88. Twin Turbo Big Block Hemi, Track Incidents, Drag Racing w/ Greg Schmidt

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. Here with my fantastic co-host, Mr. Gunnar Garage.

Yep, it's me.

And I think we are at the perfect event for many automotive aspirations. So today we are outside of the Ratified studio. We are out at Brainerd International Raceway for the North Star Speed Summit, formerly known as a variation of different events, but now it's on a comeback. I think it's a good way of putting it.

Yeah, I'm enjoying myself so far.

The new event here, because this is the inaugural North Star Speed Summit, it's really neat, and that's why we came out here is to support it. But it's cool because not a lot of people know it's almost a throwback to the 80s when the national event, the NHRA Nationals were here, where they were called the North Star Nationals.

Oh, that's cool.

Oh, really? The guys that had named this didn't even know anything about it. And when they told the track, they're like, oh, that's so cool. A neat happenstance there, but it's also a really cool throwback.

So what the North Star Speed Summit is, it is really perfect for anybody who just loves cars, right? So you have, right now we're in the tower for, we're watching drag racing right behind us. Right now, they're prepping the tracks. That'll be cool. You might hear a few passes throughout the episode. But then you also have drifting, autocross, and then you also have road course. And then they also have something called a triple track showdown, where you do drag racing, autocross and road course. I don't know how exactly the scoring system works. We're not exactly competing at this event this time around, but basically there's a trophy at the end.

Yeah.

Of some kind.

The TTS is really neat, because it's like your lowest averages, average times of each one. So like if you're quicker on the drag strip, you're quicker here, quicker on all those, and they can put them all together and see who's the best overall car for all of them.

And that's kind of neat.

And I think we should actually introduce our guests now, by the way, as well. Mr. Greg Schmidt of BIG Performance Solutions.

Yep, right here in Brainerd.

Do you want to tell us what BIG means? Or you want to say?

So BIG, a lot of people ask out there, my racing and YouTube and social media stuff is Bad Influence Garage. And when we opened up the shop and such, Bad Influence Garage can kind of hold a negative connotation to some people. So we just kind of put it into an abbreviation of BIG. And a lot of people are like, oh, big performance. I'm like, well, that's BIG. But yeah, we do big stuff, so sure.

Big is certainly an understatement because you do have a hell of a fast Camaro. Well, I'll let you introduce the build. What is the build made for? And how did you get there from beginning to end, I guess?

Okay, so currently the car set up is a 535 cubic inch, big block Mopar Hemi. All billet, it's a Brad Anderson block, Bryant crank, you know, billet heads, the whole thing on alcohol. Twin 88 millimeter TrueNorth turbos on it. 16 injector set up. We use for some of the nerds out there that like to hear it. Our primary injectors are 220 pound an hour. And then when we start getting into boost, it's a 800 pound an hour AFIS injector on there. So we have over a thousand pounds an hour per cylinder. And yeah, kind of run everything there. We built everything in house. It has a turbo 400 base transmission with close ratio gear set in it, and full tube chassis, everything. It was built to fit everything for the no prep king's rules back in 2020. And we've kind of evolved it from there, where it was at that time to where it is now. Turned up in that 50, 60 pounds of boost, it's in that 4,000 horse range on methanol. And we've been 406 in the 8th at 187 miles an hour when it was still a blow through carb in a single 180. So it definitely gets down. Yeah.

Well, it's right, we were hanging out with you in the trailer last night, just swung by, chat. You bent some stuff, you know, it's just a part of racing. Everything at that power level is a consumable.

It gets to be there. Yeah, and you'll find like your next barrier. I always call it the next wall. Like what's the next wall you're gonna hit? But then after a couple years ago, I had a wreck where I hit a wall. So I don't like to say it too often that way. But in any time, like especially in drag racing, you're trying to go faster. You're gonna get to a point where something happens and it just, whatever you do, it's not gonna go quicker because you have to figure out that one thing on there. For us, when you're making really big power, it's what's the next thing that's gonna be the weakest link on there. And we found yesterday with some tire shake issues, we had a four link bar just bend on there and went, oh no, that's not good. So why did it do it? And that's the big question. Whenever you're trying to race and make things quicker is why?

What's the why?

And yeah, we kind of just saw that the tire shake when it started, the tire was bouncing so hard and it just bent that bar, but that bar probably has six, 700 hits on it.

Oh, well.

Speaking of consumables, when you put together a billet motor like that, how many hits do you expect to get out of somebody? Do those last quite a while?

So we will replace the rods after about 45 to 50 hits on there. It's on minutes. And we'll replace the rings as long as we haven't had anything big in there that gets hurt. About 150 to 175 passes. Sometimes you can get about 200 depending on how much boost you've been running and things like that. But yeah, that's kind of maybe it's weird to say your rods are a consumable item. And you're like, oh yeah, we're going to go out and you have to keep your rod counts and everything. And if you've been sitting there doing a bunch of two step testing, where it's sitting there on the chip and such a bunch of those takes strain on that as well. So you have to count some of that in there as well. So but yeah, we actually did a whole YouTube series on the inside and putting together a billet hemi, where it kind of took people along with it. And then we did a tear down when we had an accident where we had to tear it apart and showed when you do tear it down, what's the process you go through with leak down tests and why you would do that. Because once you get it apart, you can put things together where, oh, so under six had a bad leak down. Oh, well, now look, the rings are completely full of garbage. And then it makes sense. And you can have something to look to while you're tearing apart.

Yeah, I've got a I've got a built motor at home right now that I don't really want to dive into because I'm scared to see what I find. Trying to figure out how to shut that off, maybe.

I'm going to say I've been in this booth right here, this actual one for a bunch of different events and everything. And I never knew that that was a volume thing on that. And I always just dealt with it being loud.

I just went over there. I was like, you know what? Let's I'm like, oh, that looks like a volume button. I was looking for a switch or something.

I considered like unplugging it. Like there's usually a fan blade.

I was about to cover it. It was a little loud.

Well, the thing that was there is I'm all of five, seven on there. So I can't reach that. And Harris goes over. He's like, I'll just get this. Thanks.

I think we might see it in one of your cameras. So I'm glad we got that sorted out because I was like, all right. It's getting to a point where I can't even focus. And I listen, I can fall asleep at a bus station. No problem. But it's like, man, it was getting rough there. But OK, so let's take a little detour back to the past. Right. So how did you get into this? Like you say you used to live in Vegas, wasn't I?

I lived in Vegas. I'm from here in Brainerd, where we're at here for Brainerd International Raceway. I grew up here, was born overseas, military dad, you know, and family there. And I started when I was like eight years old, dirt track racing with my dad and the family and everything. We did like 14 years of dirt track racing and learning, you know, stuff through all that and how cars work and such. Went to college up in Bemidji, Minnesota, and have a degree in high performance engine machining and worked at a shop down in the metro area and then got a job offer to go out to Las Vegas and work at a NHA machine shop out there doing stock eliminator, super stock eliminator, and a lot of super comp, super gas, bracket stuff out there. It was a lot of fun.

What goes into a job like that?

So when I got hired out there, I was hired for specifically bottom end, doing block machining, balancing, you know, everything there, because they had a head machining guy, and he was very good with everything on that. And that was kind of my specialty. I was really good with block work and balancing and such. So we would be tearing down, like people would bring you a core engine from the junkyard, 350, and they want you to build a 383 or whatever out of it. Your job is you're tearing it down and getting it into the cleaning systems, doing all of that. And then start with all of the machine work, measuring pistons, measuring weights, getting the crank ready, making sure that bearing clearances are good, all of that on there, whether it's bearing clearances on your rods or your mains or anything. And yeah, had a lot of fun out there. And after about six, eight months, the head machining guy decided to leave, and he was also the manager, and they promoted me to manager, and I managed it for about a year, and then ended up leaving there. And the owner kind of had, we'll say, very big aspirations but no intentions of actually doing it. And after that long, you can kind of see like, oh, we're not going to be growing into this, that you're saying, that type of deal. So I ended up working at a place called Fig Speed out in Henderson, Nevada, which is just a little south of Las Vegas until I came back here. They basically do, they're like a JEGS or a Summit, but for the West Coast. And they do a lot of drag race stuff and off-road stuff. So I worked there for a year before I came back here. And that's where I learned a lot of the plumbing and fittings, fuel systems, you know, things like that. It got to the point I was actually building fuel systems for drag cars and rail cars over the phone. And we'd build everything except for like one or two fittings and then send it out so they could put it in. And you're talking these top dragsters, you get 3000 plus dollars into the fuel system, not including carburetor or anything like that. The pumps and all the lines and filters and having it all put together. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. You learn stuff there. And then came back here in 2012 to kind of help run the family business and take over day-to-day operations there, so.

So that's like a perfect storm for building a drag race car, right? And getting a lot of that knowledge. And is it basically like grooming you to build a car like this and do a performance shop? That's kind of a...

Kind of, yeah. My parents kind of groomed me to be racing, to go racing since I was young. It's kind of the joke there. I'm an only child, so I got to have the opportunity to do experiences that doesn't...

Spoiled, you can just say it.

