad.

How long, beginning to end, how long does it typically take you to just swap a trans in there or rebuild? Are you rebuilding them on site or you just swap one in?

Depends on how many you have in hand. Think of this like a revolver. How many shots do you have? That's all it is. At this level, you're talking to truck in street trim that weighs 6,500 pounds, that makes 2,000 horse, 3,000 pounds feet of torque. Using all four gears, we're talking a 135, 60 foot, trapping 143 in the eighth mile. Things get ugly. This is like a bucking bull. I don't know what that's like, but I imagine riding a bucking bull is really hard and violent. I'm a full manual valve body. I shift it myself. I don't have an air shifter. There's no... I am a driver. I'm not a co-pilot. So it's one hand on the wheel, one hand on a shifter. And back in the day, I had a few buttons of nitrous, but I upgraded to several controllers now that turn on my nitrous for me. Turns out that's a lot better than just hitting a button.

I definitely want to talk about nitrous, but one of the other things you mentioned earlier was the solid blocks and how people say you can, for example, drag and drive with those.

Right.

How do you make that work then? Cause don't you run into overheating issues typically? Or how's that?

Right.

Yeah. What's the concern there?

There's a lot to talk about there. That's the rock on the building. That could be a windshield and it has solid blocks. What we do is we have a wet block that takes full coolant and then we fill it with Moroso hard block. It's just like concrete. There's a few passages you leave open to allow coolant flow through the motor. And then I'm externally supplying coolant flow to the head. Full radiator, full flow to the stock, normal diesel guy. When you look at this engine, you might not even know, you might not even be able to tell that it's filled and modified. But some of mine are my upper level competition motors are definitely filled. Now I have a 3000 horsepower motor right behind you on the stand that is full wet. We're looking for 25 to 2800 horsepower sustained, like a 10 second Top Dyno run, like a sustained load. That's a big difference, right? Yeah. And no sleeves, no deck plate, no hard block. It's a CGI 420 MPA alloy from Hamilton Cams. It's an aftermarket block. Very excited for how that's going to turn out. We're going to put that thing in in a couple of weeks here.

Okay. Actually touch on that then. So what point do you get an aftermarket block compared to a stock block?

Well, there's a lot of ways that question can be answered. It's in what you're doing with it and how long you want it to live. Okay, you can hold a grenade and pull the pen, just don't let the handle go. Well, how long can you hold it, right? I typically say a thousand horsepower. Stock engines live a long time with one turbocharger, fuel only. After you get two turbochargers, the 5.9 can make a thousand a lot longer than a 6.7. The 6.7 is a bigger engine, a bigger bore, a lot more torque, lower boost, more fuel you can burn, easier, cleaner, more power, blows up sooner. Then you start getting to aftermarket connecting rods, and then you're talking to the 12 to 1500 horsepower engine ranges. Then you start talking into blocks. After, if you want more than 1200, I'm going to put you straight in an aftermarket performance series block. And then if you want more than 2000, man, here's a couple of grenades. I'll give you the best, but it's like a tally marker. After four strikes, you kind of got to line it out and start a new line. And that's how this game can be. How you use it depends on how it lasts.

Connecting rods, because I come from mostly on the show. It's been primarily gas cars. When you say aftermarket connecting rods, what kind of material are you putting in these trucks? Because it's a whole different ball game, I imagine.

It is. Well, luckily for you, I have every flavor under the roof that I can show you. And there's three solid configurations or choices or levels. There's a stock connecting rod. And of that, you have cracked cap, a powdered metal rod has a capped cap that's cracked off of it, so it can't be reversed. These are also splayed caps. The caps are crooked. And the stock connecting rod can do a thousand in a single, let's just say. That's roughly about 1,600 pound feet of torque. Then your second choice for a stock connecting rod is a 12 valve, 24 valve VP 44 or mechanical series connecting rod. It's a forged connecting rod and it's a machined cap and it has some small bolts. And that's like 1200 horsepower, but you're talking three to six hundred dollars for a pair of rods. After that, you have a Wagler Street Fighter connecting rod, which is by Wagler Competition Products. And to my knowledge, no one's really broke that rod. I know a guy that made 2800 horsepower with that rod. So at a thousand, if you come to my shop and you want a thousand, you get a Wagler Street Fighter connecting rod because it's overkill, it's bulletproof, it has a half inch rod bolt compared to a 7 16ths. It has a very nice wrist pin bushing in it. And then it has a diamond interlock cap that's like a design, like a pyramid or a ledge, and they're tapered in a way you can't get them backwards. And it has the ultimate shear. It doesn't have a dowel in the center. It actually has these great big tangs that lock into the cap.

Oh, OK.

And that rod is $2,000. And basically, nobody has found a normal limit. I'm sure there are some after that.

You're saying for one or for a set?

A set of six.

OK, I was like, wait a second.

Yeah.

You weren't kidding about those diamonds.

Diesel prices are different, but not that bad.

Yeah.

So yeah, $2,000, a set of six. They have ARP 2000, or maybe they're L19. There's a few rod bolt choices. And then after that, there's another choice, which is a Wagler Billet Connecting Rod, which is a true billet steel. Now, I don't know if it's 4140 or what material, but it's cut out of a piece. That's nice. The Wagler Street Fighter Rod is a forged connecting rod here in America. And then the billet rod is a true billet rod. Then there's one more choice, and it's the Mac Daddy. And it's the D&J X-Beam Connecting Rod. There's five of them, five sets right behind you on a bench. They have oil passage through the center, so the wrist pin is forced oil. They are an X-Beam design compared to an I-Beam, compared to an H-Beam. So there's pros and cons. Incredibly strong, the most expensive, they cost about $3,800 for all six. I've broke or I have hurt probably six of them. Generally, I break pistons, melt pistons, and it sprays the rod with aluminum. But I did bend one of those rods, and we sent it to him. And they're like, what did you do? It's bent. And I'm like, well, you know what we did. It's bent, my bad. It was a really bad combination that I put together. And it let me know, but that's the Mac Daddy Connecting Rod.

How often do you go to that level of a connecting rod though? Is that just for you personally, or you had customers do it sometimes?

Yeah. I've probably only had five or six people that have splurged for that level of addiction, because that's all it is. The distance between more and enough never closes, that gap remains the same. It's just always existing. So we're always wanting more. So I like to build for the future. But we don't do too many of those rods because you're talking a $20,000 engine, no fuel, no air, so no injector, no pump, no turbos. You're talking a long block for $20,000, $30,000. It's incredibly expensive. And the menu has a lot of options. You know, it's very good.

Well, let's talk a little bit about customers and what's a standard kind of build here? Because obviously, you are all in the, what is it, Mopar space? Is that the way you define it?

Oh, yeah. I'm definitely, whatever. I'm definitely Mopar or no car. Fourth time generational drag racer in my family. I grew up in shops. I've done homework at the receptionist desks in the office. Fallen asleep on the work benches growing up. When I got out of high school, I knew exactly what I was doing. And my family was a Chrysler family. And in 2003, Cummins put a 5.9 common rail in a Dodge. And that was just the best thing that's ever happened to Chrysler. I was building transmissions at the dealership and I wondered why they were breaking input shafts. And I found out what a bully dog was. I didn't know at the time, but in 2003, I learned real quick. And I've been crazy busy with Dodge Diesel ever since. We offer three things. We offer performance, we offer repair, and we offer remanufacturing. We build our own engines, build our own transfer cases, our own transmissions. We do our own axles. So that's remanufacturing side. I ship things like motors and whatnot. And then we do tons of repair, bumper to bumper, AC, brakes, front end. I have wholesale accounts with fleets. I have hotshot customers. I do a lot of that. And I'm really wanting to push that hard in the future. And then I also have performance. And it's basically me, the client and the truck and what their goals are. And it's a three-way relationship. I'm pretty particular about who I do work for, but it's a relationship that we have for a long time. And I want to invest in the right people and go do good things in the future.

Do you have a lot of performance folks coming through here then as well?

We do have a lot.

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 3,000 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.

There's not necessarily a fine line between repair and performance. If you come in with a blown head gasket on a 6.7 and you have aftermarket tuning on it and you're pushing rail pressure and duration and all the fun things that are related around power, you're gonna blow that head gasket out. So we do O-ring, you cut a groove in the head, a wire presses on the head gasket, it holds boost. We also do firing, replaces the head gasket, firing portion. And then we offer head studs, ARP 2000, ARP 625 Custom Aged. So yeah, you can come in here with stock injectors and stock turbo and get a head gasket, but you are gonna get 625s, a fleece coolant bypass, grid heater bolt fix and O-ring cylinder head, all brand new gaskets, boost test, valves adjusted. Like it's all done right to last another 150, 200,000 miles. So it's kind of the both in the same.

Okay. Let's say I want to get into the diesel game tomorrow, right? Let's say I got a hundred grand to spend and you know, I kind of want to go down that performance side, whether I want to be racing, whatever. What am I getting?

Okay.

If you were to guide me, be my shaman on this journey. Yeah.

So you're coming in and you got a hundred K to drop and you want to go have fun with us. I'm going to tell you to go get a 060759 Dodge, 2500 quad cab short bed automatic. That is the Fox body Mustang of the diesel performance world. They offer every possible component you can dream up. If you want a hundred percent billet engine, oil pan to valve cover, they have those. I'm a fan of the stock stuff. And I like engines looking like they came from Chrysler that way with compound turbos and a 14 millimeter stroker pump and makes 2,000 horse. Like you can't even tell it's really modified. So the most important thing about coming in here is your expectations and what you're going to be doing with the vehicle. A lot of people screw this up and they take your money and they tell you what you want to hear and they sell you something that ain't going to do what you want to do with it. And then you're going to be the one stuck. And then you're going to get mad and go to another shop and it's going to be the same thing, better or worse. So, I would advise $100,000, third gen, five, nine, put a six, seven in it, put X-beam, put Wagler, whatever your goal. Let's say 2,000 horse. That's a wonderful number for a $100,000 truck, but you're talking a $15,000 trainee, a full manual valve body or a standalone transmission control module. Do you want interior? Do you want a roll cage? Do you want four link? Do you plan on going down the racetrack, sanctioned, which means a license, which means a chassis cert? Are you going to sled pull? Do you want a Dyno in it? Do you like nitrous? Do you want more than one turbocharger? Do you want to explain to your wife how to drive it? Like, do you have the ability to change your oil and adjust your own head studs? Or am I going to have to work on this thing every day? Those are a lot of questions that you have to iron out. So yeah, 100,000 will get you done. It could be a show truck that has no safety equipment that only makes a thousand because it has a stock connecting rod or two thousand, but you never raced it because it wouldn't possibly work. Or it could be a bad boy that you don't care what it looks like at all. You care about time slips, distance pulled, dyno graphs, things like that. Those are going to have a major, major impact on your budget and your expectations of the job that you're hiring us to do.

