61. Building Mustangs, Servicing Ford GT’s, Track Support, w/ Jarrett Bowen

Perfect, let's do it. All right, hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, aka Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And man, it's been a while since we've done a proper intro because of PRI. Do you remember how the next part goes?

I don't really know. I know we were working on some stuff, but yeah, this is the Minnoxide Podcast, as you said. I'm Dan with Gunna Garage, and we are just here to bring you beyond the meat and give you a chance to meet some of these people you see at your car shows and maybe on YouTube or wherever you see them at.

Yeah, it's about time I'm starting to feel a little bit more like normal. I sound a little bit like Steve-O, but it doesn't matter to me. But today we have... Is it Jarret or Jared?

Jarret.

Okay, I thought it was... I saw a T in there. So, Jarret Bowen from Bowen Built. Dan's been talking about you forever, and I think I've heard your name a number of times through the community just because I have an absurd amount of Mustang clients, but...

Same here. Yeah.

I think yours pay more, though. But no, Dan was telling me a little bit about you. Dan's been really on it with trying to get guests on his podcast from a different, I guess, part of the car community. So it's been really cool to have you along my side to make it work.

Yeah, well, I've had that discussion with you. I have blinders when it comes to cars, right? And I try and like we had a BMW guy on the other day and they're spitting off numbers and I have no clue what they're talking about. I'm very, after talking to you for so long, you probably know, like I'm very Ford oriented. I have a passion for one automaker and it gets hard for me to get out of my comfort zone. But I know a lot of the Ford guys in the area, which is beneficial to hopefully the show so we can get some of these people on here and some of the bigger names in the metro area here.

Yeah, next few weeks will be very Chevy oriented. So I think it's time to wrap up the Ford era. But nonetheless, we wanted to get you on to obviously talk Ford. You've done some very cool stuff. I was even perusing through your page a little bit. It looks like you work on some Panteras and some just a number of cool things, Ford GTs. So just tell us a little bit about who you are, how you ended up with Bowen Built, and we'll go from there.

As a kid, like Dan, like my first cars that I fell in love with were Fords. I grew up back to the 50s, GSTA, going to the old school shows. So I'm all about muscle cars and sleepers, something that has a lot of power but doesn't really look like it. So I got big into Thunderbirds to start. So my first car was an 88 Thunderbird.

One of the best.

Yeah. And very underestimated car. And it just drove me to loving cars, because it was like, hey, I can mess with this, maybe go fast, and I can be unsuspecting. So honestly, the weirdest part, not even like the biggest Mustang fan. I work on thousands of them. You know, for me to say like I'd own one, there's a ton of nice ones. But I don't know if I could ever just settle down on one Mustang. But that drove me into just wanting to work on cars. So I started going to tech school and was offered a sponsorship by Apple Valley Ford in the early 2000s. So hopped on that, jumped over to the Ford Specialties Program and became a Ford mechanic for the better part of about 20 years. And yeah.

Right in a good era too, like early 2000s, we're talking like now Terminators are coming out here. Like what a great time to get into Ford performance. Like they're starting to push the envelope. Like things are, you've got the lightning. So I had heard about you before I even met you, because you, so you and Casey used to kind of, Apple Ford had like a performance department, right?

Apple Racing.

Apple Racing. And you guys, they had a dyno there. They had all that stuff. And that was a department that you worked in. Is that where you met Casey too?

No, I actually met Casey years before. When he was tuning at another shop, every car that I would build at Apple Valley, it would go to them for tuning. So Casey was tuning all those cars long before he ever came to Ford. And then...

Real quick, by the way, just pull this closer a little bit more. I think just pull it closer towards you. Yeah, there you go.

So no, he's been tuning cars that I've been building for over 20 years probably now. So no, I've met him before Avalon Valley happened. That was actually during a little hiatus where I ended up going to an independent shop for three years. Ford called me back, and that's when Casey was there. So we just partnered up and went nuts at the dealership. So yeah, pretty much. And then grew from there. You know, Casey and I have been building, and he's been tuning everything that I've been building and everything else and still does. So we do remote tuning now, and it's working out really well.

Yeah, I know I've had a car or two tuned by you guys over there. I'm a pretty good repeat customer to a lot of the guys that I know that have shops when you have a few cars and you like to go fast parts, you end up kind of being a regular at some of these shops.

Yeah, I'm hoping that to go down that way.

Yeah. Yeah, we'll see what happens. Mel's car, starting off with, gotta have a green car.

Yeah, that one's a lot of fun. Yeah, that one's, and it's a two year only. The collector in me too, when I go to get a car, I try and, okay, what's got the lower numbers? Because even that muscle car error, you don't want something that everybody has.

Right, except your current car, which is how many different cars can we piece together to put together just one car?

Now it looks as one, though.

Yes, it does. It doesn't count if they all come from the same kind of car, right, all the parts.

Doesn't it?

I don't know.

Now you can say built, not bought.

Yeah, there you go.

Thrown together, not bought. Didn't you say the headlights were from a 5.0?

Well, I think because the front end had damage, the GT350s and the GT500s have 2015 style headlights in them, I believe. So I think what I have in my car, they're a little faded. So I think they were just off like a 15 GT, even though it's a 2021, but you can tell they're kind of clouded.

It's a later problem.

Yeah, they work. That's all that really matters.

So then, so where did it transition from the working for the dealer, which by the way, that's really sweet to think that the dealer had that in-house, that sort of performance program. I think there's only a handful of them that still do that, right?

Were you there at its demise of the performance department there? Because they don't do that anymore, right?

So there was another tech that worked there that was doing some of the performance stuff as well. Unfortunately, there were a couple of cars that went sideways in that whole world with the dyno. One of them got overboosted and popped like a balloon on the dyno, and the general manager said, yeah, we're done with the dyno. So then it just went to building cars and then having it outsourced for tuning. So that's kind of like the dissimilation of the Apple Racing part where I was still doing all the builds, but then Casey stepped aside, he went to Midway, and he was just tuning on the side from there. So now we've been pretty much working with Casey, and more or less it got to the point where all I was doing at the dealership was high performance. So word of mouth starts to spread, people start hearing my name, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting tagged to a lot of groups that I'm like, I don't even know this group existed. All of a sudden I'm getting all these invites to join groups and answer questions, and then people are like, well, where do I take my car? And for the longest time, it was Apple Valley Forward.

So what was that time period then, like when you were at Apple Valley?

So I was at Apple Valley from 2003, a couple of shorts thin, sat at other shops in the middle there, and then I left the height of COVID. So I left August of 2020.

Oh wow, okay.

Oh wow, I didn't even realize you were there that long.

Yeah. So it was quite a while.

So when did they get rid of the dino, for example, when that popped?

I'd probably say right around 13, 14.

Okay.

That's when the dino went away. It was very limited. I was just doing baselines and proving numbers at that point. They didn't want to do any tuning on it, but we were just doing baselines at that point. And then they were just like, we're going to get rid of it.

So what happened? What went catastrophically wrong? Do you have any idea?

The biggest thing I think was us techs had something in mind and how we wanted to grow it and how to make it more, but it wasn't absorbed by the dealership at that point.

It's a really weird... So dealers don't want to take that risk, right? So at a dealership, it's a whole other animal than it is at an independent shop like here at Ratified. So I'm sure that they start looking at the risk of that stuff and going, oh man, there's no way, or whatever. So yeah, I could see where that would start, you'd start to butt heads at some point in time.

Well, you have a dealership that, you know, prides themselves on, you know, fix already the first time, you know, getting good fixes on cars that are, you know, your normal everyday car and having a warranty. But obviously with the high-performance world, it's like tail light warranty. Or, you know, people stand behind their work, like I'll stand behind my work. I'll stand behind the job that I do and that I'm speccing it out correctly. I can't help if a part fails out of nowhere or something doesn't work in that realm. But for the most part, you know, dealerships don't want to have the headache.

It turns into a whole blame game.

It is. It is a big blame game. And there was a couple of cars that went into a big blame game where, you know, the dealership's eating money, the tech, the customer is eating money. And in the end, it just breathes bad blood.

It was more headache than it was worth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, but I continued to build a lot of cars. People kept coming in. The GT community, I was servicing a lot of Ford GTs. I think I was up to about 30 different Ford GTs that I was servicing in the dealership. By the time I left.

And when did, so the last GT came out, was it 16 or 17?

Well, the last GT, GT was 22.

When did it start?

Oh, when it came back in. 16.

16, that's what it was. Okay. Yeah, I remember that on Ford.

The new GT came back out in 16.

Okay.

The EcoBoost GT.

Yeah, the EcoBoost GT.

So when you were talking about those numbers, I'm guessing you're certified to work on both generations, right?

I am. As I was leaving the dealership, I was taking all the Ford Performance classes to be certified in the new Ford GTs. The only thing that I wasn't able to finish up before I left was you have to do a two-week internship at Multimatic. And the dealership wasn't willing to take on the responsibility of even servicing the new ones, because you have to pay a fee to Ford to be able to service those cars. You have to have a special hoist that's dedicated to those cars, a special trailer that's dedicated to those cars, a special tech that's dedicated to those cars. And it's kind of an all-hours thing. So if something happens to the car, you have to go get it, bring it back, service it, and then bring it back to the client. Apple Valley just didn't want to do that.

Is there a Ford dealer in the metro here that will work, that is certified to do those cars now or no?

Morrie's Luxury Auto was the one I heard was servicing, but I am not 100% sure what dealership is actually servicing them in the Twin Cities area.

Are you working on much of the current gen ones? I think most of the ones I see are that first gen, that 0506 ones.

The 0506 is mainly what I service. I've taken a peek at a couple of other ones just to see if there was something wrong really quick at a car show or anything like that, but as far as bringing them into the shop for service, I haven't. I have a couple of clients that have them, but they're still under warranty.

Right, so take it somewhere where it would still stay covered under warranty.

Yeah, I guess for it if it's free.

Yeah, exactly.

Especially for a car like that.

Absolutely.

I'm sure they're gonna be coming out of warranty here soon. No, the last year you said was 22 is when they made them. So those ones still got two years left on them, but I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of them coming out from under that warranty here soon.

Oh yeah.

That'll be interesting. So which EcoBoost is in there? It's the same one that's in the GTs, or not the GTs, the EcoBoost Mustangs, right?

No.

No. So this is a 3.5 twin turbo, but it's not the regular 3.5 twin turbo.

Right, yeah, yeah.

It's not like what's in the F150 or...

It's not like a Raptor 3.5.

Okay.

It's similar, but still very modified.

Yeah, of course, yeah.

I figured they had one. They're not running 650 horsepower out of the Raptor with that, but yeah.

Well, same thing with the 350, it's 351s, right, in the 0506s. They're, oh, 5.4s, I'm sorry. Yeah, okay, I'm going back to Pantera's now. All right, so the 5...

414, like the 14 GT 500, that's a 351. It's a 5.8, so, but no, it's a 5.4.

And that, again, is way far away from like a 5.4 that would have been in the Lightning or whatever the same year, right?

Oh, big time.