I was kind of spoiled, we'll say, out there. But dad was really big on like, hey, you're not going out to the track with us if you didn't get the lawn mode, get this taken care of, clean the garage, stuff like that. And there was times where I'd be at the house and the track is like a mile away, and I was at home and I could hear dad and all of them racing, but I wasn't allowed to go because I didn't get my stuff done. So yeah, I was spoiled for different opportunities I had. But also, he was strict because he was military and he's like, my kid's not going to be a spoiled brat in there. So I am appreciative of that, but also see I did get opportunities, you know, because I was the only child that most people might not have had.

Yeah, you're poor for kids.

I know, right? Yeah.

But yeah, so we kind of groomed to do that. And through the building of the dirt track cars, you kind of learn the fabrication and the tubes and suspension. And you learn a lot of that because those guys are going to repair their own cars. I mean, talking mild steel, mig welders, they're repairing them. More power to you. That's what that grassroots racing is. When you start getting into some of the bigger, you know, drag race stuff on there, it's all chromoly. You need to be looking at the angles of bars, a lot better bracing. We have SFI, you know, for chassis that you have to follow on there. So it will certify. And that's where it got a little bit better, where if we need to make changes to chassis, we know what to look for, and we can fabricate a little bit better than we did, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

Yeah, it's crazy how regulations have changed over the years. Like we had a podcast with the Patience Metal Fab guys down in the cities. And they're redoing, so they're building a Renault, but it's gonna be like a Resto for the most part, like 90% accurate, but they're updating the safety in it, right? Because he's like, yeah, back in the day, it was like a 40 pound aluminum cage was the regulation. It's like, yeah, now it's gonna be like, I think it's gonna be Cremale or whatever.

Yeah, I watched it and followed you guys and everything. I saw that there, and I thought that when they had some of the video there, I think you'd put in or something, that thing looks so cool. I love like old cars where you're modernizing them, and stuff there is super cool. And then you have like a newer car, like a 2010 Camaro like I have, and I put an old Hemi in it, you know? So we're going to go backwards on that, but it's hard to beat the power of a Hemi. So it's a lot of fun, but I love doing the different stuff like that. It's super cool.

Well, and you were saying you were running a carb on that thing too for a real long time, up until just recently.

Yeah, so 2020, 21 and 22, we had a blow through carburetor on that with a Precision Gen 2 118 millimeter turbo mounted up front. And it had Holley EFI on it. And the only thing Holley didn't do was obviously the fuel. So it allowed us to learn the controls and everything of the Holley on a car of that caliber. So when we did bring the fuel injection on board, it was a little less to learn and figure out. But yeah, we raced it for three years, put radials on it. We went down to Georgia and raced radial versus the world, just to try it out and see how we would do. Did that two years, did 21 and 22. And in 2022, we actually broke the world record for blow through carburetor in a door car. We took it away from Daddy Dave from Street Outlaws. And that's when I went 406 at 187. We were trying to be the first of the threes and went up for another pass. We were talking a little bit about it. And I said, oh, we'll talk about it on the podcast. The air came down and we were actually below sea level for corrected altitude. We were like 700 feet below, but the dew point wasn't coming in yet because it's so warm down there. So really good air. So to try to go shoot for a three, we did that. Well, the bumped in work and we timed out on the tree. And you don't get a time slip, but on the data we can see how much quicker it was than the 406. And it was there, it was a high 90s, but without a time slip, it don't mean a thing. So it was kind of a bummer, but it's neat to get to and be a part of some of that stuff there. And then you remember the picture that I did a big wheelie, and it was up on one tire, and they got the picture of it. And that was a neat picture to have, but a lot of stuff got bent up and broken.

That's the thing about wheelies, man. They look cool, but they're not what you want when you're racing.

No, no, and they're hard to catch. You don't have a turbo car because you have to build that boost back up. So to pedal it is very, very tough.

Well, yeah, it's really cool because, for example, some of these fast Viper guys that I'm around, sometimes they'll just shift into second gear, like midair or whatever, I believe. I don't know, is that the same case for if you go airborne with yours or get lift?

On ours, no. So the guys that are shifting like that with the Viper guys, some of the pro stock guys and fast stick shift guys for NHRA or track guys, when they're grabbing that, they're using the gear to lug it down because you have your first gear is gonna be a very high ratio and that next one. So if it's doing something like that, you can tame it down without trying to pedal it by getting into the next gear. On ours, since we have only three speeds, and when it goes up in the air like that, we're automated shifting. So we're one of the weird people out there where we take an automatic transmission and then we make it so it'll only shift manually with a manual valve body. But then we put a shifter on there that's programmed with air to shift it for us. So we take an automatic shifter, make it manual, and then make it automatically shifted. We're silly people, but it works. So yeah, it's hard for, you know, you're not really ready for it to wheelie already, and then to go and grab it when you're already up on the wheel, it's kind of tough. Now, there are sensors out there that will read ride height, and you can program that so as it's coming up and the further away from the ground it gets, it can pull timing out or boost out or anything like that to try to set it back down. So as it comes back down, it will put it back in. I didn't have that at that time.

I didn't even realize how crazy that stuff can get. When I first started hanging out with Harrison, he's talked about these Vipers and the MoTeC and the traction control and all that stuff. The fact that that can do that enough to plant your car and just the technology we have now is crazy.

The traction control technology in the last 10 years that's come out for drag racing and just any motor sports is insane.

Well, it's so funny, right? Because I remember I told one of my buddies, he has a thousand horsepower Mustang, right? Really fun car. I drove the wheels off of it. Amazingly fun car on the street. And I told him about my buddy who has 2,000 horsepower Viper. He's like, he's not putting that power down on the street. I'm like, you want to bet?

That's what I said. When you told me, I was like, okay, 2,500 horsepower and a Viper, useless. But no, with the MoTeC, it just goes.

It's ridiculous. I'm hanging around some of these smart guys like I've gotten to the Red Civic match to make it out. Almost whacked the car.

Barely.

Yeah, dude, these Civics are fast. We'll get into that later.

Yeah, I'll talk real quick on that one. Like this is known a little bit more as like an import race, but traveling around as a drag racer, like these guys are serious. Like, there's some serious power here. And we'll talk about some of them in a bit, but yeah, these aren't something where you're like, oh, it's the guys out there, you know, popping and banging and they're making a bunch of this. They're like, there's guys ripping seven second quarter miles here with four cylinders.

One of the Minnesota guys, he cut an 806 today. I think they're trying to get into the sevens.

Yep, I believe that was, was it Nate in the Blackwood? Yep, yeah, he went 806. And then Mark Leisure went a 781.

I didn't see that one. Wow, that's the Talon, right?

Yep, the blue Talon, that thing is...

That's crazy.

He's actually an electrical engineer. Yeah, I heard. And so when it comes to all the tuning and the wiring stuff, he's like me, he's just a big nerd.

I heard he did everything on his car except for the engine assembly is what I heard. Yeah, it'd be cool to get someone like that on a podcast as well. And that's one of the things about this podcast, some people think they gotta be this crazy influencer sign, come on. I'm like, no, I want cool people who do cool stuff, right? You don't need a big following or anything. I've had several big following people on, and it doesn't make the episode give more views or less. It's pretty standard stuff. It's like, if it's a cool episode, people watch it basically. But anyways, yeah, when it comes to street car stuff or even detraction on track and all that, it's just, it's really, really advanced. I would love to get somebody from Haltech or MoTech, whatever, that's Seema on the podcast or something.

That'd be kinda cool. So I have his number and everything like that. Shannon Davis of Davis Technologies that does all the traction control for drag race stuff and everything. He'd get on here and talk about it. He's super knowledgeable and I mean, he's the one that has the profiler on there, where basically you can put it as a dot plot and it'll for your driveshaft speed. And if it goes above it, it'll pull it and hold it right there. And it'll do and it updates. I mean, extremely fast faster than a Holley can update and sample on it. And yeah, I've seen guys go, okay, this is a plot that I've run before in a different car for wheel speed and everything is close. We'll put it in here and you'll hear it like in the 60, and take off. And that's it dropping cylinders and coming back in and it controls it where if they had that shut off, it'll blow the tires right off the line.

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Yeah, so yeah, it's cool stuff. But yeah, if you're looking for somebody like that, I can get you in contact.

Well, and at the end of the day, it's like we try to get every aspect of it too, right? Like, because there's so, there's a million parts in a car.

Oh yeah.

And each one of these things is so meticulously engineered. Like there's some, even the most basic stuff. It's like it's just, there's so much love and effort and engineering that goes into it, and there's so much to learn about everything, in my opinion.

There's a company that specializes in just the hardware, just the nuts and bolts that bolt all of your s*** together, ARP. I mean, that's literally, their business is nuts and bolts.

There's another company that does just nuts and bolts for cars, but all strictly titanium.

Really?

Uh-huh. And you can actually, a lot of the guys that race, like Sprint Cars for Dirt Track, they order hollow, so it's been drilled out to save even more weight. I wonder- So it's a hollow titanium bolt.

What just, if you add up all the hardware, I bet this thing that I didn't even think about, like you overlook, like if somebody hands you a sack of nuts and bolts, you'd be like, s***, that's heavy. Well, that's crazy.

