211. 25 Years Of Tuning, Best Bang For Buck Builds, Who Owns Your Tune? w/ Shawn Church

hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Haris, aka Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations.

And today is my last stop for the Californian trip. So I'm here at Church Automotive Testing. It's a little background. I actually got introduced to you via Andre from High Performance Academy. So I was talking about this in the last episode. It's kind of funny how a Minnesota guy messages a New Zealand guy for people to talk to in California.

Yeah, right. But go ahead and tell people a little bit about what it is you do, where you've come from, and then we'll kind of get into the specifics after that. So we're doing business. We don't sell any parts. We don't do installs, we don't build engines. We just tune cars on the street. Most of it here, sometimes remotely.

Some mentally can travel a little bit and go to the track. We do carburetors still, but most of our work, 90% of it or more, is all electronic. Usually, you know, either factory or standalone series. And we just do that five days a week, 52 weeks a year, and have been doing it now for over 24 years. It's rare to find anybody that does carburetor stuff at all anymore.

Is it pretty rare out here as well? I know Minnesota, it's not often most of you guys doing it are going to be cars like this, although this one is converted over to Holley Sniper now. But of course, you know or like we had a guy come through the other day with a blow through carburetor set up. Okay, lower.

But yeah, it's rare just because even for guys who still want to look, you can get a 41, 50 or, you know, replacement that looks just like a 4150 car. It's a fuel injection. So in most cases now it's either your race in a particular class or you just had the car for a long time and then look, carburetor.

Still plenty of power. It's just they're not the greatest to drive, right? It's not just something quick.

So okay, go back to when does business started then. So what year did you officially get into this? So I started the business in 2002. Okay. So what was the split? Because like EFI was getting more prominent at that point. Was that where the business was or was it still carbureted stuff or combination because I was in a different place then.

So I actually started doing my own cars in 99, 2000 and then started doing if you go to people's Cars in 2001 and decided to start the business in 2002, but at that point I was a high okay. I had had the civic CR, CC, GSR, I bought an S 2000 back to sit over there March of 2000.

The original one still got it and I was just dedicated Honda. I was a member of one of the founding members of temple Vtec, which was one of the biggest Honda websites at the time. We were getting press cars from Honda. It just it was a great time to be on and in Southern California. So it's perfect. And so yeah, the time when I started at the business, I was doing almost exclusively on, I mean, probably 90% at that point, race cars, streetcars, whatever policy you guys from on data.

So I had actually met Doug before he even moved to this country from New Zealand. Okay. My world was on at that point

so I had just sold. I did not start out as a car. So I have a bachelor's in like engineering. I've got an MBA. I worked for Intel in my younger years, 75th and dad's, so. And then I went back to school, get my MBA and started off here in the 90s.

And we had just sold that in 1999. Okay. So I was kicking around with a nice chunk of change in my my bank account and I wasn't sure what to do. So I was doing some teaching, I was doing some consulting, and I knew a lot of car guys who didn't have dyno shops, who didn't have dynos and said, you know what, I don't have a good place to keep my race car.

I was living by the beach. I had one car garage. Like, you know, I've been in a little shop, bought a dyno, put it in there. I could make a little money, have a place to work on my car and be involved in this industry that I really love. So I was looking at a jet 248 seat, and if you wanted to put one of those into a rental facility, you had to get permission from the owner to dig a six foot deep pit through the foundation.

Most places did not want to let you do that with California building laws. It's a pain to do anyways. So Doug said, hey, why don't you consider a DynaPack. I'd never even heard of it at that point there were two California Lexus, had one for testing and road was engineering that one for doing DSM. We drove to Fresno to US A's offices, get some testing of their model.

I said, okay, this will work a little more expensive, but no holds a dig. Push them out of the way for the stuff. And I rented a 1500 square foot shop. So basically, what am I to go here? Right? Two wheel drive dyno. Only the 500 horsepower model and start two, 1 or 2 days a week. I rented out the shop to some shops for their own purposes and just kept growing and growing and growing.

Thousand and five we bought a second time and moved here and just it took off from there. I stopped doing anything else and just focus on doing cars. At that point. When you moved here. Did you get the whole place or was it like you bought a stall each year sort of deal? The whole place? I knew I couldn't use it all, so I rented out some extra space to okay.

And you know, I still don't need those things. So I ran up that corner to. Oh, really? Yeah. But yeah, it it just kind of grew and grew. But actually, you know, we have these two guys here. I've got a third dyno, which I rent out to somebody else. And then we have a main line up being delivered.

Next one. Nice. Okay. Third boundary again. So I've got a lot of money in dynos over the years, but it's just a useful tool and they make the money back really fast if you're using the correctly. So it's it's worth it. Do you still have that original Dino. Yeah. So I've actually we changed hardware and software on a lot of stuff.

I still have the original dyno cabinet. Okay. One of our offices. Yeah. And you know, it's crazy because back then, a Honda horsepower was very rare. So we can pretty much do any hot at the game at the door. And then I started with you guys with 233 seconds start to push up the power a little bit, and it's like, I need something more and I need.

All right. So we bought the second time so we could do all the right stuff. Right. Was that DynaPack as well? Okay. So I bought three max. Gotcha. Okay. What made you pull the trigger on finally going with the mainline? Honestly, it was DynaPack. Lack of progress. I have nothing but positive things to say about my experience.

In fact, they've been great to me over the years. Scott Lampkin here at USAA has always been super supportive of us. Whenever we need parks wise and the dyno's been reliable, the tech support out of New Zealand has been great, but when we bought our all wheel drive set up in 2005 that I know the big hubs at the rear would handle 14 1500 horsepower and handle five 600 horsepower, and they have really done nothing to increase power capacity since then.

Now, back in 2005, the number 1000 cars TV being 1 or 2. So it wasn't like you're pushing the downloads that hard. Nowadays it's several. Yeah. And if the gearing these are torque limits of the greens not quite right, you may not be able to get the car way out or you may be over-torquing the dyno if you do it full throttle you know as boost comes in.

So it's an issue and I don't have any complaints of them. I just can't do some of the cars I want to do. And so mainline hub, the prices are very reasonable. I went and used a pro hub for a 1200 horsepower Camaro. It's actually sitting over there and then the shop, and they were kind of looking up the letters written down and try to us.

And you know what? This is so easy. I need to get one of these. So and they made the purchase process really easy. It's kind of funny because mainline does not it's hard to get the financing these days, especially on products from other countries. But EFI University out of Arizona actually helps do the financing. Oh no way. Yeah.

So they actually help underwrite the financing. These things to get the stuff in the mainline is just cranking these things out. I mean like 4 or 5, six times a week. And so obviously it's a it works. It's popular, it works. And you can do a lot of things with that. You can't do it. I waited years, but I talked about it back.

I said, can you guys do something more? Can you give me more power handed back? I don't even need 3000, which is what the mainline has. Give me 2000. So what? We did a prototype number of years ago. It's twice as big. It'll handle 2500 horsepower. It's also going to cost twice as much. Its main, it's mainland's offering 3000 horsepower for the price of your 15 horsepower.

Yeah. So it's it's disappointing in some ways because, like I said, I had no reason to change. Other than that the market has moved on and not affected. Well, the market's completely changed. Even if you look in the last decade, I mean, I imagine 1000 horsepower cars are even more than they were a decade ago. I mean, if you're if you buy a coyote, right, right.

Or even a head of these days and a thousand is channel sport even on a completely stock motor. Yeah. You don't want to be pushing your Coyote or your LT over a thousand, you know, on stock blocks for long. But if you're careful about it and you're used to for just Drag Race or something like that, that motor will last.

I mean, we did a Z06, C7 06A number of years ago, about 970 on the stock in order, just 2650 blower flexible, all that stuff. And that guy was he was street racing I think for years and had no issues. That lasted a long time. So done right, any of those motors will handle it. Now if you want to be beaten on it, maybe 1200 horsepower for a long time, you should do that, right?

Yeah. What you're getting to the factory is huge. And then even now, when you get into the NWSL, I mean, we're seeing B58 900 horsepower on stockholders. On stockholders? Yeah. What am I to 40? And he really wanted to see how far he could push. He's already built into the motor for it, but he's been cranking up a stockbroker.

Just see where it goes. Yeah. He's 7880 into the drag strip. He broke in the drive shaft a few times. He's upgraded that. He's been watching the garbage out in the parking lot for the last month. I've seen those videos. They're great. So just want to see what's going to break or not. And so far it hasn't. And it's it.

And he drives it every day too. So and the S&P of course makes you know stock stock turtles everything just 5750. So the market is totally different now and in some ways more power. It sounds great. But in reality if you're driving a cat or a coyote or any, you know, opting for or even on the street a thousand marks.

It's almost unusable for daily driving. My Cadillac is just under 1000 right now, and in right conditions. It's super fast, but driving every day, I've got a pedal all the time. I even take power out in the first year to make it easier to look out. And I'd actually I kind of like the car better at horsepower than a thousand.

But being in this business, if I'm not pushing the numbers up, push the limits, you know you can do it right. So I think a lot of guys get to wrapped up in the power number versus the delivery and the usability. But then again, you just go, all right, you do a track right or a car and then traction really not an issue at that point.

That is also I've never I haven't seen too many track. I've seen a lot of extra s 58 you know gads losing it. It's just it's a little too confidence inspiring. Well I think also the people getting into them don't have a lot of experience. You get a guy that went from the market. We see is a lot of the guys that used to run like maybe because yeah, are now moving up into that is the natural progression, isn't it?

So you get a 300 horsepower, horsepower, VQ, rear wheel drive. Not that bad. And the BQ chassis that that that FMC is really, really stable. It doesn't tend to get too funky on you. You upgrade 750 800 horsepower now, and especially if things break loose and you turned off all your traction management, it's a whole different world, right?

And that car keeps pulling too. So yeah. Then of course, the Mustang news, right? Yeah. That's just people being done in most cases. But you can't when you start getting up to 800 900,000 horsepower range, you can't just flat footed anything even third gear on the freeway if you hit something where there's little traction issues. Yeah, if you do flat footed, you have to know what you're doing, right.

You have to be well aware that you're riding or riding the lightning. Whatever. Okay. Actually, one thing you mentioned, there's the VQ platforms or no, sorry, the VR30, which is like that's the next progression of EQ 537, correct? Yes. So I saw something on your Instagram when I was going through it, you know, just preparing for this.

Do you think the very gets a lot of hate for no reason? Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of funny too. When we did that comparison year 30% B58, everybody hated the B58 guys. Didn't like us for talking about the good things. About 30 and VR. 30 guys thought we had to much. So I guess it was probably a good, good content.

Sure. Everybody's actors involved, but yeah, the VR30, I think the engine management on it isn't as good as the B58. So close to the feedback. And then the knock control isn't as good as what you get on the B58, so it's easier to extract the power out of the BMW motors. But once you understand what the variety needs, it's got plenty of power, capacity and also what it doesn't need, which is you don't want to bring the torque in real hard down low.

It's not hard to pick a starter. Will be our 30 on some ethanol and pump out 600 pound feet of torque at 2000 503,000 rpm. But unless it's a manual power, which is what the seat. You're not going to use that automatically down to it. But if you do happen to leave it in high gear and load it up down there and make that kind of talk, you've got a chance to bend in some rods, and you're also going to saturate the system and everything else like that.

So it's better just to bring it in and kind of ramp to work up. And you see that. Now there are guys making 770,800 horsepower right now. And they do it with obviously bigger turtles, which helps soften it down low. And they're also not aggressively trying to push that turbo. You just need to keep the torque where you want it between 5 and 7 and going to be fast.

Okay. Well like what opened my eyes set up platform is AMS seems to be like one of the very few players that's actually doing anything for that platform. Amos is always really embraced. The incentive market started 38 obviously GT-R but but and they do their research really do their homework and stuff. And they'll start out by pushing, you know, high school what everybody has to work back down to, you know, more affordable builds.

So I got a lot of respect for those guys. And they've been doing it for a long time now. Yeah. And the 30 it's also a lot cheaper platform right. You okay. So the Q50 which would be most of the cars that you see I want to see like one using on the road out here which is not even out here

Probably especially out here because cost of living. But now with the price drop is you sell a lot more smoothly, see more. But because the ships were so prevalent in the car market, this is probably going to be has in general, you could use ones really good. I mean you can pick up a, I don't know about 16 2017 Q50 all wheel drive with 50,000 miles on it for 20 grand.

It's nuts. You know, the parts are relatively cheap and it's not as easy to work on, in my opinion, as just the V6 versus the inline six. The there's more stuff than that's with trying to get to the turbos is harder, said business. Good. But you know, if you want to start out with much cheaper car and then work your way up, it's great.

Okay, so if we're what's the best bang for buck 600 horsepower, 600 horsepower? I mean, we talked about used cars makers use get them rental returns. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I'd pick up, like, a really a 15 Mustang and slap supercharger on it. Okay. I mean, that's it's so easy to make power and 600, 700 horsepower. I tell you, it lasts forever.