Yeah.

The Lightning was a two valve.

Okay.

The Lightning was a two valve 5.4, so it was more of a truck motor, but hardened parts.

Right, and that's kind of what I was getting at.

Yeah, they were in the M112 supercharger on the Lightnings.

Yeah, so that was just more so my, where I was going with that question is, just how different is that, the 35, that's in the Raptor, like for example, that's in the GT then. Like, is it Rod's Pistons or is it literally everything?

Literally everything.

Okay.

Yeah, that's what I get in the box. Yeah, people come to me and they're like, oh, it's got this motor in it. I was like, you think in the Ford GT, this, what were they, half a million dollars when they came out? It was like, you think that they just put an F-150, 35 EcoBoost motor in it? There's no way.

No.

Like that thing is so far from that actual motor. It's gonna be insane.

They're very, very over-engineered.

Yeah.

You know, to a good point, so.

Which you have to be, again, if you're asking a million dollars, you know, it's gotta be, well, no, what did it release at? 500 or something.

500 to start.

Yeah, and then the market.

And then it depends on the options that you put in from there. Carbon, different colors, you know. You can have, you can order a certain color, and then you can even pay more to have that color be the only one on your car. So you can actually pay, I can't remember how much it was, but you know, you pay a certain amount of money to be like, I want the one Mystichrome GT paid for that to be the only GT with the Mystichrome paint. So.

Which I feel like that's a good way of going about it. If you want exclusivity, you pay for it in that way. It'd be funny though if you just took like a shade different on the Mystichrome. I wonder if they have rules around that.

There's gotta be some rules to it. I mean, I can say that anyone can pay their car any color they want.

Right.

But to have it vinned as a Mystichrome Ford GT, that'll probably be the only vinned Mystichrome Ford GT with that color.

I'm pretty sure that, from what I remember, that guy paid 100 grand to have that car painted that color. So.

Yeah, Dodge had a similar program where, you know, we'll paint anything you want or whatever. I think, I can't remember who it was. Like for example, like they had the Lamborghini balloon white, but then it's weird. Manufacturers have all these different rules. It's like, oh, I'm the only manufacturer that's able to do this color, period.

Yeah.

Which is ridiculous. But that's exciting though. So you've only seen a handful of those, but you've mostly been working on the first gen.

Yep.

Okay, gotcha.

Yep. And then I work on, you know, the older kit cars, stuff like that. I've actually been in the works with a company called Downforce Racing, and they're gonna be, they're the ones that are dealing with the super performance cars. So, we've been in the works with me building an AC Cobra, or super performance car, coming up in 24. So, cross my fingers that this keeps going from there. So possibly be building more super performance cars.

Yeah, so Bowen Built then, so when did you first, I mean, I'm sure you've always had a side hustle since day one, you know, of course. But, so I guess when did, when did you start the side hustle, and then when did it become a very real, I guess, business at that point?

It was, it was a quick, it was a very quick change. So it just got to the point where like I was, like with the dealership, doing a lot of the high performance, the last three or four years that I was there, I pretty much just made my own schedule, because everybody was contacting me through social media, on my phone, email, or just walk in and they want to schedule their car to come in. So I'd have them go and they'd schedule the car with the riders, they'd write up the tickets and then as the cars came through, I would fix them or bill them. And my warranty numbers were down, you know, as far as management goes. So at that point, it was just to the point where I was just, I was getting too big performance wise for a dealership that didn't want it. So.

And so they're lining their pockets basically with work you're bringing in. Or they're taking a chunk of what?

A different clientele that most dealerships see. Yeah. I don't know any other Ford dealership that had a Huracan come in for service. But I had a couple of clients that had other cars. One client has multiple cars. I know he brings two of them to the dealership still. He's got a Ford GT, a Midnight Blue Nose Stripe, and then he's got an Aston Martin Vantage, like an old one.

Is that the one that went in a ditch or no?

The GT was one that went into the ditch.

Yeah, that was the one.

Yeah, hydroplane on 35. Came very close. I drove right by where it went into the ditch that night. And those tracks, he missed the guardrail by about six inches. He missed the sign pole by about a foot. I mean, the way the car spun, it just Rubik's Cubed itself right through all this stuff, and then just sat. And it was fine. All it was was some dirt and rocks. We cleaned it all up, and the car was great.

Yeah, I think it's an older gentleman too, right?

Correct. Yeah, correct. The car, as far as I know, now has about 115, 120,000 miles.

Man, you gotta love these people that drive their s*** out of their car. So he's the original owner too?

Correct.

Really?

Correct. He races it, he's raced it for a long time. He drives it all over the country, car shows all over the country. It's had three or four transmissions. I rebuilt the engine. That engine is bulletproof. Like if you, if anyone's gonna find a GT later on that they need to buy, buy that one. Fully built, studded, 20 over, diamond pistons, mainly everything, it's built for power.

I'll add myself to the list.

As a stock seller, supercharger, Dan Schauner can probably scoop that one up before. Yeah, he's a, so when I, the full GT guy of Minnesota.

Yeah, so when I, four GTs, I think of you, and I think Dan is the first one that comes to mind, because that guy is a crazy guy, small shop in southern Minnesota, but I went down there to get that small block from him, and I walk in and there's like one and a half million dollars worth of cars just sitting in there. He's got, he had one that had about a half inch of dust on it, just sitting in a shop. Yeah.

That's by his own.

Yeah, it was. Yeah.

We're gonna have another guy on here, probably in the new year. He used to work for Dan, I think his name's Ethan. The name sound familiar at all? I think it was Ethan.

Used to work for what?

I know a number of Ethan's.

Oh really? Yeah, he has a last name on his Facebook, so I have no clue.

Oh. Yeah.

But no, so yeah, it's kind of funny how we are having a bunch of these GT guys coming on in the near future, but no, it's just, yeah, it's super cool. So why did it go through so many transmissions then?

Racing.

Oh yeah, fair enough.

Racing. Brainerd a lot, he'd take it all to Ohio for car shows, Michigan for car shows, they'd race it. And all the tracks out there, and just, at first they weren't really built for really beating on them. I mean, they were, but obviously they get wear, miss a shift, slip the clutch too much. A bunch of guys exploded clutches. There's a number of them that would just explode the clutch within the first couple of months of even owning them. So then I was just doing the spec two, twin disc clutch was a really good upgrade for that car.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask.

A number of those, that's probably the easiest upgrade for that car is that twin disc clutch from spec. It's super lightweight, revs fast, but it holds up.

What about performance wise? Were you doing a lot of performance upgrades on GTs at all or not really?

Small pulleys, the cold air intake sleeve, so it's a steel sleeve that goes into the air box, the rubber part so it doesn't collapse it down. Sometimes canning and air filters, but beyond that, there wasn't a huge amount of upgrades for the GT. They already ran dual injectors, so you're running 16 fuel injectors out of those cars from the factory. So it was more or less just taking them out, sending them out, cleaning them, and putting them back in. And then possibly upgraded fuel pumps, but they ran a dual 255 anyway. So some of them now are getting a little bit higher.

Are there any crossover parts? And I know that I feel like this is just turning into a Ford GT podcast. I know you do so much more than that, but these cars are super interesting. Is there any crossover parts that, so like the fuel hat or anything like that, that comes from like an SVT, plenty of crossover stuff?

The sensors, a lot of the sensors are all GT500 sensors. Some of the stuff is crossover parts. Some of the switches are from other vehicles. If you look at the window switches, they're a lot like the old Focus switches. They're still like the old Focus switch. Ford's really good at repurposing a lot of stuff, but putting a new spin on it.

Yeah, so that they can charge more for it.

Making it look really nice.

Yeah.

And just function better kind of a thing. So, a lot of Ford stuff gets revised and updated. A way a part starts is not the way it is five years later. It's totally different.

Well, we kind of know that with the MT-82 transmission, so they kind of have secretly been upgrading things and stuff like that too as they come along without really saying that they are not upgrading stuff in them.

Like the forks.

Yeah.

The forks, they were upgraded, so pre-18 was a weaker fork. After 2018 was a much stronger fork setup. Even some of the gears were hardened more, were harder, so they last longer. But there's a lot of companies out there that have upgrade kits for the MT-82s, as you know.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of good things for the MT-82. The biggest thing is that stock shifter was the biggest killer in that transmission. The transmission wasn't that bad. From the get-go, it was the sloppy shifting. So all the rubber bushings in that shifter and how long the arms were, just the tactile movement from your hand correlating to where it moved on in the transmission was such a delay. So you're just slamming that fork, not even into place. It's just like deadheading it, and then it would just fall into third. That's why the three, four shift forks were breaking the most, was that whole thing. MGW shifters.

Oh yeah.

I'm not a sponsor of them, but I have all stand behind the MGW shifter for a long time.

They do make a very quality product. That is the first, the stock shifter goes into garbage in any car I get, and the MGW goes on. It's like the first thing I do normally.

Yep. Some people can't suck down the cost. They're like, oh, I'll just get a Barton, or I'll do the Ford Racing one, but it doesn't hold up to the MGW.

No.

All right, catch me up here. So now I feel like how you felt in the B58 podcast. So MT82, which car is that in?

So the Coyote Mustang from its inception, the Coyote, so what, 2011, right? It came with its six-speed manual was a Gurtag, am I saying that right? MT82 six-speed transmission, which there's a very, they're commonly known as being a grenade. Like that's not, if you start adding power to your car, if you put any kind of sticky tire on, like they pretty much say it's not a matter of if it's when the transmission is gonna go. I made mine last quite a while, I thought, for what I had going on.

With a lot of power through it.

Yeah, so, but one nice hard shift from second to third, and yeah, we made, there was glitter all over the inside of that thing.

It wiped the teeth clean off.

It was like this rounded pieces of metal in there.

Completely clean off. If you go through my page, you'll see a picture of it.

Yeah.

So, and in, so like my wife's car, which is a 2013, that...

The S197.

S197 cars were even worse, and the shifter in that car, in the S550, I thought they were a little better, but it is absolute garbage. Like in Mal's car, I haven't, I have bought the shifter, but I haven't put it in yet. But when you shift the car, I mean, it feels plastic. It's like, I swear the thing's just gonna come off in my hand at some point in time. I mean, it is bad.

It is that, it's that sloppy and that shaky from factory, that it's a night and day difference when you put that MGW in there.

You put an MGW in there.

It feels gated.

It's clicky, notchy, like it just bang, bang, bang. It's short, it goes right in. But there's no plastic pieces on it. I mean, it's nice. And they're really not, I don't know what people are, was it 400 bucks for a race spec? It's not crazy.

It's like 495, but then adding a shift ball or the adapter. I mean, there's add-ons on top of that. You can build up like a 600, $700 shifter at the end of it. But it's a pretty sweet showpiece that functions really well. The shift knobs they have and the options they have are really cool.

Yeah, it's two for one.

Yeah.

Yeah, it does the part and it looks the part. Yeah, that's huge.

Yeah, I don't know, I enjoy mine. Getting them in might be a little daunting for some people too. You probably got it down to a science by now. But.