That is a lot of questions, man.

I have to have these conversations every day. I bet 70 percent is fixing customers and customer education.

You just kept going there. You kept rattling him off. I was like, no.

I told you I can talk.

No, but again, these are the questions and considerations that I'm thinking like, oh man, do I want a show truck or do I want a race truck? Let's say I got 100 grand and I want a race truck. We've already established you're going to put a 6.7 in there. What's the rest of that look like? How do we maximize that 100 grand just for the time and being certified and all that?

Yeah, so you're full safety. You have an 850 cage cert. You have a 10 point roll cage. You have new harnesses. You have a HANS device. You got $3,000 worth of personal safety equipment that you wear. You have two stages of fire suppression, one for the engine, one for the cab, two different places for fire, two different levels of priority. And then your brake system and your fuel cell. And if you want fiberglass or not, do you just want to drag race it and you're only going to drag race it? Do you want to hook it in the dirt and go sled pulling?

Okay.

Because now you're talking $10,000 worth of sled pull suspension, tires, wheels, hitch, shocks, weights, box, technology, guillotine, licensing, turbochargers, different rules, different drive shaft safety loops versus U-joint safety shields, different power disconnect points. Okay. So diesel performance is very broad. Yeah.

I feel like this is like a decision tree. It's like there's all these decisions over here and all of this, and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

It is. It's a series of clicks and groups. They don't all talk together. Sled pullers have different rules than drag racers. They have different rules than dirt drag guys, they have different rules than drag and draft guys. It is vast. Like to the point of, let's talk about a drive shaft safety loop. You're familiar in the gasoline world. What's that mean to you? What's a drive shaft safety loop to you?

That's a good question.

Typically.

Why don't you educate me on this because I'm not gonna, I don't know.

Okay.

Yeah.

Typically it's a 360 degree loop that's at least an inch by let's say, 120th hour, 83th hour chrome moly tubing. It's halfway down the drive shaft and it encapsulates the whole center of the drive shaft.

Oh, okay. I know some, oh yeah.

That's a loop.

Gotcha. Okay.

Drive shaft safety loop.

Yeah. Okay.

That's for the middle. What does that do for you joint failure? It doesn't do anything. If the middle of the drive shaft bows, it'll hit the loop and stay contained, but it's gonna rip the joints and kick it out. So then you have in sled pulling, you have you joint safety loops, six inch long, three-eighths thick aluminum or quarter inch thick steel has to completely encapsulate a U-joint that you can see from outside the vehicle. Okay. Well, that still sounds a little ridiculous. So if you can see the rear U-joint at the rear axle, and you have a six inch long shield covering the joint, then you have a loop in the middle of the drive shaft, right, and you still need another U-joint shield on the front drive shaft U-joint, even though you can't see it, it's still transmitting 3,000 pound feet of torque. Let's put a shield on that bad boy. I've lost about eight drive lines in my career of racing. I've seen U-joints come through the floor. It is crazy when drive lines explode. I wrecked last year at UCC when I lost a front drive shaft. It's nuts. Safety is not taken high enough by any means.

I don't even think about that a little bit. I mean, so have you had any safety scares then that kind of brought you to reality?

Oh, yes. I definitely fully believe I've innovated the diesel industry in several ways. I'll let other people say whether they're good or bad. But one of the things that happened, another long story, we're at Delaware. I forget what year, but this is the king of the street challenge. And that is street legal vehicle, full interior, like windows, radio, wipers, blinkers, horn, registration, full interior, drag race, dyno, dirt drag, street drive, two rounds of sled pulling, five events, three days. Nothing goes bad at all. I got kicked out this past year, but I got way out of hand. It was fun, but I got way out of hand. They kicked me out at first, and then I got kicked out later. State Troopers showed up. It was a cool deal. Big, huge fiery burnouts, all sorts of stuff. So anyways, we did really good. And then we were doing sled pulling Saturday night. No, I got to back up. I got to back up. I had an $8,400 cylinder head that was brand new. Top of the line CNC ported, big name builder. Still have the heads. Got three or four of them. They're like between $75 and $85 an hour as a piece. And we put this thing together and we work it out here in Texas. And then we drive for three days to Delaware. And then we drive 100 miles on the street at 8,000 pounds because that's sled pull weight. And then we go three seven second runs in the eighth mile, which is absolutely nothing because my opponent couldn't touch the times we ran. So I didn't need to turn the truck up. And then on the fourth pass, it wouldn't spool up at the line. It only had five cylinders. It was misfiring and I didn't know why. And it was like, do, do, do, do, do, do, like you could hear a dead hole. So I lost that round, came back to the pit and had a valve tulip, 85,000s, an intake valve, no nitrous backfires or anything. And no EGT problems, like $2,200 Farah valves. And the other people at the track were like, oh, just lash it out. It'll be fine. These valves grow, no, I've never had a valve grow like this. So we changed the cylinder heads. I had a competitor at the track, Josh McCormick. Props to Josh, he beat us in the Dyno. He's at 4,000 horse. I've raced with Josh for many years. He helped us out. He had a stock cylinder head he gave us. Intake shelf and everything. At 5.30 in the morning, we took off this cylinder head because it was new and the valves were growing and I didn't want to drop a valve, put on a stock head, put on an intake, all this stuff, got it together, did dirt drag, got second place in dirt drag. Then we did sled pulling and I think I got second in the first heat and I think I got third in the second heat, but I broke my rear axle. I destroyed the rear axle. I'm talking gears in your hands, the adjusters, we could not repair the rear axle. At this point, it's midnight, the next last day of the competition. The next morning is Dyno, like nine o'clock in the morning, Dyno 25 trucks. It's the last segment of the event. And I have no rear axle. So all the guys start talking in the pits and they're like, what if we dyno it in front wheel drive?

OK.

And I'm like, y'all have lost your damn mind. No one's going to go for this. I turn around and the guys already had the drag radials on the front. They already removed the rear drive shaft and had it in four wheel drive, which was front wheel drive. And they were like, no, we're going to we're going to spin it up and try it. And I'm like, the sponsors are not going to go for this. So I get the phone. Hey, what do y'all think? Oh, you already knew about this. Everybody knew that this was a go, except for me. Well, I'm the only one stupid enough to do it. So I'm like, all right, fine. Put it on the jack stands. We'll spin it up real quick. So we spun it up real late at night, like 120 miles an hour, fourth gear front wheel drive on the jack stand one o'clock in the morning at the racetrack. And and this is in Delaware and it's October. So it's like 35 degrees and it works. So the next day we put a side by side on the dyno and spin the side by side in one direction. And it made like 35 horsepower. We spun the side by side in the other direction to spin the dyno the other way. And it made like 34 horsepower. So we're like, oh great, we're good. Let's do this. I put my stupid truck up there on first in front wheel drive and everybody's so scared. They made me sign an extra liability waiver release thing. Like this is stupid. I don't recommend any of these things I say or do. Do not do any of this at home kids. So I spin it on tune one in front wheel drive on the dyno, and it did 1,550. And everyone's like, okay, that's good. You probably shouldn't, you have a number now. Like I think I was sitting in second place. I'm like, no, that was, that was the first pull. Okay, let's turn it up. So we did tune three and added three kits of nitrous. Okay. And it did like 22 or 2300. And I'm like, now we're in first, buy like two or 300 horse. So I'm like, this is comfortable. You should stop, Chris, you know? Hey, do it again. The voice on this shoulder is like, show them 3000 horsepower in front wheel drive. Okay, tune five, five kits. It exploded halfway through the pull. It broke at 2500 horse, halfway through the pull. I'll show you the block. It took number six cylinder wall and blew it clean out like six inches of block, just blown completely out of the back. But I had fire suppression. I had a Lifeline eight pound bottle of fire suppression. Maybe it was a 12, I don't remember. And I had 11 nozzles under the hood. And as soon as I felt the thermal expansion from the windshield, saw the hood bow up and go back, I realized, oh s***, this is on fire. I just exploded the engine. I closed my eyes, lifted off the pedal, pulled the pin until I quit hearing funny noises. And about four or five seconds later, the fire's completely out. Or not even that. It was seriously like a second and the fire's done and gone. And in less than three minutes, the foam is still spraying and guys are like, oh my God. And we took first place. Front wheel drive completely forgot about the stock cylinder head. I mean, a hundred pound valve spring, stage one drop in, a stock diameter valve, like minimal port work. You shouldn't ever do these things. And I put a 3000 horsepower tune upon it. Who the hell was this guy driving this truck that day? This guy right here, Mr. 3000. I wasn't Mr. 3000 that day, but I was definitely had the attention.

So you straight up just forgot about that.

I did?

Yeah.

I forgot. It was like two days ago, we put the cylinder head on. We'd already been dirt drag racing and sled pulling and destroyed the rear axle and converted to front wheel drive and dyno trim. Injectors, turbos, you know, things like that. Putting all the bottles in it. Like who knew? Who knew?

That's like trims actually. That's a topic that was really interesting to me when I was talking to Dustin. All right. Let's say we're going from, or what's the order of events? Does every event have a different order? Like, you know, Dyno, then Drag. Okay.

So they change it up on us.

Okay. So I guess it doesn't matter which example we use. Let's say you go from dirt to Dyno. What's that trim conversion look like?

That's pretty good. So on the Dyno challenge, it depends on the level of the event. Not every event do we turn it all the way up. Let's just say we're doing the big one, the ultimate callout challenge. Fiberglass doors, Lexane windows, parachutes, fiberglass bed, like slicks, as fast as we can go. For the Dyno, we're going to put in the big injectors. We're going to put on the big turbochargers. We put in all the bottles. We take out all the nitrous jets. For drag racing, you can have small jets to make it behave. For Dyno, you don't need nitrous jets at all. You're just spraying all of it. And then rear suspension is very critical. Like a suspension limiter, you don't want the rear suspension having to travel. And then you put a thousand pounds of sled pull weights above the rear axle or hang them from a hurt bar on the back of the hitch or something like that. And then inflate your tires to 50 or 60 pounds and hope that they survive.

Okay. Now let's see if we're going to go drag racing. And is that typically eighth mile or quarter?

Eighth mile. Eighth mile, okay. Everybody's scared of the quarter mile stuff in the diesel game for sure. Yeah, eighth mile is where it's at. So then you're talking a radial or a slick. You're going to, I, if this is the big event, I'm going to put the small injectors in for drag race and small turbos and take out all the big nitrous because I want to turn it down in order to turn it up. The tuning needs to be advanced and high duration, but a smaller injector make less power, but make more power with less stuff and make it longer.

Are you trying to get as much power down low at that point then?

It's power management.

Just management in general. That was another thing we were discussing off camera. You guys don't exactly have a standalone system of these. Is this all stock ECU stuff?

