93. Tuning Imports (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, etc), Lurk Tuning, JWP Automotive w/ Kyle Larkin

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And today, we are missing Dan from Gunna Garage. This is my first solo episode in like, I wanna say 40 episodes, almost 40 on the nuts, so it's been a while. But you've been gone for longer. You never even got to chat with Dan.

I didn't. I'm a little sad that he's not here, because I felt like it would have been a good dynamic. Probably the two most opposite people in the spectrum, but...

I think he has to be pretty close. Oh, 100%.

You think so? He's a Ford guy, I'm a Honda guy?

Okay, mine is that part, but otherwise...

That's what I'm more directly speaking about. Four cylinder versus V8, you know, the age-old rivalry.

I think it'd be a good thing to introduce you, though, because the last time you were on was episode 40, 53 episodes ago. And at the time, you were the most frequent guest we had, so things have changed. You are in a much newer location. You're no longer at MAP, which has since moved and ditched us out of Minnesota, which is a good way of putting it.

Not to interrupt you, but you haven't even introduced who I am.

That's a good point, Kyle Larkin, which we're gonna get into because that's Lurk Tuning.

You're making a segue here.

Yeah, we're making a segue. And now you're at JWP Automotive here in St. Paul, which, by the way, there's not a single shop in the cities. Somebody's welcome to prove me wrong, but this gives me Fast and Furious vibes. You know what I mean?

Like the inside of the shop or just in general?

I think in general, the atmosphere.

Yeah, I think you're right. Cause I mean, it's like a whole plethora of cars, mostly JDM cars, and it's all kind of in one space. And obviously there's like parts and stuff all kind of hung out. It kind of does, there is some of that reminiscent vibe of like the first, you know, Fast and Furious when they're building the Supra and they lay everything out, which is not how anyone actually builds cars. So I can kind of see how you would make that correlation.

But like, there's a lot of love that went into making the shop look the way it was or the way it is compared to the other location, which, you know, this is a big jump, especially in space and all that. But you're primarily, if we go back in time, you're primarily a Honda guy?

Yeah, I mean, it's tough for me to say that, seeing as I think in the past three years, I've driven my car all of 200 miles. I guess I've kind of focused more of my time on other people's cars, but my background, like primarily, so I've been doing this 10 years now, and I started with Hondas, and a majority of my time working on cars was on Hondas. So I guess you could call me a Honda guy at my heart. But in all reality, I'm not too brand loyal. I mean, I have been thinking about building and or buying cars other than Hondas, just because things interest me, I like learning. So that's just kind of the way it goes.

What do you think you have buying?

That's the secret.

That's a secret.

That's a secret. Maybe it'll come out.

Maybe it'll come out.

Maybe, we'll see. I don't know. It's all thoughts right now. I mean, I haven't daily driven a Honda in four years. I've been driving BMWs. So F80 is high up on my list as a car purchase. Oh wow.

Oh, that's different.

Yeah. So go from bottom of the barrel, Econobox with a laptop to, you know.

The people you revolt against.

Yeah, you know, big baller with a fake watch and we're already getting controversial.

No, I mean, everything you said is accurate.

That's true. That's true. You know, you get a deal. Fourth or fifth owner, F80 M3 owners. I mean, come on pitch, you know, jump in, tell me you don't got a fake watch.

Fake watch, maybe some fake Jordans. You never know, like, you know, just fake everything.

I Gucci. I am amassing an Air Force One collection. So that checks out then it checks out. I think my wife's been decking me out with Air Force Ones and Lululemon shorts. So I think I'll be able to fit. Is that what those are? I think I have those exact ones. They're incredibly comfortable.

I know people always are like, oh, you're welcome. Okay, we will get them away from time.

Dude, I told you, this is how this is gonna go. All right, back to the shop.

Yeah, so, okay, so you started at JWP when? Cause that's when you transition over here. He saw you, what exactly, how did this happen?

Yeah, well, I guess we'll kind of go over everything. I know you've had, at least you had Charlie, right? And you had Jose and Matt. So you've had a couple of former MAPerformance, you know, outlaws, outcasts, you know, we all trickled from somewhere. And so it would have been fall of last year. I don't remember the exact dates. I actually am really bad at keeping track of what month is which. It's one of my quirks, but so yeah, fall of last year was when I made the transition from MAP to over here. And John and I had effectively zero relationship. We had obviously tons of mutual friends. And I knew who John was. And as expected, John is a very busy person, shakes a lot of hands, kisses a lot of babies. So wasn't super aware of who I was. Maybe like heard the name in passing. I know like some of my tuning customers had come here for like alignments and stuff like that.

Well, reputations, everything, especially in Minnesota being or Minneapolis being kind of like the biggest little city, if that makes any sense.

Yeah.

Like your name gets around.

Yeah, yeah. It's a smaller community in comparison to like a lot of the bigger, broader, like car communities out there. So yeah, John and I didn't really have any kind of a relationship with each other. Like I said, just, you know, passing names and stuff like that. And so when I was notified that I was going to be promoted to customer from MMA Performance, I was, you know, they kind of gave us a good heads up. I think it was, it was either six or eight months, somewhere, somewhere around there. I think it was probably six months. They kind of let us know like, hey, this is the current situation. And obviously when we did the last podcast, I was aware of that. You were aware of that, but-

We kept it on the low.

We couldn't really disclose it because we didn't want to freak people out. And I didn't want to be the whistleblower that told everybody that what was going on. So I had some kind of time to think about, you know, what my next move was. I kind of took some time and reflected, you know, what the last two years of my life was. I was at MAP for five and a half years, and it was kind of a big jump from what I was doing before, which was just a general service technician at dealerships. And then I had transitioned into product development, which is some of the same and a lot of the different. So I kind of was like, well, I could go back to just being, you know, a normal service tech. And I wasn't super enthusiastic about that idea because the biggest thing that drives me is passion and doing something that I enjoy. So I wanted to at least spend some time looking for a job that I thought I would enjoy before I was like, well, I know I can go back to a dealer and, you know, make money and be totally fine, but I'm not going to be super happy doing that. So I was fully aware of JWP and everything that went on here. I had never been here. I had, like I said, no relationship with John. So just a simple, I think I reached out to him. I don't know if it was email or Facebook, one or the other.

Probably Facebook.

I think Facebook.

That's how most businesses conducted.

I think it was Facebook. I think I sent him a message and we were, I think I had added him on Facebook like a year prior. Not even. I think it was like right away when they made the announcement to us that we were going to be closing down. I added John on Facebook as like a, this is an avenue. So John was the first person I reached out to when I was looking for a new job. And I just said, hey, I don't know if you're looking to hire anybody. Here's my resume. Here's a little blurb about me and who I am. And then from there we linked up and went to Bdubs and it was supposed to be like an hour, like a dinner, like an early dinner kind of thing. I think it was at like five o'clock. He was like, yeah, just come chat with me. We'll talk about stuff. And very quickly that turned into like a two to three hour conversation at Bdubs to then another like three hours hanging out here, just talking. So almost instantaneously, we kind of felt that there was a good connection and things could be successful for both of us. So after that, we kept talking for a little bit longer and then I was helping out after hours. There was a couple of little lingering projects that they needed help with. And then they brought me on full time, probably a month and a half after that. So I want to say...

It was like beginning of the year you started here, if I remember correctly, like March.

Well, no, no, no, way earlier than that. I only remember this because I actually don't remember why I remember this. It was the week before Thanksgiving. I only remember that because I was like, well, what about holiday pay? Like that's how my brain works. It's like, well, I'm starting a new job and typically you don't get holiday pay until way after. So that's how I remember when I started. It was like a week before Thanksgiving is when I came on board. And the first, we bought this dyno in January. So the first couple months.

Mustang dyno that we are sitting on right now.

Works as a good platform, a good stage. We're kind of a little bit elevated. You can see everything.

Yeah, this is really cool. This is my first time doing a, actually no, we did do a-

We did next to it at MAP.

Yeah, next to the-

Yeah, Sean's car was on the dyno.

That's right.

That's the background.

Now we're on the dyno.

Now we're gonna see how much power Harris makes. We're gonna strap them down. And not in the way you think. But, so for the first few months, I was just kind of working as a general tech here. And, you know, throughout my entire life, I've always, you know, people have always been like, one of the thoughts, oh man, I'm getting lost here. One of the thoughts that I had after being told that I wasn't gonna have a job anymore, that I never expected to not have, and was like, well, maybe I do my own thing. And something that I've always kind of been consistent about was like, I am sort of, not disorganized, but time gets away from me really, really easily because my brain is super scattered and I'm always doing or listening or something. I'm always, something is always going on in my head. So it becomes really hard to keep track of things.

The circus music, I get it.

Pretty much. It's the monkey with the symbols. Yeah, pretty much all the time. And so people for, you know, since I kind of gained a little bit of notoriety or made a name, a small name for myself, I've always been like, why don't you do your own thing? And I've always been really consistent on like, I don't really have much of an interest of owning my own shop, at least now. And I don't want employees because I never felt like I could manage people because I'm unmanageable. And...

Become ungovernable.

Yeah, something like that. So when John and I first talked, he's like, you know, I think you have a lot of drive and a lot of passion. And I want you to kind of push that onto the other guys and mentor them a little bit because I, you know, working at MAP in, you know, in the five years that I was there, I never really realized it, but I picked up a lot of things and a lot of things that are kind of unique that you don't have, most people don't have a huge opportunity to do. So working on all these performance cars and developing parts and being aware of all these brands and you know, they're the pros and cons of different brands and different parts. I never really thought about how that kind of gives me a little bit of an edge. And so John kind of recognized that and picked that up. And he's like, I want you to be, you know, bring that to the table and help us, you know, help you and help us at the same time kind of a thing and kind of let the guys know some of your insights of what you've picked up over the years. So when we were talking initially, he's like, you know, I'm kind of looking for someone like you. And I'm also looking for somebody that can kind of be like a foreman role. And I straight up told John right away, I was like, I can certainly work on cars and help you with that and help you build cool stuff, but I am not the guy to lead the charge and kind of manage people. And that kind of changed when I actually started. And everybody here, this is the one and only job that I've ever worked at that everyone just meshes together. Everybody has a good attitude. We all respect each other and we all get along really well. So that kind of helped me help everybody else, I guess. So when I started here, kind of picked up just being a normal tech and then sort of moved into kind of being in like a foreman role, kind of help managing the guys in the back and then letting John and Gus take care of the customers up front. And then January of this year, we went to Colorado and bought this dyno. So then that brought my tuning side and my tuning background full time at JWP. So that's kind of the run around and now we'll let you talk.

No, I think that was a good, I was like, all right, I see where just the story is going. I'm really happy that you guys have this year. It's just, that's one thing that I've noticed here in the cities is Ratified has a dyno now. You guys have a dyno and then I think somebody else may have picked one up recently, I might be tripping, but. Nonetheless, there's more, there's more power coming to this area. A lot of people are starting to modify their cars more and more and more. I don't know, is that a good assessment? Yeah, I think a lot more people have bead locks is what I'm trying to get out here.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And yeah, it's honestly, this is like so cliche and so played out, but it's because of the internet and like this, I've seen it firsthand for sure, like this drive that everybody has to make a ton of power, which I can go both ways for me. I think there's a point in which you ruin a car by making it too fast to the, like, the problem is, is like these modern cars make power so easily. So you can have a comfortable, like that's part of the allure to an FADM3 for me is you can do pretty minimal stuff that doesn't take away from the driving experience so much, like the comfortability of it and still make, you know, over five, 600 horsepower and it's comfortable and it has AC and that has ruined people because now everybody has to, you know, put up a big graph and but it drives, you know, it drives businesses cause you break stuff. You need somebody to fix it. You want to make more power. You need somebody to add new parts to your car, stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, I definitely feel as if the car scene made kind of a positive swing and like where people are actually kind of caring about performance and not just slapping stickers and you know, obnoxious, you know, body kits and terrible wheels on cars. We've kind of made a, I would say a point in the right direction where people are starting to care more about like the cars working.

I think that's actually a good point. I think a lot of, I don't know if podcasts are necessarily it, but there's a lot more information out there, you know, just via TikTok and reels and all that, that kind of lets people become more educated on just how easy it is to get power and just be more performance oriented versus just, again, like you said, stickers and a body kit.

I mean, cause like very much so the, you know, being into cars, I mean, 2014 doesn't seem, it seems like that wasn't that long ago, but in reality it was 10 years ago.

Just crazy.

And that's like-

I was in middle school.

Right. And that, yeah, I mean, that was when like, like 2013, 2014 is when I started getting into cars and you didn't see, they were out there, right? I mean, it was kind of a, if you know, you know situation, but like if you went to a car meet, it was a lot of like, oh, these are, you know, discount tire wheels on a mostly otherwise stock car, maybe with like a catback or something on it. That was like, there was all, it was crazy to see a car that, you know, was either on bags or it was slammed static, like, and that's talking to like show cars, but or even like a, you know, a big, a big turbo car or something like that. It wasn't, oh, I can just walk around any street corner and there's a car that's making over 500 horsepower. It's like, oh, there's a car with halfway decent wheels on it. And we've kind of made this shift.