I just saw dozens.

So other than, we kind of straight away there. So you made the decision to leave Apple and go start your own thing.

That was a phone call from my wife.

Yeah.

And after one of my last reviews, I was not in a happy spot. So I talked to her, and about an hour and a half later, she called me. She's like, yeah, you're done. You're quitting today. I've emailed you your resignation letter. I really bought you both. I went on to go, daddy, I got you a domain name. I got you everything else set up. We'll start filling out the state paperwork. You're quitting right now. Go turn in your two weeks. So. And I was like, well, if I got that standing behind me.

That's huge.

This is, this would be a no brainer. It'd be stupid for me not to take this leap now.

So. Well, you had a client base, you know, I'm sure you had money scrolled away. It's like everything just made sense. You know, that's the other thing. It's like, if you have the client base and you're a strong name, like you obviously do, why not?

Exactly.

I'm sure you were busy from day one. Was that the case?

Yeah. I was busy till the last day. So even through the last two weeks, I think I had done two GT350 engines and a Coyote motor, ton of wheels and tires in the last two weeks. And then after I left, you know, you're getting the phone calls from the guys that you just worked on the cars. And they're like, oh, I need to bring my car back, you know, for anything. I'm like, well, I'm not there anymore. So, and by then, I think within the first two weeks of going on my own, I was 20 cars deep. Yeah. So.

And that's a variety of work, right? From maintenance to builds, I'm assuming.

So it started off pretty quick. A client that races his car, burnt up the motor at Road America within the first like 30 days of me going on my own. So that was a full short block build. And then I had a 01 Cobra that I had just started.

Nice.

That was a full build. Rear end, suspension, couple transmission upgrades, clutch, fully custom built engine, stage two cams.

Is that Tyler's car?

No, that is Ryan Knutson, 01 Slow SVT, yeah, Slow SVT. It's a zinc yellow, 01 Cobra with a D1X Pro charger on it now. In fact, he just had a Dyno, but I think he had like 620 something, so. That's pretty good for an 01 Cobra.

Yeah, that's ripping. So okay, so then my next question is, so I'm sure you have a variety of clients, but what purpose builds do they do? Do they do road course, drag racing? Do you have a variety?

It's a variety now. At first, it was more or less just street builds, like guys that just want a little bit extra, they don't want the stock car, they want it supercharged, or they want a turbo, but they don't want to go nuts with it. Or guys are like, I want to do autocross. So then it's all worrying about gearing and suspension work, coil overs, or even just lowering the car with different adjustable shocks, different arms, adjustable arms, setting up custom alignments for those cars.

Are you doing all that in house? You have an alignment rack as well?

I use an alignment rack in another shop down the street. He allows me to do all my alignments there for a fee of course, but it's been awesome being able to have that there, to be able to do that until I can get more shop space. I have an alignment rack, it's all ready to go, hunter machine and everything. Just gotta be able to get the more shop space in the area I'm in right now.

How big's your shop currently?

Currently, I'm only 20 feet wide and 60 feet deep. Okay, so it's a decent amount to have cars in, but when you're doing a build, like Dan probably knows, you really gotta be able to move stuff around, and if you just don't have the width to move, let cars move side to side, they have to be running to get any cars in and out, otherwise you're just stacking them up.

Yep, they're just a shelf.

Yeah, and just taking up space.

You're spending too much time pushing them in and out of the garage, and that probably is a huge pain. Yeah.

Yeah, I saw that at Moe's. I'm so happy they're expanding finally. They got double the shop space, just crazy.

Yeah.

That's huge.

It looks really good, too.

Yeah. No, these guys here at Rod Ratified right now, they have a great relationship, for example, with EuroCharge, because he has an alignment track over there, and then these guys have a dyno, so it's like, hey, whenever you need something. That is something that's so underrated, I feel like, from outside looking in, is having that relationship with other shops.

Oh, big time. It's a community, the high performance world is a tight-knit community. When you really get into it, so many shops help out other shops and help out other shops. I do a bunch of sublet work for other shops. When they're backed up, or if they just, they don't have the expertise to do something, they'll send it my way, it's Ford related. I've built a number of transmissions for shops, other shops around, specked out engines for other shops, diagnosed a lot of issues that other shops are having with cars that they just bang their head off the wall. So I'll go in, help them diagnose it, and get them back on again.

Well, I have a friend that lives real close to me, because you're an hour from me, so I can't haul everything to you. So I have a buddy of mine who does all my diesel work, and he actually just put the orange car back together, did an amazing job. But I had my expedition in there, and that's where we had no compression on one of the cylinders. And I thought, my God, this thing is toast. And I'm like, you know what? Just knowing how, when you, the era you worked there, I was like, I bet Jarret knows. So I shot you a message, and you're like, check this spring, like one of the intake springs on the head, and see if it's cracked. You may not be able to see it, just kind of shake it around a little bit. So I messaged him back, and sure enough, it was a spring, so it ended up being about a three or four hundred dollar fix, and I was back up, where I thought I was going to need an engine replacement. It was going to be a whole nightmare. So yeah, you've done plenty of that stuff, too.

Yeah, doing the good Lord's work.

You know, I do a lot of, I try not to, but I end up doing a lot of over-the-phone diagnosis. Just because I was in the dealership for so long, and I was a heavy line tech there, so I was main focus was all engines, drivability. I was the gremlin guy, so if there was cars that came in that nobody could figure out, it ended up in my stall. And then I would fix it, and then get with the engineers, the service engineers, or the service engineers would come in and we'd work on it together, figure it out, and then I developed a few of the SSMs and TSBs for Ford over the years. So especially with the Edge, when the Edge came out.

Is there a lot of problems with that one?

That's when the PTUs came out. So that little transfer case unit. They just had a hard time getting them to seal up. And last, so they flew it out.

I had a Ford Flex, I think I had to put a PTU in. Yeah.

So what was it? So is there, I mean, man, I'm really slow today. What the heck is going on? Is there something in your process that just worked better than other people? Like why were you the one that was able to figure out the gremlins? Is it just experience, or you just had a better process?

It is all about building a process. Where you start to where you finish. You gotta keep it simple. Like start easy and then work your way from there. Some of the workshop manuals have a good process in it. Some of them jump steps. It's just finding your process on where you start to where you go. What you can rule out. And then stop thinking about that. A lot of techs, they overthink. They'll just sit there and bang their heads off one wall. Where there's a totally other wall you can bang your head off of. Let's go try that one for a little while. Maybe it comes up with something different. Yeah, the biggest thing is process. Check your fuses. Check the wiring. Don't forget load testing. Just because a wire ohms out correctly doesn't mean it can carry a load. So that's the biggest thing is knowing electricity, knowing engines, how they work, why they work, and little changes from there. So you can have an engine that's running bad and seem like it has low compression. Well, it's because a lifter bent or a lifter got stuck. It's not because a piston went out or valve lash isn't enough. With the older engines or your points aren't adjusted correctly.

Well, now we're going real old.

There's so many things. I also serve as a number of the early Mustangs, mid-60s, late 60s, GT350s, couple 500s, and then a couple just GT, Mustang GTs of that era, the 289s. But yeah, it's crazy how everything's evolved. But yet, if you just start at square one, I've used timing lights on 2015 S550s. Oh, really? You can make a mark. You can still make a timing mark, and you can still get the timing light off of a coil. So it's, yeah, just checking baselines, checking timing. You never know, because the chains are so tight, and the gears are so small now, you know, one tooth, engine will run just fine.

Well, we just had that with my orange car.

Yeah. It'll cause like little, little issues. So just like Mo's had a 350 recently, that it would run fine, but you know, off idle or high RPM, it would throw a code.

Is that the black one?

No, I think it was like a matte silver 350.

Oh, okay. I think I may have seen that one.

I think I'm getting a pro charger on it. But that was just a skip chain. So an unfortunate, unfortunate little thing that happens. I've seen it before. It's nothing that you can like try, you can try and prevent it, but sometimes it just happens.

Right.

And this is the case for electric cars. Again, no kidding.

When you look at the-

Let's not get into that.

Coyote, like dual-leverhead cam, when you pull that timing cover, it is a little daunting when you- And actually, I timed mine a couple of times. So it's really not that bad. They make it pretty idiot-proof, but when you're looking at all of those gears and the cam phasers and the chains and the guides and the tensioners and all that stuff, it's like, holy crap, man, that's like a whole rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to go down.

And the process, because you got to start with the left and set it, and then you have to turn the crank 360 and then set it at five o'clock and you're at six o'clock, and then you have to go back. And the process of doing it sounds horrible, but...

You gotta let me f*** up one of your cars one of these days. I'd be happy to.

Again, if you look at what it is and then imagine that that engine can run at 8,000 RPM and all of that stuff stays in place, I mean, it's kind of a miracle all in itself.

I always think about that.

And they're built correctly. Yes, yeah. Don't just run your average Coyote update grand, but...

Well, it won't let you do that until you start messing with it, I don't think, right? What is the limiter at on a stock?

About 68.

68, okay.

Yeah. 68 to 7 is about as far as you want to go with a stock stock.

Okay.

So, then my client, Mike Rausch, he shifts at 8,300, so...

He's another one too I'll have to reach out to and see if we can get him to come on here. Who? Mike Rausch.

Is that the owner of Rausch?

No.

Or a different Rausch? Okay, I was about to say.

No, they're actually are related though.

Are they actually?

This isn't... Yep. So, but no, they... Mike races in the Optima Streetcar Challenge. So, I've built a lot of his car, he's built some of his car as well. We're making a bunch of changes this winter, and gonna go at the championship this year, but get that Seaman invite.

Yeah. But if you want somebody who's got an insight to the Optima Series, he'd be your guy for sure.

Yeah.

Well, okay, now this is not bothering me. What's the name of the guy that's behind the name Roush? What's his first name? Jack, okay, gotcha. And I really hope my buddy gets his Roush back. He still hasn't... He's got the number of the guy, but he's too scared to call him to see if he's willing to sell it back to him.

Oh. Do you remember what it was? He probably has worked on the car or knows of the car.

What do you mean?

What?

Do you remember what the specs were on the Roush again? Exactly. It was something kind of rare-ish.

It was a red convertible.

Oh, I saw. Yeah, you posted about that. Black accents.

Yep.

Yeah.

Faded accents because it's, you know, all this s***. No, I was wanting to cool his cars.

I've driven.

It's just, it's a different sound, dude. It just had a sound to it that I just loved.

I mean, the three valves, the three valves were different.

Yeah.

The three valves were different for sure.

What year was that car? I'm trying to think. Was it an 08? Maybe.

Probably would have been an 08.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was rowdy. I think it was, it was making like 530 to the wheels. I mean, it was just a fun car. Yeah.

Those engines will make power. People, those are actually underestimated, but you got to build them.

Right. Yeah.

So I had built shortly before I left Ford, I had built up a single turbo 2007 saline, that dyno at 920. So.

Geez.

Out of a three valve.

Do the four, six, three valves also break spark plugs off in them like the five fours do? Or is it?

