39. Optimizing for Motorsports, Building Classic Muscle and Japanese Cars w/ Jim Hall of TPIS

All right, hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. We are now on episode 39. I really should stop listing off the episodes because it's starting to be a problem.

You'll forget it.

No, I think everybody kind of knows now.

Wait till we get into thousands, that's gonna be an issue.

Yeah, it's gonna be 1,122? I'm gonna tell you the same thing every time. I think so, I'm bored.

Yeah, but just to get a nice countdown timer. But yeah, I'm an automotive photographer, videographer, man of many automotive aspirations, and I'm here with my co-host.

Hey guys, my name is Sean Bryant. You might see me around with the BMW 1M or Durango Hellcat, just whatever kind of tickles my mood that day. And this is the Minnoxide Podcast, and this is where we take you beyond the meat and introduce you to some of the people that make the car community so great and a positive place. And we love to share their experiences.

Perfect, and today, that's gotta be one of the best intros we've done.

Really? Oh, thank you.

Audience retention, if you don't finish this episode, you break my heart. Today, we have Jim Hall, man of the LS world, the classic JDM kind of world, the Datsuns. We got a sweet Mark III Supra out there. I mean, that's a Mark III, right? I'm not tripping, yeah.

So I didn't see it. It was in part in the usual spot.

Yeah.

I didn't know where to park, so I just fell out next to that jeep out there.

We should get a Gold Star on the driveway.

Yeah, special VIP parking only. That's actually really cool. I haven't seen a Mark III in a while.

Yeah, nice ones are hard to find because they get all rusty and, you know.

A little bit closer as well, just heads up.

Yeah, this, I have a lot of my friends call it an eclectic car collection, but this car, a particular car, has been in the family since 90. My uncle bought it from a customer of his down in Kentucky, and it had a few little things on it from a company called CarTech, Corky Bell, a big turbo. Him and Gale Banks were really the pioneers of turbocharging in the 70s and 80s, in the 90s, I'd say. But anyways, in the late 90s, I had my own company, and we manufactured parts for those cars, and the Mark II. So that car has a lot of my parts that I used to manufacture, and then I built the motor. So, he passed away a couple years ago. So, just, I'm the next natural owner, basically. So, it's a great car.

Yeah, because you're telling us off air that you have been working at TPIS since you were 13.

So, Myron Cottrell started TPIS in 1987, and TPIS is an acronym for tuned port induction specialties. So, the 85 to 92 Camaro Firebird Corvette had tuned port injection, as kind of intake manifold and all this stuff. That was kind of that, and the five liter Mustang were kind of the renaissance of performance in the late 80s. But Myron started the company back then with the TPI cars, and he and my father did some racing together, and I started working there when I was a kid in the summer and stuff like that. And then, the LT cars came out. We made a bunch of stuff for those, LS car, it was just a progression. And Myron, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago, so it was, again, I'm kind of the next person to carry the torch. So I know the business really well, and I know the cars very well. And the TPI and LT cars are getting a huge resurgence now, so we're starting to get a lot of that business coming back.

It comes in like waves, and since you've been in the industry a number of years, is that something you've noticed, like certain platforms just rise and fall and just come back out of nowhere?

Yep, same with Japanese stuff and European. Yeah, and I don't really do anything with the newer GM stuff because so many other people do. A lot of companies, and for good reason, they just go with the new stuff, and the old stuff falls off, but we've always just stuck with the older stuff. Not a plan or anything, it's happened like that.

Just what you're good at.

Yeah, so yeah, same with Japanese cars. People, I don't know, you could say an age demographic, maybe early, mid-30s to mid-50s-ish. That's fair. That's not the whole picture, but you know, a guy wants to buy, oh, I just bought an 88 iRoc. What can I do to it? I'm like, well, how many miles are on it? Oh, 38,000, I'm like, okay. Now we're in business.

That's a sweet car, by the way.

Well, they are. They're a timeless, classic car. And that's another thing that people, I think, are slowly coming around to. If it was 1990 or 2000, you'd call a 1970 Chevelle a classic car. Well, now a 90 Camaro, to me, is a classic car because people in my age group or on either sides, I'm 47 years old, that's a classic car. So a lot of people don't maybe identify with a 57 Chevy or a 70 Chevelle or a 69 Camaro.

Like for us, it's like 30s and 40s, like we don't know anything about that era.

And to me, they all look the same. Is that a 34 Ford or is that a 34 Chevy? It's a 34 Chevy. Well, how can you tell? Well, it's a Chevrolet on it, but how else?

I wonder if that's how they'll look at like, so we're kind of entering this weird era of design where a lot of cars kind of have that same look. So I think we might enter into that in like 40, 50 years, like, huh, is that a Mustang or a Accord?

Exactly, yeah, and especially with SUVs. You go out, you walk out of the store, you walk out of Costco. Where's our Hyundai Santa Fe? Oh, no, that's a Jeep. Oh, it's over there.

Yeah.

You know, and there's some of them that, the tail lights are like 90% the same, you know, stuff like that, so. So yeah, I know TPI cars really well, LT motors. I build motors for either one of those LS motors. I know fairly well, and one thing that sets TPIS parts apart is, and other aspects of the businesses, we make the parts ourselves, we engineer them ourselves, we use them, you know, I road race a 94 Camaro, I use the parts, and a lot of the parts that we make for those cars came from racing, like, oh, our long tube header for that car, same header that's on the race car because we made it on the race car, stuff like that. So, but I'm also a big Japanese car guy. I grew up, I've just had a very interesting upbringing, being around a lot of different cars. My grandpa was a huge Studebaker guy. So, you know, I don't know a lot about them, but I'm like, oh, there's a supercharged Avanti. Those are pretty cool. Let's go look at that. But we always had, we had AMC cars when I was a kid. We had Datsuns, stuff like that. So, I have a 70 AMX that my dad road raced for a while. That's been on our family since 1972. And then Toyotas and Datsuns. We always had a Datsun station wagon. My first car was a 1977 Datsun 810 wagon. And I swapped in a 280Z turbo motor with a five-speed in that car, lowered it and stuff like that. That was my first car. And then it just, Japanese cars, primarily Toyota Lexus have always been kind of my favorite kind of a make, I guess you could say. The build quality is absolutely excellent. They're just great cars.

You have such a wide range. Cause like how many people can you add? Like, I think it's probably getting a little bit easier in this day and age, but you know, people have these silos, like I'm only a Mopar guy. Or I'm only this guy, but you got two very, very different types. And even like back then, like the design languages I imagine were pretty different too, from the GM stuff to the Toyota stuff.

Yeah, and I, you know, a friend of mine, this was a few years ago, he had a 1970 911T, you know, Porsche. And well, I was, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or more, but he had, he brought it over one day, and it's sitting next to my 70 AMX. You take a 1970 Porsche 911T, and you take a 1970 American Motors AMX. Two absolutely, completely different ways to approach building a car. And that's what really, it was just kind of a defining moment. I mean, it sounds silly and over, it's an overused term, but it's like, it's pretty cool, you know? And I've always, European cars, I really, really like older Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, because they're so mechanical. I've built like the Ferrari V12, the Colombo series, the 60s, you'd find in a 365 GTC or something like that. Those engines are so simple, but yet they're complicated. Kind of like a Lamborghini engine. I just, I really, really like a lot of different cars. But, you know, yeah, I just have a very wide range of likes and I've been around a lot of different stuff.

Do you want to settle a quick debate for us? Because I'm a Diablo guy. He's a Countach guy.

Okay.

Which one do you lean towards?

Well, I was, so the last, I don't know, I would almost argue that the last couple years of a Countach, the build quality is better than a Diablo.

That's fair.

Because Chrysler didn't own them then. I mean, that's, you know, you take an old Dodge Shadow or something and you close the door and it rattles around a little bit. Kind of the same thing. But I think from a Countach to a Diablo, it's an absolutely perfect evolution because you can see the Countach in the Diablo.

That's true.

And then I think it was 1988 was the first year for EFI on a Countach. But I've also, Myron who owned TPIS, he had a lot of cars that he collected and he also loved older Italian cars. I learned a lot from him engine wise. And one of the fun things I learned from him was Weber carburetor tuning. And I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it. So I get a few guys every once in a while, they got a Ferrari or Lamborghini Countach with Weber's on it and they'll, where are you Jim Hall? I got your name from, you know.

So what is Weber tuning then?

Well, Weber carburetor, it's a different kind of carburetor, they're made in Italy. And many, many Italian cars came with these carburetors on them. And they're also a very popular upgrade for a lot of Japanese cars, older, you know, 70s, 80s, early 90s even. Like the 22R, 3TC, which is an older Toyota motor and a couple of the first-generation Celicas. But they have a side-draft carburetor. You know, if you, I don't know, if you see an older Z car maybe, and it's got carburetor, you know, the, you know, if you don't know what Weber carburetors are, it looks like ITBs, individual throttle blades, but it's carburetor. So Weber carburetor typically is a two-barrel side-draft. So the air is going in the side of the motor. They mount on the side of the engine. They also have vertical carburetor, and those are what you would see on, you know, the Lamborghinis, some Ferraris. There's even some corvettes that used them in the late 60s, road race corvettes and things like that. So the great thing about Weber carburetors is you don't have to really spill gas anywhere when you're tuning them. And they're very, very tunable. You take a Holley four-barrel carburetor. Oh, we gotta change the jets. All right, get that cup over there and take this bolt out in here. Just let the gas run into this cup. And then take the jet, you know, put it back together and hope you don't tear the bowl gaskets. But a Weber carburetor is very tunable. It's got an individual idle jet setting, got emulsion tubes in it, which I could go on and on. But they're just, they're a cool carburetor. But also anytime you have a really short runner on an engine at full throttle, it's almost louder out of the intake than the exhaust because you get that reversion bouncing out of the intake. With an individual throttle body EFI setup, you get the same kind of... So...

Yeah. So basically Italian cars were peak tuning potential back then?

Well, yeah, you know, and a lot of us say it, it's like, oh, I wish I was around in the 60s, or I wish I was around in the 20s, or, you know, or a lot of guys, oh, I wish I was around when muscle cars were around, but, you know, like if somebody was around in the, in, you know, the early 20s or late teens, oh, I could have helped Henry Ford with that. You know, not that you would know that back then, you know, like if you could go back, but, yeah, I just, I have a lot of experience tuning a lot of different kinds of things. So for me, that's fun. I have a couple really great customers that road race Datsun Z cars. And, you know, they changed some of them. Hey, Jim, we need to bring the car in and let's get it tuned and all that. So there was one guy, his name's Tim, and he has, I think it's a 72, 240 Zs that he rode races, and he had not chassied on it before. He had just, oh, this is what this guy says to use for jets and this and that. But we found him 50 rear wheel horsepower.

Which is a lot.

Absolutely. Out of a 2.4 liter motor. And it wasn't all tuning, you know, oh, your throttles aren't opening all the way. Okay, let's fix that. Okay, you know, your timing isn't what you think it is, because you use the timing light from O'Reilly's. Let's use a real timing light. You know, stuff like that. So I really, really enjoy tuning engines.

Yeah, the problem solving of it too.

So was 50 a lot for that car?

Well, yeah. So I think a factory, a stock, you know, 72, 71, 240Z, I wanna say there are probably around 130, 140 horsepower. Not that this has that, but this car made about 230 at the wheel, but he came in at about 180 at the wheel. I mean, any car, 50 rear wheel horsepower, whether it's your Durango or a Supra or a Corvette or whatever, that's definitely something to feel at. You know, 50 rear wheel horse, everybody says there's formulas and it's 20% and this and that. There isn't, because every car is different. But you know, in that particular car, that was probably 65 flywheel horsepower.

Yeah, so that was something that we kind of talked about when we were texting back and forth. So kind of break down the difference between flywheel and, you know, rear wheel drives horsepower.