That's a good point, yeah, because like back then, not as many people knew what reps were.

That's true. Right?

You go back 10 years.

But if you really think about it, it's like, when I was growing up, you know, when I was in high school driving my Honda Civic just to high school, right? And I went to high school in Woodbury, which is if you're not from here or don't know, it's like a, I mean, it's like a nicer suburb, right? East of the cities.

It depends on who you ask and which side of town.

Yeah, that's right, you know.

That's how it goes every single time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the bad part of this richest town in the country.

West versus East, right? But, so I went to like a fairly, you know, nice high school driving, a s*** box, 95 Civic, and nobody was in the cars at all. And you would just see that and go, oh, that's just some kid in his s***** Honda, right? And I think social media has really kind of flipped that where now more people care about cars. And like being a car enthusiast is cool again. Like I think it was cool 10 years ago, you know, in 2004, right? It was cool to be in the cars. And then it kind of made a shift where it was like, you're a weird guy if you're in the cars. And now it's gone on the other direction where like everybody's in the cars.

It's kind of like a trend there, even for like two or three years, like it became people's personality. And then they realized like, oh wait, I actually don't care about this. You saw that a little bit too.

Yeah, that was me. I'm just stuck. But yeah, I think social media has kind of like flipped the switch where people are, they care about, you know, how they appear and how their car looks. And like I said, that comes with performance too. Like there's definitely a big motivation for people to like put up a big number just for the sake of putting up a big number.

Have you put up big numbers yet?

What?

Have you put up big numbers yet here?

Here?

Or has nobody come chasing a dragon quite yet?

There's been a few guys. Nothing, nothing like, a lot of the cars I do are street cars. So, and they're performed, or primarily Japanese street cars. So, you know, like a Honda in like the five to 700 range is like a perfect, like not too much to where you need like a cage and a helmet every time you drive it kind of a thing, but not too little where you're bored every time you go drive it. So like a lot of the Hondas end up in that, you know, five to 700 range. And obviously I do more than just that here, like these skylines behind me, done a couple of JZ swapped cars the last couple of weeks. So wow, what day was it? Monday or Tuesday, we did a S14 with a 2J in it that made 715 Mustang. So for those, I guess we'll segue a little bit.

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 could 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. Okay, so you've been working on a variety of things then.

Right.

So how many 2Js have you done? You've done quite a bit of 2Js, or is that one of your first ones?

Actually, the second car I ever tuned when I started was a 2J swap car. So a guy that I've been telling you to get on here is my good friend, Max Odegaard, who's over at Patience.

Okay, yes. And I know you should reach out to him actually.

Yeah.

I was thinking, I was going, sometimes I go through Facebook and I, what?

Did you do, you did a Patience episode, right?

I did do a Patience episode. Yeah, it's out. Did you not watch it? That was nine episodes ago, Kyle.

I haven't caught, I haven't gotten caught up yet. I've been rewatching Breaking Bad.

But no, I actually think of things for a reminder. Because sometimes I scroll through my Facebook friends and I'm like, all right, oh, that guy.

I've been sending you lists of people to hit up, but.

Yeah, they're always like 7,000 miles away though.

No, there's one person that doesn't live here.

We'll talk.

Anyway, so.

Continue, 2J, Max.

Max, he has an Azuzu pickup, and it's entirely tube frame. So essentially the only thing that's left that's still in Azuzu pickup is the body. So the entire rest of the frame, the floor, everything is all hand fabricated, hand made, and it has a, it's actually not a 2J, it's a 1J, but same, same, right? They all make the same noises.

Somebody's punching the windshield right now.

Somebody's really mad. I even have a hotter tank than that about Jay-Z's, so.

We're gonna forget, you better just say it now.

RB's sound, look, RB's sound better than Jay-Z's.

Well, you're the second person on this podcast.

Really? Good.

Yeah, cause if you watched episode 84 with the patients guest.

Oh my God, this guy's always got the callback. So Max, Max's truck was the second car that I tuned, the first one being my own. So Max and I, obviously we worked together at MAP and his truck was finished and started. And this was after Brian had left MAP and-

Brian.

May.

Okay, gotcha.

Ever ratified.

The man behind many beamers.

Yes, yeah. And Brian had helped wire, they had exchanged some labor. Like Max built a cage for his E90 and then Brian wired the truck for him and set up the base map and stuff. And Brian was busy with some other stuff cause he was in between jobs. So Max is like, well, I want to go drifting. Like, do you think you could take a stab at it? And I was like, sure. So just kind of spent some lunch breaks, getting familiar with not only the AEM Infinity platform, but the truck and the whole setup in general. So I think I retuned the car three or four times for more power and we did some setup changes. He actually crashed it at one point and redid a bunch of the stuff after the crash. So I've done quite a few Jay-Z's. I kind of know where they live and how happy they are.

Do you enjoy working on them in general?

I haven't had to do a ton of work on them. Mostly just tuning.

The tuning side?

Yeah. And I mean, it's every tuner's favorite engine for a reason. They make good power and they hold together pretty good. So I think that's a big motivation for a while. A lot of people choose them and why the For Supra is so infamous because it does respond really well to mods and stuff like that.

You said that was every tuner's dream is kind of just how you described it. Is there anything that's like I would never ever work on? Or are we at risk of you getting fired?

No, no. No, honestly.

Is there anything that's difficult, I guess? It's probably a better way of putting it.

I mean, everything has its nuances. I feel like the only thing that becomes difficult is when you're unfamiliar with something. And if there's something that's kind of obscure that you're not used to. Like, I don't work on Audis, and I have before, and I suck at it. So if you ask me what's difficult to work on, I would say an Audi. And that's different for anyone. If you went and asked Blake at Ratified, you know, how is it working on Audis? And he goes, it's the easiest thing in the world because he's a beast, right? But if you worked on a Honda, maybe if you worked on a Honda, it would be hard. I don't know, probably not. But in general, like, it's always when you experience something different. That's when things become a little bit challenging and difficult. And then once you kind of figure out everything, everything's nuts and bolts. And you sort of power through it until you become familiar. So nothing like off the top of my head goes like, oh, man, that really stinks to work on.

But I'm sure there is something that I'm sure you've had projects that were difficult, though.

Yeah, I mean, everything there is no world that anyone lives in where like you can put a car together and it just works the first time and everything's perfect. I mean, even if like there's a difference between having like a catastrophic issue and then having just like a minor inconvenience, right? But I feel as if there's never a time where like even as a professional, like you don't come across like, oh, damn, like I should have done this. Like that's just a part of the game. Like you're always trying to get better and try to improve your craft. So if you're not running into issues, that means you're probably not like, I wouldn't say paying attention, but you're not trying to better yourself, I guess is the best way to put it. You should always be looking at something and thinking about, oh, you know, how can I improve this? You know, how can I make this better? That's kind of the whole goal.

So what's kind of your day to day kind of been, especially now that, you know, you guys do have a dyno here versus you working on cars, putting them together to tuning it.

Yeah. So I guess that kind of brings up an interesting like shift in my life. So for the lat, you know, at map for five and a half years, I didn't really have customers, which was nice in some ways. And I was just kind of left to my devices and ended the development side of things. So I didn't really have to worry about anyone except for myself and the rest of my team. Now that I'm here, I have customers again, which is also good. I am a people person and I like interacting with people, which is why I keep saying, let's do more podcasts and hang out. So my day to day here is generally like the first 30, 45 minutes. I'm usually looking over emails and just kind of seeing what's popped up as far as inquiries or, you know, checking either the Lurk Tuning Facebook or the JWP Facebook or just kind of asking us, hey, do we get phone calls about tuning? Is there something I need to answer? Just kind of making sure everything's tidied up in the morning. Generally, then from, so we start at nine. So that's probably till nine thirty, nine forty five. Then from nine forty five to noon to one ish. I'm usually working on like a long term project. So like we talked about there, you guys can't see it. This is a visual bit, but there's a civic over there. Just finish that one. And then to my right is a Nissan Stagia and that's kind of coming to a close. So for the first half of the day is going to be checking in on customers. And then I'm going to be working doing doing big projects is primarily what I'm focused on and kind of buttoning up the tuning stuff. We kind of, you know, let's say that there's a long term project that kind of needs to be finished up. Maybe it's 90 percent of the way done. We might kind of block off the tuning schedule for the rest of that week or whatever so I can finish up whatever I'm doing. But a typical work week, I have three to four tunes during the week. So half of my day is going to be spent wrenching on a car. And then the other half is going to be spent tuning. Yeah, because we do have neighbors on the other side of the cameras on the other side of the wall is another business. And they do actually have an office over there. So we try to keep tuning to kind of the later half of the day to just be cordial and not be s***** neighbors. So we do kind of move that to the other half of the day. So the beginning half of my day is cars, working on cars, wrenching and being hot and sweaty. And then the other half of my day is sitting on a keyboard and sometimes being hot and sweaty if it doesn't have AC.

No, I think that's I think that's reasonable. But also, you know, it's really not that bad, right? Like you do one poll, how frequently?

It depends. So like the car I did today was a Subaru WRX 22 or a VB chassis WRX, which is a flash based tuning software through Cobb. And that one, you know, you have a decent amount of downtime waiting for anything that's a flash base. So it's using a stock ECU generally has a little bit of downtime. It's not an instantaneous change. That platform in particular is frustrating because there's no real time tuning, meaning every time I make a change and I want that change to be applied, I have to shut the car off, key it on, flash, key it off, key it back on, and then key it off for 15 seconds before I can start another run. So there's a little downtime between there. If it's something that's like on a standalone, like a Haltech, a Link, AM Infinity, Series 1, Series 2.

Something that has live tuning.

Yeah, that'll have live tuning features. So I mean, it's do a pull, look at the log, decide if I'm going to make a change or if I want to verify something, then make a change and then immediately go back to doing a pull. And honestly, the only downtime is like, is the engine hot? Is the intake hot? Stuff like that. So it really depends on the platform and what car you're doing is to like the frequency. And to like, I try to be obviously we're in an open environment. It's a little bit different than how it was at MAP. And this whole program here isn't even that old, right? We're less than a way less than a year old. I guess seven months.

Has it been that long? Oh, yeah, I guess it is. Wow, time is flying. So I guess everything about enclosing this little area.

That's for sure that, you know, you can only you can only piss away so much money, right? So yeah, you have to verify. We had to kind of, you know, work the environment and see, you know, is this sustainable? And so far, everything's been been great and customers have been happy and everybody's been pretty good about everything. The guys in the shop, you know, aren't upset or, you know, threatening to leave because it's noisy and stinky. Everybody's pretty excited. And that's another thing I really love about this place is there's a lot of excitement.

You know, how could you not be right when I came in here to do some filming for Sean and for David over at DRC Automotive? It's like when the Camaro was here and the EVO is here. It was super cool. Yeah, right. Now, granted, yeah, it does stink up shop. It is ridiculously loud. But if you come prepared for that, like exactly.

And everybody is they're aware of their situation. It's not like they're coming to work one day and they're like, oh, there's a dyno here. It's like, no, everybody knows this year. Like they know it's here and they know what's going on.

Somebody just comes in.

Yeah, somebody rolled this thing in here. No. So, I mean, everybody kind of knows knows the deal and everybody, like I said, there's a lot of excitement and enthusiasm that kind of flows throughout the shop. So everybody's, you know, if something's cool is on the dyno and let's say, you know, maybe it's lunchtime or something like that, like stop, take a video and ask what's going on. Oh, how much power is this making? Like nobody's like, I don't see anybody in the corner like pissed off throwing wrenches like, oh, damn, he's making another pull, making it all noisy in here. But obviously, the the goal and the long term, you know, is to have a cell have a controlled environment that, you know, maybe we could do some artificial weather or something like that, you know, try to keep it a little bit cooler in here. That's a that's a big problem we face is it's a, you know, it's a big open shop with not a not a ton of great ventilation. So it gets pretty humid and pretty musty in here. Being able to kind of control that would be would be nice. Maybe having some, you know, if it's in a cell, we can do AC in the cell, something like that. And there are you have to have air exchange kind of like how we had a map where it was big fans on the ceiling that exchange the air so you don't die. That kind of throws a wrench and things.

But so is dying.

Yeah. So is dying. We try to not do that. In all honesty, the only thing that ever bugged me when tuning in the dino cell was pump gas like E85. Oh, sorry. Pump gas and methanol. If you ever been around a methanol car, it's it's brutal. And I can't imagine like driving one. I maybe it doesn't bother them while driving. I have no idea. I have zero experience. But Mark Leisure had his I don't know if you've seen that car before.

That's the talent.

Yep.

The blue ones.

Yeah, it's a talent. His blue one G. He used the dino a few times at MAP. And one of the times I mean, that car is so ridiculous. We have no idea how much power makes because every time it makes a hit, it just blows the tires off. It makes a thousand horsepower spinning.

Was it high sevens or low weights?

I think he went seven eight.

Yeah.

Yeah. Moving.

