207. Building 1000HP Evos, Engine Programs, Pushing the B58 and GR Corolla Platforms w/ SpeedLab INC

This episode is brought to you by 6XD Gearbox. More on them later. Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And now we went from a bunch of big V8s on last episode, now we're surrounded by a bunch of these four cylinders, a broken six cylinder. Here at Speedlab INC with my boy Ronnie. We've been trying to get this set up for like a year, I think, a little year and a half. I kept saying, I'm gonna come to California, I'm gonna come to California. We're here, you fed me, you took care of me. And now I'm happy. Let's talk a little bit about Evos, man. Tell me a little bit about how you came to this. What's your story?

Sure. Well, thanks for coming by. I'm glad you enjoyed Armenian food.

Dude, it's good. It's fire.

Yeah.

That was really good.

I didn't get to make it, but next time I will.

Yeah, I promise. I'll be back.

I promised him I will, but this time we didn't really have time. We didn't want to get thrown off. But name is Ronnie. I've been working on these since I was 18 years old, 31 now. So quite a long time. I started working out of my garage. Yeah. Put a stroker engine together. I used to go to school and I used to go to automotive school, actually, UTI, and I would just sit there on the forums. Evo M was big back then. So just trying to figure out what the best street combo is, what I wanted to do. I wanted a torque monster. How do I make this thing make torque? What turbo is reliable?

Which car is this? Like an Evo 8?

It was an Evo 8. Okay. And just got some money together, bought a cheap one. At that time, you could buy a fairly decent condition Evo, and you did not have to sell yourself for it. So which is kind of the case with every car now. I suppose it's getting old. But I did that, actually built it out of my garage, bought engine tools, believe it or not, and everybody told me I'm crazy because it's expensive. You buy mid-totoy, dial bar gauges, micrometers, and all this jazz. I spent $3,000 or $4,000 or whatever on measuring equipment. Then you can just pay a machinist, probably half, for a good machinist to do it. So anyway, got all that stuff, built an engine out of my garage. The engine was good, melted a piston, the tuner was not. So that just kind of put a bug in me, I guess, to kind of try to do my own thing. And I started kind of doing it on the side. I was a Mercedes tech out of all things.

Oh really, okay.

I was a Mercedes tech for about two years. And on the side, I would just do this out of my garage. And I was super passionate about it. I was decently good at it. You know, I was learning. Obviously, don't have a lift to do much at my house. And on these, you want to pull a transmission. It's not like a Honda. It's a little bit more difficult. There's more steps involved. Transfer case has to come out. Axles come out. It's kind of a pain in the a**. I have the luxury of lifts now, and I have for a very long time. So it's just easier to kind of drop the subframe a little bit. Yeah, so I learned the hard way out of the garage. And long story short, ended up working for another European company. I was assembling AMG engines for a while, just blueprinting engines for this company. And then ended up five, six years later, I was still tinkering with Evos the whole time that I was doing everything else.

This is like on the side like you had?

This was on the side. Yeah. And then officially was working for an Evo shop for about a year and one thing that really made Speedlab kind of what it is today was actually the result of me leaving the shop that I was working at because I was getting paid decent. But what was bothering me is I would show up at eight o'clock and I would drive an hour and a half from LA to wherever the shop was.

So two miles basically in LA traffic.

Yeah, basically. And I would get there and I would have to wait two hours for people to show up and open the door so I can do my damn job. So I'm like, dude, if I ever open up a shop, the first thing I'm going to do is make sure I have proper hours for my employees so they don't drive and sit there and wait for me to get there at my own leisure. We're going to have set hours because that to me wasn't professional. And so what ended up happening is someone reached out to me, but somebody that I used to follow each other on Instagram. And he's like, hey, why don't you open your own shop? I'm like, well, I would like to. I don't really have funding. It'd be great, but it takes money. And he's like, well, I'll help on that side. And you just bring your skill set and let's start a shop. So we did. And it actually ended up growing pretty big. It got pretty big.

And that was what time frame was this like, is this like five, six years ago?

This is about seven years, seven or eight years ago, pretty much seven years ago.

Okay.

And, and so after that, things didn't work out. Partnerships are very finicky. Everyone likes to do things their own way. And given that I was doing all the ranching, I wanted things done a certain way. And long story short, it just didn't work out, you know, happens. And I ended up working out of my garage for about a year. My previous business partner, he did his own thing. He actually had fun. So he started a shop that didn't work out. But I was doing things out of my garage. I was porting heads, building engines. I was porting so many heads out of my garage. I don't know why I went through a crazy porting phase that I would, when I would like get out of the garage to wipe, like I would just like blow like black dust out of my nose from like the actual like cart ridges and stuff. And so I ended up, you know, saving some money, barring a little bit of money, of money, saving some money. Came across a shop that was 1500 square feet and started back up again over there. The one thing that I did very differently was I under promised and over delivered. And that's kind of what we do still to this day. And you can ask any of my customers, they'll tell you that's how it is. And great communication. So you make sure you tell the customer what's going on. You don't, you know, obviously not every two seconds you give an update. But, you know, at the end of the day, if, you know, someone's waiting for a project to be completed, it's nice when they get a picture or two of their project being worked on. And it's not just collecting dust. And so that was about five years, that was six years ago. So we've been in this new location for about a year and two, three months now. It's been, yeah, so this is a 5,000.

So that's right around, like, when you reached out to me, you were moving in over here, probably.

Yes, I was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's exactly when me and you actually started talking.

Yeah, but you got to kind of give some people a background there, too. Like, you basically heard my episode with Greg Banish.

Yes.

And that's how you discovered me. And then now we're best friends and you're feeding me.

Big fan, Greg. Big fan of you, too, actually. You're awesome. Yeah.

So you get this shop and this is like, what, 3,500 square feet?

This is 5,000 square feet.

5,000 square feet. Okay, damn, man. I didn't mean to offend you like that. It's all right. So then, okay, so you kind of do a little bit of everything. Kind of like you do the Evo stuff, but you got a Supra over here. You had a GTR at one point as well?

I did. So yeah, that went into a little bit of everything. Let me start by saying the biggest thing that I also want, aside from proper hours, good communication with the customers and under promising and over delivering. Now, obviously I'm a human being. I have made mistakes.

It's kind of you ghosted me once or twice.

Yeah. But for the most part, I try to be on top of that. But the other biggest thing was I wanted to keep everything in house.

Okay. So what does that look like? What's everything you're doing in house here?

Sure. So everything in house, and aside from machine work, everything is done in house. The only thing that I outsource is the actual machine work. Cylinder head assembly is not done in house, but engine assembly is fully done in house. Engines come from the machine shop. We double check everything. We clean it. Obviously, it's been cleaned, but we clean it two or three times before it gets assembled. Everything gets blueprint assembled. We have all the two. I do every single engine that has ever left here, and we've probably three or 400 engines by now, if not more at this point. Actually, last month, I had my best month. I sold six engines last month, and that's quite a bit for me. I'm still a small shop.

For a small shop, even like we were talking to NRE, and I think he said he did like 150 in a year. And that's like a big name shop, but it's just like, I mean, 150 is still a lot when you think about it.

150 is a lot.

Yeah. But again, to be knocking out six, that's quite a bit.

Yeah, and that was in one month. So I had a super proud moment. From time to time, we were talking about it. You have these up and downs as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. We wanted to not work a nine to five, so we're working 24 hours a day. And it was a proud moment, and I was super happy. I told Lexi, I'm very happy. It was like six engines, you know?

She just said, get back to work. Yeah, yeah.

She's like, okay, nice. Yeah, now put them together.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but yeah, so engines come here, everything gets measured. I do all the assembly in house. I have some very competent guys that I trust with the rest of the assembly. So most of the time, what I'll do is I'll put the bottom end together. They will turn it into a long block and then they'll dress up the engine and they will put it in the car. And behind me is a mainline all wheel drive hub dyno, which is probably the best purchase I've ever made. And if I ever break my back and I need to sell something, that's the first thing that's going to sell it because everyone wants one. And it takes like six months to get from Australia. So we have an in-house hub dyno. So break-in oil goes in, we do a start up. We do a heat cycle on the engine at like 2,000, 2,500 RPM just to get the oil flowing and stuff, just making sure the walls are covered and all that. Do an oil change again. I'm crazy with oil changes. I do like six oil changes before the car leaves here. But it's better safe than sorry. Oil is a lot cheaper than an engine. And then yeah, it goes on the dyno. Load gets put on it. We'll do that for about 20, 30 minutes. We'll drain the oil, break in oil again. What do you know? And then we'll do some wastegate hits. Then by the time the car is off the dyno, it's already on synthetic oil, ready for the customer to rip. So there's no... That's awesome. Customer doesn't have to drive it soft for this many miles and bring it back. So try to keep everything in house. Like I said, it's very important to me. And if anything happens during that process, at the aftermarket has no warranty, but I've had a handful, thank God, only a handful of times, maybe two or three times that something has happened on the dyno, I have covered it on my dime. Because if it does not leave here and something happens, if it happens here, I was the one that touched it, I will cover it.

There's very, very few people that actually do that as well. And there's some of the craziest shops that I've had on the show, that's how they do it. It's like, if it's gonna break, I'd rather break on my dyno. That's respectful.

100%. The other thing is, you know what they say, for every good experience you have, you're gonna tell 10 people, or one people, or whatever the saying is, but for every bad, you tell 100. So I would much rather be like, hey, sorry, something happened, I'm gonna take care of it, than have somebody post a story of a blown up engine on the side of the freeway.

The Facebook groups are brutal too, right?

It's just insane. No one really understands how things function, right? So I'll tell you this, for the most part, if something's gonna happen, it's gonna happen on the dyno. If you start it up, if you've done something wrong with assembly, it's gonna show itself pretty much instantly. Either the rings aren't gonna seal, it's gonna spin a bearing, something's gonna happen, it's gonna be mechanical, you're gonna know it right away. If you're making a mistake on the tuning side, usually most of these cars that you see here, fortunately and unfortunately, my customers have high standards for me. So most of these cars, they're flex fuel cars that are making 400 to 480, 500 horsepower on pump gas, and they're making over 1,000 on E85, and they can still put their kids in the car and go to school, take them to school, go to Costco, do whatever they want, and at nights, they can smoke whatever they want on the freeway.

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Yeah. So if something's going to happen also, when you're throwing 50 pounds of boost at it on the dyno, it's going to show itself. So if it's bad assembly, bad tuning, most of the time, it's going to show itself before it leaves. But if something happens outside of here, you know, it's, it's up in the air.

You kind of don't know.

It is, it is, which is, which kind of brings me to my next point. Every single car that we put together now, I pretty much require a standalone. For the Evo stuff, last year and a half, it's all been Link ECU stuff to plug in. Great ECUs for the money, very capable. And full time onboard logging, you know, as long as you're on the throttle. So if something happens, you can just pull the log and be like, oh, this is what happened. This is something I did. This is something, this is what happened. You know, you were at 13,000 RPM somehow, you know, maybe you money shifted, you know? So, you know, that helps a lot. That allows me to then be able to service my customer. If something happens, I can take care of it if it's here. And you know, if something happens outside of here, at least we can know what happened and prevent it from happening again.

So, Link is your main one for when it comes to Evo's. And I know you've been dabbling a little bit with Mocheck as well then?

Yes, pretty much a little bit of everything, with the exception of Mac CCU and a couple of other ones that I really haven't had to tune. I actually have a car outside, a crazy Evo 8 build. That's on a Mac CCU that we're going to be tuning. But yes, so the Evo 8s and 9s are mostly on Haltech. They can offer a package that's very, very well priced, I would say, with the tuning package and everything. And it's right, it's around five grand out the door, including flex fuel tuning. So that's all the sensors, oil pressure sensor, fuel pressure sensor, can lambda, and flex fuel sensor, and tuning the car on flex fuel. Pump gas tuning, E85 tuning, and then the EC obviously will pick up a blend.

So you do Haltech and Link pretty much for those?

Correct. So I do Haltech, Link. I do, believe it or not, I do some Cyvex tuning for the GR Corollas, because that's another random platform that-

We're gonna have to talk about that at some point.

Yeah, that thing is stupid. Yeah, we have the highest horsepower GR Corolla in the shop, actually, in the world. But yeah, we'll get to that. I've done, I do some Motek. My GT-R was on a Motek that made 1700 horse. 1702, if you want to be precise.

Yeah, yeah. Well, 1702 might as well round it up to 1800, right? We round it down. Yeah, we round it down here?

Around here.

Yeah, the second is past that one. Exactly.

But yeah, a lot of Haltech cars as well.

So what came first for you then? Were you doing more tuning early on? Were you doing more assembling? What was the favorite at the beginning?

I have always been a huge engine guy. I was obsessed with engines, clearances. For some reason, it just made me very excited. So clearances, you know? When you put an engine together, usually when you're running about, say, two and a half thousandths of clearance for rod bearings on these engines around, healthy human hair, I want to say healthy because I'm starting to bald, so I don't know how...

Listen, man, I use Rogaine. It's fine.

So healthy human hair is about 3000 stick. So when you're working with clearances, you know, two and a half thousandths, you're working with less than a human hair worth of tolerances. It's always been fascinating that you can put something together with your own bare hands, obviously with guidance of measuring tools, right? Because you don't, if you're not measuring, you're guessing. And you put it together and the thing makes, you know, a thousand horsepower out of four banger, that's 250 horsepower per cylinder. Those are very tight clearances. So it had always fascinated me. And then, you know, just learning about like different material, piston rings, different pins, different, I mean, dude, I went through a crazy experimental phase with my pistons on like V7, but like, I just, I just call it the SPL spec pistons because we're not changing anything anymore. We're kind of at, you know, if you want anything crazier than this, you just go to like Rafe or something, you know, and you just, you just get his like bill of block.

Are you good with Rafe by the way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's awesome. He's an awesome guy.

He's an awesome guy. We've got, you know, we've talked a little bit. He's helped me with the drag racing side a little bit.

I like that dude. That dude was awesome.

Yeah, he's very passionate. He's another passionate guy. Yeah, I have a lot of respect for him. But yeah, so, you know, experimenting with like wrist pins. We used to run the, you know, 9310 pins that come off the shelf from CP. And then CP had an upgraded version that was a 250 wall. It was just a super thick 9310 alloy or 9310 pin. And, you know, that thing was heavy, but it was a lot stronger. And then, you know, somehow we would still bend those in some applications, which you would think is impossible because it's such a thick pin. And then, you know, I learned about all the other, you know, materials, you know, tool steel, H11, H13, TP1, which is what we use now in our Evo engines. And they're actually the same material that top fuel dragsters that make 12,000 horsepower run. It's just a lot thinner than theirs.