And you be doing manuals if you want. You're not going to get the ten speed. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. That tends to be stuff like super high power very carefully. Even then you have to upgrade them. But that's a that's a good value. I think it's also more daily drivable than a lot of the other cars.

You could do an older B58, my employee when he was M2 40, I that was a 16 for like 1819 grand. What's that Gen one B58 Gen one. And you know, that's right. He bumped at that level. Got a good training upgrade right. Turbo upgrade the most like that. So.

You know but yeah if I said to the B58 you can't get to 600 on the stock today. So you got to spend money. Not terrible at that point. It's going to be cause I'm not saying that. Right. You could also do it, but if you're looking at anything LT, it gets more expensive. You start to spend a lot more money.

It's a better motor. But once you start getting the highway patrol to the recognition set up, you either have port injection or spend a ton of money on more die stuff. And that's just that's cost prohibitive, right? It's been 6 or 7 grand on fuel systems, right? Yeah. It's just really needed to be. So, you know what else would be good for you, Buck?

I can't, can't say any front wheel drive cars. As much as I love the, you know, the K20 and the Integra and the civics just you start pushing the parallels just fine.

Who else would you pick? One. I love arts, but they're so rare and six that might be a little bit more expensive. Oh, compared to a mustang, I would imagine so, yeah, it's a cool car. It's a unique car as well. It sounds different. Looks different? Yeah, it's a baby. All right. So yeah, it's probably going to be a mustang or a car.

Okay. 600 horsepower. What about 1000? That was more power. Wow. Okay, so because I imagine everything changes at that point, because everything has to be upgraded. You know, if you're willing to to roll the dice a little bit, I think you pick yourself up a Gen three coyote at that point. 50. Okay. You can get those pretty cheap.

Now to use the power, the ten speed is going to be a little unhappy at that power level. You have to upgrade it. But yeah I mean that's much power is not hard to do any time. So we just did a 2026. So Gen four and Whipple kit, 13 psi long tubes and E85 852. And you bought the truck and you for 48.

So you probably know that thing 6065. And he's got a thing that it's going to run the nines all day long. Yeah. So there's that value there. I like, you know, my LT stuff like ZL1, like C7 Z06s, but price wise they're really expensive. And to get to a thousand horsepower to get fuel system. So so it adds up.

I think, you know, that's probably one of the factors is how easily can you add fuel to these cars to get that power B58 for injection setups relatively cheap to do. Whereas for the LT stuff you've got to spend 4 or 5 grand, probably get it all done right. You know, something like that DS Atlas systems that. Whereas with the B58 it's easily integrated with the factory ECU and it's just, you know, manifold and some injectors and pretty good to go.

Whereas with the coyote stuff, you're, you're on port injection already on the Gen twos or you still have port injection, the Gen three, just by adding the Dia is one of those things where it offers a lot of advantages, but at some point it becomes cost prohibitive. There's a ceiling. Yeah. Yeah, it's I always thought about creating for a gym three or even a CP five, but I just don't want to deal with the expense to get where I'm at on a lot for.

I'd have to spend so much additional money just to get back to my mind right now. And it's like with words, it's just not for me. Plus, I think that's fair to see. The Gen three didn't come from the black wings. Have a manual. Yeah, back there is a manual and that's great. But on the other hand, if you run a thousand horsepower manual, not going to be fastest way to go.

Yeah. So you really have a chance. But but yeah it's a it's a tough situation and it's a question you get a lot. So important adequate injection by cars obviously everybody 48 guys considering it. The guys have to think about it. If they're going to do a big power, any LT guy has to think about it. If they're boosting one on E85.

So those are three big markets for us. And now even the FA24 guys. Now we're talking about you know put a manifold on a WRX. Okay. Make that work which it can be done. It's a little bit expensive and there are decisions as well. But it just it adds up. It adds up real fast. And basically having to add a whole nother fuel system on the car and they make sure you have control of support as well.

So that's where like I'm not a big fan of what the bars from a big power perspective, that for me is more of a fun handling card. Yeah, call it a step up in the meta maybe power wise. And I love the new 24 engine, but if I was going to have to build a high-powered FA24 or FA20, I wrote a wooden BRZ.

What's a high-powered FA24? 500? Okay, we've done some in that range, but most guys are happy with 400 or less. That's the nature of the vehicle. But doing it on BRZ is so much easier because we already have port injection and it's already part of the factories, so it's really, really easy. Whereas doing it on, even though I'd rather have the old drive system for traction.

It becomes a lot harder to do so. And you can always now you can go out and search by stuff for that, but by injectors and GI pumps are never know. You go a top quality company like XD Nostrum, any of those guys you got to spend a lot of time and there's a reason for that. I mean, direct injectors have to be calibrated so much more precisely the important vectors, because they're injection times are a lot shorter.

And it just it's expensive to do. Yeah, I actually had the opportunity to tour Nostrum a couple of years ago now. And it's like everything that goes behind the scenes into making a die injectors, it's insane. Like I think it was like they're injecting at like 300 bar or something like that. Yeah. So we always tell people 3000, 5000 psi.

Yeah. Where you're at and Bartosz resonate with people but yeah, yeah. But yeah, 5000 psi, which I think is what the M5 and the S&P are on as well. Yeah. That's, that's a massive amount of pressure. And these injectors are they have a lot of straight capacity. So like an LP detector thing is 170 years, 220 pounds per minute.

I would look at it in grants for a second on the calibration. But you know, whereas like the objectors on my Cadillac are six, 140 pounds, so the factory injectors on the LT4 are 50% bigger than what I have on my thousand catalog. But because we don't have much time to inject, you don't get nearly as much fuel availability.

And so yeah, just it's a catch 22. It's like direct injection offers so many of us. I don't know if you saw that recently did a comparison test where they did direct injection for support. Yeah. Yeah we were talking about that brought in. Somebody got all know about 200 and better. And no matter what he did he couldn't get the 30 horsepower the decoder 180 motor.

And so it is provably better than most every circumstance until you get into fuel delivery issues. And then at that point it was just you can't go big enough. So and at that point, you if you're looking to make 1500, 2000 horsepower, you know, finding the extra 50 or 199, but it's just easier just to add a little boost to make up for it and go from there.

That is a good point. Where's the DIY ceiling like in the next ten years? Are we going to be able to see higher horsepower to die cars like that? So if you look at where diesel's at in terms of oh yeah, they are 3 to 4 times higher pressure. So technically we could potentially get a lot more fuel capacity out.

But I don't know that we'll ever see that, especially in all fuels, at least without additives. I'm not I'm not I'm guy. But one of the problems with with the system, you look at the early like 30 and 54 stuff and I think the early so the early VW and massive stuff as well. On die, they had problems with high pressure points with that.

And I think a lot of that city of gasoline versus diesel. Oh yeah. Right. So that dry fuel is a problem in ethanol is even drier than gasoline. So if you don't add some sort of lubricant there, I don't know, maybe it just doesn't work for those high pressure systems. I think it can eventually find a way. But will they I don't know, I mean, unless ethanol gets pushed more into the mainstream, you know, in terms of flex fuel and die cars, manufacturers want to start having more capacity for that.

I don't think they'll have to go whole lot higher than that right now. It's kind of funny, too, because ethanol was much bigger on the rest of the country for a number of years. And then just as California began to adopt ethanol, a lot of the rest of the country you started. Yeah. See it go away like Vegas, where we used to have a second facility, used to have 15 and 20 stations, which were a small town in Vegas is pretty good.

And then over the years we were up there from 2011 to 2020. Over the years we went down, there was only three, 3 or 4 times as five ways. California went from when I first started in ethanol on my Cadillac in 2014, I set to drive. I had flex fuel. I actually back then, not actually food festival. I had to drive 30 miles to fill up a bunch of drums with all that here locally.

Nowadays there are hundreds of ethanol stations within the greater Los Angeles area, and in fact, you can drive from LA to Vegas to Phoenix to San Francisco to San Diego and out there. How for your fuel economy is on Ethnology Station? One way to keep doing that. So it's it's awesome. Interesting. It's also really cheap. I'm pretty sure I've never looked in the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that California subsidizes ethanol either by not taxing it as much or maybe even offering some subsidies, because the difference between ethanol and gasoline in the rest of the country is much smaller than it is here.

So we filled up yesterday for, I think, 250 a gallon and ethanol premium gas station was 550. So this is no brainer. And in fact, during this whole reason, gas price surge, the whole thing going on. So California politicians were proposing that they incentivize or eagle and flex fuel for anybody who wanted to run it. Well black pressure people clean about $7, right.

It's kind of fallen off, I think, as gas prices have dropped. But, you know, if California was really serious about reducing transportation emissions, they would do everything they could to get people into E85. Okay. It's a no brainer. I don't think they're really that concerned about it. They're more concerned about taxation and and social management. But you know, back in the day when it happened, all emissions out here was done on an emissions vacuum.

So every two years you have a role in the emissions side. And I think that's you at 1500 rpm, 2500 rpm state stayed in certain road and they measure retail emissions. And we were able to get cars, you know, doing testing at various lockdowns. We were able to get cars to pass the California emission standards with no catalytic converter on E85.

That's how it was done. First, this is not just an estimate, this measuring the actual tailpipe emissions. You got to be careful about your nitrogen. You're not NOx nitrogen. But other than that I mean the carbon monoxide the CO2 gets so much low with an opportunity to fuel and burns cater to. I mean, your exhaust gas cameras are lower, the piston tops are cleaner when you get done.

I've done a huge proponent of that at all, and that's one of the reasons why we were trying to get involved in five plus, go get Levi's through car right here, but it's just too difficult to do. But if you had everybody in this in this state running on ethanol, you would reduce emissions by 2,025%. It's just it's just not good.

And motors are going to last longer in terms of, you know, people trying run their cars, trying to save gas to run it on that instead of 91, even 87, in some cases of their choice. And even our 91 out here is world, I would argue that it's probably worse than hundred. And I say that because our additive package out here is unique to call ACM 91 to Arizona, California.

Nevada. Yeah. Yep.

And that formulation is not prone very poor tolerance for heat. Just not good. So the joke out here is not even knocking. Oh okay. It's just horrible guessing. And is there a reason that it has the additive pack in there that it does. Yeah okay. They basically demanded reformulated gasoline that would lower, I think both evaporative emissions and smog emissions.

And maybe it does, but it hurts on terms performance. I always look at stuff like that. It's like, all right, cool. Like you lowered the emissions, but now you have a blown up engine. What's the emissions? And making a new engine. So there was a it was an interesting test years ago where GM had we may still have a 1.4m turtle.

Yeah. Okay. Chevy Cruise and a few other things. And it was a decent little engine, but it did not like 87. It was rated to run in the 19th when he ran around. He was so hot. Hot weather conditions it would not lose a bunch of power and you would actually turn lower. Fuel economy on 87. All the time you lost in the power loss than you would run a 91.

So you didn't really save any money, but the average Joe wouldn't know that, right? Right. And not only that, but you were risking per year and and not the best are not clean. That is not going to interact with combustion, do all kinds of good things. That's why if you see a car running full, probably get that great pop out of the tailpipe.

That's not good. It's you're actually moving more of it. You get those compliments too. So it's misfires. So there's this perverse incentive, you know, where legislators, rule makers, bureaucrats will focus on one particular thing and never think about the following effects. There's no free lunch, right. And ethanol certainly has benefited from federal government subsidies. And like I said, probably state subsidies here in California.

So it's not it's not fair to say that at all is always going to be that much cheaper than it will be cheaper, but it does benefit from subsidies. So it's not a true comparison. But in terms of how clean it is and how much power you can make on it, it's I love this stuff about a couple of companies out here, Propel Fuels and Pearson Fuels that have most of the ethanol stations in California, or ethanol pumps that put pumps and stations.

And I thought about those guys say, you know what you guys need? You need a better marketing campaign because you need to educate people about how good this stuff really is. Yes, people are going to get worse gas mileage 100%, but the cost per mile is going to be lower. Yes, the mileage thing is also like you have to realize how many, how many people are adopting electric cars with lower ranges anyway.

So it's like if you get 200 like the same people that are pro, you probably be pro ethanol if they are advertised to correctly, like you're saying.

You don't always have to run if you have a place, you can put that. As I mentioned earlier, I feel like I'm not seeing as many flex fuel cars from the factory anymore. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, Ford was one of the early adopters of fuel, but they decided to stick with what they call virtual western. So Ford doesn't actually put ethanol sensors in most of their vehicles that have flexible logic in them.

They use an inferred ethanol percentage GM two on 1 or 2. But but they look at the long term fuel trends and then say, oh, well, if you're consistently running 15% lead, then you must be on E40. If you're 30% E60, and then they'll adopt that. That's not a big deal for a lot of the Ford stuff, because anything that's running that these days has full time closed loop.

