206. Nelson Racing Engines, 2000HP Streetcars, the SSC Tuatara, Fast and the Furious w/ Tom Nelson

This episode is brought to you by 6XD gearbox more on them later.

Hello. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the podcast under host Harris, aka monoxide man of many automotive aspirations. Today we continuing the California trip, the first ever California trip of the podcast, which has been a lot of fun so far. And today we were at Nelson Racing engines.

I want to hear your story. How do we get here today?

Because there's a lot of cool stuff in here that's different. You got less stuff you got for stuff. You got heavy stuff. But what is 20 years ago look like? Where? How do we get to where we're at today?

So my dad was always kind of, you know, racing cars or tinkering, tinkering with cars. So he had as a kid, he had like a Corvair that he was a road racing. And then that went into a 70 boss Mustang. And he had, you know, it for 410, top loader, all that stuff.

And he was road racing that. And then he got a Andretti series, Lotus. And then from there he actually twin turbocharged a Pantera in the garage. So that was kind of cool because he did a like a like back then. Obviously they didn't have the tech that they do now. So he had like Della Toes drawing through a pair of rages on like a manifold.

And it was pretty cool as a kid. Like he would take me on this one back stretch where we lived, where there was really no, you know, cars or anything. And that thing would like, you know, come on. Boost in. One turbo was behind my ear. One turbo was behind his. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's that's what we were talking about, you know, and, you know, he kind of put the bug in me and then, you know, as we were kids, we started street racing and doing stuff like that, and we were, you know, constantly, you know, I mean, almost we're not going to say making a living, but it was our life basically twice

a week. We were street racing and stuff like that. And then it got, you know, it got sketchy, like gangs started getting involved in the races because the bets were getting bigger and you had to lock the money and, you know, different things like that. And, you know, there were some unpleasant outcomes where actually saw a guy get shot over the race.

And then I actually saw another guy get run over. I actually ran the guy over. And at that point I was like, I'm out of this thing, you know, I'm not doing this anymore. And so I was like, well, maybe I could do this professionally. And at the time I had like a construction business. My mom owned property management company, and I was doing like, fences and house painting and, you know, general construction and actually, like, making real money, you know, and but I decided I was going to try to do it professionally.

So I started up in my grandmother's garage. My grandmother gave me her garage, and, you know, so I wired it, I bought I went to West Tech, which is a machinery show. I bought my first machine on the floor there as a display, and that's an echo mill that I actually still have that we use for balancing today.

And it started accumulating. We ended up getting I made my own flow bench. You know, I had a head servicer, had a steel breaker, you know, and I was starting to build all my friends motors. Okay. So real quick. So what time frame was this roughly. So did you stop doing everything in the construction side of things? Well, to keep things moving, I had like for a long time, even even after I opened professionally, I still had to take construction jobs here and there, because for the first ten years of business, I worked seven days a week and I lost money every year.

So like, I had a nice little nest egg, and after that ten years, like I had nothing, you know? But I didn't really care because, like, I just remember there's a freeway, there's 118 freeway. It goes from the 23 to the 118. There's a bridge that goes across into into Simi Valley. And like I did a lot of work in Simi Valley, and I used to cross that bridge and my stomach used to just be, like, upset because I'm like, I do not want to be doing this s***.

Like, I don't want to be doing construction. Like, I love cars, you know? And so at any rate, I was building my grandmother's garage out and buying all these things. And my friend Cole Bolster, his dad, used to do these body and white cars. So he used to give out like cars to good Pro Stock drivers. And so there were these guys there called the Scribner Brothers.

And so they had approached Cole's dad, saying, do you know anybody who wants to buy a machine shop because a guy named Bill Hyatt had passed away and they were selling his machine shop. And like, for me, this was the opportunity, because it had been a couple of years that I'd been moving towards this goal. And, you know, I went and checked this shop out and like it had a go go power dyno at the time.

It has a flow bench that I still used today like it was a full machine shop. It was like a dream come true, you know? And so. I couldn't afford it for the price. But my grandmother let me, my mom and grandmother let me some money and I landed this like 100 fence contract in like the middle of it was like 116 degrees in the summer, I swear to God.

I mean, we just worked like I worked so hard and there was like a deadline to come up with the money. And we literally came in with the cashier's check, like an hour before another person was coming in with a cashier's check for for the shop. And that's how professionally Nelson Racing started out of an actual shop. And that was 31 years ago as 1995.

And I bought this shop and I didn't know how to use s***, you know. And where does this knowledge come from? Right. Because you went from being a kid that was street racing to now you're teaching yourself on a machine or what exactly what was happening? Yeah. I mean basically, yeah. I mean.

Drive is 9/10 of the law. I mean, that's really what I like to say. You know, like if you have a passion for something and you have drive for it, drive is 9/10 of the law. Like there's a picture somebody gave me a while ago, this little baby, like pushing this super heavy car, which looks impossible, but like with enough vision, enough goal towards it, you're going to get there.

So I bought this machine shop. I've obviously was in the like, I had awareness, we were street racing. I was building my own motors, I was building my friend's motors, but I didn't have the machine knowledge of everything. So I just went to work and just f***ed things up for a long time. And you know, when you're starting a business like that, at least for me, like other people have different stories.

But for me, like, it's hard to keep the lights on, you know? I mean, it was a struggle. I was there, you know, 16, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And I would take in anything to pay the bills because that's what I wanted to do. It's funny because, like, you look around the shop right now and you see like, engines, crazy engines everywhere, crazy cars everywhere.

But I remember back in the day, like, if I had a set of aluminum heads that came in that I got to work on, like I would put it like as a display, like, you know, we're working on a motor with aluminum heads, man. We're badass, you know? So it was, you know, that's that's kind of how Nelson Racing got started professionally.

As we opened up a shop on Receipt and Parthenon in 1995, had all these machines and then, you know, just started learning how to use them. I had one guy come in, used to trade me. He would use my machines and show me how to use them, and he pretty much showed me all the wrong ways to do everything.

So for a while, you know, we were doing I was doing stuff, you know, you just have to learn, you know, you have to get your feet wet and do it. And then I was selling a machine one time because we had a what's called a wet grinder, which is a it's a stone servicer. So it's really pretty bitchin machine, because if you have valve seats that are close to the deck, if you're cutting that with a carbide, it usually takes the seat and drags it across the deck.

But a stone will give you a really nice finish when the seat is up there. But the it was old and it smelled really bad and I didn't want to deal with rebuilding it. So I put it up for sale. And there's a guy named Jean Oley who turns out was like the man when my dad was doing his stuff, and he came by and very humbly was like looking at everything that I was doing.

But for some reason, he took a liking to me and like, could see that, like, you know, I had the hunger. So he, like, started showing me some things on how to machine stuff and that, you know, kind of spawned into a relationship, not like a lot of time, but on the weekends he might come over and show me different things.

And really like in that little time period leveled me up, like, you know, because he at the time I think was like 70 maybe or something and had been doing it all of his life. So he showed me things that probably leveled me up ten years in a jump, you know, and that was super grateful to him for doing some of those things for me.

But a lot of stuff at that point to then. Oh yeah. Yeah. Or some like slap on the wrist, like things that you learned. I mean, none of this is done anymore because everything is like, you know, you're getting brand new rods or whatever. Back in the day, we were rebuilding rods, and what people would do when they rebuilt a rod is they would cut an angle into the rod.

That way when they clamped it, the sides would bend in. So when you honed it, there wouldn't be a shadow there. So we were doing that. So when you gave the product to the person, like the whole rod looked like, it was honed and bitchin, but essentially it was bending the rod bolts. And everybody at that time was doing it, you know, and he was like, dude, like you're you're f***ing bending the rod bolts right now, you know?

And you know, just because the customer thinks that it's better that it looks all honed, you can't be doing this. And he showed me how to like one of the biggest things he showed me is how to true the shoes and the stones in. So like the stones and the shoes, they've got to be totally straight for you to be able to hone something and have it be straight.

Whereas, you know, I would just be honing on the thing and one end would have like 8/10 of taper different than the other, or the middle would be bowed. And I didn't understand how to make it all right. So he showed me how to like, you know, without honing oil. True. In the shoes, in a stone. And to this day, this is like something that I don't see many shops doing is like when we line, hone.

All true the stones and the shoes in and you'll put Dikembe on it. What I usually do is I'll take, like the grit out of the hone and I'll pack the stones to where you, you get the stones where they're clogged, and then you take an old block and then you just true the line. Hone in bringing, bringing the shoes in dead straight.

And when we line hone like what I will never do. And that you see shops do all the time. And probably anybody watching this will just be like, he's a f***ing idiot or whatever, but I will never loosen a cap when we line hone, because people will line hone and they can't. They're not getting the measurement that they want, and then they'll loosen a cap so that part of the cap doesn't cut, and then the rest of the block cut so they can get their dimensions right vertically.

But to me you got mains that are all like this when they do that. So you just you want to get the you want to get the mandrel as, as straight and true as possible before you put it in there. So those are a couple of things. I mean, there was many, many things that he showed me. But those two are probably the biggest, you know okay.

So so you get the machine shop then how does how do things expand from there. So for me like I was always into like pro touring style cars, cars that handled, braked and accelerated, whereas I was wasn't just a drag racer like I always liked the whole thing, you know? So I was always. You know, pushing those kind of things, those kind of engine builds.

And, you know, actually, it's funny, I found I'll have to show you later, but we were just cleaning up an area of the shop, and I found these, like handwritten letters that I had written to every magazine there was at the time, like there was GM, high tech and Corvette and Kit car magazine and Street Rotter. And so I used to write hand handwritten letters saying like, let's do something like, let's do some stuff so I can expose my shop on what we do, you know?

And some of the big breakthroughs were.

One, we did an engine for Boyd Coddington. I don't know if that name rings a bell for you or not. So he was a big car builder at the time, and he had a show on discovery called American Hot Rod. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we did a twin turbocharged 427 in this Corvette. You know, back then when when I was doing turbocharged stuff like, let's say 1999, right when it was like we were popping off and we're making like a thousand horse and pump gas and everybody's like, no way, no way.