What's TP1 stand for? Like what can you plant a little bit?

I don't know if it's a proprietary like material. It's just the type of metal it's from. Yeah, like tool steel, there's H11, H13, like different grades of tool steel. It's just different tensile strengths. So how much force it'll take to bend that thing. And you know, you can still bend them. You know, you have abnormal combustion, you know, you can, you can still bend them.

Yeah, everything has its limit. Yeah.

But for the most part now, the pin is over-engineered over everything else. So you'll hurt, you'll pull the pin out before you hurt the pin. You know what I mean? But I didn't just focus on the pin. Everything else is strong as well. So we use like the Calis rods with the seven 16th rod bolts, which are the big block Chevy rod bolts. And you know, these, all of these cars, literally every single one of these, aside from my red one over there that has aluminum rods, they have the Calis rods. We experimented with a bunch of cranks. We had cracking issues on journal number four with a lot of manufacturers. And now with the Brian Crower ones, they're good. Calis also, we had really good success.

That's a name I heard again today from NRE. Brian Crower is?

Amazing products.

Okay.

Amazing products. The crankshafts, we primarily use Calis in BC now. The only reason I changed from Calis to BC at the time was because Calis was out of stock and they were waiting to get their shipment in essentially. And I couldn't wait because again, I got orders and I got to fulfill them. I can't just wait months for cranks to come in. So we use some of the BC ones. They're pretty bad a**, man. Like the Calis stuff we would get. And most of the time when we get them, we have to send it out to get straightened because out of the box, they're like a thousand half out, man. They're like, it's bent a thousand half. It's not around. The BC ones are like two tenths, maybe. Acceptable. Ideally, you would have it straight as an arrow, but nothing's perfect. So yeah, the BC stuff has been super awesome. We do a lot of tutus, so 94 millimeter crank stuff. Yeah, so it was the engines at first, and then tuning became another necessity. So everything kind of came from necessity. For some reason, people that haven't met me think I'm an a******.

That's just everybody in the car community.

It's crazy though. I'm literally the most down to earth. We met and we were just literally talking for like, Lexi's like, stop. So you guys have something to talk about on the podcast. We're like, we're going to talk. But for some reason, some of these tuners that were around at the time didn't really want to work with me. Or they were just like, I could not rely on them because I'm promising the customer a certain timeline. And then I have to rely on this guy that, you know, is like three weeks out for a simple stock ECU tune. So I took matters into my own hands at the old shop, actually, the one that I had a partner at the time. And, you know, I just did a bunch of research at the time. We didn't even have HP Academy or anything that I could, you know, actually learn something from. It was just forums and, you know, getting definition files and open source was big. I mean, still, as I still do maybe one or two a week.

Oh, okay.

You do stock ECU Evo stuff. Yeah. But, yeah, just kind of figured it out. And I'm, I don't think I'm a very talented person, but if I am interested in something, I become obsessed with it. Like literally, dude, like I put a gaming PC together just because I wanted to have a VR gaming PC. I spent four grand, I put the whole computer together. I'd never bolted anything computer related in my life. I put it together and I put it on my head and I got dizzy and I'm like, yeah, I don't like this. I sold it. But I became like obsessed with the thing, dude. I'm like, I have to do this. Like, and I'm going to do it, like, I'm going to do it right. Then I'm going to become really good at it. And it's kind of, it's crazy, but it's literally been the same thing with the engine stuff. It's like, I keep everything in house because I have the QC on it. The tuning stuff was just that, you know, just a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I didn't blow up cars.

Let's go back real quick. So what does that experimenting look like? Are you, would you, were you like trying to mess with your own car at this point? Where did you, I guess, again, if we go back to the banished thing, like who are your resources for learning this if you weren't using HP Academy?

Sure. So in the beginning, when I was doing the stock ECU stuff, it was all forms and there was a Merlin, this guy named Merlin, he was from Australia, I think, and the guide is still out there. And he had a tuning guide for the Evo stuff. So it was like, I remember I was geeking over it because it was like a hundred page, 120 page, like thing that he had online that I printed and put it in like a folder and I kept it clean. Like every page was like laminated so I could like go over it and like learn everything.

Do you still have that?

I don't. No, at one point it just, yeah, unfortunately. But, you know, I would read it all, but I'm one of those people that until you do it, like until I do it, I'm not gonna like grasp it fully.

Right.

But that was my main learning guide essentially was that in the Evo M forms, Evolution M, there was a lot of knowledge there. There was a lot of people, you know, doing hex editing and stuff with open source and my hats off to those people. I still don't know how to do, you know, hex editing or anything like that. I'm literally using what they have paved the way for us. You know, I'm still using that stuff. So shout out to you guys, cause I owe you guys a lot, you know. So these guys literally did it as a hobby and you know, we all got to use it, but that's what it was initially. And then the first, first card that I did was actually, I think we were like having trouble reaching out, getting a tuner to work with us because we were a growing shop. Either they didn't like me or they didn't like my partner at the time. So like tuners would like refuse to work with us. And I'm like, dude, f*** this. I'm just, I'm gonna, I feel like I can do it. So we told the customer, hey, like we can attempt to do this. We're not going to charge you or we're going to charge you very little. I can't remember. It actually was not my car the first time. And usually it is all my car, you know, that's how you want to do it. But I'm not going to b******* you, man. It wasn't my car and I'm going to, you know, you want me to do it. And he trusted us and I appreciate that because that basically got my tuning career kickstarted. I don't know how many cars I've tuned since then, dude. That was over seven years ago.

Yeah, hundreds at this point, probably.

It, yeah, dude, like high. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway.

You're doing all right.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it was that. And then obviously, you know, along the way, I had some guidance from other tuners that, you know, we're working with. There was one guy at one point that he he taught me some stock ECU stuff that he was doing. And I taught him some engine building stuff that I knew. And yeah, that's how it was. But the first standalone car that I did, ironically enough, I've circled back all these years later. It was on the G4 on my personal car. Yeah, that thing made a thousand that thing made nine eighty on our Mustang Dyno at fifty four pounds of boost. It was my first standalone car. And I literally tuned in myself and people were like, oh, there's no way this guy tuned in himself. No, I tuned in myself. I just don't know how it didn't blow up. I mean, I knew the basics. I knew what I was supposed to do. I kept honestly, it could have made more power knowing how much timing I could throw at it now and the mechanical capability. Yeah. Yeah. And we overbuilt the crap out of that engine that had like half inch L19 head studs, you know, O rings that we use now as well. Aluminum rods like I was just super tame on it. I just didn't want it to blow up and it was like the best thing after it made, take it with a grain of sand, but 12% correction, you know, over 1,080 horsepower on the dyno jet. Yeah. So that was the first link car I did. First standalone I did was link. And then I circled back all these years later and they still have a great system that works for these cars. And yeah, I can, I can make them drive better than stock, I would say.

So, all right. What does it cost to do 1,000 horsepower Evo? Let's say I got an Evo 8, it's a mint one. I got it off, bring a trailer, stock Evo. What does it take to get 1,000 horsepower out of it?

So, if we're not factoring in drivetrain as far as like a transmission, a transfer case, a rear differential.

What would you recommend? I got a blank check.

I would probably run like 60, 65.

Okay.

Yeah. That's going to include a PPG dog box.

The standard.

The standard now, like literally five of seven have a PPG. One of our SPL 2.2, the SPL 900s.

Okay.

We've made over 1,050 on one of those. It's a steel rod and it's a heavy steel rod. So I don't like to surpass 1,000. And I like to go aluminum at that point, but the service interval has become a lot shorter. But that includes a full standalone ECU, which will be a link plugin package. It'll be, you know, have all the full logging that I mentioned. That's a valve cover at the pan engine, oil cooler, front mount intercooler, intercooler piping, IGN 1A ignition coils, catch can, battery relocation kit. I mean, clutch, the whole nine. You're, yeah, 65 to 70 probably. Just drive train as well. And yeah, it's one of those things. If you actually want to make 1,000 horsepower, you can do it for that amount of money.

Okay. Yeah.

But if you want to make 1,000 horsepower and go to the drag street every weekend, you're probably going to spend more money on it because s***'s going to break. That's just how it is.

Okay. Yeah. So you're talking about if I was a little less casual and more serious about racing? Is that kind of what you mean? Okay.

Yes. Yes. Because you are going to break stuff.

Yeah.

Especially if you're not an experienced racer, launching the car the first time, you know, there's just a lot can go wrong. You know what I mean? And dude, things happen, you know, 1,000, 1,100 horse, a single ignition event gone wrong, it gets away from you pretty quickly. Yeah. Like, you know, you, you can have O-rings, you can have half inch head studs, you can still melt the head if something happens. Injector gets stuck. You know what I mean? It's always better to have no fuel than have some fuel. It will hurt s***. And I've seen it happen, you know, it's like, it's, it's not tuner. It's just sometimes it happens, you know, I figure that's clogged or whatever. One thing that's actually, it's kind of funny. You know, everyone's like, oh yeah, like this thing is running 11.8 air fuel on E85. It's fine. It's like that number that you got is from the sum of all four cylinders. You don't know what each cylinder is running. You know what I mean? And to do, you're talking with, Tony Palin mentioned this in the podcast, but if you're trying to do individual lambdas, like individual air-fuel ratio sensors per cylinder, you need some back pressure compensation stuff to happen. So you need like a controller specifically for that. And it doesn't work well. So nobody does it with that. And if you do EGTs, well, EGTs are kind of slow. You can't do real time, real time tuning on EGTs, you know? So yeah, s*** can go wrong when you're pushing these. But most of the cars, you know, if they're roll racing and they're just weekend cars, you can make 1000 horsepower and they're pretty reliable. Yeah. But I would say for an Evo, 850 is like, I can like almost guarantee it's not going to break. Some people will still break it, but yeah, some people can still break it.

Is there a big jump from like an 850 package to 1000?

It is with me because I'll put an aluminum rod motor in it.

Okay.

Yeah. It beats up the bearings. That's the problem. So when you get into that 250 horse per cylinder territory, that is f***** on the cylinder pressure, man. It beats up the bearings and you can see it because you'll have a properly tuned engine. You'll have proper oil clearances. You'll have the best oil in there. Everything will be controlled and we've done it. Like we've put an engine through dyno testing, 100, 120 pull different turbo combinations. You take it apart and if it's over a thousand horse, usually what you'll see is the top bearing will start. That little hydrodynamic wedge that's in between the crank and the bearing. It's hammering it and even though the combustion is controlled when everything is working properly, the pressure becomes so great that it just hits the top of the bearing like a hammer, slowly, not like a sledge hammer, like a rubber mallet, you know what I mean? But you're slowly chipping away at the f****** thing. So when you go to an aluminum rod, the aluminum rod is literally a shock absorber. Like, so much so that you might need to run a little bit more boost to make the same power you would on a steel rod. It's crazy, but it actually takes away from the transfer of torque from the combustion chamber to the actual crank.

That makes sense, yeah.

Yeah, if you think about it, that's what it is. It's absorbing the shock.

Well, it's kind of like the opposite, like titanium rods, like they put all that extra shock in there, right?

I would assume so. I'm not...

Yeah, I've heard that it's like the worst thing you could possibly do.

I know some people were selling them at one point, they were stupid expensive, but aluminum is the way to go. It's just very bulky and you have to clearance a lot of s*** to make it work. And their service intervals become shorter because if you actually make enough power to be on an aluminum rod, you have to service the engine fairly regularly. Now I say this and we've had engines that have had 10,000 plus miles on aluminum rods, but it's been like a thousand horse engine and the guy will just drive it around and do hits here and there. So that's not a real thousand horsepower engine in my opinion. I'm talking like thrashing on it every single time.

Yeah, like 50 passes or actually how often you have to refresh an aluminum rod.

Who knows? Yeah, because it's not like you check the length every 10 passes. So say you go and you do 50 hits, nine second hits, whatever, 10 second, nine second hits, eight second hits. You might as well just put some new rods in there, because if you don't, then it windows the block. Now you're not just putting a set of thousand dollar rods in there. You're putting a crankshaft in there. You're putting a block in there. Probably hurt your head because you know what I mean? So it's hard to say.

You saw I've also had Ben Hockman on the show as well. Yeah, I think his interval, I want to say it was 25.

I think he said 15. I think I remember 15.

I think it was a low number though, because again, he's also trying to chase a record too.

Oh yeah, he's up there. We got some stuff from him, Scatter Shields and stuff.

Oh yeah, that's his go-to.

He does some amazing fab work. But yeah, it's very hard to say because I would say after a thousand, I would ideally like to put them on an aluminum rod, but most of the guys that want the street thousand, they usually don't thrash on it as often as you would think. And you know, I give these people at least three maps. So you have a waste gate, a little bit above the waste gate map usually. You have like a 40 PSI map and then you have a f*** around and find out map. That's the one that will make like a thousand, like my customer Vic, I love the guy. He drives his car like he stole it. And that's what he wanted to build it for, right? He has three maps. He has a map that makes 840-ish, still spanking everybody. He's on the dog box now. He has a 940 map and he has a 1015 map. I told him, the 1015 map, this is the no-warranty map. Don't use this unless you actually want to make a point. But yeah, that's, I would say, after a thousand is where it becomes kind of unreliable for the most part.

Yeah, and at that point, let's say your boy Vic is out, using the no-warranty map and something goes down.

He's gonna laugh at it.

That's all logged, I'm guessing.

Everything's logged. Yeah, it shows what map he's in, how much boost it was on, what the close-up was doing, what the air fuel was doing, how much correction there was. Everything's logged. Literally everything's logged.

Okay, so then, I mean, this all happened very quickly, five, six years or whatever. You've learned a lot here. And again, you do have a sizable shop here with quite a few fast cars. What do you attribute all this success to? Is it a lot of 18-hour days, or what does it come down to? Because you're kind of an anomaly, man. Like I talk to a lot of people on this show, and like when we talk to you off camera, like it takes a lot to get to this. So I'm trying to figure out, like, how do we get here?