This is the Wild West Cowboys from Texas. I have a stock computer, a Cummins Bosch 849 controller that comes on all the 0607s. Until six months ago, I was running a factory rail pressure sensor, like 29,000 PSI, instead of running like a 35,000 PSI valve or sensor. And then I run, until six months ago, a factory map sensor, so it stops at 37 pounds of boost, is where it quits registering boost pressure. And that's fine, because after 20 pounds in this game, we're shooting for the moon. 20 PSI in a thousand horsepower truck is getting somewhere.

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It's probably 600 horsepower on an efficient setup. So now we're running a, I think it's called a five-bar map. It's 140 PSI, and I can read up to 140. So it makes power management a lot easier. We're starting to learn a lot more this past year or so.

Well, that was one of the things that, you know, Dustin, when I had him on the show, he was talking about how young this game is, the whole diesel performance game compared to the gas game.

Yes.

What have you seen that's evolved in the last five, 10 years? What are some big changes that have come?

The most, the biggest and most changes I've seen have been efficiency and knowledge sharing. We are way smarter than where we were five, three, eight years ago. If you look back in time, diesels are notoriously smoky and oil down and explode and kill transmissions. Motors have split in half on tracks, transmissions die every day. It's nuts. Well, now we're efficient and we're a lot smarter and turbo technologies came a long way. So now we can have one turbocharger. The ability to use nitrous and the knowledge around it is way further than when I first started. And we use a lot more nitrous now than we did back then. And that makes it clean. So that makes no smoke. Now we run standalones that have a wide air to fuel ratio like a lambda sensor. So now we actually look at air to fuel ratio. I mean, we, the industry, me, know the industry. Yes, they look at lambda and they look at tuning. They look at cubic millimeters and real turbo compressor mapping and calculating air to fuel ratio and measuring air to fuel ratio. And making them as efficient and as clean as possible.

Tuning wise then, you don't do any tuning yourself, do you? Okay. What does that look like when you're, again, competing between these events? You're switching. Do you have all this kind of loaded up? Do you have to, okay. So do you have to pull up the laptop and just switch? Okay.

This is very much like street outlaws. They pull in, they put the computer on the hood and then crop their hat up and then punch numbers. And I don't know, we could put a little, we could take a little and that's what it is.

That's a good representation.

That is good and bad.

I just binge watched, so I never watched it as a kid, right? Maybe an episode here and there or whatever, but I just binge watched, I think it was like what? All 15 seasons last fall. So it's fresh.

You were actually able to watch that?

I couldn't get to the last season.

That's dedicated.

I was dedicated, man. Cause I was just kinda getting ready for PRI at that point. And I was just like, you know what? Let's just see what this is all about. Now granted, at a certain point, I just kinda started tuning out a little bit. It was just kinda like background noise, but either way, it was kinda cool, right? To see how it progressed through the, what, 2010s. It's kinda cool to see some of the brands that I've had on the show too, on there.

They've had probably a higher rate of change than we have. They, as in the gasoline performance world. Y'all's technology is absolutely amazing. The anti-lag, the staging limiters, the boost limit per gear, it's insane. Diesel guys, we're like 18 months, 24 months. Obviously, some pioneers in the sport have had standalones a lot earlier. But now, more and more, guys are putting trans brake turbo 400s with no lockup torque converters and running a standalone down track that is truly, they floor it and then just let off a button and the truck drives for them. They're just riding. That's where I say is, I'm a driver, not a co-pilot. I drive my truck, not always have and always will. Some of these guys in this game, they just let off the little red button and hope the dude that they said to put it in, told the other dude what they said to put it at and hope it works out. And they're just the face that regurgitates it. Yeah, we're a lot different than that. We build our stuff, we break our stuff and we drive our stuff.

What's the most expensive mistake that you've had when it comes to the racing side of things? Does anything come to mind? That's a hardy one.

That's the best question I've been asked in many years. That's very good. I've done this a lot. I've had a lot of questions. The number one thing is the stupidest thing, and that's human error. A mechanical part always has a limit. I have not found the mechanical limits of my engines. I found my human limits. I found my limits. I found my tuner's limits, my guy's limits. But we've never blown up a motor that was not our fault. The one that exploded, I've only exploded two engines. The stock one that came with the truck, well, that's free. That's like bingo. That's the one in the center of the car. That one doesn't count. It's a stock engine. Anybody that blows a stock engine in their vehicle, that one doesn't count. That's free. And then one built motor, I forgot about the cylinder head on, right? The stock cylinder head. That one counts. I blew it up. It did not blow up. I blew it up. It's a big difference.

Okay.

So to answer your question, the most expensive lesson I've ever learned was in 25. And it was at the Ultimate Callout Challenge. And it's a triathlon, drag race, dyno, sled pull. No rules. Let's just say no rules. I went all weekend and did not turn on the nitrous. So I went all weekend on fuel only. We got, I don't remember all the numbers. I think I got fifth in drag race. And I only used like 1400 of drag race and got fifth. I think we had like 565 at 135 or somewhere around there. Okay, that was fair. And then I wrecked, I broke a drive shaft and wrecked. And then we dynoed and we did 2000, like four or five times, but I think it stopped at like 25 or 23 fuel only. Had no clue my nitrous didn't come on, which I was having problems. So you only have 30 minutes on the dyno, so you're always in a crunch. And then sled pulling, we got second, and we were on fuel only. And the whole event, we got second, which is great. If I would have had my nitrous, I would have had first, no doubt in my mind, I would have done the number on the dyno and we would have had first place. So the most expensive mistake is not checking your own tune up. And by the expense, I say it like you have eight people, you have five trucks, three trailers, probably six hotel rooms, five days of eight people in six hotel rooms, 12 days away from the shop, 500 gallons in diesel fuel. We took two motors, three transmissions, like two sets of pumps, four sets of injectors, probably 10 turbochargers. It's a hundred thousand dollar weekend to go to the Ultimate Callout Challenge and try to compete. And I did it. And I did it the best I've ever done. And I've done it for years, probably six years. Pretty much always been top five. And this past year, 25, we did our best. We got second. And I made the mistake and didn't even have nitrous turned on. And I carry that weight. And I don't plan on competing at the Ultimate Callout Challenge again. And I can say here, I don't really plan on racing much this year. I'm ready to start focusing on business and my marriage. I'm going to put my marriage first and my business second. That's not been the past eight years of my life. I'm tired. I'm broke. I'm tired of being broke. I'm ready to be happy. I want to stay married and I want to have my own company. If that means the helmet collects dust, so be it. There will be tracks. I've got four or five trucks. Tracks are all across Texas. So I'm going to stay here for a little while. So I'm living with my best results of second place. I'm fine with that. I'm content with that. I gave it all my effort, but it's a human failure that I didn't click all the like the boost parameter, the RPM parameter and the throttle percent parameter. You have safeties. I didn't have them all turned on. Okay. That's a lesson. Another expensive lesson was the stock cylinder head.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a $10,000 block that I blew the back of it out, plus ruined the connecting rods, plus six pistons broke down the middle, plus the camshaft it took out, plus fixing the cylinder head that wasn't mine. Yeah. Lessons are easy, you know. It only matters if you don't learn anything from your lesson. If you don't learn anything, it's for nothing. But if you learn from your mistake, then it's worth it.

Have you gotten first at the Ultimate Call of Challenge before?

Nope.

Okay. But always top five.

Yep. I don't have a first place finishing trophy. I have first place drag race, first place dyno, first place sled pull, dirt drag, street drive, whatever. I have all those. I don't have first place position from the triathlon of all three put together, or really a sweep. First drag, first dyno, first sled, and first place for all three segments. You're talking $50,000 payday.

Wow.

But yeah, I always wanted that. And I tried my hardest. And I've forced it the past three years. I have forced racing. I just cannot do this anymore.

Is there people who haven't done clean sweeps, then, out there? Like for those events?

I don't know for sure. I don't think. Maybe in the first year or two of the competition, there was a few that clean sweeped. But you're talking back then, there were like six to eight competitors. And last year, I think there was 17 competitors signed up and 12 showed up. I've been to competitions that have had 71 competitors for the triathlon. 71 trucks to dirt drag, drag race, dyno, sled pull, street drive, drag race. Like holy, you're talking seven rounds of drag racing in a 48 RE. That's not easy for a Dodge diesel guy. For a Cummins guy, that's not easy.

So it's basically, it's not next to impossible, but insanely difficult to do it at that level then.

I would say to get a clean sweep at UCC or King of the Street would be the hardest feet in all of diesel drag racing. To get first in every competition of the segments and get first place overall, I don't know of anyone that's done it. And anyone that could, they're probably gonna be the baddest dude alive right now, or the most lucky individual, because so much of this is luck. One competitor, one Titan has a problem, and then you lose a very fierce competitor, and then it completely changes the demographic of the weekend. You have to live for three to five days, every day racing, just because you're winning Friday night doesn't mean you're winning Sunday. I've been there, I've been in second, I've been so close, and then I went 35 feet in sled pull and smoked a training, and then took last and went from second to like, I think it took me to fourth or something or fifth, it was tough, it was a hard one, it was a real hard one to lose. But you know, when you're in that moment and the pressure is on you, and you have all the live streams, and you're at a competition where let's say there's between 20 and 30,000 people at the event all weekend and there's 500 trucks on the property competing, and then you lose in front of everybody, and I'm a very controversial competitor. I have a reputation. To some, they love me, to some, they hate me. When you lose in front of everybody, you can't act up. When you open that door of that truck, and you get out knowing you just took an L, you can't throw those gloves or that helmet, and you can't cuss, and you can't start getting out of here and making excuses. You have to learn from it, and you have to be a leader and show others. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of, that's a bunch of pressure out there. Everyone's always watching everything you do these days. So I always try to act right. Most of the time I try to act right. I definitely act up.

I haven't found anybody perfect yet.

That's the truth. You're gonna have a...

And yeah, you're gonna be like episode 196, 197. I don't know. We'll see you in the stairs. Haven't met anybody perfect yet. Well, I'll let you know when I get to 1,000.

There we go.

Speaking of being that kind of role model, let's call it. You mentioned you have like a 19 year old kid over here working as well. How do you be a role model for this upcoming generation? Cause you said you're about to turn 40. How do you make it? I'm 26.

I'm getting old. Can you tell? So, well, I have to learn. If you don't learn something every day, where you even trying, you have to try every day. And if you don't learn, you're not trying life hard enough. I've made a lot of mistakes. I've had to humble. I've had to answer for things I don't want to. And I've had to learn from that. And I always try to implement better to people younger, the people that are older and have experienced these things. It's our job to raise these other people better because they're going to be the ones taking care of us when we're old, which is a really scary idea, right? Terrifying. Yeah, it's a completely scary idea. But I want relationships that last a long time. I told Riley, he gives me 10 years, I'll give him the company. I don't have to be full owner in this bad boy. I'm in a position now where we've been working really hard up here for about eight years at this event, or at this company, this Unrivaled Diesel, this Dodge Diesel repair facility. I don't have to turn the wrenches anymore. I don't have to talk to all the clients. I don't have to run the schedule. I don't have to look at the bills. I should. That's why I'm changing my ways, because I'm ready to make the next five to 10 years way better than the last five to 10 years. I'm going to put everything in the people that stand behind me to give them the very best conditions, to get the best possible results they can want. I'll do anything to support them.

