99. Setting Records, Educating Enthusiasts, and High Performance Academy w/ Andre Simon

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris, aka Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And I'm here with my co-host, Dan, Mr. Gunnar Garage.

Yep.

And today we're doing something that's very unique. We have always sworn to never do a remote podcast, but the stars align for this one, you know, by some miracle. So today we are doing a podcast with Andre Simon, one of the owners of HP Academy, which I'm sure many people are familiar with. Man Behind Many Evos, I mean there's so many different ways to describe you. So I just wanted to quickly thank you for coming on, I'm glad we managed to make this work. So why don't you just go ahead and quickly introduce yourself, what HP Academy is, and we can go from there.

That's a very loaded question. How long have we got here? Yeah I mean first up, thanks for having me on guys, do appreciate it. High Performance Academy, I mean if you are into cars, and you have Facebook, chances are we've probably served you up a bunch of ads. So I'm guessing most people into cars in the English speaking world may have probably already seen or heard of us. But essentially we're an online training school. We make video based training courses that people can take from anywhere in the world provided they've got an internet connection. And I think what we see as the benefit of this is people get to learn at their own pace, and they can learn in their own place. So I think there's other advantages as well with the way we do this with the video training courses. Once someone's purchased, it's theirs for life, so you can watch it as many times as you'd like. And I've previously been to a number of in person training courses, not necessarily automotive based. But I think when you're in the room, you're frantically taking notes and everything seems clear, and then sort of a week or a month or six months later, you're sort of starting to scratch your head like, actually, how did that go again? And you don't get that refresher. So I mean kind of bigger picture taking a step back. I'm based in Queenstown in New Zealand, so a pretty remote little country. I owned and ran a tuning workshop for about 13 years where we specialised in modifying road cars, building race cars. My own passion at the time was import drag racing, so we were pretty deep in that scene. And over that time I kind of got sick to death of customers bringing me cars to be retuned and sometimes it would take a drive around the block or just literally looking at the maps in the ECU and you realise that whoever had tuned that car had no idea what they were doing. And for me, while we were making money obviously retuning these train wrecks, it was really frustrating because you were seeing cars that drove horribly, didn't deliver the power and talk that they were capable of or you've all heard horror stories about engines that have been blown up needlessly by tuners that just don't know what they're doing. So I found that really frustrating, these customers are just wasting their money and getting really really poor results and HPA was kind of born out of an attempt to kind of fix that with the industry, try and improve their overall level of education and knowledge. So that's kind of the 30,000 foot overview, but if you want to dive into anything more specific by all means. Yeah.

And so I kind of discovered you through your YouTube channel, which by the way, I like the free webinars, the long ones. Those are my favorites because you get really in-depth on that. And then the SEMA interviews are also pretty good. But the way that you described on your website was kind of like, like there's really no certification for tuners.

Yeah, there's no way to see. That's kind of, I think, where the problem really originates from. So hey, if you want to become a mechanic, obviously the rules are going to be a little bit different depending where you are in the world. But generally, you're going to have to go through some classroom based courses to teach you the fundamental theory and then of course you have to do your hours of on the job actual training and you come out the end of your apprenticeship, maybe it's two or three years with a piece of paper that kind of says to the world, hey, I know how to be a mechanic. Same for most of the trades but that doesn't exist in the tuning industry and it's kind of a bit of a situation where there's a lot of cowboys out there, essentially if you've got enough money to buy a dyno, or for that matter, rent dyno time, plenty of guys and girls these days just road tuning with no dyno, you can start taking money off customers and of course the results are exactly what you'd expect. Now I don't want to take away from the fact that of course there are some amazing tuners all around the world but I think they kind of just sadly fall into the minority. And yeah by far and away, the largest number of tuners out there just don't have a good understanding of the basics. And I mean I wouldn't say maybe necessarily ripping people off but I think there is a bit of that going on. Essentially the results are terrible. I think the bigger problem that I saw though coming from owning a tuning workshop was it gives the whole industry a bit of a checkered reputation and you have customers kind of coming in to get their cars tuned or at least talk about the job they want done and they're kind of almost suspicious, like they're gonna get a bad job or you're gonna rip them off from their get go, which was obviously absolutely not our MO. But that was the frustration I had with the tuning industry in general.

Well, aside of $500, $600, $1,000 you pay for a tune, you can screw up somebody who's got tens of thousands of dollars into a motor. It's not even like your average mechanic who has to have certification can screw something up, and getting a stock engine is a lot easier, but some of these people have big money into builds. Yeah. And then a tuner can screw that up real quick with a couple clicks of a mouse.

You're familiar with that.

Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely the case. There is a bit more that goes into it though. So I was involved at the cutting edge of import drag racing for a number of years. My own Evo set the world record for the fastest Mitsubishi Evo four wheel drive. Held that within 8.2 at 180 mile an hour for about five years after we retired it. And I also tuned and consulted for Heat Treatments Racing here in New Zealand. And at the time they had the fastest R32 Nissan GT-R in the world, I think that ran seven four, maybe 193 mile an hour. I mean obviously times have changed, that's no longer a relevant time. But at the time, those are two of the cars that I was involved with. So at that point when you are trying to beat the best in the world and you're pushing these engines into a region of power and RPM and torque that no one else is doing, you can't jump on forums or Facebook groups and kind of say oh hey, how do you do this or what parts do I need to hold up to this? It's very much a case of trial by fire and unfortunately in most circumstances, I do think that occasionally an engine failure is likely to happen. But there's engine failures from a mechanical strength standpoint and then there's engine failures from tuning related failures. And the two are very different and I think a lot of tuners will try and hide behind mechanical strength issues where it's not. You know, knock, detonation or also pre ignition are really really serious problems and then of course running air fuel ratio targets that just aren't suitable to what you're trying to do. So that's kind of like the high level import drag racing or drag racing in general where you're trying to really push these things into an area no one's been. The flip side of that is like light to moderately modified streetcars or even road race cars where you're not trying to kind of reinvent the wheel. Really under those circumstances, there should be no reason for a tuning related failure. That just should be unacceptable in my opinion.

