65. Winter Tires vs All Seasons, Sway Bars, Traction, Performance Driving School w/ Michael Petersen

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris, aka Minnoxide, and I'm here with the man of many Mustangs, Dan.

Was that good?

Yeah, that's the perfect intro. And today, we're gonna go beyond the meat again with Michael Petersen. You're officially our most... I guess you've been on the show more than anybody else so far. You're only on the record at three. Two is probably Kyle Larkin, which I'm gonna get him back on soon. But as we discussed last time...

Most prolific, but least viewed. Is that what my...

Actually, I was going through some of our stats. Our first episode had a massive uptick recently, for whatever reason. I didn't look into it, but yeah, it was super cool.

You know what I find is interesting when you put stuff online? Because, listen, as you guys know, my dork factor is pretty high.

Right?

Which makes me, as my wife tells me, I'm special. But what's interesting when you put stuff online, you know what stuff gains traction? If there's a twinge of controversy in there.

A hair. But the thing is, I'm just going to adjust this real quick. It really depends on just where the controversy is, too, because sometimes it goes right over people's heads.

Correct. You know, there was one, there was a snippet that we were talking about emissions a couple of weeks ago, the last time I was on. And we were talking about how cars are tested for emissions. And this 30 second or 60 second snippet kind of took off. And I thought, well, this is not that exciting. I mean, putting gases in a bag is not that exciting, believe me. And the reason it took off is it lit up this debate about our emissions to stringent, EVs versus internal combustion. And so it wasn't the content, but we were touching on these subject matters that people find a little bit more controversial. And that's what lit up the viewership.

Yeah, we had a lot of fun on the last episode. And like we talked about, you were definitely due to come back because we had a lot of, I feel like whenever we open one can of worms, there's 20 more to come with it. So we had a number of topics. I know you were a few months ago, you were even on a, I can't remember what was it, when you were on a news channel, right? Talking about winter tires.

Yeah, I was. We were on Fox 9 one morning talking about winter tires.

Was that Fox 9? Okay.

No, I take that back. It was WCCO. Yeah, okay.

So I think we have zero inches of snow on the ground, but I think it's still worth, if you haven't bought winter tires yet, I think it might be worth having a conversation now. Cause like there was, okay, so there was a video in particular that came out a few years ago. I can't remember if it was BMW or a tire company or whatever, but they had two exact BMWs. I think they were rear wheel drive. Might've been front wheel, but nonetheless they had one that was on all season tires and one that was on winter tires. All other variables were equal. And they checked, they went to like the slippery slopes of wherever. And I think they actually went to a ski hill or something. And they basically tested to see which car stops. And the difference between all seasons and a proper set of winter tires was insane. So you could probably just Google BMW winter tires test or whatever and you could find it. But that's when I kind of smartened up and I'm like, all right, I'm probably done with the all season lifestyle. So do you just kind of want to just jump into it?

Yeah, no. In fact, I lived in Austria for a while, in Vienna, for a couple of years. And which is a weird time in my life because I didn't speak Deutsch, but I'm living in Austria. And believe me, it's hard living in a foreign country when you don't speak the language.

How long ago was this?

Oh, 15 years ago, maybe.

So they probably weren't speaking as much English as they were now. Because I visited about seven years ago. I have some family out there.

Yeah. Yeah, well, and we didn't live in an expat area. We lived in just a regular neighborhood in the 18th district where it was just Austrians. And so you're right. If you're downtown Austria, you can totally function in the touristy areas. But we were just living, you know, buying groceries, getting our hair cut, you know, living life. And so anyway, the point was in Austria, we lived at the base of the Alps. And so if you look at Vienna, Wien, as I would say, it's at the base of the very tip of the Alps. And so we lived in the 18th district on the north side and the big hills, you know, I think they were 10, 12 percent, 10, 12. And in Austria, if you don't have snow tires on your car, your insurance is invalid.

Really?

Think about that.

We should adopt that into states. Let's just get that out of the way.

They're like, we're not screwing around. You put snow tires on your car. If you want to drive your car, put snow tires on it. Don't be a dummy. And so your insurance was invalid unless you had snow tires on it. I thought that was fascinating. So but the point is snow tires make a huge difference. And there's really kind of two reasons why they make a big difference. One is the tread is fundamentally different. And there's a lot of small little cuts and grooves in there. Well, we were talking before the show started about skiing. And if you imagine yourself on a snowboard or skis, when you're going straight, you're sliding right over the top of that snow. Low coefficient of friction, you're just moving. You turn, and now you're actually moving snow. And that's where all the grip is, right? That's where all the tension is. It's when you turn. Same thing is true with a snow tire. It's the snow to snow attraction that actually sticks. So all those little grooves will suck up more snow, and then it's really the snow sticking to the snow that provides better traction. OK. And so that's part of it. It's what's that profile look like. It's a little bit like skiing. The second is the durometer or the stiffness of the rubber. Rubber gets really hard when it gets cold. And you can imagine that bottom of the ski, man, that thing's hard and it just goes. Rubber does the same thing. I have a set of race tires on one of my cars. Man, you get that thing cold, and those are just absolutely like plastic, right? There's no traction at all. And so the same thing got to happen with all season tires when it gets cold out. That rubber gets hard and that gets slippery. So what they do is they lower the durometer of the rubber significantly, so it stays very pliable when it's cold out, which allows it to mold around any little deformations in the actual roadway. And so when you put the two together, you can just get significantly better traction in the wintertime. The only downside is you can't drive them in the summer because you'll wear them out right away, because they're just too darn soft.

Yeah, like immediately.

Like immediately.

Yeah, I did that with my winters. So I don't know if you remember this last melting we had. It was crazy. Like one week it was 27 degrees, next week it was 70 degrees, and I still had my winter tires on.

Yeah, I'll be fine.

And it was like, well, then the forecast said 40 next week. So it's like, I got to stay on these stupid winter tires. And they wore quickly in those 70 degree days. I mean, they were all toasty.

Yes.

Well, Ford also going back to the performance tires, I have a friend of mine just received a Dark Horse with a performance pack.

Oh, nice.

And they are canceling orders if you had one and it hadn't shipped yet, because they won't ship any cars with performance tires, even though they're just coming on and off the trailer in and out of dealers, they won't ship anything that has that type of tire on it.

Seven minutes, by the way.

Of what?

Until you said, mention Ford.

Oh yeah, we'll get there.

It's my favorite topic.

Yeah, don't worry. I am a huge fan boy, so we're gonna talk about that later. Harris promised me I shouldn't do it right off the gate, so we'll...

He made it seven minutes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, yeah, he was super, like this is before Dan became a co-host. He was super excited to chat with you, just because our first episode was a blast. I mean, that still holds the record for longest episodes.

We were all so excited talking about whatever it was that we just didn't want to know. But I think that people need to remember is, there's a belief now that if I live in the north or in the snowy area, I have to have four-wheel drive. And four-wheel drive is better than two-wheel drive. We understand that. I would take a two-wheel drive car with snow tires all day long over a four-wheel drive car with average tires.

My car, for example, it's front-wheel drive with winter tires, and it performs fantastic in the winters. The only thing that kills me is it's a little bit lowered.

Yeah, and so you'll get where it doesn't help you if you get hung up in the snow. But I think there's this belief, oh, it's gonna be on four-wheel drive. It's gonna be fine. Four-wheel drive does not allow you to step faster. It doesn't allow you to turn any better. It'll help you to accelerate a little faster and get you out of a snowbank. But we don't want to go to the snowbank to begin with. Listen, for all those folks that are out there listening, even if you live in the North, just buy a decent set of winter tires and then buy the car that you want. And if it's not four-wheel drive, it's gonna be fine.

Well, the common phrase I hear, it's four-wheel drive, not four-wheel stop.

Figure out what, find the bolt pattern for your vehicle. Figure out what other wheels and tires fit on there. What I usually do is I take my stock wheels, winter tires go on there, and then I find a different nicer set of wheels for in the summertime, and that's how I usually do it. I just picked up a Lincoln Town Car. It's rear-wheel drive, but I figured snow tires and two sandbags in the trunk, it's gonna go anywhere. So.

Exactly. I think you're brilliant.

Yeah. Well, I grew up in the 90s, so I actually learned on an 86 Mercury Cougar, so I've had one-wheel wonder, rear-wheel drives in the winter.

Back then, I just had to laugh because we all drove the same junk back then.

Right.

And the winter tires back then were still super hard, and it looked more like a mud tire. Yeah. But they were terrible. They were just atrocious. And there wasn't any traction control, and they were really forward weight biased, and there was very few cars that had locking rear diffs or traction control. And so you try to drive these things. It was hard. I mean, it was fundamental. You had to learn to drive in the snow, because it was fundamentally different. And now you get in there, and it's just easy.

Does everything for you.

Does everything for you. Yeah. It was a skill.

Yeah. Dude, even I won't say, but somebody I know was in, hit someone, because they were reliant on the backup camera. Like, there's a guy reliant on it, Dave. It's like, you don't look behind. You know, you expect to hear that beep, and then hit someone in a parking lot. But yeah, story for a different day.

They do still put mirrors on cars, just so everybody's aware. Yeah, yeah.

I'm actually curious. So this is something I had a question about. So what's Ply when it comes to tires? I was going to get the old chat GBT Google machine, but I figured I'd ask you.

No, that's a good question. Because when you say Ply, you mean like bias Ply.

Yeah, there's like eight Ply, ten Ply. So I have trucks. So like in a three quarter ton truck, you got a ten Ply tire.

And I don't know, I'd have to look into that a little bit more carefully. I don't know, I haven't looked into that. Because normally when they think about Ply's and passenger cars, you think about bias Ply. Radial was actually the way that they wound the cords around the tire and it reduced the rolling resistance. I'm not an expert on truck tires. My assumption would be when they talk about Ply's, it's how many actual cords they have inside of that because every tire is structured for a particular weight up to a certain amount. You know, the traction and everything else is what they wrap around the outside. So I suspect that's the structure inside. So when they talk about the Ply's, it's how many layers do they actually have that it's holding the structure up, which contributes to the weight capabilities.

As Ply goes up, the weight rating goes up, so that would make sense.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it just came to mind because I want to say I was on Facebook or something the other day, and somebody was recommending somebody to get a higher Ply tire, and they're like, you'll never see a nail in that sucker ever again.

Oh, that's not how it works. Trust me, I have plenty of 10 Ply tires with nails in them.

All right, I'll go back and comment on that. But no, winter tires are absolutely like, again, we're in Minnesota. We don't have jokes for winters up here. This year, we got lucky. It's January, what, 5th, and we don't have a single-

You can call it luck, whatever you want to call it. But I miss the snow.

I don't. I'm doing all right. I wish we didn't have storage on the AMG right now. That we'd still be driving that around. Okay, so to recap, so I guess is there anything else that we should add to the winter tires discussion? I know the one thing is that ultimately they are very soft. That's kind of where we left off before we went on a tangent.

If you're going to drive in the north, everybody that I know that's ever put winter tires in their car, it's a one-way street. Once they have winter tires, they go, oh my god, this is so much easier to drive. And they're done. And I think the fear, the reason people don't buy them are two reasons. One, they go, oh, they're expensive. Two, they go, well, it's a pain in the a**. I have to switch my tires over every six months. I think the counter argument to that, and those are valid concerns, the counter argument to that is if you have a pair of winter tires on there, the rate of which they wear is half as fast. And so they last twice as long, so you're not really spending more on the tires. And the second, to your point, you can go buy a used set of rims for three, four hundred bucks and you mount them and you're done and, you know, the last of the life of the vehicle.

And slide into a light pole and then pay your $500 deductible, and now you're...

Yes. One accident and all of those concerns have gone away.

Yeah, that's fair. What about all season tires? Because like I know, so from my understanding, all tires have a range where they work best. Summer tires work best at, you know, 65 or whatever degrees or higher. Winter tires at this point. All seasons are kind of like a weird window.

This is what I love, though, about engineering, I mean, in general, which is, you know, everything is a trade-off, right? Tires are the same way. Are you trying to design a race car or a truck or a passenger car? Passenger cars tend to be some of the most difficult things to actually engineer because you're trying to balance out thousands of different variables. If I'm trying to build a NASCAR, OK, it's pretty one. There's two limits, right? Fit the specs, right? It has to be legal and then to get around the track as fast as possible. That's it. Yeah, right. If you're trying to design a passenger car or truck, whatever it may be, thousands and thousands of variables. So it's much more difficult. But tires are kind of the same thing. So on one spectrum, you have race car tires where you just say, oh, I'm just trying to optimize to get around the track as fast as possible. The other end is a snow tire, where you say I'm really optimizing for snowing rough conditions. And then that continuum kind of goes from a race car or race tire to a sport tire. And I know within there, they have three or four different varieties of sport tires, extreme performance, hyper performance, etc. And then you kind of bump into all seasons. And they're a blend of doing just about everything. They're not great in the winter. They're not great in the rain. They're not great at traction or sort of they're pretty quiet. They just do everything pretty well. But they tune them for how Americans drive 98% of the time, which is on smooth surfaces, you know, that are generally fairly dry, and they want to be quiet and good fuel efficiency, etc, etc. So they're good at a lot of things. They're not great at anything. They also one of the tire in the middle, and I think they call it not all season. They call it all weather. It's called an all weather tire. And it's kind of a halfway cross between an all season and a winter tire. But it's tuned more towards the winter. I've seen some pretty good performance out of those from the little bit of work that I've done. I mean, the things that I've researched. They're still not as good as a winter tire, so you're still better off having two. But there is this all weather tire that seems to be somewhat compelling.

So do you, and I'm sure it varies from brand to brand tire to tire. But is there eventually a point where all seasons just become worthless? I think if it's like under 20 or 30 degrees.

I think that they're never worthless, right? You can only do so much. And so once that weather, once that gets really cold, the rubber gets cold is, you know, they lose a lot of performance. And a good winter tire has almost twice the traction of a modestly used all season. And that's significant, right? If you have twice the traction, that's huge. That's huge. Right?

So yeah, I'm really bad with, I shouldn't, how do I want to phrase this? I'm very good at run. Let's put it this way. If I was to be a part of an R&D department for a tire company, I would be the best at that job. I get the mileage out of my tires, like down to the cords. Now I found out in the winter when I came back from Jacksonville last year, I got to the limit of my winter tires. I couldn't start at a stoplight, but that's where I learned. But it is crazy how long those winter tires last. You can go like three or four winters up here, I think.

Oh, I think you probably do more than that if you're taking care of them.

Where you're losing, you're losing, you don't have as much friction on the road either, right? So you've got, your compound gets harder in the winter time, like you were discussing, and you're, the road is slipperier. It's just like oil in the engine. Right.

You're not getting a lot of wear. So I think for most people, if you buy a set of winter tires, they will probably last the length of however long you own that car. They just don't wear out very quick, assuming that you don't drive them when it's 70 degrees out.

Yeah. And one thing I want to touch on actually, so we're going to kind of go to the opposite end of the spectrum here. So Alex Sajadi, who I mentioned is an instructor up at Brainerd, he'll be up there this year. We were talking, I was actually trying out his racing simulator yesterday, and we were chatting a little bit about, you know, just tires, a number of things. And one of the things that came up is, so I got Pilot Sport 4s on my summer set up. And he mentioned like they're a great tire overall, but like in a track situation, they start to get a little greasy. Like they just, so explain that then. So where the difference between like a traditional sport tire and an actual, I don't want to say slick. I don't think we're gonna go that far. But like, let's say a Cup 2, for example, or just a higher tier of a summer tire. I guess, what are some performance advantages to that? Can you speak to that at all? Before we get too far into the show, I wanted to take a moment to talk about Razorhood. If your daily driver is having issues, aka your beater you got off Craigslist, Razorhood's telemechanics and AI tools can help you diagnose and solve the issues you may be dealing with for a fraction of the cost. All you have to do is add your car to the Razorhood garage to get started. You can provide the AI tool, also known as Gus, with the specifics of the issues you're having, and it'll help you narrow down what the culprit is. It's a great way to bounce ideas off of to figure out what actually might be the problem. You can then select from a variety of solutions to explore the cost and difficulty of doing the repair yourself versus taking it to a shop. If your car doesn't have detailed solutions yet, that's totally fine. Just go ahead and add your car to the garage for free, and that'll let the Razorhood team know what to focus on as they continue to develop and grow. If you want to try out Gus or chat with a telemechanic, go to razorhood.com and add your car to the garage to get started. Use code MINNOXIDEFREE for a one-month free subscription or MINNOXIDE20 to save 20% on a 30-minute call with a telemechanic. Let's get back to the show.