A couple of things that I will give credit to, and I have to. It's my due diligence to do this. My mom was an immigrant. She came here with $0, literally $0. She had like 500 bucks in her account because my grandpa sent it in case of an emergency. She didn't want to touch it. Was working at a bakery, started selling cars, became very successful. And I always learned how, like I would, she would literally work like 14 hour days as a woman. Like she would just go to a dealership and she would come home, be asleep. That's all she did. And, you know, I always applauded her for that. And I told myself, I'm like, if I'm 10% of the man that my mom was, I will become very successful. I always said that even when she was like, she passed away two years, three years ago from cancer, very young, two, 53, I love her. So I have to give her credit for the way I was brought up and the hard working aspect of, you know, me putting in 14 hour days and not being like, Oh, f*** this s***. This is not working. Secondly, your spouse is very important. Lexi has been literally my backbone for the last five years now. And she's a big part. I mean, she's a huge part of my life, obviously, but she's pretty much always at the shop helping out, whether she's actually wrenching on a car or like sending invoices or like following up with a customer or whatever the case is. And she's always supported me. There hasn't been a single time that I've been like, because we went ventured out a couple of times. I bought a G80 literally because I woke up and I'm like, we're going to buy G80 and we're going to like, you know, go crazy with this market. And she's like, okay, she had some connections. She used to sell cars. So literally like 30 minutes later, we have a G80 in the driveway. Like not literally 30 minutes later, but the paperwork got started and I had to put it down payment. But so having a supportive spouse is another thing to, you know, obviously I have to give her credit. It's very important. But the biggest thing is I did not come from money. I did not. Actually, we were never well off back in the day. So I promised myself, I'm like, one day if I ever do have kids, not that we're planning on it, but I'm like, I want my kid to be well off. And I don't want to go through the same s*** that I went through when I grew up. And so it's a lot of hours. I have to give credit to my employees, being able to count on them. And dude, the biggest thing is just being obsessed with whatever the f*** you do. That's all it is. I've been obsessed. I'm still obsessed with these Evos. Literally, it still gets me excited to drive this car. I can just go drive around and just not even race, just drive it around. I'm obsessed with the car. I'm obsessed with the platform. And I'm just hungry to learn, man. Every single day I learn. I watch HP Academy videos. Every webinar they drop, I'm probably on there just watching.

They have a cool forum, too. I was kind of digging through those recently.

They're pretty active on there. I've been on there, obviously. But you can't ever stop learning. And I'm hungry to learn, dude. I want to know what the next, the new thing is.

What is the new thing? Is it the Supra? I know that's one thing you're working on.

The Supra, this car is actually going to be on a Motec, on the M142. Paratoon Australia makes the kit for it. And then our buddy Norris P. Tuned, he does his auxiliary harness and stuff to make it work with everything else that we add on top. So I'm super excited about that, but it's just a M142, it's just a M1 series Motec. It's not like anything crazy, but obviously it's going to be a learning curve. And I'm not letting anybody touch this thing, so I'm going to learn it again. So it's one of those things, if it blows up, it's on me, you know? I don't mind if it, it's obviously not going to happen, but it's not Lex, I promise. But that's the next thing that I'm excited about.

So how do you end up in a Supra anyway? Because you said you had a G80 for 30 minutes, or you got, why did you get rid of G80 and then now you're in a Supra? What's the story there?

So the G80, the thing with the G80 was, I was going to go ham in the platform. I actually bought a bunch of aftermarket parts for it. I got the tuning suite. I became a dealer for, what is it? Pro tuning freaks, group mod. And well, it actually just has a crazy way of working itself, dude. Like I got so busy here that I did not have time to drive. I wouldn't drive the car. She would drive it to school. Like I just, I never saw the car. I got a PPF and we were going to work on it. And then that was it. I just never got to work on the car. It never came inside the shop. I just got very busy. I just, I've been blessed, man. I mean, it's, I like to say the reason why that happened was because of my work ethics and how I've been with the customers and you know, b*********** people and just taking money, Rob Peter to pay Paul situation. I've grown at a very steady, steady, slow, but steady pace.

Like manageable.

Yes, because if you don't, look, I've been doing this now for six years in California, dude. It's very hard to do race car s*** in California. The Evo stuff, the communities, like the shops are for the most, I mean, I'm cool with everybody, but for the most part, a couple of years ago, no one was supporting one another. So it was just a rivalry, which I guess it's kind of like that with like every platform, but it's very hard to grow fast. Like you need to do it slowly because if you don't, you're going to make mistakes. Like you can't take, you know how people brag, they're like, oh yeah, you know, we're working on like, you know, we have 30 cars at the shop. Like you, dude, you cannot work on 30 cars at once. Like if you have 30 cars, it's probably because you promised people you're going to do something and now you're not doing it.

It's kind of like when people win the Powerball and then they blow it all in two years.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The curse of Powerball or whatever.

The Powerball curse is very-

Yeah, dude, I know I've been reading up.

I always say if I went to Powerball, I don't need the billion, it'd be nice, but like, oh, I'll take a few million. Like the little, like the five numbers in the Powerball.

You know how they say like, oh, stupid guy, he took the, you know, 20,000 or like 10,000 per week for life. It's like, dude, that's the best thing. Imagine not like, you just get a check every week or every month or whatever. And it's just like, it's never ending.

Bro, the second I get that, you just got paid early notification from Wells Fargo, I'm like, we blowing this this month.

Yeah. So I think that's been the biggest thing that I did not rush into anything, but also, I don't know, dude, I just, again, like if we go in it, we go all in.

Yeah.

We wanted to powder coat a valve cover. We bought a full powder coating station.

Oh, for real?

Literally, dude, we got the hot coat station. It's like $15,000 worth of equipment. We got like everything plumbed to powder coat a valve cover, dude. I didn't want to outsource it. And then that was kind of stupid. Like that was one of the ones that I wish we didn't do because we really weren't like into it like that.

But are you still doing powder coating?

Somewhat, yeah. If we need to, we'll... All this stuff is powder coated by me on the race car.

Oh, for real?

Me and Lex, basically. Did you do that? I don't remember. I remember she was mad at me because I didn't do it right. That's just...

What was not right?

What's up?

What was not right?

The cure times and stuff. I don't know, dude. Like it just says like spray it on for 10 minutes and then wait and like read a book for five minutes. It's just weird. The instructions are so weird, dude. It's like I just want to be able to like just spray the thing and then just put it there and just let it like cure. That's it. But it's a whole, obviously it's a big industry on its own. But now we have some good people that are doing it for us. So I think I'm just going to sell this stuff and I don't know, get into something else, maybe start wiring harnesses in the house or something. I don't know.

Something cool that you do all your own wiring in house.

We don't do full harnesses. But all the ECU wiring that we do like pigtails and like, you know, DTM connectors and stuff. Yeah, we do it all in house. I have all the right tools to be able to do harnesses if I want to. But it's not something that I'm...

There's just those things like, and I've had various, it's so funny because I've talked to like every type of car enthusiast at this point where it's like, some guys love wiring. That's all they do. And there's other people like, I don't want to f****** see another wire in my life again.

The problem with wiring for me is, I'll watch a video from like Race Grade, MoTeC, like the wiring side of MoTeC, and Mil-Spec Wiring, I think also. I'm not sure, don't quote me on this. But, you know, they have like, benches that they're like laying out like these flying leads and like, you know, getting everything like crimped with a machine and like terminating the wire ends and stuff like that. And it's like, I want to be able to do that, but that's another big investment that I'm going to have to make.

It's a big time suck too.

It is. And it's going to be a learning curve. Right now, I don't exactly have... Right now, I don't exactly have all that time. You know, my customers are keeping me busy, which I'm super thankful for.

You got a nice Supra engine to rebuild over there too.

I do, yeah. Lexi's engine. She's actually going to be putting it together. I'm going to teach her how to measure stuff.

Well, actually, real quick, because you guys, you're pretty good on the content side. We talked about this last year. You're pretty decent. I didn't follow you until today. Talking to Lexi over here. But I just started seeing your stuff. But...

Dude, Lexi's famous, bro.

Yeah, you're famous. Yeah, yeah, but...

I'm with a celebrity, man.

It's like being with the Kardashians here. But anyways...

She's Armenian too, so...

Wait, it's Kardashian?

Of course.

Is she?

Yeah, yeah.

I had no clue.

She got famous for all the wrong reasons, but she is a Kardashian.

Yeah, yeah. But that's crazy. I learned something new today. Anyways, are you guys going to be videoing that whole process? Because again, I learned a lot about six cylinders watching Jay when he was on Real Street. I loved watching those teardown videos.

I learned a lot from Jay, all my life.

So are you going to do something similar to that?

Sort of. That's what I want to do. So our channels are very different as far as the content that we deliver. Mine's very... If I'm explaining a piston, it's going to take 10 minutes because I'm literally going to tell you everything I know about it. And that's quite a bit. Not everything. I'm not Jay. But whatever I know, I would like to get it across as long as I'm not giving false information. I'm very careful about that too. If I'm not sure of something, I'll just shut up.

For example, me saying the dumb thing about titanium rods.

I don't know. You might be right though.

I've been wrong more than I've been right.

But hers is more of just like vlogging the journey of everything.

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You guys were talking about my Supra and how we ended up with the Supra when we sold the G80.

Oh, okay. Got you. All right. So we have a surprise guest.

I felt left out.

You're just like, I just pulled up a chair. Okay. So we were talking about how we ended up at the G80 and selling that now we're at a Supra.

Okay.

I think I'm caught up. Right?

Yeah.

How do we get there? When did you get rid of G80? How do we decide on that again?

Well, that was different. So her Supra, she bought the Supra when she was working at a brokerage.

I just came home with it one day.

That was a very different deal from the G80.

Okay. Got you. So you just got the Supra. Was the G80 gone at that point?

No. We got the Supra first and then the G80. So we got the Supra, what, two years ago?

I've had the Supra since 2023.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the G80 came later and it went. So she had the Supra at the time. This was not meant to be what it's going to be.

The plan was to put a hybrid turbo on it.

Okay.

That's what she initially wanted.

And then last minute, I was like, if we're going to take this apart, then I want to go all out.

Okay.

What was the funniest thing with the Supra? She told me she wanted wheels for her birthday. She didn't specify what. She told me I can choose whatever.

Some reps.

Dude, I bought her a drag pack.

Okay.

With skinnies and, you know, the sex.

Are you talking about the bellies that are on there right now?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

And she's like, well, babe, I can't, I can't, you know, put this on the car. The car's stock or I think it had a flashlight. People are going to laugh at me, so I can't run skinnies.

Yeah.

It was like a downpout in a tune. So I got a tease for the front. And then it just, it just spiraled, dude. She's like my, our anniversary. That's how I've gifted her like this whole time. Anniversary, birthdays, just car parts.

Literally. Okay. What was the first car part that was a gift to her?

Something for my Subaru. Callbacks.

I actually tuned her f****** car.

Okay.

A Subaru. Okay.

I'm an Evo guy. It's like, but I actually tuned it. And it was, it was pretty, that was a pretty fun car. And we ended up taking it to the dealer. Cause the fourth Syncro had a problem. And I'm like, I'm not going to touch it. It's under warranty. And the, whoever put it together, they forgot there. So the Subarus have like the shift fork that the Evos have. They have it too. And then there's like a cap that goes on it. They didn't put that on. And then the rod had backed out and it had broken the tab inside the trans... Oh my God, it was a s*** show, dude.

What year Supra, what was it?

It was a, what year was it? I think it was 2020 or 2021. It was the newest one.

It was an STI or? It was an STI.

It was an STI. And yeah. And then you want to say what we did?

So underwhelming, dude. Like we didn't put like, we didn't do anything crazy. Like I got our front mount, but we didn't put it on. But I remember like tuning it on the dyno. And I like, I think I was up to like 22 pounds of boost. And it was like, IITs were climbing. Like, I'm like, oh my God, this is so underwhelming, bro. I was getting so pissed off. It's like 40. And then like Control Z just pulled the, don't command 40 PSI. No, it was like, it made like 20, 24 PSI peak boost. And it made like three or five, three 10, something like that.

It was fun, but it's a good daily drive.

Yeah.

Right.

We would have eventually gone crazier with that platform, but we just, this, this was a better, you know, the supermarket is very saturated too. And actually the, one of the biggest reasons that we're going so heavily into this market, the supermarket, the supermarket, cause no one knows of us in the BMW world, literally, like maybe a couple of people are friends that we've worked with. This is going to be the first manual Mk5, I keep saying it on an M142 Motec. We're gonna go basically balls deep with this platform. And we're gonna do it like that. We're not gonna do like a stock ECU deal with a reflex box controlling it. It's gonna be crazy. That's how you put your name out there. And then show people what we can do, you know, if we can put a car together that, you know, motor together that stays together, 12, 1300 horse, 50 plus pounds of boost. Tuning is done at the same shop. Build is done at the same shop. Again, it goes back to, you know, keep everything in house. Right? She knows I'm obsessed with that. I just, I have to do everything myself. If I could do machine work, I would, but I have a couple of good machinists that I work with. Shout out Aaron, Arlington Machine.

Is this somebody local here, like an hour or two away?

Yeah, an hour away. Yeah, he does all my Evo stuff.

Okay.

My GTR stuff, he did the B58. He's, he's another busy one. He's always backed up. So, you know, it takes a while to get stuff back from him, but he's busy. He doesn't have a lot of helping hands, but we have worked engine program together with the Evo stuff. Because you remember how I was talking to you about the pistons and all that stuff with these pistons?

Yeah.

We use a Total Seal ring pack that's very different from the off the shelf stuff.

Yeah.

So we had to change.

Okay. Let me back up here. So, okay, that's your SPL thing? Yes. Okay. So that's... What's that stand for? Speedlabs? Okay. So how do you get there? Right? Because, for example, even though I did an Airdy episode, unfortunately, I did have Boostin on Devin. Like, you know, he has his package and Hockman's kind of working on his thing with Rafe. Right?

Yes.

What's different in yours? Like, what made you want to go and get your own package? What's that consist of?

Um, people were contacting me showing up with their own parts and...

Which is the worst?

The problem with that is some of them work, some of them don't. And you as a builder, if you have enough experience, you know what's going to be a pitfall and what's going to work. I got tired of it. I said, I'm either going to build it my way or I'm not going to build it at all. And I've stuck with that for the last five years. Yeah, five years, not six. The first year was kind of still. No, no, no, no. I had my pistons. I just had diamonds at the time. So what I decided to do is offer a package that essentially uses the same components, but cater the same package in a way that if a guy wants to make 400 horsepower, I'll set it a little bit differently than the guy that wants to make 1,000 horsepower. Yeah. So the SPL 900. I use the same pistons and rods. I set the ring gaps a little bit differently. If somebody I know is going to run like a stock frame turbo versus somebody that I know is going to run forward facing and wants to make all the boost, you can make 400 horsepower with it and it's going to live for the longest time. It will live. You can make 1,000 horsepower with the same engine. I don't do stages. That's another thing that I'm very biased on.