You and I put together sim rigs, right? You get those little nuts and bolts over there. It's like, those things are like 5, 10 pounds by themselves.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, just, yeah. Just crazy.

It all adds up, and when you're trying to race and you have minimum weights that you can get to and everything, all of that little bit matters. And sometimes in like the Sprint Car world, you may have a race where there's no minimum weight. So you're trying to get the most power you can and be as light as you can, and still hook up. So yeah, the amount of money that you're gonna spend on some titanium bolts or hollow titanium bolts, for them, it's worth it because they saved, what, five pounds over the whole vehicle, but with no minimum weight, that's five extra pounds.

Yeah.

So take us through the iterations of your car.

Oh, okay. So that's a fun one. I started, I prefer doing heads-up drag racing. I jumped in, it was a car that my father had, and we couldn't get it to run right and everything. And it was more, I was doing engine tuning, but I couldn't, we didn't have data loggers at that time. So I couldn't hear the engine and kind of understand what's going on. And he's a suspension guy. So he's trying to look at this really crummy video that his 24-year-old kid was taking and couldn't quite understand and see everything that he wanted to see there. So he just one day said, how about I get you licensed and you drive it? And that was a third gen Camaro body. It was a fiberglass body deal, a tube chassis with a big block power glide and nitrous. That was like 2013, 2014 around there, so about 10 years ago. And just started building it up from there. Raced it like that for a year or two. And then we went to a 632 big block Chev with a Fogger kit on there. It was making like 1,050, and then I was spraying like a 400 pill on it. I went like deep sevens, like 760s, 770s. Ran up that for a while. Then we built a brand new car for between 2018 and 2019. And it was a full R8 Doe Call chassis with a steel roof and quarter third gen body on it. And unfortunately rolled that on the sixth pass on a brand new car, had a part failure. So the next, we rebuilt it and changed things. And that was like my dream car. Like I grew, you were talking a little bit. I grew up in the nineties, you know, I'm there and the end of the third gen was there. I had dad's military buddies, one of the guys had one. And like, I remember as a kid, I'm like, that's the coolest car ever. You know, when you're five, six years old, like that thing's awesome. And so yeah, I wanted to build it. It was low, big tire, big engine. That was an all aluminum 632 made like 1260. And then we were spraying about an 800 pill on it. And yeah, then ended up rolling it.

So get this a hair closer by the way.

Oh, not a problem. So when that rolled, I didn't want to rebuild it the same way because I knew I'd always compare it to that. So we decided to go to a fifth gen body and I got rid of the nitrous and went to turbo. And I said, I'll never go turbo. I was a hardcore nitrous guy. And I had to eat some crow there and went turbo. And we even made shirts about it, the whole thing there. And yeah, we decided to go blow through in a big single. First year we did that, we were running everything off of a MSD grid system with all of their add-ons. And it was just a pain in the butt with the, we had a race pack and then all of your other stuff on there. And you weren't able to get everything all in one. And that was my big thing there. So I told dad, let's put a Holley on it. And that's what we did, put a dominator on there. Went to SRD up in Fargo, Sabin, and went on the hub dyno, dialed it in. And then I think it was like two weeks after that, we were down in Georgia with radials on it. Hadn't made a hit yet on, with a Holley system on it. And ended up, that week went 417 at like 181. It was my personal best at that time. And it was really cool with the amount of technology and everything you can do with these ECUs now is just insane.

Yeah. And you do your own tuning and all that fun stuff, right?

Yep, so on our car, everything was built in-house, except for the chassis, which was built by Innovative Metalworks out of Lafayette, Minnesota. It's a 25.2 R8 Doe Call, which is a, I don't know if you guys have ever talked about or seen that, instead of chromoly or mild steel, mild steel, when there's an impact or anything, kind of crumples and it will impact, but yeah, it has to be thicker because of the strength. Chromoly, it can be thinner and still have the same strength on there, but when something like breaks, it has more shears. This actually will take the impact like mild steel, but it has the strength of chromoly, where it can be lighter, so it's a happy medium.

What was it called again?

It's R8 Doe Call.

R8 Doe Call?

Yeah, D-O-C-A-L. It's actually...

I feel like I'm back in Spanish class.

Yeah.

You know I don't speak Spanish. A little anchorman throwback.

It is warm today. Milk would be a bad choice, so. But that steel and metal is actually made over in Europe and it's brought over. So the one downfall of the R8 Dohcal is it does cost more. But yeah, that's what we have now. And we built everything in-house besides, like I said, the chassis and mounting the body to the chassis. So my dad builds transmissions. He grew up in a transmission shop because my grandfather worked in a transmission shop. So he has fun doing all of that. I do the engine work since I have a degree in engine building. I do the driving and the tuning. And dad does chassis, you know, setup and everything. And now that I've been doing it for more years, I understand a lot more of the chassis setup. So we joke around, we'll butt heads on how we should set up a chassis because he does it one way that he's known forever. And I have a different way of understanding it. And I'm like, no, do this, this. And like even last night when we were fixing the car in the tech barn over here from bending a four link bar, we were arguing on where we should put them and everything there. And it probably took us an hour and a half to finally come to an agreement to where we should put everything. So, but it's nice because you have more than one idea.

Yeah. I work with my dad, so most of the time, 90% of the time we're getting along, but there's some epic times where we're not.

Are you guys the same? About 90%, it's really good. 8%, there's some arguments. There's 2%, there's serious arguments.

Yes, yes, it can get pretty heated. And we got another guy that works with us too. And I think sometimes he's like, holy s***, man. I don't know, these guys, I think this is the end of it. And then we're just back to being buddies here in another hour, you know?

Yep, in 2012, when I came back from Vegas and I was working at the family shop there, and then we have employees and there would be blowups between me and dad in the back. And they're all like, okay, we're gonna, the second lunch, this sounds like a good idea. Okay, and they're like, we're gonna leave them be. Or they would see me like, they'd hear an argument, they'd see me walking over by the railroad tracks, just like cooling off. They're like, oh, okay, well, he didn't jump in the car yet. So we know that it couldn't have been that bad.

Well, you ever get it too, where you actually are talking about the exact same thing, you're just explaining it to each other differently?

Daily. Daily.

It's like we were both going to the same place, just different ways to get there.

Yeah, or the different way of explaining it. And then finally, when one of you realizes it, you go, wait a minute. So you want the end result to be this? Yes. Okay, so we're on the same page. I don't care how we get there.

Welcome to this episode of Dr. Phil. Today, we're talking about fathers.

Yeah, father-son relationships.

Yeah, but in 2022, we were stalled on blow-through carburetor. We were racing, no prep kings here in Brainerd, and had an on-track accident where some fuel got underneath the left tire. We're in the left lane. And as it went out at about 100 to 150 foot, it turned violently left and went head on into the wall, bounced off the wall. And then I was in a methanol fire for about 12 seconds. Yeah, it was not fun. Fire, I don't know if you know this. It's really hot. Yeah. So I'm a big safety person. I've seen people get hurt. And unfortunately, I've seen people that had been racing have been killed through all the years of traveling and doing this. So the only thing that got burnt on me was the top of my nose. When I hit the wall, I couldn't see inside the car. So I flipped my visor open to see, did I hit my head and I have something serious on there? Or is it, you know, there's stuff from hitting the wall and everything in there? Well, it was just stuff from hitting the wall that was floating in the air. And that's why I couldn't see, okay. But then when the fire started, every time I would look down to grab my seat belts, fire comes up and would burn my nose. Well, you do that twice, and you realize, wait, I'm on fire. Like this is a life or death thing. So pull the fire suppression system and then get out. And you know what? They can fix the nose. You know, they can't bring you back.

Yeah, right.

So get out.

Yeah.

I don't know if you guys are listening to the podcast. I can hear that, but that is...

That's the boy you're supposed to race.

Oh, so...

And our next guest.

Well, we'll see. We'll see this year. I know there's some cameras behind me. So we'll talk. This is the outlaw class that I was supposed to be racing. There's two people in the class, me and that guy. I'm broke, so he's in the final right now against himself. And he's going to earn a Wall-E on this pass.

And what exactly is a Wall-E?

A Wall-E is the trophy that you would get. So if you watch NHRA, that they get it at the end, they hold it up.

We gotta get a video of this.

We gotta get it there. Any bogs. Oh my.

Oh, here I am.

Just I'm taking it.

He let off there at the end already. Just taking it.

So he knew he was going to take a win there. For the people that are listening and not seeing any of the camera stuff, he just blew the tires off, bogged everything, went 14. 14.32. And therefore, the win in the Outlaw class. And yeah, it almost stinks watching it, but at the same time, you can't win if the car isn't working.

Right, the winning is showing up.

Yup, and drag racing is one of the most humbling sports. You can have 40 some people enter a class, only one of them is gonna win. And you have to go up to the guy at the top end and shake his hand, hey, good race. That could be first round. And only half of the people are going on. So it happens. I've been doing it long enough where it still hurts watching it like that, but it's part of racing.

Imagine that just sucked all the energy out of the podcast, I got to a commercial break.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, Riley.

But anyway, so back to being on fire.

Yeah, being on fire, not fun, very hot. But yet so.