Well, I mean, I think the closer you get to a race tire is, and there's even, you know, the tires I put, the tires I run on my everyday track car and just scooter on a town car are Toyo, not Toyo's, yeah, Toyo double Rs, and which is a street legal race tire.

Yep.

Right. So they have these two thin little beads that go through there. So you can say there's a groove and I drive them all the time on the street and they're perfectly fine. But if it's raining out, I'm just not going to go touch the car, right? Because they're terrible in the rain. I mean, they're just dangerous. But when you move further and further towards the race tire, you do further and further actual grooves because those grooves actually weaken that surface and you're trying to get as much surface down as you can and you want it to all be relatively rigid. The grooves are not your friend in that situation. And the second is you're going to soften that barometer up as much as possible. Now there's a bunch of things you want to do to go prevent that from actually wearing because ideally, you want that rubber to be so compliant that it forms around every little groove and crack and molecule on that roadway. But then when it starts to slide, it doesn't actually tear it apart. So it's this really hard time of just the balance between making it as soft as possible, but then also as wear resistant as possible. But the softer you make it, the higher the wear resistance, I mean, the wear tendency is going to be.

Oh, it's huge. Yeah, again, like your Toyos, I'd imagine you'd probably get what, three, five thousand miles out of them.

You know what? It's actually better than you think. It's not terrible, but that's on a lighter car as well.

True, yes. Because that car weighs what? Next to nothing.

Yeah, next to nothing. I pulled a bunch of stuff out as well. So there's not a ton of weight on it. But the point is, as you go to a race tire, you're trying to get that durometer as soft as possible to really just optimize traction. But you can forgo, you go, well, I don't need to get 10,000 miles out of them. I don't need to get 5,000 miles out of them. And in fact, if it's a real race tire, I need to get 30 minutes out of it. That's all I care about. I need 30 minutes and then I'm done. And they're going to be worn out after that. Okay, they're going to be worn out after that. I'm fine with that.

So then back to, and actually it wasn't Alex, it was Dave Rasmussen, our last guest, I was talking about Creasy PS4. So then is, so is that basically just because the tire isn't as stiff because of the grooves and such then?

No, it's really all comes down to the tire durometer, the compound of the actual rubber itself.

So what's durometer then? That's the compound?

Durometer is just a technical term of if you want to measure the hardness of something, right? What's the hardness of my skin? What's the force versus the displacement? They call that in rubber the durometer. Now the reality is once you start to get into the compounds, and I'm not a chemical engineer, but once you start to get into the chemicals or the compounds that they use, it becomes more complicated. But they're trying to optimize that thing for softness as well as wear. Now obviously, just like anything, you're really trying to go after optimum coefficients of friction. And by changing the chemical makeup in there, I can change some of those a little bit. But that's a little bit beyond my pay grade.

Yeah. Well, that's one of the goals that I have with this show is I want to have people within all these different professions. I would love to have a tire engineer on here. I would love to have a suspension engineer, you know. And you are able to give us a lot of these things, surface level and maybe even a little bit in depth, maybe further in depth, and I definitely don't understand. But then again, having somebody who specializes purely in tires or whatever would be really cool.

Well, there is one that I find interesting. And I was a ride and handling engineer for a little while. And I will say this with the greatest amount of respect. I have met ride and handling engineers that have done it for a long time that did not have a great grasp of physics and the systems that they were designing.

Yeah, that's true. That happens, too.

I mean, I was surprised on some of their miscalculations in terms of the interrelationships between some of the suspension bits. Now that said, good folks, but suspension is one of those that's more of a black arc than just about any other. And we've talked about suspension tuning a few times.

We can always bring it back up. There's always more to learn.

No, but I mean, that's one where it's harder to... That's one where black art takes over, where people go, oh, I can definitely tell it's faster. I have coilovers. I'm so much faster with coilovers. Half the time, I call b******* on that because, you know, what does coilover fundamentally give you that you don't get out of your traditional shock setup?

A little less body roll, maybe.

That's the roll bar.

Well, you get that lower gravity or center of gravity.

That center of gravity. I can do that. I can do that.

I remember. I watched this highlight 45 times when I edited it, so I started to remember it. But no, it just basically prevents, what was it, slipping of the tire, right? Because it's lower placement.

Well, no, there's some things. And what I'm trying to do is just separate out coilovers from a traditional setup.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Coilovers have some adjustment benefits. There's generally a larger oil chamber to keep them a little bit cooler, so you have more consistent dampening. I mean, you know, there's some benefits there, but coilovers are not inherently better. And then every coilover you get, they go, oh, you're going to have tuneability of the compression and the rebound and all this other stuff. The average person couldn't tune that thing. I mean, it's not like there's a right answer. They go, oh, all of a sudden, this is optimized, is I could put the average person in that car and tune it multiple different ways, and they would probably not be able to tell a difference. And they certainly couldn't tell me which one's faster on the track.

So, at what point do people start noticing a difference when you again start gathering data with actual race cars, I'm guessing? That's where it kind of really starts to matter.

And so, I keep going back to the fundamentals. Like if I'm building a track car, I keep going back to the fundamentals. And I've said this a hundred times in this show, but it all comes down to that tire road interface, right? And I'm trying to optimize that. And so, within that, I know which things work, and those I'm trying to optimize. One of the first things that we do, you talked about it, you said, hey, I'm trying to lower that car. And in fact, if I can, can I bring out a prop?

I've been waiting for that.

Because I'm a total dork here, and you're going to like us too, Dan.

He made it 25 minutes without the prop. No, I'm kidding.

I have some sandpaper.

Okay.

And I have this. This is really exciting.

What's under the towel? Let's see.

This is...

I hope it's a Ford.

It's a 2003 Chrysler PT Cruiser. Isn't that pretty cool?

Yeah.

That's right.

Mom had one. We called it the eggplant because it was that purple color. Yeah.

And then I have another one here as well, which is slightly different.

This is the show and tell portion of the show.

This is a Mustang show car that they built that never went into production, obviously. About 25 years ago.

Looks like a Cadillac Camaro.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I have some funny stories about that as well. But so we have two cars here. One is this Chrysler PT Cruiser and one is a Mustang. And so within this, though, is you can imagine that the center of gravity of this Mustang is quite low, right? The center of the gravity of this, of our very nice PT Cruiser here, is much...

The old Chrysler. What's in the bag? I feel like I'm at a magic show.

No, I have a pencil. That was my big piece. But my point here is that one of the things that we do is we lower a vehicle. Every moving body out there can be reduced to a single point of mass, and we call that the center of gravity. And I bet the center of gravity of this Mustang is probably somewhere about where that gear shifter is, right? Where the eraser is. Agreed? The PT Cruiser is much higher than that. And I bet it's somewhere, I don't know, maybe about right here, right?

Yeah, above the steering wheel.

I'm guessing, right? So, when I push on this Mustang, if I'm going to push it longitudinally, I would push it at a point that's effectively at the same height of its CG. And if I push it at that point, the amount of weight transfer to the outside wheels is actually less the further I go down, the further I lower this CG. We're going to use this Chrysler PT Cruiser as an example, piece of sandpaper. So we're going to assume this is a really sticky road. If that center of gravity was all the way at the top, right? And I go around a corner, like, what's going to happen? I mean, I would literally roll the car.

Yeah.

How much weight transfer do I have?

Quite a bit.

All of it. Yeah.

All of it.

All of it. Right? So 100% of the weight transfer is on the outside. If I magically, so I'm going to convert this to a Mustang, and now I'm going to push at its center of gravity.

I'll just help out with the mic.

Thank you. I push at its center of gravity. Well, it's not going to tip over. It's going to slide to the side. How much weight transfer is there?

Little.

Not as much, and if I move this all the way down to like where the tire is, and I pushed it, how much weight transfer is there?

None.

None. Right? So the lower I move that center of gravity, the less effective weight transfer I have moving over. Why is it that I don't want weight transfer? The reason I don't want weight transfer is we keep talking about these slip curves, right? And we say, well, here's the slip curve of the tire. And slip curve just says, here's the slip angle and here's the force it can support. Tires lose their potential the more weight you put on them. In other words, if you have a higher, and I'm going to scribble on the back of this here, and I don't know if we can record this or not, but if you have a slip curve like this, and say that's your, sorry, like this, there's your slip curve, there's my force times my slip angle, is if I actually have a higher tire, more force on this, is that slip curve actually goes down. It doesn't have the same peak coefficient of friction called mu.

Yep. And sorry, everybody that's listening, you may have seen the highlights where I showcase what the slip curve actually looks like, too.

And so the net is if this is a high weight and this is a low weight, right? So there's two things we learn out of that. Number one, you want to light a car because the lighter the car, the higher the coefficient of friction, the stickier it's going to be, the lighter the car. Have you ever seen these RC cars? They zoom around. Yeah. My God, they look like they have a jet engine on them because they have incredibly high levels of grip because it's a very light vehicle, right, right? So, you want a light vehicle because it has a high coefficient of friction. But when I start doing the weight transfer on this PT Cruiser and you push it, and now I'm going to go to the side, I'm getting 100% of the weight on the outside and 0% on the inside. So, in other words, at a balance point, this might be the coefficient of friction. When I go around a corner, then the outside tire goes to this, high weight. The inside tire goes to this, which is low weight. So guess what? Now I have 100% of the force on the low coefficient of friction and a really 0% on the high coefficient of friction. In other words, the average coefficient of friction goes down as I raise the center of gravity.

I think I'm tracking on that.

So my point is, you go around a corner and you put more weight on the outside, and the more weight I put on that outside tire, that tire does not have the same stick potential from a coefficient of friction perspective. Okay, right, the best thing that I can do is I want the same amount of weight on all four tires. Right. That's one of the reasons we have a car that has 50-50 weight distribution. Right. Because if a car weighs 4,000 pounds, I'm doing really easy math here. And I had a 50-50 weight distribution. That means I have a thousand pounds of force on every tire. Anything off of that means that the weight for one tire is going to be more than a thousand pounds, which means its peak forces are actually not going to be as attractive. So that's attractive being a coefficient of friction. So I want to keep the weight on every tire as low as I possibly can. And that means when I'm accelerating or de-accelerating or turning, I'm trying to minimize the weight transfer there. I'm trying to keep everything sort of at this 50-50-50 level. That's why I lower the center of gravity. If the center of gravity was on the ground, like physically on the ground, there's zero weight transfer.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Now do you want to touch on an instance where weight transfer is a good thing?

Of course.

Like drag racing, for example.

Drag racing is the easiest one to understand. Is why aren't there any four-wheel drive dragsters? Well, no, because the front wheels aren't doing anything. They're obviously optimized. When they take off, they get 98% of their weight transfer to the rear end and they accelerate very quickly. The other example of that, though, that I think is great is the Porsche 911s, the Turbos, right? Fastest accelerating car for so long. Well, guess what? They actually had the engine behind the rear tires. And so they get an enormous amount of weight transfer as well through that, because they're already rear biased. And when you're accelerating, think about this. As you accelerate, you're getting more and more weight transfer to the back end. So if you have a rear biased car and now you're shifting more weight to the back, it also increases the net traction capability, so it's kind of this spinning flywheel.

It is crazy, yeah.

And that's why the Porsche Turbo could do amazing things, because they were getting so much weight transfer to the back end.

The Turbo S, the latest one, when they dropped it, it was the quickest car in the world for a brief moment.

Yeah, I think so.

It was something. And even then, when they dropped the Dodge Demon in 2018, I mean, it was the fastest accelerating car, production car in the world.

The Porsche was.

No, well, the Demon was, and then the Porsche came after that, I believe. I think there was a couple of hypercars in between the Demon and the Porsche for a little stint there. But I mean, when you had a freaking Dodge beating a Bugatti Chiron, that was pretty impressive. And then the Turbo S came out and it was just this bargain of a car before, you know, COVID price hikes. But 200 grand for the fastest car in the world. That was the quickest car in the world. That was something.

And the Dodge Demon was kind of interesting because they did some research for X to help optimizing the release, right? Some braking techniques or transmission techniques to optimize the release. But they optimized it to say, OK, we're going to set this up for drag slicks. And when they would do that is if you looked at those demons coming off the line, they were able to lift the front wheels on a stock car. Yeah. Right. So now how much transfer do they have back there? All of it. Right. That's exactly what you want. The challenge is if you don't have drag slicks on that car, you know, or track tires, is it's a front engine. It's a front weight bias vehicle to begin with. It's hard to get that much weight to transfer back. And so if you're not running really aggressive tires, you're only going to get what's, you know, 70 percent of your weight to the rear, 60 percent of the, you know, only so much.

So then there'd be tire spin at that point, too, then?

Massive. Exactly.

Because all the weight's on the front. There's no on the back. Yeah. Not on the back.

That's why if you take an average demon and if it doesn't have drag slicks and you put it up against a four wheel drive Tesla, the Tesla is going to smoke it every day because it has four wheel drive.

Those are those are pretty those are crazy. I I'd love to know the engineering behind those because I mean, there's other all wheel drive cars out there to absolutely crush it. But for some reason, the Tesla just hooks it and books it because it's heavy, though, all the battery weight. True. That's right.

I hate when they show the video of the Tesla truck and the F-150 like hooked together and it just drags the F-150 around. Well, yeah, as soon as you break traction on that F-150, there's no way it's going to pull the Tesla's got way more weight on it.

Well, what about, for example, I actually like, do you mind, Dan?

Please, because there's actually two dynamics going on there in your in your spot on. The first one is, if I'm pulling something, remember, the force from the tires is a function of the coefficient of friction times the mass on top of it. And the Tesla truck is a heavy, heavy truck. So in almost every one of these pulling exercise, what's stronger, the Ford versus the Tesla? And I mean, these have been going on forever. The truck that's heavier wins nine times out of 10, because it's not a horsepower issue or a traction issue. It's just a mass issue. One truck has more weight on the crown, so it's going to have a higher net traction force coming away. The difference is, though, when you accelerate, now it's that force. Force equals mass times acceleration. And so it's the force divided by the mass equals the acceleration. So the mass works against you when you're accelerating, right? So while it works good for pulling, it's bad on the acceleration side. The reason the Tesla does so well is think about the Tesla. The entire floor is a battery, right? So the center of gravity is incredibly low, which means that the weight distribution doesn't change nearly as much under acceleration. And so all four wheels are actually kind of optimized for traction because you're not getting this massive weight transfer back. And I'm pulling with the front wheels, number one. Number two, it does have stupid horsepower. You can drain batteries very quickly so that the Plaid is, I don't know, 1100 horsepower order magnitude. And so that's the second thing. But the third thing that's normally overlooked, you know, we were talking about these slip curves. Slip curves are optimized somewhere between, you know, six to 12 percent, depending on the tire. Think about a V8 engine and it's going vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. It's a bunch of pulses. Think about electric motor. There's no pulses effectively, right? Very, very small pulses. It just feels totally fluid. So on electric motor, you can get that coefficient of friction right at the very peak and hold it there. If you are on a V8 engine, is it's constantly kind of bouncing back and forth across this peak. And so the average of that curve is lower. So you can actually get a higher net performance out of an electric vehicle from a pure traction perspective due to acceleration than you could get with a ICE, because it is still, you know, it still has pulses on the crank.

So are we talking about like hundredths of a second affecting traction then? Oh, absolutely. OK. OK, that makes sense.

Well, and remember, if I'm if I'm accelerating with something and I'm pushing it, it that it's not a constant torque. It's a boom, boom, boom, boom.

Right.

You've built a bunch of Mustangs, right? When you pull part of Mustang, you look at the transmission or the flywheel. Normally there'll be a dual mass flywheel, right? And you'll have the little springs in the dual mass. And that will help absorb a lot of those pulses. But even tuning those strings will not eliminate those. And typically under full acceleration, you'll actually have fully collapsed those springs. So you get this pulsing going on in the back wheels.

As the V8 runs through its cycle. I mean, it's firing cylinders.

Each one of those cylinders is going to create a little bit of a micropulse, which means that you're moving the tire kind of back and forth across that traction curve. And in a very small way, but it's not as good as if you can just hold it exactly at that pure 6% slip.

And this is something that is completely, I mean, it's invisible to the naked eye pretty much.

Yeah.

No, you're not going to notice it.

Never.

Yeah.