Well I can tell you it happens.

Oh I absolutely know it happens. But I guess it shouldn't be happening as often as it does.

Yes, I agree.

So one of the things that I noticed when going down your entire catalogue is it's not just a matter of tuning cars, but also when it comes down to suspension and just setting up a car as a whole for various circumstances. When everything was founded with HP Academy, what was the basis? Was it, you know, let's get the cars tuned, and then you started adding all these other variety of courses and such?

Yeah, it started as a bit of a proof of concept. So we were actually doing in person training at my old tuning workshop. So we'd host a two day weekend course, we'd get maybe 25 or 30 people in. First day would be all there in the classroom, and then the next day we'd basically let them loose on the dyno, under controlled circumstances, to actually get some hands on experience tuning. Those are really popular but New Zealand's a small country, we've got four and a half million people so you're not gonna be able to hold one of these every weekend. Because of our success on the drag strip, we did have quite a large international following on my business' Facebook page. And we started posting about these courses and people overseas were asking to buy the course notes which in isolation would have been completely useless. But that kind of gave the spark of an idea of being my business partner and I were thinking, well hey why don't we record this course as a video based course and then we can sell it and that kind of gets a solution to those people overseas who wanted to learn. So we did exactly that. Then the first course, the production quality was pretty low, it was filmed in my business partner's flat at the time. We had to stop recording when the neighbour was mowing the lawns, the lighting was terrible, the audio quality was pretty garbage and we were using an iPad race taped to a stepladder as a teleprompter. But it worked. And pretty quickly we saw there was demand for it and people were really responsive to it. So of course tuning and engine building kind of my two main skill sets. So we went a little bit further, we started with a high level EFI Tuning Fundamentals course and then we added a Practical Tuning course and I think there was a Boost Control Tuning course, all of the things that I knew people struggled with. And it got to a point where we were running High Performance Academy and I was still running STM, my tuning shop, and really not doing justice to either. So about a year in, I think it probably was, we kind of had to make the difficult call of what are we going to do here. HPA really needed full commitment so I decided to sell the tuning business and commit fully to HPA. Now as we sort of developed more courses and obviously had more time to apply specifically to HPA, we kind of ended up going a bit more niche I suppose you would say on tuning and of course the more niche you go, the less it interests people so the course sales kind of dropped off. So we decided, alright let's look at the other areas that we specialise in that we can do the same. So engine building followed, that went really really well, well received. And then we also added in the motorsport wiring which is another area I know people kind of get a little bit scared of dealing with because wiring harnesses can be scary and reading a wiring diagram isn't necessarily that intuitive. And then at this point we sort of relocated ourselves to Queenstown. Initially we were just a two man band and quickly realised that if we wanted to do justice to what HPA could become, we were going to need help. And that grew slowly. I mean I think we're 12 years in now and we've got a team of 14, which is pretty sizeable for what we're doing. But that's allowed us to then sort of expand into the wider range of just everything automotive. We've got car setup, race driver education, data analysis, suspension optimisation. Another area, thanks to Connor who's been working with us for a couple of years now, we've delved into 3D modelling and CAD. He's currently just about to complete a 3D scanning and then a 3D printing course as well. Fabrications in there, it's grown, I think we've got about 35 or even 40 courses now, including, we've just released one with Sasha from Mountain Pass Performance and On Point Dino in Canada on electric vehicle fundamentals as well.

So when you hear a course nowadays, right, people get nervous because everybody and their grandmother has a course that they're selling. At what point did you realise that when you started expanding beyond the two of you, when did you realise, like, all right, was it a skill thing, like you didn't necessarily have the skills to teach these specific courses or were you just more so time limited?

Initially, it was definitely time limitation. It was more a case of the video editing and all of the other work that goes into it. Customer service is huge, particularly now with the size of HPA. So I was kind of doing the technical content. I was in front of the camera producing these courses, doing live webinars. Ben was filming those, editing those and doing customer support. So at that point, these are 80, 90 hour weeks, the grind was pretty real. And the first hires we looked at were a videographer and then someone for customer service. That sort of freed up more of Ben's time. Ben's specialty is really the business development and he's an online marketing specialist. So our skills work really well together. More recently, it's been a real struggle I guess to find more Andres. That's a problem because without sort of trying to make out that I'm something magical here, it is a unique skill set in that you have to A, be really really good at the thing that you want to teach. And there's plenty of people out there who are that, they tick that box. What you find though is that most of those people who are genuinely really good at a particular task, maybe will struggle a little bit to explain exactly why they do a certain thing, a lot of it becomes muscle memory, they just do it because that's how they've always done it and they don't have to think about it. So that skill of being able to teach in a concise and easy to understand manner, that's quite unique. And then the third skill set that sort of comes with that is being comfortable in front of a camera. I mean, I wasn't initially, the first couple of courses we produced were pretty average, pretty wooden. That EFI Tuning Fundamentals course I mentioned, that was our first course, we've reshot that now I think three times. As we've upped our production qualities, we've built proper studios that are soundproofed and we've got Sam on staff who's an absolute magician with animation. So we've just made that course better and better. And now we can apply that to the rest of our courses. So coming back to that, it's been difficult to find other people to come in and be on camera. Connor, our most recent hire, he's been amazing, he's really adapted well and his courses have been really well received. Over time we've also had a couple of other people on camera. We had Zac who was presenting our wiring courses. He's absolutely great and we would absolutely love to still have him on staff but unfortunately he had a wife and a daughter, probably about a seven hour drive from here so he was commuting back and forth each week which was never gonna work but a strain there so that lasted about a year and unfortunately just wouldn't work out for him. And we had another guy working for us for a while, Tim White who actually is a Kiwi but he was a race engineer over in the Australian Supercars series so he's got a massive range of skills that he brought to the table around suspension, car setup, data logging, data analysis et cetera. So yeah we're always on the lookout for more people to kind of come in and produce more courses as well and hopefully someone that can take a little bit of the strain off me as well.