How about when it comes to the education side of things, right? Because you don't know what you don't know. When it comes to, what is the biggest misconception, right? If for somebody that wants to get into the diesel game, what are some mistakes that you see that could be addressed?

Education is tremendous. I spend a lot of time educating customers on my beliefs, my opinions and the way I do things. And you can educate people in life. You can educate them on how to use their hands and how to use tools and how to do things mechanical. For example, everything that we do, humans have done. These engines, someone designed these diesel engines. There's nothing to say that we, as modern day people, are any better or worse than the guy that originally designed the engine. Take the transmission, take an automatic transmission. That really hasn't changed much. We still have valve bodies. We still have constant and variable pressure pumps. We still have solenoids. We still have clutches, bands, levers, strut, anchors, sprags, all these things. The technology is the same, but yet we're better at it. Well, there's a lot of area for improvement in these products. These people, you have to teach that. If I build a motor, I'm not putting in a part that was a known component to fail. I don't build stock transmissions because they're terrible. Life's too short to be stock. If a component's gonna fail, I'm gonna put it in the training so it doesn't fail. And then I prefer to get all of my help young and blank, like a canvas that's ready for the first stroke of color from the artist's brush. If you bring in bad habits, you can't break that. And there's a lot of opinions in this game. And I'm very opinionated in this diesel game. I'm very particular in what I do. And I want my people to do what I want to do, not what they want to do, because it's not their engine specs or their program they're running. So older techs can definitely bring in bad habits and it's hard to correct that. Younger techs, I can invest two, five, eight years into and do continue in education, but push them for how I want them to be and mold them and create them. And then that is going to in turn, turn a long employee, a long friendship into family.

When it comes to engine programs and specs, and I'll grant to this part, you won't necessarily have to share out there. What is it that you think you do differently compared to other competitors that kept you successful and at the top for so long? Anything in particular?

I think there's several things. Number one, I'm blatantly honest. I am blatantly dry. I don't have a filter which sees what you get. Number two, I only give you what I know works on my experiences. So, my specs, from what I've done and didn't work, I'm never going to cross that again. If I ran, let's just say, piston ring gap or piston to wall clearance or transmission shaft play or clutch clearance, line pressure, all those things are variables and they're all pieces of a cake and you can shape them and create them to how you want it to taste. And I've done a lot of experimenting. I've broken a whole lot of stuff. I've had a lot of stuff really work out very well. I think the best piece of advice I could give on engines, on transmissions, in tuning, the most stock you keep it or the closer to stock parameters you keep it, the longer they live. You don't have to have custom pistons. You don't have to have valves that lift the... Let me rephrase that. You don't have to have a camshaft that lifts a valve further than what the head flows. So, a lot of people have a radical a** camshaft with a head that doesn't flow what that valve is lifting at, and it's wasted time. It's wasted power below the curve. It's wasted low flow below the lift. There's a lot of opportunities. Well, they fly cut pistons. Now, you have sharp edges for pre-ignition. It is a diesel. It depends on pre-ignition. And then you're creating vortices in the... Like a turbulent, violent, volatile fire on top of the piston. They melt easier. And you didn't even need that big a** camshaft to start with. If you would have stuck with a cam that didn't need a valve relief, you would have saved yourself $1,000 for the reliefs, run a cam that would spool up 400 RPM quicker, idle better. Combination, combination, so much of it. And a lot of people go crazy. They think they got to decompress it to run more boost. Oh no, I love compression. So, there's a lot of parts there.

Interesting, okay. All right, let's talk about the rest of the combination. So you touched on cam. Is there anything else that's important when it comes out? At this point, are you talking about turbo sizing as well?

We can talk about all those things. So there's Happy Islands. You know, we all know Hawaii, like that's a great place to talk about, right? One day I'm gonna go there, maybe next year, you never know. If I don't race, right? So there's Happy Islands, and you have to get in a boat and go to the next island, and the next island could be bigger or smaller, far short. Well, that's how horsepower is. 800 horsepower, $20,000. A thousand horsepower, $40,000. Well, oh my God, Chris, it's only two or more horsepower. Or now you need a built motor, because that stock connecting rod is not gonna do this a long time for you. It might, but I don't want to do that to you. I don't want to charge you $20,000 and you leave, and then TX2K's this weekend. Let's say we take it out tonight, and then we throw the rods on I-35 at 1130 tonight. Well, now it's like $60,000 or $50,000, because you took out your ECM. I had a customer throw a connecting rod, it blew past the block, broke the starter off the adapter plate, the connecting rod hit the brake line, cut the brake line, truck had to ditch it. 37s, weld-in-truck, twin-turbo, 800 horsepower, 8,000 pound, dually, Texas, pipeline or weld-in-truck, six inches lift, Carly long arms, 37 inch mud grips, ditched it. Like things go bad quick. So you want 1,000, you need a built motor around me, or you sign this liability of release, and you have had all the educational talks, and here you go. So, okay, let's just keep it real short and simple. 800 horse, single turbocharger, 100% over injector, a 12 millimeter injection pump, stock injection pump is eight millimeters, so it's a good size for volume. And then you're tuning your head stud, your push rod, your valve spring, 20 to 30,000. Well, you need a transmission no matter what, so then you have choices there. But then after that, you're talking 1,000 to 1,200, now you're talking 120 to 150 % over injector. A bigger turbo, like a GT42 VS7289 for $950, they're absolutely amazing turbos, and they make good power for a long time, and then you're in the built motor range. And after that, you're talking 2,000 horse, so then you're talking 200, 250%, 14 millimeter pump. Two turbos, because that's way funner than one turbo, or one turbo with a whole bunch of nitrous if you're only drag racing. Two turbos, if you're on the street, call those compound, like a two-stage air compressor, big turbo, blows in small turbo, small turbo blows into the motor. And then 2,000 horse. Now, with all this, there's one rule I've always said, and it's the five-gallon bucket rule. Whenever you got on the weekend with your buddies, and you know you're going to be acting up, put a five-gallon bucket in the bed of the truck, because you're going to need it to pick the pieces up. The pistons, the rods, the block, you're going to want to pick up your carnage. Everyone likes it. Everyone wants a piece of their busted block. Here you go, here's your piston, what was left of it. So they explode, for sure. But for a tractor engine, they're amazing. It's a straight six-diesel engine, 15, 36, 24. They are so simple. They're naturally balanced. You can leave the cylinder head on and do push rods, valve spring injectors, like 1,000 horsepower and it will live for multiple years. It's very impressive. There's not a lot of engines that make 1,000 from the factory. They're only rated at 325. Yeah, we're slightly over that now. 1,000 on the ground, 325 at the flywheel. Impressive. It's the LS1 of the diesel world. It's the 2JZ of the diesel world. Really the 2JZ.

Yeah. Okay. And I definitely want to talk about that because we talked a little bit about that off camera earlier. I do want to touch on that. Let's go back to the islands, though. You mentioned, so what, 800 horsepower, 20 gram, thousands, 40 grand.

Bigger island.

What do those next islands look like?

Oh, 100.

Okay.

2,000.

Okay.

And after that, you don't even keep track.

Okay, so that's really the only next jump is from 1,000 to 2,000.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the way I build motors, it's either gonna be a stock rod and it's like 800 to 1,000. It'll be a street fighter. It's like 800 to 1,000 or 1,200 to 1,500. And if you want anything over about that, aftermarket block, D&J rod, big, big stuff. Like you need probably 40,000 for just the motor, 20,000 for just the training, 10,000 on fuel, 10,000 on air. It's only 4,000 for the turbos, but six grand worth of pipes, flanges, sensors, couplers, hoses, clamps, vibrant, it's expensive stuff, intercooler.

Speaking of all that aspect, are you doing a lot of the welding here yourself, or what does that look like?

Just a little cheap ACDC TIG welder, 220-amp jobber, I've had it for like 10 years. We do all of our own welding, pretty much aluminum, steel, cast iron, stainless, whatever.

Okay. How much is custom versus you could get it from a supplier of some kind?

Ooh, it's a good question. You can get anything you want to from a supplier. The very best products in the world don't mean s*** if they don't have customer service. So you have to learn who to do business with and who not to do business with. And then turnaround time. There's three things in this game that I tell every person. The quality of part that you're being sold or that you're buying, the customer service before and after the sell for the part or the service is provided. And then the price point. How much is it? When you change that order, quality, service, price, you get different results. And that's the exact order I go in. I'm not the cheapest buy, cheapest guy by any means, but I'll always stand behind my work and I'll always try to offer the very best product on the market. Now there is budgets, there is decisions, but there's a whole lot of good stuff out there and there's a whole lot of bad stuff. I try to build everything myself. The more factors I control under this roof, the better my product is and the better service I can provide and the more expected outcomes I can guarantee. When you start involving other companies and other people, other tuners, other injector builders, other turbo builders, other engine builders, training builders, whatever it is, the more people in the conversation, the muddier the water gets.

So then, and I'm talking present day, what happens five years from now? Who cares? That's up in the air, especially with private equity gobbling up everybody. We never know.

That's a big thing now.

It's a big thing to pay attention to in the quality space, but who are some of the brands and partners and whatever vendors that you work with right now that you respect, that you would wholeheartedly recommend? Is there anyone?