Never really is. But yeah, that makes sense actually, where you're talking about the weights too, because if we go back to the weight distribution, if it's all mostly equal weight on all those tires, even if they're both all wheel drive, the Tesla is in favor.

And it's low, because all the weight for that car is in the batteries, not all the weight. The vast majority of the weight is in the car.

That thing is impressive though. So I was watching.

But it's three inches off the ground. That's what the batteries are. Four inches off the ground.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous. So there's very little weight transfer, which gives them huge advantages when you're doing acceleration and braking as well and handling.

There's a bunch of benefits in that way. Yeah. We've seen Teslas come out to autocross. They only last a few laps before they overheat. But I'm sure they'll come over that curve one day. But I was watching the guy who does the Hagerty reviews or whatever, I forgot what his name was, but he did a great comparison between the Cybertruck, the Hummer. I can't remember what the third vehicle, there was a third and a fourth vehicle, but the Hummer was kind of, I'm not going to lie, that was a little bit of a joke. You know, GM, you know, but it's just this, you know, eight, nine thousand pound unoptimized hunk of junk.

I think they so missed the mark.

You think so?

GM, I think they just, can I say s*** the bed on that one? Is that appropriate to say?

Yeah, I think that's their company motto.

And I love some GM cars, so I'm not taking a stab at GM, but I think they just totally missed the mark on that vehicle.

They did create the 3800 motor, which is, I think, going to be around long after we're all gone.

Yeah, exactly.

That's a great engine.

I mean, you can't kill that.

No, if you had like a 98 Buick Park Avenue, that thing, there's still, it rotted away before it ever died.

Yes. And then there's some great things. I mean, I think the suburban platform is awesome. I think the truck platforms are generally awesome. You know, I'm a huge Corvette fan. I think there's a bunch of things that GM does well. But I think they were so misguided on the Hummer. They have so much mass on that thing, and it's so expensive. It's just, it cuts against the grain of almost everything that people are trying to do with an off-road vehicle, with an electric vehicle, with a daily vehicle. It doesn't really fit. It becomes bragging rights, and then it just becomes kind of a comedy show.

Yeah, I mean, it's like you, as a kid, I used to have the Hummer toys. As a kid, the Hummer was the coolest thing. Like the H2s, I was like, god damn, then I found out that there was an H1. I'm like, but after, as I started growing older, I'm like, man, this Hummer is kind of a joke. You know, you can't look out the window. It doesn't really do much of anything. It was great in military applications.

It was great in military applications.

But as a road car, it does not make sense. And the new one's a bit of a joke too. And I'm sorry, I have one or two friends that own them.

I'm sorry. I feel bad when I pick it on a car and somebody goes, I own that.

But at the same time, listen, I got a Volkswagen. I'm the king of game jokes. But point being is, it really is master of none. And it doesn't, I mean, I don't mind the front end. The SUV version is actually kind of cool, like where they have the thing blocked off. The truck version is a little silly. But nonetheless, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like now that they were, I think they were first to market compared to the Tesla. But again, I feel like they're going to take that cake. The Ford's going to take the cake, which isn't too bad. I mean, now that they're not overpricing them like crazy. But yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to watch that whole electric segment, because now we have these traditional manufacturers catching up. Porsche, Ford, whoever else, not GM, but nonetheless.

I think this whole, one of my favorite topics to discuss is electric vehicles. Because it touches on so many elements right now. Did you know in 1900, about 35% of the cars that were sold were electric?

Really? I knew that they had them back then. Yeah.

40% were steam and 20% were internal combustion engine. So we've been playing with EVs now for 120 years. And it's like anything. Listen, electric vehicles have some advantages, like we just talked about relative to ICEs. ICEs have some huge advantages over internal combustion engine in a whole bunch. I mean, ICEs have huge advantages over electric in a bunch of other areas. What I found, though, is we have become as a society very tribal about this, and it's become almost like religion. And what's happened is, on the EVs, as I've seen, like technically, is an EV or an ICE better? I would say, well, it depends on what you're trying to do with it, right? But when you talk to individuals who aren't really car people, and they don't look at it, they tend to fall into either one camp or the other because two reasons. Number one is the government started to promote EVs pretty aggressively, I mean, very aggressively. Like if you're a good person, you need to buy an EV, and they start throwing a bunch of dollars at it. The second is if the environmentalists have picked up on this and said, hey, if you're a good person, drive an EV, right? You want to kill the planet or do you want to drive an EV? Right? So there's a whole bunch of virtue signaling there, right? Now I like to remind them that 80% of the power that they're getting from their electricity is coming from a carbon plant down the street. So it's happening. It's just happening somewhere else. But be that as it may, is it's become this religious discussion. And what happens is you see 50% of the population that just says, EVs, I'm out. Like, when you start pushing something too hard, half the population just says, you know what, you're pushing this one's too hard, man. This is not. We saw this with the COVID vaccines, right? We would have had more people taking the COVID vaccine, no matter where you stand on it. If we would have said, hey, it's optional, we think it's a good idea. Here's the stats that back it up. But it's your decision. No, we didn't do that. We told people we were going to fire them if they didn't get the shot. And it just became political. So people inherently push back. And I don't know you very well, but if I told you, Dan, you have to go do this. I told you, you have to go do this, you're going to go screw you, buddy.

I know. That's kind of my personality. Anyway, I don't like that. Anyway. Yeah.

Exactly. And so I think there's a little bit of this undertow on EVs right now where we're trying to push them so hard that we're even getting pushback from people that probably shouldn't push back because it's probably a great vehicle.

Yeah.

What do you think, dude?

Well, I would be in that boat of I'm not for EV, right? But again, we're in this society now where everybody's got to be in one box or the other. It's just insane on all kinds of fronts.

All kinds of fronts.

But I test drove a Mach-E when it came out. We drive diesel trucks. Right now, my wife drives a 2002 Ford Excursion 7.3 diesel. It's got no emission stuff on it. Didn't come that way from the factory. I mean, it's just they were oil spitting machines. So she's now got a new job where she's traveling an hour. And we test drove a Mach-E. It wasn't for us. But here just recently, they've come down a little bit. So I was shopping again, just looking. Maybe it would be an all right. For some of you, it's commuting 45 minutes to work. It's not your everyday. You're not trying to take a family vacation. And I see the need for it.

Yes. Totally agree with you.

But to force it down everybody's throat, I'm on that with you. It's it's you can't that's not how this is going to work.

It's not how it's going to work.

No.

Right. Ninety nine percent of the time, the best solution wins.

Yep.

Right. The best solution overall tends to kind of flow out and, you know, VHS versus beta, I suppose, is one of the debates that kind of went the wrong way that doesn't follow that. That's why I say 99 percent. But but but it's unfortunate what's going on with the EVs right now, because I think they're a very good fit for a lot of people. But they're not a great fit for everybody. And we need to acknowledge that for the same reason that there's reasons why you buy snow tires versus summer tires or a sports car versus a truck. But we just we sometimes lose focus of that. And we get all these impassioned people. And then they tell Danny has to go buy such and such dances. Screw you. I'm not going to go do that.

Yeah, well, I'd even I even go as far as to argue that it's not even like they're for half the people. I think the people that EV works for is I'm going to just guess that's less than 30 percent of the population is an EV works for if you think if you get outside the city, just go drive an hour outside the city and tell me that somebody that lives out in Delano or wherever you know, it's going to need that doesn't work for them longer distances or rural areas.

You know, you just there's charge anxiety and rightfully so. Or even if you live in the city, you don't have a garage to go plug it in. This just gets complicated. It gets really complicated. I have a funny story and this is this is an embarrassing story. So I hope you don't mind me if I tell this, but go for it is. But it kind of goes back to this EV thing, although it has nothing to do with EVs, is we were out skiing over Christmas and we were out in Idaho. And when we go out to Idaho, we bring the dog and the skis and everything else. And I hate traveling via airplane over the Christmas because it's like amateur hour. So we just throw everything in the truck and we just, you know, blast out there and one shot and we're coming home and my wife, we were coming home and we're going to get back for Christmas. So we left on like Saturday, they get home on Sunday, we're going to drive through the night and I pull over in Montana and to fill up the car with gas at midnight and I've been driving four or five hours and I go to start the car and the cars, you know, lights up, the dash lights up and I hit the button again to start the engine and it goes into shutdown mode and I've doing this like 15 minutes. I mean, it's not, there's no, now it's 10 degrees outside. I have no tools. I start swapping relays and fuses and trying to recover this thing and I'm like, you know, this is not starting. I have no idea what it is. There's a hotel like right across the street. This is a small town. I'm middle of nowhere. There is one hotel in town. It's across the street. I go over there and it's locked and they don't take residents after 10 o'clock and now it's like one o'clock in the morning. And so here I am stuck in on Christmas Eve morning in Montana with my family and no place to sleep. I can't get my car started. Like, what do you do? And so in this case, like embarrassingly, we hunkered down and slept in the truck that night. The next morning we got up and I got a hold of a tow truck. They came in, they jumped the car. Something was still wrong. The net was I had to tow the car to Bozeman, leave it there, rent a car, drive home. My truck's still in Bozeman, and they just tore it apart the other day. And this all came back. The repair was it all came back to a ground strap that started to corrode, that when you started to try to start it, it put too much current through the main block and I blew a 450 amp fuse to the battery. And so the net was minor repair, although expensive day trying to schlep cars across Montana. And so this is one of the few times in my life, one time in my life I've ever been stranded. And it's one of the reasons we're building Razorhood, which is how do you go solve these things, because I couldn't even solve it out in the middle of nowhere, our AI engine hadn't figured this one out yet. And so the net was, it was a long night, it was a long day. Imagine if you're driving an EV, and you get stranded or low on gas, and you're out in the middle of Montana, there's no plan B. Right? And I think that's the anxiety people go through, because you can't just go put a gallon of gas in it. And you can't quickly fill up. And so the whole risk of becoming stranded makes people anxious. And then people go, well, we're just going to go build out the electrical network, and it's going to be fine. It's going to take a long, long time to get that electrical network everywhere around the country, and in effective locations, it's a long build out process. We have to acknowledge the fact that this has not happened rapidly.

And even, I mean, to be fair, even with newer vehicles, I don't know what year your truck is, but it probably isn't. So you had no connection between your battery, it sounds like. You can't even pop start it and run it just off the alternator. You used to be able to start a car and disconnect the battery, and it would continue to run. I don't think you can do that anymore with all this.

Well, and what happened in this one, there's actually two batteries in the car. And so they were able to dump start it, and I thought, well, that's really weird. It wouldn't start on the battery, but you can jump it. But then the car ended up dying very shortly thereafter just because the battery went dead, so all the systems started to shut down. But because the fuse wouldn't go back to the battery, even though I got current, the truck was still running off of the battery itself. Because it wasn't completing the circuit. And anyway, my point is this, which is when you run the risk and you're in a cold environment or you're out in the middle of nowhere and you run the risk of actually becoming stranded, that's a real fear of people. And there's no easy plan B. You can't just bring a 100 kilowatt battery and pull up next to them and plug it in and say, there you go.

Well, there was a whole business model when we were at SEMA. There was a company, they were outfitting vans with high capacity batteries and generators. So they go out and give people 15 minutes, give them enough mileage to get to a charger. That's their whole business plan, is to go out and save EVs.

I applaud companies for doing things like that. The business model, though, is how often does that happen? There's a huge fear. You want to prevent it. So how many calls are you going to get? And then how much does it cost to go build a van like that? Maybe it's a $30,000, $40,000 van when it's fully equipped, maybe a little bit more than that. How many calls do you have to get? And then once you... It seems like an expensive value.

It's a problem because, I mean, if it's a 1% or 0.01% chance of happening, who wants to take the financial risk to build out, you know, bringabattery.com or whatever, you know?

They had some stats they were spouting off, but yeah, and where we're at, it's not a problem.

It's great they're doing that. That's wonderful. I don't know how pervasive the problem is. But you don't have anybody running around with portable gas tanks just to say, hey, you stuck, we're going to stop by and...

No, but you can call any tow company, they'll bring out two gallons. Correct. I've had to do it a few times.

Yeah, exactly. But there's just... That's not an easy one to go solve. So anyway, the point is, there's pros and cons to batteries. I think they're a great fit for the right application, but I think we're going to live in this dual world for a long, long time.

Which is fair enough. It's fine by me. I just hope Porsche figures out their... What's it called? The fuel they're building or developing.

E-fuel?

No. Maybe. I think they branded it E-fuel. The replacement for gas or whatever, standard gas.

I think hydrogen is where it's at.

I think that's what they're working on. It's some form of hydrogen or something. But anyways...

Toyota is making some pretty good strides on that, too.

Yeah. Toyota. I think we talked about this with Dave as well, where Toyota is just like, they're not succumbing to the EV craze. Like they're literally saying, like, absolutely not.

They've been doing it for a long time. And they were very cautious early on, too. You had Mary Barra, who is the CEO of GM, saying, hey, we're going to be 80% electric by 2030 or whatever it was. I mean, going all in. And then you had, I can't remember the CEO's name of Toyota now. At any rate, Toyota kind of went, we think this hybrid strategy is working pretty good for us. We're just going to step cautiously here. They weren't criticizing, but they did not go all in on EVs. And I think for most people, a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid specifically, is the best of both worlds.

Yeah, it just makes sense for people. We've been harping on EVs for a little while, though, so I kind of want to go the opposite end of the coal spectrum. Let's talk about...

Nuclear?

No, not quite there. Let's talk about that Cummins EPA thing. So we were talking about some topics to discuss. So before we got on the show, or actually for the last month, we've been planning about a number of topics to discuss. And I saw the news around that. Isn't it like a $7 billion? It's the biggest fine ever.

$1.73, $1.76. It's almost $2 billion.

You guys have to fill me in here. I don't know.

It just started to crop up like a week ago, Dan. And the EPA is fining Cummins $1.76 billion for emission defeat devices on the truck.

Oh, really?

Now, before I bias you, you did some research on this, right? I kind of prompt you and you did some research. What did you find out? What's the problem?

Oh, I just, again, before you prompted me, I actually looked into this a couple weeks ago, but I can't remember the specifics for the life of me. All I know is that they were in trouble because of what I was actually kind of something similar to what we were talking about where they I don't know, I can't jog my memory at the moment. Remind me again.

Listen, no, I don't think you can remember because I don't think they haven't answered it.

Was it? Yeah.

That's the part that's interesting on this is that neither Cummins nor the EPA has said what the specific violation is. Now, they've said there has been emission defeat devices on the vehicles. Now, that's a really broad catch all term because you could have a, you know, the main engine computer could be considered an emission defeat device if it was turning something off at a particular point in time. And so they actually haven't said what the infraction is. And this is the part that I find really interesting. You have a great American manufacturing company, right, Cummins. Located down in Indiana, they've been building diesel engines.

I think the Cummins is the one who invented the diesel engine. If not, he was right there, I'm pretty sure.

Fun fact, I learned this one yesterday. I think it was on Joe Rogan, actually, the guy who invented diesel, his last name was Diesel.

Oh, really? Okay.

But they were one of the primary, to your point, they were one of the primary early manufacturers in North America. And, in fact, coming out of college, I interviewed with Cummins many, many years ago. But at any rate, great company, right? And the EPA sues them for the last 12 years of production, or from like 2012 to 2020, or I mean, this huge chunk, almost a million vehicles they sued them for, they put fines against them. And they don't actually say what the actual infraction is. And I'm always about, okay, just let's get to the facts. Here's the part that concerns me. Like, number one, what did they actually do wrong? If you can't cough up what they actually did wrong, that concerns me. Number two, why did it take you 12 years to figure this out, that there was an issue? And third, if you're running Cummins, and your core business is building engines, you are not doing anything where you're intentionally trying to break the law, to break emission standards because you're trying to make an extra 50 bucks an engine. That's not happening. You would never put the reputation and this huge risk on top of the company. You'd never go do it.

Probably the biggest name in diesel engines.

Yes. Why would you ever do that?

Yep.

So clearly, whatever they did, they were doing it unknowingly, right? And so, my suspicion and where I get frustrated about this is, I think the EPA has gotten way over its skis on this stuff, and I think the EPA went in there and they went, well, under this condition and that condition, we think that you, the engineers may have tuned this. We talked about this in the last podcast. There's times under extreme conditions, you modify the settings of the engine to protect the engine, right? Going up a huge hill in the desert when it's 100 degrees out. You're doing things to protect the engine, right? And they may have looked at that and said, well, you're doing these things that are these scenarios and that does not meet the spirit. Not the law, but the spirit. And therefore, we're going to find you $1.7 billion. I mean, we talk about American manufacturing and American business and rah-rah. You know, we want to do the right thing. And then we're out there finding our own companies. $1.7 billion. Are you nuts?