Yeah, so flywheel horsepower is obviously what a particular engine makes when it's on an engine dyno, whether it's at a manufacturer or an engine shop or whatever. And a lot of people will say, oh, build me a motor with, I don't care about horsepower, I want torque. Well, an engine makes torque. Horsepower is just a calculation of torque and RPM. So I'm like, well, what do you mean? It has to make torque. That's what they do. You make torque, that horse makes torque. But rear wheel horsepower is measured or front wheel horsepower, if you're having a lot of fun, or all wheel horsepower, it's measured at the wheel. So you're taking into account your air filter housing, your throttle body size, not that you wouldn't on an engine dyno, but your entire exhaust system, your torque converter, your transmission, all the parasitic losses from your drivetrain. So a lot of people, not a lot, but sometimes people come in with a car. Most of the cars that I dyno are cars that I built. I built the engine for it. We put it in, and things like that. A lot of times when somebody, not a lot, I keep saying a lot, I need to be a little more friendlier to people that bring their stuff in. But it just seems like there's more trouble when you're tuning somebody's car that they bring in. They're not crossing their T's and dotting their I's as much. But I had an ASA car, ASA had a national tour series. All the cars had dry sump LS motors in them. This was back in the late 90s, early 2000s. I had one of those cars I converted for road racing because SCCA had a GTA class, and now that's TA2, but that car had 7% loss from the engine to the road. And then I dynoed a friend of mine's newer Chevy truck, and that was 37%. Well, it was a 3 quarter ton truck. So, you know, a lot of people will be like, wow, I was hoping it'd make more than that. Well, what did it make on the engine dyno? Well, how do we know that?

So one watch. It's just a number.

It is, and a dyno is made for tuning. It's not to compare your car to somebody else's. I know that happens, obviously. That's a lot of why a lot of people do it.

Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people see a dyno, and they just want to be able to show, hey, here's my number compared to other people's number. My number bigger, I'm better.

Exactly.

That kind of mentality, where we want to be able to see what that, what our-

What your improvement.

What we're making, versus like, I think I'm making this, and it's like, well, what are you making?

Right, so when we have, the luxury of having an engine dyno and a chassis dyno is what the engine makes, because we built the engine, we tested the engine, we verified it and put it in the car. So, you know, I've had, I have a hub dyno, the wheels come off, and there's adapters that go on the car, and the garbers bolt to the adapters instead of a roller dyno. A lot of those are inertia dynos, some are what's called an eddy current dyno, they're electric, so you can load them at any RPM and any amount of load. That's what my hub dyno does. But, you know, I've worked at other dyno shops throughout the country, and somebody will bring a car in. Is this microphone close enough?

Yeah, like three more inches, but it's fine.

All you gotta do is say something.

No, I get, that's where editing comes into play.

Anyways, yeah, a guy brings a car in, and, oh, I see your left rear tire has what looks to be about 12 pounds of air in it. Why don't we air that up? Because that's horsepower, you know. Let the air out of the tires on your bike and go ride it. How hard is it to ride? It's pretty hard to ride. So, there's a lot of variables with chassis dynoing, and I like hub dynos because you get rid of, especially on a high-powered car. You know, you see videos on the internet where three guys are sitting in the trunk because the tires are spinning on a roller dyno. You don't have that with a hub dyno.

Yeah, I've seen a video of, actually, I don't know if it was on the internet, but I saw they used a forklift to keep it down.

To push down, yeah.

I'll tell you this off camera. I don't know if it's a public video, but it's a local shop. It's a high-power car.

I've seen all kinds of, and roller dinos are a little easier to set up, and I don't know. But anyways, I like hub dinos. It's electric. I can move it around. Hey, let's bring that machine over here and let's move some stuff around here. And I've been moving from shop we were in in Chaska for a long, long time to where I'm at now. You just wheel it into your trailer and you take it to, you know, we've taken it to car shows. But yeah, so that's the main difference between horsepower and rear wheel. Rear wheel dino measures everything. Air filter, tailpipe, everything that's bolted together. So sometimes I go to a car show, and one thing that's kind of fun is if I take my super to a car show, nobody knows who I am because that's not what I do.

Right.

I'm like, oh yeah, what's this? Because I know exactly, you know, what they are. But yeah, there's no magic percentage. It makes what it makes. The dyno is there for you to tune your car or your vehicle. It's not there for you to tune your car or compare your car to somebody else's. Even, oh, my buddy has the same stuff. Okay, what exhaust does he have? Well, it's almost, you know, hey, we're done.

All these different aspects of flow and all that come into play.

Yeah, so, but we do dyno days at the shop every once in a while, and it's fun. Okay, like we had a 2023 Mustang. I can't keep track of all the Mustang.

Probably a 5.0 maybe.

Well, it had a supercharger on it.

GT350.

That could be.

Well, if it had a, no, because GT350 doesn't have superchargers. Those are NA. I don't think they even made a GT350 in 2023. Did they? But no. What color was it, first of all?

It was black.

It was black? I had to ask. I had to see if it was Mike.

Well, maybe it was dark gray. Anyways, you know, the newer Mustangs are just a hell of a car. But anyway, we dynoed that, and it was a little over 800 at the wheel.

Yeah.

Pretty close to that for torque because of the type of supercharger.

Was it a centrifugal in there?

It was like a Eaton. You know, it was like the factory. And, yeah, it just, it's not a very big motor. It just sounded absolutely incredible at, I think we ran it to 80. He had done some things to it.

Oh, if it's 8200, it might be a GT. Oh, if it was 2023, though. I don't know.

What, they stopped making GT500s?

GT350s, they don't have a new generation.

What about GT500s?

Maybe it will. I don't know.

No, it depends on the year, because the 23s, that's the new S650 platform.

How much horsepower can you put through those, where are they, hub dinos?

It's a hub dino. Yeah, my dino will accurately measure, again, it's not about horsepower. How much horsepower will your dino take? It's like, well, it's not about horsepower, because that's what the calculator does. Mine will accurately measure a little over a thousand foot-pounds.

Okay. So, because I know on a lot of, where are they, roller dinos, where it's in the ground, it's in the building, can't move it. Those ones, usually you can get about, you're accurate, up to about 1400.

Well, it depends when your tire starts to slip.

And exactly, that's around the time where tire slip happens, and then the number is a toss-up. It can be anywhere from 1400 more or less.

Yep, so a lot of the cars that I dino are anywhere from, we'll say, 400 to 800 wheel-hours. I don't really do a lot that are over a thousand, just because. Not just specialty. Certainly have. But yeah, so if you have, let's say, an LS Camaro that's turbocharged and it's got a 416 cubic inch motor in it and things like that, you know, a car like that is very easy to get 1,400, 1,500 horsepower out of, but it probably is only going to make 900 or 1,500. It really depends on the RPM. So yeah, it's just as an engine builder, I build a lot of engines. I look at, for a street car, let's make as much torque as we can in the widest RPM range. And I do that for some of my road race customers, too. I have a customer, Tom, he road races a 93 Camaro, and I built him a very nice LT, 383 cubic inch LT motor, or a small block on that when we got rid of the LT, because he had some parts. But that makes 500 foot-pounds, 500 horsepower, it makes 500 horsepower at 5900 RPM. And it makes almost 500 foot-pounds for a good 2500 RPM, from 2000 all the way to 6000.

That's rowdy.

You know, that kind of motor, you don't have to, everybody's, I want to spend 8000 RPM. I'm like, why? You're just spending money, literally. So, building a motor, you want, well, for any engine, especially a street car, you want to make 500 horsepower at 6700 RPM or do you want to make it at 6000? Most people are going to say 6000, 6700 might sound cool, but a lot of people may not like me saying that, but yeah, you want to, when you're designing an engine, you want to make as much torque everywhere and the horsepower will follow.

Right. That's the calculation. Yeah, that makes sense.

You know, a good example that I tell a lot of customers is the good old Honda S2000 when that car came out. It had a 2.4-liter motor, four cylinders, and it made 240 horse.

Something like that, yeah. In the 200s.

Yeah. Well, it doesn't make 240 horse at 5,000 RPM. It makes it way up the tachometer because you have to spin it. It takes the RPM into account to get that horsepower.

Okay.

So it doesn't, you know, it's a 240 horse motor. Well, yeah, but my 240 horse, I can make that at 6,000 RPM. So that's a perfect example of horsepower versus torque. It doesn't make any torque, not any, but let's say it makes 150 foot pounds, but it also makes it at 8,000 RPM. And that the same example can be used with any crotch rocket. Oh, it's got 200 horsepower. Well, yeah, but it's way beyond the RPM capability of a car engine, so yeah.

Have you done any bike stuff?

I haven't. One bike, I had a bike and I'd love to have one again. It's hard to find. 93 CBR, or yeah, 93 CBR 900 RR, I had one of those when I was younger, living at home with no bills. It had the blue, red and white Honda, no livery on it, and just an absolutely incredible bike. By today's standards, probably slow-ish, but really, I mean, any bike, you can get on it and it tears your hands off the handlebars. No, I mean, I had one of those bikes, and I wish I could find a nice one again someday.

It's a totally different thing. Like, I went to somebody's house. I want to say it was pre-COVID, actually. The guy had, I say, no less than 30 super bikes.

Wow.

Like, everything, every brand from BMW to whatever. I mean, it was just Ducatis, I mean, but just crazy. And somebody was at Buck Hill today. I didn't see it, but I knew he was going to be there. It has a 650 horsepower Busa.

Oh, jeez.

Yeah, runs sixes in the quarter.

Oh, disgusting.

When I was younger, in quotes, nastiest bike was a Katana, you know. 1,100, 1,000? But those, I mean, that was just like untouchable, but then that was, phew.

That's a crazy, crazy world. I'm not scared of 2,000 horsepower cars, 1,000 horsepower cars, but bikes, that one is like, I don't know if I got, I'm a man, but I'm not that much of a man.

Well, a lot of bikes now, I don't have one, but just observing and other friends that have them, I mean, they're at such a high level of development that something about an older bike that I like, where it's, the power doesn't come on right away, you gotta wait till 9,000 RPM. That's a little more user friendly. It's not just, oh, okay.

Yeah, I just pooed myself.

Yeah, now I'm sliding off the seat. Yeah, I haven't done much with bikes.

Okay, so I see you have a Sonoma Speedway shirt.

Yeah.

Speed Tour. So have you done some racing out there before?

Well, this shirt, I actually bought at Road America, which is funny. But yeah, so I have not personally raced at Sonoma, but throughout my career in life, I've worked with a few race teams, professional race teams in Trans Am. So, and then also TPIS, we raced in the SCCA World Challenge from 1993 to 1996. So I've had a lot of opportunities to go to a lot of different tracks. But most of the popular, famous road race courses I've been to, but myself personally, I've raced up at Brainerd many, many times. Road America, Blackhawk Farms, that's down in Illinois.

It's a cool track. I haven't been there, but I was trying to rent it for last year's rally, and I decided to do something else, but that was a sweet looking track.

Blackhawk is a fabulous track for street cars. Because it's small, it's 1.7 miles. The straightaway is not very long. Back in the late 90s, when I was doing a lot of Toyota stuff and Datsun stuff, I don't know if they still do it now, but we would drive down there. It was basically, they called it autocross, but it was just time lapse. I guess you could call that time attack now with the new term. But it's a great track. They've, I would say probably in the early 2000s, they really started to fluff up the place. I can remember about halfway down the straightaway, there was a massive oak tree on the left side that was probably only 15 feet from the track. So, that's all gone now. It's a really nice track. I've raced at Sebring. That's a lot of fun. We would do that between, just for fun between Christmas and New Year's with Champ Car. My uncle and a friend of his down in Kentucky, they took a, I was gonna talk to Tyler, the sore guy about this. I got pictures, but they bought a SC400 Lexus off Bay or Craigslist or something. E-bodied it, took the body off, and shortened it, shortened the pan, I think seven inches. And then they put a 1984 Jeep Cherokee body on it. So made a road race car out of it. And so they did a lot of Champ Car and lemon stuff with it. So just as kind of a fun family thing, we would all meet in Sebring and do Champ Car race between Christmas and New Year's at that. But that was... that's a pretty awesome setup. We got Kelford cams from Australia. We put those in, did some other things. Found some real JDM, HKS, remote reservoir shocks for it, you know, for a twin turbo supra, a few other things, but yeah, Chief Crazy Fast was the name of the... you know, because it's a Cherokee and whatever. But it was also funny because the jeep that we took the body from or they took the body from had a four liter in it, while the 1JZ V8 that's in the SC400 is a four liter, so we left the four liter badge on the back of the jeep. We put twin turbo super brakes on it and things like that, but that made 328 rear wheel horsepower, I think 350-ish torque at the wheels. So after my uncle passed away, that got sold, so I'm not sure where it is now, but that was...