No. Their spark plug was different. So it was more like the 08 version, when they moved up to the 08 version for the F150s. So they got rid of that little sleeve, and they bored it a little more, and then that's where they put the threads on the spark plug. It was on the tip.

Okay.

So.

We just picked up an 06 Explorer for my mom, and it's got a...

Those are gonna snap out.

Are they? Oh, perfect. I guess I might have to bring them to somebody who knows what they're doing and have them do the plugs.

Four, six is not really as much.

Okay.

So.

It's got the broken exhaust manifold bolts on the front of the passenger side, which you and I both know is like a 99% for sure thing is gonna happen.

Yeah.

So I might have to.

A hundred percent.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Okay. A hundred percent.

They all break.

Yeah.

So what about you personally? What do you have? You're saying something about you having some cool stuff or?

I used to have some cool stuff. In the past years, one of my favorite, I had a 79 Bronco, 351M, and then I just went through the whole suspension on it, and that was a fun driver. Then I had a 95. I started with an 88 Thunderbird, went to a 96 Thunderbird that I had slammed to the ground. That was a V6. I had just collected all the super coupe parts for it. I was about to turn into a super coupe. Ran into a line from a buddy of mine, his parents were selling the 95 Thunderbird, Hunter Green, green interior, but it had the 4.6 in it, and I was like, I'd rather move up to a V8. So I bought that. About six months later, one of my training instructors from Ford had gotten an accident with his Mark VIII. So I bought his Mark VIII back, and I stripped out the powertrain from that because those cars have the four valve 4.6. So now I took that engine, I built it up into a four valve Cobra motor with a lot of four GT parts actually on it too. So that was like my favorite car. 95 Thunderbird with pretty much a Cobra powertrain. That's rowdy. Fully built 470W transmission. Had a one-piece aluminum driveshaft and a pumpkin rear differential out of an 03 Cobra with 373 gears.

A lot of love went into that one, damn.

A lot went into that car, but man, it ripped. So it made 350-350 to the ground. And back then, it was a lot. That was more than the Mustang GT made just out of the flywheel at that time.

That's from 1994 to 2004. It was like my favorite era of Ford. That was all the stuff that I grew up watching and wanting. I actually have been looking at doing it because I'm coming over here more often and driving my big diesel truck through the cities isn't always awesome through the Lower Hill Tunnel. So I've been looking at Mark VIII, actually. That's just such a good little zippy, I think they're cool looking, just a nice little car. And you can get them for damn near, $2,500, $3,500 for a nice one.

There's nothing to be said about a small car, man. You saw the little Golf I got out there, man. I can't, I rip through traffic.

Oh, they're fun.

Dude, that's a blast.

They're fun.

I finally had a dynoed here, actually. So I got a new tune from Ratified here, actually. I want to say, while I was at PRI. And it's not that much different than my previous tune, but again, it's nice to have the in-house tune, you know, the guys right next door. And plus I got a few fun features. I'm waiting to try out. I was playing around with the rolling anti-lag the other day, that was fun. But it's like, it's not the fastest car in the world, but it's fun. I mean, I make 340 to the wheels, 360 torque. So it's nice to actually have solid numbers.

A lot of power for that little car.

For that little car. Well, yeah. I'm kind of surprised that I was even able to beat some of the cars I beat. Even though it's heavy as s***, a Hellcat TRX, Roll Race did 40 and 60, smacked it. It's awesome. It's fun. A car that's making more, double the power.

I think that pissed him off.

Well, my buddy, that same buddy came back the next year, he rented the V8 R8, which I will stand on this until the day I die, is the most piece of s*** transmission that I've ever driven in my life. Dude, I urge everyone to go rent the one from Driveify for a day and tell me it's not the worst transmission you've driven. And it rents well. It has the supercar look. But man, if you're looking for a driver's car, that is not it. Yeah. Get the manual.

Well, if you're doing an R8 V8, you're probably just going for the supercar look anyway at that point. Yeah.

I mean, it's a hell of a V8. I mean, it makes a nut.

But you really want a manual.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's an amazing sound. That thing bellows, dude. It's ridiculous.

Yeah.

Do you work on many 350s though?

There's a few. There's a few. I wouldn't say I work on a ton, but definitely when I was at the dealership, I worked on a lot. But now, it's kind of few and between now, because a lot of them aren't being driven. So, the 350s are more that like, I'm finding a lot of the guys are more or less collecting them because they want to resell them later on. I'm not seeing a lot of 350 drivers out there.

That's a bummer.

You're talking about the new GT350? Well, they had some issues out the gate.

I figured you weren't talking about a Nissan.

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.

I feel like I do have one of those coming in soon.

Do you? I was going to say, do you... I mean, we know what you specialize in. Is there... I mean, you're getting a lot of other stuff rolling through the shop, too, or...

I do a lot of... I still do a lot of classic stuff, and I'll work on pretty much any make and model. So I've done a couple of 350s, 350Zs with their gallery oil seals that leak. You know, maintenance stuff on those cars. An older 300ZX twin-turbo car from Jeremiah. That was a fun one. Let's see. 69I think it was a 69 El Camino, 396. And a couple other Chevy cars, Chevelle rear end rebuild.

You didn't just have them put a Ford 9-inch in it, that's what those guys normally do.

No, it was a 10-volt. But, no, there's a bunch of random stuff that will come through every so often. Like the Pantera that you saw recently. We got a 74 Trans Am in the shop right now that's been sitting for a long time. So I'm going to be going through that, getting it running for them again. Just making sure everything is good. For a full restoration, hopefully in the next few years. But at least get the powertrain back together to where it's running and driving and safe. So, yeah.

Man, I desperately need a Trans Am in my life, man.

They're pretty sweet.

I would have a mullet so f****** fast. Get the mustache. Beard would be gone immediately. I mean, that mustache, it's going to look ridiculous the second I get one. That's awesome. I don't know. I need a redneck mobile of some kind at some point. Something cheap. I was looking all over Facebook Marketplace just before the pandemic. I was like, all right, I'm making a little bit of money. I want to do something stupid. And then things kind of took off from there.

But I would classify Trans Am as stupid, but that's, you know, to each of their own.

You wouldn't?

I would.

I would.

Don't worry.

I'll do some stupid Ford stuff too. Don't worry. Yeah. And you know, people have been listening to this podcast, especially the last 30 episodes. I've been ranting and raving about Ford. Like they're just crushing it right now.

They really are. It's just a lot of a lot of good things. You know, especially with that crazy GTD coming out and the other stuff. They're the lull with the whole EV craze for that little while. The lighting, that kind of thing.

Well, did you see that? What they read? I just saw an article yesterday that they're holding off on EVs now at Ford. Like they're holding off on that some $12 billion investment. They're like, all right, let's pump the brakes here. Probably gonna wait till after the election to see what happens. Well, it's like we just passed by that Chrysler factory. Where was that?

Oh, just out.

Illinois, right?

Yeah, Illinois. Just outside of Chicago on the north side there.

Bare empty. They're like retooling it and everything. It's interesting. Weird stuff is gonna be happening in the next five years. I'm curious to see which direction it goes and what companies come out ahead for this.

I think there's gonna be a lot of big changes in that whole realm. I think EV is a good idea. I don't think that it's plausible to be just because there's no way that our grid can handle everybody who wants to have a car. When you get 20, 30 people in your neighborhood plugging in a car at the same time, something's gonna go down.

Which is great. When you think about this fact, right? Like think about how bad the internet would get at times, right? When everybody gets home from work and everybody logs on, especially during the gaming boom, I guess, in the mid 2010s or whatever, I can't remember how bogged down the internet got. And then they all have to upgrade to fiber optic. Now that's getting bogged down. Same thing applies to power. It's like that power's gotta go somewhere. And especially if you start getting into these cities that are underdeveloped, dude, it's gonna be crazy. I don't know, the long term, I know they're trying to fast track it for 20, 30, but I don't see it as being feasible.

No. I don't see the infrastructure being built up that fast.

No.

Or even having the power plants that can sustain the infrastructure if we even build it.

Right.

So I talked to, I met a friend of mine who is a firefighter and actually works on fire trucks. So he was at a GM plant somewhere down in Alabama, wherever he's from. And he was at a GM plant and they were building this, they had this big warehouse. They were putting sprinklers in, doing all this stuff. And he's like, what do you guys got going on over there? He goes, that is the area just to store the batteries. So in there, like not even the ones that are the good ones that we're putting right in the vehicles and sending out the door. That's just for the warranty returns, any of the batteries that are bad, any of that stuff. We can't do anything with them. So we just got to set them in this giant warehouse with all of these sprinkler systems and hope that someday they can figure out what to do with them.

And when it comes to EV cars and catching on fire, there is nothing you can do about them.

No, I've seen them push them into the waters.

And the thing is, is that you're putting it out, but as soon as you pull it back out and those contacts and those supports and those cells are still active and you start towing it down the road and everything starts jostling around and it starts sparking itself, it lights itself right back off. It's actually best if a EV car catches on fire, let it burn to the ground. Yes. It takes about two hours.

Oh my God.

Well, it takes, but you know, you let it go to the ground, it'll, you'll see the energy come back down. Those cars burn at like 5,000 degrees. Now you're getting the fireman thing on.

Are you guys doing like training and stuff on those things now, I suppose?

We've been training on EV stuff ever since hybrid cars even came out because they have hybrid batteries. So they just burn so hot that it's, it would waste thousands, tens of thousands of gallons of water to cool it down to the point where it's more than likely just going to start up itself again on the trailer, getting towed to the impound or sitting in the impound. It's going to light itself back off.

So you're, I suppose at that point you're, it's containment, right?

You're just making sure nothing else around it gets hurt.

And then at that point it's just lawn chairs and marshmallows and just sitting around watching it.

Yeah. It's, it's horrible for the public to see too, cause now you got a bunch of firemen standing around a car, burning to the ground. It doesn't, it's not a good look, but it's the, literally the safest way to do it for everybody is just let those cars go and, you know, ruin all the contacts so they don't cause issues down the road. Cause then when you throw them in the lots, the impound lots, right? And all of a sudden, you're, you're lighting off tons of cars around it. It's a bad deal.

That is crazy. That is freaking, I didn't know they burned that hot either, but I remember, I don't know if you ever saw, uh, when Richard Hammond crashed the RIMOC however, many years ago, when that went off off the cliff over there, they said it was burning for three days, like on and off just cause they put it out up, it's back on fire again. And that's, that's the first thing that came to mind. It's like, if it starts in a lot and there's any fuel anywhere, I'm not sure when cars get taken to lots, are they drained of fuel or no?

No, no.

So they might still have a little bit of fuel in them, huh? Interesting.

Some of them have full tanks.

Yeah. Some of them get hit with forklifts at the yard and get all their oil deleted right there at the co-part.

They'll be sitting there waiting, they'll sit in the lots waiting to be torn apart and drained and everything else, and then used for salvage parts or crushed.

Right.

Yeah.

I was watching a Scrap Life garage video the other day. I always wonder what do those cranes weigh when they drop them on a car to crush them? Do you have any idea what those weigh? I'm still, I forgot to finish Googling that.