That's crazy. I've heard good things about him in that car.

Yeah. Mark's awesome. He's a super, super smart guy. And he's also extremely friendly and easy to talk to. But yeah, he was renting the dyno. And I was just kind of there as support, like making sure straps aren't coming loose or anything goofy. The example I was trying to bring up was that the car made so much power and the exhaust energy was so violent, it blew open a cabinet and blew a piece of paper or rag out or something. And I was afraid that the turbo was going to suck in the rag. So I ran into the dyno cell, no mass, no nothing, right after doing a pull on methanol and ran in, grabbed the piece of paper, ran out, and my eyes were full of tears instantaneously. I mean, that was the most gnarly thing I've ever felt when it comes to fuel. It's tough.

What are your thoughts on methanol for street cars?

Does anyone do that? Or are you talking about meth injection?

Oh, I suppose. Why don't you distinguish it for the listener?

So running methanol as a fuel is just a very... What's the exotic fuel type? And it has a lot of benefits, particularly with cooling and anti-knock properties. I don't have a ton of experience with tuning on methanol, or actually any at all, pretty much just what Mark and I had gone over when he was making the jump from an ethanol-based fuel to methanol. He kind of had sent me some stuff. He's like, hey, you should read this. This is really interesting, which was awesome, because that's what I love doing, is kind of just reading and learning the nuanced stuff. But, so yeah, methanol as a primary fuel is just an exotic fuel. And then when people talk about meth injection, that's generally a mix of methanol and water. There's a couple different formulas that people use. And they're using that.

When you say formula, you mean ratios of methanol to water?

Yeah, I think it's usually 50-50.

That's what I've heard, too.

And I've only attuned a handful of cars that use meth injection, because we might get controversial here. But I don't like using meth injection as either a substitute for an intercooler. That's what a lot of people use it for, because they're going to use the water and methanol mixture to help cool the intake air temps. Or you can use it as a fuel adder. If you're a DI car that's running out of a fuel injector, you can use it as a substitution for a port fueling or something like that. And in my opinion, in both scenarios, it's a band-aid.

A band-aid for what?

Well, what I just said. Either you have high intake air temps or you are running out of... Usually they're being used on direct injected cars because if you had a port fueling car, it's simple enough to put different injectors on it, right? So with a DI car, if you're out of injector and you're experiencing misfires or you're just trying to raise the amount of power you're making, or if you're a non-intercooled car or a car with a kind of a lackluster intercool setup, then you need to drop the intake air temps. That's another way that you can do it. In both scenarios, the likelihood of having an engine failure if the meth injection system stops working is very, very high.

Oh, I've driven a car that was out. And it's a nerve-wracking drive. But I knew there was more there. That's why I pressed.

You prided a little bit.

Acting like I'm not listening to you. Breaking my heart over here, Kyle.

Yeah, I just have always seen it as a band-aid. And like, whereas you could, there's generally, there's a better solution. And like the thing that makes me fearful of meth injection is either running out, like your tank goes low. And the better meth injection systems do have like a tank level sensor. So they will, you know, it all depends, you know, is this system communicating with the ECU or is it not? Because if it is, then there's possibly fail safes in place that could prevent an engine failure from happening. Let's say you run out of your, you know, water meth setup. The other thing that the controller will not know, because it's just simply a solenoid telling it to turn on and spray this water meth mixture into the intake is if the nozzle is clogged. And if that happens, like it's going to turn on, you're going to hear the pump on, it's going to tell you that it's on. Like the AEM controller is the one that I'm more familiar with that has like a light when the solenoid actually clicks on and it starts injecting the water meth. Everything is going to seem normal and fine other than the engine is going to be super unhappy because it's actually not flowing anything. So that's always what makes me fearful of water meth is you just too many variables that you really can't control and things can get really messy really quick if something doesn't work. And like you need that water meth in the most extreme conditions, wide open throttle, full boost, full power, and that's if you run out of fuel or if your intake air temps are skyrocketing, that's when stuff melts down.

Or when you see meth fires. We've seen one of those recently.

It's tough to see.

Yeah, I'll show you a picture after.

And I would say the comeback to that is like, well, your ECU should have fail safes built into it, either for intake air temps or if the car is running lean. And the reality of that is, is a lot of times it's going to happen too quickly for even the ECU to react. Intake air temp sensors are inherently slow, and they take a while. They kind of catch up. If I do a pull on the dyno, the air temps might be fine, and then by the end of the pull, they're going to be hot. And when the air speed starts to slow down, and some of that has to do with sensor heat soak and stuff like that, but most people are in agreement that most intake air temp sensors are relatively slow, so they might not catch the rise in heat as quickly. Or let's say you have enough water meth to make it through half of a pull, and then it shuts off halfway through. Is it really going to have enough time to catch that? Using it as a fuel adder, like a more modern car, a DI car, is generally going to run full time closed loop, meaning that it's going to have some amount of fueling correction based on the feedback from the O2 sensor. But if you are out of injector, and you need that water meth to supplement the additional fueling, there's nothing more that the ECU can do, right? It can't inject any more fuel if it doesn't have any more, there's no more flow rate left. So, that's kind of the way I look at it is like, there's got to be a better way. That's generally my, when people ask me like, what do you think about doing water meth? I always say, there's probably a better way.

I just in general have seen, it just seems complicated, right? For like a regular street car, I mean. Now granted, if you're using it for racing applications, different story.

Yeah, and I don't think most, I think most guys that are using it are using it in a street application. Like a race car, like you don't, there's really no excuse for not having an adequate intercooler, right? And there's not really an excuse for not having adequate fueling, because it's a race car. Like, you know, it's not going to have the luxuries of a street car. I would say like some of the FK8 and FL5 Type R guys, they use it. I think some of the Volkswagen Audi guys use it. It's kind of gone away. It's not super popular anymore. I think people have kind of realized that there in fact is a better way, but there are still people that are like, you know, should I use this? And it's one of those things to power the internet. You know, if you search something on a forum, a lot of that stuff is old tech and old information, and they're going to tell you, oh, yeah, I used water meth, and it's the best solution, but that post might be from 2010. And if you don't look, then you're going to say, well, this guy said it works, so I'm going to use it.

Check valves.

Yeah.

That was such a fun part of that episode. By the way, just walk into a PetSmart.

Let me grab that off the shelf, man. You got to get crafty when you're a car guy. Not everything is going to be readily available to you.

Sometimes you just get an instance of being crafty. Like if you ever use a dreidel bag for something, or like, let's say a Gatorade bottle.

I mean, for like a coolant overflow. I like, you know, I try to try to plan ahead whenever possible. You know, like, yeah, I've been stranded on the side of the highway and had to Jerry rig something together. That's just part of being a car guy, right? Like, if you don't have a road trip story with your buds about like having to fix something on the side of the road, then...

Do you have any fun road trip stories?

I think I've already told them. I don't remember if we talked about when I went to Texas. I think we talked about when I went to Texas 2K. Well, I went to Texas 2K in 2019. We drove down there with my buddy Josh and Junior and Josh's dad. And we drove his Duramax. I don't think it was a Duramax. I think it was just a regular Silverado. Yeah, it was. It was just a 5.3, run of the mill, cat-eye Silverado. Towing Josh's Evo. He has an Evo 8, makes like somewhere in the 7, 750, maybe even 800 range, depending on how much he cranks it up. We were halfway there. Kansas City? No, what?

I don't know. That's not halfway.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we were Kansas City. And I don't remember if there was a noise or if the truck just shut off or if the, I think the, oh, the power steering went away. And then whoever was driving, I don't remember who was driving at the time. It wasn't me said, oh, we lost a belt. There's no power steering. So then we pulled into like the nearest like exit off the highway and parked in a Jimmy John's and like open the hood on the truck. And the belt tensioner had completely destroyed itself. It was melted like the pulley itself had melted. And the belt broke into a million pieces and was all shredded. So then we're like kind of scratching our heads and we're like, okay, what do we do? And unloaded the Evo. And I think I myself and Junior hung out while Josh and his dad drove to like the nearest O'Reilly's that was still open because you know, that's the beauty of driving a very common truck in the United States is any parts store is going to have a belt and a serpentine tensioner. So they went and got a belt and we just pulled out a bag of tools and fixed it on the side of the road while eating a Jimmy John's sandwich. And then on the way we went. But it's just little stuff like that, you know, that just kind of part of being into cars, even if it's not even your race car that breaks, it's just your tow rig or daily driver. You know, everybody has, you know, another one would be my buddy Aaron.

Hold on, before we get too far. People like to say I ask good questions on this podcast. What did you eat at Jimmy John's?

I get a turkey tom with cheese and extra lettuce.

All right, cut that out, Jamie.

Come on, man. Jimmy John's, I like, I don't know. I just, I like to stay a little safe with Jimmy John's. Sometimes I'll get a little crazy at Subway, but. Otherwise, at Jimmy John's, I'm playing it safe. I'm sticking to what I know.

Subway is crazy, by the way. Like, they're doing some ridiculous stuff on their menu and we're getting off topic again.

Dude, did you try the Big Pretzel? That's awesome.

Yeah, they got Big Pretzel now.

They have a huge pretzel. But it doesn't, it doesn't come with cheese. It comes with honey mustard. What kind of psychopath decided that? I can't believe, how do you not know?

Have you ever tried fried cheese with Mahoney before?

Yeah.

It's really good, I don't know.

Or like goat cheese with honey? That's really, really good.

Noted. All right, second story, we're getting at.

Oh, yeah, like, I mean, it's whatever. Just another car breaking down thing. Like my buddy Aaron had a turbo CRX and I had my turbo Civic and we were just, you know, out cruising around. I think we were on 494 in Bloomington and common Honda failure to this, the distributor, the coil in distributor stopped working and we were stuck under a bridge and then out flat towed his CRX with my Civic off the highway. Like stuff like that. Like you, if you're a car guy, you're always going to have weird stuff like that happening. And you know, it's just part of part of doing this stuff. You're always going to run into those kinds of nuance. I have to just make whatever work kind of a deal. But nothing like, you know, patching an oil pan with a pop can or something like that. I've never had to do anything like that. So that's, I'm sure there's plenty of people that have JV welding oil pans back together. I'm sure there's plenty of people.

I can't remember what story it was, but one of the guys I had on a PRI to drag and drive guys, they had some crazy story, the guy that won the championship, I had to look back. It was ridiculous.

But I mean, those drag and drive guys are dedicated. Like I mean, and it's you pour a bunch of money into it and you take all the time off and to do it like I can understand why you're going to do whatever it takes to finish it. You're going to go to whatever lengths and go to whatever place and do whatever you need to do to finish that because like that's your whole week. And like it would suck to go home early because you had to like imagine getting breaking something the first day and then going, well, now what do I do? You know, like I can understand why those guys are always going above and beyond to like keep the cars running and like we'll stay up all night just to make one pass the next day.

No, we saw that at Road America for the Optima Streetcar Challenge. Granted, this is like an actual race team, the Trans Am, but like they were working the car. I s*** you know, it was just a bare chassis like at 10 p.m. at night and they worked through the entire night and reassembled the car. I'm talking like every panel was off the car, motor was out, everything. Just ridiculous. What's your ratio of race car to street car in here? I don't know if you touched on that earlier on.

Yeah, I did a little bit, but I would say most of my customers are like street car based. And you know, I will say that like Minnesota still is sort of behind in the sense of like import drag racing.

Which this last event at the Speed Summit was a step in the right direction.

Yeah, I would say that was like kind of bringing what we can do into the limelight and like showing people that like there is a scene for this and people, you know, I was a sticker sponsor for the event because it was something that meant something to me, right? And Nate and Carrie have always been good to me. Those guys have been around for a long time and kind of asked if I wanted to pitch in because they knew that I was, you know, enthusiastic about drag racing and the scene and want to help push it. I mean, that's part of what I like about tuning and doing all this is that I'm able to kind of help people. This is really cringey and cliche, but like help people reach their goals and their dreams. Like that's a really cool part of doing this. And I think we're still kind of behind, at least in terms of comparison to other cities of, you know, drag race cars. Like there's just not a ton right now. I think people are starting to move towards that direction, but I think our scene is still definitely, primarily dominated with street cars. Like an event like power cruises is always packed and that's mostly filled with, granted there are cars that make a ton of horsepower, over a thousand horsepower that are street driven. I think we've kind of lost the touch of reality between street driven and track driven when it comes to levels of horsepower, because there's definitely cars that make more that drive on the street regularly than they do the cars that are on the drag strip.

What a street car is able to do is ridiculous. So, Sean just picked up his GADM3. He actually took me for a ride in it yesterday, my former co-host. He put on the Nitto, the 555R2s. I think that's what they go with. Yeah. So, that car is rear wheel, so it doesn't have DX drive, so he needs a good tire. It's ridiculous. That car, as some people saw on the Minnesota performance page, made high 800s.

Okay. I actually was curious. I'm glad you said that, because I was curious what I saw. I stopped at Moe's, or sorry, Minnesota performance.

The name changes with the season.