I'm going to take a second to support the home team. Many of you know the podcast is based out of Ratified Motorsports, who makes some of the sickest builds out here. That dyno you all hear downstairs has seen some serious cars. Whether you're looking for a standard tune for your cute little Volkswagen to a full on Supra or RS3 build, you should get Ratified a call to get the sauce. Check out ratified motorsport.com performance to see what they can do for you. Let's get back to the show.

Do you think it was for just making it easy? Is it easy to put in an emission delete device? Because they can't even do that either, right? That would technically be overstepping. So like making it easy for the consumer to like, hey, we're going to put a port here if you plug this in.

I don't know Cummins engines well enough to even know if that's even a possibility. You might know more about that.

I know it's been hell for like the last three or four years.

Well, all I know is I drive F250 Power Stroke. For off-road and race use only is what my truck is used for just in case EPA is listening. And as soon as that warranty was up on it, the def came off and the EGR went out. Doing that, I doubled the life of my engine. I can guarantee you that because recirculating that stuff back into the intake, stuff like that, that really just takes a life down. The DPF filters has been a huge problem. They clog, they take 20, $30,000 engines out. So I got rid of that stuff.

I have never seen an engineer, and I don't have a lot of experience on the diesel side, but where an engineer said, hey, we want to go tune this thing so it's easier for people to go modify it.

Right. Okay.

You know, for all the things that they need to engineer around emissions, safety, cost, quality, speed, blah, putting another layer on top of that to say, hey, I just want to make it easy for people to cheat. There's no upside.

It's not on the priority list at all.

It's not on the priority list.

Right. Right.

There's no upside to that. Now, what could happen is just the way it was designed. People figured out how to go bypass it. And then later on, now they've made it more secure. In fact, I know even like the new GM, I think I saw the GM ECUs of the Corvette now are actually encrypted.

Same thing with the new 2024 Mustangs. Is it? The 650s, yes.

So they're trying to do things to lock them down. And people are out there trying to hack them and decode them. I get it. And so it's not to say that they haven't gotten better at trying to prevent that. But you know, 15 years ago, you're going to go sue them for the stuff you're building 15 years ago. Like if there's an issue, you should have let them know. Did it pass the test or didn't it pass the test? Anyway, I just think that's and I don't know the facts around it. That's the hard part. I don't know what fundamentally they did that was so egregious.

That's a lot of money we're talking about. That's a lot.

You know, you're trying to make America a stronger manufacturing is the backbone of any company in a country, right? We should have a very strong manufacturing base in the US. It needs to be stronger than it is. And so when we have good companies like Cummins, who have been building great engines, and I think their reputation is quite strong.

Absolutely. They're known as being the best.

They're known as being the best.

They can swap Cummins motors into Ford trucks. It's a thing. Not to mention, they haul half the stuff across this country, I'm sure. Yeah.

And so here you have a company that's just building good stuff. And your best answer is just to go find the s*** out of them. I mean, big, big dollars. Not even publicly say what they did wrong. And that's going to make manufacturing stronger here. You would want a partner that said, hey, guys, this is not cool. We need to prevent this from happening in the future. We're just giving you a warning. But the fact that they're out there slapping these guys with $2 billion fines, it's an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment. It's not making the US stronger.

Yeah, there's so many regulatory bodies that just... It's rough. I don't know if you know this, but...

And I've seen online, and sorry, I'm consuming too much space here. I see a lot of stuff in areas outside of automotive as well, just kind of given my role. And somebody posted something the other day on LinkedIn, and they have a social channel, obviously. And somebody talked about Cummins, and people were just taking a piss all over Cummins. Now, these were not car people, right? But the perception was Cummins is a bad company, and they're wrecking Mother Earth, and they find the s*** out of them. And I'm like, this is just terrible. You're wrecking the reputation of this company, and they've done nothing wrong. They've been building some of the best engines in the country for forever.

Yeah, it takes a lot for a Ford guy to say that about a Cummins.

Yes, I will say. It's the truck they put them in and everything else around it that's crap, but the engine's great. We know how Dodge is with their transmissions. They can't build one to save their lives, but other than that.

Yeah, exactly. But my point is, I find that very disappointing.

Just like to remind you who helped Ford in the early days of transmissions, it was Dodge.

Yeah, Ford's got some bad transmissions out there, too.

In the 1920s, by the way, 1910s I'm talking about. I'm just saying, Ford wouldn't be in business if it wasn't for Dodge.

Oh, that's a...

It's a hefty claim. It's a big claim. It's legit. Look it up. Yeah, why don't you fact check me? No, I think it was one of those history channel shows or whatever, I think. But nonetheless, it's a bummer that we're seeing that happen.

Well, there's some things, too. Some companies... So gasoline used to be a by-product of kerosene, and they just dumped it in the river. So now it's like a huge commodity to us, but there's some...

Is that true? I didn't know that.

Yeah, so one of those history channel things made me think of it. So there was like... The companies are something that built America. I don't remember exactly what the series was. It was a little eight-part mini-series where they took JP Morgan and all these people, all these big industrialists, and kind of talked about how this country came up.

It's fun to throw on the TV every once in a while.

Yeah, absolutely. So, anyway, yeah, it was a byproduct of kerosene, and they didn't know what to do with it, so they dumped it in a river, and then things started to get a little out of control.

I knew we could do something with it.

Right, absolutely.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

So, I mean, there's reasons why we need to have some stuff, but just the overstepping starts to get a little out of control.

And I think that's one of the big debates I think everybody's having right now, or that we think through, is when you think about one thing that I think is brilliant about the US is that it's a republic, it's not a democracy. And so every state kind of has their own rules, and so the debate all along has been, should the federal be stronger or should the states be stronger? And there's debates on both sides, and I'm not going to say one's better than the worst, but you're constantly trying to find that line. What we do see, though, in federal agencies, in my opinion, is the federal agency can never be big enough. So they're going to get bigger and bigger, and then you have to justify your own means, and then all you've got the EPA suing Cummins for $1.8 billion for God knows what. We haven't even figured that out yet. And so I do get concerned when some of these agencies get too large, and you start getting involved in some things that may not be moving the broader ball forward. And this is just a great example of that.

I'm curious to see what happens on eBay. We talked about that last episode, too. Have you seen any updates on that?

I haven't seen any updates on it. What was that fine? That fine was almost $2 billion, wasn't it?

Yeah, that was a similar price tag on it.

They're throwing around the B a lot, the billion.

Well, just economy, you know.

Yeah, it's the perfect time to be finding the s*** out of everyone, isn't it?

Well, the fines have gone up, too.

Yeah, you're telling me. I'm about to have a court date in three days. I want to deal with that. F****** Minnesota, front plate ticket.

I don't have a front plate on one of my cars.

You know what the person that the guy was running the DMV in Minnesota, or in Wisconsin, in Hudson told me, this was a while back when I first got my car, he goes, he kind of pulled me aside and goes, Hey, we have to give you two plates. He goes, You don't have to put it on there. He goes, I haven't had a front plate on my car in forever. He goes, Just have it on you. When they stop you, put it up there. So I was like, Hmm, all right, cool. I've never been messed with either.

Yeah, this year's been, I've been getting harassed. So why don't you get pulled over?

Because I don't have one. I have collector plates on one. That does not need a front plate.

Not in Minnesota.

My other vehicles, I have not, I have front plates on one of my vehicles, not the, well, I guess there's two vehicles I don't have a front plate on. What do they say?

Oh, let's see. I'm trying to recap my mental breakdown I had that day. That was the day I went to go scouting around for swapping keys. And I literally, I left the house for like 10 minutes and I got pulled over. So thank you, Chanhassen Police. But anyways, literally, I was going through a roundabout. Guy saw me, pulled me over, and he told me why he pulled me over. He's like, oh, your tint's pretty dark. He actually initially pulled me over for tint and no front plate. He just saw me. I was just going through a roundabout. I was in need of speed. Listen, if I was speeding, give me a ticket. At least give me something to talk about. You know, like a mutual friend of ours just did 55 over. His radar saved him the other day. But anywho, yeah, pull me over to that. My tint's a pretty big giveaway this season for some reason. It wasn't an issue before. But as you've seen, I have really dark tint on my car. It's a white car, and it's just a magnet. But the guy tried to give me for everything. He's like, oh, you don't have insurance in the car. In Minnesota, you could just show it on your phone. I guess I just wasn't fast enough for him to pull it up. But he says he's going to cut me a break and just give me one for the front plate. I'm like, you didn't have to do that at all. But you're cutting me a break. So anyways, I think I've talked about this story before. But yeah, he pulled me over because he saw no front plate and tint. He just saw somebody to prey on. It was the beginning of the month. It's a bummer. Hey, listen, I respect the police, but that was frustrating. Then I got pulled over right after a detail again. Yeah, this guy got me for like four things as well. He's like, tints, saw you on your phone, I was at a stoplight, whatever.

Tint wasn't very good if he could see you on your phone.

That was my argument too. I'm like, this is b*******. You're telling me you could see my phone, but my tint's too dark. Which one is it? And by the way, I'm not one of these lunatics who has my phone on full bright, you know, burning my retinas. I had a full dim and it was at night. So you're telling me you could see? Okay, whatever, whatever. That's my rant. I know we wanted to talk about a couple other topics. I think we wanted to talk about sway bars. Okay, let me go through my mental list of what I want to get done with my car. Coil overs, I already have that taken care of. We'll never maximize those because I don't know what I'm doing. Actually, to be fair, the guy who shares the office...

I think dropping it though, I mean, there's... If you want to drop the car, there's absolute benefits for that. For all of our little things here, dropping a car absolutely helps.

I'm actually going to...

But there's multiple ways to drop it.

I'm also going to have somebody who knows a thing or two about it, like, you know, do corner balancing and all that. You know, people who are experts in this space take care of that. But, yeah, let's talk sway bars.

And so sway bars actually gets... We started on this the other week, and I don't think we finished the conversation, is oversteer and understeer is one of these that you're constantly trying to play with.

Oh, I actually saw this on Alex's simulator yesterday, and actually, you were in the back of my head a little bit, because I'm, you know, again, I have this Porsche GT4 on the track, and the simulator is phenomenal. And, you know, again, the engine is in the back, so obviously the turning dynamics of Porsche...

A little different.

Quite a bit different than, you know, my front-wheel drive Golf. So there were some moments where I had some pretty bad oversteer, or it was an understeer, I can't remember. Basically, when I would be throttle off, there was some problems. So, but anyways...

Go back in serves to come around.

Yes, exactly. I was on Road America, and it's the last corner that would get me. I would just come in a little too hot, let off a little funny, and it just snaps. So I had some practice. So we can touch on that as well. Actually, I'd love to talk a little bit more about track stuff, especially since we are going to be doing something with Brainerd.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about that.

Let's jump into the sway bars. Yeah, so let's talk about what are the different varieties of it, where the benefits are, and let's just go from there.

And so sway bars is, in an ideal world, and sorry, I keep walking away from my mic here. In an ideal world, you're trying to keep every wheel on that car at the lowest weight on it, right? All kind of the same weight. And the more I overload one tire, it's the less I underload another tire, but it lowers my average coefficient of friction. Right? And so when we think about a neutral car, all four tires start to slide at about the same time. That's actually good. That means every tire, you're effectively working every tire the same amount. If you're plowing, if you're going in and you're understeering, you turn and the car is still kind of go straight, clearly there's a lot more turning capability in the rear tires, but you're not using them. And the vice versa is also true. That's why when you go in, ideally you want a car that's neutral, right? Is the best, although we almost every car on the road today, you'll find it's tuned for understeer because people don't panic when it understeers. You can just slow down a little bit and recover it. When cars start to oversteer, that's when you get backwards and bad things happen. So cars are tuned for understeer, but most on a track, you really want a more neutral. But to get there is I find people say, well, I'm going to adjust this and adjust that, and adjusting a car for understeer or oversteer is actually pretty straightforward because the reason, the easiest way to adjust the understeer and the oversteer is by adjusting the forces on the outside. So again, I'm going to go by my little PT Cruiser here.

I was waiting for you to use it again.

And if I'm pushing on the side, and the mass is always at one particular point, if I push this way and these tires are resisting it, if this has a really stiff sway bar on it, the front wheels, the front wheels, and the back wheels have a very weak sway bar, is what wheels are actually resisting the car rotation? The front wheel, right? That's the one where all the pressure is. If that one's picking up all the pressure, right? That's going to lower its net coefficient of friction, which means the higher stiffer front prey bar up there is going to create understeer in the car, right? The front wheels are going to slide first. If I reverse that and I pulled off the sway bar here, and now I have a really stiff sway bar back here and I start to push on the side of the car, it's going to be the back wheels that are going to be resisting all the rotation of the vehicle. And so all the load is going to be right here on this particular vehicle, which means I'm actually going to lower its net coefficient of friction, so the car is going to start to oversteer. The back end is going to start. So wherever you put the fattest sway bar, is that's fundamentally where you're going, and it's going to slide the first, you know, the most. And so when you stew in the stray bars, you're trying to get it so it's effectively neutral, but you can change that by either loosening the front or tightening the rear or vice versa.

I'm curious, how does that get, what's the effect between a rear wheel drive and a front wheel drive car then when it comes to, you know, when you do sway bar work?

Well, fundamentally nothing. Is if you're in the middle of a corner and you're effectively at a constant velocity, it doesn't matter if it's front wheel drive or rear wheel drive, right, you're effectively getting the kind of the same thing.

Would it change how the car loads or unloads like when you're on and off the throttle though?

The difference is, is when you go through the transients, for instance, if I'm coming around that tire, let's say I'm coming out of a corner, and you see this, you come out of a corner and you hit the gas, guess what happens? The back end starts to slide, right? Even if, well, if you start to spin the tires. The point I'm trying to make is that when you start to accelerate, now you actually have multiple forces on that tire. So let's say I'm coming out of a corner, and I'm coming out of the corner and I still have a big lean angle, but I apply power to the front wheels. So now that front wheel has a forward friction on it and a side friction on it. The tire only sees one thing. The tire says, oh, I just got one vector of force kind of somewhere in between. And that combined friction can be no greater than this peak coefficient of friction. And so what will happen is once you start to add more acceleration to that, is you're going to give up a little bit of the side force, because it can't do both at the same time. Like if it's a 1G tire, you can't get 1G to the side and 1G forward, because the tire actually sees the combination of the two, which is one times the square root of two, or two times the square root of two. And so it's really the combination thereof. The other thing, though, that's challenging is when you come out of a corner, for instance, if it's a rear wheel drive, and I'm applying more power here, I'm asking more for the wheel tires, but I also get the weight bias on the back end. And now that I have the weight bias, now I actually have traction advantages out of that because I have a higher net force on that. So while the mu goes down, the force goes up. And I know this is hard to see without a chart, but it's one of the reasons, though, when you're coming out of the corner...

Do you actually want to remind people what mu is? Mu is average, right?

Mu is the coefficient of friction. And so mu is... So here's your little can, right? And I start pushing on this. And this probably has a coefficient of friction of about 0.5, right? And so if I double the force on this, it's going to take double the force for me to go push it, right? And almost every mu is somewhere between like 0 to 1. If you're on ice, it's effectively 0. And if it's, you know, 100% traction, I know that's a nebulous term, you effectively get it at 1.

What would be 100% traction?

Something bolted to something else?

Well, and normally the way you would measure it, if I took a block at 45 degrees, and I put a vehicle on there, is if it had a mu of 0.1, or of 1, it would stay on that block. Right? If I had something bolted down, it would be much higher then. But the idea is that if it was a mu of 1, it means the side force would be equivalent to the downforce. So if I had a 100 pound weight here, and I said, Dan, go pull this, and it took you 100 pounds to go pull it, that would be a mu of 1.

Okay, I see. Okay, that makes sense.

And so the thought for so many years, it was, well, you can't get a mu greater than 1. Like, you can't put something down that's not attached with the bolt, put something down and pull on it, and have the pull strength to be higher than the actual weight that's on it. And normally when you do that, we call that adhesive. Right. And, but now they're getting tires to the point where you can get 1.2, 1.3, 1.6, but you're doing kind of funky things.