It's got to be a crazy amount though. Yeah.

Because I saw the one that they just did the recent video on, they dropped it and this is a Porsche and had a full roll cage in there and it took the first smack pretty good. Like you'd probably live. But then obviously, you know, when they kept hammering way, it was done. Just ridiculous. That's what I wonder. That's what worries me is if one of those, like, for example, a Tesla flies off a cliff in California where there's all this dry wood. I don't know. Do you, so when you do firefighting, is it primarily like residential or is it, do you do any like forest stuff or anything like that or?

Um, it's, it's pretty minor as far as wildland fire type of thing. It's going to be farmland, farmland and ditches. So tall grasses, sometimes they get out of hand. Years ago, we had one that got out of hand and going through like three wooded areas, took out about 98 acres. So that was 13 fire departments and two helicopters, buckets, and a lot.

So how long you've been doing that for them?

15 years. Wow.

Okay. And that's the volunteer fireman kind of gig, right? Yeah, I figured. I've always wondered because I just on call. Is there any? Is there anybody that's really paid in that field or not really? Is it all volunteer?

We are paid on call.

Okay.

It's more or less just minimum wage, right?

Right.

Or less. At times.

So yeah, that makes sense. I was always curious.

It's not much.

Yeah.

It's more or less the volunteer part of it. Signing up to be involved in the community and do something that wrong.

And to, you are happily married, right? To all those ladies that are like, he works on Ford Performance Vehicles and he's a fireman. Yeah. So calm down everybody.

All four.

Very happily married. Two kids.

Yeah. All four women that listen to this podcast.

Yeah, right? Yeah.

I want to say it's less than 10%. Highlights might be different. Highlights get pretty rowdy when it comes to stats, but I don't think there's a lot of ladies that listen to this podcast. It's so car-oriented. It's so niche. And granted, they are getting a lot more involved in recent years, but, oh man, it's still a minority.

It is. Oh, my wife even though she's like, once you start building, because I'm going to build an F-100, and she's like, you just have to get the license plate mistress, because she's like, because I know the only girl you're going to leave me for is that one.

Yeah, that's a good one.

But no, my kids are starting to get into it now. My daughter loves going to car shows. She's obviously getting into Mustangs. And my son Connor is big into, he's torn between like a 66 Nova or a Porsche. He's like two totally different worlds. But no, he's turning into a little bit of a car enthusiast, too. So it comes and goes, you'll see how that goes.

It's weird. Like I remember, so as a kid, I was huge into cars. I mean, I had more hot wheels than an entire city block. I mean, it was ridiculous. And then I think I got into like gaming. I want to say like around 10 or 11 years old. And then I kind of honestly forgot about cars for the most part until I was like 16 again, because I was busy playing freaking Minecraft or whatever. The occasional Forza or whatever, but never would really get invested. And then I got my license, started going to Cars and Coffee over at Chanhassen before they moved it. And just really, I mean, ever since then, it's just been a meteoric, like just cars, cars, cars. Like it's kind of annoying to anybody that's close to me because it's all I can talk about. Because like when I was on campus, for example, in college, I was like, I don't like you people. You don't talk about cars, you know, that's all I could talk about.

So my wife loves the story of the day we met, I talked about cars for like two hours, and she's like, I just blacked out. But she went on another day with me. So hey, it worked.

It worked. Yeah. Well, the logic was there.

The cars, cars is life. It's like when I grew up on my father, I got the bug for my father and my grandfather. My grandfather was like the flathead genius of the era. And my father drag raced Mopar, as you say, Mopar earlier. He had a 70 duster that he had all built up. You know, he drag raced for a long time. My grandfather raced sprint cars back in the 50s.

So at what point did you start wrenching then?

I think I was about eight or nine when my dad and my grandpa started making me do brakes.

Gave you a flashlight?

Brakes. They were having me turn the wrenches. I mean, I was doing brakes. I was doing oil changes, valve cover gaskets. I mean, but back then, the Chevy 350 was ten minutes for a valve cover gasket, and anybody could do it because they could just set me in the engine bay right on top of the fender well and say, get in there. I loved tinkering from there. Then that turned into tearing apart the lawnmower, tearing apart phones in the house and radios to see how they worked. I just got bit by the I need to know how things work bug. So, and then it just got went from there just out. That was always like my big hobby was cars and engines and just playing with stuff.

Yeah, it usually starts as a tinker, right? Like that's how a lot of big car people end up from they're just taking crap apart doesn't always get back together. I've had several. I remember. So my daughter is going into high school now next year. And so she signed up for she's doing a shop class and they make you start small engines as a prerequisite. And I was like, yeah, I'll have one for you to bring in. But I was like, I'm pretty sure mine is still a part in a box somewhere. I don't think I ever actually put it back together.

I got a big mini bike group that I'm in and we always have a lot of little engines.

Oh, that's another way. I don't know if I even never told you we have a mutual friend, by the way. Who? Speaking of mini bikes. You and I or all three of us.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Him and Massey are good friends.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, speaking of your mini bike group, he's in that group, too, with you guys? Yeah.

So, he's in our big, like our rural American group. So we're a bunch of us are judges for the WeatherTech vintage car races. So we judge the Concourse d'Elegance for Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the WeatherTech races. So we'll go out there. It's a group of like eight or nine of us. There's four or five of us that actually judge. And then the other one's just running around having fun. But no, it's a great time. Brett's a good dude. Yeah.

He's right. I can't wait to rally with him again.

Yeah. That's it. We want to get the... I don't know if you hang out with him more often, but it's like once or twice a year, we get to actually see him and hang out with him, right? Yeah, so then, but it's...

We chat all the time. We have a group text message that's always going. It's a blast. But, and I play hockey with him.

Oh really? Okay.

Hockey finder.

He's... The last time I think we heard from him was when he was yelling at us about putting the wrong car that he was driving on the podcast. Oh yeah.

Yeah, he was not happy about that one. Yeah, I was like right after the rally, we had a big group chat going with us still because you know, that post rally, I don't know, the Mondays, you know, he was still trying to hang on to the weekend.

Oh yeah.

And then we had the podcast and we mentioned whatever was wrong, some, oh, what Porsche he has.

Yeah.

Yeah. He was not happy about that one. Have you gotten under a S650 yet?

I have not.

I stole it from him.

Dan stole it from me.

He was the one that was supposed to work on Tim's car. But I, yeah, no, we talked about it.

There's going to be plenty more. There's going to be plenty more S650s that come out and are around, so.

We were talking about EVs. Have you had any Mockeys or Lightneys or anything come through for even just like wheels or suspension? Nothing like that? No.

No, I'm okay with that.

Those guys will probably stick to the dealerships too.

Yeah. When I was at the dealership, I was the EV guy. So I don't know if there's not a lot of people that know that we actually had a full EV focus back in 2013. Really? Ford had a full electric focus back in 2013. So I was the only one certified to work on them at the dealership at least.

What did you see? Many of them were not really.

Not really. I think there was two in, I think, probably the Midwest, really.

Super rare collector.

It was. It was super weird. So actually the general manager at the time had bought one. So I ended up working on it quite a bit.

Were they difficult to work on now?

No, no, really it's not. It's now just a big computer with wires. So most of the time, it's going to set a code, and the codes get so specific for what module, what interface, what area you're looking at. And then it's only a few other things that it could be once you get down there to rule it out. And then by then, Ford doesn't want you replacing this one piece, they want you to just replace the whole module, or the whole assembly, that kind of thing, and then it's just reprogramming it.

Interesting. Okay. So it wasn't too shabby to work on. Do you think the new ones are a lot more like that too?

The new ones are a lot more involved. They're getting to the point now that there's more being able to be repaired or fixed or programmed or anything like that. I had a short stint at Motorworks BMW, and that's when the i8 came out and the i3, and those were insane. Really? Yeah. You really had to be certified. You went through a lot of classes to be able to work on those cars because there was so much involved.

Really? And is that mostly just because they were hybrid?

Probably just... Understanding the EV system is probably... The EV system was really intricate on them. Really?

Okay.

And just a lot had to come apart to do a little bit in the whole...

Is there a lot of safety stuff involved? There's probably some high voltage shock risk at that point.

You pretty much have to break something or really not know what you're doing to get yourself hurt. There's a lot of safeguards, a lot of floating grounds, nothing's chassis grounded, nothing is where you're just going to grab onto something that's going to shock you. Unless it's been in a horrific accident and the thing is demolished, that's when you have to really have to worry about the shock risk or anything like that. But a lot of times, they have safeguards where if you pull the main fuse on it, they're dead. But then from there, is it damaged? Is it going to cause a shock or an explosion?

I wonder how much safety has to go into loading up those cars after an accident. Is there a lot? Do you know anything about that? Like when a tow truck has to pick up a total Tesla or something?

As far as picking them up, I'm not sure if there's anything that...

Have you seen any EV fires being in the fire department yet around here?

Not around here. At least not in my area. We haven't had a lot of EV fires. So we've seen them crash, but not on fire.

Interesting. Yeah, it's going to be wild. Man, these next few... I'm worried, because I also think about what chemicals are burning. What's going into the air, right? Because for example, I can't remember if it was Iraq or Afghanistan when they had those burn pits, and then all those guys came back with just f***** up lungs and everything. It's like, I wonder what happens when all that stuff gets in the air.

Or even cars now. So, if you have burning plastic and your AC system ruptures, now you got R134. Good point. Burning through the carcinogen of burning plastic and rubber and gasoline, I mean, that stuff turns into cyanide like that. So if you don't have breathing apparatus on in front of a burning car, it's bad stuff.

I hope one burning Tesla equals a hundred deleted diesel trucks. Just to stick it to them.

That would be awesome. Someone needs to do that math.

Yeah, right?

We need that proof. I'm sure the math is crazy. I almost wonder if they are like dead equal. Somebody probably did do the math or again, worst case scenario, it's like, for example, one ship is like the entirety of the US, burning gas or whatever it was, whatever it did, numbers out too, but bringing batteries over here, the ship and then the biggest thing is making the batteries. Yeah.

How much earth is being mined and stripped down to build these batteries?

Somebody did the math on that too. It goes viral, like maybe like every few months, but it's crazy. I mean, it's crazy.

The amount of fuel of the machines to mine all the explosives stuff, everything, right?

Well, I think it came out to, I think somebody did math did out right. So like they say a Tesla battery should last 10 years or whatever it is. And it's after seven years where it's actually like carbon neutral or whatever it is. So you finally offset that. I'm not sure what a normal car would be as well for carbon neutral, but I was just like, oh, that's interesting. But I don't know. I feel like we're just three petrol guys talking about something that we might not know about.

We don't know s*** about EVs really.

At some point, yeah, well, that's kind of where I'd throw out that disclaimer to people. I mean, I can't imagine I have many EV listeners, but I'd like to get at least one expert on in the future just to see like, all right, am I full of s***? Because I have a lot of body. I think it's only I got to say it's got been the last five or 10 minutes that it must not have got the whole EV thing, f****** Elon just sent a missile down.