That's fine. I was there first. I stopped by Carey shop, upscale designs, which is right next door.

Yes, and I was going to ask, yeah, continue.

Yeah. And Sam was at the shop, and this was before the Speed Summit. But I think this was a different time I saw Sean's car there. At some point, I saw Sean's car there, and I was curious what it ended up making. So, that's cool that it made high eights, you said?

Yes. Yep. And I really hope that he can come on and tell the story of what happened recently.

Don't take that away from him.

I'm not going to take it away from him because I don't want to put him anywhere.

You can tell me off the record.

But what I was getting at is that is a car that's like it's for power crews. But granted, Sean's one of those people that he will drag it, he'll do everything, right? Because you have some people that are street only or track only. It's kind of interesting that she's saying that is we're trying to build that track scene. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

I mean, I'd love to see it. But I also I do think like me personally, I don't drive and my car is not even like a race car or anything crazy. It's a 500 horsepower Honda Civic. Like it is nothing that's crazy. It's by no means breaking any boundaries or doing anything. It's not even impressive. But I just don't drive it because it's not comfortable.

It should be a future t-shirt. Not even impressive.

Yeah, it's it's just I mean, it's just a f*** around car. And there's nothing like it. It's fun to go cruise on the street and like maybe you'll beat up on some unsuspecting other enthusiast on the road. But it's not breaking any records or anything. But at the same time, like it's a 500 horsepower Honda Civic. It has stiff suspension. It has solid motor mounts. It's not comfortable to drive. It sucks to drive. That's why I don't drive it every day.

I thought you don't drive it because it's broken.

No, it runs and drives.

Oh, it runs. Oh, it's good now.

Yeah, it runs and drives. I just I just don't drive it. I won't ever sell it because I'll never find one again for the price. And I'll never find one that has the sentimental value or anything like that.

You'll regret it forever.

Yeah, exactly. Like I own the car outright. There's no and like, sure, I could get a decent amount of money for it. It's a clean Honda Civic with a turbo on it, right? I could get some amount of money for it. But like, it just there's I could also make money by just working really hard. So to me, it doesn't really the way I always look at money, we're getting into a finance podcast here. Sure, the way I always look at money is like, as soon as it leaves my account, leaves my hands, that money is gone. I don't ever expect a return on whatever I just bought that once I once I that money leaves my account, it's just gone. And this might be a terrible way of managing money. But for me, I'm never thinking about what am I going to get out of that? I mean, I think a lot of people like build cars with like the the hope that like, oh, I can drive this for six months and enjoy it and then I'll sell it and make back what I spent or close to it and then build another car. And I think that kind of gets you into like a deep rabbit hole. And to me, like you should just build it, enjoy it and just have it and feel like you own it. Right. So that I don't drive my car because I was like, oh, I want this to be like I said, it's not a race car, but like it has no interior. It's a race car. You know, it's a it's a street strip car and it's just not it's not fun. It's not comfortable. But now you can build cars that make a ton of power and still go on the street and still be comfortable and you can drive it every day.

I would see 80s are a prime example of that, dude. That thing I mean, it debating how much I want to give away. It's ridiculous.

Right. Yeah. I mean, and you can do all that. You can have you can have cruise, you can have radar cruise. Like you can make 800 horsepower and have radar cruise. You can get in your car and go on a road trip and press cruise and then never touch the brake pedal or the gas pedal and just drive for hours.

What is in your Civic?

Where I was in my Civic. I don't even have a I got two windows. That's my AC. And the cruise control is, you know, like how cramped my leg is. So like that. Yeah, there's, you know, I feel like if you're going to build a car, you've got you got to pick in my opinion, like if you build a car that's comfortable, right, you're not going to be the fastest on the track in comparison to somebody that, you know, it's got it. It's got a cage. It's got all these mods that, you know, make the car handle better on the track. You're not going to be able to compete with that guy. But at the same time, you're going to get a lot more time and enjoy. Well, I wouldn't say enjoyment, because I know plenty of track guys that do not care that they drive their car only just gluttons for punishment. They don't care that they work on their car, you know, more than half of the season and they drive it eight times a year, right? They are perfectly happy with that. And you know, that's how it should be. You should be happy with what you have. But if you if you if you want to drive your car often and you want to be happy with it, and I'm sure like people are going to be, oh, this guy's talk, I drive around a car with no roof and no doors and I love it. Like, sure, I might make you happy. But I think for most guys, you know, don't even get me started with them.

Oh, you got beef.

I just got beef with the guys with no doors. And they got their toes hanging out. I swear to God, I see another Jeep with the guy hanging his toes out of it. I'm going to drive past him and grab his toenail off. I can't stand.

Have you seen the video of GTI literally exactly like mine with all four doors off cruising down the highway?

Sure was on TikTok.

Yeah, I'm sure it was so awful. Somebody texted me and they're like, you should do this. I'm like, I didn't do it when I had a Jeep.

No, I will not be doing that. But yeah, I, you know, in my opinion, building a car that like is just on the kind of the ragged edge of comfortability and still having fun fun is like the best place to be. But drag racing is a necessity. It drives everything. Everything's a trickle down. Like it goes government contracts, so military. And then it goes race cars like NHRA, you know, big power, pro mod stuff, and it goes to those guys. And then you go to like your weekend warrior drag race guys, and then it trickles down to street cars. So there's always like there's always a need for those guys that want to push the envelope and want to go as fast as possible because it benefits everybody. And that's what keeps the sport alive. And I would love to see that continue in Minnesota and more people be really enthusiastic in that. Enthusiastic about drag racing and kind of putting Minnesota on a map and and making a name for themselves. I think that's awesome.

But a good way of putting in more Minnesota government contracts.

I don't know if I said that I was making everything comes from space, man.

Oh my God. I need to start doing mushrooms on this podcast.

Jesus.

What platform would you say you're the most knowledgeable on then? Would Honda's be it then for sure what goes into making a fast Honda and I guess you could choose which generation platform?

Ultimately, it depends what you're going to do. Like when you say fast, do you want a fast three car? Do you want a fast drag car?

That's a good point. Have you okay? So here's another trickle down question. Have you done many like road course cars?

I've done a few. And like that's when I the thing about like road racing and I guess I don't want to be like negative, but road race cars are some when it comes to like my portion of it, which is like the tuning. I don't have a ton of time and energy and knowledge when it comes to like suspension tuning and aero and stuff like that. That's just not really my wheelhouse right now. But when it comes to like the engine performance and how much power the car makes, a lot of these road race guys, they don't really care all that much, right?

There's a sweet spot for power.

They want to be they want to make just as much the same amount of power as the guy next to him, right? Because at the end of the day, what they're looking for is to outdrive them. And sometimes you can have you can get into a scenario where the car makes too much power for the driver and then you end up being way slower with double the horsepower of the guy next to you. So when it comes to road race guys, most of the most of my tuning isn't even spent like trying to chase a big number goal. It's just trying to make sure that the car drives well in every condition.

And more importantly, like where they're making power probably as well.

Yeah. And like some like GLTC, like they have a that's the grid life global. Yeah. Touring car. Touring car. When we were at MAP, we had a lot of guys rent the dyno to use because GLTC, I might be miss speaking here, so don't murder me if I am, but I could have swore it was GLTC. They require you to have verified dyno runs of like the car making X power because there's weight restrictions and it's based on class and stuff like that. So they have to actually, you know, they can't exceed a certain level of horsepower. They have to add weight or remove weight.

Same thing with NASA. One of, actually, the Camaro that was here, Nick's blue Camaro, I don't know if you remember it was on this dyno.

Yeah. Well, it has to be on a dyno jet.

It has to be on a dyno jet?

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

I told Gus that. Pretty much all sanctioned race leagues require a dyno jet because.

Oh, interesting.

A Mustang dyno is a loaded dyno that has an eddy current retarder, which is what applies load to the wheels. A Mustang, or sorry, a dyno jet dyno is an inertia based dyno, meaning it's a fixed roller and it has no, well, some ratifieds dyno jet does have an eddy retarder, but it's not used during a wide open throttle pull. So all of the calculation of, and it's a math formula that I'm not going to repeat because I'll butcher it. But an inertia based dyno is just all based on math and the weight of the roller. And that's what creates load. And because of that, there's effectively, there's very, very little chance that you can skew the numbers. Whereas a retarder dyno, it's pretty easy to go in and change some parameters and then either make way more or way less. So that's why most sanctioned race events that have like a horsepower limitation will say that it has to be a dyno jet. And they will tell you it needs to be a certain correction factor and all this other stuff. Pretty much the, as far as I'm aware, because I've never tried to do this, maybe there is a way to do it and I'm just not privy to it. But as far as I'm aware, really the only way you could skew the reading on a dyno jet dyno is by like taking the weather station little dongle thing, which is just basically measures, you know, the air temp, the humidity, all that. And you like put that, let's say you put it in like a really hot environment. So the dyno thinks that like the room is like super overly heat soaked. So it's going to add a positive power correction then so it so it makes more. It's telling then most people wouldn't do this, but it's saying it's making more than it actually is where you could go the inverse, you put it in a fridge, right? And so it thinks the room's really cold. And so then it makes it's going to correct negatively.

Interesting. So saying that it's making less power than it actually is.

Right. Because it's saying and like, God, I hope I'm quoting that right. But that is the math seems to math in my head.

Don't worry, because if this becomes a highlight, I fact check it. So the actual episode is where you get the disclaimers. I get the disclaimers.

The armchair physicists will tell me I'm wrong. But it's okay.

You put a disclaimer in there like I'm 90% sure.

But yeah, I mean, that's that's generally like how most weather correction factors work. Like if it's colder in here, right? Because what they're trying to do is like say in optimal conditions, like when you're using a weather correction factor, it's saying in an optimal condition, which you are currently not in, this is what you would expect. So if it's colder, and when I say colder than optimal, there's really no, the colder the better, right? It's been at least excluding traction. But like if it's colder than what you would say normal or ideal is, then you would scale down because of the car is going to be making more power than normal. And then the inverse when it's hot and humid, the air is less dense. So you're going to be making less so then the weather correction scales it upwards. So yeah, most back to what you were saying, the most most sanctioned events like that will require a dyno jet to be used and they're going to require like three verified pulls. And they want you to like sign it off. I had to do it a couple of times. What we're talking about road course tuners.

Yes.

Yeah. So I would say a big part of tuning road course cars is spent doing kind of the same with drifting, actually, too, is like transitional throttle is a huge thing. Like you have to be able to get back into the throttle, into the gas, and it has to be smooth. There can't be any hiccups, stuff like that. That's really, really important to those guys. A drag race car, they might not even really care because, you know, let's say it's either sequential or it's a dog box transmission that has a strain gauge. So you're never even, your foot's never coming off the floor. You're just banging the next gear and you're never touching the clutch. There's no re-engagement of the throttle. So like a drift car or road race car where you're kind of always having throttle inputs, you need that to be smooth. So a ton of time is spent making sure that like that's as perfect as it possibly can be. Another one with both drifting and road course is like part throttle, high RPM, because that's where you're going to spend a lot of your time and you need that to be perfect.

Have you done many dog box cars?

I've done a few. I mean, there's that and there's not really anything inherently different about them. It's just noisy. That's really it. I mean, you have to shift it a little bit harder, but there's not like any like, oh, you got to do this differently. Like the only thing, the only transmission that's ever terrified me was Matt Cornea's Turbo 400. And that's because I had like, he had just finished the car and just wanted to make a couple pulls in the dyno and do a little bit of tuning. And like the night before we were supposed to do it, I watched some Facebook video on sloppy mechanics of somebody like doing a pull and the engine shutting off and then the center of the transmission exploding and going through the floor. And I'm like, oh, that's like a thing that happens like kind of semi regularly. If you mess something up like that's that's kind of terrifying that like my legs could just be severed from the rest of my body. Yeah, I guess I'm not super privy to it. I'm not a turbo 400 guy. But my understanding like there is some like you're not supposed to want to shift when they're spinning, I think is one of them. And then like second gear, some like if the engine shuts off, the input shaft and some other shaft does some crazy physics and then explodes. So yeah, I was terrified. That's the only time I've ever been terrified of a transmission was doing a turbo 400 car. Some people are like, ah, you're fine and just send it. And that's what my coworkers told me. And everything worked out okay. But I was a little bit nervous. I was.

You said you watched that video the day before?

Yeah, like the night I was like laying in bed scrolling through Facebook and it's like, oh, here's like a turbo LS truck with a turbo 400. And this is going to be similar to Matt's car. And then I just like watch the center of the transmission rocket through the roof.

Like I was like, if you find that video, you need to send it. That is that sounds terrifying.

Yeah. And then like the comments are full of like, oh, yeah, I did the same thing. Like my engine blew up on the drag strip and then the transmission exploded. It has something to do with automatic transmission. People that do auto trans are wizards, even like a simple one, like a turbo 400 is there's still so much stuff going on, you know, fluids going everywhere and applying clutches and D applying clutches. It's a lot of wizardry versus us manual guys. It's like, oh, yes, one gear and then the next sliding a collar. It's really easy.