You're making that reliably. And, you know, we were. But at that time, like right now it's like you probably. How old are you? 26. Okay. 26. Like a thousand horsepower to you is like, what 400 horsepower was to me back in the day. So that was a horse. Part of you is like, was a big deal, you know?

Yeah, exactly. But it wasn't back then, you know? So we did that. We did the thing on on American Hot Rod and it kind of showcased like, oh my God, man, they made 1500 horsepower on this thing. And it had a little build. And that was kind of nice. Gave us some notoriety. And then there's a guy, David Freiberger.

I don't know if you're familiar with him or not. So I would always go to Sema and I would see him and just badger the s*** out of him, you know, like he'd see me coming down and I'd be like, David, dude, we got to do something. We got to do something. And I had done it enough to where he was finally like, okay, you know, you could take this anvil motor that we had and, and you can modify it.

So we went ahead and started building a twin turbo for him. And at the same time we started building, he had a 70 Camaro in his backyard. And I'm like, well, we should probably, you know, throw this in something so you could take it to the track. And he was like, I don't know. And I ended up sending my tow truck driver over there.

We ended up getting the car and we built this really nice 1500 horsepower engine. And the car ended up being called the F bomb. And David really took care of me, like, like we did the work for free, but like, he paid me back like tenfold because he had like, I think we ended up getting like the cover twice from that on Hot Rod, which back then print meant something.

Print was like the thing, it's like you blew up a million views on the internet or something, you know? So we got that, and then it turned into an ESPN TV show. And, you know, just having a relationship with Freiberger was good because he was, you know, he was the guy, you know, so that was good for us.

But at that point we were kind of just off to the races because we were doing all these crazy twin turbo projects for, for everybody. And it was unusual at that time what we were doing, you know, so that really, you know, kicked off, you know, where we are now is we're basically just an engine shop. We have had a full blown supercar shop for 15 odd years, which I don't do anymore because it took too much time away from my family.

But yeah, that's that's what that's what got us here, you know? Okay. So you get to you become a shot. You're building for folks at that point. You scale it back then. So what's a normal day look like to you now? Are you in here doing some machining or are you doing. Are you doing the QuickBooks? I mean, this was a normal day look like now.

So now I'm actually in here working every day. For a while there I was like the guy getting beat up on the phone, you know, ordering all the parts. I still do order a lot of the parts, but now I've, like, I really enjoy coming to work. Like, I feel like so grateful that I get to do this every single day.

And like, I absolutely love what I do. Like, I love coming in here putting motors together. I love figuring out like, fuel injection stuff. I love sizing turbos. So I'm in here working every day now. I mean, what I call it as ping pong like for me. We've got ten guys in here and all day long getting ping pong.

So like to actually be able to concentrate fully is pretty hard. But my guys are starting to get better at, you know, doing their own thing and like, letting me alone and and letting me work. And I don't know, that's where this last like couple months, when I walk in, there's a piece that I'm like, I'm looking forward to going to work, and there's a piece that I'm getting when I'm working that I'm just like, it's becoming like.

Like as exciting as it was when I started, it's kind of like you're entering into a new season. Yeah, 100%, 100%, I think. And, you know, I don't want to hex myself, but I think, you know, the days of, like, survival, you know, like those first ten years of where, you know, I come home and the lights were off and, you know, I got my power shut off or, you know, you're, like, robbing this and robbing Peter to pay Paul and stuff.

Those days are going away. And now it's kind of like, you know. Whoa. Like look around. Look. Look what you're doing. Look what you built, you know, and go enjoy it. So that's what that's what I've been doing lately, is just coming in here and kind of like I'm either doing the rebuilds because I want my guys to stay productive.

So they're like, doing the constant crate engines and like, let's say if we heard something or, you know, like we want to learn, then I'm doing the tear down. So I'm like, my new like title is engine like rebuild, which is I f***ing hate cleaning stuff and like doing all that stuff. But, you know, I'm also hand picking like selective projects for myself, you know, that that I can enjoy and kind of learn from, you

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okay, let's take that run with that.

When it comes to rebuilding engines or inspecting, is there anything in particular that sticks out like for example, is it a customer putting 87 on accident or what? What exactly is a rebuild come from? Well, we definitely have like we have a customer that put 87 in on purpose because he was actually like two lazy or not too lazy.

He just didn't want to spend the money on 91. And this is like a 1400 horse twin turbo LZ. And you know, I mean, the head was torched, the block was torched, and it happened twice. So the first time we rebuilt it for free, and then the second time it came in and I was like, you know, bring the car in.

And we sent the gas out and had it analyzed and, and the dude was running 87, you know, I was so out here, I do the same thing. Yeah. I was so irritated, man. So but yeah. So that's something. But I mean, for example, we just got a we have a Kong supercharged LLS package that we do makes like 1100 horsepower.

This one, we tune down slightly, but we have it in a trophy truck application. And so they had 1300 miles of just like something that we would never, ever do to a car. And we have a tear down on that. And that is like an autopsy. Like, I am so excited to take that apart because I could take the Pistons out, send them to engineering, look at the barrels, see how the barrels are wearing.

I mean it literally. You don't get that opportunity to to do that often where you have some really hardcore beating going on. Like, for example, they sent me a data log, and on that data log I'm like, man, how long were you wide open? And he was like 80 miles. I was like, you're f***ing wide open for 80 miles.

He's like, yeah, man. I'm like, oh my God. So like being able to take data from an engine like that. You know, that's priceless. So next week we're going to figure out some things on that engine. Wow. Okay. How do you even build for something like that? Was that did you build with that intention in mind? Yeah, we knew it was going to get thrashed.

You know we we did these this boat motor for like, have you ever heard of jet boat racing. Yeah. So that's like 45 minutes wide open throttle eight heats. So for eight times that motor is wide open throttle for 45 minutes straight. You know it's making 1200 horse for 45 minutes straight. You know. And so that thing we did all sorts of things like piston squirts and big block rod, you know, bigger mains and I mean everything that you could possibly do to, to an engine to try to make it live.

And ultimately that actually it ended up being successful. And then he got banned first, actually laid back up first he put it in the water and ended up routing water the way I didn't want him to route the water. And he cooked the exhaust valves, which we did like four times on the dyno, and there was already a pre warning on that.

So we put it back together and then he ended up going racing and he, he told me he had like ten miles an hour on the field which was awesome. They even gave him like some kind of like I don't know, I'm just I don't know the exact. But they gave him some kind of like one minute penalty or something and he still was, you know, ahead, you know.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh you're too fast. You get electro. Yeah, exactly. One of the things I was looking through when I was going through an Instagram page or your Facebook page is you're doing Dino's on the engines themselves. You don't have a chassis down here, do you? Yeah. No chassis. Dino. Yeah. Has that always been the case?

It's always been the case. Yeah. It was always like, you know, if you were to take it on the street, you do the drivability on the street, in the car. But nowadays, like these packages, let's say you buy a twin turbo les or a supercharge les for me, I mean, we've done now, I don't know, we've done so many like right, this year is going to be our best year ever.

And this sounds like a small number, but it's huge. Like we're going to do 150 engines this year. And that is top to bottom. That's making headers, making the wire harness, doing the line work completely assembling it and denoting it. So these packages I mean we've probably built for or 500 of each of these. So you can get these things, you can put them in the car and they're going to like you're going to literally better have well pressure.

Because when you click that key it's going to light, you know,

Okay. So at this point you're doing all these and once you start selling it, you always sell engines. Yeah. Well, well, we started at with rebuilds, you know, and the rebuild. Like the guy starting off doing rebuilds. That's a tough game because you got a guy that you know has an engine. You're going to rebuild this thing. He's got a very limited budget and you've got to do there's no way to do a bad job like you could do a bad job, but you're not going to do a bad job.

So you're going to do basically the same amount of work as you would putting one of these together on a rebuild, but you're going to get paid, you know, a 10th of what it would be, you know. So I did that for a long time. And I remember I had an employee that worked for me. This guy Ron thall always remember this guy, and he was the most dedicated employee.

And I was paying them like, like minimum wage. It was it was terrible. You know, he was older than me to, you know, but he absolutely always wanted to work in an engine shop. And he came in there and I remember, like, going to my office thinking, I don't know how I'm going to pay this guy. You know, like I've been I worked like 100 hours this week.

This guy is working for minimum wage, and I don't even know how I'm going to pay this guy, you know? And and it wasn't that we weren't busy. We were always busy, but just we weren't getting paid here value. So I remember I was like, you know what, I don't care at this point. It had been multiple years.

I'm like, I'm going to double my price. If we go out of business, then then we're going to go out of business, you know? And so I double my price and we got double the work, you know. And then I was like, well, you know, what makes sense is actually creating a package. So you're not taking somebody's stuff in, having to figure out what's wrong with it, fix all those things, custom order, individual parts.

Those parts usually have some kind of roadblock into it, so you can't really finish that job. So now you got like, you know, at that time we'd had like 50 custom different weird projects going on. There's always like one ball in the air under the next. And I was just like, let's take some of that out of the equation and make, you know, actual standard packages that are badass.

And that's what we've done. We've just continually refined these packages. And literally you can buy these packages and their way better than the one off, because the chance that you get the one off totally right is slim compared to the guy that's done 400 of the same thing and thought, oh, well, you know, this camshaft profile is a little better, and I actually like the exhaust valve seat with on this head a little better.

And this head gasket works better. This piston, you know, and over the course of all these years, you come up with being able to have like an engineered package. And then for us it's like we'll have okay, let's order 50 blocks, let's order 50 cranks, let's order, you know, whatever, 20, 30 sets of pistons. So you're not like you're still chasing your tail around manufactured parts, but you're not chasing your tail around 100 different version of that manufactured part.

You know, that makes sense. So that was probably the biggest and best decision from a money making standpoint for the shop was to go into the crate engines. And I'm just curious. I like to ask this question whenever I travel the country. What's the shop right here. Do you have a standard shop? Right. We really don't. I mean, like the car shop was like $125 an hour, and really I was like 90 an hour.