Why Benfield Patrol. So, you know, trims are off a little bit. It's always make sure. And Ford is not really aggressive planning board mission timing on ethanol. So even if they're off on the content, they're not trying to create much time in and and make more power. Now if you're doing the best on that. So you're doing a coyote and you're enabling flexible.

You got to be careful if it's. And actually that's great. Adding that much time you're not control is pretty good. But like we've never learned run inferred flex fuel on the right to dangerous or something happens. Whereas GM is censored on most of their stuff. So they really don't offer companies anything anymore. But in that flexible sensor, it's almost always continental sensor.

Very well understood. Everybody uses for that market and it's cheap. And I think both sales are you get it for 50 bucks okay. And it's super simple to do. It's literally on GM cars. It's a power wire or ground wire and one wire to each of you. And then you click a toggle and easy you and set up your flexible tables and you couldn't go.

So and that logic is still the analogy that is used now. I mean, even the black market for example, they have flexible logic in there. It's not enabled in the factory. It requires an operating system adjustment to make work. But it works. It's all there. And it's so you're not having to kind of Band-Aid things. You literally has a timing table for fuel, has a different power enrichment table, but you'll has your blend tables or in there.

So it's easy to do. And I think maybe GM still has a belief that maybe it's going to be something they want. And so they keep the the ability in their in their vehicles. But yeah, they're really not using it right now and I hate I don't like I don't like government in San Jose for stuff. I don't want government to tell you what I can or can't do.

You know what, it comes to my vehicles. But maybe they're waiting for some more government incentive to to push happen. All of you, I don't know, but yeah, the education is not out there. There's a lot of people that believe that ethanol is worse for the environment than guessing. And you say, well, why do you think that? Well, that's nothing to do with how the unknown is.

How do you make it right, making that often corn, which is where we get are if not from is inefficient and causes more pollution than prevents. We should. If we're going to do it, we should use, you know, sugar like Brazil. You know, Brazil is almost entirely on film. On. Really? Okay. I didn't know that they have the ability to pump some gas during colder seasons because it's not good for cold start up to be one country.

Obviously Minnesota. You don't want to pop out to start, but but even using corn and this is kind of one of my my pet topics because I really need your get with people to start talking about ethanol and don't know what's going on. If you university is a lot of studies on energy inputs into farming, right. Because people want to know, hey, farming consumes resources and generates resources, what's the balance?

And they looked at what does it cost to cultivate and paper. And for oh in terms of fuel. Right. So and so they looked at planting, you know, you know, preparation, fertilizing everything else like that. They figured that depending upon where you're at and what methods used, it's between 25 and 50 gallons of diesel fuel to plant, cultivate and harvest an acre for.

Okay. And out of that at your corn, currently, the average yields would end up with about 400 gallons of ethanol from that. So you could actually maybe 500 gallons a day by. Right. But when you have the gas, so you're inputting worst case scenarios that could be honest. So you're getting out 400 gallons of ethanol. Now, even though diesel has twice the energy content of ethanol, it's still a net gain of about 400% in terms of energy for the sun.

And then they said, well, but the planting releases a bunch of carbon dioxide. So it's a negative. And there was a study done by University of Wisconsin a couple of years ago and some, some actually relatively influential, you know, car chances that picked up on it just carry the stuff on that chicken. And they said, yeah, bye bye.

Tilling land and plowing the land to replant the court. You're going to release more carbon dioxide than you're taking in. That doesn't really make much sense. And then I started looking at it more. I don't know about farming, and it turns out that corn farmers don't use planning. They literally harvest the corn, and then they go back and they plan it right through the leftover stuff in the field.

So there's no tilling of the earth, nothing like that. So the entire argument of this paper was completely moved because they don't do it that way. And not only that, but when you saw that corn, you literally take it to the ethanol plant, which is usually located right in the farming country. They take the corn there along with all the silage, all the leftover stuff.

They they burn the silage to basically brew the ethanol. And then when it's done, you left over with all this horn match that all the sugar can take it out to create the up. And that corn mash is actually a high protein cattle feed. It's actually better for cattle than just straight corn sugar. So you end up feeding the cattle anyways, which is what a lot of this field have been grown for.

You create ethanol out of it and you burn the waste as you're entering. So it becomes really energy efficient and you create a fuel that is produced locally. It makes more Howard burns cleaner and produces less pollution. So yeah, look, there are reasons not to that you don't want to put it into an older car. Anything pre 2000 few lines aren't going to be right for me to have stuff in.

If it's going to dissolve and cause problems. You know, you shouldn't force people to run ethanol, but it should be an option and it should be an encouraging option because it's great and it's kind of yes, we can actually get on board the EPA, everybody else and go, yeah, let's all work towards this together. But there is not there's not an incentive for that.

And I don't know why it is. You know, I don't I don't pretend to understand the machinations of government and your credit mobilizations. But it's a shame because ethanol, in my opinion, has been the single biggest driver of the horsepower increase we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years in this country. Without ethanol, you either be doing expensive or his students race cars these days is how do you get any for less than ten bucks a month?

And the good stuff is one more. You couldn't produce anything near the power of producing not even a good 93 octane, you know, today. And it's all due to ethanol. It is crazy to think I actually watched the funny enough when I was in like, high school, like Hank Green. I don't know if you've ever heard of Hand Green, but he was like, you know, like, oh, we watch it on to projector or whatever.

He recently did a video on, I think it was AI data centers and how much water they use and whatever. And then he compared it to what we spend on agriculture, and it was like magnitudes more. And a lot of that was towards corn as well. But I'm. I.

I don't know enough to be dangerous. It sounds like you had a couple evenings just digging into this. Couple guys said some stuff online and I don't like it online arguments. But it's just like, wow, this is just egregiously wrong. And, you know, look, the agriculture industry is not not without sin, right? I mean, there's a lot of money that goes for the agricultural lobby to Congress and everybody else.

They ask for special favors. We give a lot of money to farmers to not grow stuff, you know, so I don't I don't pretend to defend that. And I'm just saying, look, be great. If we could do certain King instead of corn, it's even better way to do it. It's more efficient. But, you know, the net benefit is massive to us.

And, you know, water use for agriculture technically should is being recycled in the environment. Anyways. I think there's issues with monoculture, you know, and when you plant just one crop. Yeah, yeah. You got to rotate crops and stuff like that. But but in terms of ethanol, especially before we began to do our, our fracking and increase our little puppeteer, ethanol is a great way to reduce our dependance on oil sources that maybe aren't as friendly does as we'd like you to do so.

And it's really purely from our guys standpoint, though, who doesn't want to make more power and safer? But I think knock is not an issue for most people. Is there any reason for. So I'm currently exploring the idea of taking my daily driver and modifying it a little further, because I did all the handling stuff and I'm enjoying it a lot.

But now I'm like, all right. Do I go E85? I've never done E85 on my own cars. Right. Like so I'm thinking about, do I want to do that for to GT? Is there any reason not to do it? If you can do it without having to invest a ton of money in fuel system, there's no reason. I don't think it was egregious.

Yeah. Is the new market so I yeah. So it becomes very easy. Yeah. It just I was looking at the various you know there's a lot with any of these four banger platforms. They're all off the shelf. Right. So I'm like looking on comparing. And yesterday I was looking at in the car again and I'm like I might have I don't know.

We'll see. We'll see. There is no car, a factory boosted cart. There is no better way to gain power than simply adding E85. And I think that's what's great about it. If you don't have to worry about changing a lot of parts, you're just changing the fuel and you can improve everything. Like the way the car runs with the exception of fuel economy.

So B58, for example, running completely stock if you tune it up on 91 octane for 10 to 3440 horsepower, two wheels, max hundred, which is bad, right? That's a nice output, which is the most you can run on that car, and you can run more than 5520, 544. So 100 horsepower, getting less, knock cleaner, burning cheaper. From what I mean, to do that kind of gain anywhere else you go to buy a turbo, you got to invest more money in it.

It's super, super easy. Even cars where you can't turn. So my catalog, Cts-v, when I first brought up on that car, because the tours on those weren't that great. So, you know, it's hard to run 91 with a lot of time in charge for reasons I think like 80 or 90 horsepower on that. And once you drive it like that, you can't go back, right?

It's like if you have to put 91 in it, you're gonna be like checking your phone. Certain E85 station within range. How far can I get? Can I put a gallon of 91 and get you to the next step of research and so much 91 and it just you feel like you're mistreating the car when you put it in.

It's so much slower. Yeah, yeah. It's nice to give it a gas mileage, but if you like your celebration, you like power. I mean, it's it's a bit of a growth. Yeah. You know, I mean, acceleration is already the thrill that we're all looking for, whether it's lateral or watch two and whatever you want to go in corners fast when it's a straight line fast.

And ethanol just gives you more of it for less money. What are your thoughts on the whole like, you know, we've been talking about B58s here a little bit. What are your thoughts on the whole like blending at the gas station thing? So I don't like it. I don't like it when guys try and run blends on cars that don't actually have flexible sensors.

If you have a flex fuel sensor, then it's okay because we can set it up where it could go too far. We're going to dial it back so far, 20s for example, on the WRX they can't run full ethanol on the factory fuel system upgrade. Do you think about 400 bucks you get yourself. Maybe you could be 60 on a structure of a car and then that you got to roll it up.

But on blending table we can say, okay, at 50%. I want to be my maximum boost. But as Matthew goes up, I'm going to roll myself back towards the 91 boost so that I'm keeping things safe and saving the time and everything else. So if someone does go a little bit over there still okay. If they go way over, we just pull out, power out so they can fix it later on.

If you're trying to blend a lot of guys and do this, we do this in the BMW stuff. They wouldn't actually want to do a flex feel censored. They just said give you a 50 map and then they'll put it in. And the assumption there is that, well, you've got good widebands, you've got individual cylinder knock control.

So even if you go to E55 or E60 or only E40, the car protected in that case. Right. And we were talking about this before we started today. That's really how the market got so big. Vehicles like the BMW, vehicles like the Coyotes. Right. One of the things that those very different platforms have in common is they have really good ECUs.

And when I say to you, I mean they have very good timing control. They have good knock sensors, well calibrated knock sensors that you can really trust. And they have closed loop wideband fuel control. That's really accurate. BMW is better than Ford in that they do better cylinder control. But overall both those cars you can mess up the tune to some extent and the car will protect you.

So if you're good to you. And we talked about, for example, in Lund or W space, one of the guys that I always keep track of is Mike body. He's he's out there making cars go really fast platforms. And both of those companies do a ton of I don't know how much, but I'm pretty sure it's it's more in a year than we do.

You know, we tune one of cars and and they're able to do that though because they're working on platforms that give them really good feedback. And so if this firearm will protect somebody from a bad year, then imagine and and that's what it comes down to. Whereas if you're trying to remote tune any pre global BGM car right.

No widebands, still narrow bands and all those cars right. Hellcats at least get a wideband that helps a little bit. I'm not a fan of Dodge's knock control regime. So. But if you're on route five.

Prior to the turbo Honda's, you know widebands are not that great; the wideband in the K-series stuff, so it all depends on what you're trying to early Subarus also PJ's right? Wideband, but it didn't really read anything accurately below 12 to 1, so you couldn't really count on it at wide open throttle. When we went to the the FAA 20, then we got a decent life, a little bit more accurate at that point.

So guys are trying to E2 older cars. A company that I really respect is GP for the GM stuff. Yeah they they will tell you if you've got an LT that you've got to get a wideband and wire it in before you leave it to your car, which is smart for their part, because otherwise you're just guessing, you know, and you don't want to guess, which is what's the cost on something like that anyway?

Just add that. Well, so I'm not sure how GP is doing it when they ask people to put it on a car, if if they're having somebody where if there is then log in through there. You can't do that. That way you can get an input for your is going to be. So they're probably just doing it that way.

So if you're going to get to provide that sensor, you probably spend it 3 or $400 for the setup and you've got a bug in. You can take out a secondary, but well, to bung in and wire it up so you can get it for $500. But if you don't have a tune revive, you can go with that.

You want to trust that $500 plus the 6 or 700 bucks for YouTube. It's not going to be that different than coming to us for a few. So the problem, of course, is if you're out there doing road testing, you know, full throttle pulls in the road, you go to run time on place and you might get arrested.

Yeah. So we always tell people it's like, even if you're doing it with somebody like Lund or somebody like body and you're out here so we don't care. Come out and make a few passes and get your data there, at least. So you're not having to be on the road doing something unsafe, you know, and we work directly with some customers.

I think anybody from bodies come in here. But but we've had several customers with Mustangs come in and do ones today because told us that he got pulled over the ticket while he was doing data on the streets. I can do that anymore, but I think most states still tend to do it on the street, which is not ideal.

But we also need. Right? Yeah, yeah. Earlier you let me start. Earlier you mentioned DSL, so now you got the gates and locking to TCU. Do you think you're going to see a big influx of those customers? No. The reason is. Oh okay. So I like to see it. But I didn't buy one because early issues in the transmission scared me a little bit.