That sounds awesome. Yeah, I got a Jeep Cherokee outside too.

Sure, let's do it.

Yeah, that sounds way better than the four liter that's in it now.

Yeah, you can get, you can get an SC400 nowadays, like a 93, 94, 95. A couple of years ago, I bought one for $1,000.

Yeah, well, that was a couple of years now. I think they're going for like six or seven now.

Yeah, we were gonna, my son and I were gonna do the same thing, but put a Celica body, you know, Mark II, well, not Mark II, but rear wheel drive, mid early 80s, Celica body on it. And then...

The Celicas were considered Supras, weren't they? They were the Mark II Supra.

Yep, so Mark II Supra was from 1982 to 1986. And then the Celica, so if you had a Supra, that was a Celica Supra, basically. Same car, it was just a few inches longer between the front wheel well and the door, and then the Mark III started in 86.5 through 92. And the way you can tell, an 86 Mark II is really rare. The way you can tell if it's an 86 is that 86 was the first year that cars here had to have a third brake light. So, and then it also had that different spoiler on the back, which it also shared with 85. But, yeah, we decided not to do that. Sold the, I think I sold the SC400 for a little more than I bought it for, and sold the Celica. I got that from a customer. I didn't have a lot of money on it. Because I'm a little simpler for right now. So, yeah.

No, so you've had a lot of road racing. So, because I know you have two of those Camaros, right?

Yeah, I have a 94 1LE Camaro, which is a 1LE is a very special RPO code for Camaros. They also made the same type of thing for Firebirds. But 1LE was an option code that was designed for SCCA showroom stock racing. Okay, so that started in 1988 and went through 96, but the 96 cars were kind of fluffy compared to the hardcore 1LE cars. So 1LE Camaro, whether it's a third gen or a fourth gen, no AC, no fog lights, no rear defrost, no power seats, roll up windows, that kind of a thing. All just made for being as light as possible. So yeah, that's my 94 street car, if you want to call it that, is a 1LE car that has a 402. I built a 402 cubic inch LT motor for that. And there's a couple companies now that a lot of people, you know, the LT1s from 92 to 97 had an OptiSpark distributor, which a lot of people have heard of. And in my world, they're like, oh, I got to get rid of that thing. And well, all you really need is a cap and roller, buddy. But there's a couple of companies now, EFI Connection. My friend Mike Noonan owns that company. He was a pioneer in developing a 24x setup to run an LS computer.

So what is a 24x setup?

Yeah, 24x means, you know, if you look at, you know, any engine, you know, modern engine, it's got a trigger wheel in it. So 24x on an LS motor means 24 teeth. So 24x is, hey, let's get rid of the Optispark distributor or on a small block Chevy. They have done it on big blocks, too. We get rid of the distributor. We put a trigger wheel on it, essentially, for the crank and the cam, and then you can run it with an LS computer. You can run it with a Holley computer because Holley makes LS stuff. But the nice thing about your tuning capability is much more expansive with a bunch of different tables and things like that over the factory LT computer. But the really, really great thing about that, and a lot of modern engines, is you have one coil per cylinder. So your spark energy is so much better. So you get a more efficient engine with a higher compression ratio or forced induction. But anyways, this 402 that I built has that system on it. And typically you run it on E85. It has 12 and a half to one compression. But it makes 585 horse and about 555 foot pounds. Down at 2,500 RPM, it has almost 500 foot pounds.

So it just launches.

Well, yeah, I mean, I need to get a different rear end in it. It's still, a lot of people are gonna laugh if you know anything about GM rear ends, but it has a seven and a half inch GM rear end in it, which is among the weakest rear ends that GM has made. A lot of people will put a four to nine inch in it, or Strange is a company, they make a 12 bolt bigger, bigger rear end for it, but.

It's gotta be perfect though. Like if you have all that torque on the low end coming out of a corner.

Absolutely, yeah. So with the LS1 computer, which is what this uses, I haven't, I get rid of that, put a Holley computer in there, like an HP or whatever, but the LS computer, those cars, let's say a 2001 Camaro, they had traction control on them. So like a lot of cars, this was mechanical traction control. So if you guys ever driven a car with the wheel, the wheels will start to slip maybe on snow and the accelerator pedal kicks back at you. So that's what these cars had. So they would close the throttle and they would retard timing. So in this computer, I have a, in the wire harness, I wired it. So a button on the steering wheel grounds the pin for the traction control on the ECU. So if you're coming out of a corner and you get a little wheel spin, you just hit that button a little bit and it will retard whatever you predetermined amount you're able to have. So, yeah, and that's a great, you know, it's what I do for a living. So obviously, if you're gonna build a motor for one of your cars, it should represent kind of what you do. But yeah, you just, you don't even have to, and you're going 75 miles an hour down the highway in sixth gear and you just roll into the throttle and you know, gone.

Right.

We took it out to the Black Hills maybe seven or eight years ago, and I think it's like 17 or 18 miles to the gallon, which that's not too bad.

That's incredible compared to, I feel, most of the cars that I've owned, probably for you as well.

So, okay, so you went out to the Black Hills, you were just driving through the roads out there then?

Yeah, it was just a vacation. I love those roads out there. Yeah, and I think that was the previous iteration of this motor. I've built three of these motors. The first one was a 409 cubic inch, but that's a one. So LT1, just like a 350 small block Chevy, the bore size is four inch. And LT blocks are a high nickel block. And if you get the right one, the walls are a little thicker than other ones. So this was 100 thousandths overbore, so it was a 409 cubic inch. But that was a little more fragile. I ended up cracking the block on that.

But... How do you know if... You could probably just look at factory numbers. How do you know a block is what you're looking for?

Well, you know, there's... You can... Older Chevy blocks were not as good. If you look at the front of a small block Chevy block, or a lot of older blocks, Pontiac, Ford, whatever, you know, the cam is in the middle because it's a V8. So... There's a... When they machine the front of the block, they just go across... They go across and machine it flat. And you can literally see if the cam is centered in the block. That's the first thing you look for, or what I look for. The block's centered, and you know, okay, there's not a lot of course shift, which means all of the material around the bores is going to be pretty, it's going to be about the same. You don't really have any thin spots. But really the main thing for... To check the thickness of the bores, you know, how much you can safely take out is you sonic check it. And that process is very similar to going into the doctor when you're having a baby, they use an ultrasound machine. And yeah, sonic check little, there's various manufacturers that make them, but yeah, it puts a sound wave through the block, the cast iron or the steel if it's a sleeve block, and it basically tells you how thick the material is. So one good example of, you know, a lot of times you can ride that wave or ride the edge a little bit. I've taken some 5.3 LS blocks out of trucks and bored those out to a six liter. One time, the first time I did it because I wanted to see if it could be done. And back in the late, when the LS motor first came out in trucks, you know, the C5 Corvette came out in 1997 and nobody made any blocks. You just stuck with what you had. So you could get like a 383 cubic inch. You'd put a longer stroke crankshaft in it. Well, in 1999, they started putting them in heavy duty trucks. So we would literally, we wanted that cast iron block so we could bore it out and make a big motor. We would literally buy a six liter motor in 1999. That was the first year there weren't very many made. You could buy a six liter motor and we would literally not use anything but the block. That's the only way you could get a different block. So we would...

So what would you do with everything else?

Well, so 99, the heads were cast iron. Screw that, we don't want those. Okay. Because an LS1 head is aluminum.

Right.

So at our old shop, we had the barn, we called it, go out to the barn, see if there's one out there. We just had this stockpile of brand new takeout, six liter pistons, connecting rods, crankshafts, all this stuff. So I was just up there looking for something one day and I'm like, these pistons up here and nobody wants a stock or six liter piston. Cause if you have a six liter, you're gonna bore it out to this or that. So I just took a five liter or a 5.3 liter block and bored it to a six liter and I'm like, oh, okay, 130,000 wall thickness. That'll work. That's probably about the thinnest I would go on a cast iron block. But I think we took like 18 pounds of weight out of the block by pouring all that cast iron on it. I purposely put a piece of cardboard under the boring bar so we could pick it up and put it on a scale when we were done to see how much weight we took out of it. So, but yeah, that sonic checking is a good way to tell how far you can go on something like that. So, yeah. There's a lot of older Datsun guys, the L24, L26, L28, the inline-six stuff. They're like, oh, we can take this out to 80,000s. And a lot of people do, you know, they overbore them 80,000s. I'm like, eh, let's look at that first. Those blocks, the water pump is right on the front of the block. So you have inline-six engines. I kind of learned this by doing a lot of the 5MGE Toyota engines, which is the predecessor to the 7MGE, and like the Mark III Supra, 5MGEs were in the Mark II Supra, and the rest of that same vintage. One of the main problems with the 7MGTE is they blew head gaskets in a turbo application, because the coolant temperature from the front of the block to the back of the block was somewhat drastic. Also, coolant flow, there was a lot of coolant flow to the back of the block. So the bores wear differently, because they're all working at different temperatures. So a Datsun block, that L-Series, which is also almost the same block, evolution into the RB-Series motor. The water pump's right at the front, and it blows cold coolant right on the front of that bore. So that part of the bore wears differently. Areas of the bore. So that's another reason. Or blocks like that, you want to sonic check them to see, if we bore this out, how thin is the spot or how thin is the spot. So you can do a lot of different things with those motors to equal out the coolant flow. You can run coolant lines to the back of the motor, the 7MGE, there's a couple of passages, holes you can drill in the back, cool, that can see it. For a while there, nobody made any good head gaskets for the 7MGE motors, and then HKS finally problems. So they started making steel gaskets, and pneumatic, and a lot of it.

Yeah, I gotta take a second and say how freaking cool this is by the way. This is one of my favorite parts of the podcast because, and I avidly say this, that I'm a dummy. So it's like, I love being in this position where I'm learning something, and I hope some of our listeners learn a thing or two because I know all y'all aren't as smart as me either. So, not all y'all, but I know there's a lot of people out there that want to learn too. So it's super freaking awesome.

This is a totally new platform. I've never really even looked into any of these like old Datsun engines.

The forgotten motors basically.

Yeah, so these are predecessors to the 1JZ?

Well, yeah. So, you know, 1JZ, 2JZ, that family of engines gets tons of attention because of a certain movie.

Yeah, the JZ.

I'm like, yeah, well, yeah. So you take a 2JZ cylinder head. You know, if you took a 2JZ and you put it next to its grandpa or dad, the 7MGT, 7MGE is naturally aspirated, it's like a 1JZ.

Correct.

Whatever. You take those two motors and you put them next to each other. Okay, let's look at them. Now let's take them apart. They're very, very similar. All Toyota crankshafts in those motors are forged. The connecting rods are forged. The pistons are not forged, unfortunately. But, the cylinder heads flow very, very close to the same from motor to motor. The 2JZ is a little more elegant looking because it has a round engine cover on it.

Oh yeah, that's gorgeous. That's the chef kiss of, you know, these resistons.