So none of it has to do with, as I'm coming in, having one side, so we know the sway bar does the, it controls the body roll and the transfer of weight there, right? So having this side stiffer versus the other side as far as dampening. So if you're coming into a corner, you're pushing from one side and heading towards another side, right? So is there a, there's no advantage, we talked about coilovers earlier, so having like, let's say one side stiffer than the other or in certain corners, or having, is the control, the dampening and setup of your coilovers or anything like that have anything to do with this cornering aspect?

Let me back up a little bit. I think I know what you're saying here, Dan. Do you ever watch NASCAR?

Yes, I have.

Yeah, yeah. And so at NASCAR, they do something that's called jacking. Have you ever heard of jacking before? My brother does a little bit of dirt track racing many years ago. He taught me about this. Jacking is, what they'll do is, race cars, if you're a stock car, you only turn left.

Right.

Right? That's pretty easy. And so what they'll do is they'll go in and they'll put a stiffer spring on a particular corner of the car to kind of preload that end to have higher or lower. They don't have to do it with a sway bar. They can do it with a spring. So they physically put a higher force on one particular tire to do effectively the same thing. Right? And so that works in NASCAR or in stock car racing because you only are going one direction. If you're on a track or road course or the street, you got to go both directions. So it doesn't make any sense to jack a car on a street and overload one corner of the vehicle. And so you're almost always going to be symmetric on the street or on the track or road course. And then what you have to deal with is then you use the roll bar to actually adjust that variable. Because I don't think and maybe somebody's doing it. I don't know. But you would never, never say never, but never set one corner up to be different than the other corner for a road car.

But typically on a road course, you want your stuff to be a little bit stiffer. That just helps.

Even within, typically one of the reasons that you go stiffer is you're trying to get the car as low as possible.

Okay.

And I can't get the car really low and have very soft springs.

Right.

Because I'm going to be bouncing off the bouncing off the bottom.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

So one of the reasons they go lower is that, you know, it, it, I mean, one of the reasons they stiffen it, it gives you the flexibility to go lower at the same time. The other thing is you do want, in a perfect world, you don't want that tire to be infinitely light. So that when that tire went up, it could go back down instantly. So you always have like a constant force on the ground. So even if there's a bump, it's just going to, you know, smoothly go over that bump. And sometimes if you have springs that are too stoffed and you push the tire up, guess what? That tire has some momentum, and so it's actually going to carry a little bit longer before it comes back down into the contact. So if you have a fairly stiff spring, it allows that tire to kind of react quickly to the bumps and gives you a better overall, more consistent pressure on the road course. It doesn't always feel like it when you're in the car, and it feels like it's a really stiff car. But from the from the just the wheels perspective, because remember that's an unsprung mass with your car as a sprung mass. You're trying to keep the force on that tire as consistent as possible.

Wow, you just saved Dan five seconds of the track.

Well, I don't know. So I have a very track track packed GT 500. So it has tons of it. It's got caster camber plates. It's got all of this stuff. I have no clue how to use it. I can adjust the wing to downforce or not downforce. That's about as far as my I'll give you some ideas.

Because if you're talking if we have GT 500 owners out there. I've never even driven the car, but I trust the guys at Ford did a good job. So assuming they dialed that in properly, and I'm sure that they did, is adjusting the downforce on the wing is obviously the more downforce on the wing, the better traction you're going to have in the corner. But it will suck a lot of aerodynamic drag out of the vehicle at the same time. So you're constantly trying to figure out where the right downforce is. If you're on a short track, I would go a more aggressive wing. If you're on a longer track, you would do a less aggressive wing on this generally. But again, it depends on the track. And so that's part of it. The wing doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference below 70, 80 miles an hour.

Yep.

So it's only the higher speeds that really makes a difference.

How is your MPG?

It does affect my fuel economy when I have it in track mode, yeah.

And so just changing the wing?

So it's 600 pounds of downforce at 100 miles an hour.

So you have 50 pounds of downforce at 70 miles an hour. Because it's related to the velocity squared.

Okay.

And so if you...

I get about... In versus not in, it changes about 2 to 3 miles per gallon. But...

That's a lot.

Right, but maybe this car doesn't always go 70 or 80 miles an hour. That might be part of it, too.

So to put this in perspective, if you were doing 100 miles an hour... I mean, at 100 miles an hour, you got to... 100 pounds of downforce at 100 miles an hour?

600 pounds at 100 miles an hour.

600? So that's actually pretty significant.

Yes.

Right.

So at 70, what would that be, then? Or 50, if it's better for them.

Because it's the velocity squared. So would that be about 70 miles an hour? No, it would be... Well, let's see here. So if it was 600 pounds of downforce at 100 miles an hour...

So it's not as simple as like 50 miles an hour is 300. No, it's not. It has to do it, because as your wind goes more, as you're going faster, it changes.

So the force is equal to some coefficient times the velocity squared. And so if you were trying to solve this out, if you knew that 600 pounds equals some constant, which we don't know, times 100 miles an hour, right? I know that.

Yep.

I would calculate that constant. And then I could also say that at 300 pounds of downforce equals that same constant times x squared.

This is why they were teaching us algebra in school.

And so I would just solve for x, and I think that number would be somewhere around.

All right.

I think it's somewhere around 70, is my guess. But it's related to the velocity squared. That's why if you had, if you doubled, or 150 miles an hour, you'd probably have like 2,400 pounds of downforce, which is a big number. It's a big number. And so if you're getting that much downforce out of that wing, there's also a lot of. But when you're coming to that first corner, like at Brainerd, coming off the long track, it's Brainerd's track, turn one is the fastest, I think it's the fastest turn one in North America because it comes off a drag strip and then you drop down. And so it could be 100 with the right wing set up, you might be 140, 150 mile an hour corner.

I think that's so Mark, a friend of ours has one and I think that's he says he takes that corner at about that much.

Yeah. So it'll make your butt pucker a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah. He has that car dialed in. Yeah. I need to go for a ride with him in that car.

Yeah. His butt also does not pucker. So I think that that's one of his.

But the other thing you want to do, because you were talking about your Castor and Camber, Yep. Right. Castor probably doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference, but the Camber certainly does. And so when you get into a track, really what you want is your tire perfectly flat on that road when you're going around a corner. But imagine as I start to load this thing up, things tend to roll under a little bit. So that's why I want to do negative Camber on this so that when I'm really in a corner, I can keep that outside tire perfectly flat. On most vehicles, because that's still a MacPherson strut up front, I'm sure. Or do they have a SLA up front?

It's, I don't know, it has the Magna, the...

The Magna Shock on it.

Yes, yep. But I believe it is a strut.

I think it is.

Yes.

And so with that, on most struts I find, if you're running like negative three, negative three and a half degrees on the Camber, that's probably a pretty good start point. But what's exciting, we can do this the next time we're off the track together. The easiest way to figure this out, if you're right or not, it's a super easy to go to. We get you off the track, and the first thing we do is we're just going to measure your tire temperature. And we're going to measure on the outside, in the middle, and on the inside. Oh, okay. Right? And you want that tire to be roughly consistent across the whole surface, because that means you're using the entire tire equally hard. Right? And if it's one side is cooler than the other, then we're going to go say, okay, let's go make some camber adjustments to this. So it's a really easy way to actually go adjust that.

Interesting. Okay. So let's dive into that a little bit more. So first of all, how would you go about measuring the tire temperature on the inside and the outside?

And so there's a couple of ways to do it. There's the little infrared guns.

That's what I was thinking immediately.

Which are pretty easy. I think I actually have an insertion. The tires cool off a little faster than you'd think. Yeah. So you would actually stick a little probe in there, and I have a little probe I take to the track sometimes. And you just put it in there, a couple of millimeters, and it'll give you a reading. But you just measure it across the surface, and you kind of write it down. But you're looking for two things. You want to make sure that that temperature profile is consistent. But then you're also looking at what's the absolute actual temperature of that tire, because you're trying to optimize that tire. You might say, hey, this tire performs best at 165 degrees. So now you're making adjustments to actually get that tire to 165 degrees. But that depends on the weather and the temperature and the sun load and your driving style and the air pressure and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of variables that are out there. And so most people don't do a great job adjusting that, quite frankly. For track days, it doesn't matter. We're not out there setting Formula One records.

Right. Speak for yourself.

But those are nuances that aren't huge. Because I think the best thing you can find is something that is consistent.

Right. But if you're a serious track day fiend, maybe a step up, maybe you're even trying to be competitive about it, this would be something that you would pay attention to, potentially.

I would always caution people, even at the track, when you're on a track day, you should be a better driver.

Yeah.

Right. If you want to become, if you really want to optimize your real time, start racing.

I feel like a lot of people at that point, and I'm not talking about like me and Dan here, we're rookies. I'm a bigger rookie than you. But there's some people that we know that, for example, are winning first place in national competitions that are beating people, not by tenths, but seconds, across several categories, tracks, whatever the case may be. I'd imagine they have a lot of that camber and stuff probably dialed in at that point. Would there be even any benefit to just jumping in, measuring and seeing like what kind of load you're putting on those tires? Or do you think it's probably already dialed in if they're winning by that much?

I think they're pulling on every trick in the book. Not only are they a good driver, but they have everything dialed in pretty tight.

So, to spin off that, would you set your car up per car or per track? Would a track layout make it so you could adjust?

It all changes, yes. And even the day, the temperature outside, the time of day, the sun load, I mean, all of that stuff matters. But you get to the point where there's a law of diminishing returns out there. And so, you're not really trying to optimize that, you know. If you're talking about.001%, it becomes an academic...

Is it better? Is it worth it?

It's an academic exercise. And the hard part, we talked about this last meeting, is you can go out there and say, hey, I've adjusted my camera, is it faster? You won't be able to tell if it's faster or not, because you can drive it and you'll have impressions, but you're not running a thousand laps.

That's what I was going to say. You probably need a thousand laps to even know.

And even then, the tires are wearing the whole time, the weather conditions are changing, you have traffic out there, like it's really hard to go measure this stuff in the real world.

Yeah, I mean, even think, I mean, yeah, like you said, tire wear, you know, you're losing fuel, all that weight's changing, all these things.

There's so many dynamics that are out there. And that's why when you look at Formula One, the telemetrics that they have on these vehicles is really impressive, because they're trying to measure absolutely everything, because they're out there trying to adjust the same things that we're talking about.

In real time, too.

In real time. And then even the alignment of the vehicle starts to become very important, because as we start to look at these slip curves, the slip curves, that peak of the slip curves changes as a percentage based on the load. And so what happens is you will actually adjust the camber, knowing, okay, when I'm in a corner, I actually want to have a lower slip percentage in the corner on the inside than the outside. So you start doing some funky things with your alignment, just so that it's optimized for the corner. But those are things the average person should never touch that stuff in a track. And then it depends on how tight the track radius is and the corners. So there's a whole, you know, there's a host of variables out there for the average person just doing a track, learn to be a better driver.

That's the biggest part. Seat times, everything. I mean, I was shaving off seconds, again, in the simulator. And this is, I mean, the sim is incredible. But even then, it's like shaving off seconds and, you know, learning the line better and all that. I want to bring it back to maybe not even car enthusiast level, but just general car maintenance level. Explain a little bit around alignments, right? Like last year, before I got my alignment done by JWP, it was pretty rough. I mean, we're talking several degrees over the limit, like it was in the red.

So did you? I mean, was it in the red when you brought it to them?

Yeah.

Just from where?

I mean, that was my first alignment having the car.

Gotcha.

And we're in Minnesota. We had a lot of potholes. Yeah. I think alignment companies do very well. Like for example, Ceratified here, where we're at, they have a partnership, or I think they work with EuroCharge because they have an alignment rack, I think. I don't know. But anyways, if you need an alignment, go to those guys. Point being is, let's talk about why you should probably get an alignment once a year. Because there's some people over here that just don't know how to drive in Minnesota.

I think first of all, if your car is pulling, like it actively pulls when you're on the road, get an alignment. Clue number one. If it feels like you have to go a little bit left, I wouldn't worry about it because every road out there, almost every road...

I was going to say there's a little crown to it.

There's a 2% crown on it, and so it's going to naturally want to go to the right. But you can figure that out. Even if you just go on a blank road and just go right in the middle of the crown and try to go straight. But if the car wants to pull left or right, it's totally time for an alignment, number one. Right? The reason alignments are important, and then after that, any time you put new tires on the car, I would get an alignment. I don't know if you have to have an alignment every year. I think it depends on how hard you drive the car, how many potholes you experience.

That would be me. Potholes.

It seems excessive still, but yes.

And some cars are more prone to going on a whack on a pothole than others.

Fords, yeah. No, I'm kidding.

But and so a little bit of is judgment. But the first one is just does the car pull at all? And that's generally a pretty good indicator. And the reason it's important is it doesn't actually change like the maximum track performance, you know, hardly at all. But it's just going to wear your tires out faster. And so if you I'd rather spend a little bit on an alignment and have my tires last longer than and the other way to do it is if you have an alignment issue is go on and it's almost always your front tires that will go out on alignment first. Run your hand across the face of the tire, right? So if this is the tire, just run your hand back and forth left and right. And if there's an alignment issue, your hand will go over it one way easily and it'll feel rough coming back the other direction. And that's the easiest indicator of an alignment issue. So if it's out of alignment or if you have any indicators, rubbing your hand across the tire, odd wear items on the inside or the outside of the tire or it's pulling, just get it on alignment.

Or if you're Harris, whichever side the cord show up on first.

If your cord is showing, take it in. The car will ride better, it'll handle a little bit better, and your tires will last a lot longer, so you have to have an overhand.

Which brings me back to Michelin, please sponsor me to be your R&D expert. I'm just saying 30,000 miles on a PS4, so I mean, it's got to be a record.

But like past the point of their recommendation, I'm sure.

Oh, by a lot. And you're on a light car too, so that makes a big difference.

Oh, yeah, that's a fair point. What about in addition to traction? So, for example, one of the things that I ran into when I did autocross, I wasn't paying attention to my tire pressure as much as I should have. I was just doing some Mickey Mouse science. But is there an optimal point of tire pressure? Does it vary from tire to tire or?

It depends. Yeah, I think first of all, if you're driving on the street, just follow the manufacturer's tire pressure recommendations, and you're going to be in good shape. Those have actually gone up, though, in the last 15 years. We used to run them lower. And if you run them lower, it's softer and it feels better for some people, right? It feels softer and squishier and more compliant, but it takes more energy to get it down to the road. And so you get tire pressure, the higher tire pressure is reduced, rolling resistance, it doesn't ride quite as well, but you get better fuel economy.

Yeah, I was going to say, good old EPA there again.

That was huge for me. So when I had the Gladiator, actually, there was times where I, you know, like a week or two where, you know, the tire sensor would be like, yeah, you're a little, you're like 10 psi below where you should be. And my gas was awful.

Yeah, it makes a big difference.

Yeah.

Try riding a bicycle with the tires half pumped up. It's hard. It's really hard. And so if you're racing bicycles, you know, you pump the daylights out of them because it just rolls easier.

It's good for traction, though.

When you're on the track, though, is the cold pressure is something to start. So, you know, I told you when you get off the track, then you're going to actually measure the surface temperature. You're also going to measure your tire pressure. And the tire pressure changes significantly coming off the track because it's what's called the ideal gas law, PV equals nRT, which in other words, which means that temperature is directly proportional to temperature. I mean, pressure. Yeah, pressure is directly proportional to temperature. So as these things heat up, guess what happens is the tire starts to heat up. So if you go look at a typical race tire, what they would say is a typical race car manufacturer would say, hey, this tire performs best at 38 PSI at 165 degree face temp. And so now you at least go, okay, I know the engineers have tested this thing, and they believe it performs best at this temperature and this pressure. And now I have something to go target. Right? If I take your PS4s, what's the optimal temperature and pressure that they recommend? I don't think they do. I haven't seen it published.

No, because they probably would have to have two if they were, because it's street and track is what they advertise, right?

And I'm just thinking track right now, performance, but the average person doesn't do that. So what percentage of people that have a PS4 tire are actually going to take temperature and pressure readings coming off the track?

Nobody. I mean, I might be the one silly goose.

This is my first time that I have dropped the pressure of my tire before going on the track, and it seemed to make a huge difference.

It could, because then if you put a lot of temperature into the tire is you may have just gotten it back up to where you want it to be.

And it was. I can monitor it from inside the vehicle. So that's why.

So you probably put five or seven pounds of PSI in it driving it. I'm guessing.

Yep.

You were driving pretty hard at Road America. You were doing pretty good over there.

I was trying to put the car to work, figure it out.