So then are you looking more so for people that are very specialised in a particular part or more well rounded like yourself? Would you consider yourself well rounded?

Yeah, I think I would consider myself well rounded. I mean I've got a unique upbringing in that I'm not actually a qualified mechanic, going back to what we were talking earlier around certification. Everything I've done is self taught, but I mean I guess I was lucky that my dad when he was growing up was very handy mechanically. I mean I got into racing carts and I think I built my first cart engine at 13. So I was always sort of hands on doing that sort of stuff. And the same with self taught with building engines, but over probably 20 plus years, maybe 25 years now of building race engines and kind of refining them, seeing them come back for freshen ups and overhauls and kind of seeing how they've worn, you start to develop an understanding of what the engine needs. And then wiring, I would say I'm definitely very capable, but it's definitely not the area of performance automotive that I'm most passionate about and I am pretty slow at it, but I can get it done. So there's not a lot that I can't do on a car, and that I think probably would be reasonably rare. But if we could find people that are more well rounded, that's absolutely ideally what we're looking for.

What do you dislike the most?

What do I dislike the most? Fabrication. I suck at fabrication. And I just don't enjoy getting covered in metal grit and grime. It's just not something that I enjoy. Having said that, I mean I have so much respect for those who do it and are really really good at it. We talk to plenty of those people on our podcast and the work that they can turn out, it's just unbelievable to me. I think that high end motorsport fabrication industry though is kind of a bit of a crossover between the skill set of the fabricator but also they have to be creative. They have to be able to imagine in their mind what that finished product's going to look like from the get go and then understand how they can manipulate their material and the techniques that they're using to get that finished result. And that I think is something in fabrication that I lack.

Taking a little bit of a different route, what are some of the things that kind of bring you over here stateside? I know SEMA is one of them, you mentioned Texas 2K. Is there any particular events that draw you to this side of the ocean pond?

Yeah we've been to a variety and I mean a big part of what we do is kind of our YouTube channel where we use this as basically a way for people to find out about us. We give away a huge amount of content for free and information for free on our YouTube channel anyway so there's some genuinely great information in there. But we started from the get go interviewing known experts in the industry. And I think probably I've got a pretty good knack for interviewing people and diving into more of the tech details that you don't normally get to learn about. There's so many car tech tours where it sort of comes down to cool, so how much boost does it run and how much power does it make? And that's kind of irrelevant. I want to get into the details of how it's done that. What's the combination of parts that you're using? So I think our interview style is quite unique in that it's going into that deep dive which you don't get elsewhere. In terms of the events, we kind of have gravitated towards SEMA and PRI. Those have been our sort of two main events, but yeah, I went to TX2K once, loved that event. Huge number of R35 GTRs, Lamborghini Huracans and RDR8s producing ridiculous amounts of power. You sort of become a little blasé after a day or so of watching this. It's just, all of these cars are so powerful. That was a great event. And the other one that I've attended, which I quite enjoyed, I actually crewed for a local New Zealand team at Pikes Peak who ran a two frame Ford Focus with a mid mounted R35 GTR engine in the back of it, well, mid mounted obviously. Went there twice in a row I think it was, and that was a really big learning curve. One of the times that also coincided with watching the Pikes Peak airstrip attack roll race event, which again was a huge eye opener. So yeah, I guess that's kind of the main ones. Another one that we did attend which I really really enjoyed was the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK. That was amazing. The quality of the cars, the access to all of the historics, and I mean, yo, where else are you going to hear a V10 or a V12 Formula 1 car screaming up the hill?

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I don't think there's a secret source. If I was honest and this is probably going to get a lot of the Nissan guys offside, it's not that great, it's actually not a great engine. However, I mean with enough perseverance and if you throw a big old bucket of cash at it, you can fix all of the downsides to the RB platform. Now don't get me wrong, I do actually absolutely love the RB engine. And it can make exceptional power. But yeah, it's an expensive platform if you want to go wild. I think what's happened, it's more so in Australia, but definitely the New Zealand contingent also have developed the RB platform to a fairly high level. But particularly you go to Sydney, and the Sydney street car is now a sort of a 2000 plus horsepower GTR. R32, R33 or R34, they love them all. And there's guys literally rocking around on the streets with billet blocks and probably 100k in the engine bay or more. So I think the aftermarket has really come up with solutions for all of those problems that we see with the RBs. The oiling issues are probably the first one. The factory oil pump falls apart at 8000 RPM, or if you exceed that, suffers from oil starvation, it pumps too much oil up into the head and it can't drain back. You know, the head needs to be clearanced if you want to put a decent size cam in it. There's just so much that needs to happen. However, it's a solid lifter, a bucket and shim style valve train. Very very reliable at high RPM, and they do work incredibly well with the right size turbochargers on them.

It's kind of funny that as these platforms come out and they develop and things change, I'm a huge Ford guy, so the Coyote platform has been amazing for us over here. But if there's one, somebody will find a way to squeeze the horsepower out of something, and the platform will kind of prove itself as people start to modify them and push the limits to them. So I guess I kind of had a question too. When it comes on a tuning basis, how much of crossover is there between all of these different platforms? You're, what did you say, probably a specialist in the FA-20 platform, and then, so where do, how much would that be different from like tuning a Coyote? If somebody took a course, would a lot of that transition?