The 7M motor has a plastic, you know, it's got three coils. It's a wasted spark motor, so each coil has two spark plug wires going to it. But it has a little black cover on it with some cheesy louvers, and it says turbocharged and stuff like that. But that's 80s excellent stuff there. But yeah, the 2J and 1J also. 1JZ, for people that don't know, is a smaller 2JZ motor. Other than that, they're the same motor. Same design, same family. So there's a two and a half liter, which is, the one, the one, the one, one JZ is two and a half liter. And then the 2JZ is a three liter. The 7MGE is a three liter. Yeah, so the 2JZ for very good reason is a very popular motor to modify. But I've built many, many 7M motors that for a lot of guys that built 2JZs, it'd hang right with them. I'm not talking 1500 horsepower or anything like that. I'm talking, you know, that fun street amount, you know, 600 to maybe 800 horse. Wow. So, and back, you know, back in the late 90s, you couldn't, you know, the twin turbo Mark 4 Supra was like, this car is incredible because it could compete with the world's best supercars, essentially, you know, any Porsche, a Ferrari, Lamborghini.

Yeah, it beat a lot of records back in the 90s. Yeah. You know, it destroyed supercar, you know, absolutely. Braking and, you know, there were just like performance handling. It just did it so much better than some of the.

Absolutely, and it was, you know, it wasn't a cheap car, but it wasn't as expensive as many other cars, so. And one thing I've always been a fan of Toyota for, whether it's a Camry or, you know, really nice Mark IV Supra is the engineering. You know, you might take some, and I'm going back maybe 20 years or more, but an American manufacturer might have 20 alpha and beta test cars. Toyota would have a hundred of them. So, oh, we didn't see that. Well, Toyota did. That's why it doesn't do it. You know, you can, I've had several Toyota cars, well over 200 of those.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think we talked about this with Tyler about Toyota and their factories, and, you know, they'd stop the production line, you know, 30 times a day, just to fix something and then figure out, like, hey, why did this happen? And then go back down the line and fix it so it doesn't keep happening.

Yeah, and that's one of the things I was telling you that, you know, hey, I watched, or I watched one of your podcasts with him, and I'm like, exactly, that's why I like Toyotas, because they do stuff like that.

You guys are passionate, man. There's a reason to be passionate about Toyotas.

Yeah, they're just very into their cars, and they know why. And that's a good reason why, not just like a lot of people look at it as like, oh, you only like it because of the 2JZ. You don't have any other reason to enjoy these cars, but what you were just saying about the 7M, I feel like I had no idea that engine even existed, and now it makes me feel like I want to go out and find a 7M car and build it up, because the alternate would be to spend $50,000 on a 2JZ. How much does a 7M car?

You can find a very nice, we'll say a Mark III Supra Turbo, maybe somebody's messed with it a little bit. You can find a really, really nice one between $8,000 and $10,000.

See, that's amazing, because that's what the Mark IV Supras used to cost.

Absolutely.

And so that's where I feel like a lot of people are like, oh, I can't wait for the prices to go back down, but at this point, it's not gonna happen. No. You know, people invested what they thought, and now it's at that price point. Yeah. So now it's like, okay, you gotta take a step down and kind of look for the next best thing.

And that's the whole thing about the 80s and 90s cars now, whether it's American, European or Japanese, is they are, you know, like my favorite car show around here is the Back to the 80s show at Buck Hill. You know, you can go to any other car show, I don't know, 69 Camaro, 70 Chevelle, you know, it's like, wow, all of them here. But the Back to the 80s car show is really fun because, oh, there's a Conquest TSI, there's, you know, an 84 Ford LTD wagon, you know? There was a guy.

There's a lot of weird cars that came out in the 80s.

Yeah, it's just the vibe, it's just like, oh yeah, I remember that, oh yeah, that car looks cool. But there was a guy there, he had a, he has an 88 Camry station wagon, and it had like 48,000 miles on it. I'm like, I would drive that every, you know, I drive that every day, maybe, whatever. Let's go to Dairy Queen, let's go to Duluth, let's, you know. You know, and you can say that about any older car, they all have more character. But, yeah, I just, the Toyota product, Nissan is, from that same era, is also pretty good, but I'd rather work on a Mark IV Supra or a Mark III Supra than a 300, the second gen 300Z, with that VG, the V6 in there, especially a twin turbo. There's no room to work on it.

Yeah, those things are a shame.

They're wedged in there pretty good. I'm a big fan of the 80s, and you could say early 90s cars, especially Japanese because they have their own character. The build quality is very good. But I had a really, really nice 2000 GS400, Alexis GS400, and it was used as a pace car. There was a, what was it, the PPG Toyota Atlantic Series. These cars look like Indy cars, but they were powered by a 4AG Toyota four-cylinder. Same that would have been in a first gen MR2, or the halo car, the AE86 Corolla, same engine. But PPG painted a bunch of these cars, mostly Toyota and Lexuses, to be the pace cars. But this car had Supra twin-turbo brakes on it. It had a few TRD things on it. It had some TRD springs and other things, but it had the 1J, or the 1UZ FE VVTI, a four-liter V8. But it had a five-speed automatic transmission, and it was, the gearing was absolutely perfect. It was just, rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. It would just climb through the RPM, the RPM range in each gear. But, you know, that car is a 2000. I sold it a few years ago. It only had like 90,000 miles on it, but you get out of it, you just tap the door and it goes, doonk. If that was an American car, it would go, rrrr, you know, the glass would rattle inside of it. You know, so, yeah, I love Toyota cars.

There's something so satisfying when like a car closes its door, and you have that just one, so nice.

And you're like, oh, and especially if you buy a car, and you're used to, you know, kind of putting a little effort into closing the door, and you know, like that's what that Lexus, a couple other cars I've had were like, oh yeah, okay, it's closed. You know, it takes a few days to remember that you don't have to slam the door to close it.

Yeah, I've noticed that on my wife's car. It's a Lincoln, and the door is so heavy, because it's double-paned glass, and all the speakers in the door. I like go to shut it like a normal person, and it's like, it goes to like that half-click. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. So I gotta open it, and then like close it, like force it shut. And then I like, in any of my other cars, like I just, you know, with two fingers, I can just push them, and they're like, click, close.

Yep, that's something to be said for that.

Yeah. I'll chime in with a question I had a little bit earlier. So if somebody wanted to get a 7M built by you, for example, and they wanted, and I'm not asking for myself or anything, I promise. Maybe I am.

He's asking for me.

Yeah, I'm Sean's bad idea journal right here.

He's going to text me later with like, oh, check out this Datsun.

What are you doing tomorrow?

Yeah.

So if you wanted to get a 7M built out, let's say 600 horsepower, 700 horsepower, what does a typical build for that look like?

Well, 500 horse is very achievable without a lot of expensive parts. 500, that 400 to 500 is your best bang for the buck. 600 horse, 600 horse, you're kind of, you can use the stock crankshaft. I wouldn't recommend it, but the problem is, as these cars get older, the 2JZ is a different story because you can buy a billet 2JZ block. You can buy anything for those motors.

It's so well supported.

So, you know, you can use a Toyota crankshaft. I would probably nitride it, gas nitride it. That's a hardening process.

What's that process look like?

It's a crankshaft supply in Minneapolis does it, as well as a few other places. It basically, so it's kind of hard to explain, but have you heard of cryogenic treating things, freezing them?

Yeah, yep. People do it with like brakes, I think.

Brake rotors, crank, you know, all kinds of stuff. Brake rotors are a very popular application for that technology. Gas nitriding, let's say you got 10 crankshafts, you put it in this chamber, and it pressurizes, it puts a gas into the, I don't know how deep it goes into the metal, we'll say 20 to 30 thousandths. I'm not an expert on it. I just know that it's a good idea and it works. Yeah, it basically changes the molecular structure, just like cryogenically treating things. So the crankshaft is stronger. I've done both processes, and that type of thing is a good application for something that might kind of be on the edge of its envelope for a usable part. Most of the time, you know, 2JZ I built, this was many moons ago, but I think it might have been Bryant crankshafts. They made crankshafts for those motors. And you see that product, along with really any upgraded, you know, an LT1, LS motor, small block Chevy, you buy a forged crankshaft for one of those, and they're not nitrided because they don't need to be, because the product was engineered for its use, where you take a 7MGE crankshaft, and you want to make 600 horsepower, yeah, it'll do it. You just got to keep in mind that, hey, this is an OE crankshaft. So with that being said, now you design your motor, so you don't have to run it to 7,000 RPM. But let's change our turbo size. Let's change, hey, let's put some Brian Crowe camshafts in it that are going to work in this RPM range with our turbo. So that kind of a thing. And that's the nice thing about, no matter what engine, the American V8 engine industry is flooded with crate motors. Just call them, get a crate motor. Just get it, put it in there. Well, that motor was built with two things in mind generally. I'm not saying this about all of them, but it's built with a horsepower number in mind and a price. I have several customers over the years, I got this engine from this company, and it's a 383 cubic inch, and they say it makes 450 horse. Well, what parts are in it? Well, it's got this, and it's only got 10 to 1 compression, but it has a 248 degree duration camshaft in it. Well, that's how they get the horsepower number, but it doesn't drive very good, and it doesn't make any low RPM torque. So the nice thing about building an engine specifically for its use is you can do exactly that. You can pick, based on experience, you pick the components to work in the environment that you want it to work in. So, you know, if you want to make a 600 horse, 6MGT, 7MGT, let's do it, but let's make it so it makes almost 600 foot pounds of torque, too.

Right.

So the one offshoot thing here is the 5MGE is also an excellent motor, which a lot of people are like, what the heck's this guy talking about? I'm really going back. The 5MGE, so the M series Toyota inline 6 started with the 2M. Have you guys heard of the 2000 GT Toyota, like a 1969? It looks kind of like a Z car.

No.

I only go as far back as 3000.

Well, Google it. It's a very cool car. It's a very iconic car. They didn't make very many of them, but that engine had a 2 liter inline 6, like a lot of older Japanese cars, the Nissan's Mitsubishi didn't do anything like that. So it's the M series block. So that block was used from about 1968 all the way to about 1993 in the Cressida. And the Nissan stuff is the same way. The block in like a 1970 240Z, that's the L series. That block went all the way until they started making the 300ZX here, which would be 1984. But in Japan, meanwhile, hey, let's build a skyline. It uses that same family of block all the way to the end of the... What's the... There's R33, R34. How long did that...

R35, and that's what we're still on.

So, and another cool thing about a lot of... You know, there aren't a lot of Japanese manufacturers, but primarily Toyota and Nissan Datsun, they use this stuff for a long time because it works great. But anyways, I can talk about this stuff all day, but the late 70s was the first when the Celica Supra came out. It looked like it basically was a Celica, but it was longer like I was talking about before for the six liter. So that was a 4M GE motor. And then they had the 5M, which was 82 to 86, and that was a dual overhead cam, 2.8 liter inline six. It was a really, really cool motor. Have you guys like a late 60s Jag XKE, where it's got the two cam towers going along the motor? They're up top where you can see them with spark plugs down the middle. Same deal with a 5M GE. They look really cool. But that crankshaft, so they had, nobody cares about this stuff, but in Japan, if you had a Mark II Supra, you could get a 6M GE, which was a 5M GE with a 7M crank in it. So it's a three liter. It's a three liter, but it's a 5M GE. So if you take a 7M GE motor apart, it's a 6M on the crankshaft, because it uses the 6M in, you know, a crankshaft, you know, stupid stuff.

I'm doing so much math in my head right now.

But anyways, so yeah, the 2JZ came out. It's a fabulous motor for obvious reasons. One reason it's a lot more efficient is because it has the side, the intake manifold, brings motor from the front, or brings air in from the front, the 7M and the 5M. 5M is, nobody makes parts for them anymore unless you can find some old PECO camshafts or HKS even made cams for them for a while. But you can get some serious flow out of one of those cylinder heads because it's a HEMI. So they were just two valves per cylinder, but the 2JZ, I don't even know where we're going with this, but.

We'll figure out where to take you. I got so many, so this is the beautiful thing about this podcast, because we do have repeat guests too. What I'm going to do after this, I'm gonna listen to this episode six to seven times, and we're gonna pick out a list of questions. We're gonna be like, all right, let's talk 60s Japan. We'll figure it out, but we'll just see where it takes us.

There's a lot of stuff to talk.

I feel like I'm back in school. I love episodes like this.