Oh, no.

Yes. I'll tell you why. What do you think the biggest difference is going from an H-beam to an I-beam?

I'm sure you'll tell me right now.

An I-beam is a little bit heavier, but it's not going to bend. You can still break it, but it's a lot harder to break than an H-beam. How much do you think the cost difference is? 300 bucks. My SPL 2.2s are 8,500 bucks. I'm not putting an H-beam in that thing. You're just not getting it. That's it. If you want to go to somebody else, they'll put it together for you gladly. They'll take your money and put together something subpar. You want to make 600 horsepower, that's fine. It'll live, but no one wants to make 600 horsepower.

If you ever want to turn it up.

They always turn it up. They always turn it up.

Well, nowadays, nobody, 600 horsepower is not enough for anybody anymore. People.

Yeah. Yeah. No, literally. So I just, I kind of cut that and it kind of helped me in a bit.

We kind of get a reoccurring customer with that too, because the same guy that you took care of this year, it comes back next year and he's already happy and ready to go.

Yeah.

Have you seen that happen?

Yes.

Okay.

Many times, dude. We've had customers that have literally came here on a dino day and just watched cars go on the dino. Maybe they weren't sure how good the work is. They come here on a dino day because we do that sometimes. We'll have a dino day, we'll feed everybody.

Just like you did today?

Yeah.

Same place?

It's the Armenian in us. I swear to God. Literally, 50 people will be here, I'll order 50 pizzas.

We had a meet here not too long ago where we had a dino day and people were putting their car on the dino. After that, a lot of people were disappointed in how much power cars were making.

How often do you have a dino day?

That's how big the guy that he mentioned was.

It's not that often, but we would like to do it more often.

Is it like once a year, twice a year?

No, we want to do it more frequently. Right now, it's like once a year.

Let me know. I might fly out for the next one. I'm going to plan my California trips around your dino days.

Do 100% Armenian food. But yeah, people come and they watch and they're like, okay, well, this is SPL22. This is the SPL900. So the SPL900, I kind of made that a thing. I made that like a brand. It is.

It's a stage.

It is a stage. It's the end stage. Yeah, end stage. But honestly, it's the SPL900 and the SPL1000. The difference between the two is one, it's an aluminum rod motor. One gets half filled or full filled, depending on the level of the car. And the 1000 also has the L19 main studs from Boost and Performance. That's literally the difference. And I haven't had any issues. I get the same pistons from Wyseco. Wyseco custom makes the pistons, I order them in a batch of 12 usually. Same rods, same crankshafts until, like I said, we switch from Calis to BC. So it's a very vetted package. I know where the clearance is gonna end up. Obviously, I still double check everything when I assemble it. And I know how it's gonna break in. That's also very important. I know the machine work that it's gonna take. And like I said, I work closely with Aaron on that. And the engines just work, dude. They don't blow up. They really don't blow up.

Real quick, can we cut? That bug is gonna drive me crazy in the editing. Can you just close the door? Yeah, the door.

Yeah, unless it's inside.

If it's inside, then we'll deal with it.

If it's inside, I'll take the torch.

That bug was driving me crazy. All right, so, okay. So why did you develop that kit the way you did? So break it down. What does it all consist of within the package?

The SPL 900 is a combination of Ysco Pistons that they make for us. It's hard anodized. The forging is a little bit different than the Ysco 1400 HDs that are available for the Evos.

That's like the off-the-shelf option?

Yeah, that's the OTS option. Works great. Fantastic pistons. But for what we're doing, I customized this and I wanted to go a step further and I'll tell you why. It uses custom total seal rings. The top ring is a 1.2 mm ring instead of a 1.0. And it is an AP grade steel ring that has a PVD coating, it's a mouthful. It's a hardening coating that they put on there so the ring becomes harder. And the ring is also gas ported. Before I used to, so before anyone did it in the Evo game, I literally would get custom gas ports. At first we would do horizontal gas ports and then we started doing laterals. So, you know, because you got to think about it this way, the combustion pressures, the flame front is coming down and the combustion pressure is increasing and it's trying to push down on the piston. When you have gas ports, what happens is it goes through lateral, horizontal, whatever. It goes to the top ring, behind the top ring, and it pushes against the wall. So your dynamic compression increases with boost, not the other way around. You still have blow-by, obviously, right? Every engine has blow-by. Some of the combustion pressure is going to get through it and make it into the crankcase. That's why you need catch cans. But the problem was that eventually the bores were unevenly because you just have gas ports on top of the piston and it's not moving, right? So uneven wear a little bit of an issue, but the biggest issue was just carbon buildup, dude. The carbon buildup would just clog up the gas ports and eventually wouldn't be gas ported, it would un-gas port itself. So we started doing it on the ring. So Total Seal was offering a ring that they could gas port and you could put twice the amount of gas ports on the ring that you could on the piston. And if you're not milling the crown of the piston for gas ports or you're not taking strength away from it, think about it, somebody has to go in and drill.

Real quick, down and down for a second. So what do you mean gas ports? What exactly?

Gas ports are literal ports, like drill, imagine somebody taking a drill to the top of the piston.

Okay.

And drilling the side, like where their ring is, right?

Yeah.

So the ring is here. This is the top of the piston. Around where the ring is, they will drill it. So whenever the flame front propagates, and the combustion pressure is coming down, it will go behind the ring. That's where it's... I'll show you later.

Here, let's just pause. You want to show me real quick? Yeah, okay, let's pause for a second. I'm on a trip right now. Okay, so we're talking about the ports. I wanted to understand the gas ports, because again, I haven't really fully gone down that. So real quick, just kind of show me again what we were looking at in the engine room over there.

So if we look at the side of the piston, right above the top ring groove, there is ports. There are half moon ports, essentially, but these are horizontal gas ports, horizontal because they're horizontal. Again, so when you have the flame front propagating, it goes behind, so the pressure feeds behind the ring groove, pushes the ring against the cylinder wall, increases your dynamic compression, increases seal on their boost. The problem with these was uneven wear, and whenever you mill the crown of the piston, or actually any part of the piston, you're making it weaker. So that's why whenever we went to...

Yeah, so this is what exactly you're doing now, then.

This is SPL900, these are the last batch we got, so these are two months old, maybe. So, there is no gas ports on the piston itself.

Okay.

We're not compromising the strength of the piston, or the crown of the piston, or the ring line. Now, the top of the ring itself is gas ported.

Okay, yeah, so I see.

Yep.

So like these grooves are in here, basically?

Correct.

Okay.

Two things, two benefits that you get with this. Benefit number one is you're not getting, you're not weakening the piston because you're not drilling it anymore. And you can put more of them on the ring itself because the ring really, you know, it's already a strong ring. It's coated, the material is a lot stronger than the off the shelf stuff that you get. And two, a ring is always rotating. Think about it this way. The crosshatch pattern that the machine is puts, the ring is always rotating in the bore, in the cylinder. So as it's doing that, it's self-cleaning. So it has self-cleaning tendencies.

I see.

Yeah, it's not fixed.

Whereas opposed to before, it'll basically like kind of clog those.

It would clog.

Okay. Gotcha. Okay.

You can only put what? 8, 10 gas ports versus 20 or whatever on this. So just small development stuff that we kind of learn by doing. And the reason why I actually went to these compared to like off-the-shelf rings, like 1.0 ring, let's say. The reason we actually decided to go with Total Seal and get the AP rings was because we're annealing the rings. Annealing is whenever the material itself gets like... The ring like caves on itself. It becomes weak and it kind of like closes on itself. Like it closes the gap on its own. So you've heard of Chevy guys taking the pistons, taking everything apart, gapping the rings wider, bigger gaps, putting them back in so it can handle more heat, because otherwise it butts ends. What I ran into with some Evo engines that we were actually really pushing them, but they were just off the shelf rings, they were annealing. So the ring was like closing in on itself, not just the gap, but like the ring would change shape. And then I would like take it out of the cylinder and I would like compare it to like another one, like out of the box and it would like cave in. And I remember Daniel Fonz at the time, super helpful guy. He's the one that actually got me started on these custom pistons. He used to work for Diamond Pistons at the time, super knowledgeable guy. He's the one that told me, but he's like, dude, you're annealing it. He's like, you're throwing a lot of heat at the ring.

Okay.

You really need an AP profile, like you need an AP ring. And that's when we switched to the AP and then we went from the 1.0 to the 1.2 and then the PVD coatings came, which is a hardening coating. One thing to keep in mind is machine work nowadays is has come so far from like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So if you buy an off the shelf manly bicycle piston and you're getting just like some regular MPR ring packs, which work great for 90% of the people. If you have a good cylinder finish, which is a plateau honed that people do, you can just, as long as your air, fuel and everything is in check and you're not washing down cylinders, that thing will like break itself in. If you just, you know, just hold it up in the RPM, and just let the oil kind of fling all over. And how I like to do is just put power to it. It'll just seal very quickly. With the PVD stuff that we use, because the ring is so hard, you actually have to put some load on it on the dyno and then like kind of slowly, okay, slowly kind of put power to it. It takes two, three times longer than a normal ring pack to seal. So that's another reason that I ship my engines everywhere. Like, I just sold an engine to a guy in South Africa last month.

Okay. Random.

But it's like, he's like, okay, can you tune? And I'm like, I can. But you're probably better off just flying me out that the first time. So I'm there and I get everything dialed. So you guys aren't just starting the car and it's washing itself down.

So you're going to South Africa soon then?

I don't know if it's going to or I can do it remotely. But if you want my 100% undivided attention that I can be there and be like, look like this is wrong. But yeah, it makes breaking a little bit harder, but that's a part of the SPL 900. It's just a part of the development thing that's happened with our engines. I'm not saying this is the best engine out in the world, but it's one of the best ones out there, man. I mean, I have a lot of R&D into it. Yeah, I'm definitely in the conversation. I'm definitely in the conversation. Oh, and the TP-1 pins that I was telling you about.

Yeah.

That's the material of the pin. It is extremely hard and it's extremely expensive. Trend makes the wrist pins, and we DLC code those. So DLC is diamond like carbon. It's an actual coding that you put. The coding is as expensive as a freaking pin. But a lot of times, what we'll find with these Evo engines, when we take them apart, is when you push the pin out of the pin boss of the piston, it galls the actual pin boss of the piston, and the pin has this weird wear on it. And the reason for it is, you can have the proper clearance, but again, it goes back to how hard that cylinder pressure is beating up on these parts, right? Eventually, it's gonna displace that thousands of oil from the clearance that the pin has with the pin boss. Or pin bore, rather, sorry, on the piston. And when that happens, it can seize itself in there, and that could be pretty bad. So when you have a DLC coating, it can run basically without oil for a couple of seconds. So it's a very expensive coating, but it's very justified, in my opinion. And that's also included in the SPL 900.

Coatings are freaking crazy outside. Do you ever cross paths with Jeremy Hunt, by any chance, from Outfront? He's a little, he's down here as well.

Yeah, they're local.

Yeah, Subaru stuff, whatever. Well, he sent me a video of some local, whatever, coating place, and they're like, it's like super like high tech s*** for like F1 cars or whatever. And they did like a before and after, like this weird coating thing, and it's just like completely frictionless. Is that basically kind of like the goal of that, is to minimize friction or?

Yes, the DLC coating is basically to take, take care of lack of lubricant where it may apply.

Yeah, okay.

Now, let's say you're doing a wide open throttle pull from first gear to fourth gear, quarter mile pass. At some point it might happen, that you're like just beating that, again, hydrodynamic wedge, right? You have this wedge of oil, a hydrodynamic wedge is the film of oil that's in between two parts.

Pause real quick, I think this one may have filled up on me. You were talking before I cut you off, Ruth.

Yeah, I'm always talking.

You're the after.

I'm the after. So yeah, the DLC is essentially there to take over whenever there is an instance of lack of lubrication.

Yeah, the wedge and all that. Yeah, okay.

Hydrodynamic wedge. The hydrodynamic wedge is the wedge of oil or the layer of the boundary of oil that you have between two parts. On a piston that we're talking about, it's between the pin bore and the actual wrist pin. There is a clearance there and there's supposed to be oil there. Between the crankshaft and the rod bearing, right? The crankshaft journal and the rod bearing, where the crankshaft main journal and the main bearing, there's a hydrodynamic wedge. So the parts are never touching. It's always, it's essentially a hydraulic layer of oil that is just preventing these parts. Again, it's so crazy, dude. You're talking about three thousandths of an inch, less than, you know, the human, less than human hair.

A healthy human hair.

Healthy.

Maybe it's Maybelline.

Maybe, yeah. If it's non-Armenian, it's... It's... But yeah, that's what... And we actually do the same thing with the rod bearings and the main bearings. So we send them to North Carolina. Calico coatings does their CT1 coating on our main and rod bearings. And that's a dry lubricant coating. And I don't want to admit this, but I actually tested this accidentally one time. We drained the oil on the customer's car and it was at the old shop and we had to move cars because our neighbor was b******* at us because the car with the... We had a car that was parked there. Anyway, so we pushed the car out and then I started the car.

My accident?

My accident, no, I didn't know. And heard the knocking noise, actually. It was like 40 or 50 seconds of dry run.

Okay.

And there's two takes on this. People are like, oh, that's fine. It's really not fine. It's a metal to metal contact, basically. Took the whole engine apart. It was spotless. Wow. So I literally heard the dreaded noise and it was spotless. We still changed the bearings. We mic'd them. They were still fine. But yeah, so I'm big on coatings. There's also line to line that I've used them once. Line to line, they do a lot of like skirt coatings, piston skirt coatings, and you can actually, it's a wearable coating. So you will put that piston in the bore and I'll have like zero clearance. And once you start it, it'll self-clearance itself and it'll always stay at that clearance. So really interesting stuff. I haven't experimented with that stuff too much.

This is all really cheap stuff too, I bet.

Very cheap, yeah. Yeah, but when you pay for an SPL 900, this is stuff that you get.

Okay.

So it's not, you know.

So that's all within, okay.

It's nothing, pretty much nothing's off the shelf aside from the crank shaft and the connecting rod.