But you're still tuning autos, right? Yes.

It's not super popular. And I would say the biggest platform that I'm tuning that I'm seeing like a lot of auto transmissions is Nissan's. So like a lot of G 35 and G 37. Another funny thing we'll get to in a second. But yeah, those cars, I see a lot of autos and there's not like a ton of tuning that goes into them through the engine management software. It's essentially just telling the transmission controller how much additional power is being made in the engine. So that way it can apply line pressure appropriately and too much, too little is going to cause issues. So I don't do like a ton of manual transmission tuning, like a turbo auto or sorry, auto.

It's skinned towards that part of the day.

I worked all day. But like a lot like a turbo 400, that's going to be like a manual valve body. And like there's not a lot. There's not really any effective tuning on the laptop that there's no computer telling you what to do, like a 4L60 or a 4L80, they have and there's some level of control there. Like you can mess with the line pressure and tell it when to shift and when not to shift. But like the real fast ones like that are on a turbo 400. And I think a power glide to are mostly like a manual valve body. There's not there's stuff that goes into like, like lock up converters and like dump valves and stuff like that. Nothing that I've ever experienced. That's like I said, nine times out of 10. That's primarily on a domestic car, which I don't do a ton of. So I'm not the guy to tell you how to tune your auto transmission. Most, most, if not all of my clients aren't a manual transmission, excluding like a few ones here and there. And then, like I said, the Nissan Infinity guys, I see quite a few of those and they seem to work okay. And the tuning side of it seems to go fairly as expected. Most somebody once told me like 70% of tuning is just diagnosing whatever's f***** up on the car. And then the other 30% is actually doing the tuning and, you know, it's the same.

Something one of our friends would say.

Yeah, it's the famous like last words of anybody is like, oh, it just needs a tune. And like a car will run on a pretty s***** tune and make it back and forth. If it really doesn't run, it's generally a mechanical thing. I was going to say generally, it's not all the time, but you would be surprised like the level of incorrect calibration in a car will still run halfway decent or not. Well, I shouldn't say halfway decent. It will run. I guess that would be the better, more acceptable.

So what I'm hearing is the Facebook marketplace, the classic, it just needs a tune.

Sometimes that's correct though. Like somebody, sometimes like a few of the cars in here people bought and then they brought to us and they said, you know, I bought this car, I didn't do any of the work. It doesn't run very well. The person that I bought it from said that they just finished it and it needed to be tuned like a car on a standalone. You see who is going to not run very well if it doesn't have a well configured base map. Like that's just that's just how it is. I would say the newer, more modern, like you can throw a downpipe and an intake on a new BMW and it's going to run like it'll figure it out. It'll figure it out. It'll be fine. But like a car in a standalone that needs like it needs to be configured correctly is either not going to start or not run at all unless it's configured correctly. And that that does that is the case of like, oh, maybe it does just need a tune. But like if your 335 with downpipes and dual cone inlets just needs a tune, I'm going to call b******* on that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Now, if it's a big turbo car and it's all that, then it might just need a tune. But a lot like, like I said, a lot of times there's mechanical, you know, hardware issues that are present on the car. And that's a bigger factor as to why it runs like s***. And it's not actually the tune. What I was going to bring up before you start talking again on the second episode, I got a lot of flack for cutting down the guys with the cracks and bangs tune.

Oh, I, fun fact, when I got my when I got my reflash yesterday, I got rid of my burbles altogether. They're gone, gone, gone. So because I basically had a quiet mode and an obnoxious mode.

Yeah.

And I was like, I don't need the obnoxious mode.

Because you left it in that all the time?

Depends. Like if I go on a cruise, like, for example, I was going with Dan and the other Mustang guy after our last podcast, and I was like, I had to.

Yeah, you have to.

I'm like, you can't do this Mustang guys.

Now that I tune a lot of Nissans and Infinities, that's a large part of my day is the cracks and bangs.

So you're a big cracks and bangs guy?

I don't want people to know that.

Okay, so you've heard it here, Kyle will do burble tunes. As crazy as you want them.

As crazy as they can be.

As they can be?

Yeah, if you come in here and you want to crack some bangs tune and you still want a cat.

Why did you bring that up?

I don't know, because I thought you would think it was funny because I was so adamant that it was the worst thing in the world. And I don't necessarily love it, but it does like kind of make me giggle a little bit. Like, you know, I kind of get a little enjoyment out of it. So I haven't completely switched sides, let's say.

I'm partial to it. A flame map, for example, or a flame tune, not exactly good for your turbos, right? That's obvious. Same thing applies for verbal tunes. But is it really that bad?

Yeah, I mean, well, here's the thing. If you're a car guy and you're modifying a car, you can throw every expectation of reliability. I don't care what anyone says. I'll be pretty firm on that. No modified car is going to... God, I keep thinking about the reels that are going to come out of this. But no modified car out there is going to last as long as an OEM factory car that's been maintained perfectly its entire life, right? If you modify your car, it might be 100,000 miles, but you will experience an engine failure or a large part failure at some point in your ownership and while driving it. That's just going to happen because you're pushing the engine well past what it was ever designed to do. So things are going to break even with nice internals. Even an overbuilt engine can break. It just happens. It's the nature of it. That's just something you have to live with. So yes, is it hard to run? Two-step or anti-lag, that's all extremely hard on your engine. It's extremely hard on the turbos, but nobody really says, oh, you shouldn't be hitting the two-step because it's a necessity, right? If you want to go fast, you want rolling anti-lag for the street, or you want launch anti-lag for the drag strip, you're going to use it, right? And everybody kind of just accepts that. And we accept that there's going to be accelerated wear on all the parts that are involved in that process.

Yeah, this is all obvious, but I'm talking about verbal tunes.

That's what I'm getting at. It's the same thing. If you want to be obnoxious and make a bunch of noise, you're creating an explosion inside of your exhaust housing, and so that's going to wear things out. They're going to have massive pressure spikes and pressure waves going on in there. That's going to break things eventually.

So it's a choice thing at the end of the day.

Exactly. You have to accept that. That's why I said if you come in and you want to crack some bangs tune on your G37, but you have stock cats in it, if you have stock cats, I probably just won't do it because it's just not going to sound... Well, it's not like it sounds great anyways, but it's going to be really muffled and you will be disappointed, but it'll blow the cats out. Like that's just a fact. Even if you had high flow cats, eventually it's going to degrade the cats and cause them to clog or blow out. So you just kind of have to... And same thing with the valves. You can create micro explosions and pressure waves that hit the exhaust valves and start to break things that way. And it's a choice at the end of the day. You are choosing to have a laugh, I guess as my British friends would say. Versus the longevity of your vehicle. Me and my lights, you're gonna have a bit of a laugh. We got the burble tune.

But no, cause I remember seeing that a lot in the comments. Cause like, you know, it's fun to look at the comments that he's real sometimes.

That's what I do every night.

Yeah, no, I pinned yours. That was a blast. But no, cause like there's a lot of people disagreeing saying, well, it's not going to do anything. It's not going to cause any damage. And that's just blatantly wrong.

I mean, yeah, for the most part, I think there's like a varying degree. There's some cars that come factory with a little bit of burble.

Jaguars come first to mind.

I was thinking of like the Hyundai N Series cars, like the Kona and the, what's the other one?

I didn't know they come with stock burbles.

It's not anything crazy. It's not super aggressive or anything. But there is like a slight rumble. And a big part of what goes into like a flame map or like a burble tomb map is a diesel fuel cut. So like when is the injector, when you're on diesel, when the engine is on diesel, there's not really a much of a reason for the injector to be on and spraying any fuel. There's no load. There's no demand. So most OEMs will shut the injector off until there's a hysteresis between when the injector turns back on and when the car starts to idle again. And there's other parts of that that have to do with drivability on and off throttle. Sometimes you can have a more harsh decel if the injector shuts off too early. So sometimes they'll leave it on, on decel to kind of smooth that transition out. And that's going to naturally, if the exhaust is hot, that's going to naturally cause a little bit of a burble, and you're going to hear that. So there's plenty of cars that come stock that have burbles and they live life totally normal. It's when you get really aggressive and you're dive bombing, it's me rocking the chair. And you're like dive bombing every single underpass you can go under and just put it on max burbles all the time. That's when you're going to see a lot of the accelerated wear. I would say if you're kind of like, oh, you pass your buddy on the highway and you flip into the map with burbles on it and you hear it for a second, then you go about your day and you never turn them back on, you're probably going to be fine, and you're not really going to experience anything. But it's the guys that have it on all the time, and they're racing up and down the freeway, just being ignorant. That's when you start to see some accelerated wear on parts.

I don't think... This one, I promise you, this one's going to be a highlight. I'm just curious, what do you think? Who cuts people off in traffic more, mopars or German cars? Like cutting up traffic, bro.

I got flicked off this morning, so... Yeah? That might be a good... I used my blinker. So, you know... I feel like I live in the primary, or not live in the primary, I think my commute is in like the primary for cutting it up. And I think it's the mopar guys, at least here. I mean...

I've been noticing a lot of Germans.

I went out east like a month or two ago, and I drove all over. I stayed with my buddy in Connecticut, and we drove, you know, New York.

That's a super smart guy you're telling me about.

Yeah, Alex, he is super smart. Yeah, he lives in Connecticut, so we went to Manhattan, we went to Salem, we went to Rhode Island.

Like what, did you do the witch trials?

Yeah, yeah, I went there. It's sweet. The East Coast is like, man, now we're getting into a travel podcast here. If you want to experience like every season and every sort of climate, and you like you want to be in the mountains, but then you also want to be at the beach, the East Coast is where it's at. You can do it all there. And I like people, nobody says, yep, I'm going to vacation in Connecticut. Nobody says that, right? Have you ever heard anybody say I'm going to Connecticut for a vacation? No, doesn't ring a bell. No, but like two minutes from Alex's house, I could drive on the most beautiful driving roads that are like mountainous and curvy. And everything's cool. You could see waterfalls. And then I take an app.

Sounds like my Tinder preferences.

And then you drive an hour towards the ocean. And then you're at a beach. Like it doesn't get much better than that. So being on the East Coast, I felt like I was going to see a lot more BMWs and Mercedes and Audis cutting it up. But I really didn't experience it all that much. Even like going into Manhattan where you would think there's like a plethora of it. So maybe I just somehow avoided all of that. But at least in Minnesota, driving a 94 every day, it's for sure the Mopar dudes cutting it up and just flossing.

The G37s come in every once in a while, too. The G35s.

Yeah, but that's like every G37 owner, every Q50, G37, G35 owner just wishes that they owned a BMW. I mean, that's just how it is.

I thought you were going to say GTR.

No, you know who graduates to a GTR is Evo guys, like Evo 10 guys.

Volkswagen guys too.

Volkswagen and Evo 10 guys.

Have you done many Evos?

No, I actually don't tune Evos. I have tuned, sorry, I have tuned Evos on standalone. I don't do stock ECU Evos currently. It's just kind of a...

But you have done a handful of standalone. Yeah, yeah.

So like Tommy Effiaz, Evo 2, that was on a Haltech. Is that 2 or a 4? 2. And then it was a 2, but it had like 4 skirts and 3 bumper. Evo 1 through 4 or 5 are like, they're like Hondas where you can just kind of switch everything.

Check so.

But I did an Evo 4 like 3 weeks ago that was also on a Haltech. So when it comes to standalone tuning, like as long as you know, I'm going to get a little little in depth here, but as long as like the you understand the workflow of the engine, meaning like does it have a variable valve timing system on it? Does it have some sort of cam advance or variable lift system on it? Like you know all that's going on. And then if you know the trigger pattern of the crank and cam triggers, as long as you know that, then you're essentially just characterizing the engine, which is all tuning is, is saying this is how much airflow is moving through it. And this is how much ignition timing it likes. And this is how it makes power. This, that and the other thing. As long as you can figure out the beginning stuff, like ultimately starting the car, tuning most engines is relatively, like obviously when you get into the exotic stuff, that's way different.

But at a bare bones level, when you say exotic stuff, you mean like exotic cars?

Yeah, like Lambos and like Mercedes, like crazy Mercedes GTRs and stuff like that. That's a whole other world, right? You got to have a lot of time and, you know, knowledge under your belt to really get into that market. Like even the people are like, have you ever tuned to Motek? I was like, no. Like I...

Would you ever take a crack at it?

Sure, if I like, if it was a friend, right? If it was like somebody like, just try this. But like the level, when you get into that really high end stuff, the level of support and the level of detail that you have to have, and like you just, these people are paying so much money, they expect everything to be...

Typically somebody on Motek is on $100,000.

Exactly, like the stakes are extremely high. So like that, in a fair number of years, I'd love to be at that level, but right now, I think I'm perfectly comfortable where somebody can bring me a car and I can give them what they are looking for and give them a great experience at the end of the day. I certainly know my limits, I guess, is what I'm trying to say there.

Do you have a favorite stand-alone?

I'm pretty open. Oh, are you? Yeah, I am sort of leaning... Like, I recommend most people a Haltech.

Why is that?