It's like the Ricky Bobby.

Yeah, so everybody always would say it afterwards, like, yeah, you should have gotten out and been like, ah, and done a Ricky Bobby thing. Like saying it afterwards, very humorous. In the moment, last thing I'm thinking of is Will Ferrell. All right, in his underwear. Like, yeah, that's not my thing that I'm gonna think of. I'm like, get out. And there's actually a video that a fan was up in the stands had sent me, and I'd used in a YouTube video, he allowed me to use that, where he saw it and you can see me like fumbling around and the car's kind of moving, and then the door pops open. And only thing I remember from high school was stop, drop and roll. So good job, Brainerd High School. But no, so got out and it was just, I'm rolling across the track. A methanol fire doesn't have flames that you can see. It's clear until it starts burning other stuff. That is the pro car class behind us. And that is a bunch of turbo four cylinders making a lot of big power. So, but so people in the stands had no idea what was happening and they just see me jumping out of the car and rolling and flopping around on the track. They're like, is he joking around or something there? And then they all of a sudden, fire rescue comes in and they're putting out, putting it out and everything. They're like, oh, he was on fire? Well, BIR's fire rescue crew is very good and they could see the haze coming up from the flames, from the heat. And that's when they're like, get down there. So yeah, bravo to the track for their safety crew. But yeah, being on fire kind of stunk. And when we went to, are we gonna rebuild it? Are we gonna be done? Dad's like, we're rebuilding it. And I said, all right, well, we had a 118, like I was saying, and it was right up front. And it went head on into the wall and smashed that turbo up. So let's go to two turbos.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

That is some those are some fast. Oh, that's a big fireball. Let's see where they run. Eight four.

Wow.

Those are some fast Hondas.

Yeah. He popped something down there. You heard him talking. There was a fireball. And you could see that from here. And he was at like a thousand foot when that happened.

That was like a six foot flame that just shot out the side exhaust.

So perfect. We're talking about fire there. But we decided, you know, like, OK, since we wrecked turbos up front, we're going to put two in the rear. And at that time, we're like, you know what? Let's might as well go EFI. We've had it on here for a while. Let's do the whole EFI. So we converted an old blower manifold for a Hemi that was magnesium into a into a EFI manifold and showed how we did all that on YouTube. Made my own lower injector cups that actually ran in.

Oh no, the talon's going off.

No, the talon just went off there because he had a buy run in the first round. So he took the tree and just turned off.

Gotcha. Yeah, it's been hard to pay attention to everything. We've been all... That's one of the downsides of this event is you can't, unless you choose to watch the entire series of something.

It's hard to follow.

Yeah, because you want to go see autocross. You want to see a little bit of everything.

So you can kind of follow along with like drag racing and drifting here. You're still going to miss some stuff on each of them, but you can still kind of follow along with it. But to try to follow everything out at this event is difficult.

Especially if you didn't have a cart, that cart has saved our a**.

Yeah, it's nice. And I'm curious, just because this question came to mind, does a methanol fire burn differently? Is it like hot or anything? I was just like the visibility thing. That's the only difference.

Have you ever seen like a sternal can that where like a buffet like at a wedding or something that got underneath there?

I've never been to a wedding, so.

It is like a white or like a bluish or whatever. But like in the daytime, you would never be able to see anything.

Yeah.

Like you said, unless it starts something else on fire.

If it was at nighttime, you would see it kind of burns blue on there, which in terms of flames, blue is like one of the hotter flames. So yeah, that does burn very hot.

Okay.

But since methanol is there's no petroleum in it, there's no oil or anything there. So the black that you see from fire and everything and the flames on there is from carbon. So carbon based fuel like a gasoline or ethanol is going to have flame to it where methanol is 99.9% pure and manmade. So there's nothing in there. That's why it burns clear until it starts burning other things, AKA you. Or the car that has carbon, anything that's carbon based on it too. So yeah, but I got out of that. And like I said, I was at No Prep Kings. I sat in our pit for about three hours after the car came back, still in my burnt pants talking to fans and people who wanted to come over. And I had people like, I don't know you. I'm not from this state. I see what happened here, and I want to donate to your cause to help you get the car back out. And I was like, just blown away. And every single one of us had no, I said, I won't I won't take money on there. I'll sell you a hat. And if you want to overpay me for it, that's no problem. But, you know, I don't take the charity. And but yeah, I probably had a dozen people that day who wanted to do something like that. And just the community coming together for somebody that that happens to is very heartwarming at that time, especially after you're looking at your car going, that's going to be real expensive.

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, the other thing is, too, is like, so was there any mental obstacle? You're just like, just got to get back on the horse. That was your second or third big crash.

So I've only had two crashes. You know, where was anything where big like that? I've tapped a wall here or there for, you know, I used to I used to try to overdrive and be a cowboy. I'll admit it. And I've gotten a lot better at it. That was the second. So out of the two of them, the going upside down in the Camaro, it was here. I was doing 180 when it lost control and hit the hit the wall the first time.

And then I saw when the part broke. Is that the one? Yeah.

So it was a it was a rod end or a hind joint that was in the wishbone of the rear end. Brand new parts because it was a brand new car. And it had a manufacturing flaw inside the threads. It was an air pocket. So when it's trying to control the rear end from going side to side, it had force on there and snapped it. And when we looked at it, you could see where there was an air pocket in it. So that kind of stunk. But we just don't use that brand anymore. And we're fine. But when you're upside down and a lot of guys that race, that listen or watch there and people who may listen or watch that don't race these cars, when you're in your car, especially on the drag strip, you're strapped in so tight and you've got cage around you. You've got all this stuff. You feel safe as heck in there. There's two people go in the same direction. So if you hit another car or they hit you, something went very wrong. But when you're upside down and you hear the steel roof being ripped away and you're watching the rocks in the asphalt, like in front of your eyes there, that is what you're like, I'm not safe anymore. And that is what took a long time. I didn't get a full night's sleep for five weeks. I ran on like two to three hours, and that was like two to three hours put together over small portions. Luckily, the guys at the shop and my now wife and everything, they all understood and they were very good with it. My wife is a social worker, and so she's very big on mental health. So she helped me out a ton through that. From the fire, it wasn't that bad. It sucked. I was on fire and I had it replay in my head for a little week or two, and it would kind of jolt you. But after that, it was fine. But yeah, being upside down was definitely much bigger.

Yeah, I'm laughing at my phone falling out. No, it's fine. Just in case anybody thinks they're just laughing.

I almost died.

I saw that, and I saw your hand there, and I looked down and saw the phone.

I almost caught it too.

I was like, okay, he's not laughing at me. We're good. But when I was upside down...

You just saw a smirk coming up. I felt it sliding out. I'm like, oh, he thinks I'm chuckling at him.

I watched the carburetors actually get ground down on the track. And then the intake manifold broke and they disappeared. And there was fuel spraying. And when you're in a wreck like that, everything slows down for you inside there. And I've talked to people who do skydiving and stuff. And they go, same thing. Like if that your first time, it kind of seems like everything slows down. Or if you have something go wrong, you're like, okay, I have time to do this. Because in your mind, you kind of just have that muscle memory and everything. And I was slow down. I saw that. And that's when I had time to pull the fire pin on it. As I was sliding, I was waiting till it stopped to pull my belts off because I knew if it were to catch and roll again, it could throw me around.

Yeah.

But then I also didn't think you're upside down. When you pull the belts like that, you're going to fall over like a taco. And that's exactly right over the steering wheel. I was, you know, all over. I was like, Oh, just get me out of here. And so got out. And but that was that one was what much worse. And I was telling you guys before. So I've been in three near death experiences and I flatlined once. The flatline has nothing to do with the three near death experiences. So I've rolled a card 180 here. I was in a head on collision and methanol fire here. And then I was actually in a methanol explosion back in like 2009. I was at a dirt track and we were partying afterwards and somebody took a pretty much empty barrel of methanol and threw it on this big bonfire. Holy s***. The hole for where you get everything out of that ignited and shot the barrel across the pits. But it blew the fire on a bunch of people. And like people had to go to the ER and to the hospital for burns and everything. I got fairly lucky. I had burns on the side of my nose and face and my hand. But I was talking with someone and just for some reason, I had seen something here and I just moved over and I covered them when I moved over. And that's when I got burnt on it. But yeah, it was everything there. And then I flatlined from having my wisdom teeth pulled. And they had to shock me back because they were giving me a bunch of anesthesia and my body processes the anesthesia stuff quick. So they're giving me a bunch and yeah, flatlined and shock me back and just give one of those fun little things. Yeah, three.

So out of the nine lives, you got how many left? Five?

Yeah, four or five left. So definitely have seen different things from different aspects. And it definitely puts a different mindset to you.

So speaking of mindset, then, I mean, those each of those crashes, fires, all that, that's scary stuff, right? Some people, they get into a 40 mile an hour accident on the road, they're done driving forever. Like they just can't, it's always a constant hurdle for them. I mean, you said that your wife was a social worker, for example, does that play, you said that played a little bit of a part, but has that always just been a part of you? Like just get back on the horse or like, because not everybody's able to do that, especially after big crashes like that.