Sure, absolutely. Everyone I've worked with has became very good friends and family. The number one relationship that has done the most for us and our longest relationship is probably Dawn and April Morrison at Flux Diesel Injection. They're a family owned diesel fuel injector company. They are here in White Right, Texas. So they're like two hours from here and I'm all about my Texas based companies. Dawn and Ape have stood behind me forever since the very first time I was referred to them. I called them, I want a thousand horse, I want 250 percent, I thought I knew. And they educated me. And then we opened a relationship and I bought injectors and they got them. And we put them in and then we started going nuts. And then Dawn's like, trust me, man, I got this injector, it's going to do this, it's going to do that. And then we got products and we hurt things and we develop things and we learn things. And we went forward and we went backwards. But we developed a bunch of stuff. And then we made a decision not to go to an event because we kept blowing up motors. And we finally had a motor that held. And then it did 2,500 and everyone's like, it'll never do it again. And then it did 25 and then it did 3 and then it did 34. So Don Ape at Flex Diesel, they have been absolutely amazing. So they do all of our fuel injector work. Then I've had an excellent relationship. Dan Valance, Valair Clutch, he's 20 minutes down the street. He's a clutch guy. He builds some amazing sled pulling clutches, but he's an amazing friend, sponsor, associate to have in life. And we buy all of our clutches from them, our transmission torque converters, input shafts and rebuild kits come from them. And that leads me to the torque converter discussion, which is also Phil Taylor of Diesel Performance Converter, DPC Converter. He's out of state. He's in Georgia. And that's okay. We love Phil. Phil's stood behind us forever. Phil builds the converters for Dan. And so I buy the converters from Dan because he's like 20 minutes down the street, and it's still Phil's converter from Georgia, supports my Texas guy. I don't have to pay shipping. I don't have to pay cores, and they're in stock. The torque converter has been amazing with Phil. We've broke a lot, but we've sold a whole bunch. And then that goes into the input shaft, which is Matt Sancher, Sancher Performance Development. He made a 37-spline, industry first, solid 47-48 RE input shaft. No oil goes through the shaft. Traditionally, when you lock up a torque converter, there's a plow circuit in the center of the input shaft, locks the torque converter. This one is backwards, so the shaft is solid. Amazing. There's only one broken. Some have been wounded. I've wounded one, but only one's ever been broken in the industry, which is amazing. And then in the transmission, we built our own transmissions. We've never had an input shaft failure since we went to Matt. And then also, that leads us to the valve body, which is Muldoon's Diesel. And Muldoon's is in Delaware or maybe just north of Delaware. I forget the name of that state. The only state that matters is Texas. But John builds the amazing valve bodies, and he is ADD, OCD, ADHD. He is definitely on the spectrum, and we get along so good. He's a wealth of information. His valve body program is amazing. The week we went through six trainings on Drag Week, I talked with him exclusively. He was like, hey, don't try that pump pressure. I told you all that s*** wasn't going to work. Turn it down to this and do this and run this, and then let me know. And we did, and it worked, and it worked. And I just, I started talking with John more and more ever since. And that's our transmission department. And then we have Yukon Gear and Axle. Yukon has sponsored me gears and shafts, and we've had amazing results out of that. VS Racing Turbo Chargers, surely you know VS Racing. Amazing. Billet ball bearing water-cooled turbos for less than a thousand bucks. 106 by 118 GT57 replacement is $2,100 out the door.

It's crazy what you're doing with those two.

Oh my gosh, brother. I have oversped the s*** out of them and they don't explode. I haven't, I better knock on some wood. I haven't ever exploded one of those turbo chargers.

What kind of PSI are you getting out of this? Again, that's such a low level question, but yeah.

Used to be, I couldn't answer that because of my stock map sensor. I would say, oh, 37 pounds. Well, that's just where it stops reading. So I put a GoPro on my helmet at one track and had a standalone boost gauge like everyone runs that normally runs gauges and stuff and data acquisition. And then just down the drag strip, like a 550 pass, it said 120 pounds of boost. Conservative. And then I've been on the Dyno with triples and I've seen 200. I've also seen 140, typically 140 to 160. Now there's these really stupid things called wastegates. They're completely ridiculous. So that plays a role. And then nitrous has the most bear on boost pressure from what I've seen.

Okay.

Yeah.

And that all just gets way more intricate. Obviously, it's more than just a number on the gauge and all that. I do want to talk about nitrous though. I've kind of been dancing around it this whole time.

Oh, it's the best thing invented. It is. I'm not supposed to say it, but it's literally like the bam bam. It is like the best stuff ever. Way more powerful than a turbocharger, way more powerful than diesel fuel by itself. But the combination of diesel fuel, plus boost pressure, plus atmosphere in a bottle. Oh my God. It's like the best stuff.

So you were running six kits, correct?

I've had a bunch. I've had up to eight solenoids before. Okay.

So explain how all that works for me. Is that just like, you just keep adding one each sort of pass or?

Excellent question. A lot of people don't know, especially gas people. I'm surprised you didn't ask if it was wet or dry.

That's a good one, right?

All dry. We don't flow any fuel. All of our fuel is directly injected, direct injection through the fuel injector. So when I say a kit, I mean a solenoid. And typically when I mean a solenoid, the small solenoids, Nitrous Express is another wonderful, amazing sponsor that stood behind me forever. So typically a small solenoid is a Nitrous Express 15300L, which is 125,000th internal restriction. We supply that, each noid kind of gets its own supply line and probably with its own bottle. So that would be like a dash six supply with 125 internal restrictor on the solenoid to a dash four hose straight to the pipe. No jets, no pills, no cannons, no stupid nothings. Literally a three eight MPT to dash four bung in a pipe, in a charge pipe onto the intercooler or the turbo or whatever. And then each noid gets its own supply line. So a small kit is 125. Let's say you had five of those, five 15 300Ls, 22 amps a piece or 17 amps or whatever. And that's about 300 horsepower per solenoid. That's drag race, that's sled pull, that's like down track horsepower. And then one of those you might put on a button or two of those you might put on a button, you might put like a 55 jet or an 85 jet or 100 jet. And that's like a spool jet. Like when you're half throttling, you want to get the turbos up to speed, you kind of bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And it'll add five pounds every time you bump the button. And then you have the big nitrous. And this is the really, oh my God, I love this. Everyone said I was crazy when I first did it. And I was and still am. Have you heard of a Nitrous Express Lightning 375? You haven't heard of these?

This whole world is really, really like, I don't know a ton about that.

This is the biggest, the biggest solenoid Nitrous Express makes. We supply it with a dash eight hose. So 0.5 internal diameter to the hose with one 15 pound bottle with a high flow valve. And then that goes in the noid and coming out of the noid is another dash eight, 0.5 diameter hose that goes to a half inch pipe plug to a dash eight fitting in the charge pipe independently. So let's say we have three or four of those solenoids. The internal size of that solenoid is 0.375 of an inch. So three-eighths of an inch. Right? So it's that big, right? So you got three or four of those with a 15 pound bottle at 1,250 PSI of its own supply. So yeah, you got six bottles behind you. You have to open them all. And you got these huge hoses that you hope a hose doesn't blow off and start whipping around in the cab with you. One year, I put all these bottles in the back, so I didn't want any hoses in the cab. I've seen a bottle come out of the cab through the windshield. I've seen hoses. I've lost a few hoses. It's scary. Dash-eight hose whipping around in the cab with you. The thing's 15 feet long, unsecured for six foot of the cab. Yeah, elephant trunk, empty in nitrous as fast as it can. So, okay, if you just start doing some basic math, we're basically spraying an inch and a half diameter of nitrous. If you got 3.375, so that's already 3 3 8. So that's what? Nine eights. So that's an inch 125 right there, 1.125. Then you add in all your 15 300Ls that are 125 piece. You got four or five of those. That's going to be another half inch, five eights of an inch. So a bunch, a bunch.

Okay. So what does that equate to then? You flip all that on. What does that mean?

Like one good nitrous run and everything works on the Dyno, 3000 horsepower plus eight to 14 pounds of nitrous emptied in three tenths of a second. Like you've seen the Dyno runs. Oh God. Do we have to talk about Dynos now? Like you get it. It's foreplay. You get it running good and you're dragging the brake. The rotors turn orange. We have four rear brake caliper rotors and you drag the brake to make it jet black smoke. And then you jab the fuel and you bump nitrous until it cleans up the smoke. And then you make 10 or 15 pounds of boost. And then you jab it more with fuel, makes it smoke. You hit the brakes more and then you grab another spool jet. So you're like two or three spool jets in now on the Dyno and you're dragging the brake and it's smoking and the rotors are orange and throwing metal. I'm talking 50, 60 feet in the air, molten rotors. I have a pile of rotors here I can show you.

You got to show me that after that.

And you're two or three kits and you're holding back 15 or 20 pounds of boost and the whole entire truck is shaking because you're at 80 miles an hour. You're at 2800 RPM and final gear. And then you're just holding the boost. And as soon as he says, we're good, or you say, we're good, hit the button, hit the load, he brings on however much load you say. I have to say these things in a certain order. He brings on the load you say when you say it and you run as fast as you can through the RPM of the load on the Dyno. The Dyno has no rules. Drag racing, it's an eighth mile. There's staged, pre-staged, a laser two inches off the track, six inches apart. There's 330, there's 660, there's a thousand, there's a mile per hour speed trap at the end. Sled pulling has a counter wheel that goes on the ground that measures mile per hour in distance pulled. It has a floating finish. That's the racetrack. The Dyno doesn't have any of that. You calibrate the Dyno at 2000 RPM and the gear you're gonna pull in, you tell the Dyno operator what load and when to bring it, and then he does it, and then you just floor it. Well, you toss the baseball in the air and swing the baseball bat at the right time with the right trajectory, and you might hit the ball and it might do a home run, or you might foul and it goes out, or you might miss altogether. It's a strike. So you have to do all these things at the perfect time between sitting there at 800 horsepower, melting your brakes, trying to get the boost pressure up enough that you can slap. Oh, here we go, the nitrous slap. That's the word they hated. So you can slap it all at once. And it's literally, how long can you hold your hand on the skillet? Well, how hot's the skillet? If the skillet's 100 degrees, you could put your hand on it all day. If the skillet's 120 degrees, how long can you touch it? 20 seconds, 15 seconds. If the skillet's 140 degrees, how long can you touch it? Yeah, well, this skillet's about 300 and freaking degrees. Like, it's like, I might burn myself if I touch it too long. The horsepower that we're known for, the horsepower we make, the Mr. 3000, is only good for winning Dyno competitions. That is it. If you strapped, if you change the rules to the Dyno, if you put it on a hub Dyno, and you had a generic set of rules with a generic load that was the same for everybody, and you had to pull from 2500 RPM to 5500 RPM at 50% load, and you were allowed 500 RPM of rise per second, it would be a really long pull. 25, 3, 35, 4, 45, 5, 55. Is that six, that's three seconds if you're allowed, all right, something like that. It's a bunch. It's more than three tenths of a second or one tenth of a second or six tenths of a second. The more power you make, the easier you push through the load. If the rules of the Dyno change, and the load is variable, and it controls RPM rise, engines are going to explode like crazy. There's no way we could do what we do. Now, if you changed your engine development program and you did not have eight kits of nitrous, well, then sure, you could make horsepower that's sustained over RPM over a long period of time, but there's no way I would ever try to hold this engine back on RPM. It is scary and insane every time we go up.

So you're saying if you were to just do fuel only all day long?

Yeah, fuel only all day long. And you had a set rise of RPM, you could manage your power. But whenever you just shower power is what I call, like how long can you touch the red hot skillet on the stove? That's all we're trying to do. But if you know that you have to hold it for five or six seconds and it has to live, it's a whole another. What if the rule is different? If your engine blew up on the Dyno, your runs don't count. Well, right now, if it blows up, the number still counts. You still did 1,400 or 8,500 or whatever the heck the number is going to be, right? It counts. But if you had to drive it off the Dyno, now you're talking a different set of rules.