And then for the cars, this is the reason why I actually stopped doing the cars is I would I would go off on a bracket and we might have like 15 hours in a bracket. The guy just wanted a bracket. But like, I wanted to make it art, you know? And then I'm like, I don't know, how am I going to charge him 15 hours for this bracket, you know?

And so then added up charging, I'm like 4 or 5 hours or something for the bracket, you know, and that's like, I don't know, it's hard to charge by the hour, even though you should get paid for every hour. So the crate packages makes it really easy for me because it's like this is a set price. If you want an option, it's this if you want to die, it's this.

And that's what it is. You know, I noticed that when I was going through like your packages on the website that you can put that. Yeah, that was the question I wanted to ask about the, the engine. Dino. So do you when you're denying these again, 1500 plus horsepower engines, what's your process to make sure that it's going to live.

How long are the sweeps and all that? We beat it up pretty good. I mean, what we do first is we will prime the motor. So we'll fill a can up, pressurize the can. And before we're even cranking the motor over, we get oil and everything. We got the lifters pumped. We got all. We make sure that the valve covers off and oil is dripping off every single rocker arm.

We won't even, won't even turn them over until every single rocker arm is dripping of oil. This is on a pushrod motor, of course. Right. And then with the plugs out, then we'll spin the motor because there'll be an air pocket in it, most likely will spin the motor until pressure is everywhere. Put the plugs in it and then we'll fire up immediately upon fire up.

We'll check every cylinder for temp. So like, you might have an ejector that's not connected or clogged or something. So immediately or on exhaust temp on every cylinder to make sure that, you know, all holes are hot. And then we bring it up to 2500 rpm and then then we'll load the rings. So you'll vary the load. These days it could be 1 or 2 cycles of 10 to 15 minutes of getting the rings put in the cylinder wall.

So you just have tension on the ring constantly, you know, on and off, pushing it in the cylinder wall. Then we will cut the filter. So we'll make sure that there's actually depending on sometimes we cut the filter before or after, but we'll cut the filter like if you walked in that room you saw like it looks like 12 paper, but there's all these filter elements hanging.

So at any rate, you want to make sure that the health of the motor is good before the motor ever leaves the door. So you'll cut the filter, spread it. Actually, what we do is we put it in a vice and we squeeze all the oil out of it. So that way if there's a particle, you're going to see it.

And then we extend it all the way out and, and double check that there's no particles in it anywhere. And then we start hitting it, you know, then we start, we'll come in like a maybe 5500 rpm pull, you know, data logit, dual pull check for knock. I'm pretty good about checking for knock on the RLS stuff. It's, you know, really good indicator if you've got something weird going on.

If everything looks good, the fuel looks good. You know, obviously on a lot of these you have to check a static timing when you fire it up. So you want to verify that your hall effect is in the right spot and that your timing actually is what it is. Because if that's off, like the motor is done almost immediately, almost the first pulse, the timing is off.

You just you'll see the pistons come right out of the exhaust pipe. And then then then we'll start running it up, you know, at max power, my dino sweeps pretty long. So each pulls like 15, 16 seconds of of power. You know different dinos you see sweep really quick. I don't really care. I like it to be under load and I like it to sweep for a while.

I get better data that way. And then we'll go in and adjust the fuel curve to that particular engine and, you know, go in there, listen to everything, look for leaks. You know, if it's a solid roller at some point, like maybe, you know, five minutes into the run, once you get engine temperature, you're going to go in and adjust the valves, make sure everything's good.

And then, you know, after the dyno then then you know that you have something that when you give the customer it's not going to leak. It makes exactly the power that you want it to do. It's got good all pressure before it leaves the door. You know that like the the whole system, there's no debris in the oil because you've cut the filter.

All the injectors are firing. The wiring is, you know, certified. It works. You actually ran his harness on his computer with his coils. So there's a lot of things that, you know, when a guy gets it, it's it's like Russian roulette. Like there's so many. We've actually developed this thing. It's called a safety package, where we put these 0 to 100 sensors on everything.

And then we even have in the, in the, in the program, like measuring fuel duty. So let's say the guy steps on it and, you know, it's low on gas or the pump fails, it'll measure a duty spike and that duty spike, then we can go in and we can, you know, cut the motor. So he's not going to just grenade it, you know, or pressure drops below a specific cut the motor, you know, overboost, cut the motor.

All these little things. We do it in a safety package. Charges like 550 bucks for this for the sensors and the wiring and the programing. And that's kind of like a nice little insurance policy for the guy buying the motor. What are these. Do you like a standard. Are these all Holly. All that you saw most are Holly so most are Holly.

But we do have a lot of life racing on the super high end stuff. We do Motec on some of the high end stuff. We just did a whole tech. So we've done, we've done. I mean, we used to do Electro-Motive all the time, so we've done a lot of stuff, but I like to stay with one thing.

I found that the Holly is like so recognized by everybody that if it needs something, somebody competent will know how to use it, you know, but, you know, capability wise for the money, I would say it's really hard to be Holly, you know, as far as like if you want to get into something super high end, we usually go into a life racing unit, or usually the customer might not know enough about life and they'll like, demand a Motec and we'll use a Motec.

Yeah, this is actually my first time hearing about it before it was. So it's called Life Racing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. How how is that different from like, a Motec? Are you able to get into nuances at all? I mean, the Motec is way more user friendly, I think. But I think the life I think the life is just I think it's a, it's it's better than the Motec.

It's harder to. Have you ever heard of civics. So civics is an off of life for life racing. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So life is like their civics? I don't know, I don't really want to say. It's like life is the parent company. Civics, I'm assuming is, I don't know, they would have to chime in on what psi of X is, but they're you know, I think the program is basically the same, you know, okay.

Was that always your process or I guess because like for example, you look at like something on chassis and they just whack it for a quick 2 or 3 seconds and that's it. Your tunes done. Basically just a few of those hits. And whatever. Did you evolve to what you're currently doing, the 15, 16 second sweeps or I guess, when did that become standard for you?

Well, we started with a manual goal power, so I don't know if you've ever run a manual dyno, but it's f***ing gnarly, right? So you have you have a water valve and you have a throttle. Right. So you, you come in on the throttle and it's literally it's like a garden valve. I ended up welding like a, like a pole to mine.

And then you would basically try to match load to horsepower. So you'd come in on horsepower, and then you'd grab water until you could stall the motor, and then you would slowly sweep the motor with your hand, you know? And while you're doing this, you need to be looking at this gauge that's swinging around as raw torque, noting in your mind that every 500 rpm, you're going to write down what kind of talk it made.

So that's how we started. I mean, imagine hitting nitrous. I used to hit nitrous all the time and then like you'd hit it and then like try to, you know, automatically adjust how much water you're going to grab on the thing, you know. And then in zero four, we were doing this thing called the Engine Masters contest, where like 50 of the best engine builders get together.

And then we basically race the engines on dinos. So you have like an average horsepower, and to work from 2500 to 6500, that average number gets you a final number in places you in like a race. So I started in zero two with this. And then four. I'm like, I got to get it fricking computerized dyno to get some really good numbers.

And so we bought this dynamic test systems, which is DTS, which was bought by a company called Super Flow. Now okay. But DTS were the best. I still I still run my DTS right now. It's f***ing awesome. You know, it has trouble now with the big horsepower. Like again I need to add another break to it. But anytime we're over 2500, that thing is just pissed.

It starts literally taking the water and turning it into steam, you know? And so if you don't have the rev limiter set, sometimes it can just. Oh, yeah. What are you doing 2500 horsepower engines on. Is that is it just about it? Just about any any package we sell. If it's turbo and you want to get crazy, it'll make 2500 horse, you know?

Okay. Who does it best? Like power wise? Chevy or Mopar? I mean, again, we're doing a lot of street stuff. We're not doing, like, you know, solid block race engine stuff, but like, horsepower per cube, probably a coyote. But big blocks are, you know, they're the winter, you know, you see that truck had it. It was a ten three as big as it gets.

We've got an 800 cube in here right now, which is like 13. I don't even know how many leaders that is. I could work it out on my calculator, but it's big. It's a it's a like, I'll show you guys it's a 12.5in deck. So it makes that motor look like a baby. You know, this thing is ridiculous.

Yeah. What did you say? This wasn't me. That's a 565 with 288. That'll probably make 2500. And do you know Finnegan's drag and drive stuff? You know, you call this stuff art and your interviews that I was checking out beforehand here. When did you start seeing it as art? Did you always have mechanical sympathy and how things look and interact?

Or 100%? It was always for me, like one of my things is functional mechanical art, you know, like, I guess I made it. I've been less on that lately as far as like we say that. But like when I build a motor, it definitely needs to function, but it needs to look sexy, you know? I mean, we patented the mirror image turbos because I, I couldn't handle looking at conventional one rotation turbos, you know, and like I used to build these header sets and intake tubing and everything was lopsided all the time.

And I was like, why the f*** is this lopsided, man? You know, I can never make the motor look right.

you were saying, like, did I always, you know, have the art version or the mechanical sympathy? I've never heard it that way. That's pretty good. Yeah, but. Yeah. No, I mean, like, where I left off was, you know, we I patented the mirror image turbos for that simple reason.

We were doing so many turbo combinations and I could never make the motor look symmetrical. So we, you know, made a reverse rotator and, you know, made it in sizes that were, you know, actually pertinent to the V8 and that just for me changed so much as far as the way the engine bays look. But I always like to, you know, have, have it look like if you see an engine with like an engine cover on it, I like, what are they doing with that?

You know, like you'll see the late models. They got the, you know, stupid a** plastic cover on there trying to make it look good. It's like you should have made it look good as an engine because the engine, to me is sexy. It's this mechanical piece of art, you know, and I want it to look like it's supposed to.

Well, like, for example, like, I think it was like the Kong that you had over there. I was just, you know, silver or chrome or. And I'm like, man, if you open an engine, it looks awesome. Like one of my favorite cars that I've ever seen. I think it was, I want to say it was a Nova back home sort of saying similar.