I do attribute that, the never give up, never quit attitude, like get back out there type of thing to do to my dad and the military type stuff there. I did not join the military out of high school. But as I was growing up, he was, you know, like I'd crashed my bike when I was a kid, you know, and you scuff up your knee when you're trying to learn everything like that. And instead of like, hey, let's go get that fixed. He would be the one to go out there and he's like, your knee is still attached. Get back on. And you're sitting there like, what? Like, no, get back on. Yeah, you had something bad happen. Now learn from it and get back out there. Well, you're more than up to then jump back on the bike again or do whatever. And if you do hurt yourself later on when you're riding your bike, when you're 10 or whatever, you're going to go, OK, yeah, that stinks. It's a scuff. Get back on and keep going. And we kind of say there ain't no quit in this pit because we were being yesterday, we've had four link bars broken and we had a transmission that had to seal out and everything. We're back in the in the garage over there, pulled the transmission out and part of it apart, put new seal in it, went back to my shop here in town and I made new four link bars to come back here to put in, re-sling everything, check all of it over to come out here and try to race again today. What were we racing for? A trophy and a little bit of money, nowhere near what we have into these cars or anything. But it's that never quit, just keep going. When I rolled the car in 2019, I made a pass down the exact same lane in my GTO street car, and it's like two weeks, maybe three weeks after, went right back down, I had tears in my eyes just trying to push through it and everything. But that helped me get past that. As far as like when I had the fire in 22, I didn't make another pass until 2023. It was 363 days later, and I debuted the car back at No Prep Kings here again. And the first pass with everything being rebuilt, new front half on it, EFI, all of it, was the right lane here and let off the button on No Prep surface. And I had no issue with that because I knew that, hey, I can push through it and we'll be good.

So here's our boy, Peter, one of our upcoming guests in the white Civic on the right or the left, sorry. And I apologize to anybody watching. It might be blown out, but nonetheless, I am curious to see how this goes. But no, I was going to say, like, you know, is it bravery or stupidity? And it seems like it's more on the bravery side.

A little bit of both as I say, as drag racers, where some of the dumbest people out there will spend ungodly amounts of money to spend less time on the track. Doesn't make a lot of sense.

But what is that they say? How do you make a small fortune racing? You start with a large one. Yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely not something that every racer out there is going to make money at. You definitely do it because of the passion and you know that I've kind of dedicated my life to racing and such here, you know, between having the shop where we sell parts. We have two hoists in there for doing work on cars, a chassis dyno, a machine shop, fabrication shop, engine building room. We do all kinds of different stuff. Full tuned carburetors, EFI, all of it, and a lot of like exhaust fabrication too, headers and full stainless exhaust. From that, it's just that you're that dedication of you want to make the everything better for the industry. It's not just, oh, I want to do this till I enjoy it and I can make money. You know, I'll come out here and I teach the intro to drag racing classes at BIR four times a year. And I don't take anything for that because I'm getting people who have never been down the track before to come out and try it. And that's big because a lot of people don't want to look stupid going up on the line for the first time if they don't know how to treat others.

I really should have had him talk to Jay. He was so nervous, man.

He wasn't doing great. Like he wasn't doing fine.

Yeah. I'm sure he was saying the same thing, like you don't want to look dumb because that's the biggest thing is you go out there in your drift car and you spin it around. It's my first time. Okay, cool. Everybody thinks it's so easy to stage a car. But if you don't know how far everything is, because you don't get to see the beams that you're going into the stage of the car, so you have to kind of be watching and know where everything is at. And that's kind of where we tell them some of the safety aspects of what they need to have. Who turns off the track first? How do you read the time slip? A lot of the more basic things, but it's an intro to drag racing. And over the last two and a half years, we've put like 60 or 65 people down the track for the first time, their first time ever. And it's been really cool to see them like coming back and you'll see them at an event and they're like, man, I've gone back out six, seven times now and I made it to the semi finals like three weeks ago. And you're like, that's so cool to see, you know, that that's the heartwarming portion of yeah, you're not taking any money from it because you're trying to better the sport. But hearing those stories from them is where you're just like that. That's good. They're like, I feel fulfilled from that.

Was there ever a time you strongly considered not getting back on the horse or it's always just been like, get up and go? Because I know sometimes, you know, again, to bring it back to whatever, but you know, whether it's sometimes maybe it's a financial thing or whether it's the crash or whatever it is or everything.

Yeah, after the wreck where we had the fire, I knew I was going to get back in. I just didn't know when.

That's the other thing we see it constantly some of our guests like we'll be back in two to three years like, you know, we got to do all this stuff and prepare this.

Yep. I didn't know when I would. And I knew it wouldn't be that same year because there was no way I was going to try to get it together in a couple of months when it happened in June. You know, up here, we have a limited time frame where we come out to the drag strip and automotive stuff in general. So I didn't know when it was going to be done. I didn't know what I was going to do with it or any of that. I just knew I would get back in it. And it got to the point where I didn't get into any other car that year where normally I'd have a buddy, hey, take my bracket car out or go do something like that. You know, get it out yourself. I didn't do that at all. I ended up, I got picked up by NHRA Mountain Motor Pro Stock team in 22 after the wreck. And I traveled on the NHRA tour for Mountain Motor Pro Stock for the rest of the year doing tuning and data acquisition. So I was always at the track with these big power cars and I was never like, oh yeah, I want to get back in this. I was having fun doing the tuning and helping out with that. So and then weeks that we weren't racing, I'm back at the shop working in the shop or or rebuilding the car. So over the winter, it finally kind of got me that itch of I hadn't been around the track. I hadn't been in there and I got to get back in the car. So that's kind of when it hit. But since I had that other outlet of going racing and feeling that I didn't have it like I got to get in it right now. Let's go do it. But yeah, there was a serious time in that one where I didn't know when I'd get in or if, you know, I had a couple of people, I had ideas of like, okay, me and dad can tune it and do all this stuff and I can put this person in it. And we talked about it and this wasn't the time for us to do something like that. So I know that there's going to be a time where I, you know, that car and our cars and stuff we have, there's a lot that's going on. And it might be time for me to step out and put somebody else in on there or hire somebody else to do all the stuff I do. And that is probably not going to happen. I'd rather put somebody else in there than, you know, give up all of the stuff that I've built and do the stuff that way.

Do you have kids?

I do not. My wife and I, I'm 36 and she's 34 and no kids as of right now. She works in a school, so she sees kids all day there. And through the different classes that I do for teaching, for the intro drag racing, I also do during summers. Not this summer with the new shop, but I do an internship for usually a guy, but any student can apply for it. That's between their sophomore and junior or junior and senior year of high school. And they get to come work in the race shop with me for three months during the summer. We pay them. It's usually 20, 25 hours a week, you know, I do a paid internship and they get to see and be a part of all of that. And we had our first one. He actually just graduated last Friday, graduated high school. And it was pretty cool to go to his grad party and see that. And they ate us a whole bunch of like, you helped him, you know, find what he wanted to do and everything. He's actually going to school this fall for diesel mechanic out in Wapiton. So really cool to see these kids growing into that. So, yeah, no kids ourselves because we work and try to give back to the kids that way. There's a lot of kids out there that need somebody to kind of look up to or look over them or help them out. And, you know, if that's my calling in life and I don't have my own kids, hey, I'm glad to help out.

Yeah, no, it's I just didn't know if there was going to be like another one to hand the keys down to kind of like your dad did with you. But yeah, you might find that through your mentoring and stuff, too.

You never know, you know, I'd love to find some kid that would be, you know, just completely on board, wanting to do everything there and ends up being your shop guy. And eventually you put them in the car and hand them the keys or something like that. And, you know, down the road, I'd love to see something like that. It'd be really cool.

Yeah.

But right now, even though I've been having some struggles this year with our car, I'm still happy to be in the driver's seat.

Yeah. Well, you're not you're not retiring age yet anyway.

No, I got some gray hair, but it's not all gray yet. Yeah.

Half of it is probably from drag racing anyway.

Yeah. The stress of the shop and drag racing. People were telling me this year, like, man, have you lost weight? I'm like, I don't know. I'd never actually go on the scale at everything. And I've stepped on the scale here at the racetrack for the cars down there. When all these people were saying, I'm like, wow, I'm down like 15 pounds. And my old man is like, yeah, it's from all that low stress and clean living you have. Yeah, that's exactly what is wrong. So some of the stuff that we do here at BR, they kind of, since I do so much here, I've worked at BIR, like people who have never been here, it's 640 acres here at this track and they can hold like right now, but they'll hold like events where it's four or five events going on at the same time up here and like snowmobiles on the water, mud trucks out there, you know, road course stuff, drag race, everything going on. If you've never been up here for an event, like coming to one of the Wet and Wild Weekends where they have all those events going on, it's the same price and you get to see all of them. Or this event here, the North Star Speed Summit, they have another one, I believe it's in September, at the beginning of September.

Something like that, yeah. We're going to try to make it out to that one as well.

Well, we'll see if I'm going to come up to that one. It's towards the end of our season where we're looking at possibly going to do some traveling there, but it's right in my backyard, and I like supporting these events. Guys that are out there, come on up to these, because you do get to see everything as you hear stuff in the background right now going.