So, okay, so let's go down this path again. So with the SPL 900 kit, for example, what's all in there? Like, is this something, first of all, is this something that's on your website? Like if I was, okay, so break down like what this kit is exactly, that's all included within it.

Sure, our SPL 900 Pistons, which are these guys.

Yep, that.

Pistons, pins, DLC-coated TP-1 pins, our custom ring pack, Cali's Ultra Enforcer I-beams, very strong rods with the 716th L19 rod bolts.

And those are steel?

They're steel rods, correct. SPL 900.

Yeah, yep.

ARP 2000 main studs, BC Brian Crower 94mm crankshaft, or 88mm if you're doing a 2.0 long rod. And the block machine work and assembly. So our machine work includes a line honing of the main tunnels. So every time you put ARP main studs, you're putting more clamp on the mains. So it's going to change shape. And usually it turns into an egg shape. And you don't want that whenever you're running bearings in there because you're going to wear it like an egg, right? So it's going to be uneven. So an aligned honing, sometimes you have to align bore it and then hone it. But basically we get it to the point that whenever you torque up the main studs, it's a perfect bore, a perfect round and it's a perfect alignment of all five main studs on an Evo 8.9, 4G63. And then we obviously boring of the block, torque plate honing of the block. That's another thing that's very important. I've always talked about torque plating, I've posted tech talks and stuff on Instagram years ago. Basically, a torque plate simulates the head being torqued down on the block. So, I don't know, something you want to talk about?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we sell those for Subarus at company 23.

Absolutely. Some engines suffer from this more than others. For instance, Mercedes engines, they could give less of a s*** if you had a torque plate on it. They would measure fine top to bottom because it wouldn't have too much cylinder distortion. That's just German engineering.

That's how it was.

The Supra block that we just got sleeved, that thing needs a torque plate. Right now when I measure it without a torque plate, that's a thousandth and a half difference from the top of the board. Why are engines, specifically Evo engines, but why are engines so much more reliable nowadays, built engines than before? Before a machinist would take your piston, measure it and then set the piston to all like five to six thousandths of an inch. It's a huge piston to wall, dude. The rings are going to be loose. The piston is going to be clittering, clittering. Come on, dude. Oh my God.

The piston is going to be doing what?

The piston is going to be clattering around. Making noise on cold starts and all that stuff. You don't have to do that now. All of our SPL 900s are at three and a half thou piston to wall, sometimes four. The reason we can do that is we use a torque plate during the final honing process. Whenever you put the torque plate on there, it simulates the cylinder head being bolted on top of the block. You use the same studs, same torque for the head studs, same head gasket that you would be using, simulating basically the head being bolted on. Then when the machinist goes to final honing the cylinder, it's being honed with the torque plate being bolted on. Whenever you actually put the engine in use, you actually have a true round cylinder. As round as we can get it, one or two tenths is not much. But before, I've had 4G blocks that literally would measure 2000 difference from the top to the bottom. That's a huge variance, dude. So that's why they would have to run insanely loose piston to wall clearances. You don't have to do that now. It doesn't matter if it's making 1000 horsepower. I don't have to gap the ring super, super loose, especially my rings, because they don't anneal. They're not my rings, they're Total Seals, but you know.

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

Well, my dad didn't make them, but. And yeah, just having the torque plate just allows us to get a lot longer of a seal with the rings in the cylinder. The engine just lives that much longer and you don't have to run super loose clearances. They're not clattering in the mornings. They don't smoke. They don't do anything weird. It's just, it's changed a lot from before. Torque plate is very important. I still see a lot of engines that come through here that have been built before and we check them and they're not torque plated. So, very important, very important. And so yeah, that's where you're getting. You're getting main studs, you're getting pistons, rods, the ring pack, the wrist pins, crank, and of course our bearings and assembly.

Okay.

And then they compare it up with a cylinder head if they wish. We work with head games now.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave, yeah.

I've become very familiar with him recently.

I met him in Texas. We went up to him in Texas. And super, super cool guy. And he's like, he's like, dude, how many heads do you? He's like, you send me like two, three heads a month. I did not expect you to send that many heads. It is really funny, dude. He's like, you made my CNC program worth it for the 4G63. It was really funny. Super cool guy. But we do that. The only thing I do here in house with the cylinder heads is I do o-ringing. So I have a fixture. I cut o-ring grooves on the cylinder head. And then I put stainless steel o-rings in there. And I have a certain spec that I use. And I use a multi-layer steel MLS OEM Evo 9 head gasket on all the 4G63 stuff. And the o-ring basically clamps down around the combustion chamber and it makes a perfect seal. So we can run 50, 60 pounds of boost on the M11 OEM thickness studs. Obviously on the ARP625 is what we use. That car right there, my red one? Yeah, that's your car? Yeah, that's 67 pounds of boost on the 625 off-the-shelf ARP head studs. Just has our o-rings.

What does 67 pounds of boost equate to power-wise? What are you doing in that car?

Power-wise, not much. That turbo had a lot of back pressure. It made like 1,000 horse. But at 52 pounds on a 7275, it made 1,078.

Wow, OK.

That's SPL 1,000. So that has an aluminum rod motor.

OK, so what's the difference between a 900 and a 1,000?

Aluminum rods, L19 main studs from Boost and Performance, half-field engine. So half of the engine coolant. So half of the block is filled with concrete. And we do that, and we have to, again, we have to use the torque plate when we do that, because it is literal concrete that we buy from Moroso. That's engine-grade concrete.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's not from Home Depot.

I mean, you can literally use that. You can use that, if you really want to.

Yeah, that's the deal.

So for a half fill, and the theory behind concrete filling, the block flexes a lot. Combustion is not forgiving, dude. Like, it is f****** chaotic, right? So when you're making, again, 250 horse per hole, s***'s moving around. The mains are moving around. If you ever use, again, the reason we went to L19s on the SPL 1000 versus the 2000s, the Evo has a tendency, specifically the 4G63, the main girdle has a tendency to f****** lift off and come back. It like frets itself. You can pull it off and it can be freshly machined and you'll pull it off and you'll see fretting from the actual girdle to the actual block. Like, it just moves around, dude. It's not forgiving. So around the thousand plus horse mark, like if somebody actually wants to make over a thousand horsepower, be serious about it, I'll half fill the engine. And so we'll fill the coolant ports with concrete up to half of the block. So the water pump still is used like normal, has no cooling problems. You can run it with half fret on the street. You will not overheat the engine. That's not how it works. Because you got to think about it. All the combustion and all the heat is happening at the top of the cylinder. So if you're half filled or even three quarter filled, you still have coolant where coolant needs to be.

Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense.

When we do that, we have to let it dry for about one or two days, depending on how you pour the concrete. I like to make it super watery because it cures very well. If you make it super watery, like super viscous, I guess. When we do that, we'll put the torque plate on. We'll torque the torque plate on with the head studs to whatever spec we go to, and we just let it sit for two days. Then after that, when we take it to the machine shop, he can own that visual without a torque plate. If he wants to, that thing does not move around much. But you have to do the curing with it, because it's concrete. It will not move afterwards.

So you gotta be careful with that.

A lot of people don't do that. They'll torque plate it afterwards, and the block doesn't like that, so you can crack a block afterwards if you do that. Ask me how I know.

Okay, yeah. So does that cover everything that's in the 1,000? I think, yeah.

That's it. And then they can do full fill if they want to, but if you do full fill, then you have to weld the surface of the deck of the head, and then you have to weld this dash 16 port to the side of the head. It becomes a drag car or a deal.

Yeah, at that point, it's a full on race car, yeah.

Correct. I've made 1,100 plus on a wet block.

Okay.

So can it crack? Yes, but we've done it before. So we like to do the enforcing of the half filling if they're gonna make over 1,100, I would say.

So now let's talk Supra again. So you got that program. That's how we got onto this. Is there an intention to do this sort of thing with the Supra at some point? To have a program?

We already have a program.

I'm pushing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's, we both have a very competitive nature when it comes to, dude, we don't like average. Average is f****** boring, bro. Everyone's average, you know? Everyone. Both of us.

Like I think the biggest thing we have in common is both of us are either zero or 100.

Yeah.

So you guys, let's back the bus up here. How long have you guys been together for?

Five years.

Five years. How did you even meet? Like because you're both into cars, you're both, like, again.

That's a funny one.

Could I say why? Yeah.

That's a funny one.

I posted my Subaru on my Instagram story and he slid up and he's like, you need a tune.

You need a tune? That's how it works.

I didn't tune Subarus. That was a funny thing. I did not tune Subarus.

That's the crazy part too.

Yeah.

So what you're saying is if I want to make it in life, if I want a woman in my life again, I got to be a tuner and swipe up on stories?

Well, actually I didn't reply and he unfollowed me.

Wait.

There's two parts to the story, bro. Hold on. Part two is coming.

I didn't reply to that. He unfollowed me.

Okay.

And then I don't know if I'll follow her again at one point, I guess.

Yeah. He followed me again. He messaged me again.

Her Instagram got hacked.

My Instagram got hacked. Someone called me at like 2 a.m. They called everybody in my like following.

I was just the lucky one.

I thought he was cute. So I decided to apologize to him.

Oh, okay.

I'm so sorry. Somebody.

So somebody messaged everybody. Oh, called. Okay. Okay.

Everybody on my like Instagram messages. I like 2 in the morning.

Okay.

So I'm like my phone's blowing up and everybody's like hello, like why are you calling me? Yeah. I saw that they called him and I was like, it's kind of cute. I'll apologize to him. Be like, so sorry.

I saw the phone call and I'm like, dude, why are you apologizing? I was drunk myself. I don't remember what happened yesterday, but I'm seeing this missed call. I'm like, yeah, that was nice.

We literally have never stopped talking since that day. We have, I don't think we've had like any days apart.

No.

Unless it's like traveling for work.

Yeah.

That and like literally, I think one day, like when my mom passed, like one day, like she just had to, it was a crazy time for both of us.

Yeah.

So in the five years- Yeah, we've been through some traumatic s***, dude. We've also like scaled and like grown this business, dude. She like, she has been by my side the whole time. In the beginning, when obviously when we first met, she wasn't as involved. I didn't kind of let her-

We also had a super tiny shop.

Yeah, and I didn't let her get involved just because-

And I was doing my own thing too.

Yeah, she was doing her own stuff too. But the last year and a half, two years, I've encouraged her to get involved, and she's actually very smart.

She's actually very smart. Thank you so much.

It's like, you just found out recently.

It's like, after I found that out, I told her you can come to the- No, I'm just kidding. Well, the thing was, she's also like me. Like, she's all in if she's into something. But I like it. That's why I support her. It's like, you want car parts? No problem. Like, it's one of-

Well, cause we have the same problem. We have the same mental illness.

Yeah, and I just, I love supporting what she is doing now because she literally wants to be involved. She is involved. She's like, she actually knows. Like, bro, not many people know, like, how to stage a car. Not many people know how to, like, pre-stage, like, stage pre-stage. They don't know. Like, just, she knows this s*** now. Many people don't know how to take s*** apart. She's taking apart, she's taking off her own transmission. She's probably taking off everything.

You're being really nice to me right now cause whenever I, like, take things apart off camera, he tells me I would have to be able to not be able to do it.

Well, I do that. So, she builds thick skin. She's in a shop environment. You know what I mean? Like, you gotta give her a reality check once in a while.

You gotta check on her once in a while.

I'm never nice to her when she's working on s***. I'll literally walk by and just say something very rude and walk away.

I'll be fighting for my life and he'll walk past me and pat me on the back and be like, good job. I walk away and I'm like, dude, I'm dying over here.

Dude, cause it's like, I know you can do it. And it's like, obviously I'm here if something happens, but yeah.

All right, give me a most recent example. Cause today you posted a video about, what were you pulling? Like a clutch or something or?

No, the motor from the Supra.

Yeah.

Pulled that today. Way easier than I expected it to be. Cause you look at it compared to the Evo and it's like super intimidating cause there's all these like sensors and s***.

Okay.

And you're like, what is going on?

The f****** cams on the wrong side of the engine.

The engine's like backwards.

Do you know that? The crank pulley is in the front.

Yeah.

The cams are on this side.

Oh.

The timing side is on the flywheel side.

Okay.

It's like a Lamborghini. Like a Huracan.

Is that an Audi thing too? I think so. Yeah.

Yeah.

You're gonna have a hell of a time doing a timing on your car by the way. Oh, my time is fine.

That's not your problem. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. I was gonna ask, like, why is it easier? But that makes sense. Okay.

So you're, like, looking at it and you're like, what the hell is going on? And then you just unplug all the sensors and you're like, oh, okay. I can see now.

Sure.

Yeah.

That's just for me because all I've ever touched is the Evos, which is, in my opinion, a lot less complex than these BMWs. Yeah.

They're very rudimentary compared to these cars. But then these cars are surprisingly a lot more serviceable. So to pull the motor, I mean, take the drive shaft out. Took like five minutes. Yeah. You take the engine out. The engine takes like, I'm sorry, take the transmission out. Takes like 20 minutes, dude. Somebody that's, like, not, sorry.

Definitely, I cut that one.

Someone that's somewhat mechanically competent and inclined, 20, 30 minutes, you can knock this transmission out, dude. Supra. Supra. And then after that, yeah, after that, it's just like draining your coolant, and like all the air to water stuff, and just tucking everything away, and just pulling the water out with a cherry picker. It takes two seconds to get the hood off. Super easy. Okay. And then putting it together is just like any other engine, dude. Like it does not, it's like one of those things, like tuners always say the stock ECU tuners, like Evo stock ECU tuners. I'm going to get a lot of backlash for this, but I really don't give a s***. I only tune on the stock ECU. Well, you only tune on the stock ECU because you don't know how to tune. I'm sorry, but you just learn how to move tables around, and you just have a bunch of base maps that work. Trial and error, I don't know, maybe you paid for them. But if you know how to tune, you can tune any standalone. It's just there's a learning curve, obviously. Where's this table? Okay. This is allocated here, like on MoTeC. There's different pages. You get a GPRP or a GPR package, and there's just the layouts there. You can find everything from, there's all calibrate area that you can just type in whatever you want, and it'll bring up the table or whatever you're looking for. A link gives you four pages. You have to set your own up if you want to do it properly.

It has to be something that you're obsessed with. We're home, and all that plays on our TV is things that have to do with work.

Tuning, drag racing, work, literally.

That's all. We rarely watch anything at home for pleasure.

Sure. Yeah.

It is pleasure.

What's the last TV show you guys watched? Like a normal TV show?