So that's what you got here. You know, black powder. Kelly open and symmetrical circuit. Two guys have advocated. Yeah. He made it perfect. Yeah. That's awesome. And you share a photo like you don't want to be embarrassed to share your engine day. Yeah. So yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I think it's a big part of our you know, if you look at an Allison Racing engine, you pretty much know I used to not put our logo on things on purpose.

And just so, like, I would make it to where you knew that was a Nelson racing engine without our logo. And now putting our logo on all of our s***. You got a lot of a lot of real estate. Yeah, yeah. Talk about the terms. So these are your turbos then? Yeah. So we patented the mirror image turbo in.

I don't know, it's I don't even know the year anymore. 2000. Well, I think I filed the, the early patent in zero five, but yeah. So, you know, we we made the first ones out of all billet like literally I don't know if you've ever cut Inconel from a solid chunk, but I would make the turbine wheels from all built.

It would take 14 hours to make one turbine. So it was insane. And this is back in. Oh five. You're listening. Yeah. Like by the time we had a working model, it was probably, I don't even know the year, but it was early. You know, this sounds incredibly cheap to do back then as well, right? Oh, yeah. It was really cheap.

Yeah. It would take two tools and 14 hours to make one exhaust urban. It would be like $20,000 for a pair of turbos. Yeah. So how's it how's the how's that developed in the last 20 years? I hooked up with a guy named Brad Lewis, who owned a company called turbo. And me and him, like, we get along, like, amazing.

Were good friends. And so he basically we they they manufactured our turbochargers. So I came up with we came up with the tooling, our own tooling. So we had divided exhaust housing and all this other stuff. And with the with the reverse rotator you need the thrust bearing needs to be different, which, you know, there's just things that you learn going the other direction.

But that actually brought it kind of mainstream because, you know, I was able to sell the turbos then at like at that time, not anymore. But at that time we were selling them for like 2000 a pair. And that was and you know, that was really good. Like, I actually I broke my back in 2016 and was in a full body cast and was like, I'm going to lose my company because I literally was stuck on my back for, you know, for months not being able to move.

And, and I decided, well, I'm going to actually release these turbos to the public because I used to be like, oh, if you need to buy my motor to have a mirror image turbo, you know? So I put these turbos out there and we sold like that year. I don't know the exact number, but let's just say like 3 or $400,000 where the turbo is, which allowed the company.

It allowed me to get through, you know, with being stuck on my back. So I literally all day long would like answer calls and do PayPal orders with like my fabricators here built me this TV screen that was flat and I could rotate and stuff, and I could just answer the call and take the sales and sell turbo as well as yeah, yeah.

Again, I didn't go into the details. That story when you were on camera five, it was a hot rod sometimes. Yes. Yeah, I didn't get that far into it, but that is that is kind of like every car guys were saying there. If you're making money off of working on cars and it's like now you can't do anything.

Yeah.

How did you get through that time? Was there anything like were you just trying to look at that light at the end of the tunnel, like, I guess, what kind of kept you going through that? I don't know. I mean, life just kind of happens. You kind of go through it, you know? I don't know, I think obviously having a great family, you know, having an incredible wife who was, you know, taking the load.

You know, I had these little, little babies running around. And it was even crazy because they would be like running on the couch over my head. And I'm like, you know, you can't get near me, you know, because if at the time my back hadn't solidified. So if, like, if I was hit wrong, I'd be paralyzed. You know, that's why they got you in the fricking, you know, suit.

You know, like, even walking to the toilet was, like, step by step. It was crazy. It was f***ing crazy time, you know? But like I said, like, it allows me to come in here and be so grateful to be able to be in this position, like, relatively pain free and do what I love every single day. I mean, really like for a guy who broke his back, like, I really don't have any issues, you know, around.

No problem. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, if if I strain it, too bad. I'll pull. I've pulled a couple ligaments because now I'm kind of hunched a little bit, but, blessed, you know. When did you start getting back into it then? Did you? Was it a pretty quick like, recovery and go back into it, or did you have to ease into what you were doing?

As soon as I was able to get back in here, I was in here, you know. So yeah, I was actually doing I was doing all the tuning on the dyno remote, you know, so I'd TeamViewer in, they'd have the motor ready on the dyno and I would tune it, you know, in my little fricking back suit on the couch, you know, how is, how does when you're doing an engine dynamic compared to a gamma use a jazzy as an example here.

But like, you kind of have to feel the car. You have to know what you're looking for. Is there any thing like remote tuning? Right. Like you, you're not with the car. It's the same thing applied to the engine. You have to have somebody competent running everything or. Yeah, well, on our dyno, it's like we already know these combinations, so it wasn't.

But you know what? That's actually an interesting story because at the time when that happened, we had a twin 100 millimeter, 700 inch semi hemi that I don't know if. Have you ever seen a Sonny Leonard Hemi? It's f***ing huge. It's huge. You know, we had 200 millimeter turbos on this thing. Dual injection, you know, all this stuff.

And I had a guy that never had ran the dyno before, and I was trying to, like, walk them through. And we ended up having, like, a belt drive issue. And any rate, he ended up, you know, he ended up he ended up doing all these pulls on this motor with me, checking the tune and adjusting it and, and it it worked out, you know.

So why turbos. Why is that your favorite. Why is that your go to.

There's I don't know. I mean, these days it's like, I like everything but turbos, there's nothing that makes power. Like turbos. Like you can put a blower motor on, like, for example. And I'm not hating because I don't want people to get pissed at me, but you can put, like, a big a** 1471 on something. And the thing I'll have, like a crazy camshaft and, you know, it's, it's doing this awesome like surge idle.

But that is the most unreliable nightmare for an everyday car because like, you can never get the fuel right in that thing. That blower is totally inefficient. Like and then I used to call them two for once. So we used to do these blown marine packages. So you'd have two, five, 72, 14, 70 ones and make like, you know, whatever.

Let's say they make 100 horse each like from the marine world. Or you could have one twin turbo that makes, you know, 2200 horse, you know, and, and and the sad thing is, is that one turbo motor is more reliable than the two blown ones, because you got this belt that's whipping around, wreaking havoc on the main bearings.

The fuel distribution through the blower is crazy at best, and like the efficiency of the blower. To get that thing to make the power that you want, it's driving. You're you're making like, I don't even know, but let's call it like 400 horse to drive the thing. I'm sure that's incorrect, but insane amount of parasitic loss. So turbos there's like, barely any parasitic.

It's really easy on the bearings. Like you'll know when you build blower motors versus turbo motors. The turbo motors are way easier on the bearings in racing these days. Now they're kind of going away a little bit from the turbos and they're doing like, you know, screws and pro chargers or whatever. But for me, it's still it's still a terrible thing, you know.

But a screw blower on the street, like a Whipple or a Kong or, you know, one of those things they are it's hard to not like them. They are f***ing amazing, you know? Yeah. Like, give me an example of one of your blower engines here because it's actually doing like a big blocking. Throw a Kong on top of it.

You're making stupid horsepower there as well. Yeah, yeah. The like the screw blower stuff we usually stick to like the, you know, coyote, the newer Hemi and the LHS kind of lower cubic inch stuff. They don't necessarily have a good, like they have A38 was A38 that can kind of keep up with the big block a little bit, but they're supposedly coming out with a five liter that would be probably suited for a big block.

But if you've ever driven one of these combinations, like our blown combination it if you're driven a Tesla Plaid, then okay, it feels like a Tesla Plaid, but it actually has soul, you know, like so when you accelerate, it has that kind of torque immediately, but then it revs to like 7500 rpm. So it's there. Glorious. Like I these days.

My buddy, my buddy Enzo, I was talking to him. I'm like, man, it would be pretty nice to get like a third, like a love rocks, right? So get a third gen Iroc. I mean, maybe put one of my blown packages in this with the roaster shop chassis. He's like, what the f***? Like, if you don't have a twin turbo in that thing, I'll cut your legs off, you know, and I'll probably have a turbo in it.

But that's how good our little blower packages are. They're just like you drive around any gear, any RPM, and you get in it and it's just you're pinned, you know, it's because it's making like our, you know, 1200 horse, three liter Weibo package. It's making 1000ft pounds by like 3000 rpm, you know, I mean, where do you need 1000ft pounds?

You know, it's crazy, you

Roadster shop stuff. Is that you go to them. Roadster shop? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Jeremy Gerber and Phil Gerber, those guys, those guys are awesome, man. Super awesome guys. And like, they're humble, but they they push and kick a** like, I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen their shop.

I actually haven't even been there personally. But like, I mean, I'm actually like super impressed with those guys and the products that they give are just amazing. Morrison also is awesome. We used to use Art Morrison and their products are incredible also, but I just tend to go with Jeremy stuff just because, you know, got a lot of respect for the guy and he's just badass.

I think they're like 5 or 6 hours away from where I'm at. I think they're like not too far from Chicago from. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. You cool to check that out eventually. But what do you do all in-house. Right. So if you're getting a Roadster shop chassis then what else is done in-house? Seems like you do a lot of stuff.

We're looking some stuff at everything off camera. Yeah, I can't do it. I mean, we at one point, like there's there's a car that's not here right now, but it would be. It's too bad it's not here for you to see. But we basically we're we're building a mid-engine, all wheel drive 1967 GTO. And we built the chassis from scratch.

We built the all wheel drive system from scratch. The front differential, the rear differential from scratch. This is obviously there's a guy named Wiseman who's who's building that portion of it, but there really isn't. When we had the supercar stuff, we were doing interiors from scratch, wiring the cars, painting the cars. You know, absolutely everything we were doing out of this shop.

It's like I told you before, it's it's literally like for a guy coming up right now, it's like the Wild West, like you literally, if you've got some talent and you've got some customers that believe in you, you can build just about anything. I mean, you can build your own engine from scratch. No problem with AI coming in right now.

I can only even imagine what that's going to do. Like we have AI help us with some of the structure of suspension components or this and that, and it comes out looking like a spider web or something. But it's like super light, super strong. I make, like I said, like I'm coming into work so grateful and so happy and realizing, like, like this is just the beginning.