And it did fine, didn't it?

Yes.

I think the one thing that people are surprised the most when we get them to the track is you guys are total car guys, and you guys are comfortable taking all 700 horsepower and using all of it and tossing the car around and having fun. The average person, we get them out to the track and they go, God, I didn't know my car could even do this. They'll go spend $80,000 on an AMG Mercedes C-Class because they think it's sporty. And they have no idea what their car is actually capable of.

Oh, it's crazy. Even my Volkswagen, it's a weird example because it's a light whatever, but the C-Class Mercedes, like Total, Sedan, Cruiser, that's a little sporty, it's got an AMG badge or whatever, but a lot of people will never see it.

Yeah. And I do think they're overusing the AMG badge.

Okay, that's a hot take. I like it.

I think they're using it on more things than they should. But in general, it used to be more of a purity, and the whole AMG range, and I know your dad has an AMG.

It deserves the badge.

Yes, exactly. That's my point. That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's some where you go, yeah, that's an AMG. There's others that go, okay, I understand there's marketing dollars. You're pushing that one. It's a four-cylinder. I don't know if that deserves the AMG badge. But the point is people get these things in the track, and they're like, holy s***, I had no idea, which is always the exciting part. Yeah. And they're always also concerned about, well, am I going to hurt the car? And you're like, no, no, you're not going to hurt the car. Like the car was designed for this. Yes, we're going to burn your brakes up a little bit. We're going to wear your brakes out a little bit. And you're going to have a little less rubber on your tires when you go home than when you came. But you're not going to hurt the car. So just go enjoy it, drive it and enjoy it.

Was it? What was it that I was reading about somebody driving an AMG? It was a it was an article about you, I think, wasn't it? That you were mentioning somebody doing a track day, some woman that never knew about her AMG. Is that what you're referencing?

I wasn't referencing that. I may have mentioned the story before, though.

Yeah, I'm trying to think. Yeah, it might have been the story. I might have been the one about.

Oh, you know, it was Joe. We were talking to Joe.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, it's coming back to me. When we were in our meeting. Yeah, yeah, OK.

Yeah, Joe was talking about that from Brainerd.

Yeah, I'm super excited to get because I've never been on a road course. I've only done autocross, which is kind of like a little bit. It was a longer course. It was definitely a heat up. My tires really fast again, turning like crazy. Oh, yeah. This is actually what came to mind earlier. So there's this famous video of Kimi Raikkonen, I'm sure you're familiar with, where everybody is warming up their tires. They're weaving like crazy, but Kimi is just driving straight. And his philosophy to warm up his tires is just breaking hard, speed up, brake. Whereas everybody else is doing the weaving, you know, NASCAR style. Is there one of those two that would heat up a tire quickly, the weaving versus braking? Because they're both putting a lot of force on the tire, I think.

I think as long as you are slipping, slipping roughly the same amount, it shouldn't matter. The tire doesn't know if I think it seems easier to go back and forth and gas brake, gas brake. But technically both would work just fine. When you get on a road course, I mean, if you're racing, you're looking for every advantage that you can. When we get on to a road course, though, the first lap or two, you're not going to weave or any of that, but you're going to take it easy for the first lap or two, and you're going to let everything come up to temperature slowly. When I was younger, there was one race, and I was racing motorcycles at the time, and I just put fresh rubber on my bike, and I was all excited. And this was still the warm-up lap. I crashed on the road on the warm-up lap. I mean, how embarrassing is that?

It happens to the best, including Charles LeClair.

I high-sided it, and I started to come around one of the banks, and the tires had not been scrubbed in yet, and they were cold, and it just started to slide, and then it hooked up, and Superman me off, and I ended up in the outfield and looked like a dummy. But it was just because I didn't warm things up properly before they were time. So anytime you get on the track, the first thing you want to do is just let the car, especially if it's cold, let the car come on up to temperature, including the tires. You'll put a ton of heat into them very quickly, but it takes a lap or so to get up there.

To really get up there, yeah, exactly. I mean, because again, you're going to be putting this thing through a lot more force than it's used to. These aren't street corners. And so I think that's a perfect segue into the slip curve versus what's it called?

Latitudinal versus longitudinal?

Yeah, you're here to help me out with the big words.

Well, and I saw this and somebody posted this.

It was a comment.

It was a comment. And they said, well, you're looking at the lat curve versus the longitudinal curve. And yes, there are some differences if you look at the longitudinal curve, one is forward-backward, one is side-to-side, right? And if you think about the treads on the vehicle and the shape of the contact patch, they're different. So you would expect different slip curves. But imagine you're just a... I'm going to dumb this down. You are a molecule of rubber right now, dude. And you are a molecule of rubber, and you are sitting on top of this piece of asphalt right now. Like, do you know what direction is forward or backward or sideways? You have no clue if it's latitude. I mean, the rubber is going to react this way, just the same as it is this way and this way and this way. So guess what? The curves and everything are fundamentally the same. Now, there are some slight differences just based on the dynamics of the tire and the compound.

Right, the sidewall versus the tread and all that.

It is, but fundamentally, they follow the same dynamics. So anyway...

So does that come down more so to how the tire itself is manufactured then?

Well, if you look at the way... We talk about the contact patch. And if I looked at the contact patch of this very fancy PT Cruiser here, you would realize under every tire, it looks kind of like an egg underneath of there, kind of a square egg underneath of there. And generally, the contact patch is wider than it is forward and back. And so... But if you had really skinny tires, then you have to get more compression, and the tire is going to be longer forward back than it is side to side. But the net surface area, if you think about the physics, the net surface area, if I have a thousand pounds on this vehicle, I'm going to make this real easy. I mean, I have a 4,000 pound car, there's a thousand pounds on that corner. So now there's a thousand pounds of force on that tire. And that tire is at 50 psi of force. I'm going to set it in how to make the math easy. I have a thousand pounds of force and 50 psi on the tire. Well, guess how much surface area that I have there? It's 20 square inches, a thousand divided by 50. So I know I'm going to have effectively 20 square inches to go work with. And if I cut that down to 25 psi, I've gone from 20 square inches to 40 square inches. Because the forces from the air have to offset the forces on the tire. And then once I start rolling, there's some movement there as well. But if you look at that tire as it contacts, whether it's rolling or not, you really have one molecule that's kind of doing the work. And every molecule is going to do the same left, right, forward, backward. And so the slip curves tend to be fairly consistent there. Weird things start to happen as you start to go over that slip curve, or the peak, where you go from a deformable state to an actual slip state. And then you're getting all these little, you know, imagine me on the track and I kind of have, you know, everything sucked together. As I start to slide, I'm going to kind of, you know, come over these little ripples and everything else. And that's where I'm going to start to transition into this different state. And so I'm getting into the kinetic slip rate, which is slightly different. But the net is very simply side, side, back, side to side, forward, backward act really similar. But if you're accelerating while you're turning, you actually have forces both directions.

Exactly.

And then the tire, all the tire knows, it goes, I don't know if I have a force this way and this way. I just have one force and it's somewhere in between. And so that's why you can kind of break everything down to sort of the singularity, you know, single force, single direction. And it's looking at it at that really just like a force vector.

Okay. Okay. That makes sense. I'm caught up. So, okay, so then we need we need to get a chalkboard. That actually would be kind of funny.

It would be kind of funny, would it?

He was suggesting over here to get a TV back here of some kind, which I'm not 1000% in agreement or opposed to yet. A chalkboard would be funny.

I don't know if the chalkboard would be funny.

I don't know if it would be exactly for a podcast, but for a video of some kind, I think it would be interesting. It's old school. Chalkboard. Everybody's got this stupid...

Who's that guy? He has a YouTube channel.

Engineering Explained.

Yes, he does a great job. He doesn't use chalkboards, though. He uses whiteboard.

Whiteboard, yeah.

But same thing.

He is... He's incredibly sharp.

And I watch his stuff and I have... Listen, all of us, every engineer thinks they're smarter than the other engineer.

But I know your types.

Yeah, exactly. We're all arrogant SOBs. But I think he's sharp. I have yet to watch anything where I think he has a false premise. I think he knows what he's doing.

Well, especially when you're on that level of notoriety, a lot of people are fact checking you at all times.

Oh, yeah.

So I'm sure... I bet if you go early on, he's probably made mistakes. But that's the thing we all learn.

We all make mistakes.

I'd be surprised if he had every video be absolutely perfect. But at the same time, there's some guys that are just sharp as a tack out there, too.

I think that's one reason he's good, because he... I think he is... I think he's accurate 99% of the time. And he's very good about explaining things in a way that makes sense. So I think he takes these complex subjects, and then he brings them to a level that more people can understand, which is a skill set.

I think that's one of the benefits to us doing these podcasts, because we're able to find the middle ground, because I'd like to say I'm on the learning side of things and you're the teaching side of things. So let's find the middle ground here and how we can present it to the average Joe. Like, how can we shave off seven seconds off of Dan's track times, which actually wouldn't be a bad topic to jump into. What else can we start doing for old Danny Boy over here?

Well, and so it might be a really good transition as well, just talking about BIR.

I 100% know that's where. I have not had, other than just some pointers from other drivers that I've been with. There's no formal training at all whatsoever.

And so here's the... I find people on the track, you can take way more time off on the track by practice and training than you can by more horsepower or bigger brakes. I mean, magnitudes. And so if you want your car to be faster, just learn how to drive.

I actually learned this yesterday, and I probably should have known this. I think I've always known this deep down in my heart, but there is no fat. What's faster, zero to 60 or 60 to zero?

Well, if the car is doing properly as four wheel drive, it doesn't matter. They're the same.

Wait, what do you mean?

Well, is if if you it depends on the car. First of all, right, if the car was traction limited, right, and four wheel drive, then it can accelerate to 60 miles an hour as fast as it can slow down from 60 to zero.

Right.

The reality is there's not that many cars out there that are traction limited and four wheel drive.

For example, like my golf, right? Like I'm guessing my zero to 60 total guess five seconds, four seconds, high fours, whatever. Whereas if I threw on some nice carbon ceramics on there, it would probably be less than two seconds to go back.

It depends on how you took off, too. Did you spin? Did you?

I mean, that's let's say all things perfect.

Perfect launch.

Yeah, perfect launch and front wheel drive. It'll never be. I'm always going to blow the tires off.

That's my point is you can only use, and the downside of the front wheel drive when you go accelerate, you're getting weight transfer backwards.

Yep, so I lose traction.

So you lose net force up front. And so listen, it's a totally fun car, but you're absolutely limited on how fast you can accelerate with that.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, even when I was doing autocross from a standing start, I would blow the tires off.

Yeah, and that's just physics, man.

Yeah, damn physics.

But my point was, if you had a car with infinite horsepower and driven by all four wheels, it will accelerate as fast as it will deaccelerate. But there's very few cars that have enough horsepower to effectively spin all four wheels to 60 miles an hour.

I see what you're saying now. Okay, okay, it took me a second there.

So if you have enough horsepower to spin all four wheels up to 60 miles an hour, the car will accelerate as fast as it will deaccelerate.

But just to clarify, just so I can kind of simplify the point, basically you're saying that if you max out your braking potential and everything to basically go zero to 60, you're saying that the tires are eventually, or the traction is going to be the limit.

We get back to that molecule. It doesn't know whether it's going forward or going backwards, right? So it doesn't matter, launching, stopping.

Sounds like a stupid molecule to me. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Think of any cars that are traction limited all the way to 60 miles an hour if they're four wheel drive. Can you?

I'm not sure I understand.

Tell me one car that could, if you wanted to, smoke the tires past 60 miles an hour all four wheels.

Sean's freaking Jeep was able to blow off the tires pretty hard, but you're talking about 2000 plus horsepower or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, that's my point. It's very limited, but if you had that capability, then it wouldn't matter. But there's just really fundamentally no cars that can do that today.

Talking about all this makes me think of Carroll Shelby's always said, there's no such thing as too much horsepower, just not enough traction.

Yeah, exactly. But maybe it brings us up to kind of the next thing that we've been working on, which I know we're both excited about.

The Brainerd.

Yeah, the Brainerd thing.

So in short, what we're basically trying to do is we're trying to really promote the Brainerd Driving School. What's the official name of it again?

The BIR Performance Driving School.

Performance Driving School, whatever it is. So basically, I've been trying, I tried to get up there this season, unfortunately didn't work out. But thankfully, we were able to chat with the management up at Brainerd to basically see what makes sense. I want to get a large amount of the Minnoxide following to come out there, whether it's five, 10, 20 of us, whatever the number is, to basically get up there and get better at driving, because there's a lot of talented drivers up there. Again, Alex is one of the coaches up there, you're one of the coaches or instructors. I'm not sure what the... I don't want to get canceled for calling you guys the wrong thing, but...

You can call us whatever you want. We're pretty easy.

Yeah, but the people who have a lot of track time and more importantly, also have the ability to instruct, because there's a lot of drivers that are great at driving. They're not good at teaching. But I'm really excited for this, because I think it's an opportunity for me to get some of my followers up there to really just get better at driving our cars. Does that explain it well?

Well, and I think even... I think it does. And I think even beyond that is, I think what BIR is interested in is, Minnoxide has developed a really strong following. And it's unique though. It is one of the premier clubs, automotive clubs, here in the Minnesota area.

I wouldn't say I'm a club, but...

Not club, gathering group, right? Tribe.

Yeah, I'd say I have a little bit of a tribe, sure.

You have a tribe. But more importantly is...

Followings would be a better word.

Following. But the point is, people that own are enthusiasts are all across the map. And I'm sure if you quizzed them on what they own, it's from Mustangs to Porsches to Ford pickups and the whole spectrum. We're going to host a track day at BIR that's focused on Minnoxide and getting Minnoxide listeners and enthusiasts up there together. And we'll tune the entire day to the group. More importantly, we're going to complement it with this podcast. So we'll get a few of the customers. And if you're interested, by the way, reach out to Harris or myself. And so we'll do some of the podcasts before the event. We'll do some of the podcasts after the event. We'll do some of the podcasts in the middle of it. So we're going to take this entire thing. And just instead of us talking about what track school is like and what we learned, we can talk to some of the actual, you know, users or customers or Minnoxide listeners of what they learned in this whole thing.

Yep. So yeah, we want to document this aspect. Because again, promoting track events, and I've talked to many track owners, managers, it's a little difficult, but there's an opportunity here because Brainerd is one of the better tracks up here. People love it.

Brainerd is a great track.

Out in the middle of nowhere. But we do want to do a little bit of a before and after aspect. So whether it's one, two, three, however many people, we want to basically get people. I think we also said we wanted to get the instructors on the podcast beforehand too, right? Here's what we're going to do.

I think we should have a combination of a couple of the instructors and a couple of the, I hate to call them students, Minnoxide listeners, and just get their impression of what it is. Here's the thing I find when I talk to students is, let me pick on my wife for a second.

All right. This should go well.

No, it will. She knows I married up. I gave her a track day one day, and this was before I was instructing her or anything. I just thought it would be fun. Kind of an experience. She would have never gone to the track in a billion years if it wasn't for the fact that I forced her hand. So she and I and my son went up there and had a track day. She still talks about it to this day because she had so much fun, and she overcame this fear of driving on a racetrack at a really high rate of speed. Everybody starts out on their first day at the same point. You don't know anything. It's scary. You're going fast. The engines are loud. You think you're going to die. Everybody has this fear, and there's a lot of anxiety kind of going into this thing. And everybody comes out at the end of the day, and they go, God, that was so much fun, and I learned so much, and I have a new appreciation for the vehicle and my skills, and I accomplished something. And I think I have yet to see anybody walk away with any regrets from actually doing it, but I think there's a lot of people out there fearful of the first time because they've never been on a track before. And so I think the best thing is, if there's people that are out there that are going, oh man, this sounds kind of funny, but it sounds a little bit scary, just go give it a shot. Because everybody does the same thing. Everybody starts out as a total amateur, and you're not measured against how well you do against others, you're measured against yourself. If we went out golfing, none of us, I don't think, are big golfers.

Yeah, I'm selling my clubs if anybody still wants them.

Yeah, there you go. If we went golfing, like if you measured me by my golf game, you picked the wrong friend, man. We're competing with ourselves. None of us are joining the pros, right? We can laugh about it if we hook a shot. We're going to get out there on the track. It's going to be safe. We're going to have fun. We're all starting out at the same point, which is we're all amateurs.

Yeah.

And if you have a car that you enjoy and you want to really appreciate it, let's get it up there and have some fun.