Sure, and one thing for me is, a lot of the friends I have my age, or friends as I was getting older after high school and everything, they all went for American stuff, where I kinda did, but mostly because I worked around it. So the past couple years, especially now that I have the Mark III Supra, it's been a lot of fun. It's just fun to go to a car show that might be centered around imports or something like that. I met a great guy from Duluth who has a Mark III, and he put a 3UZ, the 4.7 liter, all aluminum Lexus V8 in his car. It's just fun to, I've been missing those types of people because I didn't have the car to go along with it. It's just, you go.

All right, so the conversations wouldn't come because if you come with your Camaro, the JDM guys won't naturally talk to you.

Exactly, and the JDM stuff, or whatever we're calling it these days, Japanese stuff, whether it's JDM or here, whatever, it's just, I really enjoy talking about it.

Have you been to Japan? I keep looking at the Japan heads. I'm just like, have you been there?

No. Japan, England and Ireland are on my shortlist of places to go. So my son Jack doesn't like flying, but I think he'd probably make an exception.

He was probably flying on his way to California. He was probably cooking, I bet.

Yeah, he's having a good time out there.

That's a cool car he's got too.

Yeah, he bought a GR86 which is, can't keep the car straight. It's the same as the Subaru BRZ.

Yeah, the new one. These newfangled cars.

Yeah, got that fuel injection on. Yeah, he bought that car, well, he ordered it in April of 2020. Ordered it, put down a $500 deposit. And then they're like, wow, we don't know how long it's going to take to get it. I'm like, it's fine. But he wanted to buy it. He did all the legwork, and he's like, I want to kind of get one of these. You know, a lot of parents, I'm not talking poorly about parents, but I'm just like, yeah, let him get a car. He's buying it. Who cares? But he's done a lot to that car. It's a really, really great car. It's a heck of a value.

I think it's one of the... I don't want to say cheap. It's not a cheap car.

It's not a cheap car.

It's one of the least expensive rear-wheel drive manual cars that you can buy today.

Yep, you can get the six-speed or the automatic. He got the automatic.

How do you feel about that?

Betrayed.

Betrayed.

It would have been cool to get a six-speed, but having driven modern cars with modern automatic transmissions, I can't fault him for it.

It's crazy nowadays.

It's just... Yeah. If you want to manually shift it, you just manually shift it, and you don't have to move your left leg at all.

It still twitches sometimes.

What am I doing over here?

I don't have anything to do. But he ordered up some HKS coilovers for it. The whole time he's talking about this stuff, I'm like, this is exactly what I did when I was 18 or 19 years old.

You kind of get excited for him.

He's done basically all the work himself. He did coilovers. He bought an HKS stuff. It's just really, really nice parts. The quality is nice. There's some other long-standing brands that aren't what they used to be.

Okay.

You get them and you're like, oh, this one made China.

Yeah, like TN or Tine or whatever you pronounce it.

Or certain carbon fiber manufacturers for supercars that say they're made in America, but instead you can literally go... I'm not going to say who it is, but you can literally go on the owner's Instagram, and he's in a f****** factory, and it has Chinese safety warnings.

Yeah, yeah.

It happens, but that's part of it.

And to segue way just... We'll come back to the GR86, but I had an 86.5 NA. So 1986.5 was the first year for the Mark III, and you can only get an NA car. 86.5, there's no 86.5 turbos. 87 was the first year for that. Anyways, this would have been about 1996 or 7. I had that car I set up for autocross and stuff like that. I bought some Tain coilovers for it. I want to say they're like $2,800. Oh. And this was, what is that, 25 years ago?

Wow, that's like, well, probably like $5,000 in today's money.

What? I'm getting chills talking about it because I took these out of the box. I'm 20 years old or, you know, whatever. Took them out of the box. I waited a long time for them. And I just took them out of the box, and I'm like, I can't use these. They're too nice.

Yeah, they're works of art for that money.

We're going to scratch them, you know? But I used to autocross tons in the late 90s here in the Twin Cities area. We used to autocross. They had autocrosses at the National Guard hangar out at the airport on the tarmac. That was really cool. But Dakota County Technical College, which I know they do a lot of now, we used to go out there all the time. There was different Corvette clubs that had autocross, the old state stadium, Midway Stadium. Anyways, I put these on my car. I had built a really nice, naturally aspirated 7MGE for the car. It made about 300 flywheel horsepower. Back then, that was like, oh, that's pretty cool.

That's pretty good, yeah.

And some other things. But that car I used to take to Blackhawk Farms a lot for their, what we call now as time attack. But those coilovers took over two seconds off my lap time. And that's a long time. Yeah, and before this car, so in the Mark III, you could get, if the car was optioned, it came with TEMS, Toyota Electronically Modulated Suspension. So the shocks were basically adjustable shocks. You know, a lot of shocks, you take your little tool and you put it in the top and you change the involving. Well, Toyota had a system on those cars where it had an electric motor on the top. So like my turbo car, when you hit the brakes, you can hear them go, or you make a sharp turn, or you accelerate hard. You can hear it. But anyways, I had some Tachiko, I think, Tim's shocks back then. A few different manufacturers would make Tim's shocks for those cars, so you could still retain all that stuff. But that was just... That was an eye opener for me. Like, okay, spend money, good money, you're going to get good performance, which nowadays typically happens, but not all the time. But yeah, back to the HKS stuff and the GR86. I can't remember what else. You know, he's got different wheels on it, and I can't remember.

Yeah, the white on white. It looks good.

Yeah, it's just...

It's a good style right now. Like, the GT3 I drove last week, it's white on white like that, too. It looks really good.

Yeah, the exhaust, I can't remember all the stuff he's done, but it's just... There's a road. I shouldn't say where it is because everybody's going to go there and run.

Yeah, don't give it away. I don't give away any of the secrets of the show.

So he's on this cruise that he was on, you know, mostly German and Japanese cars, younger guys, and they went down this road and he's like, Hey, Dad, have you heard about this road? I'm like, Uh-uh. Well, let's go over there. And I'm like, Dude, I drive by this road all the time on the way to work. So this was shortly after he got the car, it was all stock. He got the premium trim level. I think there's two or three trim levels.

Baller.

Yeah, if you're going to do it, do it.

You have to.

So I'm in the passenger seat and he's been up this road several times by then. And I'm just like, oh my, this is...

This thing rips.

It does. And it just sticks and sticks and sticks and sticks and there's no... It just does whatever you want it to do. And my car on my Supra, one of the products I made, just another Segway, it was a quick change boost controller. The factory setting on those cars was 8 to 10 pounds, depending on air temperature. It has an air temp sensor. So if you went to 10 pounds, it would hit boost cut, and it would just shut the ignition down until it came back. It's kind of like a rev limiter, but a little more harsh. Anyways, I made... This was back in the 90s. My company was Hall Sport. We made exhaust parts for the cars, big brake kits. One of the products was this quick change boost control kit. So the Mark III Supra next to the steering column, you got a fog light switch, hazard lights, or not hazard, fog light, I don't know, whatever. There's three switches, and then there's a blank spot with a knockout on it. So I made a kit. It uses a air solenoid, a little solenoid, 12-volt solenoid and a regulator. Old school, this was before computer-controlled boost control. Use the solenoid, and then I would order 10 or 20 cruise control switches for a Mark III from Toyota and put it in that empty spot and peel the cruise part off. So you could switch back and forth between your preset boost level or stock. So anyways, my car right now, I have it set up for 17 pounds or 10 pounds. But anyways, on the 10 pound setting, I can't get away from his GR86. It's just, I don't remember what they weigh, maybe 27, 2800. It's a very, you know, it's a lightweight car for a modern car. A lot of cars now have a bunch of airbags on them.

Yeah, getting real close to that 4000.

Yeah, you can't get away from the excess weight that they forcibly have in them. But yeah, it's a great car. He wants HKS, some of the HKS stuff you can't get here yet. Somebody just, I don't remember the company, but they just released software so we can do some tuning work. Okay. Those motors, the F was a F824, I think. I'm not a Subaru, it's a Subaru motor, but 12.5 to one compression. So a few people that we know have done E85 conversions on them and picked up a little power. Not a lot. You know, E85 has higher octane, but the really important part about E85 is its cooling effect because it's alcohol. When you inject alcohol through a small orifice, it turns into fog, basically.

Yeah, I start sweating when I get alcohol in me.

And you probably don't get any cooler, you get warm. But anyways, he'd like to get an HKS supercharger kit for it. And then at that point, okay, let's do an E85 conversion.

Should be, what, around 350 to the wheel, I think?

Probably.

So remind me again, do you want higher or lower compression if you're wanting to boost a car?

Well, typically lower compression. It's all about cylinder pressure. But a lot of modern cars can get away with high compression ratio because they have variable cam timing. You can change your cylinder pressure with cam timing. So that's why, you know, it's like, I want to get a supercharger for it. I'm like, okay. But you have 12.5 to 1 compression, so we need to be able to, obviously you would not put a, well, some people, but the right way to do it is not to put the supercharger on it and then go drive it. It needs tuning work. So, you can change your cam timing and things like that. There's different advantages to that with if it's forced induction or naturally aspirated. Typically you don't use as much ignition timing. It's all about cylinder pressure. So whether it's forced induction or naturally aspirated, you get to a certain amount of cylinder pressure, it ignites just like a diesel. You just don't want that to happen too soon. You don't want that to happen when the piston is coming up to the top of the cylinder or it's really hard on parts. So another thing too that I don't quite know about, when you run a power adder, supercharger, turbo or nitrous on a motor, it makes more heat. Your piston rings start to get bigger because they expand. And when your piston ring and gap meets each other, bad things happen. So typically on a motor with forced induction or nitrous, you make that gap bigger so it can grow more. There's kind of a silly, you know, I got a 5.3 out of a truck at the junkyard and it has 200,000 miles on it. Well, that's perfect for nitrous because the rings are, you know, the gap's a lot bigger on the rings. But I think that's, the supercharger is kind of his next step, but.

It's a very common thing on those.

Yeah, the previous iteration of those, the first gen cars, there's companies, a couple of companies that make a turbo kit. I think Jackson Racing makes a supercharger kit. That name, back in the 90s, Jackson Racing was awesome for supercharger kits for Hondas. So that's, oh, they're still in business? You know, so by Jack buying his GR86, and then I've got the Supra, all of this stuff has kind of come around full circle, and it's been a lot of fun.

So is there a lot of teaching going on along the way, then?

Well, yeah. So I have, there's a hand up in technical college in Eden Prairie, I've taught an engines class up there.

Okay, I told you I was back in school.

So I really, really enjoy teaching, not only just on a very simple, I don't even know if I'm whatever, I'm teaching you maybe, but I'm not meaning to. But I really enjoy teaching, especially the younger crowd.

That's the demographic I'd fall into.

Sure.

Sean's a little older, he's a boomer.

But I think what you're doing is sharing knowledge.

Well, sure. But yeah, that's one thing, other instructors that other students may have had, you're just going through a book and, okay, today we're going to talk about oil. Today we're going to talk about the part.

Jackets more hands-on.

Well, yeah, and also a lot of, so Jack's 19, he really enjoys working on his car. That's all winter. His car was in storage, and rightly so, he had just got it and driven it for like a month and a half before we put it away. He's like, I just want my car. I just want my car. I want to do something with it. But he likes working on it. He's very intuitive, which obviously probably gets some of that just from family lineage or whatever. But one trend I see with kids, people his age, is there's a very, very strong following of they really like cars. But when I say but, that means there's a negative, but it's just that they enjoy the cars. They like owning the cars. They'll put a set of wheels on it, things like that. But compared to when I was younger, we'd tear the whole car apart.

Yeah, a lot less wrenching.

Yeah, there's less wrenching. But the passion is still there.

It's tough nowadays. So a lot of people such as myself, we aren't out and about on our own. We don't have a space to wrench on it. It's just different, I feel. I think it's more of an access thing rather than a lack of wanting to do it.

I think also it has to do with the fact that older cars were a lot more analog.

Oh, absolutely.