All right, so let's just say you were given the power to completely change the Dyno events across the country. What's the rule set? What would be the perfect rule set if you were to run a Dyno event?

Well, definitely not to be a hub dyno because tire slip is a thing. The ability to hold a tire to a 40 inch roller, like that's hard to do. I've definitely had expensive mistakes there. I've put VHD on the rollers and spun tires and ruined it. It would have to be a hub dyno.

As in ruin the rollers?

Yeah. You put an oily substance on the roller and then the next guy really hates you. Josh McCormick blamed me for years for not making power when he could have because I put VHD on the roller before him. It's fine. It still blew up, his blew up. I'll still take it, whatever. Me and Josh battle all the time. I guess I should say did. Don't plan on battling much anymore, but a hub dyno with a set RPM rise across a second, it has to be a laid out rule. Short story, shorter, long story short. I did the Diesel Power Challenge in 2019. I was the official alternate. This was in Colorado. Street legal trucks, drag race dyno, street drive to 13,000 feet at the Red Rock Amplitheater, 100 miles, eighth mile drag, no, quarter mile drag race, eighth mile drag race with a skid steer on a bumper pull trailer, a 10,000 pound skid steer on a 28 foot steel bumper pull trailer. Eighth mile drag race, sign me up. That's freaking cool. And then it also had a fuel economy test. And this was done at the ATS Diesel dyno in Colorado. And the roller RPM varied. It was a simulated road drive. You had to keep the RPM of the roller between these graphs and your RPM had to stay between them. For every second your RPM was out, it was certain points off. And the load would go up and down. So you'd have to throttle in to maintain the roller mile per hour. And it would lug you to like 1200 RPM. You would have to downshift on the roller. Guys were downshifting in their trucks. So that was very, very interesting. That's an example where there's a set rule on the dyno. You have to drive the same condition everyone else has to drive in. If you dyno a truck like that, it would be fair. It would be way more fair. I simply took advantage of an open system. That's all I did. There's no rules on the dyno. Still no rules.

When it comes to dyno, I remember watching a Banks video. Again, that's where I learned a little bit about diesel stuff over the last couple of years. Let's say somebody comes here for 800 horsepower, 1,000 horsepower truck. Are you doing any dyno work? Is it so just copy paste at this point? And if they do go to the dyno, what do those pulls look like?

Okay. There's a lot of good stuff there. We'll come back around to Gil Banks. I definitely want to talk about him. 800 horsepower? No. I'm going to street tune it or data log it on the streets, send it to the tuner, revise four or five revisions. Definitely looking at data. It's so cookie cutter. 800 to 1,000, I don't have to go to the dyno. Most people that get 800 to 1,000 are realistic minded folks. They're not asking for too much or too little. They probably, most of them don't have built motors. So it's a little bit more of a safe 800 because you can make it 100 that's not safe and you can definitely make it safe. So those are cookie cutters. Now after 1,000, yes, we do go to the dyno. We use calibrated addiction. His name is Robert Ivy. He's down in Kingsland, Texas. He's about three and a half hours south of here. He has a Superflow 849 dyno in his shop. That's the very same dyno that the Northwest Dyno Circuit has, which is the dyno for competition in diesel performance world. It's a Superflow 849. It goes to UCC. It travels the whole North America all year. Robert has the same dyno three hours south. Robert's my tuner. It's 150 or 180, I forget. It's a set hourly rate to get on the dyno. So I got a 43 foot triple axle scenario or dual tandem, whatever. I load up trucks, I drive them down. I spend down there all day. Leave the house at three o'clock in the morning, come home at nine o'clock at night, dyno on three or four trucks. And they're on the rollers all day, like 10, 12, 15 pulls. It's nuts. We do steady state load testing. Let's say you get it in your pull gear, like fourth gear, one to one, steady state roller, your torque converter's locked up. And then let's say you want to find out how fast the turbo can spool up at what RPM. Let's say 2000 RPM. Give it all the fuel at 2000. But at 2000 RPM, you cannot overcome the speed of the roller. The load of the roller, the engine cannot make enough power. We're talking like 80,000 pounds of force. And then he can drive into the roller at 2000 and it stops the Dyno and just wahhh! And he goes wide open and just sits at 2000. How long does it take the turbo to come up to full boost pressure? And how much fuel does it take to make the turbo spool up? Steady state. And then we try 1900 and then 1800 and then 17. And then we'll try 21 and 22. We will bring fuel to make the turbo chargers or turbo spool up as fast as it can. And then that's how we like to tune it. And that's working on the bottom half of the curve. That's not saying, oh, it made 800, do another pull. It made 805, add two more degrees. It made 843, add two more. It made 880. That's not, that's not increasing power. That's increasing drivability and turbocharger response on the street. Think about this, on gasolines, y'all control air. You have a throttle body. You have a sensor that reads vacuum. We don't. We have no throttle bodies. We have no vacuum. We run unlimited air as much as fast and as cool and as dense as we can get it. Great. So we have to find out how to spool it as fast as we can. And that takes fuel to do it. And you drive into it. And this is where you're looking at those stoichiometric air to fuel ratios of diesel. This is where you're doing cubic millimeters of fuel injected to how much air the turbocharger moves according to the compressor map and getting the theoretic horsepower on paper and then getting proven horsepower on the ground. So I go do that. And I work out these customer's trucks forever. And then it's like, yeah, we did 12 pulls. We picked up 113 horsepower total on a safe number. But now we picked up 400 pound-feet of torque and we got 400 RPM quicker spooling turbo now. Okay, another way to think about this. If you're blowing up balloons at your birthday party, the bigger the balloon, the harder it is to blow it up. The hardier lungs have to push air into turbochargers, intercooler pipe diameter, intercooler core thickness, intercooler flow, head flow, head volume, T4, T3, T6, turbines. All these things, the turbine housing ARs, they all air. It's all about air flow. Well, you have to inflate that thing every time. Every time you breathe, you have to charge that thing up to full pressure. Charge it as fast as you can. A smaller pipe charges up quicker and has a higher port velocity, which has more of a turbulent combustion process. Nitrous just helps all of it. Two turbos does it even better. Air flow, as much as you can.

There are some things you said there, like when you talk about the velocity and all that. How does that go into, again, everything about this seems to be like a sizing thing, because you're trying to move as much air through there as possible. Does that kind of impact how you build various stages of trucks? Again, 1000 horsepower, 15, whatever. I guess, do you have a particular philosophy when it comes to that, that might differ from anybody else or not really?

There's definitely forks in the road. There's definitely combinations. There's definitely sizing. This has to be very appropriate. I could say this is like bowling. If you and I are going to go bowling tonight and you pick up a 13 pound bowling ball and I pick up an eight pound bowling ball, I'll probably be more accurate all night and have higher points across all the games because it's a lighter weight that I can consistently control. Yours is going to be so heavy, you're going to lose the ability to control it. Now it has more momentum and will knock down more pins and have more torque and inertia and mass and all that. It's way harder to control. So you can't utilize it to your best ability. If you have a smaller turbo that you can drive harder, make boost sooner, which means more torque, which means less smoke for us because it's burning the fuel faster, you'll make more power down low. Now the bigger turbo, bigger guy, he's going to catch up, but he's going to have to catch up like two or three seconds after you're already a gear or two ahead, or you might be at 40 pounds and he's at 20 pounds. And by the time you're at 60 pounds, he'll be at a hundred pounds. And then he's going to come on like freight train. So there is sizing, a hundred percent sizing. And this is again where, what are you going to do with this truck? Are you going to drive it to work on Monday? Are you going to take the wife out tonight in it? And then do you have a skid steer you're going to go move around? You want 800 to 1,002 turbos built motor, like you want a truck that's strong. But if you're only going to take it and do a sunshine holler, only pop the sun roof and never put anything in the bed and only drive it in perfect conditions, absolutely, 200%. It's one big turbo, a stock motor, and here you go, have fun. It's cheap, it's fast, and it will explode. But you're not going to hook to a sled. You're not putting radials on it. You're not going to dyno it. You're not going to take it to dirt drag. You're going to drive it on the street. After a thousand horsepower on the street and two wheel drive, all they do is spin tires. I could take you out on the property and take you in six trucks right now that will destroy the tires till 120 miles an hour in two wheel drive. You can't go wide open. I can't emphasize enough how much fun 800 horsepower is and how useless 1200 horsepower is daily in two wheel drive. Now, four wheel drive? Well, now you're talking to how I drive, which is 1200 horsepower in four wheel drive, 100 miles an hour every day, 4000 RPM every day, and you can control it, but you can't really just drive around in four wheel drive in a Dodge diesel all day long and never put a transfer case in it or lose a front drive line. These trucks aren't meant to do this, but they sure do.

I was going to say, we come from the north, it's like we're always in four wheel drive.

Yeah, that's right.

Jealous of you guys down here. You guys can drive whatever you want down here.

We have nice trucks. We have beautiful weather. The racetracks are open 51 weeks of the year.

What's the week they're closed?

Christmas Eve.

Okay, I was going to say.

Typically Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve. All the racetracks close, but the streets never close in Texas. They never close. You want to go out tonight? It is TX2K. I guarantee you, you're going to have a good time. We'll probably be in jail. My wife is out of town. I can't. I'm watching the dog. Like, we can't go out tonight. We got to stay here.

I'm trying to decide what to have. Two questions. I'll go with this one first. I'm going to use drag racing as an example. It's a very kind of universal thing that it's easy to equate to. What's the fastest you've, or quick fastest, sorry, what's the quickest you've gone at the track?

I like how you use your words, quick and fast. Those are two different things. The best track time I've ever got was in UCC in 24. I went down this track at 2000 horsepower, which is like tuned to, and you sometimes you have to crawl before you run. And the stupid truck went 543 at 143, and it weighed 5500 pounds, and it did it on fuel only. And I was like, wow, it went really fast. And I turned it down and it went faster than when I turned it up. It was interesting. And for whatever reason ever since, and I haven't ever been that fast. I've had a lot of problems ever since then, but I've never had that much luck in that weekend at that track. Now we've done some testing here on like no time events at the track, but the prep on a track in Texas is probably the very best prep you're ever going to come to. If we go to Ennis tonight, I guarantee you, you're going to see guys losing their shoes, losing the centers of the wheels on the three piece race wheels. It'll shear off all the bolts. Like the prep is nuts. I can get down in Texas way better than I can get down in Ohio or Delaware or Indy or Tennessee or New Mexico or Colorado or Salt Lake or any of those other big ones. The prep is insane. So I can turn it up and it holds and it works. But yeah, 543 at 143.

Okay. And then is that kind of like sort of like an unlimited class? Is that index? How is that exactly worth?

That's as much as it'll hold.