Is Apex a TV show?

No, Apex was a movie, a really good movie on Netflix. Last TV show we watched, we binge watched the TV show.

It was that horror movie.

No, no, no, no, that was Apex.

No, no, no, the girl with the mansion, she was getting married. The you.

Oh, I don't remember. Bridgerton? You are my destiny.

No. She's this really pretty girl.

That's the fall of the song, but I forgot. Okay. I don't think she's attractive. She's obsessed with the girl. I don't know.

I think she's really pretty. I'm obsessed with her.

She's like Leonardo DiCaprio was with her. It's like she was with everything.

Yeah, she dated Leonardo.

But no, before that it was Stranger Things.

Stranger Things.

Oh yeah, we did watch Stranger Things.

I never went down that rabbit hole. I never could get into it.

You should.

The reason I asked this, because you remember we were talking about off-camera before the episode, you guys were talking about, it was like a trend, like look at your whatever boyfriend's explore page. I'd love to see what your explore page on YouTube is. What are the go-to channels? What are you watching, Jen?

1320. 1320.

Okay.

There's some Peace Cow. That was very sad. That was actually one that I was actually sad during the day when it happened.

Did you ever meet him?

No, I never did. I never met him. I met Fred one time. He didn't meet. I mean, I saw him. I didn't like me. I was like next to him, but like, yeah, I told him, happy birthday, but never. He was filming. You know what I mean?

Did he at least hear when he said, happy birthday?

I don't know. I did my due. I paid my respects. I don't know. Steve Morris, Steve Morris Engines.

Oh yeah. Yep. I just watched one of his videos for the first time. That Viper that got set on fire.

The fire?

Yeah. I watched that one.

I re-shared that video and everybody was like, bro, are you okay? I'm like, dude, it says Steve Morris Engines underneath the video. Like I'm fine. Yeah. I'm sharing this from my f****** toilet. Like everyone was like concerned. People are calling me. I'm like, dude, literally, it's us. Steve Morris is a very knowledgeable guy.

Yeah. That's a bucket list guest as well.

Jaffrosmobile, Jaffrosmobile. I used to watch him like before I started working on these cars. He was a very DIY like 4G63 guy.

Okay.

Like Hyundai 4G63. He would bolt stuff together, like make his own very, very, very knowledgeable guy. And I had this like awakening moment one time, I was watching his video and he gave me a shout out.

That's cool.

Cause I was talking about torque plates. And he was like, I'm not going to get into it. Go watch Ronnie Bilt's channel, Menti little fella. And I was like, dude, what the f***? Like I was watching this guy's channel 10 years ago. And I was like, I hope one day I can do what he's doing. That's so cool. 12 years ago or whatever. And it was so crazy dude. And that was like a reality check. It's like, dude, like I'm doing it right. You know what I mean?

We're here more than we're home.

Yeah. We're obsessed with this s***, bro. Like if we want to, and it's not like, oh, we're better than everybody. No, it's not that. It's just like, if we want to do something, we're going to do it, bro. No, nothing's going to stop us. You know what I mean? Like if I'm obsessed with something, I'm going to learn it and I'm going to do it. If she is the same thing and I'll support her, she'll support me. And that's the biggest thing in the relationship and like the dynamic that works. Cause yeah, you, you, you both have to be on the same page. Sure. When it comes to like running a shop, bro, I'm here 14 hours a day. Sometimes most, most times, especially like this year, we're getting married in two months. Bro, I'm here more than I've ever been here. She's obviously here a lot of the times too, but she understands, excuse me, if I'm here, there's a reason I'm here. I need to finish the cars. I need to deliver stuff.

Yeah, you're not hiding from her. Cause there's some guys that do that too, yeah.

Well, I just come here all the time.

They just show up, yeah.

I mean, there's always something to do, but also-

Yeah, how involved are you with the business? Like, cause like you were talking about that off camera earlier as well. Like you help a little bit here or what exactly does that look like?

I mean, it's us two, we have two techs and we just hired a media guy that we're trying to kind of get more into the media stuff.

Was that one of the guys I met earlier?

Yeah. Derek.

Derek.

Yeah, yep.

So I've been kind of lately, I've been kind of trying to train him as much as I can with my social media stuff, at least like it kind of took off more naturally. I didn't really have to put the effort into like editing and stuff. I guess that has to do with being a woman, but I'm just going to be like completely honest. Like it's a lot easier to blow up on social media as a woman in this niche. Yeah, but we're a smaller team, so we wear many hats. So I'll do, that's kind of like the dynamic of working together as a couple. Someone always has to take the backseat and let someone else guide. I think that was the biggest thing of like getting into working together is like how is that gonna work because we both have really strong personalities. I'm getting that. You know, we're both really like, I don't know, how would you describe it?

We're both like alpha personalities in our own role, I would say. But the biggest thing was, dude, I built this s*** from the ground up. Like no one can come here and like do any like, so it took a while for me to like even let her like get involved with the business. Because this is my baby, bro.

I didn't want it to like affect our relationship either. But now, I just kind of like.

Well, she's my other half, so she's going to be a part of, she is a part of this. Literally everything that I'm going to do from here on out, she's going to be involved with. But yeah, in the beginning, it took a little while for me to be like, okay, just come to the shop whenever you want.

Was that before or after you followed her back?

A lot after. Yeah, this was literally like two years ago, bro. We were already living together.

Well, I was working as a car broker, and I had insane hours, and I hated my life. I'm not even going to lie. I would come home every single day, and I'd be like, I can't do this anymore. I was making really good money, I was really good at it, but I would come home and I was like, I can't do this anymore. And then, once we got the bigger shop, the shop here, yeah, the shop, he was like, all right, come show up every day.

So what did that look like then? What did showing up look like?

So many things.

Like were you just learning a bunch of stuff?

Dropping off animals first. We have a lot of animals, bro. We don't have kids, but we have f***** up animals.

What do you guys have for animals?

No, we have three.

We have two cats and a dog.

Oh, okay, the wiener dogs.

Yeah, one wiener dog and two cats.

Wiener cats, yeah. Why has nobody made that yet? Anyways.

Over here, I mean, sometimes it's cleaning, sometimes it's office work, sometimes it's fricking wrenching, which...

Wrenching is mostly on her own cars.

Yeah, and filming, content, media, that kind of stuff.

She sends invoices and stuff. I use Shop Monkey for all my invoicing.

Okay.

Yeah, that's something that I cannot recommend enough to someone that's trying to get into the business or is in the business and is trying to scale a little bit. I'm not saying I'm anywhere insane. I have so much growth to do. I am barely, even with the shop space that you see, I'm comfortable, but I am not where I want to be. I am barely making enough money to be able to f*** around with cars still. You know what I mean? And still pay my bills. The one thing I'm proud of is three families basically got fed by me. So they rely on, not fed by me, but like they rely on me and I, that's cool. I paid three people's paychecks. And that is insane for me.

A lot of people will look at what we do on social media, like with the Supra, we're like full send everything. And they're like, must be nice to be able to do this. Like I'll get comments like that all the time.

Yeah.

But what people don't see is that we're here. The amount of hours that go into, yeah.

The amount of tunes I have to do, the amount of engines I have to put together, the amount of people I have to tolerate, talk to, schedule things. My life revolves.

Scheduling is my least favorite thing on the planet, by the way. I.

Shop monkey. You need shop monkey.

For the podcast?

Yeah.

Wish me luck.

I wish they would sponsor me. I pay like $530 a month with their CRM.

They have like hands on training for everything too.

What's that?

They have like training for everything too. They'll like remote in and like teacher everything. Yeah.

But we can schedule, we can schedule appointments week. I have vetted services, like canned services, they call it. SPL 900. I've sent like 20 of those out last month. Seven of them got bites. But the point is I don't have to sit there and type every single time. It's already vetted. It's a full, this is how much it is. This is how much the deposit is. You're getting this, this, this, this, the whole nine dude. Engine R&R, tuning, like everything. It just makes it so much easier. I feel like that's one thing that has given me a little bit of an edge over some other people that do the same thing.

Like on the business side of things?

Yeah, because I don't have to waste three hours on them. She sees how it is. Some mornings I wear a lot of hats here. Like she said, we both do, but I wear a lot of hats here. I have two techs, one media guy, but sometimes, dude, I get here at like eight o'clock in the morning, usually eight, eight-thirty, I'm here. By the time I start ranching or tuning or whatever I'm doing assembling, it's like 11 or 12. Like I am just sending out quotes, I'm reaching out to customers. I love doing it, but like it's hard, bro. That's one thing that, another thing that set Speedlab aside. It's like you have to be connected with your customers. You have to respond.

24, seven.

Even if it's people that have already paid you.

People call it two, three in the morning and he will pick up the phone.

If I see it, I'll pick it up. Unless I'm like literally knocked out or whatever.

I'm the same way. If I get a text that one and I'm up, I'll respond.

Yeah. The biggest thing is that customers that have left and they've already paid, the balance is clear, the tab is closed, invoice is already archived, person hits you up to have an issue or they're asking a question. You can't just ignore them, bro. These people help you be who you are. Every single one of them, break by break the algorithms.

And it's a lot. Sometimes people will get upset if you don't see their text messages and stuff. But if you literally pull up his phone and look at it, it's literally like 1700 messages. 1700 messages.

I'll show you. It's more than that.

It's literally insane. And he provides all of the customer service. I don't really deal with the customer side. Nobody does besides him. And that's like that in itself, on top of everything else, is like a 24-7 thing.

Yeah. Especially if you get a yapper.

Yeah.

Oh my God. You can kill an hour and a half.

I don't mind it though. No? It's like me and you, when we first saw each other, we were just talking, right?

Yeah.

It's the same thing. It's like, if I'm explaining the whole piston rod, SPL 900 thing to somebody, yeah, it's nice. I'm going to get the cell. Even if I don't get the cell, at least I get the information across. It's just, I like to share my knowledge. Whatever knowledge I have, I like to share.

He likes to yap. He likes to yap.

I love it. Yeah, no, it's just, we're car guys, bro. We can talk all day.

Why do you think I started the show?

Yeah.

That's exactly why I started.

Why not, though? It's like you have the same passion, and that's why you're successful the way you do, dude.

Please tell me more.

No, seriously, though. We were talking about it before, and I'm like, how do you know what kind of questions to ask? Like, does it become difficult at some points? Like, it's like you're natural at it, though. Like, you know exactly how to flow it. Like, sometimes I'm like, okay, I'm done. I just explained it, and then you ask another question. I'm like, that's a great question you just made. Like, I was not thinking you would ask that, but.

Listen to my last two. They were a little rough.

But no, it's just, yeah, we're car people.

No, we hold a standard to ourselves, though. That's different, yeah. OK, so then you kind of get involved with this. First of all, do you guys have beds here? Do you sleep here? If you're here 14 hours a day, there's got to be like a couch or something here.

I've slept in the car before.

Which car? Like, like, just in a Supra?

Yeah, oh, she's slept in my Evo before. I have videos of her knocked out in the Evo.

Yes, videos of her being knocked out in the Evo.

Back seat, probably. Yeah, yeah.

Crisscross applesauce mid-wiring of fuel pumps.

She was literally wiring her primary, and I'm like, where's Lex? And I'm like, Lex, Lex, and she's like, just knock out, I have a video of it, dude.

That's wild.

It's knocked out. But no, we thankfully, we lived very close to here.

Five minutes literally.

Yeah.

We were talking about this earlier, like getting a location was very hard in SoCal.

You went to the old shop, so did you see like how like, were you able to like pull into the parking lot?

That was a rough, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so. He thought it was a marketplace like scam. Like I told him, I'm like, hey, pull in, there's gonna be a bunch of Evos. Like, hey, it says wood design here, bro. Like, dude, you're at the old shop.

So that was another reason why I wouldn't go to the old shop because it was small and there was no room to do anything. My little brother actually used to work for him when they were at the other shop and he kind of followed in Ronnie's footsteps. And once he was CI, now he's a Mercedes tech.

I was a Mercedes tech.

So he'll be working on Evos in five years, gotcha.

Go back to where he started.

I pulled in twice into that parking lot. I went halfway, I went like a few cars and I'm like, I don't know, backed out, did a couple of laps, went to the golf course, came back and I'm like, okay, this has to be the address. I pulled back here all the way and this lady is like, what the f***, just came back here again. Like, yeah. So thanks for that Google.

So the crazy thing with that was when I was at that, again, a lot of people will, and I want to make this clear because she said this and it's very true. A lot of people will look at what we post and they'll look at, not like we have like an extremely lavish lifestyle, like we live in a-

Social media is a highlight for you.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Don't judge me off of what I post.

Again, like I said, I'm making ends meet and I'm able to f*** with cars and I'm happy. If I can keep doing this and slowly scale it at the level that I have been, I will be successful for a long time. That's all I need. I don't need to be a f****** multimillionaire. I don't, that's not what I, but people will watch this and they'll be like, oh, it must be nice to have money. It must be nice to, b****, you didn't see when I was at the old location that this guy, literally the neighbor across the street would come and shut my dino session down at three o'clock because his employees would have issues with hearing or whatever.

I would have to stop. I would have to stop and he would be like, go home.

This is the landlord on the other side. You're talking about the guys next door. We had issues with everybody. We, I didn't. They had issues with me. And then if somebody has an issue with me, I take it very personal and it becomes a problem. But the thing was like, dude, it was 20 people and I liked his employees. They were all nice. The business owner himself was not a very nice person, but I had to respect the bounds and just do what I, given what I had, I had to work around it. So 1,500 square foot shop, the rent that I was paying was not a crazy amount, and I had a dyno and I was going to run it. Dude, so I would wait until 6 o'clock, everybody would leave and I would start my dyno session. Even though I would be there from 8 o'clock working, my 6 o'clock I would start my dyno session, I would get home at 1, 2 in the morning. Dude, I did that for almost five years, bro. So when somebody watches and they're like, oh, must be nice. It is nice. If you work hard, it is nice. Nothing gets handed to you, bro. Like you have to go through it. Like no one comes and just hands you business. You earn it from trust of customers. You earn it from word of mouth. I watched a recent Chain T podcast.

I got a lot of Bucky Lesk.

He's an awesome, awesome. I've talked to him a couple of times online. I look up to him as a tuner. I think everybody does.

He holds a very high respect.