And not being able to them. Problem. There are some aftermarket piggyback boxes to boost transmission pressures. But what I was going to do and we're getting 7000 horsepower turbocharged. Know if you're careful with the torque model in the ECM and at least report correct, correct values of the transmission so you get these pressures. But I mean, I had six guys that completely stock or having issues with GM was trying to their warranties because they missed a transmission filter change by a couple hundred miles.

So I don't get involved at this point. But now that we continue to see them, yeah, it should be a lot safer. Big power stuff. What is your to do? But the cost is high, so I haven't seen the battle yet. I've done a lot of sixes, a lot of easy to do one stingrays, whatever. And for the cars, if you're not going to go ahead and do a camp swap and if he not running, you know, new intake manifold or we don't like that you're looking at maybe 30 to 50 horsepower gains.

Okay. But the cost now in the old days, most GM stuff from HP could cost us 100 to $200. And so that was our overhead for 2 to 5 with the global stuff. Because EC has to be unlocked. You have to take you up, send it to Illinois. Good luck. Got to ship it back, reinstall it, and then license credits the tune.

The C8 unlock is $1,500 shipping, typically with insurance back and forth. Especially trying to do it next day or two days. Customer doesn't want to sit for hours from here, install some and would be the transmission tunnel if it was a front engine car. That's actually easier to get to in some ways because it's just such a bolt.

Pull it out. You good to go? And of course the card is a movement at that point. Others have the underneath the rear bumper, which is okay if you get the bumper out without disconnecting the parking sensors. Otherwise you have to recalibrate stuff. So you're going to have a few and a bunch later there. So unlock shipping, insurance, and R&R.

You're already up to about $2,200, something like that. Well, yeah, get 2200 bucks and then you got to spend money on credits. And for just the ECM, it's $400 and that we're we're getting close to $3,000 now before we ever touch a key to the car. So if we're charging $1,000 for a tune now, you're going to $4,000 to get 30 or 40 horsepower at that point to save your money and get the turbo if you do it anyway.

Right. So that was our one story because they just turn it on boost anywhere. You got a quarter million in a car anyway, it's not a big deal, but zero 1.com. So you know zero six is similar issue. And they love they love ethanol. They they make more power on that. But then you also have let's do it.

You came the only guy I'm gonna buy a flexible kit for those cars just for DS. At this point, they're the ones that will go in and enable things properly and set it all up. So. But that's another six, 700 bucks that's going for these days. So it adds up a lot. And I think I don't blame you for charging with the charge, but the only in the town, they probably spent millions of dollars to unlock that global business.

They got to make their money back. But until the price comes down, it's going to be tough to really push that market. And by the way, all those costs, the TCM, the TCM, unlocking licensed PCM as well. So that's probably $1,000, right? So I don't think you need two for naturally aspirated car if you get your torque models.

Right. But a lot of teams don't. So one of the things with the GM cars that people don't realize is that even on the LS stuff, that torque model was kind of important. If you had a six, eight, 609 transmission card and you were having some issues with first, you didn't make sure your torque model is accurate. The ECM does not require report the right torque value to the PCM.

That means that your transmission pressures are not going to be accurate. We've had 690 cars making 800 and 900,000 emissions. No problem. But you can also smoke in 700 if you don't tune the things correctly. So and when you look at the LT cars' torque models, even more important, not only was it about recording stuff with the transmission, but the whole operating system for the way that the car runs is based upon demanded talk and talk like that so you can find yourself hitting torque management, timing retard for no reason that your torque models are correct.

And so a lot of guys just cheap torque models down to try to have you, a boy pulling out any time. But then that that you know, it starts having issues, right? Especially for five ships and a corvette starts slipping and you're, you're having problems. So those torque models are really, really important. They've been a portfolio of time and GM stuff.

But when it comes now to the corvettes, it's even more important at this point. And that's the thing where a lot of guys who went from Lt had issues, early life stuff, obviously on a four and 60, 480, not as big a deal. Six LS talk more important, you know. But you could still get a good transmission directors.

But when you go into built stuff, you can't just add time. When you tweak your elevation or anything like that. The torque model has to be active. And so early. And we ran into that back when we first started seeing the LT stuff. 2014, 15 season Evans did a trivial charge car, and it was really difficult because no one really figured out yet what that was.

So there's a big learning curve on that. There's lots of guys out there not teaching that stuff on how to do it, but a lot of guys look to two worlds very in these days. It's very wide. Okay. What I mean by that is that you don't you don't have to be someone to a car. You don't have to have background.

You don't have to know somebody from most up. Whether it's Honda, you found out it. Software is free. Software is free, right? Yeah. Some open source stuff. It's all free. Yeah. There are companies like Epi Tech now, Cobb unfortunately took away the the ability for individuals to cars. But for most tuning solutions out there, the software is not limiting you to say I have high here.

I have a shop. Your picture of my dyno. You know I'll pay the get the software right if anybody can download it and learn it. So that's really good in the long run that it gives us the ability to find bugs faster. It allows us to integrate faster, and it allows people all over the world to to share tuning knowledge.

Right? I love the top access to the software. It's good, good stuff. But at the same time, you know, we can't just go talk to anybody in the form about it. There's a select group tuners that have access to it. Same thing for you today. One of the reasons I love open source, that I really like to support open source guys is because they're doing us a favor in terms of that building.

But the downside is, is that anybody can spend $300 on empty dongle. Makes me call the substitute. Yeah, right. So you take the good with the bad. And I think also, you know, with the advent of E85 being so popular, now E85 tolerates a lot of states. You can do some really, really dumb stuff in. It's from E85.

And the motor was still really he wanted to get in two seconds. So there's a lot of guys out there that will create a tune on E85 and you just really stupid stuff. Do you have some examples? Yeah. This company is no longer in business out here. Shocker. A business because of their poor work. I won't name any names, but they were tuning GM platforms.

And the LT1 loves it though. I mean, it makes a ton of power and all the stock, but the LT platforms also get that torque management stuff, right? So a lot of times people would end up getting timing. They didn't know how to manage the torque models, and we had a shark that had blown up an LT1 on E85, and they put a new motor in it.

And then I did routine. And one of the nice things about HP Tuners is that for most cars, you can't hide your work. So someone can download your file and see what you did. And we download the file for this car and said, well, the timing maps look pretty reasonable. It was pretty normal in the car, can't figure out what's going on.

And we went and looked and there was a table of several tables in the vaults of the United States that limit your minimum time by loading RPM and at wide open throttle. This particular shop had put in a minimum time limit of 20 degrees. Now 20 degrees is about what the car went on to octane ideally, but you may get some not in there.

It's probably going to 2426 degrees on E85 in most cases. Although the LT stuff likes to run a little less fine higher. But if you get a knock event, you want to go full time now, right? Well, this car, by capping the 2020 degrees, it didn't matter if it had a knock that learned about 12 or 15 degrees in time, it was never going to run up to 20 and it just destroyed the motor.

So probably not a good point, but but yeah, just just stupid stuff and stuff that anybody could even take. Probably a basic, you know, eight hour tuning class from any of the tuning schools online would have known that. You don't do that. I mean, but they were to. So speaking of tuning classes, because we were talking about this off camera, there's a few guys out there that are doing it.

Is there anybody that if obviously you as a business, you want people to come to you for proper tunes and all that? But if people that want to learn, right, in fact, everybody who's ever come to work for me as a tuner started out learning how to their own vehicle first. True. So I can't complain about people wanting to.

And I have said pretty much since you're one of this business that I would always prefer a better educated customer base. Yes, an uneducated customer basis. If you look at it right and educated customer base is going to look at how you get there. And I think anybody with a decent amount of knowledge can get in the first time.

You know, anybody that's going to be 58 knows how to get to 525 horsepower and 50. It's not hard. But if you look at the way I do it, way too much boost at it, way too much time to get it. And you will go in and correct use, correct timing, whatever. But it's still in the power. It doesn't run a smooth industry, has a proper tune, but giving the powerhouse office was really concerned about an educated guess.

We're going to say, hey, I noticed that, you know, there's some weird things going on and some fluctuation, whatever else. So I want that educated guess. So it turns to two schools, though. I mean, HPA are probably the biggest, if not the biggest. I love the fact that you can use a remote dyno with them if you remember right.

You go in there and and do some testing on the car. It'll set up for you. That's really, really cool stuff. EFI University Ventures school. So I remember Ben back when he was a tuner like me. This was maybe a good guy who was doing, and he decided to go out and start doing EFI University. And man, I did not think it would go where it went.

For now, he's like the default guy for all the NASCAR Pro Tools. Oh, interesting. Okay, well when NASCAR converted to fuel injection. Yeah. Where did all those guys go? Well, he was the guy that was doing a lot of teaching stuff. He's got a great engine dyno set up. You'll see him doing testing with with a bunch of guys.

You know I love him in cylinder pressure sensor monitoring, right? He's just the finest details you can get. It's not cheap to do, but it's how OEMs do it. Yeah. And so, you know, I think if you get a chance to learn from him and he's brought in a lot of good guys to work for a ton of experience as well.

So those are probably two of the big ones. There's a guy two out of Michigan and he used to work for GM and now his name is Casey, but he's been doing online tuning stuff or tuning schools for stuff. HP tuners I talk about Greg. Yes, yes. Yeah, I respect as well. So if you were looking to do stuff that's picked on a specific class.

Yeah, he was doing classes in the what, 2005, 20 tens? I think it was, yeah. You came out of GM as Cowherd or so. Yeah. I guess from somebody who knows the system inside and out, we knew that there were tables that you couldn't see in. HP Tuners is one of those. So I call it the banish effect because my show had when I had banished on tripled and stayed after because it just exposed me to this whole entire audience.

And it's like one of my favorite people to go visit here in California Speed Labs. They're about an hour north. Evo guys. It's like he. Oh, really? Oh. That's funny. Full circle. Yeah. Like he found out about me through my episode of banished. And we started talking, like, a year and a half ago, and then now, you know, full circle.

I had him on the podcast, so it was kind of funny, but. Yeah, no, like, there's some of these guys that are just kind of staples in the industry around before people were doing streaming, he was he was sending out CDs and yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So yeah, he was one of the early guys. But yeah he knows what he's doing.

Yeah. That's the other thing in this industry is that you have two groups of people in the business. You have guys that they have that kind of adversarial approach to me, like I'm better than anybody else. My car, more power. I'll be a feature of the racetrack, whatever else. And I appreciate that. You're trying to establish a name.

And then you go out there and you challenge what else and say, you know, I bet you can't beat me, but then you get the other guys. And I find that these guys tend to be the better tuners on average, who are really interested in knowledge and they want to get into that. They want to learn. And those guys are actually usually willing to share information with you and talk with you and discuss things.

And, and I like working with guys like that, those, you know, people say, oh, you know, well, you know, this like, oh yeah, yeah. You know, I sure did. I sent him a follow up the other day and said, wait, don't you guys can be. Yeah. But, you know, there's plenty of business for us all. And I help them.

He helps me and yeah, this guy, he works for a company here in LA that he used to work for a company now San Diego moved up here. Really nice guy. And I think at one point we needed some canvas data for a flexible sensor. And I didn't have it. And we can couldn't find it online anywhere. I called them, my friends from the company said, oh, call this guy.

He can easily get used to be like, oh, he's got called look. Yeah. And now I probably communicate with him, you know, every week, every of the week. And he had a problem with his dyno and thrown me up and like, we call the shop actually, and said, oh, I'm gonna call more than just he helped me out.

So you build this community of tutors that it's like, it's nice because you can actually do better. So I've got a couple guys in Arizona that I work with regularly. I've got to be out in Texas that I know some of these guys really when they were young, when they got into business later, you know, they call me up and it's nice to have that.

That's actually one of the things I really like about about my business here too, is that most shops have one too. He's the guy. He's the don't don't bother him with the car and tell the customer when it's done. And I've been business now almost almost 25 years and I have had come through here including guys who currently work for me.

I think I'm up to five tuners that have come through here and grown, and two of this over with now, and I haven't heard as well. Real quick, just pull this a little bit closer towards you. Perfect. Yeah you're good and you know, so right now I have two guys working for me full time or two years. So three of us in there.

Yeah, we all have different skill sets. We all have different experience bases. There's a lot of overlap. But you know, for a lot of cars, HP Tuners, LS and us, but I use it. That's it because I've done more Motec stuff. My guy Daniel has tons of okay. So he'll do stuff right after that. He's relatively new, but he actually came on aerospace engineering, but he wanted to.

So he entered with me for a year or two, and then he put his full time job. He came here to work, but he loves BMW. So we developed that BMW business in a way that I never could have done that one. So I learned a lot about it. He's learned a lot about tuning basics, then applied it to the market.

And so when there's an issue with the car, especially on the days when we're all three here, we look all insolvent. We work together on this overlap. But you know, so, hey, can you come listen to this thing? I'm here. I'm not getting hit on the knock sensor, but I hear what sounds like a knock. You're, you know.