So there's two aspects to this, I think. The first is that the tuning, the way the engine responds to fuel and ignition, it doesn't actually matter what the engine is. The engine is nothing more than an air pump. Our job is to give it the correct amount of fuel to match with the amount of air going into it. When we start the spark event at the correct point, the engine is going to produce great power and torque. So that is across the board, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with an FA20, a 2JZ, a Ford Coyote or an LS, it does not matter. Now yes of course there are some intricacies that come into this with the advent of variable cam control for example. That does change the game a little bit. Pretty common now on just about every performance engine so most tuners are pretty well versed in it. But it does add a little bit to the technical challenge, particularly if you look at FA20 quad variable cam control. There's a bit of setup work and then a bit of tuning work and it becomes an iterative process that are going around in circles, dialling in the cam targets and then the fuelling and the ignition because when we change the cam targets, that changes the volumetric efficiency of the engine, thereby we need to change the fuelling and the timing. So it's going to take a bit more time but again, when you're well versed with cam control, the specifics of the engine that it's fitted to don't matter. Where we do get a separation though is how the control module works. If you're dealing with a standalone aftermarket ECU, this is a bit of a moot point. They kind of all have their own little differences with their user interface but once you're familiar with that, they essentially all work on very similar principles. So not too big of a deal. It's when you get into the world of reflashing, which is the process of retuning that factory fitted ECU that came equipped in your car, that's where things get tricky because now you are at the whim of how that OE manufacturer decided this was the best way to control fuel and spark. And I mean, if you look at the way Ford do this on the Coyote for example, versus the way let's say GM do it on an LS, I mean it's chalk and cheese. They couldn't have been more different. It's almost like Ford looked at what everyone else in the world was doing and sort of said to themselves, well hold my beer, I'm gonna come up with this most crazy solution to the problem. So yeah, there's a bit that goes into learning the specifics of the platform is probably what I would say. How we've dealt with that in our tuning courses, we've got our practical standalone tuning course, which is obviously for aftermarket standalone ECUs, and then we've got a practical reflash tuning course for those people who are re-tuning the factory fitted ECU. So the body of the course in both of those is generic. Again, it applies across the board, but then the second part of both of those courses, we include what we call a library of worked examples and in that library we'll vary the type of engine or car that we're tuning and the software platform that we're tuning on. And that gives people kind of a broader understanding of a whole bunch of different models. And we kind of add to that every year or so.

Yeah, I've been looking at taking a tuning course of some kind just to educate, not that I'm going to go out and become a tuner. I just think as you're building cars and I've had a few mistakes, I've had a few blow ups and it gets very costly. So I felt if I just had more of a knowledge myself, even using other people to help me build cars, I'd be like I could have a better understanding of how it all worked. It would make things run a little bit smoother.

Yeah I couldn't agree more and I think that's actually a big part of what we envisage with the courses. Even if you're an enthusiast, you've got absolutely zero intention of turning your own car, having an understanding of the process and how it all goes is still going to be beneficial. First of all, it's going to probably save you money because you're going to be able to do a better job of prepping the car for the dyno. You're not going to turn up with something that needs six hours of workshop work done on it before it can hit the dyno. And I, excuse me, I know from first hand experience that's really frustrating, you've got a car booked in for a dyno session, that's your day and then it turns up and it's absolutely not that. So then it goes into the workshop and you sort of sit twiddling your thumbs while the mechanic's doing these tasks. And also I think it's going to help you fix that other problem which I talked about to start with, basically understanding if the tuner that you're choosing actually is worthy of working on your car.

OK. Speaking of dyno tuning, is there a difference between street tuning and dyno tuning, would one be better over the other?

Yeah I don't think you could necessarily say one's better, they both have their pros and cons. And generally where possible, I incorporate both. So, the dyno is a great tool because it allows you to very precisely load up the engine at a particular RPM and throttle position for example, and you're getting feedback on the dyno on power and torque. So you know for example when you add two degrees of timing, did that improve power and torque or did it flat line or did we go backwards? You're not gonna get that sort of sensitivity on the street, the buck dyno unfortunately, no matter what people say, is just not that finely tuned. So yeah there's a time and a place for the dyno. Obviously safety is another big element there on the dyno. It's not gonna get away on you, you're not gonna hit a pedestrian, run up a curb or crash into another car. And that's a genuine concern on the street. So yeah really important to get the car dialled in. Where the dyno really does have some limitations though, is no matter how much money you've spent on your dyno and your dyno facility, I think it's difficult, probably almost impossible to replicate the sort of air flow that you're going to get at let's say 80, 100 mile an hour out on the road or the racetrack. And with that comes slight differences in the operating condition of the engine. What I'm getting at here is you're not actually tuning under perfect real world conditions. And what this can translate to is we take the car off the dyno, take it out on the road and we'll find maybe the air fuel ratio's marginally different to what we saw on the dyno. Quite often we'll tune the car on the dyno, get the ignition timing dialled in, it's conservative, there's no knock. And out on the road, we'll actually find that under certain conditions, maybe a transient, we might end up inducing a small amount of knock. So again, the ignition needs to be trimmed. Probably the biggest one I find is with boost control. You can get the boost control dialled in and run a ruler through the boost curve on the dyno, absolutely perfect. You'll take that car out on the road and under transient conditions, sort of part throttle through a corner, rolling back into the throttle, you can quite often find that you'll get massive boost overshoots. So those are the sort of things that I'm trying to clean up and fine tune when I take a car out on the road. The other part that's really important for a street driven car is the part throttle cruise area. And it's sometimes impossible to get to that on the dyno because the dyno requires a certain amount of torque to maintain the wheel speed or the hub speed. So if you back off the throttle to get down to those very light load regions, at some point the dyno just slows down so you can't hold the combination of RPM and load that you need. Whereas if you're out on the road for example, let's say you're rolling down a slight hill, well you can back off almost a completely closed throttle and the engine's still going to be operating. So those are the areas where I'll try on the road to clean up the fuelling and make that absolutely perfect which we can't get to on the dyno. That makes a really big difference to the drivability of the car and a lot of tuners just don't do this and the results simply show.