He's an amazing guy and just the values he has is just awesome. I hope to meet him one day. He was saying word of mouth is the best advertisement. Imagine you trust somebody and that somebody that you trust tells you this is the guy to call. That's how Speedlab has become Speedlab. If you f*** people over and you brought Peter to PayPal and you lag on the projects and you just do things wrong, which most of these shops do, most of them, they have the potential to be great, but they just make the small mistakes. They make the first 20, $30,000 and they just, let's party, you know what I mean? Dude, you gotta look at the big picture, man. This is a long-term thing.

Every penny we make gets reinvested back.

Every single penny.

What's the biggest investment you guys had?

Dino.

Dino? When did you get the main line?

2020. 2022, sorry.

So you've had it for a while then?

No, not 2022.

Oh, 2021. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Right before, six, seven months before I met her.

The first shop in 2021. Yeah, he got the first shop like six months before we met.

I got the main line. No, no, no. That's not right.

Yeah, like six months before we met.

The shop?

Yeah.

Oh, then I got the Dino like two, three months after that. Yeah, I'd already put the order in for the Dino when I got the shop. Yeah, I've had it for a while.

Okay, so customer cars. That's one thing that some shops kind of put like a hard stop on. Like, you know, they either do customer cars or they don't. Where do you draw a line in the sand? Do you do it? Or I mean, sorry, not customer cars.

Yeah. Okay. So somebody wants to come in for a tune.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. At the scale that we're at and the cars that we're working on, the dollar amount just isn't there to not do non-customer cars, like you have to. However, what I implemented is a non-refundable pre-Dino inspection. Now, the non-refundable part is your appointment. And it goes back to the whole invoicing system that I have. I'll send them an, you know, they'll request the day and I'll send the appointment details and they'll authorize it. And I'll take the one hour charge that we take for the pre-Dino inspection. And that is a non-refundable deposit. If you let me know 24 hours prior that you're not going to make it, we can move it to another day or whatever. That's all fine. But what that hour allows me to do is do a compression check, leak down test, boost leak test, and most importantly, just putting the car on the lift, sorry, taking it up, just making sure that the car is not going to fall apart on the first pull.

That's such a pain in the a** because I talked about this with the Cannonball Garage guys. It's like they work on McLarens, right? And it's like these are high ticket builds that they're doing. And it's like if you're just having some guy with his piece of s*** Mustang on the dyno, it's like, I can't do anything for two days. It's stuck on the dyno. It's taking up your shop time.

So to answer your question, if I understood it right, you're asking me if I tune other builds.

Correct, yeah.

Not renting the dyno out. I do rent the dyno out. That's a separate...

Okay, so you do that as well.

I do that as well, if I have time.

Okay.

It's very rare.

You just have to operate it.

Yeah, I usually have to operate it.

Unless there's a time whoever rents the dyno and operates it.

Or I'd like to operate it. I don't want to just, you know... Anyway.

It's a big investment to let some stranger do it, yeah.

It is, it is, yeah. And it's not, you can't really mess it up.

Well, I'll find a way.

I've done it before, but... There is a very viral video of me, actually.

Wade.

Yes. Hold on.

Which video?

Wade. That one. There was a, okay. So there was a 2J swap, there was a 2J IS300 here. He'd rented the dyno from me for four hours. Dino'd the car, made like 1200 horsepower, and then told me to take it off the dyno. No problem. It was just a dyno rental. I came and took the arms off, and then my bladder gave me issues again. So I went to the bathroom, and I came back, and he's like, hey, can you launch the car on the dyno? I'm like, of course I can. It's a main line.

And it's like midnight.

No, no, no. This was during the day. This was like 10 o'clock. It was? Yeah, this was like noon when I texted you. Yeah, it was during the day. Yeah, I just sent you the video later. But no, it was like during the day. And he's like, can you launch it on the dyno? And this is a TH400 car and an 8085. And he's spring 200 shut to spool this f****** thing up. He's like, can you launch it? I'm like, of course I can. He's like, can we do it? I'm like, yeah. I totally forgot the arms. Sound the f****** thing, launched it on a TH400, 200 shut of nitrous, like God knows, 30 pounds of booster or whatever. And as soon as I let go of the f****** button, the hubs just did a 360, like six times in one second. Luckily nobody got hurt, but I forgot the arms, but I didn't forget the arms whenever we started the dyno session, it was afterwards. Like the dyno session ended and then he asked me after and I forgot to put them back in because I just...

Is this pinned on your page or something?

No, no, no.

So it was New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. This is like six or seven months after this happened. I'm scrolling on Instagram reels and I see this guy post this and he's like, 2025, the year I almost died.

Yeah, dude, honestly, I was glad he didn't get hurt and nothing happened and I didn't care that he posted it. I was going to post it eventually myself. It was crazy. It was crazy. Obviously, he didn't get hurt. He was filming from in front and ever since then.

Which we typically don't let people do.

We don't let people do that, bro. And actually, it's crazy because my employees were filming a car about two months ago, right before I left for a race. And the intercooler pipe let go and it almost grazed my tech here and my media got, it was like a final destination f****** scene, dude. Like I have a video of it from over there. And it like, it just missed both. And I could do, 50 PSI. That's not a lot of boost.

It was like.

And it happened so fast. Like you can't see it in the, you have to slow the camera down. Like you have to slow the video down to see it.

It looks faster when you slow it down for some reason.

Dude, it was so insane. And after that, I'm like, no one is no one ever. Not because before it was no customers. After that incident, there was no, and now it's like no one, like no one. I don't care if like, no one is gonna be in front of the dyno. S*** happens, dude. I have no control over that.

Things happen, yeah.

You know, I'm a human being. I make mistakes, but even if I don't make mistakes, you know, engine parts, this, that can happen. So yeah, it's, it's very important to also be very, very of what can happen on a dyno. Dude, it is a lot of horsepower moving things around. Even if it's not a lot of horsepower, things that are moving have, things are moving. You know what I mean? If it comes to sudden stop, something probably gave and that's something can hit somebody, like it's just, it's very scary, bro.

I've seen some scary videos. Like it's like, why chance it, right?

Like, no, no, you, you, you really can't, you really can't. But yeah, we, we do the pre-dino inspection and that allows me to make sure everything is okay to go on the dyno for both myself, my employees and the customer. Like you don't want to, you know, sometimes these guys get like a car done from a shop and it will come in and stuff will be loose, man. We've had like driveshaft bolts loose. We've had like control arms loose. We've had, dude, we've had every, a lot of stuff loose. Like just, you have to go through it. Just check the oil, do a compression check, do a leak down. The customer will thank you. Like it's just, it's a pre-dino inspection, but the compression leak, then usually people charge like an hour or two for those. We just do it in there. It's just very easy.

What do you, what do you charge again for the inspection?

It's 190, it's an hour.

I think that's fair. So many people come to the dino unprepared too. Like it's just, I hear so many shops complain about it. It's, yeah, I get it.

You have to do it. It's one of those things that saves your a**. It just, it's saving grace for the customer too, because, and it kind of like filters the customer out too.

It is very rare though that a car will come in for just a tune and it will be ready.

You're perfect.

Yeah.

And that's why the pre-dino inspection is very important. Like, I'm sorry, but you actually have to be like a little ignorant to like let a car just come on your dyno and, like you just, you don't know, bro. Like some people put this, they put it together with hopes and dreams, bro. Like you got-

Bro, you do not want to be the guy. Like, listen, if I were to go build a car in the next year myself, I f****** hope you do an inspection on me. I need to verify my stuff with somebody else. Like, yeah.

Bro, so I have had a lot of builds that I've done myself, that it's been ready for the dyno, and I've left it overnight because I've been tired.

Oh yeah, sure.

And then the next day you come in and you're like, holy s***. You're like, oh s***, that's not even bolted in. You know what I mean? It's like people make mistakes. We're human beings, bro. We have cognitive abilities, but it gets limited when you're tired, sleep deprived, under caffeinated, over caffeinated.

I think I'm still chugging these Diet Cokes to keep up with you.

But no, it's just pre-dino inspections are a must.

Yeah.

If you're a shop owner and you care about your customer and your business, you need to do a pre-dino inspection. You're doing your customer favor by charging them a pre-dino inspection and doing it because again, like I said, compression, leak down, boost leak, visual inspection. At least two people see that. I see it. My worker sees it. I always glance over the cars and 190 books an hour, you know, one hour. That's not bad, man. And then after that, it goes on the dino and the customer gets a report of everything. Hey, your ball joints are shot. Hey, your shocks leaking the rear right, whatever the case is, you know? And if there's a mechanical problem, we don't dino it. Don't do it. I mean, so I'm not going to blow your s*** up on the dino because again, if I'm not successful, they're not successful. It doesn't matter if I built the car or not. Most, mostly I did a lot. It's very expensive to build a car, right? Like say an Evo. An Evo is an expensive example because they are getting pretty pricey. You buy an Evo for $30,000, let's say a clean one, and you put money into a build, ECU, this, that, another. Say nothing crazy like you asked $1,000 for nothing like that. Like say you put another $35, $40,000 in there.

Yeah. Okay.

Then let's say you take it to somebody else to tune it, and they don't do an inspection on it, and then there's things that are not right. You hurt the engine. Something happens on the dyno. That person might never do it again.

Yeah. No, that's a wrap. It hurts everybody. It's like, I'm not going to modify a car ever again.

Say that person has a spouse that's already given them a hard time. Hey, why did you spend this much money? Or say this person is on the verge, did I make the right decision doing this? Could I have spent my money elsewhere, invested it or whatever? No. Okay. Whatever. I did this because I wanted to do it, and then they actually end up hurting it. They're not going to do it again.

Yeah. Lesson learned. Don't do it again. Yeah. It kills the hobby for a lot of people.

100%. That $190 or whatever you charge for that pre-dino inspection is well worth it.

Yeah.

99% of the time, it avoids that happening.

I have a burning question. I'm going f****** insane. So what made you get rid of the Subaru? Like, how do we get to... Okay, so you're around Evo's. Why did you get rid of it? How did that conversation go?

That's her.

Well...

I'm sitting outside. I'm going to leap.

Well, first of all, it broke.

Okay.

What broke? Transmission thing I told you about.

Yeah. So one day I left work. I clutched in, clutch pedal just sucked to the floor.

Good question. Never clutched out.

Yeah, I clutched in and never clutched out. I clutched in and never clutched out again. But anyways, I don't remember what happened.

No, it was the fork thing. It was the whole fork thing.

I don't know what happened. It wasn't you. Somebody welded it back together and we drove it straight to CarMax.

Should we say this on the phone?

I mean, we sold it as it. So we drove it straight to CarMax.

Yeah, there's a waiver for it.

So I go to work the next day. This Supra is parked up front and we were supposed to sell this to a Toyota dealership.

When you were at the Carbroker.

Carbroker.

Okay.

Hold on. She sends me a picture of the Supra.

She's like, look at how hideous this is.

I'm like, eww. Over text. I'm like, what the f*** is that color, dude?

I'm like, I will never drive a yellow car.

The next day she had it in our driveway.

I called him and I'm like, hey, I bought the car. I swear, bro.

Did you just like test drive it or something?

No, she just bought it.

She just bought it?

Yeah, she just bought it.

It grew on me. It was my desk.

In 24 hours?

It was my desk and it was just parked outside and I kept looking at it and I was like.

She's like, I need the down payment.

I'm like, I don't even need, I don't even remember what it was. Whatever it was, you used like half of it or whatever. And she just bought it and then I'm like, you told me you're not, and then I look at the car and I'm like, this is actually kind of nice, dude. It looks like a nice banana, bro. I don't know how to explain it, but this has potential. Once we put the f****** beadlocks on it, game changer.

The best looking Supra. So I didn't go from a Subaru to an Evo. I went from the Subaru to the Supra.

Okay. Okay.

And then that, I was just like, I'm just going to not touch it. I'm just going to leave it how it is. That's good about the Evo. What do you mean?

She has an RS that's on the way from Virginia.

I have an Evo 8 RS, too.

Oh, she has an RS. It's not here, but it's one of the cleanest RS's you'll ever see.

So you bought an Evo then?

I did buy an Evo. So this, fast forward, this car, it was a Sunday night, and him and I were hanging out here. We had a little bit too much to drink, and we got a little bit greedy on the dyno. So that's how that happened.

Yeah.

So I didn't have a car.

That was like a year ago, correct? One year anniversary of a blown up car.

Yeah, that was a year ago. So we had a spare engine here. We sent that one to the machine shop, and it took like eight months.

Well, it wasn't eight months. No, it was probably two months of him working on it. By the time we got the sleeves to him, there was a bunch of stuff we had to figure out because we were novices in the platform. We still are.

Yeah.

Sorry. We still are. But our friend Norris from P-Tuned helped us a lot. Very helpful guy. We consider him family at this point, but yeah, this guy helped us out a lot. Anyway, there's just a bunch of stuff that we had to get figured out to do it right.

I was like, I need a car to mess around with because I don't have anything.

Because this is down. Okay.

This was down.

It was another birthday gift. The Evo was.

I always told him I want a white Evo.

Okay.

Then he found one one day and we went and we bought it. It's a really clean eight RS, like mint.

Okay. And it's out of Virginia.

No, no, no.

Right now it's in Virginia.

The car wasn't in Virginia. This was a Cali car.

A Cali car?

This is a Cali car. No joke. I think it's the cleanest Evo.

I told her I was going to buy her an RS. An Evo, not an RS.

Yeah.

And then she said I want a white Evo. And then it was May. Her birthday. I'm sorry. It was March. Her birthday is in May.

Yeah.

And one day I told her we have to go to.

Thank you.

One day I told her I'm like we have to go to. Oh yeah. She's a quarter century years old.

Yeah, I am.

One day I told her I'm like we have to go to Anaheim. And she's like, why? I'm like, which she already knew. So I got her the RS.

OK.

63,000 miles when I got it for her. Super clean.

Yeah.

It is probably making like 750 wheel right now. Stock bottom end.

OK. So why is it in Virginia again?

So we basically shipped it out there to so I could index race it.

Now you can see why we don't have a lot of money saved up.

No.

Yeah. Listen, I traveled to do this. I know where the money goes. I get it.

Everything backwards. Yeah.

So I wanted this car to just be a stock bottom end deal on a dog box. It was just I told she enjoyed it. And it was just a crazy combo.

The dog box is just a game changer on these Evos in general.