Here. Take these. Knock and listen while I'm watching the knocks that you're here or. Hey, can you tell me, am I getting any kind of, you know, vapor out of the catch camera on these runs or whatever? Or if you're seeing this kind of weird kind of this particular platform and having that debt, that resource in house where multiple guys with both combined, now, you know, I've got 25 plus years, Daniel set 19 years.

Ryan's got three years now. You know, we've got close to 50 years of experience in house to heal ejection stuff. No one tuner can have that because he hasn't been around long enough for tuning to get there. And that makes life not only easier, but also more fun because you say, well, you know, I know that, you know, our guy who is these guys got this much power on it.

So I need to get at least two there to make sure that I'm meeting the standard for these cars. Or, hey, you have a base for this car so I can, you know, shortcut the bosses in the building. And I don't know if there's too many other shops in the country that have more than one tuner working for.

good. All right. So before we went to go check out what's going on outside, we were talking a little bit about did you always plan to have multiple tuners? I never this was going to be a hobbyist business for me. When did you get your first employee? 2004 2004. Okay, first couple years.

I was only coming in for a few days a week, and then I ran out of space to Honda from, which was nice to cover the rent. But yeah, I had jobs. I was, I was teaching was an adjunct professor at Harvard University graduate school out there. I was consulting for different companies and taking my this tutorial and using that.

And this was kind of a hobby, and I always expected it to kind of just be something fun to do. I met my wife in 2004 and we didn't get it ever since. And to those five, I decided to go into this a little bit more fun, but I was pretty well off at that point, and my wife was making far more money than I was at that point.

So it's like, okay, I can just do this. I'm making enough money to cover expenses. She's doing well. What, you got plenty money to bank. Would be good to go. But in 2000. So I had one employee at one point in 2004. And that's actually by the way. So my first employee was about to start this, the new Integra, right?

Dude, these things are sick. I mean, they are a little high on the price side of things. Do you think we'll come back to the topic? But do you think they're worth it? No, I don't think thousand dollars.

Okay. But I love I love that it's a great project. Yeah, it's like a nice, cheaper front wheel drive BMW. Yeah. Yeah, it looks good. Everything else so. But yeah. So. So I had my one employee, Thomas, and he was with me. He moved over here and my wife moved here in 2005. And then around zero six she began to have some, and she ended up taking some time off from work.

She actually got injured during the work trip. And then during that whole process, even though she was technically out on disability when they fired her and her sales team. So it wasn't they weren't firing her because she was injured and it could work. They just want to replace. The sales team was a lot cheaper and her health continued to deteriorate.

So I went from having to support myself on a relatively limited and come here with plenty of savings from my previous ventures too, and support two people and one of them is not well. And so I made a decision at that point that I was going to grow this business even more and, you know, start hiring more people, everyone else like that.

So it was a conscious decision about 4 or 5 years in that this business needs to support both of us now for the pursuit of the future, and let's make it happen. So that was when I decided it was going to be a bigger venture. I already had Thomas working for me. I taught him how to team, and I said, if we can do this over people as well.

And so I would recruit customers. Or sometimes people come to me after the fact and say, I really would have to learn how to do this. We teach me how to do it. And like I said earlier this year started out in their own car and they came. We asked for help and I've taken on more people than a pirate.

Some people just didn't have, but once they did. Daniel has been looking for 19 years now and so very good guy. So yeah, it's an interesting environment because tuners can be very protective of what they know. Oh yeah. There's a belief that that their knowledge base is somehow unique. And when it comes to maybe where to find certain tables, where to find certain things within you.

Yeah. Some people go in and plow through it and the binaries and able to identify tables that maybe he should have found yet, and then get those tables to so they can make changes that nobody else does. I get right because w stuff is actually going to cause a lot of limiters, things that other children aren't touching. So maybe this is run into the nervous launch process.

So so but so that, you know, that is knowledge there. So that that knowledge I understand projecting because you put the time to find it. But when somebody is using something like HP tuners where you have your own tables to find, you don't have any tables to find, or even running a standalone that has standard tables in it and said, well, my timing map or my fuel map is special and I don't want anybody to see it.

That's that's b*******. I mean, it's absolutely you're not that. It's math and physics, that's all. Yeah. And so trying to to to to gay people ever. Look, I understand you don't want somebody saying I'm going to take this tune and and use that as starting to modify, but they're going to do it. And so we don't want our kids.

There was all you up for the past world. No. Yeah. Look, if you have access or you can't look at it, that's just how it works. You have to do it. Same thing. But for anything else, HP, we don't really like nothing. Stand alone. You don't have to walk on it because it's your car. It's your ECU we're selling you to do you do whatever you want it?

Definitely, man. I'm sure at some point some other shop has said somebody in Princeton and see what's going on, especially if they're new. Great. Good for you. We got paid for work. That's all we ask for. If you don't understand why we did the things we did, copy and paste. It's not going to help you, right? Doesn't do them in the car.

It's just it's not how it works. And the best example I can give you this one would be we we had a customer come to us probably 5 or 6 years ago. And he is a military that had a team that he had with him in the white was stationed up their attitude up here and Hawaii, this higher quality gas that we do with hierarchy right around here, because I just want to be tuned a little bit for that one.

I don't want to risk my motor. I start playing and sure, no problem. So get a power seat. Very old school standing on the right and we have the full XY factory software. And we said great. Yeah. What's the one there? And lots of time where you still did and was like I said, wow, I've never seen you, but do it.

I said, what do you. He told me, leave the shop. I said, oh, I've been out to you before. I use their shop. I know that guy. He's fine guy and I spent a week after two more time and so let me call that his number. I'll call him. The password won't be a problem. Call the guy up and said, yeah, I've got one of your customers here.

You just moved back to California. We need to in his car for 91, but I know she passed out the password so I can take some time to know the car, because if I have to rewrite it over, it's going to be three times as much to get this car routine start from scratch. And he said, no, I can't do that.

I said, why not? He said, the person who taught me two said, always protect the two files. I said, I get it. I said, but you know me, you you don't have anywhere near the experience. I do tuning cars. You think I'm really going to steal something from you or do something uniquely different, that you're doing something different?

I don't know about. I mean, you know who I am. I'm asking you to unlock this one particular car because your customer needs a retune, and I'm trying to help them out here. It's it's good for $1,000. Can you do this for me? And he refused to do it. And I said, look, man, this is bull, I mean this you don't own this customers.

You don't have any right to lock it. You're there's a belief that your tune is your intellectual property, but you sold it. This is not like it's a piece of software. And somebody paying you, you use the license, you're putting something on. It's. It's like you wanted somebody home and did some work and then said, well, yeah, but you're not allowed to open this door to see what I did on the other side of the wall.

You know, use my internet sort of deal. Yeah, it's it's not right. And I'm sure there will be people saying we disagree, and that's perfectly fine. Like I said, if you have found something that no one else has access to, you develop a table or you develop a solution, I get it. That's your idea because no one else has done that for the time, and you shouldn't have to do it for free.

But if you're using an existing platform, you know, software, whatever you would call it, and you're just making changes to the tables, you're not creating, you're just calibrating. And I don't think you should give it to somebody out from that if it's their car. Do you think I should not push back on that once you what your thoughts are, do you think that sometimes a business protecting itself, for example, if you're making drag cars or whatever, streetcars, and you want to lock somebody out so they don't mess it up and then put the blame on you.

Is there anything to be said there? And I guess I've never really had a lot of customers that would be issues like that. Yeah. Stay away from the issue. Customers. How about that? Yeah. And so that is a good point. You're doing something where you have a customer that wants to to the keys, and you have to work to your work.

Yeah, that can be a problem. And we just kind of we do warranty work. We don't guarantee you that you're not going to blow your motor. You're making 1,000 pounds stockholder convention that blow up. But what we always tell people is if you're the original owner and you probably car, let us know. We'll look at it. If it's too related, we'll fix it for you in charge.

In most cases, that's going to be something like, say, cold start on E85, we tune the current summertime and we get a cold snap in the winter. It's in the 30s or 40s and the car has a long frame on cold start. It doesn't matter whether it's next week or next year, but take care of it, you know, or hey, I'm having a problem with with my wife.

It's not working properly or something like that. Yeah, we'll take care of it in the chart. But but yeah, if you have somebody that can go in and make changes. Yeah, it could be a problem. I guess if I experienced that I might be of a different opinion. But I've never had somebody come back to me and say, yeah, you blew my motor up.

You know, I'm a little bit tune file. I've had customers come back in, complained about something's going on, and then I've done a little bit to file and that goes to file and do it. And then we'll ask him. Did somebody else Mastercard. Well do you have. Okay, well we'll fix it for you but or we'll file background for you.

But if you want to make any changes that's going to cost you because this is not our problem at this point. Sure. Well, in most cases, I mean, I don't know, maybe we've had to move up with our customer. So we've dealt with a lot of people in our biggest years when tuning was cheaper and we were doing more low dollar cars, we were tuning up to 1500 cars a year.

Holy. Yeah, that's that's probably now down to 1000 or so. And you're maybe. Wow. But you know, because tunes got inflation huge. But back in the day doing a lot of stuff I mean, we would take cars days and days after Daniel, we had the Vegas facility. We were up there one time for an import face off event and it was almost all Hondas.

But over the course of 36 hours we worked on stops. So I like to say he worked on sleep and over 36 hours I think we can open hours. So over how many hours? 46 hours. You said 42 cars. Holy s***. So it was crazy. But but yeah, but the Honda market, it's like nowadays the Honda markets kind of fabricated.

You get the guys with really nice setups. All wheel drive K-series. Yeah. And then you get the guys with an old beater trying to run open source Chrome. You know it is a very wide range isn't it. And honestly it's like I appreciate the old stuff. But we raised our prices and just said, look, if you're if you can't afford to to spend the time, pay for DC tune, your car is probably not really ready yet at this point.

It might be better if you buy your own chip burner, or you find somebody who's willing to do it for cheaply. It also had opportunities for us to, you know, the the guys who want the cheapest tunes, oftentimes the customers that require the most handholding, I can see that, you know, maybe because they don't have the money to do it right, or they had to try and learn how to do it themselves.

And it it bothers me sometimes that we can't say we want to help everybody out, but we only have so many hours a day. We only have so many hours to be able to downtime and our costs have. And since we've been at this building, our rent has more than doubled. I tried to buy this building multiple times, but myself.

So, you know, just the just the inflation of rent and utilities and everything else like that, our costs had to go. But the cost of buying a Honda Civic and has not. So guys don't want to spend more money. So yeah, it's I guess that's where you're talking about kind of choosing your customers a little bit, the pricing model and everything else like that.

But that's it do is that, you know, my guys don't want to have to fix the customer's problem. It's we don't have time for that. We can try and tell you this wrong with it. But if we put you on a dyno instead of mine, just right where you come in. That's one of the reasons we like working with shops a lot.

So we have a select number of shops that we have very close relationships with, guys that build everything from LSs to Subarus to, and we have the kind of relationship with them where they will ask us, hey, can you send me a map to get this car running? Okay, it's doing this. Send us a log back and make some adjustments to.

The car is already up and ready to run. Shaking it down. They've already checked it, so when they bring the car in, it takes us half the time to the car. And so for those guys, we're offering really big discounts on those shots because they make our lives so much easier. So we have a customer coming in. This got issues.

It's like either they did it themselves or they went to a shop that maybe we don't know. It's like, look, you've got issues going with your car and we keep trying to solve these things. But every time you come back with an issue, you're spending money that you didn't have to spend. We really recommend you go visit a particularly this stuff.

What's that split look like between working with shops and individuals? I'd say right now 30 to 40% of the business shops that we would you prefer that number to be higher?

Yes and no. So purely from this perspective. Yeah, 100% would be best because every car is vetted. You have the same point of contact every time, so you don't have to things to somebody when a new customer comes in that there have been a rapport individual customer, you got to show them what you're doing while you're taking the wheels off.

You're taking care of your wheels somewhere where I'm going to ship anything. If they've got Carver brake rotors, don't worry, we're not going to attack. You have any issues with it? Don't worry about your paint. And we jack it up. Or using a hockey puck, you know, under the diff or under the jacking points. There's no damage to anything.

Yeah, I should get one of those. Hey, and some customers. Are those customers. Like, I check it out there all the time. It doesn't matter. But. But you have to make sure the customer feels comfortable. You know, once they've been here once, it's not a big deal anymore when you're dealing with the shop. I'll give you an example.

We do a lot of Subarus for a shop called powered by RPM to reach small shop, and two guys, the lead guy there, he likes to do relatively high end projects, but procedures. And so he's working on 1 or 2 cars at a time to do his complete building. And when he brings a car and he comes with the car, he and the festival will come and he brings his own fuel cans, he brings his tools.

So I know that if he brings me a car, everything about that car to me, right? And if there's any issue, easy to be prepared to fix it, get it done. So pretty much every party talking like 99% hit right here is going to get off that dyno that day running away. So cool. So yeah. So guys like that I love working with guys like that.