Well that's a good thing you're taking that into consideration, that makes a lot more sense. So from what it sounds like, you sound like you're a fan of retarder style dynos then?

Yeah, definitely. I mean I have been fortunate that that's the three types of dino that I've had. I started in my tuning shop with a Dyna Pak which is a New Zealand made dino. Those are a hydraulic based control mechanism. Work really really well and they're very very fast in their operation. The limitation for that type of dino though was the torque limit. And because I was tuning a lot of high powered drag cars, that actually became a real problem. Most Dyna Pak owners would have seen the red screen of death which tells you that you've overtook the dino and it's shutting down. Then when we moved to Queenstown and started High Performance Academy, we started with a mainline four wheel drive rolling road but that's an eddy current retarder so again it can apply load to maintain a fixed speed. So what we call this is steady state operation. So I can ask for let's say 2000 RPM and the dino kind of calculates this back from road speed obviously, that's what it's looking at. And it'll hold it at 2000 RPM and then you can go from almost closed throttle to wide open throttle and as you open the throttle and the engine makes more torque, the dino simply applies more load to hold that RPM fixed. So it's really really powerful when we are trying to work through the RPM range of the maps in the ECU. We can just go 2000, start at closed throttle, work our way up as we go with the way to open throttle, then let's go to 2500 RPM, rinse and repeat. So the other type of dino is a inertia style dino. So Dynajet would be a brand that springs to mind that offer inertia dinos. And these are just massive big rollers that have a known diameter and a known weight. And basically by driving the car on the roller, it calculates or measures how quickly it's accelerating and then can calculate from there the power. So those are effective to a point. I've tuned a few drag cars on them and that's probably where I see probably their main case study for use because with a drag car, other than idle, you don't really care about the drivability, it's kind of all wide open throttle. But unfortunately because if you apply talk to the inertia dyno, it accelerates. You can't really do that steady state tuning, which again is so important for a street car. And to kind of fill out that as well, we now have the Mainline Pro Hub dyno, which I kind of feel is the best of both worlds. You get the accuracy and precision of a hub dyno, but the eddy current absorber on the Mainline Pro Hub just will handle so much more power and torque than the DynoPack did.

Is that what we saw at Anth the other day? I think it was a main, I know it was a hub dyno. I'm curious, what was the same one?

Yeah I don't know, they're talking horsepower numbers in the 3000 and torque in the 2000 level. So I'm assuming that needs to be something. Probably the only handful of dynos that will reach that.

Yeah 100%, main line have kind of really, I think cornered the market on that sort of pro mod style tuning. They've got their quad retarder set up that, I think they've measured over 5000 horsepower at the hubs but maybe you have to fact check that. Enough anyway, it's plenty. But I mean even my single retarder I think off the top of my head, that'll handle something like 2500 horsepower in two wheel drive and something over 3000 horsepower four wheel drive, suffice to say I'm probably never going to be limited by my dyno.

Now are you, so one thing that they're doing over there is using MoTeC for traction control in a real wheel drive, you know, two wheel drive car. You having messed with a lot of all wheel drive stuff in your courses or even now as this sports kind of seems to be evolving and that software particularly seems to be doing a great job at applying that kind of horsepower to the ground. Is that something that you guys are teaching as well or seeing or keeping up with as that goes along?

Yeah, OK, so we haven't actually got a course specifically dealing with traction control. We do have a launch control tuning course which we did produce quite a long time ago. And I think particularly some of the higher end ECUs, Motec as you mentioned, have gone and adapted their strategies. They've come a long way since we produced that course. It probably does actually need a bit of a revisit. There's a variety of ways of dealing with it. Two wheel drive's obviously easy because you've got the reference of undriven wheel speed from your front wheels or your rear wheels depending if you're front or rear wheel drive. So that's not particularly difficult but the strategies of traction control I think are a lot more complex than the casual observer would think. So first of all, particularly when we're making really, really serious power levels in these highly strong drag engines, we really want to stay away wherever possible from cut events. They're just bad news for everything. The vibration or the imbalance that it causes in the crankshaft, the engine rotation, it's just pretty nasty and when the specific power levels get so high, that can do damage pretty quickly. So wherever possible, we do want to try and stay away from cut events. But sometimes it is inevitable, and I mean if it's going to save the car or save a pass, then sometimes it's a necessary evil. Where I'm going with this is it really starts more around torque and power management. So basically being really really thoughtful and controlled about how much torque we're producing at what point in the pass. Trying very hard to walk that tightrope between the amount of torque we're producing and the amount of torque that the tyre can put to the track. And obviously that's constantly evolving as the car goes down the track, it's constantly evolving as the track conditions change as well. So then the aim there really is to match that as closely as possible. But if we overstep the mark, then we theoretically should be only overstepping a little bit. Maybe we've got a 5% excess torque rather than 50% which would obviously require a much more drastic technique to halt the runaway wheel spin that would result. So then if we're only getting a little bit of wheel spin, the preferred technique there is to actually use ignition retard. It's a very fast way, it's a very smooth way and you've got a lot of control over the torque reduction. So for example, something that's easy to overlook, if we've got a four cylinder engine, we cut the spark to a single cylinder, so we cut a single spark event, we've reduced the engine torque by 25%. So it's not very granular, there's not a lot of resolution, but I've just set up a new Motec package in our Toyota 86 Endurance car, which is torque based from Motec, it's their GPRP Pro package. And that uses ignition retard for torque reduction. There's some calibration work required on the dyno, but essentially for the particular engine that I've got in there, we're reducing the torque by 1.3% per degree of ignition retard. So we can get really granular then with, I need an 8% reduction in torque, the ECU can immediately deliver exactly that. Now there's no free lunch though because excessive amounts of ignition retard also cause very high exhaust gas temperatures. So again, we're walking a bit of a tightrope, it's trying to find that balance between minimising the wheel spin and using appropriate techniques for traction control. Hopefully that answers your question.