And there's way less wiring, way less electronics. And you didn't need as many specialty tools as today.

The specialty tools.

Almost every time I decide to work on my car, I'm like, oh, this would be so much easier if I had this tool and then I'd go run out, buy it just for this one time. And yeah, it ends up in the toolbox. And it's like, well, now I need a bigger toolbox to fit all my specialty tools.

Yeah, and that's exactly it. It's not, it's nobody's fault. It's just evolution. You know, I would be like, there was one time I had an 82 Toyota Supra, and it had a CarTech turbo kit on it. Yeah, great car. That was, I think, my third car. That was my introduction to turbocharging. Okay. I got that car from my uncle, but there was no motor in it. And I had never, okay, he gave me all the parts. You know, and working at a machine shop, I was able to do all that stuff. But, you know, I was driving up to the store by my house. I grew up in Eden Prairie, and for whatever reason, the timing belt broke. I go, okay. So I got the car turned around. I coasted all the way home, about three miles, because it was mostly downhill. And I went up to the store to get something. I think we were just leaving to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle's. And I'm like, I'm going to be a little late. But got at home. We get home from Thanksgiving and I'm out in the garage and my mom goes, What are you doing? Like, I'm taking the engine out. I had another five MGE that I took out of another Supra. I'll just swap the motor, you know. I don't know that that's all that realistic for a lot of kids these days, much less adults.

If I saw my kid pulling an engine for one of their cars, I would go, are you insane?

A little bit. I mean, how long of a project was that then?

Well, you know, again, older cars. And when I say older, a lot of people, huh, it's a 65 Mustang. No, this was in the 90s. I mean, really any 80s or 90s Toyota, you need a 10 or no. Yeah, you need a 10 millimeter, 12, 14, 17. You can do just about anything on that car. But yeah, I mean, and I had, this was when I was, I think, 16 or 17 years old. And I had, so I grew up in Eden Prairie, graduated Eden Prairie High School. I got my Supra running, was driving it as a regular, that was my car, whether it was winter or not. Well, okay. Hey, what kind of car is that, Jim? Toyota Supra. Oh, those are really cool. And like a month later, he gets one. Hey, I want to, what's that car? You know, ask Jim, he has one. I think my senior year of high school, there were four or five Mark II Supras. And then I had my Datsun station wagon that I was talking about a little earlier. And this kid rolls up in a 77 280Z. And it's kind of geeky because I know that sound. Oh, it's a Z car. So I go over and talk to him, and he's like, oh, yeah, it was my grandpa's, and he didn't want it anymore. I'm like, sweet. Well, then two or three other kids get Z cars. And I'm like, this is awesome.

That's how it works back then.

Yeah, so we would just, we'd park at the end of the parking lot, all the cool cars. And then by the time my brother, younger brother, graduated, I think in 98, there was like Mercedes and Porsches. Out of there just like that. But no, it's not, you know, a lot of people, I hear it all the time, especially from, in quotes, older people. Yeah, kids these days, they don't know how to do anything. Well, yeah, they do. It's just different stuff. You want a website built? Well, a 75-year-old person's probably not gonna know how to do that, but somebody that's 20 to 30, probably, you know, it's just, it's different stuff.

It's a different time. We all grew up learning different skills.

Different things, yeah.

Such a different world. Like, there's a kid in my neighborhood over there, literally 19 years old, and he has an Amazon store, made a quarter million in Q2. It's like 19 years old at that kind of money, and it's like, god damn!

And that's not working in a coal mine. That's doing something relatively simple.

Yeah, yep. The coal mine days, I remember. No, I'm kidding.

It's a black long.

So, there's kind of two routes I can take this, because again, there's a million questions I could ask you, so we could either go down to the tuning rabbit hole or the suspension rabbit hole, because I know each of them can both have a time to talk about either preference.

I don't care.

What do you think, Sean? Because suspension, we kind of like touched it a little bit with Michael Peterson, where he basically said is like, the average Joe will never figure out suspension.

Your car does not need coilovers.

Yeah.

Is that the hot take?

Well, let's talk about suspension, because I feel like a lot of people can relate to suspension.

It's one of the first few mods you can do in your garage.

To your car. And that's something that I can do. That's what a lot of people can do. You can still do coilovers with simple tools. I mean, actually I needed a special tool to do them for a Volkswagen.

Yeah, my brothers.

I needed like an 18 spline bit. And it was like, you gotta be kidding me. Just for one part, why is this one screw here? Why couldn't you use a normal bolt? I know, I was dumped on it.

He's so mad.

I'm thinking about it because it was so stupid. It took me an extra 30 minutes just for this job. I was so annoyed by it.

Yeah, oh, I'm German.

So, yeah, let's talk about suspension because I love suspension. I think it's one of the best mods you can do to a car.

Yeah, and it's something that most people can just, like you were saying, do in their garage. Tuning, you know, and another thing that needs to hopefully stop at some point it has tapered off is, hey, what are you doing? Or what did you do to your car? Well, we tuned it. Well, what did you do? We put a header on it. No, no, no, no. Tuning, when you tune a piano, do you put different keys in it? No, you tune it so it sounds right. But again, back in the 90s, it's a tuner car, you know. When you hear that term, it's a Honda Civic or it's this or it's that. But anyways, one thing that I hear a lot of is, what are you going to do to your car? Well, I'm going to put coilovers on it. I'm like, okay, tell me why, you know. Well, so I can lower it. Well, you can do that with lowering springs. And don't buy the eBay lowering springs. Buy them from a reputable company like H&R, Eibach.

Eibach's a really popular one, especially with the German crowd.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Eibach makes a fabulous product, and they have forever. I keep going on these.

That's fine. You're good at coming back.

Yeah, so at TPIS, the LT cars had come out, so 1992 for the Corvette, and 93 for the Camaro Firebird. We developed a 50-state legal 400-horse kit for the LT cars, which 400-horse on the street back then was, well, it's a good bit. It's pretty stout, and it'll pass emissions in any state, which is another thing. There was nobody else that had that at the time. But anyways, we offered many different products for those cars, and one of them, we worked with Eibach to make a spring, because nobody made lowering springs yet. So we had a 94 Camaro, a Z28. We bought an automatic, so it was easier to sell later. But I think now I kind of regret or would argue that decision, as opposed to the six-speed. But the Eibach ProKit is a really popular, they have ProKit and Sportline, or they're two typical street car lines. The ProKit is a progressive spring, Sportline is linear. So linear springs typically you would use more in a racing application. But I've had Eibach springs on several cars, and they're just like, you put them in, you're like, yep, that's exactly what I was looking for. H&R does, I've had H&R springs on a few cars too, they're made in Germany. It's the same thing, it's just like, these people, you know, a lot of these companies now, they're just like, okay, how much does the car weigh? What's it weigh in the front? What's it weigh in the back? Nah, that spring will work. These companies actually test the car. They make a spring for it, and they'll test it, whether it's on a racetrack, or they put it on the car, and they drive it for three weeks. So, name brand stuff is definitely the way to go when it's suspension stuff, and also it's suspension. You can't break. But I see just trash, like a friend of mine was like, hey, what coilovers should I get for my Mark III Supra? A couple of friends have got those here recently, or colleagues. I'm like, well, you don't really need coilovers, but if you want to, here's brands that you can look into. Well, will you help me set them up?

I'm like, for a case of beer.

It's a street car. You don't need them. But anyways, you can go on eBay and buy coilovers for a car for $300. And there's actually, I think it was Donut Media.

I love the high-low series.

So they, I can't remember their names, but I think it was, they had a couple of 300, 350 Zs maybe. Okay, we're going to buy the $400 coilovers on eBay, and I can't remember what the nice brand was, but some of that stuff is surprising. Like, eh, it's not too bad, but what's it going to be like in six months? Or if you hit a pothole or something like that. But a lot of, I'm not putting down coilovers on a streetcar, but...

Yeah, so kind of get into the reasoning of why most, because most people won't ever use its full potential, I'm imagining.

And a lot of people buy coilovers so they can lower their car. Well, you can do that with the properly engineered set of lowering springs. But also, they're like, wow, then I can raise it and lower it. And I'm like, you know...

How often are you really going to do that?

I've been around this stuff for a long time. I can't think of one situation where I went over to a buddy's house and he was raising his car up.

Yeah, I did, I lowered mine, what? Almost a year, year and a half ago. And I said I would adjust the front to make it a little bit higher.

I never did, because I don't care to get under there. So, coilover, well, the right coilover is worth buying if you're going to use it. If you're going to buy a 10,000 square foot house and you only use 2,000 square feet of it, what's the point? Unless the 8,000 is a garage.

Yeah.

So, yeah, you know, I just see a lot of people buy junk, and it's junk, but it achieves the goal of lowering your car. Well, you can buy some nice lowering springs for 250 to 300 dollars.

Get the job done.

Yeah, and a lot of OE shocks, struts, whatever, are really high quality. You know, they're not a Monroe shock, which is fine, but...

So what does the ideal situation look like for coilovers? Like, so this is somebody that's going to be tracking regularly, I assume?

Yeah, so for me, a coilover shock is... let's say you have a... let's say you buy a 350Z. You know, a very common car you can buy nowadays. A lot of money. And you're an enthusiast, you buy some wheels for it. Maybe you put a Megan Racing exhaust on it, and you're having fun, and you want to lower it. So things with coilovers, typically the shock absorber is adjustable valving. And obviously you can raise and lower the ride height. To really get the most out of a coilover, or an adjustable shock in general, is go drive it. You're not going to be able to tell by going to Dairy Queen. To get the most out of your investment, you need to test it. And you can't test it really on the street. You can change valving to change your ride quality, which is fine. But that's why I just always, I give some of my friends hard time. What are you putting coilovers on your street? You really need a racetrack to do that.

And do like changes like every run or something?

Well, so what you could do, autocross would be a good place to do it.

That's right. I've done that exactly one time. And I was scraping on the front a little bit, because I would take the corner so freaking hard.

Yeah. And autocross is a very accessible way to test every aspect of your car. A lot of guys like drag racing. Well, okay. I like road racing or autocross, you know, obviously as the same family. But yeah, so let's say you have, we'll say the 350Z or a Miata or something, a car that you've had for a while, you know it well, you know how it drives. So you go to an autocross. You're like, okay. You make note of your time. If you know that car really well, okay, let's do two clicks firmer on the front and the back, if the car is pretty neutral. Okay, let's make an objective. How did that do? Well, it was a little looser. Okay, well, let's only change one end of the car now. That's really what you need. You need to be able to test what you're doing. So there's no point in buying $3,000 coilovers if you have no way to objectively test their performance.

And then it changes with each track, with the temperature. So even if you dial it in for that track, you're going to have to keep doing that with every time you go to another.

And it's not like you're competing either for money, or comparatively more often than not.

So one thing that I learned being around professional race teams is if it's 100 degrees out, or if it's 70 degrees out, your shock works completely different. You take a car that runs 12 hours of Sebring, or you take a car that you're racing and it's only 45 minutes, or it's an autocross car, shock absorber that's doing work, engineered specifically for the car, like let's say you have a GTI, and you take it, whatever. You take it to a track day at Brainerd, and you're out on the track for 35 minutes. Come in and put your hand on a shock absorber. It's pretty warm.

Yeah, there's fluid inside the shock absorber.

The oil gets warm.

That's what's comforting those blows or pushing it back.

Yeah, the valving and everything. So when you push oil through the piston and a shock absorber, you're effectively making things work against each other. So oil that is 130 degrees is going to work much different than oil that's 220 degrees. So when you build a shock, like a Penske shock or an O-Leans or whatever, you build the shock for what you're going to use it for. So there's all kinds of different things. But really, there's a lot of guys out there that are younger. They might not have... They're not making 100 Gs a year. I would say, hey, if you want to put coilovers on your car, just set that idea over here for a little bit. See who makes springs for your car. And then, you can put different... You can put some Coney Yellow shocks on it or whatever, but factory shocks work pretty good, because thousands of dollars were put into developing them. Not only for the valving, but also the quality. I mean, my 2002 Suburban has 240,000 miles on it, and it still has the stock shocks on it.