It's very user-friendly. So let's say you come to me and you get a tune, your car runs great, everything's fine, but you want to change the idle, right? You want it to idle a little bit higher. Like, for you to open the laptop up and be able to change the idle speed, it's fairly intuitive. I could walk almost anybody through how to go in and change something in a Haltech, or even simpler than that, like, oh, when you tuned it, it didn't have an IC7 dash, which is like their digital display. But now I bought one, and I need to configure that and add that. Opening the software and connecting to everything is extremely intuitive and user-friendly.

It looks really... Because I was looking over Sean's shoulder when he was tuning the Camaro, and a little bit when he was doing the EVO, because I think that was Haltech as well. But they literally did... They took out the old Holley harness in one day, put all the Haltech stuff in, in one day and got it running. And I was looking over his shoulder and I was like, this seems... I mean, granted, he knows what he's doing. He's the Haltech guy. Obviously, he's the Haltech guy around here. Is that accurate? Yeah. To make sure I'm not stepping on anything?

No, absolutely not.

He just kicked me all aggressively.

I didn't mean to. I got longer legs. Not long, but longer.

But it was really interesting to see him work, because I was filming the whole thing, and it looked pretty quick.

Yeah, I mean, obviously he's super familiar with it.

Right, he could just crack it open.

He could have taught me, is what I'm saying. But that's the beauty of it. And on the domestic side, a lot of people, like Holley is extremely popular for anything that's LS-based, and a part of that is a lot of these guys that ode to sloppy mechanics, all these guys, the whole idea is doing as much of it as you can yourself. So, you know, really s***** fab work. I shouldn't say s*****, I'm being rude. But like very homebrew fab work and like a swap into like a not great car and then like having a Holley ECU, which again is another one that's fairly simple, fairly intuitive to like get up and going. The Haltech side, which is broad, Haltech is essentially a universal ECU. It can run anything that has a cam and a crank trigger. And it's just very, very easy for somebody to open a laptop, connect, and if they need to change something, they can. Or if they need to see something, let's say they don't have a digital dash and they don't have a gauge for something and they want to see what's going on. Like if they're trying to diagnose something, it's very, very easy for them to get in and see all that. Whereas something like an AEM Infinity, I wouldn't say it's the hardest thing in the world, but for somebody that's never, that has zero experience tuning and has no idea what they're doing, it's a little bit more cumbersome to get in there and configure a custom screen. It's not hard by any means, but that's not what you do every day. It's easy for me to say that that's easy. But somebody that isn't familiar, they might have a tougher time. And I feel like the Haltech really is the best when it comes to making it very simplistic for people to make changes or view things or just honestly just run the device itself. It's really, really easy. So that's what I'm leaning towards. There's nuances with it that I don't love. I would say if I'm looking at a data log, AEM, in my opinion, has the best out of software, meaning their tuning software generally has a built-in data logger that is what you would use while you're physically tuning the car. But if somebody sends me a data log and says, hey, look at this, AEM is my top dog for comparing logs and viewing. It just works very, very well. Haltech, I think, is a little bit more clunky. Ironically, I use Megalog Viewer a lot now, and I didn't use to in the past. And I used to like, eww, Tuner Studios and Megalog Viewer, like this is so old, and just kind of have turned my cheek the other way. But I actually use it all the time now, and I really, really like it because it actually is super, super easy to use and super intuitive. But for the most part, I think Haltech is definitely killing it in the sense of making it really, really easy for people to be successful with their projects. Lincoln AEM, well, the other problem is I used to be like an AEM stan, and I loved everything AEM, and I've kind of strayed away from that, and there's plenty of things that I really dislike about the AEM Infinity software and the ECU architecture itself, but I can't even really b**** about it anymore because I can't tell people to not buy it or to buy it because they discontinued it all. So AEM has made a switch that they no longer, as far as I'm aware, you cannot buy a new AEM combustion engine controller anymore. Everything is EV-swapped based, so it's meant for like a Tesla motor conversion. It's all controllers for electric motors. They still make, you know, wideband O2 sensors and gauges and dashes and a whole plethora of stuff that are meant for internal combustion engines, but I believe the Infinity series is completely discontinued now. So your big two that are pretty hot in the import world, at least, is like Link and Haltech. And Link is good, too. I really like it. It works really, really well. It's not, like I said, it's not as easy to navigate for a beginner as Haltech, but it does work very, very well, and it has a ton of adjustability and configurability. There's some lesser known ones out there that people may or may not have heard of. Max ECU is another semi-popular one, MTRON. I'm trying to think of some other ones. FuelTech is kind of making its way up the ranks. Their ECU is kind of neat because it includes a screen and an ECU all in one, like you don't buy another, like a digital dash. Like the ECU is the dash. So that's kind of a cool... Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a gimmick, but it's a cool feature that comes along with it. And it doesn't like raise the price point double of like if you were just buying, you know, if I was just buying an ECU, it would be $2,000. But because this ECU doubles as a screen, it's $4,000. It's priced competitively with an ECU that is just an ECU and not a screen. I will say with that, there are some nuances with the FuelTech stuff, but a lot of people love it and it works for them. Like that's the biggest takeaway from it. If you can make it work for you and it's fine and it does what you need to do, then it doesn't really matter as long as you have somebody that can support it. Which is why I tried to stay universal. It means that sometimes I'm gonna have a harder time with things like if there's something that's a little bit different or new to me, it's gonna take me a little bit longer to figure out than the guy that only tunes a Haltech or only tunes a Link. But I ultimately haven't really found my place in the world where I'm like, nope, this is just where I wanna sit and this is what I like doing. I kind of enjoy bouncing around. It's fun to me and I feel like I meet a lot of people and learn a lot of things overall because of it.

I recently asked Sam when they were on our podcast for the Ratified episode 91. I was asking where he gets his knowledge and stuff. Do you have that sort of same... Okay, I'm just making sure. Doesn't make me nervous. I mean, do you have that same energy of just wanting to absorb as much information as possible?

Yeah, 100%. And even though I work here, I spend a lot of time at other shops, making friends with people because everybody has a story and everybody has something to share and to teach you ultimately. So, I mean, for me, like a typical night for me right after work is, I get home, say hi to the wife and kid, eat dinner, hang out, you know, put my kid to bed, hang out with my wife for a little bit. And then generally from like 9.30 to midnight, one o'clock, two o'clock, you've experienced the two o'clock random messages. That's usually the best time to get a hold of me. That's like spent either I'm gaming. It's one way or the other. It's either I'm gaming or I'm reading or watching or just consuming some kind of information. It's not even always car related. Like I just kind of like consuming information. That's kind of what drives me.

Big master chef guy over here.

I have been known to cook, cook it up in the kitchen.

Where's the f****** lamb sauce?

I don't do nothing with lamb sauce or Worcestershire sauce. Like pastas, big pasta guy.

I don't think you're too big of a pasta guy.

I wasn't supposed to.

You look like an average size pasta guy.

That's f***** up, man. But yeah, even though I have kind of like a decent amount of knowledge when it comes to tuning, I have never, like I've tried to stay as humble as possible and always understand that there's always something more to learn. So I have paid for many subscriptions for various peoples like tuning seminars and stuff like that.

Anyone in particular?

The one that I liked the most. So I've done HP Academy, EFI University, and the one that I have been like just kind of, you know, whenever I have some downtime and I want to just consume something, it's called Evans Performance Academy, EPA. He's who I've been watching. And a lot of it is because the modules that he does pertains to kind of what I'm doing here. It's, you know, I feel like it relates most well to me. And they're very one-on-one and focused modules where, you know, he kind of walks you through everything and gives as good of an explanation as you can in a, you know, couple hour long seminar. And funny enough, Jeff Evans, who's the guy that runs Evans Performance Academy, was a well-known tuner on the East Coast. And then when the Big Daddy Government got involved and was starting to knock on doors about, you know, performance tuning for street cars, he actually got like a cease and desist from the EPA and was told he couldn't tune cars anymore. I'm hoping I'm quoting this correctly, but this is my understanding. And so when that happened, obviously he had to make a living and had made his living tuning cars, which he was being told he couldn't do anymore. So he started filming these seminars and teaching other people how to tune. And then he named it Evans Performance Academy, which if you spell that out is EPA.

Yeah, I got that immediately. I was like, all right, that's funny. I was like, that's pretty ironic.

That's the story behind it. But yeah, I just, his modules are really, really good. And they're really, really in depth. Like something like the HP Academy, which is I think the most popular.

Would that be HP Tuners?

No, no, no. HP Academy is something different. They're some Australian guys. They do a lot of stuff. Yeah, right. A lot of like, they work, I think, pretty closely with the guys over at Haltech. So a lot of their seminars are, you know, they're using Haltech stuff. They have a lot of webinars that you can view for free, like on YouTube, like they're pretty well known for like their shorts and stuff like that, or like the snippets of their full tuning seminars. So I'd say they're by far like the most easy that comes to mind when people are like, oh, where do you, you know, where do I go to learn about tuning? HP Academy is generally what most people think of.

That's a good baseline one.

Yeah, it's broad. And that's the thing is like, when you're starting out, you have to start broad because you need to learn via experience. You can't just, you know, be like, oh, I'm an expert now. Like it doesn't happen overnight. You need to get your baseline and understand. And then you start to work and learn things and learn by doing. And then you go back and you say, okay, what am I missing? What can I improve? How do I make something? This result was good. How do I make it better? And that's kind of the stage that I'm in right now where I'm like, I am doing a job that people are happy with and they're, I'm having no issues and everything is fine and everything is great and there's no complaints, right? But how do I like get to the next step? How do I, you know, how do I gain that extra 20 horsepower that's left on the table that I know is there, but I'm just not seeing? Or, you know, how do I make it drive even better? Or how do I make it start like that? You know, just those little things, that's what drives you. And that's what gets you to like that upper echelon where you're tuning Motec cars and you're tuning these crazy exotic cars and you're tuning race cars. Like that's kind of the mindset and the mentality that you have to have is, you know, kind of tucking your tail between your legs and going, yeah, maybe I am halfway decent at this, but I can always get better. I can always learn more. So that's what I've kind of been spending. This you're doing is like, I made a name for myself. People know me as a guy that tunes cars and knows me as a guy that they can come to for information, but I don't want to just stop there and be complacent and say, well, this is as good as I'm ever going to be because I know it's not. I know that there's tons of people that know way more than me. And by being around them or consuming media that they put out, that's how I'm going to get better. So I still hang out with all my old mentors like from MAP and stuff like that and talk to them, whether it's, you know, Daylen and Charlie when it's coming to like, I've been doing this stuff for JWP social media for Instagram, so like, you know, leaning on them and kind of working with them with community-based stuff, or if it's talking to Brian at Ratified about tuning or Shane from DB, you know, all these different people that I...

Where is he at nowadays?

Shane?

Yeah.

He's retired.

That's what I thought.

I mean, unofficially, like he isn't, he isn't. I shouldn't speak for him.

But the shop isn't around anymore, right?

It is.

Or DB isn't?

It is, but it isn't. It's not what it used to be, I guess is the best way.

More like invite only sort of deal.

Kind of, I can't speak on it because it's not my place.

Yeah, good call. Yeah.

But it still exists in a way. There's nothing bad happened, I guess is the best way to put it. But Shane has just taken some time for himself. He's been around forever. And like he is like the staple of Minnesota tuning. He's the guy that everybody went to once upon a time. And he just, you know, he had an opportunity to not continue to do that for the rest of his life. And he kind of took some time to say, I might do something different for a little bit, but he's still around. And like I said, I'd still stay in communication with him. And you know, if I have something that I have a question about, yeah, I don't know how I completely space. Sean's here all the time too. So if I have a hall tech question or like, hey, have you ever seen this before? That's the biggest thing. The biggest way to get ahead when it comes to doing something like this is asking questions. And I am someone who is terrified of asking questions because I hate seeming stupid, right?

Which is weird, because you seem very inquisitive from my perspective.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a talker, right? Like that's, half of my job at MAP was presenting and doing social media. So naturally, like I'm very comfortable. But I do try to instill in like anyone that I talk to, like I still have a long journey to go as far as like who I'm going to be. There's always more I can do. There's, you know, it isn't just a, well, you get to this point and then there's no reason I'm going any further. Like I want to keep going because that's just what drives me.

Longtime listeners of the show know that I don't like to peddle BS, whether it's my own merch or to 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's Aqua Bead, 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 got a lot of brake dust from riding people's a**** and having to slam on my 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.

And we're back?

Sure, we're back-ish.

Back-ish.

Yeah, it's just for me to...

Used for you to blend.

So one of the fun things that I've learned producing for other people for the short time that I did, just because I decided to full send it with this, granted I wouldn't mind having more clients to do podcasts for. I learned how to mark things, so it's super easy. I thought about getting a clicker, but I feel like that would make my guests anxious, like click.

Yeah, that's kind of like unnatural, and like yeah, I can see how that would kind of ruin the flow.

So I thought about that for a little. I did it for like one or two episodes. I'd be like, and then it just looked awkward, but yeah, no, it's a...