I'll bend over backwards for guys like that because they allow me to do what I want to do, which is get in there and tune the car. I don't want to fix a loose bolt. I don't want to find a vacuum hose that's torn. That or not, or didn't put zip ties on it, or a claim or something like that.

I don't want to. I don't have to worry about just put the right oil in, you know, or you didn't drain the fuel tank properly. So helping you get that right next year. So when you work with quality shops like that that are going out of their way to make sure things are done right, you know, about big discounts.

I mean, I give those guys a massive discount because the time savings and the the stress reduction. All right. Let's give me the checklist. What's the checklist you give to do you give a checklist to a newbie. Like what are the things that you need to do in order to be ready to go to the dyno? So, you know, in the old days we would just call it up and schedule appointment would just say, make sure you've got this much fuel, make sure you have your real key, make sure it's got everything else.

But nowadays we're sending that base maps online or we're the shops, whatever. What we're usually telling is, if you haven't changed your will in over 3000 miles, change your if your spark plugs worth 50,000 miles old and get them to the stand for your car. Make sure you got this fuel and tank. Make sure you have at least as much or no more than this, depending on whether we're going to flex fuel or something like that, and bring your real acting like that.

Beyond that, there's not much else we can tell the customer. We can ask them to get a compression leaked out test. We can ask them to do a smoke check on the system, to make sure it has no leaks. But most customers aren't prepared to do that that easily. And that's kind of shop that can do it. So in a lot of cases what we don't bring it in.

And you know, we'll check over the basic stuff here. And if we put it on the dyno we'll find a problem. You're still going to pay something, but we'll be a partial. You have to be asking customers at the volumes that we do, trying to get them to do smoke checks and compression. It's just not going to happen.

We're not removing parts, putting parts on the car. I'm not trying to get my hand down on the side of the EJ25 and screwing up. Yeah, yeah. So for us, it's, you know, once you worry about someone bringing you a car, that's not to blow up. No, because we can almost always tell when she's very early. And if we don't hear it when it's driving in the parking lot, you know, we'll hear it.

We'll get on the hood and start things up. We'll see. The manifold vacuum is not good or you hear about cranking. You can be taking those problems pretty easy that way. And for the really big builds, most of the big stuff that's not giving up. Some of these garage that's usually coming out of a shop that we can trust, like that 100 horsepower Camaro.

Right? That's that's been worked on by some really good people who know what they're doing. You know, motors coming from the right place or a shop, you know, so that comes out on a powered by R.P.M., you know, we know those guys know what they're doing. And so we're trying to put 800 900 horsepower of Subaru or 1200 horsepower on an LT or less.

You know, it's coming out of place where, you know, if cardinals in, it looks like it's just a pile, we'll say, no, we're not we're not going to. Does that happen every once in a while? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, in the old days I didn't take deposits. I just slowly schedule deployments and people come in. I always had 20 people coming in.

Nowadays people like to shop around a lot. So if you don't take it, you don't get no shows, which is annoying. Yeah. So we made it to, you know, we tell people to refundable as long as you give us a 24 hour notice, you know, on cancellation. So we can always different people. We just had to call us ten minutes for your appointment saying, I'm not going to be there or go see us, not even return the phone call.

So, you know, if you come in, you made that closet and say, look, your car is not ready. I'll keep your deposit. I'm not giving you a deposit back, but you got to go fix them. Come back. I'll keep your device for the day. Or, you know, we got some time in on it and just probably showed up.

I'm going to build you a partial tune and we'll fill you the balance, plus a remount for you when you come back. And so we try to be fair about that stuff. I'm not I don't ever want somebody to feel like they got taken when they come in, especially if they have a problem. You got a problem with your car is bad enough.

You know, most of the time in the problems you don't know they happen. And so they feel bad already. They feel bad because, you know, the one they could waste your time and feel bad that their car is not good to be. They feel bad because whoever told them they did the work to do it right. So I don't want that.

So I try to make it easy as possible. Every once while you get a guy, try to come in and try and get you to take responsibility for their their problems. The guy one time with the Dodge Charger checks out already. All he won was baseline and sure, no problem. So they put it on the dyno. Made two passes. The second pass is radiator in tank blew off instead of 2021 five.

That's really weird. So you know coolant everywhere. So when we're done you know you're you're radiators. You can't do anything about that. So I start cleaning up like look bad. I'm not going to charge you. I feel bad for your car. We'll just let you go in. Don't worry. We charge you for cleanup to get cleanup. And. Sorry.

You're good. Yeah. And so you push the car out, and so. Yeah, but we also got is. Why would I do? Well, it was the reader assignment put on the back. Yeah, but I can't do anything. I don't think it really. But you were pushing the car really hard. You were Florida. That's the purpose of the of. But yeah.

Isn't your fault or you're blowing up. No. And I'm, I'm a really nice guy for most people. I don't I don't get angry or aggressive in most cases. But this is that took me off and pushed her to her book. And I said, you're lucky that I'm not pushing your car industry right now. I'm leaving it out there with it.

You came in here because we didn't touch the car. I put under that on hand the same kind of industry. I said, if you want to play this game, go ahead and we're going to have problems. Volatility right left. To his credit he came back three days later. The song said he's going to you know he's going to be calm bar.

He's going to make the lawsuit. There are cases. I said I'm sorry okay. He said I actually had this problem with one of the car about two months ago, and I had a new radiator in blew up again. Okay, so you got something else going. Sorry, guys. I shouldn't have even tried to blame you. I was just really upset.

I'm sorry for for trying to hold you responsible for this. And I was actually very surprised because normally when a guy comes in and tries to do that, tries to speak, and Kakashi has got problems, they have you no alternative. But they got shady. So at least I got came back. That's legit. At least I should. But yeah, you guys coming in the last one that we had come to the parking lot of the tunes pretty much completely soft, said, okay, so we just want to basically.

Yeah, I just want to do more horsepower out of it. So we've been in the car in and we brought it in and never turned the car off. And he was sitting in the parking lot island. So he brings in pulls in, and he said we should put it down in the cars in Western as well because we have to download the file.

Right. And we got a new file for it. Oh, okay. We'll catch this running as this one. We go run the stock too. But we want to get the file to go back to start the car up. And this is why it's super. But sometimes you can't tell if Subaru's got a miss. Sometimes they already sound like missing.

Yeah, sure. It wasn't necessarily missing part of that of it was warm, but I'm cranky. You could hear it. It was way down, unconventional and something I mean like, I don't know, 5060 psi version 100 and 140. And we spent nope, not doing it. So why not? You've got a problem. Similar. Oh, well, what do you think of this rings I don't know what.

Can't you be tested and see? No, no, you didn't know as a problem. So how much will you bring? Oh, maybe a quarter. 3000 miles, of course. Okay, well, the dealer might say that's acceptable, but when your engine sounds like that on, frankly, you burn a quarter of a mile. I'm guessing you're missing a piece of piston utilities, right?

It's just. It's just it's not there anymore. And, you know, you do this long enough. You look at some of these eyes, you can tell it's like, yeah, you knew. And you were hoping to blow it up on the dyno and read the paper or something like that. So, but, you know, every once in a while you will have problem with it.

And you can't you can't say that you didn't talk to you. You have 1000 cars come through the year. Every once in a while, cars going to blow up and down on you. You can't say, you know, oh your your is the wrong way or you know, you had a problem with your injector project. If it's not a single cylinder failure on the dyno as a tuner, you got to say, okay, you got to do something wrong.

And every once in a while it doesn't happen often, but we will have, you know, paying for Partizan now. Really? Yeah, yeah we do. Because even if we're not sure if something we did cause the problem, it's better to take responsibility, make sure the customer is taken care of, because if you blow somebody's motor up on the dyno and basically go, not my problem when you might be responsible for it, you're just shooting yourself in the foot as a business.

And so I'd say maybe every few years you get a car like that or it's just, you know, did we calibrate the two sets of reporters car? Did we do we check the field where we watching fuel pressure on it? You know, if something that happened where we should have caught, you know, and if the, if the answer to more than one of those things is yes and it's like, okay, whoever the tour was, you might have screwed up with this one.

And so we're going to end up helping this customer out, because we can't say for sure that it was a mistake. And and anybody who says community is like, yeah, you do it long enough. You could be the end of the day. You're busy and you've been through a bunch of guards and you you forgot to check your brush when you're in the car, or maybe the car was showing oil pressure.

Drop it. But she wouldn't watch it because you were watching your laptop screen and the real pressure gauge was on the dash or something, you know, that were the old pressure. But it doesn't mean that your pressure was dropping. But you got to catch that. And if you don't, it's like, well, I saw it all go up and I kept running it.

You're partially responsible for it at that point. You got to have some sympathy. So once it happens, once it rarely ever happens to junior again. Yeah, it's a learning experience. Once somebody lost a motor on the dyno and they.

Yeah. Here's the ice cream truck, isn't it. I've never seen this guy, so don't know whether you're out here.

So maybe it's something that better, but I don't know but. So yeah once you once you lose motor and say you know what, I might have screwed up. Then you it kind of sensitize you to looking at everything a little bit differently going forward. For example, might be right. He's never lost customer, but he lost one of his own.

So when his age was still stock. But on his original beat was the car. He was pushing up over 800 horsepower and he had a weird boost surge coming into the air. Now normally when something happens, you get out of it. And he decided, well, the boost surge when he came back down. So to stay in it and then it oscillated again, did something kicked around.

Right. Just a big taught surge. And he was so embarrassed about that. The fact he was like, well, these is my partner. Somebody else's figured it out. But I should have done this. I should have done this. I said, guess what? You'll never do it again. Don't worry about it. Because this is that traumatic experience will teach you to never, ever.

You can always make other background. You can't. Can't always replace the motor easily, right? He was lucky enough to find a jump motor for 500 bucks. That is, down in the car. Oh, s***. Exactly. Yeah, but. But it was a lesson that is really, really valuable. And I don't want to say to every tutor should go. The motor wants just to learn that.

But when it happens, it is a valuable lesson. You better ideally, it's something that's within your means to fix. What's really do is people ask you to why do you charge so much more money for certain vehicles? Why is it that, you know, we're going to charge more for a GT-R than for. That's our plan, right? Or why is it that, you know, for a while we were too long.

So we were doing stuff on McLarens and Ferraris, and that means always. And like for a typical apparently bash, we were charging. Oh holy s***. Yeah. So I didn't like, deal with the exact market. I actually partnered with another guy who knew the customer base and he in the base with the customer, so I didn't have to. And we had a falling out, had some issues.

So I walked away from that business. But, you know, the money was good on that stuff. But the risk is high. And in order to put them in the. You have to take the future off. Five $10,000 diffuser. Yeah. And the fairness build quality is not the best. It's screwed in with machine screws. Basically it's you take it out there and recapping the whole every time.

Yeah. And and the expectation two groups of exotic our customers. You get the guys who have so much money they just don't care. It's like do what you got to do and make it happen. Fine. Then you get the other guys who are kind of just getting into that market. It's a stretch for them to buy it. Like McLaren is like, you know, a buck 30 or whatever.

It's like, I could stretch it in finance. It got the brand new 720 is the guy with the ten year old, you know MP yeah, MP for 12. Yeah. So you know those guys you know super paranoid because if something happens to this car get can't afford to replace it. Right. And yeah it's just I there's also kind of a year old pattern from the exotic car owners.

The really rich guys were cool. So.

You mostly you wouldn't even know that. Right. Because they didn't need to show off for anybody. You had $1 billion in the bank. You don't care about those things, right? The guy who had 1 million or $2 million and stretch for the car. A lot of those guys were assets like like kind of had to where they come in and they kind of treat you like your, you know, waitress at a local diner or something like that.

Hey, I've got a great car and I'm paying you a lot of money to work on it. So you kiss my a**, right? Yeah, I, I don't take that for one second. So I told my partner at that time, I said, look, I don't want people to speak at all because someone.

So. But yeah. Yeah. So if you did that kind of money because if you blow up the bear motor and 30 pounds property that. So do you think you're gonna see that more with like for example, Kato sixes. They're not a cheap motor. No, no they're not. But blowing up a 64. And actually that's great. Yeah. Fair enough to it in terms of wealth stuff,

Yeah. So you have to consider the cost. So I tell you the scariest thing, I had A99 2.123 Rs. Okay. This guy owned a used car lot, had a lot of really cool cars and turned out to be a customized. But it's the first car.

So this is a 2.12. Sorry. First car window with this guy will drop it off. And I was not a big deal. I think this is the first 9.91.2 be done. And so based on the car for it with the car in ECU.

I think actually too easy but but I couldn't connect to these. Could actually could recover it. Nothing. First thing I did was it was a weekend so I thought I saw the lucky few problem. I can't get Ahold of cop right now, but as soon as Monday comes around the world, please forgive us off. You did this. Come on the car.