You know, I'm 52 years old and like, there's so much more to do in this industry right now. It almost gave me goosebumps. Right now, just talking about it. You got a lot of runway, right? Like 52 to mess with Jay, right? Because he's always talking like he's on the back nine. Like. And I'm like, dude, you are young.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So much runway. One of the things we're looking at is like the 3D printed models, headers we're looking at. Yeah. It's like.

I like guys that are looking to the future of the industry because if you're stuck in the old ways, like you're just going to get left behind when you're looking at stuff like that. What made you want to pursue the 3D printing stuff, for example?

all right, so before the SD card fill up, you're talking about tuatara. Oh, yeah. So the the tutorial like years and years ago we were 3D printing collectors at Inconel, you know, and everybody was like, that'll never work. But it was working great. You know, we did all sorts of air intakes at a 3D printed aluminum.

We've done car parts at a 3D printed aluminum. And just recently what I was showing, showing you earlier is we actually did a full 3D printed header from, you know, like not not parts of a header where you got to weld it. It was all one piece except for I just welded flanges on because I didn't want to deal with them machining it.

But you know, it's it's really like there's a company out there as a singer or zinger. See singer not not not that Porsche company. They have this it's a supercar. It's CC Engr I think or something. But the whole car is additive manufacturing. Everything like the the everything about that car is 3D printed, you know, and it's it's pretty crazy.

So if you got a good designer like and I'm not a designer like obviously I like I don't know how to do all the computer design. So I have people hired to do that. But I have a vision of it. And you know, you can do like what I'm looking at lately is like like the casting process where you can 3D print molds for like limited runs of ideas, like, we've had a four valve 500 inch engine on the back burner for a long time and with, you know, additive manufacturing, I feel like I could cast a block in the heads at an affordable price and then, you know, pop out a few just to

see how they run, you know, because I feel like like everybody loves a coyote, right? I mean, coyotes are well, not everybody. If you're guy, you don't. Right. But like, they have a like you can drive around a Harley and then you can drive around like a Ducati. Right. And there's a difference between the Harley and the Ducati.

Like they're like, you got the rice rocket and the Harley. The Harley sounds bitchin. Like, you know, it has its own aura, but it is not like, you know, a 15,000 rpm bike motor, you know, and four valves are really like, everybody might have shops going to want to kill me, but four valves at where it's at you, like if you want to make air, if you want to make horsepower, an engine is an air pump.

The more air you put in and the more fuel you put in, the more horsepower you're going to make it. So it's an air pump. And so two valves versus four valves, unless you get into like a fuel car or some kind of crazy boosted thing for me, like I would definitely love to do like an 11,000 rpm, 500 inch big block that you could drive on a daily basis.

So we've had this project in the works for like in a while, but it's just it's a money thing, like being able to do it all, you know, on my own dime or whatever. What's the hardest part about doing it? I mean, to dedicate the time to it and the cost, you know, so a project like that. But now, like I look at, you know, what you can do with, you know, printing molds and stuff like that, and it's starting to starting to think, oh, I don't know, might have to do this soon, you know, because like crankshafts and rods, pistons, cams, all that stuff, you just go to a professional and have them make

you one, you know. But it's always been like water jackets, the block and all of that other stuff that you know, you can do in a billet like we've got, we've done a ton, I've got a I've got a four cam.

Small block that we did at all billet like 15 years ago sitting there in the corner. But you know, you got to cut the water jackets in the thing and then you got to plate it. And you know, being able to actually do a casting on a head versus doing all sorts of weird drill and this and that.

And you know, you know, it's pretty cool. Are you doing any of that stuff in house or is that something you got to outsource? You mean like printing something like that again, like machine jackets and all that stuff? Well, we used to have like, literally right next door was D and K machine and like he unfortunately ended up passing away, but he was our CNC machinist forever.

And that was like we literally, you know, walk, walk across the way and you know, hey, Dave, let's try this, let's try that. So that's why you see, like almost all these different things like the alien intake and all these different billet parts that we do was like a relationship with our neighbor, you know? So it was pretty cool.

What has been the most fascinating thing that you've learned in the last, let's call it two, three, five years? Because I knew this project, I don't know the.

What's the what's the most interesting thing that I learned in the last five years? That was a hell of a challenge, I imagine. Yeah, that I'll tell you what was nice about the two, Tara. And what I learned with that is one, I worked with this guy, Chris Muzio, who owns Danville Performance. Okay. This guy, it's like like I consider myself like a tuner, but I'm not like a real tuner.

Like, Chris Muzio is like, maybe like a like a Shane T or or a J. That guy was his name. Job better maybe or something like. But they or Ryan Witt from Holly or whatever. These guys like can look at the Ocilla scope, grab on the crank and be like, oh, you know what missed right there? You know, and or they just have such an ability to be able to look at data and decipher, like everything.

Like it's like a blood test. They're looking at the data like a blood test, you know. So I was able to work with him and being able to see that individually, trimming every cylinder when you're wide open at 2200 horsepower for, you know, 50s that every cylinder needs to run as its own cylinder. It's not just a V8, and every injector gets its own fuel and every injector gets its own.

Like when we ran that engine, every cylinder had its own timing, every cylinder had its own fueling, and they were off by like 8.5% between cylinders. And when we got that right, the reliability of that engine, like went through the roof. So that was like a, you know, a big eye opener. It was like, you know, wow. We you know, you can control these things so high level and have like if you get outside of a parameter, have a safety pull it back so you don't just grenade it.

You know, we did grenade that engine though. We grenade it on the runway once you know. But that's that's what happens when you push it and you're going to you're going to hurt things from time to time. But that thing has a two way record of 281 miles an hour, and we went 295 miles an hour one way in that car.

And I'm hoping that pretty soon we're probably going to go, you know, well beyond 300 miles an hour. Yeah. That was is that correct me if I'm wrong here. Looking back at I think it was about 4 or 5 years ago, whatever it was, whenever they did that record, was that what a controversy was? The only did 2951 way?

No, that was a whole different controversy. That thing was like I mean, and I can't say one way or another what happened there. I, you know, I'm not even going to get into get into what they had going on right there. But that was that was like they didn't go anywhere near as fast as what they claimed on the first runs because that radar wasn't set up correctly.

So but the the time that we went out there, actually, they, they, they hired race logic to come out and instrument the whole car. And they hired some YouTube influencers that actually, like, called them out on their stuff to be there to make sure it was all legit. And it went to 79 one way, and it went to 86 the other way, and with a 281 mile per hour average.

And I mean, and the thing is, is we added some power into it in the second, in the second run, only in seventh gear above a certain RPM, and it picked up like 6 or 7 miles an hour so fast that we were like, we were out of time, but like could have turned it around and gone 300.

Then we went out there a second time. It went 295 one way. But the thing is, you got to do everything for FIA. You got to do everything within an hour. So you got to do a run one way, have everything ready, car cooled down, ready to go, going the opposite direction within an hour. Okay. Were you out there for those runs there I was yeah okay.

What does that look like? Are you are you turning around the car? I mean, like, for example, you go to like the racetrack and people have like these, you know, leaf blowers trying to cool off the car, like, is this like a crazy science experiment? What does that day look like? Well, it's that day looks like it's sketchy because, like, the driver of the car, you know, and if there's a problem at 300, he's probably dead, you know?

So that's one thing. So you're, like, trying to make sure everything is you no good, you know. And on that particular with a particular day that I was at Cape, it had went to 95 on the first pass. And then we went to go turn it around and it was on, it was on a rip. It was actually 40 miles an hour faster at the mile than it was on the previous run at 295.

But you're going so quick. There's two flags and you only have two and a half miles, and then you have like a mile shutdown. If you miss the flag, you're going to you're going to fly into the swamp. So the guy saw the flag and thought it was the other flag. So he hit the brakes on the second one, you know.

And so we turned it around again. And then we had like A02 failure. And I was like saying we can't run it. The O2 aren't even on. And they were like, we got limited time and they went without the O2, you know, and that wasn't great. So it didn't run as good on that pass. But I don't know, I got off topic.

What was the actual what was the actual question. What does the day look like. Yeah. So it's the day look like like we're making sure that before the run starts, you know, everything in the engine is cooled down. So like, you know, the water in the intercoolers is cooled down. You got to do all sorts of checks on the tires because the tires are.

Yeah. Right. And they have like at first we had, they had sensors in the tires where they were like the sensors were breaking from centrifugal force and getting launched inside of the deal. But so they had like at first they had reps out there from Michelin doing that. And then I think Michelin was like, yeah, I don't even know if we want to be, you know, like have that liability.

But you know, everybody is just, you know, trying to do the best that they can because a guy's life is on the line. Like for this isn't like it for sure. Like guys that are getting in the cars nowadays, their life is on the line every day because people are so fast, like guys are going in threes and f***ing, you know, two whatever.

And the eighth, it's crazy how fast they're going, you know, but you're in a production car without a roll cage going 300 miles an hour, you know, and you got like maybe two bottles of fire system, like you're going to be lucky if you walk away from that, you know. So I even the guy who was driving that, like I made him sign like a death waiver and stuff, I was like, dude, like, I'm down for doing this, but I'm not going to lose a business over something bad happening.

You know how that relationship start, by the way? Were you just approached me like, hey, we got an idea. We need the engine. Yeah, yeah. So like, we started off with their cars. They had a car called an arrow TT, which was the earlier version of the two Tara. And so we built some of those and had, you know, good success with that.

And then, you know, started on the two Tara stuff, which was like a clean, clean, safe design. What time frame would this be roughly? Well, the arrow were early. And then, you know, they spent a lot of time on the two, Tara. So, you know, they I don't know how many years, but there was a big year gap between the Aero TT and the two Tara.

So we had multiple years where we didn't do anything with SSC. And then we came back and spent a good amount of time developing what's currently in the car right now.

Are you able to speak to what makes this special? How is it different than any of the big three that you have in here, I guess, what is it? Is the engine based off of anything that exists? Yeah, it's based off of an LHS, but it's totally like, you know, like we use, you know, a Timken crank made by Bryant like, that has been silenced out like this.