Yeah, sound cues probably is a little bit of a tough one to use.

It's just, there's no easy way to go about it. So, but yeah, I know this one, I was just like, all right, this is an obvious one. But anyways, so okay, I'm curious. So in the next year, two, three years, obviously as you continue to grow in your journey, do you kind of have like a checklist of things you'd like to learn or you're just trying to absorb as much as you can from these academies and seminars you're attending?

I would say it's just like consume as much as possible. So like the interesting thing that I've learned, so like I touched on, I feel I'm comfortable in a position where I can provide a service that is adequate, that is perfectly worth paying for, right? I guess is like the most blunt way to put it. I keep like trying to be PR friendly, but it is a perfectly, I can deliver something that is perfectly adequate, good works and your desired outcome is being reached, right? What I strive to do is to go above and beyond and give you something that you weren't expecting or that you didn't think was possible. That's what drives me. And that's what I'd like to spend the next part of my, journey of doing this is refining things and kind of finding, what can I do better? And by absorbing information and yeah, I'm sure I've heard the same phrases and the same ideas over and over again, but there's always that eureka moment of like this, I learned something different that I didn't know about because of this, right? And that's what keeps me coming back and kind of listening to all this stuff. Cause yeah, I mean, it would be very easy for me to go, oh, these guys are talking about the same thing that these guys were talking about and it's all the same information. Why am I wasting my time hearing this? Like you always learn something by hearing another person's perspective or just hearing something in general. So that's kind of, like I said, the next portion of my journey is taking what I already know and what I've already determined that I can do, and then how do I make that even better? How do I keep pushing forward? That's kind of what I envision for myself is just refining my craft now that I've kind of made like a footprint in my life of like, you know, the first year or so was like, okay, this is gonna be the trial of like, can I do this, right? Is my mental capacity able to understand what's going on and can I pick up on this or am I gonna get frustrated and then walk away from it, right? That was kind of the first year and a half. And then the second year and a half was like, okay, I can do this and I understand things. Like, can I do this for other people? And then I spent that time like, okay, yeah, people are happy, they're getting the results they're expecting, they're not having a ton of issues. I mean, like, and that's, that whole point is that you're always gonna have some level of issues, like things just have-

You will never have a perfect-

There's no world where something involving customer service goes flawlessly every single time. You always strive to avoid that whenever possible, but it does happen. So, you know, after realizing, okay, you know, things are working out and like this is working and everything seems to be going the way it should be, then you go, okay, well, how do I get even better? And how do I continue to grow? I think that like, that's the most important thing is to not like become complacent and think, well, and then this is all I need to know and I can just stop here. And I don't need, the growth doesn't need to go any further. That's what's driving me now is just knowing that like there's always something new to learn. If, and I'm a guy who hated school. So the fact like, Dude, that happens to all of us after. It's so funny, like to my dad, like, you know, my parents in general is like, you know, I was like a skateboard kid who wouldn't go to school, wouldn't go to school and hated being in school. And the moment that something piqued my interest. And like my parents always caught on to that. Like when I was in high school, I like, you know, history was like always the subject that I had like, you know, the best grades. And because I liked it, I found it interesting. You know, when something piques my interest and I enjoy it, then like, I can put a ton of energy towards it. If it's something that I don't enjoy, then I'm going to put very little energy or effort into it. But because I enjoy doing this and because the challenge is very fun to me and it's really fun seeing, you know, people's reactions when like, you know, their car makes exactly what they want to make and it shoots cool flames at the rev limiter and stuff like that. That's genuinely what like makes this such an enjoyable thing to do for me. So it's really, really easy to be motivated to continue to push myself in it. So I don't even remember what you asked.

That's a good question. I basically like, oh yeah, how you foresee the next few years and such like all that fun stuff. No, what I was going to ask as well is, obviously this podcast has a variety of listeners. So what kind of cars should people be taken to you for, I guess, tunes, builds and such, just so they're more aware, obviously Hondas.

Yeah. Yeah, the last few builds I've done as Hondas, but I would say...

You got these skylines behind you.

So these two skylines, and I'm not doing these entirely on my own, like the black one Omar did, some of the fuel system reset up on it. And then I did a bunch of the wiring, so we added a bunch of sensors and stuff like that to it. But that's the really sweet thing about JWP, is we're fairly, when it comes to Japanese cars, we are pretty universal and have a pretty decent grasp on just about anything Japanese related. Like some of the more obscure ones, like I can't tune a Hyundai, or let's see how that's on Japanese. No, whatever, Korean, Asian market brands. You did ask about EVOs.

You heard me thinking about it again, did you?

Yeah, so stock EVO, like eight, nine and 10 ECU tuning is just a little bit different than like the OEM based ECUs that I've tuned where for Subaru's, you have Cobb, which is a huge business that spends a ton of R&D creating a software, creating definitions for all these ECUs. And they give you all of the tools to be successful and tune the cars. They give you literature to read and consume to be able to be familiar with how these systems work. Uprev is the software iTunes, Nissan's and Infiniti's on currently. We'd like to move to Ecutech in the future, but which is a subsidiary of the same company that owns Cobb. So the literature is very similar between Cobb and Ecutech. But Uprev, they don't provide a ton of literature, but there's literature out there to consume and understand it. But again, that's another company that spends time doing R&D and defining these maps and these tables and the overall architecture of the ECU. So it's all there for you to use. When it comes to stock EVO 8, 9, 10 ECUs, it's what's called open source tuning, which means it's a community based thing. And that there's all these people in the community that have made definitions, they've made ROM patches, they've done all these different things. But the problem with that is you have to spend a lot of time and invest a lot of knowledge to understand how it all works and to make it work correctly. And I just haven't had a great opportunity to do that. I haven't had somebody that's like, here's a stock Evo 8 or a near stock Evo 8 with bolt-ons and injectors or something like that, that you can play with for a couple of weeks or a week or whatever. And there's just little nuances that I just haven't fortunately had the opportunity to just kind of play with. So it's something that I want to do in the future. It's the next learning curve I'd like to do. And that's very, there's other cars and platforms out there that are a similar kind of scenario. I would say like the N54, my understanding is the N54 BMW platform is kind of a similar thing to that. And it's even a little bit more complex because a lot of these definition files have bits of German sprinkled in them, or like the tables are all named something in German. So you got a language barrier even to get through. But it-

We'll just leave those to Brian.

Yeah, Brian, Vime's got those in the bag, so.

He's got that handled.

Yeah, but so yeah, the stock ECU Evo stuff, it just, I think I could do it. I don't see any reason that I couldn't. It's just, it's going to take time and just a little bit of sacrifice to get there. And I just haven't had, there's been other things that I've felt have been more pressing, but it's something that's like on a to-do list that I'm gonna eventually get to. But otherwise, like most Japanese cars, behind you, you guys can't see this. There's maybe Harris can throw a picture up there.

I won't.

No, he won't. Okay. I'll read it off. So we've got Uprev, Haltech, Link, Cobb, AEM, Honda, to FuelTech, Megasquirt. That seems to be the majority of the list. I do a little bit with Holley. So any cars that fit into those platforms is something that I'll be able to help you out on and that I'm well-versed in and familiar with. So that should give you kind of an idea. So I mean, the big three is Honda, Nissan and Subaru. But anything that's on a standalone, that even if it doesn't start and you need a little help on that avenue, I'm always up for a challenge. I've done some, I wouldn't say it's anything really super obscure. Like the weirdest things, the weirdest ones I'm doing right now is like all these. I have some friends with VR6 swaps, whatever early Volkswagen, so been dabbling in that, which is a really, really underrated. In my opinion, the VR6 is an extremely underrated engine.

Why is that?

They make really good power. They respond really well to power adders, and they sound really, really good. And they're plentiful. They sound amazing. Like a 12 valve VR6 is like an extremely cheap engine to buy. How cheap are they? I don't know. I have a friend that's, he claims. He claims.

I was just curious.

He claims he can get a 12 valve and a junkyard for like 400 bucks. And they're easy to find. I haven't put any effort into verifying that's the truth, but.

VR6 swap GTI coming in. Did you ever see the video of that one? Somebody put a VR6 in the clone of my car.

There's a VR6 in an RS3.

That's tragic.

I mean, that one, yeah, like the MQB platform. Yeah. I mean, put a VR6 in that for sure. Cause that's MQB, right? Yeah. I'm not a Volkswagen guy. So, but the two liter TFSI turbo thing. Yeah. VR6 went over that all day long. But the.

It sounds insane.

Yeah. DASA versus VR6, I don't know.

It gets tricky.

Nah, I know. I'm a five cylinder guy. Way over the VR6. But the VR6 is like, as far as a six cylinder engine goes, like sounds amazing. And maybe I'll even tier list it right here, as far as, you know, six cylinder engine sound goes. Got VR6 number one. And then we got RB26 and then 1J and 2J.

I think that's fair.

I think, I think, I think that's the-

One, the J, the JZs and the RBs are always a tricky one. It always gives people heat.

The RB is smooth and it's like really crisp and like really refined. I think that's what is like the allure to that. Like they just sound smoother. That's the best way to put it. The, the JZs are always really throaty and like, er, you know, like that's like, I feel like that's a Jeremy Clarkson quote. Like they're very like throaty and like cut throat. I think it would be the best way to put it. Like they're, they're angry. Whereas like the, an RB is like a fine glass of wine. It's really smooth.

Until it blows up.

They do that. Every engine blows up.

That's fair.

Yeah.

We call back to an hour ago.

There's every engine blows up. I mean, it just, it's the nature of the beast.

Now granted we are, we're actually closing it. This is the first, it's been a while since we've done a two hour episode, like in general. So the fact that you and I are able to cap.

And we, there wasn't a lot of hope and enthusiasm that this was going to be.

Oh dude, we were just like, we're going to riff it.

Yeah. It's, it's going to be a full on wing in it for sure. Yeah.

Which I think that was fantastic. I am curious though, because like we've been trying to have our schedules aligned for a little bit here. Maybe like a month or so. It's just, that's just the nature of interviewing people in the car world.

Yeah. Especially everybody's doing something.

Everybody. There's, if you're not doing something, I don't really want you on here. Yeah.

So that's, I mean, it's a good problem to have that somebody is getting, is hard to get ahold of because it means they're busy doing something.

Usually, right? Like 90% of the time, right? But I'm curious, was there anything in particular that you wanted to touch on? Just anything that comes to mind? Cause I know you actually, I think you reached out to me this time. Actually the first time that-

We just kind of talked about it.

We talked, yeah.

You were like, oh, you should come back on. And I was like, yeah, I should come back on. I want to come back on. And then you were like, are you going to come back on? And I was like, eh, I guess I'll come back on. No, I think we kind of touched on everything. Like I didn't really have any, like I said, I just enjoy doing this and like just hanging out. Like this is just fun to me. So I think like the main things that I want to talk about was like the shop and you know, kind of what we do here. And I think we've kind of overviewed that in a way. And this kind of like the, you know, transformation of my worlds of going from map.

It was a very different world.

Yeah.

What you're in now, especially like you said, being more customer facing here.

I mean, it's, Yeah, I talk to people every day, which is something I for sure like missed while being at map was like being able to interact with people and like I enjoy that. It's one of the best parts is like, you know, being able to help people and like them responding well to that, like that's, it's always awesome to see. But yeah, like overall, like, you know, I'm doing what I love every day. Even if it's not like something terribly exciting, there's always something interesting. And like, it's hard to come to work upset when like you're surrounded by all of this stuff. Like never did I think, you know, when I was 16 years old driving my Honda Civic that I would be working somewhere where like an NSX driving through the door was just a normal thing. Like that never, ever crossed my mind. Like even like call back to working at MAP, like when I was 16, living in the same town that MAP was in, like that was always like a, wow, that's like an unobtainable, like I'll never be able to do that sort of a thing. So it's an awesome opportunity to be here and like there's so much to do. And I guess if I could plug the shop a little bit, this is JWP Automotive. We're located in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1457 Marshall Avenue. We do pretty much anything and everything enthusiast car related. We are more Japanese focused, but there are occasionally European and domestic cars in here. Yeah, I mean, we can do anything from general maintenance and service to full on builds. I mean, it's top to bottom.

You guys are wanting to go to for bags around here too, right?

Yeah, we do. I mean, I don't think there, nobody, it's not my world. I'm not a show car guy, but nobody comes to mind as like an obvious choice for air ride install. But we do see a ton of air ride in and out on a weekly basis. There's at least one car in here for an air ride install, which is always crazy to me too, because I'm like, I didn't realize how many people are actually doing air ride. But yeah, there's, it always seems that we're doing. Tyler, one of the guys that works here is primarily the one doing it. Actually, he's pretty much the only one that does it. And he does a really good job. He's been doing it for quite a while. So air ride is another thing that I can never expect to like come in and see somebody putting an air ride in a car weekly. So lots of cool stuff in and out the door. And like I said, we can kind of do it all A to Z.

It is cool to see. And the nice thing again about the shops here in town is there's a lot of collaboration.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Maybe nervous there. But what's called a lot of people here collaborate, right? Like, you know, I can't think of anybody off the top of my head, but like, you know, if you guys can't do something, I'll just outsource it to somebody else.