Thanks for your patience. And so, of course, I've got 48 hours. So my mind starts wandering. I started checking into eco prices for. Oh, no. Of course. How would I be into this? I won't charge me. I two grand, three grand, including work. And I'm going to be out way more than that. About your place. This guy's ECU.

Because, I mean, I'm not even qualified to remove all the stuff I have to do to get to the ECB to pull it out, let alone get a program by Porsche. I'm just freaking out. And that 48 hours, 48 hours of my tuning career, because I'm sitting there just thinking about, oh my God, what are we gonna do when I'm going to do Monday morning comes around, I call Cobb, and, you know, I've never really had to use much customer service for their stuff is really robust and worked really well.

The software works really well, but I have never gotten better customer service from the tuning company than I got from Cobb that day. They had three different people talked to me in the course of like 30 minutes trying to figure out what happened, how to fix it, everything else like that. It turns out that BCU in the course of sometimes or the the system during programing was shuts up off.

And so you did the right voltage, everything else and said, well, the solution is you're going to have to do this. You're going to have to do a full recovery program in the car, and you're going to need to press the ignition switch on the dash once in every 60s. Okay. Are you sure it's gonna work? You had to do it once before.

It should work just fine. And unfortunately, the recovery program process took the 90 minutes. Oh, no. I had to sit in A99. And then I will put you Porsche GT3 with really tight race seats for 90 minutes.

I already had the stopwatch on my phone, and of course, at the end of it, it worked. So worked. Programed it. It made power. And I was like that. But yeah, stuff like that's why I got a church one for those cars. That would be such a nerve wracking 90 minutes though. Yeah, it's a good work. Is good work working?

Yeah. If it was a Honda, I could have got hundred bucks even like one of these years. That really probably took Ricky with HP to Toyota Tundra in the 80s just to break. You got to keep charger on the iron things. And I had a problem time that had a bunch of accessories on the car, all kinds of lights, radio.

Yeah. And we thought we had enough on it. And did you see that cost me like 900 bucks. You know, I could afford to do that. Basically, I could make any one of the two. But it happens. But yeah, stuff like exotics, things going wrong. It's like you, you don't want to push it. So at that point when the exotic business kind of when the person I was working with you kind of had fallen out, I said, I don't want to be in this business anymore.

It's too stressful. I mean, it's cool to start. We did it for eight. Awesome. Yeah. GT two CES. Awesome. Oh we did. We did a bunch of proceedings amg, GT-R flexors. Oh, wow. That was just a flat plane. You know, V8 versions of the regular V8 and 78 horsepower. These customers, can you please make sure it shifts properly?

Okay. That's true. Right. So, you know, but like, we have to carry insurance for the shop and you have to carry insurance for the cars for the shop. And it was those cars were so much money. I couldn't have more than 1 or 2 of those in the shop. And given time rules, I would be over my coverage limit for people to start the shop at that point.

It's just that kind of stress. Just it's not for me. I don't like stress, like being relaxed, like being chill.

It's not too late. But you know what? That's good because there's plenty of other people out there doing it and good for that. Yeah. No, it's like every time, like like my dad's got an amg GT, all right. And I'm like, this splitter is like significantly more expensive than the one on my golf. So I'm very careful getting in the driveway, so I, I get it.

Okay. So what's next for you then? What's the next five years look like? Ten years? Oh, yeah. Five years is actually because that's I've been talking to my guys about that. So I'm 55. My wife says I'm not allowed to quit because I just hope that one she, she expected at least do two days a week.

Otherwise I'd be bored at driving. So but at the same time, 25 years of doing the same thing as a lot. And I am not at all. But I am a little tired of the day to day grind of the regulatory environment in California. Got a pay rent, got a handle payroll. You got to deal with all the different things like that.

So I would like to be able to step back a little bit over the next five years and focus just on tuning the cars out to, you know, coming in 2 or 3 days a week, two in a couple cars, have a good time and still see the business go. I don't have kids, so I can't pass it on to anybody.

So whether it's my employees want to take care of the company or somebody else comes in and wants to buy a piece of it, or, you know, maybe in five years and see, you know what? I'm just going to go for next. I don't want to do a shop, you know, so I can buy Dino's and I'll be happy with the car here and there.

I already go out to Palm Desert every other week and two cars that were shot out there. You go down and I could do that. I'm not in a position where I need to make the money anymore. It's I want to do it because I like doing so. If I can find a way to keep this business and be able to let somebody else handle data operations, I'll do this.

Talk to you if people will still have to do it. I some people might be a little comfortable with me coming in with the cane. And, you know, I can't do my car, but let me do it at 80. Do. I don't want to stop. But yeah, I am. And if it was California, I probably wouldn't be a start of it.

But California is not a great place to business. You have to keep up on everything, I imagine. Yeah. You know, for example, we're in Wilmington, but it's actually part of the city of Los Angeles. So we have to comply with AQMD, which is a state-level organization. Not too hard on you. They have pretty computers, but also that LA now has their own special inspection for automotive businesses.

So there's another inspection even though AQMD does that stuff. And that was just added in the last couple of years. And then the LA tax environment, they don't charge you a flat tax or business license. They charge you for gross, not your net gross, which is ridiculous because, well, you see homeless population here and what what services are being on the road quality is for you know, the money's not willing to help us be more successful in business.

You know, in the state of California in general, the California Air Resources Board does not make it easy to do business. You know, I would I used to sell parts up until 2015, and in 2015 was when Jeff Evans was basically hit hard on the the one man operation thing was his wife. So it's so very similar to what we were doing.

And they came in and hit it with like 400 counts of violations of the potential fines, like $1.2 million. Right? What the hell? So I spent a lot of time on back and forth talking with Jeff. He was kind enough to share me with me, the documents and got from the what they were going to charge him with and stuff like that.

So this is ridiculous. And I noticed the time that every single thing we were hitting for was seven something. So they basically through these invoices for the last few years, he said, yeah, you sold 200 Honda's at 180 messes and all these are emissions sticking devices. And first thing I did was I called the guys over and said, hey, you guys need to be aware of it.

EPA considered you to be selling something, some violation, right? And the second thing is, I can't sell your stuff. I so I think at one point I was top five retailers for Honda in the country. That's a good chunk of change. Now obviously the pockets not on labor. But yeah, it was still nicer. Literally just shifting parts out of people.

It's actually money. I said I'm going to get better. I thought I could count on my revenue when I stopped selling parts. Not that much profit, but it's still early dropped. But I was afraid and I saw what they were doing. Jeff Evans and I said, I don't I don't want to be the situation. I think that, you know, those go through.

I think he ended up selling point $50,000 and, you know, stating that he wouldn't do this stuff anymore or whatever. That's what he started up his own two weeks ago. Yeah. Well, what's it called again? Isn't something like blanking on a name on it, but yeah, it was like Evans performance something. It was EPA, I think. So I appreciate his resilience in the face of that stuff, you know?

But what they did, it was very unfair, you know? And what's funny is about 2 or 3 weeks after Jeff got hit, EPA wow. So they were they were prepared. But and that changed how the business. Yeah. You know and and it's funny, you know, Peter like that same company that owns tech and God. Oh okay. Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

And which there is a concern there because Covid technical cop got hit by the EPA. That's when it's going to study. And and because he took over by the same company, you got to do the same thing. So people tend to take out a lot of features from their software. There's concern that they might do that to Honda as well because parent company doesn't want liability.

So yeah, it's for the rules. But yeah, but BPA is hard enough to deal with the California. So might we see changes here maybe. I mean I know that some of the diesel stuff going on now with the EPA now saying that deletes are not illegal in some cases, I don't know how it's going to work out. I'd love to see, you know, CARB's authority curtailed.

But yeah, but until that happens, though, you know, day to day operations in California are not fun. I always tell people that if I was starting the business today, I would not do it in California. You never, never would do it here. But our customer base here is massive. That's what I've heard from other shops out here. Actually not.

You bring it up again. It's like there's a few people. It's like, I they'd love to move, but it's a big jump to switch states. Yeah, because you're leaving behind all your customers. You know, we're doing more on the competing side of things now. One of my new guys has been really helping me set that up. Will never be like a Lund or a body in terms of that.

But if we're doing more then right, there's the quest to have the ability to move someplace else. But like I said, at my age, thinking about picking up and moving and trying to reestablish, you know, it's probably five years to get back to where you were. You know, if you go to some new place at that point, I think I'm just a freelancer at that time.

So, yeah, I would love to work, I really do. And especially with the influx of neutrality in the last few years, there's a there's a younger vibe here as well. It keeps you young people that are under 30, people that are in their 50s and but we all share a common love of cars and engines. And so we had that common language.

And yet we can, you know, cook various places. And I mean, I spend a lot of time here just hanging out with the guys, talking to everybody, seeing what's going on. I learned words I didn't know I had that I was one word you got to tell me. Oh, God, what was it? Oh, okay. This has been a while back, but I had never heard the term say less.

Oh, yeah. Okay. The first I was like, what did you say to me? You told me you shut up. I was just saying you did it. But but. Yeah. And there's there's examples like that. I always I always play with my wife and I'll say something to her. What? What did you say? Oh, no, that's that's what the young guys are saying.

Now, this means I feel like an old man doing it. But. But it's fun. But but yeah, the energy here is good, and I really enjoy them. And so I don't want to see this business go away. As I get older, I can still be able to come in here and and play around and, and teach what I know and watch guys grow and find out new things.

So ultimately, I like I like this business to be around for 20 years. If everything works out, I just won't be the guy handling the books and doing everything else. Yeah, I'll make the appearances. I'll tunes of Gaz and and I'll come in and hang out. And, you know, in my old age here, but I will, you know, they'll humor me and everything like that.

But I know, I know where life is going, and I'd like to continue here to do it. Yeah, we'll try and make that work. I've got a lot of good guys working for me, and so I hope to be a way to for them to continue things on the road. But you know what? Even if I go to a shop 1 or 2 days a week into a couple of cars and someplace else, it's still right.

Some more traveling, maybe on the horizon to go see Europe. Yeah. Let's go up there. Oh, there's some guys that I know that, like go tuning in like Qatar and stuff like that. Like across the world. I've got some customers that are from there. In fact, I went up there. He's awake. Okay. So but military based guy or.

Oh, okay. He's local okay. Being here, but yeah, I've heard too many more stories about, you know, when you get there, the person that invited you over it has to be responsible for your passport. Yeah. So, I mean, it's I bought you all for that, for that at this point to. But there's a, there's enough business in California in the rest of the country that for somebody who's just looking to keep their, you know, their hands in the game and keep their knowledge of the few hours a week.

Yeah, I think too, it's like, you know, if you're getting $1,000 for a tune, you can meet a couple of hours a week. You still think a pretty good money if there's no over it, you know, place like this would be payroll, you know, rent and everything else. You know, you're talking about many tens of thousands of dollars a month just to break even.

So you got it. You want. Right? You know, obviously, it's nice to have a place to keep my car. Just extra cars, you know, that race car and have this have access to all the equipment. But but yeah, you know, it's like there's always there's always opportunities. And you know, one thing you talk about to the new guys is, you know, you might need to think about different ways to make money from the forward, because I don't think someone today could get into the business and be prepared for retirement 25 years just to impart.

I think it's two different having the regulatory environment to do different. How much is it going to change in 25 years? I mean, yeah, some guys would find ways to be a little bit more power at the Tesla. But it's not it's not like this where you've got to understand the actual combustion process and optimize. Think it's about changing the current limits on.

Yeah. Right. So tuning is going to be different electric cars obviously we've seen them kind of peak and back a little bit, but they will be a big part of the market. And older cars, race cars whatever vintage cars. And with that on the civic.

Like that. But but there'll be markets for those. But it won't be the same as the heyday. You know, when the first time I ever used a Dynojet was 1994, 95. Right. They were just becoming popular. Dynojet changed the world. Dynojet, Dynojet. Nowadays it was like that. So that was really where it's not unique to have a dyno now, but cars are better and better now.

There's more and more capable to where you can do a generic route and still get a lot out, and you charge a lot less because you're selling the same defects. Anyway, somebody I saw, I've seen stuff on Instagram with people often like a B58 guaranteeing 100 horsepower for 300 bucks. You go buy your own license. But I'm not going to do with that.

Right? I don't want that market. First of all, I don't want to ship out generic crashes. But, you know, if that's also what he wants. More parking loading committee and spend $1,000 in a full downtown and then get 80 or 90% of the agents for 300 bucks. You have to understand that's where the market's going. So, you know, some of my guys, one of my guys is good new 3D printing.

Yeah I was asked about 3D printing. Yeah like that. And we got this black there. We did a full preprinted into custom because it was a horrible mass air airfield performance. So I think there's a market for that going forward. And also, you know, the social media, I was never much about social media, but we've done a big push on Instagram the last year or so and got a lot more reach engagement.

And it drives business. And there's also things people have to see that can generate money even if they're not raiding your car, you know? So there's there's a lot of ways of making money, but it's not the same game. And you can't just buy a dyno and be a tuner, an inspector, to have a 2025 year career retire.