Crank is not your normal 180. It's it's actually extra heavy to deal with like longevity. And then the rods currently are designed by a company called Panchal which are titanium. I mean, the total rod weight in this engine is like 477g for the total rod and the bob weight of the. The entire rotating is like 1500 of the tire rotating.

So you have this super light rotating so you don't feel all the buzz of like, have you ever been in a four cylinder car? And when you're sitting there at idle, you kind of feel a thing kind of buzzes versus like a V8 car, because that usually four cylinders are like a 180. So they have like high vibration.

So we want to have the rotating be as light as possible. So you could, you know, have long engine life. Matter of fact we just got one in here that had 6000 miles and like the bearings look like like I could still see the Dalibor mark when I, when I measured it in the bearing, you know, 6000 miles on a sock.

Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, further than that. Yeah. Is crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 6000 miles. Yeah, yeah. They drive it everywhere. Yeah. They drive it to all the shows and everything. So that was cool to actually get it back. Look at everything. And like I, like I said earlier before to like do like an autopsy okay. What's working. What could we improve upon.

And that's what we're doing you know. So I'm excited to see what these next four do. So okay. The approach to you you're looking to this project if you're like LZ is the move. Are you doing everything like from custom heads. Are you doing like how crazy are you doing it. And you mentioned the rods and the pistons.

Well, give you an idea. That car has 1002 sensors. It's got a pressure sensor in the exhaust turbine. It's got a pressure sensor on the intake turbine. Both sides. It's got two map sensors. Like that thing is like electronic to the moon. So it can be monitored and adjusted. So, like, it has a really good safety system in the car where OES are not even going anywhere near as crazy as what we're doing on that car, you know.

And then as far as hard parts, it's got the best that money can buy. I mean, the connecting rods alone are $13,000 for the for the connecting rod in that motor, and the crankshaft is $12,000. You know, just the Mallory in the crankshaft is about like $2,600 for Mallory. Just the heavy metal for balancing it, you know, I mean, the pins are DLC.

The rockers on those have DLC coding. I mean, everything about that engine is nice, you know, so and it just keeps getting nicer. So when you're buying one of those, you know, you're getting you're getting you're getting a nice piece. Have you gotten to go for a drive one at all. Oh yeah. Yeah. We're at Willow driving around in one of those things at Willow.

And it's it's good. It's man, you get you get in a car like that where it only weighs 3,000 pounds, you know, it's got some power. It's. And it's not like what we're driving like the nose is like it like falls off. It's like you're sitting in a lawn chair, you know, with, you know, I mean, that's that's a bad example, but it's like you're right there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's badass. Let's do what do you think about the stuff you've driven over the years? What's been the best experience?

I don't know. I mean, to be honest, like, maybe not. I mean, there's there's a couple cars that stick out that are, like, really that were, like, eye opening is like, back in the day we built this Pontiac Tempest. It was a twin turbo Pontiac Tempest. And that was kind of the first like chassis car, twin turbo that I was that I drove on the street and that car was f***ing fast.

That car on pump gas was going fives in the eighth, and it probably would do fives on the street, but this was 2004. Maybe it was insane. Yeah, yeah. And that car, when you're driving on the street going five in the eighth like it is so stupid, you know, I mean, it was and the car felt really safe because the guy set up the chassis, right?

It had tire on it like it wasn't sketchy, you know. So that car was an eye opener to me as to what, how fast the streetcar could be. I mean, you really don't need any faster than that for the street, to be honest. But I mean, obviously everybody's, you know, on the street, it's very hard to do something like that.

You know, these days it's again, you know, not so big a deal, but that's insane what you do on the street. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all wheel drive stuff. It's f***ing crazy too. But then, you know, speaking a sketch, we did like a twin turbo seven, which you actually saw today. And that car did not feel super safe, but it had insane amount of power, you know, fun.

But, you know, like some of the cars that I really, really loved, there was an empath that we did that's on our YouTube channel. That was just a 572 big block. Nah. But the way the car felt like the steering was good, the suspension was good. It sounded good. You know, like you don't have to have all this power to still have a totally badass car.

You know, it's the lowest power build or engine package to put out here. 656. Yeah. Lesna. Yeah. Nails? Yeah.

Are you okay? Like, for example, I've always heard of the four 20s are a little problematic. Are you doing some crazy upgrades to those to make them live longer? Yeah, they're not even. There's really nothing. I mean, there's not much in that motor that's original GM anymore. You know, we use a dart LHS next block. It's got a billet crank.

It's got these boost line rods. It's got a custom CP piston. I've worked with comp and doing spent on tests and all these like we have some really nice lobes. Like we can do a hydraulic roller with like under 400 pounds of spring pressure and rev that thing 7500 with under 400 pounds of spring pressure. You never have to adjust the valves.

That's something like you asked me about, like what is some of the things that you've done recently that have been big and some of the big things is the valve train, because we can have this in back in the day, we'd say, oh, you're running a juicer because like the cam has all in it. So it's like it's a juicer, you know?

Yeah. To, to to you're too young to remember that stuff. But anyway, we're running a hydraulic cam and a thing, you know, it acts like it's like a solid roller. You know, the thing is, making a ton of power. You rev it like a solid roller. You never have to adjust it. This is something that, you know, like have your cake and eat it too.

We always used to claim that, but now it's like, I mean, you literally can, you know, and the the power that the, the motor, you know, these motors, the power that they're making, it's actually I got a lot of guys. For example, the other day, the guy was upset that we didn't make the 2000 on the horse on the dino, so we had to put it back on to make the 2000 horsepower totally unnecessary on the street.

You're never going to use that, you know? But so like, for the longest time, we thought, oh, you know, more power, more power, more power. And then at certain point, we shifted to more reliability, easier for the customer to install. What can we do more to get the package, you know, more things done on the package because you're at a power level.

That's totally insane, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of on the things that I noticed here is like a lot of these cars you're like pointing out there, like on the street tires, pretty much. It's not like they're on blocks. Right. Besides the RX seven. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, what is your typical customer look like? Just cruisin A to B, is it. They're going to the track doing everything there. We we've got a variety of different customers. You got guys that take it to the track. But you know probably our biggest customer if you would say in a percentage is a guy who wanted a hot rod his whole life.

He started to build the hot rod and he wants something that's, you know, going to scare him a little bit, but still have like, manners to where he can drive it anywhere. And that's probably our biggest business. We've got guys, you know, some guys go to the track, some guys are doing, you know, got a pro drifter, whatever.

But most of our guys are just a normal guy that can afford one of these things. And he's building his dream car, you know? Have you done any drift cars? Yeah, we've got Andy Hartley's drift car. He's a he's a pro driver right now. He's racing today right now. Okay. Yeah. Some events, some. There's a number of tracks.

Yeah. Or something. So what's the most insane project you've been a part of? Like. Wow, I can't believe I did that. I honestly, it seems like the next one. Yeah. I mean, every project lately, it's like Scott who I can hear who's coming in here right now, this guy is always like, that's the most insane thing I've ever seen, you know?

And and I'm like, I know it's crazy, right? And then the next one comes in and you're like, f***, this is insane, you know? So it just seems like every single time it gets a little crazier, you know, because you're putting something better into it, you know? And the margins that I'm building, I'm kind of hand selecting that I'm doing what I'm working on.

It's because I actually want to do something different, you know? So

okay. So yeah. So the, the project that I really can't tell you a lot about, it could be a total failure. That's what makes it exciting. Like, you know, it's high stakes on it. So if it doesn't do well you know there's a lot of responsibility on me. But if it does well, it's pretty amazing that, you know, there's something I don't know when you do something with that kind of like maybe stakes, pressure, whatever.

If you're successful, there's a there's a type of peace that I get that, that you can't describe or buy, you know, is there's just something that happens where I feel something inside, where I'm just like, I want that feeling again. You know, where, you know, again, you have to say what the idea is. What inspired the idea? What are you just kind of thinking one day, or were you working on something?

Yeah, I just, you know, it's just evolving the engine to the next step. Can we make big power reliably for a long time? And that's that's what that's what that project is. You know, you do a lot of manufacturing of your own hearts here as well. And at that point, yeah, we do. You know, I think, you know, I was talking to, you know, Joe from free.

I'm familiar. So he we originally did an engine called the code Red, which was for Shelby, which was this twin turbo 2008 Mustang. And that was like the last car that Shelby did before Carroll died. And then Joe has taken over that program, and he does like the twin turbo code Reds, which that guy is f***ing awesome. I love that guy.

I'm like, blowing up his phone all the time. Hey, man, what do you think about this? But, but we developed 200 new parts for that car when we. When we did that project, right? Yeah, 200 parts, you know, and that's from, like, intake manifold to coolant crossovers to a special power steering reservoir that didn't foam. I mean, we developed a lot of different things here.

Okay. So what did that look like then? Did you have like a bunch of engineers on barrel at that point or. No, they're just like, you know, I've been lucky, like a lot of my best friends turned into engineers and like, you know, funny story is one of my best friends, Chris Emhoff. Like, back when we were young, we used to go party.

And then afterwards, like, when we came back, I'd be like, let's f***ing design some s***, man. We'd be all kind of half to leer, designing stuff together on the computer, you know? So a lot of the designs in the original early part of Nelson Racing were me and Chris designing stuff, coming back drunk, you know.

Or, you know, a good friend of mine, Cole Bolster. Still, to this day, he is an engineer. And, you know, we'll design stuff together. And this is something that somebody that I street raced with when I was 18, you know, but a guy that doesn't work here anymore, that used to be our designer was a guy named Xander Guerra.

And he has like a wild, imaginative mind. And he's really good with like, solid modeling. So we would do all sorts of weird s***. You know those headers right there that you saw that are 3D printed? He ended up modeling those, you know, so but he has his own thing, you know, in Florida or wherever he is right now.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. Like how some people kind of go on and do their own thing, like grow within the industry in their own way. Yeah, yeah. It's so many guys that have come to this shop all have shops like Sean at Empire, this guy Dragos, like so many guys that have come through here, it's like, seems like it's a stepping stone.