Well, I think another thing is too, is like, for example, we even have friends like Mark, who have lots of, I think, he's in the 50s on track days under his belt, so he has quite a bit under his belt.

Oh yeah, he's good.

But I feel like sometimes, even if you've been on track multiple times, like Dan has like five or six times now. Getting pointers from somebody else can be another thing, too, because that's the other thing. Some of these instructors, they have different philosophies.

Yep, absolutely.

You know, some might be more aggressive here, but a little more resilient. You know, it really depends. Not to say that, I mean, they're all instructors, and they're all good at driving, but...

We're all different. And so we even do the same thing, is I'll grab one of the instructors and say, hey, Steve, why don't you do a couple of laps of me? I just want you to see what I'm doing, and, you know, give me some tips. So we're constantly trying to push others. Everybody's trying to get better. Have you seen one pro golfer that's ever been perfect? No, they're practicing the entire time. You never get it fully right. And I think one of the things that's interesting about track school, golf is the same way. If I'm trying to influence you on something, the best way I can influence you is I don't consistently support your ideas. I inconsistently support your ideas. It's called positive intermittent reinforcement. I just give you a cookie every third time you do something right. That's the best way to incentivize people. Try it with your dog, positive intermittent reinforcement. Golf is positive intermittent reinforcement. Do you hit the ball perfect every time? Hell no, you don't hit the ball perfect every time. You get some great shots, and then you get two or three crappy shots, and then you get a great shot, you get two or three crappy shots. It becomes addictive, because you're always trying to do better. Track's kind of the same way. Once you become good enough where you know what you're doing right and you're doing wrong, you realize there's more doing wrong than you're doing right, and you get those corners where you're like, God, that was just beautiful. I'm great. I'm going to be a professional driver here any day now, I can just tell. And then you hit the next corner, and you go, God, I totally screwed that thing up. I should have done this different. I should have done this different. But you're never perfect. You're constantly trying to improve, but there's enough goodness there, but that you never actually hit the pinnacle.

Well, especially if you look at individual sectors, too. It's like, God damn it, I was faster in sector one and two, but why was I slower in third?

Well, that's why a lot of those track apps and stuff, they'll give you your theoretical, right? Well, they'll take your best from each. Yeah, they'll stitch together five, and you go, this is what you should have been able to do.

You fail here.

I mean, I think it's a cool idea. Sometimes you realize, though, that I can make one corner fast, and it forces me to be poor on the next corner. So I think that whole premise, I like what they're doing there. The premise, though, is I could have been really fast in this section, but I know it botched my line coming into section three. So, by definition, I force section three to be slower.

Yeah, driving styles are a unique thing. It's awesome. Who was it? I want to say it was Daniel. Yeah, it was an interview with Daniel Ricciardo that I recently saw, where he was talking about Max Verstappen, because a lot of people were claiming that the car was built around him, right? That the Checo Perez was just in a less superior car. And Daniel gets in there and he's like, no, absolutely not. This guy drives like a freaking animal. I mean, the way he drives is just... All Formula One drivers are on the limit. Max has found the next limit. And that's why he's been champion three times. I don't care. I know some of you guys are Mercedes fans. Listen, I am too. It's okay. They're just better. He's just better right now. Just reason he's champ.

There's some folks... You get on the track and you want to hold the car at the very limit the entire time.

Yeah.

And it's hard. It's really, really hard to do.

I actually got scared in the simulator yesterday because I jumped in the Indy car. Wow. Do I have a whole new respect? I mean, I always thought I could just jump in there. I'm sure it's difficult, but come on. It's a car.

How hard is this going to be?

But when you look at... It's one thing to putz around on a track, but if you want to max out one of those cars... Dude, when I was slamming the brakes, I was like, there's no... Again, this is a freaking video game. I can't even imagine a real car. It's like, this should not physically be possible to be braking this late. It's the braking that scares me. Accelerating is like whatever. We spin out. Who cares? But it's the braking. It's like, how late can you really brake? And that's what blew my mind. I'm actually curious. And these are tips that you might get from your instructor, if you join us at Brainerd later this year.

And by the way, within Brainerd, the way it works, and I think this is important, is when you go out, is if you're an amateur, I mean, you're a first timer, is we always put you with an instructor, a one-on-one instructor, for effectively as much time as you actually want. So when you're there, you get a private person sitting alongside you to say, you know, improve this, try to do this, and they'll give you as much or as little coaching as you actually want. But that way, it's not like they're going to say, hey, do this on the track. You're going to have somebody sitting there who's actually going to give you guidance through the entire track until you get to a point where you're comfortable.

Actually, yeah, and continue to elaborate on that. So take us through Destructure today, because again, I've never been up there for one of these classes. So take me through Destructure today. I think it starts early, right, like 8 a.m.?

Yeah, I think it's, we might be 9 this year.

Even better for me.

But it's, we start in the morning, and we typically do four sessions in the morning and three in the afternoon.

How long are sessions?

And sessions are 25 minutes. And it's a half hour, you know, five minutes to kind of cut over. And listen, in 25 minutes on the track, it goes, it seems like it's about 12 minutes, not 25 minutes. It goes kind of quickly. But that's just because your adrenaline is totally cooking. And, but we go on, and the first section is, you know, everybody, you're kind of being held by the hand of an instructor. We separate out the faster groups from the slower groups. So everybody coming out the first time, no matter, I don't care what your skills are, you're going to be in the slower group. And there's going to be a fast group, and there's people that are intermediate, and they can kind of go up or down in whatever group they want. You're trying to keep all the cars running roughly the same pace, right? What you don't want is somebody coming past at, you know, turning a really fast lap time and somebody else being very slow, because it's the differential speed that it's more dangerous. So you're going to be out on the track with people just like you, right? And so we'll do four sessions in the morning, and everyone is with your instructor until you get to the point where you say, You know what? I'm good. I'm good. And you can switch instructors if you want, so you can get multiple inputs from other people. Normally what happens is the instructors do ride alongs for two to three laps, or two to three sessions, and then they're kind of cut loose, and then people can just go out and practice and practice and practice.

Oh, by themselves.

Absolutely. What's interesting though, I find this, and this happens almost every time, is you get out there and you go, Man, I spent a fair amount of money. I want to optimize this. I got seven sections. I'm going to go drive, drive, drive. Most people don't finish all of their seven sessions, because when you're out there, what was the last time you focused on something so hard, and you focused on it for four hours straight at like a level nine and a half focus?

Depends what I ate for lunch.

Very seldom.

That is very exhausting.

It's very exhausting. And when you're in the middle of it, it doesn't feel exhausting, right? Because you're having so much fun. But by the end of the day, you're tired. And so a lot of people will get to about session five or even six, and they'll just go, you know what? I've had as much fun as I can take. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm going to go away happy. Most people emotionally just say, you know what? I think I'm going to end it here. And I mean that in a very positive, good way. You're going to get more track time than most people can absorb.

We noticed that on the rallies a lot. Actually, every rally I've ever done or hosted, people are done before a lot of time. I have a few lunatics out there that will keep going the whole day. They've really got the energy. But 80% of them, they're ready to go home.

They're ready to go home. And it's not because they're not having fun.

It's just exhausting.

It's just exhausting. And it's hard to believe. You're like, I'm sitting in a car driving, that's exhausting. But your focus point is 100%. And there's an interesting thing. One of the problems that people have on the track is they get blinders on. And have you guys ever been in a car accident before?

Yes, I have.

Not on my own.

And so when you did, you could play that back in your head still. Right? Could you? And you can see the car. I have no idea about your accident, but I bet you can play it back everything you saw. To this day, isn't that amazing? What happens is when you get to this point where your adrenaline level is up here, is your brain goes into overtime, and it starts recording everything that it possibly can. It effectively goes double high def right away. But to do that, your peripheral vision goes to s***. So right now, I can see both my fingers. You'll get on the track, and your vision will be like this. You'll get tunnel vision. Right? Because your brain is trying to process so much so quickly, because it's somewhere near that fight or flight mode, and so you just start narrowing in. So we talk a lot about, what am I going to focus on? How am I going to relax? Where in the track am I focusing? There's so many things happening that your brain is running at 100% that entire time that you're out there. And that proof point is, you're getting tunnel vision already because you're overloading your brain, and your brain has to cut out a whole bunch of stuff just so you can focus on the things that are important. And then when you're on the track, you're like, am I on the right line? Am I doing the right braking points? The right acceleration points? What's going on around me? Is there a flag out there? Is there traffic around me that I need to be concerned about? What's the car doing? Am I understeering or oversteering? Should I come in a little faster, a little slower? There's so many inputs that it becomes overwhelming. And I'll bring this back to my wife, and I think it's so cute of her. She goes through this one, and she's always going through it. And she's not setting any track records, believe me. And she's going through there, and halfway through the day, she goes, I'd get it to the point where I do one corner. I'm like, God, I'm really good at that one corner. I did it. And she said, and by the time I figured out that I did that corner well, I'm already way late on the next corner. I was so busy celebrating for a half of a second that I screwed up the next corner, right? Because everything's happened so quickly that if you take a half a second to breathe before you know it, the next corner is there and you've screwed up the next one. So you're constantly in focus, except for really on a straightaway. And the straightaway, sometimes you can breathe, check your oil temperature, stretch your wrists.

I always wonder that too. I see you have all these gauges. I was like, when do you look at your gauges? I'm constantly trying to look at the road.

Did you ever look at it in your speedometer even?

I do on the straights because I kind of have an idea of where I'm trying to hit before I break. But no, only on a really long straight. Otherwise, I don't really care.

You don't look at your dash?

No.

Because you're totally focused on the track. Right? And just trying to get better. And it's not that it's bad or scary. It's just that it's a very pure focus.

I assume that you get to a certain comfort level where now you're like, okay, I just came around that turn. I've taken a quick glance at everything.

Yes.

I soaked all that information in. Here we go.

Correct.

I'm not at that level yet.

But one of the things we want to do is we want to actually calm people down and allow you to kind of think a little bit more clearly further down the track. And don't get so jittery of what's going on 20 feet in front of me. I want you to focus on 50 and 100 feet in front of you and kind of lower your anxiety level and you'll smooth things up. Because to be fast on the track, you have to be smooth. So, so much of what we do is we want to smooth you out on the track. And the smoother you are, the faster you'll be. But that you can't do that when you're nervous and jittery and trying to make micro adjustments. We're going to take that out of you.

That was my, the best advice I got. You know, again, so for my 18th birthday, we went to Vegas and we went on to the, I think it was Dream Exotics, and we rented the Lamborghini Huracans, and we went on the track for five laps. Total scam. Never would do it again. But it was fun, one-time experience.

It's a checkbox.

Yeah, I think now, I think having more of an understanding of how to drive a car, I'd have way more fun in those five laps than I did before because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was just, you know, for glamour. But my point being is the instructor, as annoying as he was, there was one piece of advice that he gave that was really good. And it's like, you don't want to look where you're going. You want to look where you want to go. And that's so true. Like, this is one thing that they, like one of my buddies got advice for drag racing is like, hey, don't, when you pull your parachute at the end of that strip, don't look for where your button is. I need you to practice where that button is. Because even a slight head nod at 180 miles an hour, you might, subconsciously, you might turn the wheel. So that's like one of those things to practice. Same thing applies to, you know, when you're driving. You want those smooth motions, know what you're doing.

Put your eyes where you want to go.

Exactly. Because if you look away for a second, it's a problem.

Well, and a couple rules on the track, and these are life lessons as well, is if you see an accident on the side of the road, don't look at it. And that goes for the track as well, because you'll drive right into it. It happens all the time, and people look like this, and they drive right into the accident. So even if you're driving past an accident on the highway, don't look at it. Just focus on the road. One of the things, though, that I think is interesting is we teach EVOC, the police, right? How to drive and, you know, how to catch the bad guys. And one of the things we teach is the pit maneuver. And we have this group of cars, and it's, I don't know, 20 old Crown Vicks with big bumpers on them. And we teach them how to do pit. Now, when was the last time in your life you ever ran into a car and tried to spin it out?

Every day I drive here, I want to.

You want to! How many times have you actually done it?

That's why you got the town car.

You could, yeah, that's a perfect car. People just, we don't do that, right? We don't intentionally run into people and run them off the road, as much as we would like to. And so, the interesting part when you do a pit maneuver is, and I'm going to use my, not a rollover, I'm going to roll my PT Cruiser here, but when you come up on the pit, you're going to come up along the outside, and you're going to get really close to it, and then very smoothly, you're just going to pull in. And so, the first thing is, you have to touch the car, and you want to touch them as smoothly as reasonably possible. Once you touch the car, you're going to turn it a little more aggressively, give it gas, right? And then as he spins out around you, you're just going to go down the street. Now, you have to overcome three natural tendencies. Number one is when you... to touch the car, because you do not... your body's saying, I don't want to go random into that car. That's not natural. I'm going 60 miles an hour, and you're telling me to run into this, and your brain's saying, don't run into that car. Right? I've been trained for 50 years not to run into a car.

I don't have that training, but continue.

Second, once you feel contact, you're going to turn into it and accelerate. Like, normally, if something bad happens, you go, oh, whoa, I'm going to hit the brakes, man. Right? You do this in the same thing. You don't see... if something happens in your car, you take your foot off the gas. Right? Well, now, once you feel contact, I want you to put your foot on the gas and lean into it. Totally goes against everything that you've been trained. Now, as he comes around, this car is going to be right in front of you sideways and spinning off this direction. Right? What are you doing? Who are you looking at? Oops, look at there. I just broke this mirror off. Look at there. There we go.

I fixed it.

Once this car is spinning around like 10 feet off of you, what are you doing? You're looking at it.

Right?

Of course you're looking at it. There's a car spinning around right in front of you. If you look at that car, you're going to follow them right in. So, once this car starts to spin, you need to go look down the road where you're actually headed. And so, number one, you got to go hit the car. That's unnatural. Number two, you hit the car, and you got to punch it a little bit and spin them around. And number three, once he's spinning around and making a bunch of smoke in front of you, you got to not look at him and go down the road so you actually are looking where you're supposed to go. Totally unnatural. And so, that's one of the things we train the police officers is to actually overcome all of that. So when they come in, they go, okay, I know what this feels like, I know what I'm supposed to do, I know how to manage this after the fact, and execute it well. And there's a lot of pit maneuvers that just don't execute properly because they don't have enough practice. And I get it, right? It's not a very uncommon thing. So that's why we teach them an old crown vex and that. So that when they do have to do a pit maneuver, they can do it safely.

Can we come up there and sign up for that?

We do need to turn that into a course.

The pit course.

Wouldn't that be fun?

Absolutely. As you're talking about, I'm like salivating over here. Like, I need to go do this.

You know, it's not... Do you think people would pay for that?

I would.

He's a lunatic. I'm not driving two and a half hours for that. I could just... I do that enough in video games. But this was Michael Petersen's How to Road Rage course segment.

Well, they have rage rooms, right, for people to just have it in there. If you have road rage, you should be able to let that out too somewhere.

You know, I would be a little concerned about the insurance on that because I could see people out there that get a little too aggressive. Because the point is, when I'm pushing you around, you shouldn't feel it, right? I want to come up alongside of you and just kiss you so lightly that you don't even notice it. And then by the time I start pushing in, that it's a little bit of a surprise. I don't really want to bang you. I want to push you.

We're well over that two-hour mark here, but I do want to ask you this, because this has been lingering on the back of my head this episode. Do you, since you've been an instructor, do you have any horror stories as an instructor?

I was going to ask that on the ride-alongs. Like, is there some, like...

I mean, on the straightaway, right? So I was talking to Alex yesterday. He's like, you know, I love instructing, but sometimes you get in on that straightaway, and somebody's, you know, going full-on to the wall, and they break a little late. It's a little nerve-wracking.

I haven't had any bad experiences, I think. If I see any that are out there, we try to shut them down. Where there's the biggest risk is sometimes we get these 21-year-old males that just, they don't have a fear of God, and they think they're way better than they are. They don't have a fear of God. And we've had a few of them that have, you know, put their car off, and I had one in the wall. It was soft, but he did some significant damage because he's being a d******. And arrogance does not go very far on the track. There's folks out there that think they're a lot better than they are. Just go in humbly, assuming that nobody is good, and you're just trying to become better and learning how to drive your car and read your car. Because it's not about guts, it's about skill. And it's not like, oh, I'm really brave, look at how fast I can drive. No, this is a skill, go learn how to go drive.