And I will tell you guys why in a second. But the whole stock bottom end thing with her car, it just if you control the torque properly on a stock bottom end, you can make it live somewhat. You don't know when because that rod does not owe you anything, man, at that point. On an Evo, it's a four-cylinder engine. The 4G63 was developed, what, 30-something years ago now. It is a very old engine, bro. It does not owe you anything after 400 foot-pounds of torque. This car on the dyno was making like 470 at a higher RPM, because you have to ramp in the boost properly. You can't just give it all the beans and expect it to live. You have to do it very carefully. The graph has to look a certain way, like the torque has to ramp a certain way and stay a certain way. When we took it to the track, well, when we were on the dyno, that was 38 pounds. When we were at the track, it was at 45.

Okay.

So it's probably making like 750-ish. It's a 6466, so it's kind of out of steam. 750, 760 maybe, but it's on the stock bottom end, dude. Like it's kind of crazy. But there's a saving grace to it. It's the fact that it's on a dog box. The biggest thing with a dog box is, do you know where you hurt an engine the most, usually?

I know the answer to it, but yeah.

At peak torque.

Okay.

The most amount of stress you have on a connecting rod, on a piston, on everything, is at peak torque. Past peak torque, you're less likely to hurt it. The engine cycles are happening faster. Like everything's just, it's less strenuous on the engine. We're revving that thing to 8600 RPM on the stock rod bolts. Again, the rod does not owe us anything. The bolts do. I don't even know why it's together, but the saving grace there is she has a dog box. So she has a lightning fast shifts and she can keep the car out of the peak torque range. And when she does that, the engine is happier. So same thing with one of my clients. We were just we just did a swap on his car.

We went to a dog box because we drove mine and he decided he wanted a dog box.

Yeah, and he broke his fourth gear. Yeah, but he broke his fourth gear and we went to a dog box. And I was pulling, I pulled logs again, the link full time logging. So I pulled logs and I was showing him logs of whenever he was on the built synchro box or I think it was a built synchro box. Doesn't matter. Shift the same. You can't make it shift faster on a synchro. I mean, you can do some stuff, but it's really not going to shift faster. It still needs to synchronize into the next gear. Hence synchro, right? He was shifting fast. So he was going from 43 pounds to 10 pounds on the next one. So he would shift from one to two and it would drop from 43 to 10 and then had to climb back up. Then he would shift again and would go to 15 pounds and climb back up. Dude, if you're making 1,000 horsepower, if you're racing an automatic car, you might not lose, but you're losing a lot of horsepower during that transition of the shift. When you put a dog box in it, just take a guess at how much boost drop it had from shift to shift.

Was it a big drop?

Initially, it had a 28 PSI drop every shift. Then we went to the dog box, two and a half PSI.

Oh, holy s***. Okay.

28 PSI to two and a half PSI. So he went from basically dropping from 43 to 15 and back up and 15 and back up or whatever to 43, 41.

So that just makes everything happier then.

Yeah. Because dude, you would think it's more strain on the car because it's so much faster. It's not. It's actually past the peak torque. The engine is happier there.

Got you. Okay. I've heard that before. Now that you explained it makes sense.

It doesn't make much sense. It's a** backwards if you think about it because you're always at a high RPM. But RPM doesn't mean s***. If you have the proper valve chain and if you have the proper rod bolts, rod bolts is something people overlook. Dude, you cannot RPM with insufficient rod bolts. You will hurt stuff like things will come apart. The rod bolts will come apart. That's one of those things. Every time we, so there's torquing of rod bolts and stretching of rod bolts. The proper method of doing is stretch. You have a stretch gauge on there, ARP makes it.

I talked about this for an hour and a half with Jay yesterday. So I'm very fresh on this right now.

So we stretch rod bolts. That's another thing that comes with the SPL900, stretch bolts, not torque. It's the same thing, you torque it. But if you stretch it, if you go with the stretch method, you might end up at different torque levels bolt to bolt. But you're getting very consistent clamp on both bolts. And that's what you want. And that's what sets an average builder apart from a professional builder, in my opinion.

You're him.

I am him. No, dude, it's just like the right way to do it and the way everybody else does it.

Yeah.

That's it. That's literally what. Can it work? Yes, I have done it before, I have. But the proper way to do it is stretch it. And we do it on every single engine that we do. That's just how it is.

Yeah.

There's no exceptions. You just. Yeah.

One last topic that I want to touch on before I pop the usual three. I want to talk about that Yer- not Yeris, m*********. The GR Corolla. What's the story behind that? Because that is a very big outlier here. I mean, it's the coolest car here. These Evo's suck. What's the story of the GR Corolla?

He called me one day and he told me to find him one. So I found him one.

Just randomly?

When they first came out.

This is when she was in the industry and she was at work.

They first came out and you literally could not find one to save your life for sticker price, literally. So I think we paid like one or two grand over stickers.

That's not too bad.

It wasn't that bad.

Yeah, for our original GR Corolla that we had.

This was like a broker deal too, dude. Like we actually got a deal on it.

I had to hunt it down. Like nobody had it at the time. So we got that car. I think the first one of the first things he started doing is he wanted to like make a custom exhaust for it.

No, no, no.

Yeah. But you remember you wanted to make the exhaust after. Okay. After whatever. Anyways, sound like absolute crap. I'm daily driving this car. I'm not joking. This has nothing to do with getting a GR Corolla platform, but I just have to share. I would literally drive that car every day, and people would pull up next to me at a red light and like laugh at me and take videos because it sounds so bad.

Anyways, she found the GR Corolla. I picked it up. It was a gunmetal gray, super crazy color, I guess, like super in demand, and I brought it in. The goal with this car was to just do development on the car. That's it. Go crazy with this platform. Brought it in. Before I got the car, I'd already talked to Dave Gammon from PPG about a dog box, stock car. That's actually how that car ended up with a dog box that we were talking about. Talked to a couple of clutch companies that were offering clutches for the car. Ecutech was the only one offering the tuning solution at the time, but you had to get this harness that you would jump the actual OBD. What's it? No, you would have to jump the ECU header and then plug it into this. There was a harness that you had to buy from Ecutech at the time to be able to flash it. And so every time I would flash the car, I would have to come out, unplug the ECU, hook up this harness and flash it. It was my first direct injected car. So it was the first DI car that I was doing. This is DI and PI. So it uses port and direct injection. And I helped them a little bit with the development. Not a crazy amount. I mean, I was whatever help I could be at the time. You know, I was still novice with the DI stuff, but I ended up doing a bunch of like head cam packages on the stock ECU. I had cars that were making like 420, 410, 420 horse on like E40 mixes. That's where like it would still be happy with the DI side of things and the stock fuel system and not like freak out. And you still have had enough octane to be able to, you know, run 30, 32 pounds of boost through it. The biggest downfall was if you ran like 30 pounds of boost and you actually kept it through the RPM range at the higher RPMs, it would actually start valve floating. So they had valve float issues. Head gasket wasn't up to par. So we started using the Vulcan head gaskets that, you know, use the essentially the hoops that go on top of the cylinder and, you know, bolt the head down and it bites into the head. So we did a bunch of those and we did some, you know, VW injector upgrades and stuff and then we were starting to get limited with AccuTek stuff.

And parts are really expensive.

Yeah, parts are very expensive. And then I ended up selling my car. But at the time, I had already tuned maybe 20, 30 of these. And I had a customer that was pretty interested in Armando. And he came in and he got a Cyvax at the time. It was my first Cyvax GR. I've done probably one or two Cyvax cars before. I was kind of involved with. But the GR was actually fairly easy to get into with the Cyvax stuff. An ECU is only as daunting as you make it to be. Once you learn how to actually work through it, if you actually know how tuning works, it doesn't matter if you're tuning a Cyvax or a Megascrew. Dude, it's the same thing. It's just different approaches to how you achieve the same result. So the Cyvax was great because on Ecutech, I couldn't even move the cam timing. And on these, I could put a huge cam in there and actually move the cams and get the results I wanted. And these G16 GTEs are actually, they love cam timing. You can move around the cam timing and make a ton of power, dude. It's crazy how they respond to actual cam timing. Like on the Evo X stuff, we do Mivec Delete on the exhaust side. We do it because the exhaust cam gear is weak. When you put a stiff valve spring, it could just be a beehive valve spring, let alone a conical. If you put a conical, you might as well just do a, you know, delete. And my friend Marco, Magnus Motorsports, he offers the delete. You just completely block out, like lock out the cam. You set it at zero and you don't have to worry about it. On the Evo 10, the exhaust cam gear does not make power. On a GR Corolla, somehow, if you can actually retard the cam and like, you can pick up some power with cam timing on the exhaust side, on a GR Corolla. I'm not scientifically inclined enough to be able to tell you why, but somehow, you're increasing overlap at the top end that's picking up power, and it works. So, yeah, we tuned that one on Cybex M8 470 on E85 at the time, or yeah, at the time. And then we did a built motor a couple months ago.

Okay, which consists of what?

A built motor, or what I like to call for the GR Corollas is the SPL 800. It is nothing proprietary to me. I actually get the pistons and rods from Nitto.

Yeah, they're in Australia too, right?

Yes, they are. The bearings, however, I still sent to Calico. They're ACL bearings. I sent to Calico. They get the same coating, CT1 coating. We assemble the engines in house. They get main stud upgrade from Lampspeed, Charles Lamp. They're ARP studs, essentially, that he puts together. Same thing with the head studs. Yeah, the block just gets torque plated, light hone if it needs it. Those engines actually do not really need a torque plate. One of those engines that does not need it. You put a torque plate on it, it does not move much.

That's German engineering. That's Toyota. I'm just being stupid. We're getting to the end of this.

But seriously, no, it does not move. So it's actually pretty crazy.

Yeah.

So that particular engine consists of Kelford B cams.

Okay.

The regular piston rods, Nitto, I-beams, our bearings, main studs, fuel system, ID1700CC ports, yeah, three of them. We have a custom search tank, two Walbo 450s working, staged.

So you're telling me this is the craziest GR Corolla in the world right now.

It is the highest horsepower GR Corolla to date.

Okay.

The one under this one was one that Wayne Potts, I think, was involved with the tuning of it. And I, Wayne is one of those guys that I look up to as well. Amazing Cybex and Multituner. But I think somebody else was tuning it. Wayne was like kind of guiding him through the thing. And I think it made 627 on the Dynojet. The scar made 680 at 51 or 52 pounds of boost on a 5862.

On the main line.

On the main line.

And he didn't even realize that that was the highest one for GR Corolla until he posted it.

We made 622 or something like that. And I'm like, oh, the record is 627. I'm going to break this. So I just packed it up like another 56 pounds and made it. And I turned it down like to 40 or 42.

Wow. Yeah.

So it's a pretty awesome deal. It's got PPG 1 through 6 straight cut. Reverse the straight cut too. Like it's just a full PPG gear set. It's pretty crazy.

So you're a GR Corolla guy now, huh?

I don't know if I would call myself that. I'm very nitpicky of my customers when it comes to the GR Corolla stuff. If I take more builds, it's only going to be standalone stuff.

Yeah, of course. You got to set the standard. Yeah.

Yes. If they're on a Cybex or a Motek, I'll do it. If they're on stock ECU, they can go somewhere else. Whatever. Yeah.

Look at those. Yaris is making 800 in freaking Australia. Yeah.

All Motek cars.

Yeah. That checks out.

Yeah. That's how the GR Corolla stuff came about. We have one outside that build. The one's going like a 500 horsepower car. I think crazy.

Hopefully, we'll get into the Supra stuff soon.

Yeah. No, I'm excited to see that. Like I said, I always get a feeling when I visit certain shops, that the next time I'm there, there's going to be a lot of updates. I'm excited to see what the updates are the next time. We'll see what the final cut is going to be, but I think we are closing on three hours. So let's pop the usual three. You know how this goes. You've listened to the show. At the end of every episode, I like to ask my guests or guests to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget and you had to pick a daily driver, a show car and a track car. Build whatever you want. What do we want to do? Who wants to go first?

So daily driver, show car and a track car.

Correct. Any kind of track.

Okay. Daily driver, I'll get an Audi RS6 hatch.

Okay. Okay.

Show car. I don't know what I want for my show car. I don't know what I want for my show car.

Is it gonna be German, is it gonna be American, is it gonna be Japanese?

I might go American for my show car. I'll get like a 68 Corvette.

68 Corvette?

Yes.

Okay, okay.

Yes, and then for my track car, I'm gonna have to stick with my Evo 8.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, the RS, right?

My RS.

Yeah, okay.

I'll stick with my Evo 8.

How many Evos? I'm getting so confused here. It's just making double checking, I'm making sure I'm talking about the right one. Okay. All right. What are you cooking over here?

Daily driver, I would have to stick to my Ram 2500, dude.

What year?

25. 25?

Nice, okay.

It just hauls everything.

Man, after my own heart.

Effortlessly, bro. And I was not a diesel person until I got this, and it's just so awesome.

Okay.

Daily driver, what was it? Show car?

Track and show car.

Track and show car. So track would be... Man, I've always wanted a Huracan just with like a twin turbo, just like a basic twin turbo kit on the Multik. Nothing crazy. Like just like a...

Just a light 1200. Yeah, yeah.

Just like a pump gas, like a thousand horsepower, whatever. Just that would be my track car, I would say. Yeah. And then show car. Show car.

I know, I don't think about the show car that much.

Show car. I would probably... I would probably have to choose an Evo.

As a show car?

Yeah, as a show car. What generation? It would have to be an Evo 8. Eight or nine? It would have to be an Evo 8, but I'm myvac. I don't like... You don't want a nine RS? No, it would have to be an eight. It's such a rudimentary engine. It's just so raw and basic, simple to the point. There is no variable cam timing. There's just... Yeah, I would pick that as a show car and maybe lower it a little bit. That's just to put an SPL of 500.

That's it. I like it.

That's it. That's going to be it.

Well, on that note, where can everybody find you guys?

Instagram, Speedlab underscore Inc. YouTube, Speedlab underscore Inc.

I'm at boostedlexi, L-E-X-I-E on everything.

On everything. Okay.

And I want to buy at Ronnie after hours on OnlyFans. Yeah.

OnlyFans link is going to be after.

He has to do OnlyFans to support you.

With a coupon code. Yeah.

We got to get you that Twin Turbo Hurrican somehow. Right.

That coupon code is going to include him in Minnoxide code. So.

Well, sweet. Thank you so much for making this happen, guys. I'm glad we got to finally meet in person. This is all we've been playing this for a while. So thanks, guys.

Thank you for coming out.

Yeah. I'll be back. And thank you, everybody else for listening. And SD card is still recording, I think. And see you all next time.

Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.