Exactly, yeah.

Happens all the time.

No, 100%. Like, if there is, we, like I touched on personally, you know, I'm never gonna bite off more than I can chew. I know my abilities. If we think that another shop better suits you, we're gonna let you know, right? If you come in and you want like a Mopar build, we're gonna send you to M&P, right? If you come in and you want an RS3 build, we're gonna send you to Ratify. And that's the best part about where we're at is everybody's friends. There's natural competition, but it's like a friendly rivalry. Nobody's gonna strangle the other guy at an event or something. It's like, we're all friends. We all hang out. And we all conduct ourselves very professionally. And we're able to help each other, everyone grow together. Because if everybody grows together, that's better for everyone.

Which we've noticed a ton in the last few years.

Everybody's gotten bigger. John went from budget auto to this. Rat went from one shop to two shops. M&P had a massive expansion.

They doubled their, it's literally double the size.

Everybody is better off if we're friendly and working together and helping each other grow. Everybody eats if you do that. So if there's something that we can't do, we can point you in the direction of somebody that can. And the same goes for the shops that we send cars to. They send people to us on the daily. Like Sam at Radified who was just on here.

A lot of you guys know Radified Motorsport for their RS3, TTRS, 1000 horsepower hairdresser car builds, but they are so much more than that. From basic maintenance on an R35 GTR to cute little Volkswagen GTIs like mine, they're able to do a little bit of everything. Whether it's your basic maintenance or an intake in a tune or even a full-blown build, be sure to go to radifiedmotorsport.com to get yourself booked today. And I hope to see you guys at the shop.

We're friends and we talk. And so, you know, it's always funny. I'll be like, oh, hey, I sent somebody to you. And then he'll be like, yeah, I sent three other people to you too. So like we all-

Comparing notes, scorekeeping.

Yeah, looking at each other's homework.

I don't know if we really touched on it. We kind of got distracted there. Obviously we're talking about growing the drag side of things here.

And you're making a call back for sure.

Yeah, it's a call back. I was just coming to mind here. I mean, is the Honda scene here growing?

Hmm. Yeah, it is in a ways. I feel like when we think about the scene growing, obviously people that are car people and new people coming into the scene are generally younger. They're kids that are getting their license and then they're growing into being a car person. But somebody that's already well established as being a car enthusiast is, they've been around for a while, right? And when we talk about the car scene growing, it's generally people that are younger. And what I've seen is like the younger crowd more seems to focus on things that are like newer. So-

Because leases are so cheap and the euros are getting cheaper. Like for example, dude, you can get really like, what's a 135i cost? Right?

Still too much.

Like 10, 15 grand for a higher mileage one. It's like, and you could build them to the gills.

But even newer than that, like, I mean, like when I was 16, buying a current model year, Honda Civic Si was like on, that's on obtainium, right? But like it, it's very frequent that I see, you know, guys that are pretty young driving newer cars and how they come about to, you know, acquire these cars is whatever. Maybe they work really hard. Maybe mom and dad got it for them. Doesn't matter to me. You know, you do have a car and you're enjoying it, whatever. And so like I have seen a rise in popularity of like these newer generation or like more current model year cars and especially in the Hondas, like the FK8 Type R is extremely popular. And that's a newer, that's the second newest generation Civic Type R chassis. And they're very popular because it's the same Honda performance focused driving experience that you have come to know, but you have all the modern creature comforts that, you know, make it a fun experience to drive.

They finally came down to a reasonable price point.

Yeah, they were bad for a while.

I'm glad I didn't get one when I was browsing a few years ago. I would be very underwater.

Dude, John Cena's got one.

Yeah, no, he loves them. He's a Honda guy.

But I just, I've never seen him drive one.

You've never seen him drive anything.

You missed a joke. I mean, this was the joke and went right over it.

Shut up.

Yeah, like I feel like the 90s Honda scene by no means is dying. Like there's still a plethora of guys and 88 to 2000 Civic rolling around.

It's probably like guys that are in their 30s and they're probably building that scene, would you say?

Yeah.

I just don't see many 18 year old kids wanting to get an EK.

Yeah, nobody's like, oh, I dreamed to have an EK anymore. Like, you know what I mean?

Cause you could just finance like a B58.

Right, it makes triple the horsepower of an EG or a Civic.

You're looking at high 20s, low 30s to have a B58.

Right, and like I said, a part of that is just like how easy some of these newer platforms are to make like a fun level of, I won't say a high level of horsepower, but like a fun, dailyable level of horsepower. Like I had a E92 335 as a daily driver for a little while and like I loved that car. It made 330 horsepower and 330 foot pounds of torque. It was not fast by any means, but it was just fun enough and just comfortable enough to like where I never got really sick of it. And like sure, yeah, I would have loved to put a big single on it and made like six, 700. Like that would be awesome, but it crashed it.

What do you think makes it so easy nowadays with the newer cars? I'm sure there's a lot.

The technology is so much better. Fuel is so much better. And there's more people interested in cars. So if, I mean, money drives everything, right? So if they're, that's why like the obscure weird platforms, the only people that are like making waves in that sense are like people that are heavily invested in it. But these platforms that are extremely popular and extremely prevalent, like there's money behind it. So there's an incentive for businesses to push that platform and like push the technology forward and make it easy for everybody to do it because then they will do it and then they will spend money. So that's ultimately what like kind of drives it. It's kind of greedy in a way, but like it makes sense. And it's better for everybody because if you're pushing something and making it better, then it's more available to more people. If the only way to make 700 horsepower on a B58 car meant that you had to buy a really obscure, weird part from some other side of the country and it was really tough, then nobody would do it.

Right, that makes sense.

But if you can go to any website and purchase everything you need to make 500 horsepower or 600 horsepower on a B58 car relatively easily, and that's available, then there's no reason to not do it.

Good point. Distribution of parts and everything is so much better than it was even 10 years ago.

Right, you can go on a website. You don't gotta order it from a magazine. Yeah. So, I mean, I didn't have to order it from a magazine 10 years ago, but think 20 years ago, right?

Yeah, 20 years ago, you did a lot of things with magazines.

Right. Nat Geo.

Nat Geo. Yes, definitely something.

So, you know, there's so much push to develop things and make it easier for people to enjoy their driving experience that it drives companies to continue to push things and continue to make things better. And that's ultimately how we've ended up here.

That makes sense. Well, since it's been 53 episodes, I think it's fair to ask you this question once again, to see where your answers lie. At the end of every episode, we like to ask our, not we today, but we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget. You have to pick a daily, a track car and a show car.

All right, well, I've already answered the first one, which was daily driver, F80 M3. To me, that's like the perfect performance to comfort to price point, in my opinion, for what I like. That's like where it is. For a long time, I was really, really gunning for an FK8 or an FL5 Type R, but to me, they're priced like pretty similarly, and the amount of car you get with the BMW versus the amount of car you get with a Honda, it just makes more sense to do the F80. Track car, Honda Civic, an EG hatch, Honda Civic. It's the ultimate track weapon. Drag, autocross, they can do it all. Not in the same configuration, but that would be my ultimate track toy, I guess would be the sense. I don't know what configuration it would be in. Probably drag race, because that's always how I've been. It's just, I enjoy watching.

What goes into a drag configuration? Like how much are we talking here? I'm limited by it.

Okay, so, man, we can never make it through anything without asking them any questions. If my ideal setup would be like a street strip track car, so I could still drive it on the street and take it out on a weekend, or maybe do like a drag and drive with it, I guess would be a better example, would be all wheel drive, K Series, 6466, and enough power to run 950s on a slick tire consistently. That's all I'd want. Going any faster than that, like chasing into the eights, or even people are going sevens now. That's when you start breaking stuff. 950s still is slow by today's standards, which is crazy. But I feel like that's like, I can still have fun with it, it's not gonna break all the time. So maybe it goes an eight, nine one day, but like that's how I want to set up my car in the future is like 950s on a slick and be able to drive it and do a drag and drive with it. I don't know, maybe I'll lower that down to like an eight, nine or something like that. But yeah, I mean, that's pretty much the formula, big turbo slicks, good trash control, good ECU, and picking either if you're going to do the front wheel drive route or do the all wheel drive route, which the all wheel drive route has, makes it, I wouldn't say easier because there's still nuances with it and it's just kind of all set up at the end of the day.

Any particular nuances?

I mean, yes. You really put me on the spot there. It's just challenges. You're trying to convert a car that was never intended to be all wheel drive. So obviously there's mounting and stuff like that that has to go in it. And then making the driveline fit, keeping parts alive, like transfer cases and viscous couplers are always an issue and even rear axles and rear diffs. And then making it all work correctly so the car leaves. Lots of people have been trying different things with like different weights in the viscous couplers to make the car have more or less power at the rear wheels, to make the car leave differently. So it's all tuning is so much like when you say tuning, like there's so much more than just like putting a car on the dyno and then making power. Like if you want a competent drag car, you're gonna spend some time on the dyno, but like way more time at the track, dialing everything in from the engine tuning to the suspension tuning to the you tuning yourself, right? And training yourself how to drive the car. There's so much that goes into it. But for my show car, I just, I don't, I don't know. That I could use the cop-out answering would just be an F40. Like everybody loves that. Everybody loves an F40.

I think I've only heard that once or twice.

Really? All right, then that's what I'm going with.

No, no, no. I'm not giving you a cop-out.

No, I like-

I want you to think about this.

No, I want a, I swear there's, I saw an article and there's like only one of them. It's like a British racing green or some sort of similar color F40 that's rolling around out there. I want that car. That unlimited budget show car, go get ice cream in it. That would be the car, would be an F40. And I'm not like a supercar guy by any means. I don't know what the current McLaren or the current Bugatti is called or anything about it, but those cars are extremely beautiful to look at. So they always will have a special place in my heart. I've known nothing about them. They just look sick.

Are you sure about the F40?

Yeah.

Are you sure?

Yeah, 100%.

100% sure?

100% sure. Deal or no deal? All right, all right. I've closed the thing.

All right, I'm not gonna be able to reopen that case.

Yep.

Just making sure. This is your last out.

Why are you so hung up on this? How could anyone argue with it? How could anyone argue that the F40 is not one of the most beautiful cars ever made? What would you say? What would you argue?

I don't know.

You're just trying to argue for the sake of arguing?

It's been a while since I've been an asshat like that. I think that's a perfect setup. I think that's a good way to end it. I think that's actually, yeah, we just crossed two hours. It's kind of impressive. That was actually way more free flowing than I thought it would be.

Dude, that's why I like doing this because I think we just riff it out.

Yeah, I think that was good. Well, in that instance, where can people find you?

As always, Facebook and Instagram are probably the easiest place to get a hold of me. Thanks for watching. My name is Kyle Larkin. I pretty much, if you have a car or a picture of a car on your Facebook account, I will probably add you as a friend on Facebook, and I will get back to you in three to five business days if you send me a message asking a question. I always get back to people, it just doesn't always happen right away. Otherwise... Instagram. I use Instagram mostly for stories. I don't post stuff very often.

Mostly food.

Mostly food, sometimes other things. But my Instagram handle is LyleKurkin, L-Y-L-E-K-U-R-K-I-N. And I also am managing the JWP Automotive Instagram page. So that's also a way of seeing what I'm up to, because I'm the person that's posting on there.

And basically if anybody wants various builds on which we mentioned about an hour ago.

Yeah, the easiest way, if you want me to build your car or want to get your car built here, or you want a build consultation, something like that, the easiest way to get a hold of me or the shop in general is either our phone number, which I don't have off the top of my head.

Just JWP, Google it.

Yeah, or the website or Facebook. We check that every single business day. And Gus answers the phone here and he will always call and text you back. So if you need to get a hold of us, if you're interested in having a car built here, or you need some service or just some tuning, like we will do any of those three in any which order. Like we'll build your car, tune your car, give back to you and then do service, or we'll do service that then snowballs into doing some mods and then a tune. Or you come in for a tune and you leave with some mods. It goes every which way, which is the beauty of having a shop like this, where we kind of have just about everything we need. Like we don't have an engine machining shop, or we don't have a fab shop, but we have the connections in the community to make that happen. So you can kind of count on us to be able to help you out with whatever you need.

I should start implementing like a call out at the end of these podcasts. Like you basically, you know how you used to do like in middle school, like popcorn, say the person's name.

Oh, like pass it to somebody else.

Yeah, I don't know if I will implement that right now.

That would be tough. Because then you like have to organize getting whoever they get popcorn to, and like what if they just don't like you?

There's that too, right? Which happens. In that instance, thank you very much for coming on Kyle. That was fantastic. That was awesome. Everybody, thank you for listening to the podcast. Dan, I would say thanks for existing, but you're not standing next to me.

Dan, I wish you were here. I wish you could have made it.

But yeah, thanks for coming on Kyle, and see you all next time.

See you guys next time. Hand hug? You don't know how to do a hand hug? No, no, no, no, no. Only thumbs only. Get it back in there.