Well yeah, no, I'm just seeing it talked about much more now as horsepower is going higher and technology is coming along a lot more, that seems to be more of a common thing. When I was first, when Harris was telling me about these two, three thousand horsepower Vipers, I'm like, so what, who cares? 3000 horsepower, if you can't put it down to the ground. And then this is where I learned about MoTec and all this stuff here. So it's definitely something that I've been kind of interested in and learning more about, but I'm seeing it kind of evolve in the industry.

Yeah, absolutely it can be a game changer. It is a game changer, but again, it's not what a lot of people would think where you leave the line with 45, 50 PSI boost, whatever it is, 3000 horsepower, and the driver just keeps his foot pinned to the firewall, and the ECU sorts everything out. Well yes that could happen as I've mentioned, obviously it's not going to be particularly friendly on the engine. So yeah, there's a lot more. That I think is the skill when we get into these really high powered drag cars particularly, that's the skill of the tuner or the crew chief is really power management. And there's other ways of doing this as well. Obviously if we talk about a four wheel drive drag car, it's much more difficult to get a solid reference on when wheel spin's occurring because all four wheels are going to spin together. We can do this with the likes of a very high frequency GPS unit to give GPS speed. For example I'm using a Cyvax IMU and GPS in one of our cars that's 100 hertz. So 100 times a second it's getting GPS based speed. So then you've got a genuine, useful, clean road speed signal that we can reference wheel speeds to. The other way of doing this though, a lot of drag racing classes ban the likes of wheel speed sensors and traction control. So the other option is to do it a bit more of a passive way which is where we monitor drive shaft speed down the track and basically build up a profile of at X seconds into the run, drive shaft speed should be this. And that has to be done off of a very good run. So you want good data to build that up. And basically then the issue's looking at the drive shaft speed and if it spikes above that theoretically perfect profile, then it knows that that's a result of wheel spin and it can bring in appropriate actions to hold that.

OK. So one thing that especially with Monterrey Car Week just wrapping up with the release of the new Huracan replacement and a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago is hybrids. So where do you see that going when it comes to tunability and building? For example, one of my friends was attempting to build an NSX, and then the hybrid system just ended up being pesky to say the least. You know, the motor can do the work, but the electric side, he needs to get MoTak or whatever, and it just wasn't worth it to proceed. Where do you see the next five, ten years going when it comes to tuning hybrid vehicles?

That is the million dollar question. And I'll be honest, I don't know. I'm torn. I think that the hybrid side of things makes a lot of sense. You're kind of getting the best of both worlds. And yeah, there's a lot of benefits that it brings. There's a lot of complexity it brings as well, and with complexity brings potential reliability problems. So you're sort of getting the best of both worlds from ICE and EV, but you're also getting the worst of both worlds as well because you've got both of these technologies. I don't know how that's going to pan out in the aftermarket. I mean I mentioned before that we partnered with Sasha from On Point Dino with our EV course. I mean he's been deep in the EV world for years. And his own 350Z race car, he's got his own sort of put together hybrid system. I mean by all accounts it's working, that car seems to keep setting records. I'd be interested, I haven't actually specifically asked him, for him I think it was more of a case of let's see if we can do this and how well it works. I mean he's proven it does work. But whether it was sort of an efficient use of his time in financial resources, that would probably be the other question. I mean I think at the moment I kind of feel like we're almost at a bit of a crossroads with what's going on with the direction of EV versus hybrid versus internal combustion. And I think there was this big push towards EV, and that seemed that it was going to be the future. I kind of feel now that maybe there's a bit of push back on full EV, and the hybrid sort of maybe makes a bit more sense. And then you've got manufacturers, I think it's Porsche I believe, set up the synthetic fuel kind of pilot plant. So I think Porsche pretty much still dedicated to internal combustion. Hey look, as an enthusiast, I love the technology of EV. I mean there's no doubt that they're incredibly fast. I for one will miss the sound of a well tuned internal combustion engine. I mean EV's just never gonna replace that. So internal combustion, always gonna have a very strong place in my heart. But I'm not also hiding behind a rock saying, no EV technology, I'm not into it, that's horrible, let's move on.

Yeah I'm just very curious to see what happens on the aftermarket side. Especially when you and your team are educating people on it, it's like, well, how do we corner this market? Because it is inevitable as it gets more and more to the consumer level. Like when the NSX came out in 2017, the Gen 2, I think, yeah, Gen 2, in limited numbers, you're not really gonna see much development on that. But as it comes down to the regular Joe, I'm just curious to see how that pans out. So I was just curious on that. Is there supposed to be a combination of I guess both teams? Like your EV team and your ICE team?