It's not going to be. One of the things I was thinking about is like, you know, because instead of selling intakes, well, if you sold files for the design and people could just print their own, but then that's pretty easy to get copied pretty quickly. And also, 3D printing is not in states yet where the average person can make things work.

Right. The couple iterations on that one, and then had to realize that you have to do some special things to make things, or you've written long tubes, for example. And yeah, carbon based material from materials. You know, there's you need something else going on. But where it will happen, I think, is you'll be able to send it off to China.

I mean, there's no point in 3D printing like metal stuff here. Yeah, it's like a ten x cost. Yeah. Plastics and stuff. Yeah. It's okay. But but even little things like, you know, Alberto exists. Yeah. Custom 3D printed headlight. You know the turbo, he wants to sell it. So what we I think what you do is you get to combine maybe the development of the product like that, having the resources to actually test it and then sell a product.

Yeah. If you can, for profit, which these days means pretty much you get a year or two before it's already not often available. That's pretty standard. Yeah. So you gotta you gotta first I ever had come across that was you know, so map sensors, stuff like that I think so maybe. Yeah. So. So Steve is the owner of power.

Used to work for a scope two out here. Really? County dad used to work on Ferraris. I mean, just the guy knows everything. I had him rebuild the last 2000 point in our race car years ago, and he used to lived down here in Vegas, started on the power and just sell sensors. Right. And he has given us all the way.

They would be cost effective. But he told me, he said yeah when I was new product. He said within 6 to 12 months someone selling it for less than my cost. And so he just had to keep doing it and establish a brand. But that's what you have to expect to happen these days. Anything that's not locked down or you're using yourself in your own factory.

So you also have to have a constant upgrade path to keep the copycats off the table. Yeah. And like patenting is only worth it to some degree. But it's like there's costs with that and there's time and it's just it's yeah, you've had something. You also put something out there is exactly what you're selling. Yeah. There's that to be terrified to work around or part of the outside these days is pretty much just kind of our brand.

Yeah, I, I've seen like people have taken stuff off of like Amazon and TikTok shop because they basically just have crawlers or whatever, just looking for stuff to knock off. And it's like, yeah, oh, that's a mess, right? I've got a good spark plugs. Yeah, yeah. How about that? We always we can't get mass sensors for cars to work.

You go to we actually got a Delco or Delphi sets or Masako sensor for a car. See, five per day and the guys will fail. You got this one. And Delphi, and we're trying to about 45 pounds of early minutes, about 440 pounds. And then instead of the continued to go up, they actually start to go down. So even though the airflow was continuing supercharged car, it was actually doing lean because the airport was down.

So we said, yeah, we've seen this before on several GM cars, GMT to and yeah, you just have sensors. No good. You gotta get another one or another one. So I can't get another one. Okay. Well let me, let me call a company. And so he calls them up and he relayed this, this phone call to me. He said, yeah, I told them that I, you would not measure horsepower and horsepower.

And therefore the Milwaukee and the sensor company told him. Yes, but the car is only rated at 400 horsepower, so it's fine. He said my car makes more than 400. But he said the car is only rated at 400 horsepower. The sensor will be fine, the 400 horsepower combined. So we had to turn into an street to make it work.

That's the problem now for a ton of stuff. You've seen guys do thermostats at AutoZone that get stuck. The quality of that is because all this stuff is coming out of these companies overseas that don't either don't understand the part or don't care, you know, and sell it at the lowest price. And, I mean, we had a guy with CPSC that almost blew his car up because he thought the car was the customer.

We put it in place in air sensor. First time he got out of the car, leaned out and crazy. Walking was 98 five. He about 91. He was smoking. All because of a sensor. You know, I've never had to worry about off the shelf sensors being right now. We got to double check that stuff. It's like, what does it mean for oil pressure sensors or sensor whatever else?

It's like, you can't pick up on your sensor, you're screwed. And the newer the car gets, the more dependent on you are on the sensors. And like GM now, it's like anything. Only been ten years old and you have a hard time on the parts. It's almost like it's a deliberate strategy by that don't on circular stuff. Yeah.

Just sprinkle it in there. Is it called like bad actors or whatever. Like whatever. Like there's sprinkling them out there. Just I'm not sure what it is. I, you know, part of it. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but. Oh come on, it's fun. Like now are looking to transition people in new cars. So by not supporting your older cars, they forced me to pick the new stuff up because.

So on new cars, you're not just buying a car anymore, you're also a source of revenue after the fact, right? Because all the data, they're going off your car and selling to insurance companies or whatever else, and a lot of people don't want your cars. Like, I'm not a big fan of massive screen touchscreens and cars. Oh it's brutal.

I don't like all the names that are in your cars. Also brutal lane control, everything like that. I don't do that. Sure, somebody wants it, great, but I don't want to call it that. So don't want to keep me doing that with the cars. My Cadillac is 16 years old. I have not been able to find a new diff from GM anymore for that car that wasn't in the shelf to a few years ago, and the price went from $1700 to $3200 for that time period.

Did you get it's the point now where it's almost better for you to buy it for 8.8in independent or suspension conversion kit, and just put that in twice as much as rebuild your place, right? I cannot get the electric door poppers in my car. I have one left. You know, it's like I need to replace my driver's door one, but it's just a problem.

And so if you can't find these parts, it used to be manufacturers would support cars in parts for 20 years, and they don't do it anymore. I think that's the only way they keep driving. Customers need cars because otherwise the new cars are too expensive, don't offer enough for what you're getting, and have way too many vans to deal with.

And and if you look at like GDPR reliability data or satisfaction data, you see that the number of issues has gone way up. Right. But it's not issues, but the engine of us their own issue at that. Yeah, that's big right now. I guess they just another batch of recalls on their 35. But yeah, the most important people don't like the way to tell Maddux and software.

And the problem is that they're releasing cars like the Microsoft releases windows. It's like, yeah, we're going to keep patching this thing. Yeah, the car isn't fully ready to go patching stuff. And that's I mean, nobody likes the indigenous variance because you have to. Right. Nobody wants that in the car. But that's what's happening. So that's a good point.

The appeal of older cars continues to grow. But the manufacturers don't like that because they don't make as much. Well they might be under pressure to is my guess right. Pressure. And I don't know if you heard, but Massachusetts and New York and a Florida state Senate, Illinois have talked about outright banning cars over the 2000 and 2009.

Yeah, good luck with that. That is it's messed up, man. It's really messed up. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, most government agencies like I appreciate why the California Air Resources Board and EPA were founded and the air back here in the 70s was just like you couldn't walk outside with the coffin back then. It was thick, right?

People would ask me to die if they if they had that smart day. So understand what it created it. Those were good intentions. But then a lot of a lot of things are created under good intentions. And then it goes off the rails because. Right. There's that to this organization used to exist for ten years and then goes past ten years.

You got to renew it. You got to be able to remove that. Yeah. That'd be kind of a good solution wouldn't it. You have sunsets, sunsets, laws and there are some legislators like that. You have passing sunset laws. But you know, it did a good thing. But now. Well, I don't know if you know that like, diesel trucks out here have to be slaughtered between 2 and 4 times a year.

For real? Yeah. So like like, not like full on Seminoles, although he called it anytime. But like, if you have like a, like an F 353 5450 whatever dude good luck running a business out here with that. Get it done. It costs a bunch of money. Right. And and if you're on the road, like if you're a hotshot truck or whatever, like that's a 2 or $3000 load at least.

So the whole idea is that, oh, they're they're producing food and stuff like, you know, how much are you really excellent. That point. It's like you're trying to drive these guys out of business essentially. Yeah. Right. And the idea now that, for example, if you modify your SEO in California and then you go to the smog shop, they plug into Europe and port and they check your ECU checksums and calibration verification numbers versus the database.

If yours does not match up, a number of reviews are automatically. And now you have to go to the smog referee, which means a full day visit. They go for the entire car to see what they know those, but what they're basically doing is you're guilty until proven is right, right? You know, you can make a car pass a smog test pretty effectively on E85 and be cleaner than factory.

But to do that, though, I have to prove I have to go and spend 20 to $40,000 proving that on foreign missions. That's not what the manufacturers are. Yeah. It's innovation. It defeats the whole idea of making these cleaner and better because no one's allowed to. And on top of that, you don't have to do smog checks in a new car.

So again, that push to get you to the car. Right. No smog checks out here. So by that time the car's out of its emissions working. Anyways, the first owners probably sold. It may have been gone through a couple owners and they're not checking it anyway. So if you buy a new B58 car and you tune it, you go around making 750 horsepower for eight years and no one's gonna know.

So you're not proving anything at that point anyway. It's it's a really perverted system at this point, unfortunately. And it's it's been created and traded by people who really don't have any knowledge about the technology involved or the outcomes. So it's it's almost an ideology. Yeah. So it's but it's also California that is California. All right. Well, a quick question, by the way, when's your guy come in here to do his one launch control a day?

Well, so what time is that? Will be okay. But actually for like some days he actually does two in Saturday. So they won't be in today. Fair enough, fair enough. Gotcha. Yeah. So does he have a particular goal with that or just for the hell of it? I want to see how fast you get the 60ft time whether or not breaks.

Yeah. He's he's pushing that thing as hard as he can. He's trying to show people that that platform will handle a lot more than they think it will. Interesting. And that's that's still a genuine B58, right. Junkyard motor. They bought it and somebody said it had a rod until it was fine. So they're still all parts. He's got a.

6872 turbo on it. Something like that. New 67. It was important. 3.5in exhaust and with a in a triple transmission. Okay. He put a stage to get into the transmission and said oh he just upgraded. Yes. So he's so distraught. A couple of shafts at the racetrack. So big for us to say. So he said, I'm done with that.

Okay. Last time out he trapped in 148 a quarter with it, but he couldn't launch it with that. So so he's trying to dial in that 60. Yeah. We did a bunch of roll on the launch. Make sure the top one is good. Then when he said, okay, I know the car is running good, let's try launching it as soon as he did.

So we've never gotten I think it's got to make something fascinating as it is right now. That's kind of sick. That's it. That's pretty cool. What kind of tire is he on? And you just doing that right here in a parking lot? Just over. Okay. Yeah. So far, I think he's up to go. 1556. 4145. Yeah. That's going to help out.

Yeah okay. All right. Last question. Then at the end of every episode I like to ask my guest to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget. You could choose whatever you want modded however you want. And you have to pick a daily driver a track car and a show car. What three are you picking on a goal for our detailer?

Okay, got to have that for a limited budget. That one's. That one's going to be a blast. I they're not the greatest cars in the world. I just love the way they look and sound. So yeah, that's that's my show car for track card. Any kind of track. Well, for me, I'm more of a real person. So I have a car is not here right now, but,

Yeah, I'm more of a record in the corners, so.

It's a tough one, but I think I'm going to go GT3 Rs no. 1992. I have driven a number of GT3 in the racetrack. I go to the Porsche experience and you know, if I can only take the team. But yeah, my first degree goes 991.1 over there GT3 Rs. And they actually don't let your job the RSS.

But but that was just a revelation in how good IT chassis can be. And so yeah I think I would enjoy that car. I also know it's going to hold up on the racetrack. I'll be able to drive it as much as I want, have a good time. There are faster cars out there, but for for what you get that you can do is just awesome.

And then for my daily driver, daily driver has to be all we'll drive. Why you're in California. Yeah, but I don't know okay okay okay. So I need I need to know we'll drive car so I can actually use that power when I want to. I hate spinning tires. My Cadillac. Okay. I don't have to do a lot to get a go.

So that one. I have not driven a ZR1 yet, but this is your one X, you mean? Yeah. The C8 platform is very livable for delivery. Yeah, it's only a two seater, but who cares? I think I think I would do the 01X for now. There are other all the red cars out there I like, but I mean I wouldn't have to do a thing to the zone X to really enjoy it.

That's a good point. I have to make some modifications to. I think you want to do like a single cab F-150, the Mexican GT-R. We did just recently. Just cards for the fun of it. But now I think I would. Yeah okay. Yeah. Okay. Unlimited question if you give me a budget. Yeah. Different story. Yeah. Awesome. Well on that, no work.

Can everybody find you? Okay. So yeah. Church Auto Test — @churchautotest on Instagram. Church Automotive Testing on the web. Hit us up, Google, give us a call anytime. Yeah, we're always here. We're here at least five days a week off of six days a week. Tennessee. Much later. Having fun after hours. Okay. Stop by. We've had a lot of guys just stop by and say, hey, I saw what you guys are doing.

I heard you guys are tuning. I want to see what you're like. We'll show you around. We'll give you a ride in our car and do some donuts in the parking lot if you want to do a launch. Yeah, just come on by. We we love to meet other countries. Yes. It's a lot of fun for us. That's awesome.

Well, Shawn, thank you very much for making this happen. Everybody, thank you for listening. And we'll see you all next time.