Okay. What does that, what does it look like below that? Because you were always doing 543s.

Okay.

What kind of classes are we talking about when we talk diesel racing?

Okay. Great question. There's a bunch of classes in diesel racing. Let's talk about diesel drag racing. There's a real big one, Outlaw Diesel Super Series, ODSS. Group of guys owns this. There's about three or four sanctioned bodies in diesel racing. This year, they're coming together and we're all sitting at the table and we're actually listening to one another, which is different from years of the past. So now that we're all around the table eating dinner, we can have some good conversations and things can go forward. There is really, really big drag racing, mainly on the East Coast, some on the West Coast, hardly anything in the center that's nationwide. So 590 index, 670 index, 770 index, and Sportsman Bracket, name your time, all 8th mile. There's rules. And then there's like Super Pro, there's Pro Stock Diesel. There's some unlimited groups in the sanction bodies. And then there's definitely the index and the brackets. The index and bracket is definitely bigger. It's way easier to be a bracket racer than it is a heads up triathlon champion. Bracket racing is so easy, it's boring. I can't do the same thing. I have ADD. I feel like I'm on the spectrum. Who wants to leave something the same, make it stronger, faster, better, lighter, more powerful? So I tend to do the hell marries. I kind of like no time, and I kind of like exhibition runs more than I like trying to do your personal best or go rounds. A lot of the racing I've done, it actually isn't even a racing. It's your best time down the track, reaction doesn't matter, and we don't really have opponents. We do solo runs. It is the most strange form of racing I've ever seen. But for whatever reason, that's kind of how it has gone in the triathlon with the multiple segments. Now, if you're only drag racing this truck that you brought that you want to build, if we're only going to drag race it, all your safety equipment, all your Hans device, your personal gear, your roll cage, your wheels, your licensing, your certifications, then you're going to be a 596.70 guy. As close to run to 590 as you can. So you run 589, you ran too fast, you're out. 591, you left 100 on the table, or 10 on the table or whatever. And reaction time matters. And qualifying, and ladder, and who you draw, and time of the evening, the air density, the vapor pressure, density altitude, adjusted corrected altitude, correction factor. There's all these really good words in the game. But sometimes it's just really fun to just hee-haw it down there like a cowboy. And that's what I do. I'm definitely the wild. I'm the joker. Like when I pull up, people generally like, oh s***, here he goes. Watch this. Hang on. Is he going to hit the wall this time? I don't know.

Have you hit the wall a couple of times?

Twice.

Twice?

Okay. Yeah. One time I lost some pistons and put about five gallons of oil on all four radials. Don't do that at 130. And then one time I blew a front driveline and it transferred 2,500 horsepower to the rear tire because it blew the front driveline. And so it spun. And then I lifted and got the brake, which transferred all the way to the front. And I have four calipers on the rear and a little tiny 516s lightweight rear rotors. So it locked the spinning tire and then it came around and then it put me in the wall. It was very dramatic, very slow and uneventful, but it was fun.

All right, we talked about lower horsepower trucks, lower quotation marks.

Yeah, below 1000. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's say I want a five second truck. What does that take?

If I'm going to build you a five second truck and we're going to do this for fun, we're going to build it to make 2000, but 1500 horse will do it. And we're going to shell everything out of it. So a regular cab, long bed or short bed, short beds look a little bit...

Are we talking, was it third gen still?

Oh, absolutely. That's the only one you want. That's the best. I mean, you can get an older Mustang, but there's Fox bodies everywhere. You could get a 68 Camaro, but you know, no one really wants that.

Everybody wants a Fox body with an LS.

I mean, they make chassis kits. They make that, what's that? 25, five SFI chassis kits for a Fox body that's pre-notched and you can put it in in that bay right there. Like, oh yeah, pull it in. We'll knock it out before we leave today. Like that, yeah, it's only 50 hours worth of work, but you can buy it and it shows up in a box. That's how Dodge diesels are. That's how the third gen diesels are.

Gotcha. So third gen. All right, we'll start with that. Now what's all the fun stuff that we're adding?

Oh, nitrous.

Okay, nitrous.

And if you only want to run fives and only drag race and we're putting on a GT55, so we're gonna get a VS racing for $2,100. We'll do an 88 to a 92. We could do a 98, but really an 88 is gonna do what you want it to do. And then we're gonna put two gates on it, which I completely hate waste gates, but this is what you want it is you want a drag race and you want fives and that's it. No sled pull, no street drive, no interior, no AC. You can keep the power steering because you're gonna want the power brakes because it has a hydro boost. But yeah, drive lines, $2,000 worth of custom drive shafts, about $1,000 worth of drive shaft shields front and rear. You can do stock axles front and rear, stock gears front and rear for only going 550s to 520s. It'll do that. But you're gonna want to light as you can, 5200 pounds will do it, no problem. And it'll live for a long time. Transmissions will be happy because you have one turbo, you have half the amount of torque, and you have nitrous, which is a top-end power gang. So that's how you carry out the mile per hour once you're hooked up. So it's real simple.

Okay. But the difficulty for you lies in that you're doing all these other aspects as well, then. Is that where the difficulty lies?

That and then what you're doing with that truck. If you have a truck that's purpose-built to only drag race, if you have a enclosed trailer and you are gonna unload this thing at the track and drag it with your golf cart down to the burnout pit, fire it up, do a burnout, stage it, run it, kill it at the ticket booth, get the golf cart back to the pit, that's trailer queen. So that you can go really fast for really cheap and have a lot of simple parts.

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

All in for something like that, 40, 50 grand is a good one.

Oh, okay, sure.

For a whole truck. Transmission, air fuel.

Are we talking cages at this point as well, though, or no?

Yeah, probably. I mean, you can buy a roll cage for 2,500, and you can have someone install it for two. Okay, yeah, fair enough. How nice do you want this stuff? That dictates how well it fits, and choices.

Right, yeah.

It's all Ellicart. The menu is very vast.

Which one's the more expensive one? Would it be Dyno or Sled? Or is it like...

I'm going to say Sled Pulling is going to be more expensive, because if you only want a number, I could give you a motor that would make retarded horsepower. Ridiculous horsepower. And it's like, the only thing you can do is spray it, get on there and don't ever run that tune on the street. Don't do it. Just turn it off, turn the nitrous off. But if you want 2,500 horse through a bunch of stock parts, I could do that a couple of times. But if you want to go sled pulling at 2,000 horsepower, now we're going to have to build something.

Okay.

So it's application.

Okay.

What are you doing?

Okay. So quite a bit more up, I guess what are the main components that you're upgrading when you're considering a crazy sled pull truck?

Drive line. The engine, so to speak, doesn't matter for sled pull. Now, I know that's a ridiculous statement to make, but typically sled pulling trucks, let's take a 3.0 smooth bore. What are those words? 3.0 diameter turbo charger, so around 76 millimeters, smooth bore, no map groove in the turbo charger. They plug the front of the turbo with a tool. They limit the air. Typically a 76 or 3.0 smooth bore sled pull truck will make about 1,200, maybe 1,350, 1,400 horse, to my knowledge. Now these guys don't ever talk about their horsepower, but that's also sustained power from 2,500 to 3,000 to 6,000. The whole time, it might start at 1,100, and it's going to end at 1,000, but it peaked at 1,250 or whatever. RPM to RPM, fuel only, and it can do it for like 30 seconds at a time. That's endurance. That's like think of a monster truck. Think of a NASCAR. Endurance. And then think of a top fuel or a pro stock. One hit, that's all you got. So sled pulling, 38,000 pounds, floating finish. It pulls you to a stop, 30 seconds wide open throttle. You're not allowed nitrous because there's different rules. Remember, we covered the rules. Now the rules are different. So a different turbo setup, a different intercooler setup, no nitrous, no water injection, no water cooling across your intercooler. Like, good God, brother. The hoops you have to jump through, it's tough.

So you don't run nitrous in sled pulls then?

I mean, I do.

Oh, sure.

But I'm a triathlon. I'm a crazy man. If you're only, if you're a sled puller and you only sled pull and you have a quarter million dollar sled puller down there in that bay, no nitrous, no water, one turbo, extreme limitations.

Okay.

Extreme limitations. No water versus me, unlimited, no rules.

Gotcha.

But I got to do all three or all five or whatever segment we're doing.

Okay. That makes sense. And I'll slowly start winding us down here, but what was the, the Gale Banks, Gale Banks thing? What were you talking about there earlier?

I'm really glad you brought up Gale Banks. This is going to piss a lot of people off. I met Gale Banks in 2018. I had the opportunity to spend four or five hours with him at a dinner and evening, a conversation, you know. Gale Banks has forgot more about diesel than our new generations will probably ever know. This man is highly disrespected in the diesel industry. Gale has innovated so much of diesel performance throughout the 80s and 90s. He is definitely an innovator. And I don't know why people hate him. His marketing, amazing. His products, they work. They're overly engineered and they're overly complicated. But if the factory incorporated a boss for a zip tie to hold a harness, Gale put that in his product, plus all his other stuff. We do a lot of BD diesel products, but we also do a lot of Banks products. Banks is the most widely marketed, most widely sold, highest disrespected company in the whole products game. But I still put on a lot of the parts and they still work. But Gale is a heck of a guy. And the day that we don't have him, the day that we don't have John Force, this world will be different in the performance game, both gasoline, diesel alike.

Okay. I was nervous about what I was saying. Okay. No, no, no, I think that's...

I always got to stick up for Gale. He has done so many things, dude. He like land speed guy, the turbocharger innovation. He pioneered a lot of that. He was, he's definitely a godfather that brought an idea into the room. And now the other generations are taking it even further.

It's kind of like that's saying like, you know, you stand on the shoulders of giants. That's kind of, I've never heard a bad thing about him personally. I mean, comment sections aside. Oh yeah, yeah, the comments are great.

There's gonna be a lot of very good comments on all these conversations. So I expect a pop in section. I'm not gonna reply to any of them, but I definitely read it.

I always tell people, it cracks me up. It's good toilet humor.

I try to educate everybody, but some people just can't teach stupid. Like, okay, if you don't have common sense, you can't teach somebody common sense. You can't give it to them. They don't acquire it. They're just screwed. I stand by that statement. Common sense goes a long ways. If you ain't got it, you're going to have a hard time in life.

Well, before we start wrapping up here, is there anything else you wanted to talk about? Anything that I missed, perhaps? Anything come to mind?

Not really. I mean, we talked about, we talked about drag and drive. We talked about all the sled pulling stuff, the dirt drag racing, the horsepower wars. Like, I don't know, it's insane, you know? I just think that more people need to understand what they're getting and what they're expecting and that cake tastes really good when it's cooked just right with the right amount of ingredients on the right chef.

No, I get it.

And the restaurant you go to is gonna dictate how good it tastes.

I mean, I've seen a guy cook three cheesecakes in a week, so I mean, I get it.