Yeah, I don't, not having personally had a hand in an EV conversion or anything hybrid, it's difficult for me to sort of really comment on. The thing that a lot of people kind of miss with the whole EV and the electric side of the hybrid's gonna be the same is there's a limited to non existent amount of tunability in that combination. It's not like an internal combustion engine where generally if you buy a car off the showroom floor, there's gonna be some built in margin that you can extract more power by retuning it, that doesn't happen with electric vehicles. So it's more a case of understanding for our EV course, understanding how all of the systems interact because it is very complex and it's completely foreign to anything internal combustion. And understanding that's gonna be important for those who want to build bespoke motorsport based electric vehicles, or I think probably the more common one will be EV swaps where someone's buying a crashed Tesla or something and swapping that into something else. There's so much potential.

Yeah I'm just very excited to see what, even though I am the resistance in this regard, I do like to learn about my enemy as well.

Yeah, definitely.

So one of the questions I kind of teed up for you when I was emailing back and forth with your team is, who's a competitor, whether it's on or off the track that you respect or I guess value?

A competitor in terms of business, I guess we're quite unique here in this industry that when we started HPA, we were the only online training school for EFI tuning et cetera. There's a couple more that have jumped on. But probably our biggest competitor or the biggest competitor in the market when we started and is still doing a great job is Ben Strait at EFI University. They do in person training courses. I talk to Ben every time I go to SEMA, there's no animosity, we're not enemies, we're friends. And I think that's the thing that is important in any industry. People kind of get in their head that anyone competing with them is their enemy. But it's a big world, there's a lot of people out there, and there's enough people out there to service all of the providers that are there I think. It's fine. And I think competition for me as well, it drives everyone forward. If a competitor comes up with a product that we think is really good, you're like damn we should have thought of that before. And it drives you harder to try and come up with better products and just do generally a better job. I guess the other one, I haven't actually had the opportunity to meet him, but Evan's Performance Academy as well. Yeah EPA. Little bit of play on words there due to maybe some potential problems in the earlier days with the EPA. But yeah he saw maybe the writing on the wall for the tuning industry in the US. I don't think it's quite that dramatic, but obviously the EPA has had a big part in crushing a few hopes and dreams. I think he transitioned to online training. But like I say, I haven't had a chance to actually meet him in person yet. Would absolutely love to.

Do you guys offer, speaking of the in training versus, or in person versus online, do you guys still offer some one on one stuff or live of any sort or?

No, we don't. It just, the business model that we've chosen works so well and allows us to help more people. So I think, you know, the time resources that it takes to do in person training, particularly in the early days, you know, we got flown to Dubai to do some training for Link ECU here in New Zealand, which we've always had a really good relationship with. And I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun. Got to see Dubai, which I absolutely loved. But at the end of the day, you're sort of away from wife and family for, you know, 10, 14 days. You're living out of a suitcase. Yeah, we saw some cool sights, did some cool things, but at the end of the day, you're not there on a holiday. It's business, you're working. So you're not really seeing a new country as a tourist. So it's quite hard, but yeah, ultimately, we just don't have the time resource to be able to do justice to both. We had to kind of pick our poison, and I fully back that I think online training is the better approach. Now, that's not to say, it's horses for courses, I guess. Some people will learn better in an online environment. Some people will learn better in person. They obviously both have their pros and cons. So I'm definitely not sort of saying that there is no place for in person training. Just if I had to pick one, which we did, I think online training probably ticks more of the boxes for more people.

But you offer, or do you offer support then, if somebody has questions or not understanding the course content, I'm assuming via email or phone call or something, that you guys are able to walk somebody through something?

Yeah, absolutely. So tech support is a big part, which I kind of mentioned. I hate dealing with a company or a product where you email a question and a week later, you still haven't got a reply. So we've got two dedicated customer support staff, and we're pretty proactive on getting back to tickets that are raised. But the mainstream way of people getting further support on part of the course that they don't know or didn't understand is our forum. We make it really easy. So on each of our video based modules, there's a form underneath that will automatically generate a question in the forum if someone didn't quite understand something or wants a bit more information. So that's the way we do that. The benefit with that as opposed to individual email questions is if someone's got a question on a course, chances are that they won't be alone. So by posting a forum question, it helps everyone else out who's taken that course as well.

Yeah, if you're a car person in any way, shape or form, if you haven't skimmed over a forum or joined a Facebook page, then you're doing it completely wrong because you think if your problem is unique, it can guarantee you it's not.

Yeah, 100%. We're not reinventing the wheel here. None of this stuff is new with EFI tuning. It's going to be the same questions cropping up, the same problems cropping up over and over again. So again, having those on our forum just helps everyone. I think a little bit of the forum kind of thing has been lost over the time I've been into cars. I grew up in the forum era, and then with the advent of Facebook, I kind of saw maybe them go away a little bit. I think the Facebook groups are good to a point, but they don't have that sort of ease of topics and searchability that a forum does.

Yeah, well, then you have the comment section can get a little more colourful than it probably used to.

Yeah, I think, I'm not sure why there's maybe more anonymity on Facebook than on a forum, but yeah, some of those groups get pretty feral pretty quickly, which is really disappointing actually.

Yep. You got anything else on?

Oh, no, I was just thinking about all the groups I've been in, and I'm like, I'm a little savage. I'm curious, do you keep up with any of the Draggy Talk groups or any of those large group forms or not so much?