Wait, it still has the same shocks?

Yes.

After 240,000 miles? You've never replaced them?

How? Because they're good shocks. They're high-quality shocks.

I blew my shocks out at like 70,000 miles.

Is it a newer one?

It was a newer car, yeah.

There you go. I'm going to crap, so I'm just saying that, you know, just don't, you know, just relax, do a little research, but-

You can get performance gains out of lowering springs.

Oh, absolutely. And don't buy the yellow lowering springs on eBay that are $80. Buy a name brand that they're made for your car. They're not just, hey, what'd you have for dinner, steak? Oh, what kind did you have? I had ribeye. What'd you get? Oh, I had the steak that comes on a steak bagel at McDonald's. Well, they're both steak, but, you know, which one would you rather have? So yeah, a lowering- So let's talk about lowering a car. What does it do? It looks cool, but your car is also going to handle better because it's a lower center of gravity, it's just basic physics. So when you lower a car, it's going to handle better, but also there's the secondary things to look at, like spring rate and all that. Well, you don't need to worry about that if you buy a quality name brand spring kit, because they did all the work for you. If you buy just some crap off eBay, I'm not saying that, whatever.

Not all of it is, but some may be.

$100 for a set of lowering springs compared to $380.

You should be nervous.

Yeah. Well, it's the same thing.

I got a 75% coupon shopping.

What is that ride quality going to look like when that person hits a bump with those $100 springs?

Their car is just going to go like this. It's going to be really annoying. And hey, is the spring going to break?

It depends on how hard you hit the hole.

Exactly.

If you drive like me, you're going to take an airborne.

So yeah, but lowering springs are a really easy way to make your car look better, but also like just driving to the grocery store. Oh, wow. That's a pretty nice upgrade, you'd say. And a lot of times you can just do it right in your garage. You need a spring compressor and then all your typical tools. Sometimes depending on your car, if you have a strut at each corner and you don't want to mess around, or you're not sure how to do it, you can take those to a repair shop and they'll swap your springs over for you. You pick them up, you put them in your car, there's that. One thing that a lot of people don't think about too as they progressively upgrade their car is sway bars. The spring does a lot of work, but having a correct spring and shock package on a car, whether it's a street car or a race car, is great. But sway bars can also add another dimension of incredible, noticeable performance. Factory sway bars, a lot of times, they do a job, they keep your car from doing this in a sudden lane change or an emergency situation. But that's another aspect that you can take advantage of. And again, don't buy cheap junk because the diameter of the bar, who knows what it's made of? Is it made of steel or chromoly? Is it solid? Is it hollow?

It's endless. All these different little variables.

Yeah, but anything you can do to your suspension on your car, it's fun when you can just get in your car and go drive it and you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. And that's something that unlike nitrous where you run through it and you got to go get the bottle filled, it always works. And then...

Damn, I forgot to fill up the propane for our grills. That reminded me.

And then there's also the the deal where you do all the stuff to your car and then, okay, well, it's time to move on. So you want to sell your car. Well, if you put crappy coilovers from eBay on it, you basically devalued your car. You put nice parts on it. No, you're not going to get all that money back. But it shows that you took pride in owning your car.

It wasn't some 16 year old throwing crap parts.

Or you could pull the parts off, sell it, put the stock back on the car, you know.

It's hard to sell crap parts.

It's impossible. You're not going to get any money.

It's not even worth the effort to take them off. Put the stock stuff back on.

Sell it with the car.

So that's something to keep in mind. I always think about that. You know, not that the cars I have, I have because they mean something to me and I don't really plan on selling them. But there have been cars where I've had it. And now, let's drive this for a little while and then sell it.

Yeah.

You know, if you show that you take pride in owning it, that keeps your resale value up.

So one thing, just because we are getting close to the two-hour mark here. Oh, time flies, man. I really wanted it because we barely even did an introduction with you just because we got right into it. But tell us a little bit about some of the road racing stuff you've done over the years with some of the teams you've worked with and all that.

So back in the mid-90s, I mentioned earlier SCCA, Sport Car Club of America, one of the bigger, well, probably the biggest amateur road racing sanctioning bodies in the country. They've always had a pro racing segment. Like right now, it's Trans Am and Trans Am 2. But back in the 90s, they had a touring car series called World Challenge, that was Mustangs. These are all production-based cars. So you would build the car from a factory shell, you could say they're not tube-brained. Camaro, Firebird, Mustang Supras. They had Mark IV and Mark III Supras, depending on the year. They had that, BMW M3s were in it, this and that. So anyways, I grew up around road racing. I've been around it forever. My dad road raced and been around it for a long time. So TPIS, we raced, we had a third gen and a fourth gen Camaro that we professionally road raced then. And then I got a little, as I was getting into my late teens, I'm like, yeah, I think I want to do something else right now. So I worked at Toyota City up in Brooklyn Park. I just sometimes you just get these ideas. I want to do something different. So I was still a super guy, Toyota guy. I was in the parking lot getting out of my car. And this was you guys. Well, you guys see Toyota trucks all over that say TRD off road. So late 90s, you could buy a Toyota Tacoma, or they had just come out with the T100, which is now the Tundra. But this is another segue, and I'll keep it short. Anyways, there was some TRD reps at Toyota City because they were just launching all that TRD stuff for those vehicles. Hey, who's super is that? Anyways, so I got to do some work with TRD a little bit on some of the... They didn't have any parts for a Mark III, so for a short amount of time, they made some Mark III parts, air filters. Sweet. Okay. Stuff like that. Anyways, so did that for a while, and then I worked for Leighton Reese, who had a repair shop in Ian Prairie, still does, Leighton's garage, and he raced in the Trans Am series. He raced in ASA and then Trans Am. So part of me working at his shop was, we need a little help back here in the race shop. So I got to learn how, we made our own body panels out of carbon fiber and all kinds of cool stuff, and I learned more about the racing business, professional racing business. I learned how to take care of a race car. You can't just go race it, put it in the garage, and then take it out and race it again. You have to maintain it, take care of it, make sure it looks nice, clean it, and all that stuff. And then, just have always been around that kind of stuff. And then, back in the 90s, when we were racing our Camaro, another car that was in that series was the Eagle Talon. And Archer brothers, Tommy and Bobby Archer and John Archer, that whole family, they raced those cars, and those guys are great guys. They're good friends of mine. Tommy had retired. Tommy and Bobby Archer are very accomplished road racers in the US. I think Tommy also raced at Le Mans. But anyways, Tommy wants to race in TA2. They're doing this and that, and they're having, you know, they need to improve their program. So they called me at TPIS because they needed more power. And these cars use an LS base motor, an LS3 base motor. So I started working with them on engine development and this and that. And then before you know, can you come to Daytona with us? Can you go, you know, things like that. So and then I have a few vintage road race customers that I help and things like that. So and I just, I find it very pleasing to take a race car or a car to the track and use every aspect of the car rather than, and let's see what it does in a quarter mile, which I have customers that do that. They're very, very good at it.

Yeah.

It's just, I like the performance of the whole car, braking, accelerating, turning. And it also uses a lot more, in my opinion, it uses a lot more of your brain.

Okay, well, the quarter mile, it's still exciting.

Oh, no, I.

Yeah, we're like all around car enthusiasts here. Like we've had people that, you know, road course. We've had a lot number of drifters, and I have a number of drifters coming up here soon, which is something we.

I don't know if we've had actually any drag racers on, surprisingly. With that probably being one of the more popular.

Absolutely.

Especially since I've been around the most too.

I have, yeah, I just, a few weekends ago, when they had the NHRA Nationals up at Brainerd, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to that, you know.

Hell yeah. Hell yeah, brother.

Hell yeah, brother. So yeah, that's just what I've been around, is road racing. But yeah, if you ever have two more hours sometime, we can.

Yeah. No, the thing is, and honestly, if this is like a middle of the day podcast, we'd probably keep going for more and more and more. Cause like, these are, if I went to college like this, and I was a back and forth.

You guys could do it. I don't have it in me.

You're burning out.

I'm sorry.

These Jockos are good, but they're, you know, they got a limit on.

Sure.

On myself.

Dude, let's put it this way. I, and they're not a sponsor, but I would not make it through these podcasts without a Jocko. So use code Minnoxide for 10%.

Not wrong. But no, actually you can use code Minnoxide for 10% off.

But no, like I could tell, like, so when we do longer podcasts, especially like ones that are more in depth, like this one, like I noticed it with Dave Rasmussen, with Michael Peterson, Sam Moraine. It's like, it's around the one hour mark where you really come into life. Cause like we've gotten to know each other. How, you know, it's just, especially when someone like you've never met before, like I didn't know you existed until a week ago.

Sure, absolutely, yeah.

So it's like, Here we are. Yeah, super fun stuff. I mean, there's so, so much we could talk about. Cause like, you just have a wealth of knowledge. It's very obvious.

Yeah, 30 years in the industry, you know, you've obviously picked up a thing or two.

Yeah, that's, you know, there aren't, yeah, I've just had a very fortunate, you know, I'm always like, oh, we're over here. Oh, we're doing, okay, yeah, I'll do that. Or, you know, hey, you know, a friend of mine just called a couple of days ago, hey, I got this guy that wants to run a 69 Camaro at the 24 hours of Daytona, the historic race. And I'm just like, and I need an engine guy. I'm like, yeah.

So these are the types of builds that you'd be putting out sometimes?

Yeah. Yeah.

Detour.

This is a two hour and 45 minute podcast now.

We're going for the new record.

Sean, if you need to leave at some point, I'll lock up. What the hell goes into a build like that? So it's 24 hour?

Yeah, so, you know, everybody, most people heard like the 24 hours of Daytona.

Or Le Mans.

Or Le Mans, you know. Those are, the historic is a little different because it's just different. So 24 hour race, you're literally running the car for 24 hours. The historic's race, you're there for 24 hours, but since a lot of these cars are older, and they're not, you know, even, you know, a 69 Camaro at the actual 1969 Daytona 24 hour, a lot of them, you know, they had problems.

Yeah, a lot of them weren't even gonna make it.

And that's not anybody's fault, but nobody's fault, because they didn't have the parts to do it, you know? You had not very good brake pads, not very good tires, you know, stuff like that. So anyways, they run the car for, I believe it's four hours. They come in, and there's a brake to check the car over, because you don't want to tear your, you don't want to crash your historic car.

Right.

Basically, it's for safety. But yeah, so, but I would say of 24 hours, you probably have at least 16 hours of track time.

Which is still a lot.

That's still a lot.

That's a lot.

And that goes through the whole day, so.

Yeah, it's a 24-hour period.

Nighttime. Because that's where. And we'll see where things change.

Absolutely. And it's really weird driving fast next to somebody in the dark.

I do it next to troopers all the time. For some reason, that's how it always happens.

When you get old like me, you kinda bring that down a little bit.

Yeah, I don't speed nearly as much at night.

I don't either, mostly, especially if you're in a car that you care about, you don't want to hit anything.

Or if you have 5% tint, you just want to see anything.

I remember those days.

I almost whacked a deer leaving here yesterday, Sean.

Is that my fault?

It's right next to your house. But, so, are there multiple drivers in these cars?

Yeah, there can be.

I imagine it's not one guy.

Typically, there has been, and I can tell you about that if you really want, but two or three drivers usually.

Maybe next time.

Sean's like reining me in. He's like, dude.

He taps the table.

Yeah, I'm about to reach over and hit the N button.

I'll take 10 seconds. Boris said, late mid 90s, early 90s, he raced a 24-hour race without changing the driver. He raced the whole race by himself.

That's crazy.

He even got out and changed the tires.

No, this was in the Firehawk series. It was the Firehawk. So, anyways.

That's freaking crazy.

The amount of drugs he was on.

He wasn't on any. He was on adrenaline.

Yeah, that's the thing, the adrenaline, man.

And he wanted to race. He wanted to be there racing.