Starlink satellite found us and shut us down.

That is hilarious.

No, because I've been periodically looking down and I'm pretty sure it just nuked the EV conversation. All right. So Elon's listening. All right, Fords. F***, where do we take this conversation? I was a hell of a drop on that.

Anything exciting? So I know you want to expand. Your shop physically has tons of space. You just have like basically an imaginary line that you're technically not allowed to cross for your area. I know that guy or something is supposed to be happening or moving. Are you looking at, is that going to be happening sometime soon?

We're still in the kind of figuring out how he wants to lay out the rest of the shop. So the building itself is 60 feet wide, but it's 150 feet deep. So it's a very large building, like you're saying. And I'm just hoping to take over the stall next to it. So then I'll become 40 feet wide, 60 feet deep. I'll have the alignment rack in there with the hunter machine and then a lot of ground space for at least bringing in more cars, more readily available. So instead of right now, my limitation is I can have maybe three cars that are immovable or not runners in the shop that I can push around to be able to access my waist in the back. So it's and I'm already at that limit with the non movers.

Alrighty, so there was one more cut here. We didn't miss too much of the conversation, but we basically transitioned from EVs into talking more Mustang stuff. So apologies. 60 episodes later, it finally happened. But nonetheless, enjoyed the rest of the show.

I have seen that doesn't have like a crazy snout that comes out like really far to really far. Yeah. I think Celine used that on a few of this is Fox bodies back in the day on the 302s.

Yeah. There's actually a guy building one right now, Lee Wickenhouser.

Oh yeah.

He's building one with the Kenny Bell on a Celine.

So yeah, you don't, you don't aren't into Fox wise without knowing who Lee is.

No, you don't know who Lee is if you're talking about Fox bodies.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Whipple, are you messing with any of these ESS blowers yet?

I have not. I've seen a couple and Mo is pretty much holding on to that.

Yeah.

Forge right now at the ESS. You know, I've heard a lot of good things. I've heard questionable things.

Well, we both know how Dan feels about them. That's where I was getting a lot of my information at first.

Yeah. So we have the progressive, the progressive blow, like progressive boost and, you know, pro charger tried coming out with that progressive boost head unit. And I think I was, it was, I was supposed to install it, but left Apple Valley, ended up getting installed anyway, on to a Raptor and it didn't work out. It ended up making way too much boost and then it didn't make any boost. And I can't remember what all went into it, but there was a bunch of, a bunch of changes that had to happen for it to be right.

It was interesting because we had Mike on, what is it, four episodes ago. He went from Vortech to ESS and he is just loving the ESS right now.

Yeah. You built, you worked on or built Mike's first Mustang he had. The black, the black one.

Black with white striped car, his NA build.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that one, he, he made, he made a lot of people upset with that one. How was that E85 long tube header E85 car that Casey and I spent a lot of time building that dude just to get it right, you know, with the 10 R80, getting the shift points correctly. Cause we knew that guy, that Mike wanted to be a roll racer and everything else. And then I worked with Mike in just fine tuning how to, to keep it in the right gear, keeping the right RPM, you know, giving them pointers on where to have it set for the 10 R80 when he was started, when he started the rolls. And he got really good at it. So I, I got a lot of phone calls because of that guy. I'm like, what did you do to it? What's in the car? Cause he didn't want to tell anybody what he did.

He was beating people up, man.

A lot of people.

What was it making power wise? It was like mid 500s to the wheel, right?

I want to say it was low, like 520.

Yeah, I think it was something like that.

Like 515, 520. It was just a long tube E85 car that we just, we rubbed it out, rubbed it out and it made a lot of, a lot of power on E85. It took timing. I don't know what, there's some cars that just, they don't want to take timing. And then his car did. As soon as that thing, as soon as you punch it, that thing was commanding 30 degrees of timing. And that is insanity. That's a lot of timing. But it wanted it. We even bumped it to 31. It loved 31. And we're like, nope. We brought it back down to 29 for the fall, for the end. But it loved making power and that car pulled all the way through.

So he must have done the oil pump gears and stuff too, when he did it. Yeah. So one of the coyotes' downfalls is the oil pump gears. Anytime you're going to start messing with the engine, I highly recommend that's step one.

Any mod motor, really. Any mod motor that you're going to push a lot of power through or it be forced induction. Just the amount of force that you're putting on that crank shop in the front and the vibration that you get out of it, they crack, they break, and then all of a sudden you lose oil pressure and you're done. Another guy locally found that out. He kept putting off wanting to do oil pump gears and he made it so nice. But I've heard that car is now back up and running again.

So these fallen coyotes bounce back pretty quick too.

They can.

Well, thankfully, it's not a very expensive platform too. It's something I would love to consider once I have the financial means to do so.

Yeah, they're absolutely just like an engineering marvel. They really can for a V8, you can squeeze a lot of juice out of them and they just keep on. My own problems aside that I've had, which again I think is just pushing the limits of where I needed to be at. What I was trying to do wasn't exactly what I should have been doing.

Boost. They love boost and they'll hold on to it for quite a while. So I've had, you know, even stock cars, I think Mike even pushed it a little bit with his. But you know, you can push 17 pounds of boost through a stock block, 18 pounds of boost through a stock block and they'll hold on. It's that oil pump gear and the crank sprocket that once they start spinning that fast, they don't want to hold up.

And how difficult of a fix is that then? Sort of expensive, I guess.

It turns into pretty, pretty expensive venture. It depends on, you know, if you're just going to replace it and go back to what you had, not that bad. But if you want to build it then to the point of it needing to hold that amount of power, you know, with coyotes, it's not uncommon to go 20, 20 grand into a motor from there.

Are you talking about that? Are you talking about the oil pump gears?

More so the oil pump gears specifically.

Yeah, so the part itself is only $300 or $400. But I would say about 15 hours of labor.

So yeah, I mean, all in your, you know, right around 25, 2500, 300, 300 grand to doing it. I mean, it sounds like a lot of money, you know, just to put in oil pump gears. But when you're talking about, you know, that versus the alternative, a full rebuild, 2025, and worse than that, depending on where you want to go from there, or how much damage it cost. So if you ran low on oil that bad, and you ran it for that long, you wiped out the heads, now you got to get new cylinder heads, new block, everything's got to be new.

Are those getting easier to get a hold of yet, the Gentoo Coyote heads or anything? Because they were, for a while, they were hard to get.

Yeah, no, they're still hard to get. And they're out there, but people don't want to let them go. So that's the biggest thing is finding someone that actually wants to let go of a set of Gentoo heads. But on the side of that, Jane Anderson has a really good fix for a Gentoo head turning it into a port head, getting rid of the direct injection ports.

Oh, really? Okay.

So there's definitely options out there if you need to, if the Gentoo heads aren't there.

And he's our, he's local here, but he's far as coyote heads. He's like one of the go to guys in the industry, isn't he?

He's kind of the go to for cylinder heads in the industry.

Really?

So Jason, Jason was the machinist head guy for Total Engine for 25 years. And he developed a tried and true way of porting and polishing and just working cylinder heads to make the most flow, get the most power out of them. And he just continues to just crush it with all the platforms. I mean, as far as LS stuff, Miata's, MG stuff, everything, he's just a kind of a cylinder head whiz. So he's got a lot of the big name cars in the Midwest area, Tony, Bad Cobras, Jane Anderson heads, all the cars I build are Jane Anderson heads. So a lot of 4.6, 5.4, 5 liter, you name it, he does it.

Just heads though, does he do any porting of blowers or anything like that too? No.

Intakes.

Intakes?

Intakes. He's done a couple lower intakes on blowers. He hasn't gotten, at least I haven't had him porting any blowers or anything yet, but intakes, a bunch of intakes. A lot of the boss ones, the plastic ones, he's been doing those too. 18 plus intakes.

You gotta love those guys that have a specialty and they just stick with it.

Yeah.

I just crush it, absolutely, in one single field.

Six, seven months, a year booked out.

Yeah.

It's insane.

That's huge. What's your booking like nowadays? Are you booked out pretty far?

Right now about two, three months is the biggest thing. That's for bigger jobs. I pretty much put it in there where if it's a smaller job, I can sneak it in. But as far as big jobs go, it's about two, three months out.

And big jobs being just full-blown builds?

Yeah.

Gotcha. And I think I kind of missed it earlier. You said your highest horsepower build was like in the 860 wheel range?

That was dyno proven, but that was with an throttle body issue.

Right.

And if I corrected that, the highest dynoed car, I would say, was like 1300. That was a while ago. That was a four-liter blower on the GT 500. Otherwise the Coyote one, I know it's north of 1000.

It's hard to dyno when you start getting into the higher power. I feel like anything over 2000, you just kind of need a hub dyno.

Yeah. You pretty much have to have a hub dyno at that point. Yeah. There's not too many out there either, locally. No, not at all.

Dave Rasmussen is supposed to be supposedly getting one.

A hub dyno?

Yeah.

All right.

So out in was a DRSC.

Yeah.

We got to get him back on here as well. I'm excited to see what that silly car of his does next year.

It's twin turbo?

Yeah.

Are you done with twin turbo builds or not really?

I haven't serviced them, haven't built them.

Okay.

So I'm a big supercharger fan. I like that grunt. Turbos are great. Turbos make a lot of power. Super volatile. Super unpredictable. They create a lot of heat. There's a lot of things that you got to take into account when you're doing them right. So otherwise, you're just constantly rebuilding that car.

Interesting, because I've always heard that superchargers make a ton of heat compared to like what turbo guys always talk about.

So it's a different kind of heat.

Yeah, true.

So turbos make cylinder temp heat, and superchargers make intake temp heat. So turbos will melt your seats out of your heads. Superchargers will just make the air really hot. And after about eight, nine runs, you heat soak it, so now you're not making as much power because you're thinning the air out that's going into the engine. So there's just ice boxes.

There's no chance for detonation then, too, in that situation.

I wouldn't really say it's as volatile as the temperatures get from the turbos, but some of it can be offset with the methane injection, that kind of stuff.

Have you done many meth builds?

Only a couple.

There's some more headache than you're worth.

The meth stuff is finicky. You really got to time it out right, and it's got to be tuned correctly. But it's just a band-aid, still, or you're just trying to feed it a pill to make it work kind of thing.

Is that like if you wanted to stay on pump gas, and you wanted to push the limits of horsepower, that would be right? Otherwise, E85 is usually the safest option, right? That just gets you into that. You don't really need meth or anything at that point.

No.

Okay.

No. E85 is pretty detonation-proof once you get up in there, you get the really good E85, or you move into the E1, the race E ethanol.

One ethanol stuff.

One ethanol stuff.

Yeah.

I've seen the jugs. It seems like a hassle.

What, to get a big one ethanol pallet?

Yeah.

I mean, just to do that in general, like I don't, I just, why can't I have 1200 horsepower and just go put pump gas in the car? Like that's just what I want. It's not possible, but like, that's what I want.

You can get 1300 horsepower and pump gas if you just get a twin turbo Viper, you'll be fine.