They're here for like 3 or 4 years and you're like, f*** yeah. And then they're like, I'm starting my own business. You're like, oh, man. You know. Yeah. What's it like having a business in California again? This is my first time here. I have this outside vision of what California was, and I spent some time. This is not a first time here.

The first time I'm experiencing it and talking to shop owners. Isn't it difficult to run a business out of here or not? I mean, yeah, it'd be California. Super. I mean, it's expensive, you know, that's that's the biggest thing is the expense, right? So like, you know, overhead on this place, you know, I don't know, I think I'd have to go look.

But it's like roughly like 125,000 a month, you know. Yeah. So it's like there's a decent amount of overhead and in just the electric is 3000 a month in this place, you know. So it's very different than, you know, maybe owning your own land and owning your shop and not having to deal with that. So California is and they're definitely they're not necessarily on your side.

Like when we had to go get this place up to speed and get all the permits, like it was like a year and a half process. It ended up costing like $600,000 to get this place permanent, you know, because if you did over 10% of an improvement on the building, the entire building had to be brought up to code.

So that meant like we had to put sprinkler system in here. All the California green had to be changed, like every single light had to have a fire enclosure, you know, 88, 88 for handicap. Like it was f***ing insane. So that's, you know, even the air conditioning condition, air conditioning system had to be flowed. They have to do like a smoke test where you, you know, you get permitted and stuff.

So but that said, I love California and I love being here. Like like it's worth it for a lot of people. It's totally worth it for me. My family here, my wife's family is here. We're not going anywhere. You know, I love this place. The weather's freaking amazing, you know? But, you know the cost of living out here.

You know, it's like $7 for a gallon of gas. And, you know, tomorrow our awesome governor will probably put another dollar tax on it for no reason at all. So different types of taxes don't show on the gas. It's insane. It's insane. Although we didn't have our tax on our Starbucks today. So that was kind of so say $0.97 on my coffee.

I was looking at my receipts. Yeah. Okay. What are the alien thing come from, by the way, I keep looking at this. The alien thing came from exactly what I was telling you is like coming home after hanging out with my buddy and then just, you know, drawing it up, because I always have a, like, I can envision what I want, something to look at.

Like, I, you know, I'm lucky in that way that I, I do have a ability to see some things before, you know and know if I like it or not. An alien was one of those things where you see an alien, you almost think Nelson racing because it like it's kind of iconic to us. You know, it's just it's just a very unique look.

Like like this is an alien right here. Yeah. That's an alien. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's just that was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's we have a new. So there's a guy named I don't know if you're familiar with Sean's custom alloy. So Sean made this intake right here. But Sean, Sean's tool pass are like the best. His tool paths are so badass.

You know, like, you can look at his tool pass, and there's no, like, smudge from where the, you know, the cutter went sideways and smudged it, and they all make sense. Like the lines come and meet each other, right? So anyway, he's doing our new alien right now, and our new alien, like our old alien, was all about hiding things.

So you can't see the throttle linkage on that, even though there's two throttle blades. Right? Right in the front. Right there. You can't see the injectors because they're all hidden on the inside. There's a whole fuel rail and fuel regulation built into the bottom of it, and it's all hidden. Whereas my new alien, it'll be more exposed. And I'm doing that just because when you got to work on that, if there's a problem, my ears burn across the country because it's really hard to work on.

So our new aliens are going to be more like, you need to check if injector is good or wiring, you can just go and get to it. But that's how the alien kind of came about, is that we were doing sheet metal manifolds. They would mount two fuel pressure regulators on it. Then we'd have to hardline the feel pressure regulators for the boost reference.

And then you had this terrible looking throttle linkage. Now everything's DBX but on the side. But even still you have this D.W. motor hanging off to the side that looks totally out of place. So we we wanted everything symmetrical and we wanted it hidden. And so that's how the alien came to life, you know? That's cool. One of the things you're showing us off camera was like, I remember just how you balance a crank.

What goes into balancing a crank? Yeah. So balancing a crank, you basically, you weigh the pistons and you make sure they're all the same. You weigh the rods, you make sure they're all the same. And then you weigh bearing rings, rods, small end and big and piston pin, and you take all of those weights and that becomes what's called a bob weight.

So, you know, typical bob weights in a big block are like 24, 2500g. You take that 20 400 gram bob weight and you put that and you clamp it onto the rod pin on each journal. So you have an individual bob weight, which is the exact weight of your pistons, rods, rings, bearings, etc., including all allowance. And then then we spin it dynamically.

So then we take a crank just like a tire. You put a tire on a tire balancer and a thing that's kind of jacked, and you got to add weights to the tire until it smooths out. Well, you do the same thing with a crankshaft. So our balancer, it looks like prehistoric because it's a floater where all new balancers they just it spins it once.

And then a computer tells you you know drill this one inch here. Drill this one inch here. And then you can spin it again. And it tells you if it's in balance. But our balancer you can actually see it when you're spinning it. So if it's out of balance it shakes. Like if it's really out of balance I've had it move the machine before.

It shakes so bad. And I don't want to ever get away from that balancer, because you can always see if the thing is balanced correctly. Like I get cranks in here. I mean all the time, all the time from the best manufacturers that I have. Nothing bad to say, but they just they're never balanced, right? You know, I mean, even if the things off like 30g, if you take 30g, you put that in a drill and you try to hold on to a drill that's out of balance, 30g, you can't hold on to it, you know, and think about what that's doing to your motor at 7000 RPM, you know.

So.

You know, we can get into different theories about over balancing and everything else. But you want to get the you want to think, you want the crank to be as tight as you possibly can when you're building an engine. So it's as good as it possibly can. Yeah. Where did you learn all this theory? Were you a bookworm at some point?

Is this from mentors? Like, like all this, all these various things, whether it's tuning or anything, machining, whatever. Yeah, I mean, I honestly, it's for me the way I learn is I got to put my hands on it, you know, so I'll read about it. And that's like step one. But until I put my hands on it and I actually do it, then it doesn't really sink in like I could read about it.

And if I don't put it into action, like a week later, I forget what the hell I wrote wrote about, you know? So like for balancing, we just, you know, again, you learn the hard way. We still it's still like we're still kind of prehistoric in the way we do it. It's just each guy that uses a balancer myself, BJ, a guy, Rudy that used to be here.

After a while, you get used to it. Like you can see the strobe. The strobe tells you where you need to take it out, and then you can pretty much it's a little bit of a game, like you're like, oh, I could take a one inch hole, you know, drill it. There's a little chart and tells you, you know what?

You know how deep and how wide will take off certain amount of grams. But you're always playing a game because you don't want to. You don't want the crank to flip light or, you know, like so. Let's say you put the crank on it and it's light and you have to add Mallory, or you have to add weight somehow.

Then you need to figure out where you want to put that weight. Well, we have like bolt on weights that you put on there and then you can spin it to simulate it. But if you take too much out of the crank and it goes light as a balancer, this is, this is like the, the thing that you don't want to happen because then you got to take everything apart, put it in the mill, drill ream and press weight into it, which makes the process way longer.

So you're so you basically just drilling into the lows there? Yeah. You're drilling into the counterweights. So you take the counterweight, you take out the original material, and then you fill it with a material called Tungsten or Mallory. And that, that is like one of the most dense heavy metals that you can do that's not radioactive, right. Matter of fact, I put a post out of my Instagram the other day and like, due to, you know, being used for ammunition for the war or whatever is going on right now, the cost of Mallory is just insane.

Like a handful. I think he sells like 1100 bucks or something. It's like $100 a stick, you know, like for a piece. This big one one inch piece is $100, you know? So you got six sticks, $600 just in Mallory to balance it, you know? So it's crazy. Have you ever done anything out of a trade for work with any of those or anything?

Any fun projects like that? Well, like we did Shelby, we did that code Red with Shelby. So that was kind of like an OE thing. And then the other Shelby, which is S.S.C., which is, you know, limited production hypercar. We do that. And you know, we've gotten we've done some like NDA stuff with stuff that I really can't talk about, but yeah.

Yeah. So tell me what you have to shoot me. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

What are you most proud of? Most proud of is my family, you know? I mean, the company. That's something that I learned, you know, is that you can I've had like, I guess this is. So I went through some really rough times, maybe four years ago, you know, my brother passed away and I was in a position where, like, I thought maybe I would never walk again, you know, and and in those times, like, the shop does not matter.

Like what matters is, you know, the people that you love. So, like, what I'm most proud about is, like, I have an amazing wife. Like, my mom and dad are, like, the most incredible mom and dad. I've got amazing kids. I've got an amazing niece that that lives with me. So, like, I'm. I'm out of here every day at 6:00, no matter what right now.

Because I know that I'm going to be having dinner with them at 7:00. And that's like the most important thing. So, I mean, I love this place, like, don't get me wrong. Like, it's on my mind constantly and like, I like when I'm driving to work, I am pumped to get here. I'm pumped when I'm here. But by far my family is is where it's at for me.

Okay, what's the next frontier for you? What's the next big thing you want to learn? Especially when we're talking about AI and all this stuff right here. I think for me, like, I think we really have been holding off on our manufacturing of parts, and we've got like, 20 different parts that, like I have said this for so many years and we just haven't done it, but we we have a turbo, we have like stainless cast turbo headers and turbocharger packages, you know, accompanying camshafts, intake manifold like.

So I think we really I think we will go in the future is parts production where we sell a lot of parts that if you can't afford one of our engines, you'll be able to piece together something from us like that. That, and surprisingly, which I say again all the time, is we've shot like now, like over 30 YouTube videos, which I've never released and I don't even know why, but I think maybe, maybe this by the end of this year, we'll actually start releasing all the videos that we shot.

All right. Because one of the things I was looking at is like, your YouTube channels have been dormant for like six years of that. How was your it's been dormant for like, well, it was dormant for six years where we did two videos, but it's been dormant for like ten years. So and that was really like kind of what our YouTube channel was like.

What made us, you know, my dad used to cut all the videos and put them up for me, and we would just shoot, like we call it the 85% rule, because we just had like a little camcorder and we'd just shoot anything, and then he would turn it into something, you know? And it was good because people who liked us would check in.