Could you imagine he just invited all his friends? He's like, hey guys, I really need you to show up so I can take a break or two. And then he's just waiting around like, oh, they're not coming. I got ghosted. And he's like, well, I guess I gotta do this by myself.

He knew going in, he just did it by himself. That's Boris for you.

That's rally weekends for us nowadays. Like if your co-driver doesn't show up, like imagine I don't show up to CarMunity. You're gonna be driving it by yourself for three days.

I'm gonna be pissed. You'll find out in the next episode. Well, actually, when we have the episode, probably 41, 42, we'll be talking about CarMunity rally.

Because we're gonna do a few down in Chicago. And I think we have two days left to register, by the way. If anybody wants to register for a rally, use co-minnoxide for 10% off as well. Or no, a hundred bucks off, whatever. Whatever the code is.

Could we take a few minutes and talk about that?

About what?

I mean, the thing you're talking about. So there's a lot of people just from experience, they see these things posted, these rallies and whatever, and they don't have any idea what they are.

Yeah.

Can you explain what it is?

Yeah, so Trump came around, rallies became very popular.

Hey, whoa, wrong kind.

Wrong rally, okay, okay. Okay, wrong rally.

The Subarus and Mustangs.

We'll go back to the 1941 rally. But so yeah, rallies nowadays, so basically, so there's just kind of two types of rallies. You get the Subarus jumping hundreds of yards, rallies. I really wanna go to one of those events here soon.

Sure, Ultra Boy Forest, yeah.

Otherwise, you got road rallies, which is basically like, it's a multi-day cruise vacation for car enthusiasts. Yep, so in this instance, car community, we're starting here in Minnesota on day one. I'm gonna, I should probably look at the itinerary again, but just driving some fun roads, kind of like a big size cruise.

Yeah, we'll end up in Wisconsin, somewhere near Road America, I believe.

Yep, so.

Awesome.

Yep, and then day two, we're gonna be on Road America. So it's kind of like an all-inclusive thing. And a lot of different rallies do it different ways. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. Most of them include a full track day of some kind, whether it's track racing, drag racing or road course. I've done both. So I've actually had that, or autocross too. So when I did my Niagara rally, we had autocross, and what was day one? Drag racing? I don't know. I've rented every type of thing. Like we did Whiplash last year. We rented out Atlanta Motorsports Park. Okay, cool, sure. But yeah, it's like a big cruise with challenges and fun pit stops.

Different events you're going to and all that stuff. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, so it's not just driving from A to B. There's usually A to B to C and then maybe a D.

Okay.

And then along those points, there's challenges where maybe somebody scouted a route. So they want you to go a specific way. They don't just want you to go on the highway and get to the hotel right away.

Yeah, so that's a back road. So like when you brought the Black Hills, when I used to run Venom Rally three years ago, that was our route. So Minnesota to Pikes Peak, did the Black Hills and everything, three-day event. I rented out PPIR. So that was pretty sweet. And people always get on me like, man, why can't rallies be cheap anymore? I'm like, if you only understood the fire sale that I had, because I was able to get the hotels at like one-fifth of the cause. Like people are like, man, we don't have to see these $600 rallies.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine like trying to like plan all that out myself, you know?

Yeah, well, I did it.

I know, you did it, but you know, you're doing it for other people. Like I couldn't imagine like putting together like the whole route for myself and then like figuring out hotels and then figuring out like where the tracks are and like, are there events going on that I can stop and do? There's a lot that goes into it.

So were you asking that question just because like you're always curious?

I'm asking it kind of for me, but there's just a lot of people that I know, they see like you're running down the road and you see Cannonball Rally, you know, in a car or this or that. And people are like, rally? Where do I sign up? Because they think it's, yeah, you got to get from over here down to Des Moines in three hours, you know? And that's not, that's not it. Yeah. It's a...

Not legally. Yeah. So how I used to get around that, so and Crown Rally used to do this too. So we kind of adopted their model when I used to run it too. It's like, you would aim for an optimal time.

Okay.

Which is calculated off the GPS or whatever. So it's like the person closest to the optimal time would get the most points.

Yes.

But not every rally is points based. Community is, you know, lots of challenges. Mine was points based, but like Gold Rush, for example, it's a, I've heard, because it's a 10 day rally.

Oh wow.

Well, it's two legs, five days and five days. It'd be a lot of highway driving and stuff. You know, just kind of like, let's hit the strip club kind of. I've heard there was a lot of that. I have some friends that went on Gold Rush, and they're like, yeah, there was a lot of that. But it depends on who you're with too. But yeah, it's one of my favorite things to do. Because it's a big multi-day cruise. So it's like, and then depending on the group you end up with, it's not like you're assigned to groups. It's just like who you're naturally comfortable driving with.

Yeah, this guy has this car, these people.

Right, the Corvette guys seem to find each other, you know, in their jorts every single time.

Reeboks or New Balances or Sketchers. Sketchers are the new thing now.

That's the hot thing right now with that crowd. Okay, are they light up Sketchers or?

Well, probably not yet. That might help.

No, wait till the younger crowd get ahold of...

Reeboks are getting hard to find.

Yeah, yeah.

And New Balance, you know, there was a time where they couldn't find the New Balance shoes they needed because there was a run on them.

Welcome to the Reebok podcast. No, Sean, should we pop the usual three?

Yes, let's.

Go ahead.

He's like, I want to go to sleep. We haven't listened to the show before. We like to ask this question at the end and just kind of figure out, you know, what kind of vehicles that tickle your fancy.

Nobody's going to say the same ones I do.

All we got to see is what you choose for a daily, a track car and a show car.

Sure, so my daily, what I would, you know, a lot of people, if I could have, but my daily driver, which is the best daily driver I've ever had, is a Chevy Volt.

Chevy Volt, really? I think that's one of the cheapest cars you can buy.

It's like, I bought it. I'm like, you know, I want to learn something new. So a Chevy Volt, a lot of people hear the name, ah, it's an electric car. It's a plug-in hybrid. So think of it as a Prius, but a lot better looking with a battery in it. So you can drive wherever you want to drive, and you don't have to worry about range or any of that.

Wasn't expecting that. So even with that limited budget, huh?

Every, well, I don't know.

Well, that's his daily.

It's a great car.

Let's hear what his track and show car are.

So for a track car, I would go to a race car, and that would be my 94 Camaro that I already have, or a 1970 Penske Donahue Trans Am Javelin. Okay, that's bomb. Yeah, I'm a little bit of an AMC guy, so.

Not a lot of you guys left out there.

No, especially my age. They're all, you know, I go to a, I don't go to AMC car shows because people are, where are all the stickers for on there? Well, it's a road race car. What do you mean it's a road race car? What's that? You drag race it? They don't know anything about it.

They got their own little.

So you're the youngin.

Yeah. Why'd you paint the engine that blue color? That's not the factory color. Well, no, that's the color that. And then show car. Yep. Is that the third one? So when you say show car, are we talking about a car that you drive to a car show and have people look at?

Yeah.

Just for like visual or whatever impact.

Whatever you want to be. Because a lot of people say race cars or show cars.

Yeah. I would say a 72 Lamborghini Muras.

Wow. What color? The one that's got the.

Probably yellow or red.

I got to see one in Tahiti blue or Tahitian. What is it? Whatever. It's like one of two have been made that color. Super cool in person.

Those car, that's like my favorite. I'm just like, ooh, just talking about it. That's my favorite.

Those got the funny looking headlights.

Yeah.

Right? It looks like it's got eyelashes.

Yes. And then the headlights go rink.

Yeah.

And you still can't see anything. No, those Lamborghini Mira S to me is not the pinnacle of automotive technology, but just, it's just a beautiful car.

I need to watch that video again. Was it Top Gear? Who did the, it was a green one. Was it Top Gear or Grand Tour? They did an amazing video on that. I'm about to watch it again.

It must be Top Gear, because I don't remember that being a recent car.

I'll have to look it up.

It is not a recent.

Jay Leno has done a couple of really nice segments. Yeah. It's the car, if that car wasn't available, because nobody could bring it to my house, is a car that not many, I can guarantee, you guys haven't heard of it. It's a 1970 AMC AMX3. Google that. It's an absolutely beautiful car.

Would you take that over to the Miura? Or are you gonna stick with the Miura?

I'll stick with the Miura, but that would be a close second.

Okay.

AMC built seven of those cars that are built in Italy. They're a mid-engine sports car, super car, which is an overused term these days. You guys know what a Pantera?

Yes, yeah. We're gonna have somebody on the show here soon that has a Pantera.

Very similar approach to building a car, but it's a beautiful car, one Pebble Beach, I think, four or five years ago.

Okay.

Oh, wow. AMC built it? Yeah. Isn't AMC an American motor company?

Yes.

What were they doing in Italy?

Well, Dick Teague, the designer, I knew his son, Jeff Teague. Jeff Teague designed the 86 Thunderbird and the 86, 87 Ford Taurus. Very revolutionary automotive designs, but Dick Teague was the AMC designer, and he wanted to build a car that would just a completely different approach from a lot of AMC's cars. And he hired BMW to do all the engineering, the durability testing. Bizzarini did the building of the cars and design of it. And it was an absolutely incredible story. There's all kinds of incredible stories out there that nobody has heard of. But if you have a Google machine, Google AMC AMX.

You know what I'm going to do? One of these days, I'm going to do a 24-hour podcast.

I'm there.

I'm just going to have guests come throughout. You'll fill out 12 of them.

Sure, absolutely.

The Minnoxide Lamans.

Yeah.

Oh my god, yeah, the Minnoxide. I'm doing it. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to have to get a locate. I'm doing this. You're going to be one of the first guests, I swear.

Put it on, what's that?

Like a streaming platform?

YouTube Live.

YouTube Live, yeah.

Oh, we could do it.

Well, we will see. I don't know if you're going to come in for a spotlight for like an hour.

He'll slide us some pizza rolls every once in a while.

One day. One day, that'd be so cool.

I'm happy to come back if you, yeah, I really enjoyed it. There's a lot more to talk about.

Yeah, where can people find you?

I'm on Facebook, but I don't have a very unspecific name, Jim Hall. I'm on Instagram, the underscore Jim Hall. tpis.com is our website. Yeah, Jim at TPIS.com's email.

Perfect.

Sweet, we'll see if anybody wants to do, I want to send my dad some buddy to you. He needs to build some more cool s***. Sean?

Y'all can find me on Instagram. It's one MNMOPAR. Check out all the cool cars that I got. And also pretty soon, we're gonna go on that rally, so.

That'll be fun.

Yeah, follow us on that.

Yeah, or join us. And then also, if you're on this podcast, you already know where to find me. But nonetheless, Minnoxide, everything. Make sure, oh, real quick, go to minnoxide.com, sign up for the newsletter, weekly updates on podcast. At some point, I'll do giveaways. I'm designing some really cool, I'm doing a complete redesign of all my Minnoxide branding and merch and all that fun stuff. So sign up for all that cool stuff. But yeah, other than that, guys, thanks for tuning in. Jim, thank you so much for joining us. This is a blast.

Enjoyed the heck out of it.

We'll do it again. This was super freaking awesome.

Did he break the record?

Oh, no, well, we can break the record, but you're just like, I gotta go to sleep.

You're gonna fall over.

You're passing out.

You guys can keep going. You can go for the record. I'm just gonna walk away.

Yeah, second, but I think keeping it to around two hours is like, should be our max, because it's tough for people, especially since we're doing twice a week right now.

It took me four times just to watch the one with Tyler because, ah, listen to it half hour, ah, we'll listen to it on the way to work.

But that's the nice thing, is like, you know, to and from work, onto a car meet, you know, all the way to California, like your son did.

Absolutely.

So that's pretty sweet. And one of the, before we wrap up, it's really cool to go into the analytics. Like I was showing Sean yesterday, it's like, I could see that people are going back all the way to like episode 12 currently. Sure. Just, that's a lot of viewership. That's crazy, so love doing this. So I appreciate everybody allowing us to do this. It's so awesome.