But I don't think I've ever been here where there's only been one event going on. I mean, so Super Bikes is next weekend, Moto America. I think I've been here for that, and they had snowmobile water skipping, like you said. They had other stuff going on over there, and then Super Bikes going on all at the same time.

So next week with the Super Bikes, the Moto America, there's a bracket race going on on the Drag Strip, so two events that weekend.

So you just fill everything up, and you won't be disappointed. You'll be entertained no matter what you come here.

Well, I like the design of this track, because you have the short course over there, or the competition course, or whatever they call it.

The 2.5 mile competition course.

Which is what we did for the performance driving school the other day, which was the podcast before this one. But anyways, you can do the Drag Strip, too, so it's kind of cool. You can have all these things going on at once. That's not always the case at other tracks.

No, so when the track opened up in 1968, it was actually originally called Donnybrook.

Correct.

And there was just a road course, and it's the original, the 3.1 mile course that's around here that includes part of the Drag Strip. It's the 3.1 mile Donnybrook road course. When Jed and Christy Copeland purchased the track back in the mid to late 2000s, around 2006, 2007, Jed had the idea of, well, if we cut the road course through here, we could make a shorter course, while still using a summit, and hold two events. And from there, they've kind of taken that idea and run from it, or with it on there, to make it bigger and hold multiple and multiple events on the same weekend. And it's great because you can get people who... I'm a drag race fan, and you're over here, and there's drifting. Like, what is this over here? And now you've gotten interest in another form of automotive, culture and everything like that. So I think having multiple events, have multiple styles at the same facility is a good thing.

And they have all these campsites, too. We run into people all the time. They're like, yeah, we just come here to camp for the weekend and just watch. So that happens a lot.

Yeah, the VIP camping over by the pond. I mean, they have full hookups for electricity, your water, sewer stuff, everything for your camper, all of it over there. And then you walk out at 7 in the morning, have your coffee, and you're next to a lake, a pond. It's a good setup.

100 yards over here, you're on the drag strip. If you're camping in autosports, this is the place.

We will say thank you to Christy Copeland, who owns the track now, and she's kept it going. After we had unfortunately lost Jed back in 2018, her big thing is taking care of the people and making it so it's a fun place to be. There's so many showers here at this track. The Napa bathrooms that are over here has showers in it. The bathrooms over here have showers in it. They have 18-wheeler trailers that they've converted over that have almost a dozen showers in them. So when you come to camp, you can also go have a hot shower while you're here too. We've all gone camping and you haven't shot for three days. Now put on there the grime of working on a car.

Oh yeah.

It's nice to have those out here. But as far as like, you guys are telling me about some of the jobs that you do on there and you do low voltage stuff. And you're also into cars. What transfers over? I'm going to interview you on this one a little bit. What transfers over from your low voltage stuff into your car stuff?

I don't know. The low voltage thing is kind of something is kind of fell into. But I just I've always been very mechanical, like anything I can't taking things apart, putting them back together, just kind of not always something. So time is always a problem, right? Sometimes things can come apart really easy, and then you just don't have the time to get it back together. So I have a lot of projects, home things I can do construction. I can do all kinds of stuff. So I think it's just been a passion for cars. That would be number one before anything. And then if I could have found a way to like, had made that my career would be great. But that's just not how it worked out. I had landed in the trades. And I mean, I'm all right at wiring up cars and stuff. You know, as far as running the cabling, I still don't understand some of that stuff. Like I see some of these cars with like bundles of wires laying on the floorboard of the passenger side with a Haltech lane there. And I'm like, I wouldn't know how to do anything with any of that. I could clean it up for you, but that'd be about it.

We wired our own car with the Holley system and MSD Pro 600 ignition system on there and everything. And my father in the military did high voltage. He did like 480 wiring in the military. So he looks at that and he's like, oh, this is easy. He's like, if I get zapped, I ain't going to hurt. And I was like, that's the easy portion of getting zapped? But him being a little bit more of the old school, he didn't understand as much on the inputs and outputs of the ECU of what it's going to do. And some inputs can only do 5 volt or this or that. So I decided to help him with that. But yeah, he was like, he drew out his own schematics and legal pads of everything written down. I was like, that's the most I've seen my dad being organized like that in a long time. And it's been nice because we have an issue. And he's like, whips out his big book of stuff. And he's like, it should be this color of wire. And it's neat to see that and myself learning from that because I know wiring, but the way that he was kind of running stuff or using the relays and such was neat to learn. And that's where I was kind of curious with your electrical side of the background there.

No, I've been wrenching on site with my dad since I could hold the flashlight type situation.

Always wrong, too.

Yeah, exactly. So that passion came from that. And then I would say if there's any young people out there that watch or listen to this, like if you're going into high school, you're in high school. I took all of the shop classes, right? And I would say probably my understanding of engines came from a small engines class. Like when you want to just get down to the basics of how a four stroke, two stroke, the internal parts of an engine really helps you just like wrap your head around what's going on in there.

Did you have to do the old school, the Briggs and Stratton five horse?

I'm pretty sure mine is still in pieces somewhere.

So you said like you're good at taking things apart. Putting them back together is the time portion. Yes, exactly.

I know how to put them back together. Maybe it's ADHD. I just go, okay, move on, next project.

I suffer of that as well, but also that's where you can kind of get a lot of knowledge through the deficit or what you want to say or whatnot in a bunch of different things. You may not be the best at it. You're the master of none, jack of all trades, but you can be pretty decent at a lot of good things. There are a lot of things on there. But as far as for us and our drag racing, we're going to pretty much be with this car, this iteration, for quite a while. But about two years ago, I set a goal for myself, and I posted on social media and such. Within five years, I wanted to run NHRA Pro Mod at the national event here at Brainerd. And so everything I've been doing is working towards that, whether it's just for the one event, or I end up figuring out a way to run the entire season or multiple events on there. I'm a big goal person, and you have to have that goal out there to at least try to work towards it. Because even if I don't reach that, which I will, that's my... you have to have that for your mindset, that never quit attitude on there, I'll reach that. But even if I wasn't, all the stuff I'm going to learn and get to as I'm trying to work my way there is all going to be better for anything else, for the information you're going to get. And that's kind of where we've always kind of looked at stuff. Like, oh yeah, it would be really cool to have a Hemi with Twin Turbos and all this really cool stuff on there and go travel around on there. That would be great. Well, why don't you set that as a goal and try to get to that? And so yeah, when I had a big block that made 700 horse and I was spraying a 250 pill on it, I'm like, man, pro mods are so cool, and now I won't hide it. I have a pro mod in sheep's clothing. I mean, it's everything there.

You're pretty damn close there.

Yeah, there's a steel roof and quarter, and the front wheels are still five lugs. So yeah, quote, street car, right? But we still have the VIN on it, because I thought it would be cool to leave the VIN tag up on the front for it. But it's a pro mod in sheep clothing at the end of the day. I always thought 10 years ago, I'll never have something like that. Well, now you look back, and you're like, man, I was dumb. It's really not that bad to get. Well, you had to do all that work to get there. So those goals are big. That's kind of a big thing for our program, is keeping those goals going and trying to achieve them. Because if you just get content where you're at, that's where a lot of people will be like, yeah, I'm done racing. I've spent enough. I want to go fishing instead or something. They reached those goals, and they didn't continue to go on. I know that a lot of the guys that do, like, flying mile stuff and TX2K, they constantly have another goal. You know, I hit 200, awesome. I want 210.

Yep.

I want 215.

Yeah, like the shift sector, like, you know, hitting in the 250s, it's like, that's crazy.

Yeah, and I see those cars, you know, they're out there with a parachute, and, you know, you went 250 out there, and it was a mile, where I can have the attitude of going, oh, we do 208, you know, from a stop here, big deal. But if you look at the type of cars that they're doing it in, and what they're, I mean, you've got cars that weigh 1,000 pounds more than I do.

Yeah, and full-on street cars in some cases.

Full-on street cars, like, they could be making a rip with the AC on. Yeah. I'd love to have AC in my car. So that's pretty neat stuff there, and we do at our shop at BIG, we do work on street car stuff as well, but we do have a lot of race stuff that comes through.

That's what I'm asking next, too. Like, tell us a little bit about the shop side, because it's been all about you. What about the shop itself and all that fun stuff?