So I think, I think we're going to start doing that, but I just didn't want to like, I want it to production level of each video to be, you know, high quality. So I think these, these next 20 or 30 that we release are going to be like they were all shot with like on a red lit, like, you know, doing moves, explaining things.

And I think, I don't know, I wanted to do that. So that's probably why I've been holding off. And you know, you got to iterate. The editing is like, you know, to get the time away to edit it. It's like, it's a lot. You should know, you know. Yeah. No, I did 400 videos almost last year. So I get it.

Yeah. So maybe we'll do that by the end of the year. I think it'll be, you know, maybe not by the end of the year on the parts, but, you know, pushing towards the parts. And maybe by the end of the year we'll start releasing videos again. Okay. Well, towards the end of every episode, I like to ask, I guess, to pick three cars or this is what I call the final question.

You get to pick three cars and I'm a little sloppy, but you have to pick a daily driver, a show car, and a race car. You have an unlimited budget. Build whatever you want. Do whatever you want. What are you picking a daily driver? My daily driver is going to be a third gen Iroc with the Roadster shop chassis.

It's going to have one of my twin turbo 427, and it probably with either most likely a stick, but it could be an eight. And so that would be my daily driver and then unlimited budget.

I don't know. It might be a Lambo. I've always been a Lambo guy. I have a Lambo. I've got a Diablo, but.

Would probably be a Lambo. Okay. Yeah. What kind of which? You were one older one. Would you stay up at Avalon? Maybe an invented door? I don't know. Yeah, definitely. I don't I don't think it's like the Diablo. Like I do like that. And it's this motor that we did built that we built for. It is f***ing awesome.

We did, you know, life Racing unit, we built our own intercoolers into. It's got a pair of 60 Fords on it. That's going to be pretty cool because it's just a that's a actual regular manual all wheel drive twin turbo 12 cylinder. So that's cool. But you know, I don't know. We went up to the factory this summer.

I took took my family to Europe, and we went up to the factory and we're checking it all out. I was like, you know, I don't know, I do like Lamborghinis. And then a commuter, I don't know, I've got a I've got a 240,000 mile beta infinity that I freaking love. Man. I freaking love this car. That's what was the Iraq tractor.

The Iraq would be a daily. So. Oh, daily so so unlimited. And what was the other choice? Whoops. Actually got a little bit closer. Yeah. Show car. Show car is probably the Maximus that we built, you know, which I actually I, I want to talk about that I completely spaced on it. I do want to talk about it.

So the max. Yeah. Yeah. So the Maximus is like will that or or the GTO. But I guess that's not a show car, the GTO that we're building. I could talk about both of them if you want to, but. So the max, the Maximus is like, that was a car that was to showcase our abilities in the shop.

Right? So we took a 68 charger in, like, we literally have, like, 10,000 hours in hammer and dolly work on that body. That body, basically, it's six inches wider, like all the wheel wells have been changed. All like, I mean, there is so many things about that body and there's there's no filler on that body anywhere. So if you look at this car, it's an all metal body that we literally put clear code on.

And if you've ever done bodywork like and you've done any welding on it, it doesn't. It's not straight. But if you look at this car like you saw it today, right. It looks like it's paint, you know, but it's just clear over steel. So I mean, it took three years to get the body that way. We built the all the rear suspension and the front suspension from scratch like inside the dash.

We've got, we like, made these electronics where when you click the boost controller, the boost controller literally speaks to you and says like warning, you know, you've just increased the horsepower to 2500 rpm, over 2500 horsepower, and it'll automatically switch to fueling for you. And then you can like it has a all original Am billet dash. So it looks like it's, you know, like it looks like the dash is all period.

And then you click a button and the dash moves in, flips 180 degrees, moves forward. And you have all EOS control of the AC, everything inside of there. It's in the same car like so that would be my so what inspired like where does that idea come from? Just being nuts right. So the customer you get a customer who's as crazy as you are and you just start going off, you know, a car took a seven year.

Well now like it's still not finished because we're doing some electronics upgrades to it. But it was like seven years just to build the car early, like I don't know.

Damn, I don't know, let's say 2008 maybe, or something. It was like a long, I don't know, a long time ago. So how did that car. Because that car ended up in a Fast and Furious as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. So so Dennis McCarthy, who like, handles all the cars for Fast and Furious, he originally reached out to me for the F bomb because the F bomb was in fast four or whatever that was best for, right?

Yeah, yeah. So doing wheelies in the dirt, killing the dude. So Dennis, we had brought the car in all metal to Sema and Dennis was like, man, we got to have that car. So Scott, the owner was, you know, okay with it. So, you know, we went to universal and saw Vin Diesel, you know, and then actually we went to the beach, which was absolutely the stupidest idea ever because we took an all metal car that didn't have clear on it at the time.

To the beach. Yeah. No, we just took it. There it is. The salt from the beach, you know. So they were having this scene where, you know, Paul says goodbye to or whatever. I think it was. Well, Paul said goodbye in the car, but he was also on the beach, like holding his kid or whatever. And, you know, the car is just sitting there rusting in front of my eyes.

You know, it took us a month to get the rust out of the pores. And that thing, you know, it was a stupidest idea ever. But yeah, they did that. And then we had this. What's funny about that whole scene in the whole fast movie or whatever is the car had never even run like three hours before that scene was cut.

So we were building that car and then it wasn't finished at Sema. It wasn't even running at Sema. And Dennis is like, we got to have it for the movie. And it's like, can you make it happen for the movie? And I'm like, well, I really don't want to build the car for a movie because, like, we're going to have to kind of make some shortcuts to get it finished.

And they had like their grips waiting for us in the shop. And like one of my guys almost beat up one of their grips because they were like sweating us to get the car done. We're like women. We're working as fast as we can to get this car done, and we basically put it in the trailer because we ran out of time.

And when you see me turn the key, like when when we pulled it out of the trailer for the scene where they both say goodbye to each other. I'm firing it up for the very first time, and I don't know if you've ever, like, fired your your build up for the very first time. It usually doesn't go well, you know, and but we pulled we pulled that off.

It was it was pretty good. What did the. I'm curious. Right. Like what? What did the what did the actors think of the car. They even think anything of the car. Yeah. I mean, they loved it. Like, I guess Ludacris came up. He was like, oh, man, things badass, you know? And then I, I think Vin Diesel, I don't know, because I didn't actually, you know, I don't even care, really, but I guess Vin Diesel wanted it for his collection.

But then they tried to do some stupid s*** to where it was like, oh, give us a discount or promote this or whatever, like. But Scott, the owner, turned down $1.8 million for that car in Saudi. So yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I guess your car is technically the owners. Yeah, yeah, that's a hell of a car.

Yeah, yeah. So okay, so you said you're doing some stuff with it. So it was basically done at one point. And now it's like going back for like some more upgrades. Basically he's got all sorts of crazy things in it right now. He's got like this radar where it's from multiple locations. And then, you know, the rear view mirror has cameras on it and then all the, like, Bluetooth in the car where you can, you know, like the AC control through iOS and all of these, all these little, like, electronic gizmos, like we're tidying all that up and finishing it up form final.

There is still 2 a.m.. It's it's it's on an lecture mode of all of all things which is, which is pretty old so. But it works, you know. So I mean, we're not rewiring it right now, so it's what it is, you know. Yeah. What's in there for an engine? It's a all aluminum 572 inch Hemi. And it's got a pair of my 88 millimeter turbochargers on it.

It's got an alien, you know, it's got all the, you know, billet crank rods, pistons. It's all. It's f***ing nuts, you know. Yeah. So that's the show car. Yeah. Because that car unfortunately that car, like, if I were to take that car in a parking lot and somebody scratched that car, you can't blend the clear on a bare metal car.

So for me, that car really, even though we do drive it around and stuff, the car is really. It's like that car truly is mechanical art. You know, we actually ran it. They ran it downtown LA, and we drove it around there and we were filming. We're doing all these burnouts underneath this big famous bridge back there. And it was it was super fun.

But as a daily driver or something like that, I would it would be. So it'd be so nerve wracking that I wouldn't it wouldn't be my choice. You know, I would want something that, you know, somebody comes in and dents it. It'd be like whatever, you know.

Okay. So that's and then track car is the Lambo. Yeah. Maybe a track car. Yeah. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. One car that we had that was super bitchin. That would be an awesome track car as we did twin turbo Muller. I don't know if you know what it was. There is. Yeah, we did a twin turbo 427 LHS and a moose, and that thing was insane.

Man, that thing was insane. That's stupid. I think it's a force that's like, yeah, no, I don't know. Yeah. It's coming back. Yeah. It's like I think it was like a top card floors or whatever like a decade ago. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean maybe an SSQ honestly like might have to convince Jared to get me in on one of those things, you know?

So you see, she's doing a was it a production run on those right now? Well, I'm not doing it. They are you know, there's a company they're they're based in Washington. And so they're building this hypercar and it's really like it keeps evolving. Right. So it keeps getting better and better. So like it's a pretty nice car, you know pretty nice car.

What's kind of like when you look at like even like their competitors like Konigsberg or who they may not be there like iterating every few years like really quickly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's just it's being that they're not like, you know, Volkswagen or Ford or something. They can make changes and they can evolve quickly. So they're, they're, they really are getting every year that car is getting better and better.

I will say I love that those things are like, yeah, they're not. Maybe they're not the fastest anymore. Maybe they're not this, but just they that car is just legit to, you know. Yeah I mean it's bespoke. Yeah. That's probably the way of putting them. Well on that of them. Where can I find you. You can see me at my Instagram is just at Nelson Racing Engines my Facebook at Nelson Racing Engines.

I actually have a TikTok which is crazy. I just started that same thing, Nelson racing engines. And then maybe we still have videos that on YouTube, which probably have 250 videos up on YouTube right now, Nelson Racing engines on YouTube, and probably by the end of the year you're going to see a bunch more. I'm excited to see where that goes.

Yeah, well, thank you very much for making this happen. This was awesome. A lot of cool stuff in here. This is kind of like a candy shop. So this is really sweet. Thank you everybody for tuning in and listening. And we'll see you all next time.