So it's not got anything else.

For 250,000.

Yeah. No thanks. So you can just go put 93 in that some b**** and-

Oh, they were putting, yeah, 91 in f****** Kratos.

Really?

Yeah.

Meth injection then too, or no?

F*** if I don't think so. I don't think they do much meth injection in those bad boys. I can't wait for Texas.

The twin-turbo Viper stuff is insane. That world is crazy. Yeah.

I've been around those guys for a couple years now. I've learned a lot of stuff. It's ridiculous.

Yeah.

Especially the guys that do it right. That's the other thing, because one just came up for sale. It's interesting, to say the least. Apparently, it's one of those stay-away ones.

Who's that one?

It's like a smaller shop, whatever. It's an all-fair discussion. One of my buddies is like, yeah, no. Seems like a bargain, but you'll pay out for it later. And I'm sure you see it all the time in your industry or your set of the industry too. It's like, all right, this guy, he has ridiculously high numbers. But for some reason, every other build comes back blown up, you know? Yeah, so.

Yeah, there's plenty of that out there.

Yeah, this is a weird one-off one though. And that's the other thing too, is like, sometimes you get shops that dabble in something that they just aren't very familiar with. See some of that too. Do you have any, I'm curious actually, do you have a lot of fix up builds from time to time or not really?

From time to time, stuff that was built somewhere else and then I'll finish it kind of a thing or it was built somewhere else and they're just like, I'm not quite sure if I'm comfortable with this. I want you to just completely go through it type of thing. And then there's ones that are, the ones you don't want is the ones that you bid out, then they're built somewhere else and then they come back to you to fix because it doesn't run right. Yeah. And it's like, well, now I'm going to have to go through this even more.

Doing that shop jumping stuff, yeah.

So it's, you know, I'm okay. If people want to bid out, I'm all for it. And it's just the industry, you know, I'm not going to say that everyone's going to come to me or that I'm the cheapest or that I don't even really want to even cut down my prices for that point of the fact that, you know, I know how far I'm going to go to make it right.

Correct.

Where other shops are like, I need, I want this build, and I'm going to get it done for you in X amount of time, and then you're going to have fun with it. Well, if they would have taken more time or gone farther with it, then it would have been done better.

But just do it right the first time. Yeah, you know, a lot of people just try to save a few thousand bucks and it bites them in the a**, unfortunately, a lot of the time.

That's usually where it happens. It's like, oh, well, I can, these guys are 500 bucks less. Well, now you've come to me with this broken stuff and now it's going to cost you $5,000 more.

Yeah, you've double paid now at this point.

Now you've done it a few times. Or you try and bid a job out and you tell them, oh, you need to do this, this, this, this, this. And they're like, well, I only have this budget. What can I do with this budget? And I'm like, well, then I would only do this, like supporting stuff. Guys that want to like, I want a supercharger. I want to do this. Well, you need to do this to your car first.

Right.

And they're like, I don't want to spend that much money. They're like, let's just do the supercharger. Let's just do that. And then when you talk about the other stuff that was going to like, oh, let's go. So now.

Now you're screwed. You're up Schitt's Creek.

Yeah. Now it's like, well, you're this far into it. Do we do you want to fix it or are you just going to let let this roll down the river?

Yeah. Cutting corners, man. Don't want to do it.

No.

Especially if I mean, when it comes to big power, it's pay to play.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's the other thing too. It's like, can I go to, you know, ramp my, my little GTI up to 550 wheel? Oh, in a weekend. But there's a few things that I'm going to have to do first because there's some things that are going to let go.

Yeah.

And even if they might not, I don't know about other people, but I'm more, I like to be in that realm of caution. Like, let's overbuild it.

Yeah. Well, if you want a car that makes 800 horsepower, you don't build a car to make 800 horsepower.

Correct.

You make a car that builds 1600 horsepower and then put 800 horsepower to it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You don't build it for what you want out of it. You build it way more. And then it'll be, it'll last at 800 horsepower.

Right. So. You could put some serious miles on it, too.

If you want to know what it feels like, if you have a cure, get home. Grab yourself an eight ounce cup and hit the 10 ounce button. And then when s***'s overflowing and all over your kitchen floor and how pissed off you are, then, then just take that analogy and put it on a much larger scale and in your car.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, even better, right? It's like, if you think of it, if you take like an eight ounce cup and you pour eight ounces in it, you're right there at the top.

Now walk to your, your desk and try not to do anything with it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's gonna, it's gonna spill.

It's like, you might be able to run upstairs once or twice, you know, without spilling a drop, but you keep running it. You're gonna be dropping everything everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a great analogy.

Yeah.

That's a great.

I know. I just came up with that right now.

Did you actually?

Yeah. Yeah.

Where are you filling up exactly 10 ounces? I missed that part.

Well, I don't use the Keurig anymore. My wife is a barista, so we have a fancy machine and she does it all. But yeah. Yeah.

Bougie.

Yeah.

We get pretty bougie over there. Yeah.

So, we kind of talked a little bit about what's next for you, so just kind of maintain status quo, just get more shop space.

So, what qualifies as a…

Dude, getting more in-house stuff, so keeping more in-house. So, I do all my own alignments, but now being able to do the alignments in the in-house. You know, I do set up coilover setups, but now with the new alignment rack, I can get my weight scales and I can do corner balancing. You know, I can do more race-ready stuff instead of telling people, hey, you got to take it out.

Nice, okay.

Take it to Redify or take it to Emola or whatever other shops in the area.

So when you... Who do you use for coilovers? Do you have any go-to brands or not really?

Not really. There's a few that have worked out well, Fortune, I've done a couple of those kits and then just like the Eibach stuff, Viking, Viking always makes a really good product. But honestly, it's nothing that is like world's different, you know.

It comes down to your setup at the end of the day anyway.

KW, that kind of thing.

Do you tip... I mean, I guess it varies from customer to customer because I know Viking has four-way adjustable coilovers a thing now, right? So, do you go as far as any of that setup?

Mostly the stuff that I see is two-way. Even with the Almond Olin's for the Ford GTs, that's a crazy coilover setup that's running in the MTK Motorsports. The Ford GT, they went 300 in the Texas mile.

Oh yeah, that one.

So, they run Almond Olin's. I have like three or four cars now locally that run those. It's a great setup. They handle amazing, but it's a race coilover. So, I mean, now your car that you thought was just a cruiser car is now a, it handles like a race car.

Right.

So, and that's the biggest thing is guys are like, I want a coilover. It's like, well, what are you actually wanting to do with the car? Like, are coilovers the way you should go? Or should you go just like a lowering spring and a one-way adjustable shock? No adjustable shock. You know, you just lower the car for a little bit more center of gravity and handling because you don't want to be, you know, feeling every bump in the road or do you want to feel all the bumps in the road?

So you can dial, can you do that there where you could dial it in for race applications too? I mean, let's say I want double adjustable Viking shocks. You would kind of be able to set the stuff to where you thought.

Yep.

Okay.

A good starting point. And then it's going to be like a one or two click up or down from there as far as how you're going to go. So you can set up your shocks for drag set up. You can loosen them up or you can stiffen them up for a road course or autocross, launch mode, stop box. That's the biggest thing with the Mike and the Optimus series. You're running so many different events. You have an autocross event, you have a road course event, and you have a stop box event. Then you have D&E, design engineering. You want a different setup for all these different applications because you want to be able to your car to perform the best in those areas.

And then is that more like you set up a universal setup or are they changing on site?

It's changing on site. I usually come home with a rotor tattoo on the inside of the wrist from reaching inside the wheel to turn the knobs and you hit the edge of the rotor after it just came off the big track and they're glowing red hot. So yeah, no, for that event, it's constant.

So you're running like race support for him then?

I run trackside support for Mike for that weekend. So it's pretty much 7 o'clock to 7 o'clock. Every 15 minutes, something's going on. So it's making sure the tires are aired up the right way at the right temp for going on to the track, that they're coming off the track the right way. Different setups for suspension, you know, hey, this autocross course felt just different. So we change up from there, different setups, just to keep them balanced as he's going through the track. And then the stop box, because one year the stop box was a big right hand turn to a stop box. One of them was like a short autocross then into a stop box. So it all depends on the way they set it up.

Is stop box, is that what they had at SEMA?

I'm not sure.

It is the optimal event at SEMA. There is a stop box where it's just gun it and then stop inside the box without touching a cone.

Right.

So it was really cool to see how fast you can get there and how fast you can stop. But it's fun. Some of the bigger cars, you know, there's a guy, I think he was there with his challenge, 70 Challenger, there's a purple one with all its arrow on it. And he'll come flying into the box and then just lock up all four tires and he's sliding sideways through and blast the cones. It's a blast. It's a super fun event.

So I want to look into that one, and I know registration is coming up here pretty soon. Do they, so like when Mike runs it, does he go out to Laguna and do all that stuff too? Can you do just like a Midwest section of it or how does...

You can do one, you can do two, you can do all of them. It's all what you want to, how far you want to go with it. And what events you want to go in. Like he wants to do Sebring, which is coming up, and he wants to do Road America. And then obviously everybody wants to get the invite to SEMA. Says that's the big one. So you have to win an event to get an invite to SEMA. Or if you podium, you know, for a second or third, and the other guys have an invite already, then you can get your invite to SEMA kind of a thing.

So of all those events, what's your favorite to like just kind of captain on the side?

The road course is obviously just the best. Road America is, I go out to Road America with Mike, and it's just a blast. The track is super fast. It's really technical. It's a lot of fun areas to go and watch racing and just seeing everyone out there, just meeting so many different people and helping them out and helping all their track teams too. So, but it's fun.

So, do you have a lot of track experience yourself then?

I used to autocross quite a bit.

Okay, that's what I'm trying to get into a lot more next season. This year was my first year doing autocross, and I loved it.

Yeah, it's a blast. It really is technical. I mean, you can go out there with just this po-don car that you don't even think can do much, but if you set it up the way you want and it works for you, you know how to drive it, you can beat a lot of cars.

Yeah.

Like I had my Thunderbird that I had built years ago, I would go out, even when I had the V6 version, I was beating Porsche 911s and Camaro Z28s, just because I had the suspension set up the right way and I knew how to drive the car and get it through the cones. But yeah.

That's one thing I needed to do on my car is dial in the suspension, because all I did with it is lower it, just to look cool when I first got it, just to get a little bit lower than the previous owner. But I'd like to actually have it dialed in for a track set up. Do you have any recommendations on what I would do for that, actually?

For like golf, I'm not the guy to talk to.

No, anybody in the space. I should probably ask these guys.

I would say talk to Ritified about it.

I should ask them if they do stuff like that, actually.

I know Ritified, or even before Ritified, RS, RS Motors and Bernie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ronnie.

They did a bunch too, so.

Yeah, that's something I just know for a fact that whatever I did, it's not done, you know, ready for the track, as far as I know.

And really, the biggest thing is figuring out acceleration and gearing and heel toe.

Yeah, well, thankfully, I'm automatic, so.

There you go.