My father and I still have a business called Paradigm Automotive, it was Paradigm Automotive and Performance. Last year, I split the Performance shop off of that and started my own business, BIG Performance Solutions. In the hopes that dad's getting to the age where he wants to be able to retire, it's a lot easier for him to sell that business or anything without having to worry about the Performance shop in there. So we were able to do something like that. And I went from my area was like, at Paradigm was like 1600 square foot that I had in the back of this building to I went 4,800 square foot at my new place. So it's tripled in size. And we're able to kind of do everything we've done. You know, build turbo kits, hot side, cold side on there. We'll do converters, transmission upgrades, you know, on cars to full builds. We're doing a 2012 Camaro right now. It came in, had a turbo system on it, but it was just not the best, we'll say. It was one of those systems that you could order your boost on Sunday and probably get it on Tuesday. So we're changing some things around on that and be finishing that up for a gentleman up out of Superior, Wisconsin. And then that's all on a HP Tuners factory ECU setup for that. 85 mil turbo with a 427 engine in it, and 6L80 transmission with built up stuff there. So yeah, we do a lot of the street car stuff around here up in the northern Minnesota. I do a lot of maintenance and work on a lot of the Cobra kit cars that people have. They like to drive around the lakes. Because each one is different, you know, because you could have a five star or you could have a lone star. And there's so many different variations of a Cobra kit car. Each one is going to be different. You're not going to go to the dealer because they're going to be like, I'm not working on that, you know, if that doesn't have a frame that's normal or anything there. So we get to work on a lot of those. We actually just did a dyno for a 68 Camaro full restoration from a restoration shop that the gentleman was actually giving the car. He built it over 11 years in front of his dad to give to his dad. His dad would come visit him at the shop and see this car going together, being painted and, you know, getting all this stuff done. He's like, man, this guy's got good taste. You know, if it was mine, I'd do something like that. He's like, oh, noted. And we finished up the dyno for it. And last weekend, he gave it to his dad for his 60th birthday. And just being a part of something like that, you know, was pretty cool. So, yeah, we do a lot of streetcar stuff, but then we get full racecar stuff in for dyno tuning. We do intro to Holley EFI classes. So a lot of guys will have a Fox body with an LS in it and a turbo.

Take it to, you know, sorry, I must throw up in my mouth.

I know they're out there. So they'll take that car to another dyno shop or whatever and made a thousand horse. That's cool. They go to the track. What do I do? How do I make good on the track? What do I how do I change stuff? How do I program it? We kind of bridge that gap of guys that already have a car. It's kind of put together. They just don't know how to make everything work and teach them how to read a data log, how to set things up, how to adjust, you know, your starting line, your boost, your anything there. And we're actually going to be in the next about month or so from when this is recorded, we're going to be having an additional class that's going to be after that, where it's a full one on one day where you can bring your car, we put it on the dyno and we go over the Holley EFI with you even more. But then we can make pulls on there and show you, OK, so if you do this to it, what's it going to change for power or your boost ramp or boost? You pull a bunch of timing out of it and all of a sudden made more boost. Why did it do that? And this is why we can show them that and they have a better understanding of their vehicle in a one-on-one setting. And we're going to be bringing that here in about the next month to two months coming out.

So it'll be a few weeks after the series, because this will be not this coming Monday, but the following Monday.

OK, so yeah, I will say it'll be in the July to August area of 2024. Cool. That sounds really cool. All of that stuff we'll have on our Facebook page for BIG Performance Solutions, or you can go to the website, which is bigperformancesolutions.com, and we'll be getting everything. We're still in the process of getting everything figured out, because there's certain days that we're not going to do it. You know, in the middle of the week, it's tough for people to just take a day off of work, so.

Yeah, even like the Monday school is a little tricky sometimes to come up here. But what's it going to turn blank a little bit?

Maybe we should have stayed up drinking last night.

That's probably it. I mean, at every camp we go to, we could drink two or three drinks.

I had my one drink last night that you brought me. I had some of that Wisconsin beer. What was it?

Spotted Cow?

Spotted Cow, yeah.

Had never had one of those. Driven through Wisconsin and buy it all the time.

And like I said, man, get it through a drive-through. Take it on while you're driving.

Yeah, you can do that in Wisconsin, too, by the way.

That's a that's an old law place there.

This Camaro is a pretty quick one here. I was running and ran nine six last time it came down. Yeah, I'm too shabby.

I like I'm liking the the truck in the other lane, though. Just primer black. Looks like nothing. I have no idea what it runs there, but it's good.

It's down pretty good because it looks cool. Yeah, yeah, I want to say he's in the tens.

That's awesome.

But as we start winding down here, Dan, did you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah, I asked Harris this earlier. I was wondering what his answer is going to be to this. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. You need to pick a track car, a daily driver and a show car. You have an unlimited budget, build whatever you want. What are you picking?

Show car, I'll start there, would be a 66 Chevelle. The body lines are awesome. And then from a history buff of a lot of different things in the automotive world. Smoky Unic in NASCAR did a lot with that body style Chevelle to the point of even made a 7-8 scale to pass off into NASCAR because it would weigh less and be smaller, more aerodynamic. And I've just always loved those cars. So that'd be a show car. A daily driver. And it was a track car. A track car, yeah. Any type of track or are we?

Any kind of track. You want drag strip car, you want.

If it's a drag car, I'm going with a probably like a Larry Jeffers built pro mod. Like for drag racing, absolutely. But if it's somewhere we have to go road racing on there, we're going something exotic on there. Probably like a Lotus, something small, nimble, supercharged, four cylinder type deal on the rear. I like the body style, something like that. If it was going to be like a road car or a turning car.

So now you have to choose between those two.

I was like, here's never let somebody get away with a double answer.

I've heard it before. Actually, I knew these questions were coming, and I was trying to think of it. I was like, I had no idea. Some of them, I would be in my passion in drag racing. It would end up being the pro mod.

They didn't have to twist his arm too much.

No, no. And then for a daily driver, wow. I'm not a huge Ford guy who were talking before. And I'm like, I want to get a Raptor. I really like those. But I think as a daily driver, I would probably almost go to a Mopar, honestly, which sounds weird.

And I go there before I go GM, but that's fine.

It always seems Mopar is like the happy meeting between Ford and Chevy guys on there. Like they can both be like, yeah, screw Mopar. They'll agree on that. Or they'll be like, oh, I'll go to Mopar before I go Ford. But it would probably be something like the either like I'd probably go to a TRX. Yeah, I like having trucks. Cars are I have my cars that are fun, but I like having a fun.

True car guys. Daily is usually a truck because they got to have some to haul the car around. People that build cars, especially ship brakes. Sometimes you need a trailer.

Yep, you know, I've gotten to drive one of the TRX and they're fun. They're fun. They handle great. They have more power than you're ever going to need. And they are a sharp looking truck.

So a good buddy of mine picked his TRX up yesterday. So congratulations to him. But it's a fun truck. I have a number of my buddies got TRX. It's like we actually so one of the my buddies is the twin turbo viper. Like he put bags in the back of his TRX so he can trailer his viper down, you know, down to Texas 2K to just fine, decent MPG to plenty of power.

I mean, you get a Hellcat engine in it.

Oh, yeah.

Just take off.

You know, those things are bulletproof, man.

Like it's Raptor Art. Sorry.

And I've never seen one that's, you know, in one piece in person yet. So I do want to ask, what is your Camaro way?

So our Camaro, like this weekend for trim, everything is 2810 pounds with me in it and five, six gallons of fuel in it. We've gone three point two to three point three G's off the line. And it'll sustain over like two point seven five G's throughout the rest of the pass. Wow. So, yeah, we went like four ohs and everything, you'll see it come up and like four oh six to four ten. I would say about three point eight seconds of that is over two point seven two point seven five G's. So that's a lot of a lot of weight to get moving. And that's why a couple of weeks ago, we broke a titanium housing, just snapped the end of it off from tire shake because that it was for a pro stock car from 2001. And it was meant to in a car that was weighing, you know, 24, 2500 pounds, making 1400 horse and were 2800 pounds trying to put like three thousand thirty five hundred to it. She's a little bit too much. My own fault. We snapped that thing. And that was an expensive one there. You know, titanium is never a cheap item. So no, no, we've got all kinds of things that have broken and everything. I've got a nice wall of personal trophies of things that have broken.

I'll have to see that.

Yeah.

Give me a photo of that.

I have a chunk of a big block Chevrolet aftermarket dark block that we lifted the head on nitrous and it filled everything up. And then it blew the entire side of the block out. And I kept the side portion where it still has the brass freeze plug right in the middle of it. But you could look up from the bottom and see the deck surface of the head, like all the cylinders were gone and everything just blew it all out. And yeah, that was another expensive one.

Yeah, no, I have kept all of my broken s*** too. My plan is to have somebody make a lamp or a coffee table or some s*** out of it sometime or...

Well, some of your addresses will send to you. I've got some stuff, pro mod type stuff I can send you. I've got some messed up rods and aftermarket, the aluminum rods and pistons and everything. We broke a billet brine crank into three pieces and shot the piece through the oil pan. And I took for YouTube, I think it was when we hit a thousand or subscribers or 500 subscribers, I rewelded it all together and made it into a stool and gave it away. And we actually put connecting rods back on one of the throws. And that's actually where you would put your feet.

Yeah, that's cool.

And yeah, I gave it away to a guy there. So we have a bunch of parts like that. I'll send it to you guys. You guys can have them and I've got boxes of them, so please come and let me send them.

I remember a few years ago, I got a box of parts from JWP. We were making trophies for a rally or whatever. That didn't work out, though. Yeah, a lot of talent ran out on that one. That's an off air story. Yeah, I'll tell you about that after. Rally stories are always the greatest. OK, I have one last question, though, because again, you have an engineering mindset, it seems. I was at a pretty accurate assumption. So one thing I've learned is, especially on the NHRA side of things is after every pass, you guys disassemble everything, measure stuff. Is that something that you do for your build, or is that after 20 passes or something? Just see how everything looks.