And I will say, I've seen people like that too. They are in a minority, though. I always try and tell people this. If you're scared to go to the track, you would be absolutely surprised on how inviting all of those people are no matter what level you're at.

Nobody judges you.

No.

No one.

No.

At all. Everybody's out there just like, hey, you made it. You know, you're having fun. You know, what did you learn? And whether you're fast or slow or somewhere in between, nobody cares.

No.

At all. They're just, you know, it's great camaraderie. It's great camaraderie.

What about mistakes? What are some of the most common mistakes you see, whether they're on the sketchier side of things or just simple mistakes?

I think it depends on where their skill sets are. I think one of the most common mistakes we see up front is people just have a hard time learning the line. They get so confused. They don't even know what side of the track they're supposed to be on. You probably saw some of that the last time you were at the track.

Yeah.

I think the other thing that's a big mistake is people aren't very good at braking. They brake way too early. That would be me. And it takes time to get comfortable where you're supposed to brake, where you're supposed to brake, because nobody wants to overshoot and run off the end of the track.

How hard do you brake? Do you just mash on it right away or is there like a softness to it? Like, teach me right here. What would you teach me when it comes to braking?

I think number one is I probably find my, and there's different philosophies on this, I'll tell you this, but I probably use my ABS one or two times per lap. So, I mean, I'm into my brake hard enough that if I find the ABS, I back off a little bit, but I'm really at threshold braking in almost every corner, right? Every one where it's appropriate. Most people have a hard time getting to threshold braking. They're just not comfortable with it. They don't do it very often. But when you do that, you want to get to threshold braking quickly, but you don't want to slam it. And so when I do it, it's a little bit like if I come up to you and I push you, I can push you aggressively, but I'm not punching you. And the reason we do that is those transitions are important. So you want to have a controlled transition, but a fairly rapid transition from full throttle to full braking. I'm not trying to disrupt the chassis, but I'm trying to get to a braking point fairly rapidly.

So you wouldn't necessarily be going into it like... So I wouldn't be... At no point I would be at like 50% braking. Like I want to be on or off, then? And I'm sure I'll understand more.

I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but for most corners, that's the case. Now, there's some corners that if you just have to go shave five miles an hour off or a little bit off, I'm not going to go slam on the brakes and disrupt the chassis and everything else.

Okay, true.

I think what you're saying is you're not stomping your foot down. You're braking aggressively, but not easing into it either, but not stomping your foot down like you were slapping a clutch pedal down or something.

Correct. But I'll get to it fairly rapidly. So if I can use your shoulder here, come over here. Put your hand up. So I'm not going to do that to my brake pedal, but I'm going to go do that to my brake pedal.

Okay, that makes sense.

And I'm going to push it fairly rapidly, but I'm not going to slam the thing. Or like a clutch, you can just go. It's a switch, practically. And so we're going to hit it firmly, but there's going to be a slight progression to the whole thing. But on most corners, probably 60% of them, you're going to be under full threshold braking.

That's one thing that I got really comfortable with. Again, he has that sim so dialed in because it's supposed to replicate his actual GT4 car that he races. And first of all, before I even got into anything, it's a lot of force that's needed to put those brakes down because they're meant to simulate his actual race car. It literally felt like I was pushing on 90 pounds on a light press. But I found that just pressing rapidly, that was the number one tip he gave me. Be more aggressive on your brakes because right now you're just doing this too loosey-goosey.

I can guarantee you that's one of the things, my problems that I was, even at Road America, I don't think I was using my brakes to its full potential.

Well, it's scary at first. I'm not afraid to admit that because I'm worried, again, I'm worried about, not in the Volkswagen, but unsettling the car. It's a different sensation. That's where you progressively get better and better, get better tips from instructors. I'm really excited for that. And I think I talked to my friend, Piero, who does tons of road course events. And I'm asking, you know, like, where's my car at power level wise or whatever? It's fine or whatever. He's like, that's actually perfect. Like, I make 340 to the wheels. Nice and nimble. It's going to be a great track car. So I'm excited. I want to once I get we're building our own sim as well. I can't wait to start practicing the in the Miata spec series.

Just to really get an understanding. It's one of the most successful sports cars out there. They're just fun to race. They're fun to drive. And so I think sometimes people get into this mode where they go, well, I'm going to have more fun if I have more horsepower. Maybe there's a little bit of truth to that, but you can have a lot of fun on a low horsepower vehicle on the track. You have to attack the track very differently if you have low horsepower, because you really need to maintain your energy and your momentum. So you want to be very cautious about not scrubbing off too much too sooner at the wrong time. Because it takes a while to get back up there. That's exactly right. Whereas if you have 700 horsepower, I can approach a corner very differently because I can come out of that corner very aggressively. And so even the lines on a high horsepower car versus a modest horsepower car are different. But you're just trying to optimize based on the variables that you have. But if you have 250 horsepower, then make the most out of 250 horsepower.

That's a fair point.

And I find even like on that, because you know that little Porsche I use, and it's kind of track prepped, is track prepped, and it's not a high horsepower car. I think I have 300 horsepower on that car. Probably not even quite.

It's zippy.

It's zippy. I'll get out on the track with all these Dodge, Yellowcats, etc. etc. And I mean, if I can get around them at all, I mean, I can't even touch them on the straight. I'm like tied to a tree, right? But once I get around them, they'll never see me again. Right? Because they don't have a chance getting around that track faster than I do, because I can handle so much better than they can. Now, some of it might be a little bit of driver capability. Some of it is just my car is set up for the track. So when it comes to the corners, it sticks really, really well. And so even though they have four times, three times the horsepower, they're not going to catch me. And so in that case, my car with a third of the horsepower is a much faster car around the track. I'm not taking anything away from the Dodge Demons or the Hellcats. They're awesome. But it doesn't mean that it's a better car for the track. So don't always get optimized around one thing. I met with the guy the other day. He was trying to sell this C5 Vet. Fun car. He had taken a C5 Vet, put an LS7 engine in it. And a big transmission and a big clutch and a big this and a big that. I think he just took the check box and just checked every box possible. Bigger is better. And he kind of ends up with this car that's just a hard car to actually go, I don't know what you do with it. Because it's not really great for the track. It's not really optimized for the drag strip. It's too much horsepower for the street. I think he's trying to figure out, what do I do with this car now? It looks good on a sheet of paper, but it's not really optimized for any particular function.

Yeah, it's really hard to have those multifaceted things. You just can't have something that's perfect for everything. Porsche is excluded because, I mean, damn, they're good at everything.

And I will tell you, Porsches are great. Ferraris are great. Average person can't afford one. So now if I'm engineering a car, how can I take a GT3 and make that affordable? There's no perfect answer. Everything is a trade-off, and that's why when it comes to engineering vehicles, it's so difficult because you go, well, I got to hit a price point. Yes, I want it to handle faster. Yes, I want it to have better emission. Yes, I want better fuel economy. Yes, I want a diesel engine. Yes, but the average person just can't afford that. And so how do you go optimize all of that to a solution that really fits as many people as possible in your target market? It's a hard, I mean, I, it's hard for the manufacturers. It's a tough challenge. But the cars we have today, I'm telling you, we are so blessed. Compared to the stuff we had 20 years ago, we're living in dreamland. The cars out there today are awesome. They're awesome. I mean, that Mustang that you have, it's wonderful. But you wouldn't have even dreamt of that thing 20 years ago, right?

A dual clutch and a GT 500. I mean, you would never have thought of it.

And we probably won't have time to touch on it this episode. But yeah, I was told I'm a huge SVT guy. I have several 93 Cobras and my dad's got a 99.

Do you know the guy named John Coletti?

Do you recognize him? Yeah, I was just going to ask you. So we just didn't have time to talk. So give me John's phone number, and I'll just hit him up with him and I'll go out and get coffee. Yes, absolutely. I know who John Coletti is.

I've kind of lost touch with John a little bit, but he was my mentor at Ford.

Yeah, I might even have an SVT certificate may have been signed by him.

Do you really?

Yeah, I mean, I think some of the original ones, he was signing them.

Yeah. And so I have a funny story about John, and I just have such fond memories of John. He was my first mentor. So when I went to Ford, they have a program called the FCG program, Ford College Graduate Program. John was my mentor. And John is kind of this gruff Italian, kind of short, bulky, not bulky, but I mean, you know, he's not subtle. He fills a room. You know what I mean? And I was about, I don't know, a year and six months into my program, six months into this two-year program, and John goes, he asked me to go join the Mustang program. And I wasn't really a Mustang guy, right? I went to Ford, but I was never really a Mustang guy for some reason. I'm like, John, I'd kind of like to, you know, fill out my... And he was trying to resurrect the Mustang, and because the Ford Probe was supposed to be a Mustang, and then it got closed, and they're like, you can't call that a Mustang. So they wisely called it a Ford. So John said, I'm going to go revive the Mustang program. So he has this little Skunk Works project going, he goes, hey, Peterson, why don't you join me? I'm like, John, I think I'm going to take a pass, I'm going to do this. And he called me again about three months later, and he goes, hey, Mike, Peterson. He called me Peterson all the time. Peterson, why don't you come join me? And after he asked me twice, I'm like, okay, Mike, don't be a d******, right? Join the program. So I joined the program and the Mustang program, and I was there for three or four years, something like that. Loved it. John was a wonderful mentor over all those years. And I wanted to go back to grad school. And they have a program at Ford called the Ford Fellowship. And it's a pretty good gig because you still keep most of your salary and they pay for all your education, but you don't even have to go to work. You just go to school and work full time, and they kind of pick up the full tab, and this is a pretty good win-win, right? And like two people a year get, they spend on the Ford Fellowship program. And I go into his office, and this was in a Rausch building. We were doing the skunkworks in a Rausch building. And I go to his office in the Rausch building, and I'd set up a meeting with John. I go, John, I have this proposal. I said, I want to go back to grad school, and I want you to consider me for the Ford Fellowship. And I'll work my a** off for you for another year. I'll do anything, whatever it takes. But if you'll consider me, I'll give you 100%. John looks at me. He's kind of an intimidating guy, I'm not going to lie. And he looks at me and goes, God damn it, Petersen. I go, f***, I pissed him off. Now I'm going to get fired. He goes, God damn it. I wish everybody was looking down the road at 12 months at their career like you are. Of course I'll support you. So he scared the s*** out of me, and then he supported me. And so I ended up going to Purdue and did a bunch of my work at Purdue on fellowship because of John. And I have a lot of fond memories of him. They had to laugh though, because they kept sending him to Charm School, because he just was kind of gruff. And so they kept sending him to Charm School, and he said, it never worked, it never worked. But after I left, then he became, I think he was chief of SVO or SVT, which is actually part of SVO. I can't remember how the organization was.

SVO became SVT. It all started as this Gunk Works program.

Yeah, exactly.

Now it's Ford Performance. It's just constantly changing.

Exactly. And I think he left Ford, I don't know, retired 15 years ago or so, and I've kind of lost touch with him a little bit. But I just have such fond memories of John. He's a really special man.

Anybody who creates the Terminator Mustang is definitely a special man. So that's one of the greats, the GOAT.

There was one day I went to lunch with him, and he would always rent a Mustang. They'd get an executive lease, not rent, an executive lease. And he always had a Mustang convertible, and it was always red. And I went to lunch with him one day, and I'm sitting in the Mustang, and this is an old Fox body, and I'm sitting there, and I'm just kind of wasting time waiting for something. I flip open the glove compartment, or that little ashtray, and there's a red button there, and I'm assuming it's nitrous. I flip it open, and I see it. But this is like his executive lease, and he has nitrous on his executive lease. And he sits down, and I go, hey, John, what's that? He goes, stop asking him so many f****** questions. But how many people do you know that put nitrous on their lease car?

Yeah, well, I know a guy who has a car that was supposedly built for a Ford exec that technically shouldn't exist, but it was basically a turbo coupe that has a supercharged 302 in it. But I was told that it was built for an exec, so I know they did that kind of stuff.

Well, and I just know nitrous was never a factory offering at Ford.

No, I know that much.

And he just kept them for a year. I mean, they all got a new car every year, but he would take us and then sneak it off and have somebody put nitrous on it, just because John was being John. So anyway, hey, listen, I think this whole thing that you're organized up in a BIR is going to be just awesome, Harris.

I think it's a great, yeah.

And the date we have set, right? Is it still work for you?

May 20th. Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you confirm it?

Yes. So May 20th is the date, and we'll have more information about that as it kind of progresses, because we're still a few months away. But if anybody's interested, then just pencil it in on your calendar.

Pretty much start with putting it off on your calendar. I don't think they've figured out what it costs yet, have they?

No, they haven't. But I think we'll be able to make it a little bit more attractive for anybody that listens to Minnoxide.

Yeah, that's a future episode advertisement coming soon.

So we'll get that stuff sorted out. But if it's something that you're interested in, I think everybody should just put it on the calendar for now, and we'll have more details shortly.

We preach it all the time. We might as well do it, right?

Yeah, pretty much. Well, you do it more to me, so I think you're able to speak to it more. But on that note, yeah, I think all that I need to... Today we launched the rally dates, so everybody be sure to check out communityrally.com. We got two dates. We're going from Minneapolis to Chicago, and then also Chicago to Atlanta, which both have amazing track days. North does have a drag strip. And then a lot more TBA. We're basically trying to stretch the budget as much as we can to add extras. But this is basically going to be the best rallies that me and Balta have put on, so I'm pretty excited. So I just figured I'd throw that out there since we just released the dates today, so might as well, since we're talking about track stuff. Other than that, Michael, I'd imagine most people have heard you on this podcast before, but for those that haven't, where can they find you?

You can find me at razohood.com. Go check out our site. We've talked about that before, so I won't dwell on razohood. But my email is michael at razohood.com.

Perfect. So yeah, just make sure you're following all the razohood socials, Facebook, Instagram, all that fun stuff.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. We have a TikTok channel right now.

I saw you guys got that cooking.

We're terrible at social media, so don't judge us on social media. We're really nice guys. We're terrible about social media. We're trying to get better at it.

You know, you and everybody else right now, businesses are trying to convert more into that. And it's been a fun conversation I've been having with local businesses that just never cave a damn about social before.

Well, and it's not that we don't care. I think the thing that I find interesting, I think you're very good about just kind of putting yourself out there. Social takes a lot of time.

Yes.

Without question. And when you're trying to build a business, you have limited time, first of all.

Where do you prioritize?

Where do you prioritize? And I think the other thing that we're always challenged with is, when you're doing social, is I think social, in my opinion, social should be very authentic. And I think sometimes businesses struggle between the authentic side and the corporate-y side, and how do you find that line in between? And then when you start putting social content out there, what's the message you're trying to send? And these are fine balancing acts, and I don't think every company gets it right.

Well, because you can't be an expert at everything. That's kind of where we had a conversation with Dave Rasmussen at dinner last week. He was basically giving me a crap for calling myself a dummy. He's like, oh, you're not a dummy. Well, I'm like, whatever. It's a term of endearment for myself. But point being, it's like, I might not know everything that my guests are talking about, but I know the arenas that I specialize in. It's a fun topic that we've discussed a ton on this podcast. But nonetheless...

But the cool part is about social, is you can actually bring interesting topics to people directly at the comfort of their phone or in their car or their computer, wherever it may be. And that just wasn't possible. And so now you can actually find access to some really interesting podcast information or social information that otherwise you don't get access to.

Or you didn't even know you liked.

You didn't even know you liked it.

I've become a total health nerd, science nerd. I got a D-minus in chemistry, mind you. But I love listening to the Huberman Lab podcast. I'm learning about health s*** every day. And it's absurd. And it takes these really complex concepts. And now I'm able to boil it down and explain it to other people. It's like, here's how caffeine affects you and your dopamine and all this. It's really fun. It's a fun thing. But congratulations. You've officially topped your previous episode length. Pack your s*** and get out. But that was a great one. That's what I was aiming for. Because again, every time we talk, it's a very long and fruitful conversation. So I definitely appreciate your time. And I know a lot of listeners do too. I'm not sure if you see the comments, but I do. And it's amazing.

Well, listen, I think the thing that's fun about this is you get people talking about things that they're passionate about. And then it's just a fun conversation. So then it's easy. Anyway, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And then, Dan, people can find you at Gunner Garage, Two Ends.

Yep, Gunner Garage, Two Ends, all the socials. We're about as good at it as probably these guys.

Race to the bottom.

And as for me, you guys found me on the Minnoxide channel. I hope you know where you're at at this point. And with that said, see you all next time.