Yeah, I gotta, dude, this guy wanted to leave his simulator in automatic, because he was too scared to use the paddle shifter, so.

Well, I didn't, I wanted to get used to driving in a simulator, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to feel the Gs of the car, which is a huge, like, I can tell when the tire is about to slip, or something, just by, like, the feel of my a** in the seat, right? So I was like, I'm not going to get that in a simulator, so I'm going to concentrate on getting around the track, and then I'll worry about paddle shifting. I don't paddle shift my GT 500, either, no, because I'm getting, again, though, that, like, in track mode, it's supposed to know exactly what it's doing, and for the most part, it does. But I want to get, I want to hone my skills as a driver before I start worrying about when I need to not shift. I want to concentrate on when to brake, when to not spin out in a corner, try and not go in the grass again, like I did that one time, so.

Yeah, you got a lot of practice for that one.

Counting the brake markers, how far into that turn can you go before you have to really.

Now, in my orange car, that's a whole different driving experience, because I'm shifting that car. I don't have the, I can't paddle shift it, right, so I have to, but I'm almost, I feel better at that. I'm using the engine torque to bring me into corners and stuff like that than I am, and I actually am learning that I probably should be braking more than I am downshifting into corners, just because the way you slow down is different. I want to be shoving more weight to the front of my car, so not using the engine to brake as much and more of the brakes to brake when I'm coming into those corners. So that's just the kind of stuff that I didn't want to think about when driving the GT 500, just to see.

Yeah, the way you throw the weight around in a car is a big deal.

Right.

Yeah, I'm so excited to get to learn more. Hopefully, so I actually had a great phone call with Michael Peterson yesterday. I don't know, do you know Michael Peterson by chance? Big Ford guy, used to be a former engineer there.

He worked in the like, is it John Coletti? The SVT, like head of SVT in the golden era of the Terminator and stuff. He was on the SVT team as an engineer. It had to do with like engines and stuff. So he was involved in SVT Cobra stuff. I had never really heard of him either until I heard him come on the podcast and kind of nerd out about cars and stuff. But like just, I want to meet him just so I can pick his brain about working at Ford in that department those years.

In that era. Yeah, there were a lot of engines that were developed in that time frame. Cause they even developed, you know, the four six, four valve way before it ever came out, and they had it in the...

And he was part of that team that did the SN95, then the four six, four valve was something he worked on.

Yeah, cause there was two SVT Thunderbirds that were built with the four six, four valve.

Really?

Yeah, and they never came out. I think there's one that exists now, but I have no idea where it was.

I know a guy, cause I'm a big Thunderbird guy myself, it's not a huge following, so like getting parts for a Thunderbird is absolutely insane. The 87, 88 Turbo Coupe might be one of the best cars I think ever made, they're amazing. But there's a guy I know down in Iowa, he supposedly has, he has an 88 Turbo Coupe, but it has a 302, a 50, with a supercharger on it that was supposedly built at Ford at the factory, but it was for Bill himself. And so like, he has this car, and I've been trying to buy it off him for several years, it just sits in his garage. And it came with 93 Cobra wheels on it, that he said were factory, but 93 is when those went on the fin or whatever. 93 is when those were into production on a vehicle, but here he's got them on an 88 Turbo Coupe.

He's got fan blades on an 88. Yeah.

So I'm like, he took them off. I bought the wheels from him, so I have them. They're like brand new. He's a guy, I took them off and just whatever. So I'm like, well, I want those. So now I'm trying to get the rest of the car at some point in time. But yeah, there's some weird stuff that I think gets billed for executives and things like that, that people don't even realize. It could be one or two of something out there.

Yep.

Which brings us back to the-

Michael Peterson, sorry. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, I was gonna say the Matt Black Cyber Truck, one of one right now.

Is it really?

Yeah, an executive has a black cyber truck. Yeah, hold on, I was talking about EVs again. Gotta make sure it doesn't shut off the old-

Yeah.

Literally pulled the plug on the whole podcast. No, the reason I brought them up is because we are gonna be doing a podcast with him, hopefully on the fifth here. But also next season, we might be doing some stuff at Brainard. So bringing that all back to all the track stuff, I'm hoping for us to do some classes up there. So I might bring the AMG or the Golf, and then you could bring the GT 500, or maybe I'll just drive the GT 500 on the track. We'll see what happens. I'm sure Mark will let me.

Yeah, I'll let you drive mine. Yeah, after you take a couple of classes.

A couple of classes.

Yeah, no.

Dude, you know what? I actually, I feel like I'm so much better in real life than on games though. Like I used to be a killer at video games as a kid. Like I was crushing on the tracks, especially when I had the lines telling me where to brake. Well, for some reason in real life, like I just, again, geez, like feeling when to stop the car. Oh, am I, are my brakes, am I locking up and all that? Like, I learned a lot in those six laps at Morgan's Motorplex about myself.

I bet. You learn a lot in seat time. You know, how Dan's talking about the oisometer. It's, you learn a lot by what you feel in a car. You know, the first few times you go out racing, it's huge.

Yeah, no, every single lap was better. So the first, I want to say two or three laps, I left it in automatic to see like, all right, I'm sure, you know, the car will know what it's doing best. And I realized after the fact, wait, that's not the case. Because after I switched it into a manual paddle shift or whatever, my tie just shaved time off once I figured it out. So I'm really excited to get a lot more track time under my belt next year, if all goes well. But no, the reason I brought up Michael Peterson is again, we might be doing some podcasts up at Brainerd and whatever next year.

Oh, that'd be cool, like an on location.

Yeah, we're having discussions. It's gonna be very cool. But yeah, I'm really excited, too cool to do a lot of, got me all excited for that now. It's f****** winter, dude.

Yeah, I want to try and hold my skills next year for track stuff. It's something that, it's the adrenaline rush you get from being out there and just beating on your car. And again, feeling the car, I don't know, some people, so most tracks, the requirement is to have your window down. For me, that's just a given. I want to hear the car, I got to hear my tires. There's a lot of, I couldn't even imagine rolling to my windows and turning on the radio and being on the racetrack. There's so many factors that I'm trying, I'm smelling the fricking heat off of the engine when fluids start to warm up. There's so many factors that you can take in.

The hot oil smell. Yeah.

I actually had to have, and I'm like, holy s***, and I look down and look at my temps, I'm like, ooh, I should probably pull off and give her a little cool down.

Yeah, even I was like that. I was surprised how hot my temps got. I was like 30 degrees.

You're pushing the cars, Road America is rough on a car. That one is like-

It's a lot of high RPM.

Yeah, and it was, I'm burning through, people, just for reference, you get a 30 minute session, the track's what, four, just over four miles? And I'm burning-

4.084.

Yeah, so I'm burning an entire tank of fuel each, every session. I mean, you're just really, really putting a car through the wringer. But it's, I've been only on a handful of tracks, but it was my favorite so far. It's amazing.

It's a blast.

Well, we'll be back at two fun ones next year, which will be an announcement in the next couple weeks, hopefully.

Yes.

Yeah, which is, I'm gonna lead the listeners wanting more on that one. But on that note, did you want to ask the final three? We're coming up on two hours minus the EV cut.

Yeah, sure. So again, this one's gonna be a fun one, interesting one from you. So at the end of every podcast, we ask our guest to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget. Swaps are fine. Whatever your imagination holds you back from, we want a track car, a show car and a daily driver. What are your three cars?

Oh man.

Or trucks.

A track.

Or school bus, whatever you want.

School bus. A track, show and daily. Oh man. Oh man, track car, track car would have, I would definitely have to say just a heavily modded up Ford GT, 05, 06, four liter Wibble, all done up. That would be a blast of a track car. They're balanced so well. Such a fun car to drive.

For like road course purposes?

Yeah. I would say daily. Daily, I'd love to get back into like a mid 90s Thunderbird Super Coupe, like a pearl white Super Coupe with the black interior. But probably Coyote swap it.

Oh, that'd be sweet.

Coyote swapped with a Wibble.

There is something about that 90s Ford, like just interior brings me back to my like good old days. Like I want the little black radio with the spin on it.

The seats in the Thunderbird were just so comfortable. And it was independent rear suspension. So I mean, it was way above the beyond the Mustangs of that time with the solid rear ends. I mean, those guys handled really well. And then show. Oh man. I would probably have to say a mid 50s F100. Big window, big window truck. And then just a massive nasty 460 push rod motor in it. Just something that just sounds ridiculous. High compression, big cam.

Those are my favorite years of the F100 too. A lot of people would gravitate towards that 40s. They're that kind of smaller truck. And the 50s are bigger, right? They got that bigger, wide.

The F1 era.

Yeah, those are the ones that I like as well.

Yeah, like the bigger bodied.

Yep.

Just like along the lines, I had a 79 Bronco. So the big Bronco.

Yes.

So I like the big F1.

Why did you get rid of the Bronco?

We've all got a Bronco we got rid of, we shouldn't have.

Yeah.

Well, I know you and your mistakes.

That was actually just, we really wanted to take a really nice trip. We had a, the wife and I had just got married, and so we had our honeymoon was planned for a Mediterranean cruise. So we sold it to fund a lot of that.

There was a time where they weren't, like Broncos really kind of come back up, but there was a time where Broncos were five, 600 bucks, old beater Broncos.

I bought mine from Des Moines, Iowa for 800 bucks.

Yeah, I paid $500 for the one I had.

I sunk a ton of money into it, and it was a blast to drive. We used to run out to Manning, Manning the drive-in theater out there. Have them back off and watch the movies and roll it all the way back to Carver.

Yeah.

But it was a blast, but no. I didn't think it was gonna be one of those, you get rid of it and then a couple years later, all of a sudden they're worth a ridiculous amount of money.

Right, yeah. A good 78, 79 Broncos is at 20, 30 range now.

Easy.

Yeah.

Easy.

It's crazy.

So Broncos and Bitcoin, things I missed out on.

Yeah, right.

I guess.

Well, sweet, on that note, where can people find you?

Bowen Built LLC, and that's gonna be on Instagram or Facebook. I have a website, but I don't use it. So pretty much, my phone number is listed on Instagram or Facebook, Bowen Built LLC, all in one word.

Sweet. Mr. Gunnett.

You can find us at Gunnett Garage, that's two N's in there. Yeah, again, we're waiting for some snow, so I can get some more content.

You might as well just throw some winters on the freaking GT 500 at this point.

We went to PRI, and I should have been recording and doing some cool stuff there, but it's so much race car stuff to soak in.

It was mind blowing.

Yeah.

Yeah, PRI was a blast. That's a definite bucket list. I'm glad I got to cross that and see him off this year. That was pretty sweet. As for me, you guys found me, Minnoxide and literally everything. Just be sure to check out our sponsor, Raza Hood, which kind of helps us, those of us who are not into know and smart with our cars, who need a little bit of help and a bit of a helping hand, be sure to check out razahood.com. Other than that, Jarret, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for dealing with all of them. Thanks for dealing with all the technical issues today. First time for everything. Dan, thanks for existing, and we'll see you all next time.

Thanks again.