Yeah, so if we see any issues for oil pressure or anything on there, we'll drop the pan and check the bearings or replace bearings. But otherwise, like I said, it's usually about 45 to 50 hits on rods, and then we pull the heads off and change everything there.

Longtime listeners of the show know that I don't like to pedal BS. Whether it's my own merch or the people I represent, I want to make sure that my listeners are getting the best quality stuff. That said, we had the Lunatech team on a podcast on episode 57, and they talked about their awesome detailing products. My personal favorite is AquaBead, just because it really makes it easy to not have to clean my car again. But I also enjoy Skeeter Deleter and Lemon Tech because I get a lot of brake dust from riding people's a**** and having to slam on the brake. Don't worry about it, okay? That said, you want to use code Minnoxide, save 15%, give it a shot, I promise you won't be disappointed.

The nitro methane and the amount of boost and everything that they're trying to run on some of the nitro cars, you have to take it apart between runs. Because there's no way that you're going to be able to run this stuff in there again like that, and they have to measure it. The power level we're at, we can get away with a lot more. So our maintenance will be like untorquing and retorquing heads, just checking head studs and everything, or pull the oil pan off, check bearings, and retorque everything underneath that. Where pretty much every two to three passes, valve covers are off, we're checking valves. Let's see if you tool up a valve or have a lifter going out, anything like that. Because the aftermarket HEMIs, they're now getting back into it, but they don't have oiling that actually is forced oiling to the lifters, it's all splash oil on there. So if you fire it up and the oil is too cold, it's not able to splash, you can end up taking out lifters and rollers and needle bearings. So we have to do that. If you look at a lot of us, we have, if you're not dry sump, we have a primer pump that you'll spin over to put warm oil over before you even fire it up. And that kind of helps the maintenance side of it. But yeah, between rounds, it's pretty much looking at data, checking valves, checking everything over. These cars, everything's solid, so they vibrate things loose. And then when you start getting out the tire shake that we've been having on there, I mean, we had one pass where we actually popped the carbon fiber tubs off of the body. And up at the top end, we're like, oh, this is real bad. So I had to go back in and have that repaired and refit and everything on that. So as far as the engine maintenance at the track, not terrible, but a lot sooner than your street cars or even something like your seven, eight second cars.

How often do you have to just take the entire thing apart and just go through it?

I do it every winter.

Every winter?

Every winter, I take pretty much everything apart and I'll pull the engine out.

That sounds pretty accurate.

Like, yeah, it makes sense. And just go through it. Right now, the rods that are in there, they only had 20 hits on them, so I put them back in.

Right, yeah, that's what I was gonna say is, do you ever have, let's say you did 40, 50 passes or whatever, do you sometimes look at them and be like, all right, we could probably get 10 more out of this? Or at that point, you're just like...

No, it's very tough on the aluminum rods. You can kind of measure some stretch and everything, but you never know when they're gonna let loose. Right. And a set of rods at $1600 to $1700 is a lot cheaper than a block and a crank.

Yeah.

As well as another set of rods.

Well, exactly, it's, at that point, I don't wanna say it's cheap insurance, but it is cheap insurance.

Yeah, like, I don't like it.

On that scale, it's cheap insurance.

Yes, I don't sugarcoat it. Like, yeah, it's an expensive engine, and a lot of maintenance that goes in for it. But yeah, you do have to look at it, going, well, is it worth me pushing it for four more passes that I might be able to get away with? Well, what are you racing for on there? And we always will use, is the juice worth the squeeze? Are you gonna pedal it on a pass out there where you're kind of trying to be a cowboy? Is it qualifying? Get out of it. Who cares? It's another day. You're out there, you're racing for 100 grand on there. Yeah, and you're ahead. It's worth it. Yeah, get into it and see if you can salvage it and pull the win. So yeah, is the juice worth the squeeze? Pushing the rods too far, not worth the squeeze. I've done it, had to replace stuff. And a block, try to get a new block there, 8,000, 10 grand.

Well, sometimes too, you've already got it apart. Right as well. Yeah, I could put this back together, do five more, then rip it apart again.

Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah, so.

In Minnesota, we have a decent downtime in the winters, so it gives you the time to do that. And then you also have ideas of what you want to change. And maybe you're looking at data and going, hey, we should do something here. Like this year, we actually took in the side of the block, because there are a Y block where it comes all the way down, the pan rail is flat. We put a 16 ORB AN bung in the side there, and there's a hose that actually comes up into the intake manifold on the bottom side to help get the crankcase pressure up to the top to let it out, because we were having an issue. It was pushing up the oil returns and not letting the oil return back down. So yeah, that's something you're not gonna do in the middle of the season, but in the off season, you have plenty of time to do something like that.

Have you thought about case swapping it? So, I'm just passing with you.

Actually, we'll tell this one here. So, I was talking with Nate Comfort, that's back here, who had Nate built, and I said, hey man, I have an idea for a car I want to build, and I want to use a Honda engine. And all of a sudden, he was right in there. He's like, okay, what do you want to do? I want to build this car to go just completely destroy and mess up a class. And I said, but I want to put it in a Fox Body Mustang, because a four cylinder gets a huge weight break. And he's like, K Series. Like, I didn't even finish it, he's like K Series. I was like, well, I know the B Series really good. He goes, they spin the wrong way. And I was like, oh, I was like, well, how about a 4G? And he goes, that's not a Honda. Okay, so that might be something that we are actually looking in the future of like kind of a small tire type car, but we get a big weight break and it would be a K swap Mustang. I always thought it would be cool with the B Series to use an LS, because I could say it's an LS swap Mustang, but apparently they spin the wrong way. So can't do that.

Yeah, I actually watched a whole, like I don't want to say documentary, but sometimes I go down these rabbit holes. I think it's called Driven for Learning or whatever on YouTube. Big channel, whatever. Like you did a comparison between a B Series and a K Series, and all the differences. And it was like a 40 minute video. It was really in depth. And it's like, one of the things I'm trying to do is trying to pick up little tidbits that make podcast conversations better. And it's been fun to learn little things like that.

So you can check us out on YouTube.

That was my next question.

Yep, you can check us out on YouTube. It's bad at Bad Influence Garage there. We have 130, 140 videos, but we show a lot of the things like inside of a Hemi. I like to teach and show people. Yes, I have not this knowledge of stuff, but keeping it all to yourself all the time, it doesn't help everybody else out in the sport. So I like to teach things and show things. So we would show the entire build series of the car, how we were mounting stuff and everything there. But we did an engine build of the billet Hemi, of the teardown and the assembly, and showing the little things like that, of like, yeah, the oil drains on these. There's only four of them, and they're at the outer corners of the heads on there, and they're only this small hole. And I had a guy that was in our pits, I was probably three months after I had that video out, and he was looking at the car off to the side while we were working, and he tells his buddies, yeah, you guys, did you know those Hemi's only have four oil drain backs around the outside corners and everything like that? And I kind of looked back, and he's like, yeah, I saw it on your video. But he had something when he came to there, he's not with a car, but he had something to connect with people on that. And that's kind of why we like to do those videos of teaching and showing that stuff.

You never know who's watching that stuff, man. Like, it's just, you know, even some small channels, like it's just awesome to learn some of this stuff. Even if like, you know, he's a Ford guy, but he might watch a video on a GTI one of these days, you know, learn a thing or two. But besides YouTube, where else can people follow you?

So, for our racing, Bad Influence Garage on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, it's all, all three of those are at Bad Influence Garage. And for the shop of BIG Performance Solutions, we are just on Facebook and our website, bigperformancesolutions.com.

Awesome. Dan?

You can find us at Gunna Garage. I'm collecting content and doing nothing with it. So, if you want to be bored, go ahead and subscribe to my stuff.

And that is now managed by Minnoxide Media Management Group. MMMG, LLC. Actually, that's not a bad idea. I should do that. I came up with that right now. Good brain.

But hey, the off the cuff ideas are usually the better ones that happen.

Yeah, man, just need to get a little bit of snow and we'll start having plenty of ideas. Yeah. And then, as for me, you guys have already found the podcast. Thank you for supporting. Make sure to check out all our sponsors, all the cool people we support. Let's see if anything sucks. Let me know. I don't know. Thank you for supporting us, I suppose.

Yeah, well, you guys have an event here at BIR. That already happened.

That already happened. That was a collaborative event with the driving school.

That one that was just the other day.

Yep, so that was super cool. Upcoming events, I'm gonna be at Power Cruise 2, and then probably the next Speed Summit. So, exciting stuff on that front. I feel like I'm missing some sort of announcement, but other than that, thank you guys for watching.

I'll tell you, this one then, this one's for you. If you have not been up here where it's a single event that's happening in August, come up here and experience even for one day the NHRA National Event.

So we keep hearing that one for sure. I heard it's a blast.

It's the biggest event. There's so many people here. The place doesn't even look the same. And for you guys to come out here and just even experience it for a day, you have to come up and do it. So put that one on your schedule for you guys.

Sweet. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm glad we were able to make this work. Dan, thanks for existing, and we'll see y'all next time.

Thank you guys, and be safe out there.