I mean, I'm definitely a quality over quantity guy. I'm looking for good customers, good trucks, long-lasting relationships that have many good times, memories like we go to the track. We charge people, that guy that picked up that motor this morning, that built 15-horse motor, he saw a beautiful engine. I told him, you put it in, you get it running, bring it out to the finals. We're gonna have campers, we're gonna have grills, we're gonna be doing things that you get in trouble for, like come out, have a good time. What's the worst thing that happens? It explodes, we'll fix it. So I'm all about encouraging bad choices and good stories.

Is the 6.7 just the go-to nowadays? Okay.

Sure is.

What are the other alternatives? Obviously you have the 5.9. Is there anything else that people are really building?

No, that's the only engine that matters. All the other ones suck.

Okay, guys, so it's just a little bit of a joke.

No, that's just my opinion. You know, I don't sit in a V, you know, squat to pee, you know, all that. It's straight, six in a row, ready to tow. The Cummins is amazing, it's tractor motor. That thing is just, it's built so well that you can take it much further than the factory intended. That's why it's so cool. What other stock engine can make 1,000 horsepower with a head stud, push rod, valve spring, turbo and injector? That's it, you don't even have to take the head off. Well, you have to put a transmission in it for anything more than a tune, but that's a sign. But the engine, the transmissions, lots of opportunities.

That was another thing that Dustin said when we did a podcast with him was, yeah, sure, you have to do it, you have to build the transmissions, you have to do that for everybody. Is that the case?

That's right.

Okay.

That's right. I don't know anybody that runs around stock transmission, regardless of what flavor your engine is. If you do have a stock transmission, it's just because you can't afford the built one, you're babying it along to get the built one. I don't care who you are. If it's a Dodge diesel and it makes 300 horsepower or 3,000 horsepower, that thing's going to need a dag gum transmission, at least one. I'm here for it. When I first started building these, I had adapter plates that I had studs on because I was wearing out the threads on the bell housing. I'm talking like I could change a band in 25 minutes. You smoke a second gear band, slide that, leave the transfer case on it, leave the driveshafts on it, slide it back, pop the band out like, good, gosh, dude. It was nuts what you can do and how far you can take it. But I've also had to learn how to build all these things. There's a lot of ways, all these things, it's a very versatile platform. You can take a Dodge Diesel and you can make at least 1,500 a day with a goose neck in Texas and never leave the state line hauling stuff around. You could make it an ambulance with a bed on the back, and you could save lives every day. You can put 800-horsepower compounds 37, 6 inches and go lift kit and go drive off and be a pipeline welder. I don't recommend that. If you are a welder and you have a Dodge Diesel, you need three or four of them, the whole just three or four trucks. You can do so much with these trucks. You can haul the President around, you can haul Sunshine around, and have armor on wheels. It's insane. It's absolutely insane, the versatility.

Why did the triple setup not work for you, by the way? You want to touch on that?

The triple setups didn't work because it came on too hard, too quick. You have to get turbines up to speed, like turbocharger shaft speed matters. You know, you got to get them to 60 or 80,000 RPM before they're really moving any air. Well, when you have three of them to wind up, and all three of them kind of hit about the same time. In other words, I would go on the Dyno from 2,300 RPM, 20 pounds of boost, dragging the brake, bringing the turbos up, to tip in on my way to wide open, and make 100 pounds halfway to wide open, and be at 100 pounds of boost by 2,500 RPM, not even hit the full load yet. And by the time the load had hit, it'd be 200 pounds of boost, and just smoke the tires on the Dyno, or blow right through the torque converter on the train as fast as it could. I had to slow down the rate the boost came in. And of course, I'm not doing it with wastegates, and it's already spraying nitrous on its way up. So I had to get really big turbos, so they would come on slower. The triples, they were so small, and there's three of them, they spooled up real quick. Compounds, they're really big, but there's only two of them, so they're bigger, and they spin slower. They're harder to make them spin, which is a cushion, like an insurance cushion, for the power to hit on nitrous on the dyno. And then on drag racing, the triples was kind of the same way. As soon as I would get in second gear, and it would lock the converter, and come up to full boost pressure, it would just spin all six tires, or four tires, or whatever the comm, it was too much, too quick.

Makes sense. Well, on that note, at the end of every episode, I like to ask the guest one particular question, and it goes like this. You have an unlimited budget, and you get to pick three cars, and in your case, you can also do trucks, or jets, or whatever the hell you want. But you have to choose a daily driver, a show car, and a track car, or a truck.

Okay, okay. And they can be custom builds, right? Yeah. Like I can save my dream?

Yeah, you have to be able to weld a Ford and a Chevy together. Have fun.

Daily driver, I want to get an 07 Sport, regular cab, half ton, all wheel drive, 3rd gen electric blue, and I want to take a half ton truck, half ton axles, drop it in the weeds, and put a constant full time all wheel drive transfer case. No switching from two wheel to full wheel. All wheel drive, all time. And I want 2,000 horse, instant, like nitrous on demand, like proportional to throttle percent. And that's like a street truck, daily driver. And then you said show car, like something to take out and look good, like take the WIFI out and stop in at Cars and Coffee?

Yeah, yeah.

I want a 03, 04 Cobra, Ford Mustang Cobra.

Nice.

Yeah, you know, like twin screw, Kenny Bell, thousand horse, G-fit, or T-56 or whatever. Yeah. Or like, you know, 98 Supra, big single, 1400 horse, Toyota Supra, six speed.

Okay.

Okay, those are my shows.

I'm gonna, you gotta choose one.

Oh, we'll go Cobra.

Cobra, okay. I have to ask, are you gonna go to Mystichrome route, or are you gonna do another color?

Sonic blue. Sonic blue is my color.

All right.

Ironically, I don't have any blue vehicles, but blue is my color.

Okay.

So electric blue, 07, daily driving sport truck, and then 04, 03, Sonic blue Cobra. And then what was the other one?

Track.

Track.

Any kind of track.

Okay, I'm gonna get you here. I bet you ain't gonna see this one either. I have dreams of taking another half ton third gym, dropping it in the weeds, all wheel drive again, nitrous bipedal again, aluminum motor, but I want a shelled out bed. I want the radiator in the bed. I want a watered-air cooler. I want independent front axle, like a CV axle, high mount front diff. And I want an independent mount rear diff, CV axle, rear diff. I want like a five link rear suspension. So when you throttle in, the vehicle picks up and it toes out in the rear tires to make it straight. And when you break and you dive in a corner, the rear tires go in to make it turn. And I want to do a Pike's Peak, daily driver style diesel four wheel drive truck. Like Pike's Peak, like 2000 horse, nitrous on demand, because nitrous is more powerful than turbo. And Pike's Peak is like 13,000, 15,000 feet, like 144.

I think it was like 14,600 or something like that.

It's nuts. Let's do that.

Well, I want to check my knowledge after we end this. Is it 14,625? Here, fact check me, actually.

Google it over there. We have sat around and talked. I'm telling you, it makes my arm hair stand up. I've got a list. That's why I'm kind of done doing triathlon. I'm done being only diesel.

I was close. 14,115. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. How many turns? Wasn't it like 140 turns? It's insane.

I think it's like 12 miles or 14. All my friends is doing it this June. So that's going to be cool. Would it still be a diesel?

Oh, that's the only thing. I don't have spark plugs. Are you kidding me? My wife has an Audi. That's it. Well, we have a Jeep. That's her Jeep too. I don't know. Even my tractor, even my lawnmower, diesel. It's no, it's diesel around here, dog. But wouldn't that be something? All three of those builds are so unique. I mean, okay, the Cobra or the Supra, that's the exception. If you have to have some spark plugs, forced inductions and Iconic or a Viper, or a Viper with a Cummins motor. No one's done that. There's been a Viper. No, there's been a Cummins Lambo, a gold one. Yeah. One way, one way. One way diesel built that and hasn't done anything. Hasn't done anything.

I think I saw that one. Was that the one I saw at SEMA? Might have been. I don't know.

Probably. The only thing you're seeing done is fire up, back up, rev up, pull back on the trailer.

Oh yeah. No, I know. Okay. I know what you're talking about.

Imagine a Viper. Imagine a 2,500 horsepower, aluminum, single turbo, four kits of nitrous, 34 by 16 slick in the back, drag and drive, Dodge Viper with a Cummins.

That'd be cool. I have an appreciation for cars with diesel. It's very underappreciated this year in the States, but like one of the people I had on the show at PRI, he was an engineer. Do you remember when Audi went to Le Mans with those diesel cars? Yes, he was an engineer on that program.

It was a V10 diesel, right? I think it was 10-cylinder.

At least so, yeah, yeah.

And it didn't have a hybrid electric motor in the tranny, too.

Oh, that part I don't remember from the episode.

It was furious.

Yeah, it was insane.

No smoke.

They did two documentaries on those. I don't know if you've ever seen them.

No, I haven't seen the documentaries, but I've watched some of the racing. Very impressive. We have a lot to learn from the foreign diesel, like European stuff, way cleaner. The fuel's cleaner. The emissions are, well, we shouldn't talk about many emissions, but the emissions are way more realistic. And they have had diesel longer than we have. And they, like, think about all the Volkswagen Golfs and all the little small SUV diesels and the flat-faced diesel vehicles over there. Way more than America.

Are they a little more lenient on diesel in the EU?

You can get away with more over there.

That probably explains why we don't get as many here stateside than imported.

Well, yeah, as soon as it comes here, you have to do this.

Yeah.

Other countries. We didn't see anything.

Yeah.

You know, but then if you want to talk about that, let's talk about the the the cargo ships coming across seas, the four 12 foot diameter stacks burning crude, number one. That's basically mud. And then, oh, wait. But when you come close to our country and you get within visible range of our land, you have to turn off crude and you have to burn straight diesel because it smokes less coming in and out of our ports. And you can still see them chugging a mile out, four stacks chugging diesel. Well, they already turned off the crude. So imagine whenever it's 50 miles out on the coast.

Right.

But we want to talk about what we do over here versus over there. Come on.

Come on. I didn't know there was a different type.

That is crazy.

I didn't know that.

The rules are different on the water. You get like half a mile nautical on the water, the rules are different.

On that note, where can everybody find you?

We're all over a lot of places, but mainly Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. I pretty much do everything under Chris underscore Pat05. But I don't do much personally more. Everything's now is business. So Unrivaled Diesel Facebook, Unrivaled Diesel on YouTube. You're going to start seeing a lot more of that. We started recording here and showing these things and showing people how we build our engines, how we build our transmissions and why we think what we have works and what you can do to get the same results we have. It's all cookie cutter. There's nothing proprietary in this building, I promise.

That's awesome, man. Well, first of all, thank you for taking the time to sit down. This is a really, really fun conversation.

Absolutely.

That's for everybody else. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you all next time.

Peace.