Not so much, no. I think I probably try and stay away from them to a degree. I just got sick to death of kind of getting involved in conversations that just ended up going down the toilet essentially. We have a few of our own Facebook groups that we promote. One of them is the Guild of EFI Tuners. And one of the ones that becomes a constant source of frustration, and I just sort of stay quiet on it now because there's no future in it. I know how the conversation's going to go. There's a generation of tuners I think coming through these days who have only ever tuned on ethanol based fuels. Or race fuels for that matter. They're a great fuel for making power. They are also a great fuel for making the tuner look really really good. And one of the reasons for that is while it's not impossible, it's difficult and very unlikely in most instances that you're going to end up encountering detonation, the fuel is just so good. It's got a higher effective octane rating than the best pump gas and it also has a cooling effect as well so it cools the combustion charge temperature. So it makes it very very unlikely you're going to end up encountering knock. So this generation of tuners that only tune on these fuels kind of think that they're bulletproof because they've never had knock occur. So the argument there is that knock detection equipment is essentially irrelevant and it doesn't work. Now I come from a background where for the first 15 years of my tuning career, I was exclusively tuning, almost exclusively tuning on pump fuel. And I can tell you that if you're tuning on pump fuel and you're tuning a turbocharged engine, you will almost certainly find that the engine will start knocking before you reach what's called MBT, that's Maximum Brake Torque Timing, so basically the optimal ignition timing. So knock detection equipment and ECUs that have knock detection, knock control strategies for pump fuel is absolutely essential. But we get into this argument about how it doesn't work, how it's irrelevant technology and yeah, I've said my piece anyway.

So I'm curious, right, you've interviewed probably into hundreds of people over the years, I think based off of your episode count. Definitely.

It's very hard to...

It's difficult to narrow down any one thing, but has there ever been any point where you're just like, this is so impressive, like just something that you never thought possible. Does anything come to mind? For example, one that comes to mind is 3000 horsepower, four cylinders. That was a fun episode to watch.

Yeah, I mean any time I talk to Shane T, I've been fortunate that I now consider Shane a good friend of mine. We live in the opposite part of the world, but every time I'm sort of at SEMA or PRI, I manage to catch up and we've had him on our podcast a couple of times, interviewed him for our YouTube channel a couple of times. That guy is absolutely on the cutting edge. He's so smart and he just gets involved in these mind blowing projects. So yeah, he's probably one of the guys out there, I mean there's several but he's one of the guys out there who I, every time I chat to him, I'm just sort of hanging off every word and just learning so much. That's been the case though for this whole journey with HPA. I interview all these experts in their fields and every time I'm talking to one of them, no matter whether they're a tuner, maybe they're a company making engine components. I'm always, it's kind of like almost a bit selfish, I'm digging out these details to stick away in my own memory bank because I want to know more, it's interesting to me. And then I hope that the upshot of that is, I'm asking these good quality questions that are getting that information that also then helps out those who are watching or listening.

Yep, I always like to blame the listener for some of my questions that make me seem like a novice. I'm like, oh yeah, I explain for the listener, whatever, yeah, it's my own selfish attempt at learning something. And then just to elaborate, so just because the listeners may not know who was you referring to, what's, you said it was Simon, I believe it was?

Or no, it was Shane T. Shane T, so Shane Tecklenburg, he actually worked for MoTeC USA for a number of years and as part of that, he obviously learned a lot about calibration and then he got sent around the US on various tuning projects for MoTeC customers. I can't remember exactly how long he was in that job but then he kind of went out and started his own consulting company and I mean he just gets involved in the most high end projects including, I think you referred to the 3000 horsepower SR20. So he's working with Mazworks on basically building a compound triple turbo 2.2 litre SR20, I think it's a 2.2 and they're aiming to try and make 3000 horsepower. I mean that's a bold claim out of a four cylinder engine but I'd also say that if anyone can do it, the combined forces of Shane punching the keys, understanding turbo charging as well as he does, and then Mark from Mazworks with his understanding of the SR20 and how to make one hold together at that sort of power level. Yeah if anyone can do it, they can.

Yeah that was super crazy to even think somebody could put 150 psi worth of boost through something. I mean just mind boggling.

Mind boggling. I mean I think probably one of Shane's other claims of fame, I am stretching my memory here, but I think he was involved with Ekenu Racing in the UAE. I think that they were the first into the fives in an import. So he's got so many boxes there, and he's kind of involved in just about every form of motorsport as well.

Was there any point in when you were competing, did you ever almost waiver from the platform of choice? Like for example, like I grew up Mopar, but for some reason I love Volkswagens lately. Is there any reason that you stuck to one platform over another?

You know what, I'm actually not brand loyal at all. I was, when I got into drag racing, all I did was assess the options that were there. And I just simply chose the one that I felt had the best opportunities to do what I wanted to do. So I guess the two main competitors at the time, for some stupid reason I decided that four wheel drive was the way to go. The more I've learned about drag racing, it absolutely isn't. But at the time, in my little mind, with absolutely, I'd never driven a car down a drag strip. With what little I knew, four wheels driving versus two, obviously four is going to be better. So that's the way I went. And really the two options I had at the time were the Mitsubishi Evo platform. We had the Evo 1, 2 and 3 which I don't think ever came out in the US. Or at the same time, these were all kind of the rally cars that were being built up for WRC. The Subaru WRX STI was the other option. But back then the GC8 Subaru STI had a glass gearbox and I mean the engine wasn't much better. Sorry again, probably put off all the Subaru fanatics out there. So yeah, the Evo was the one I chose. I mean it does a pretty great job. That engine, the factory block crankshaft and head, albeit the head was heavily modified, at the end of my development we were 1160 wheel horsepower, 54 psi of boost, 10,500 RPM. So I don't think you would do that easily with a Subaru EJ series engine. I can't say it's not possible but it's gonna be a lot harder and a lot more expensive. But more importantly, while the Evo gearbox definitely wasn't bulletproof, we got to a point where we were running pretty consistently in the mid to high nines with that stock box and not breaking at every pass. And that was about the point where we needed to go to something better. So yeah that was it. I mean I did grow to really love the Evo but if you look at the cars that we've got in the workshop fleet, it is quite widely varied. FDR X7, I daily drive a Porsche 964. We've got a 1966 Chev C10 that's sort of just about scraping the ground with a patina paint job. There's an Evo 9 sitting there. 8086 that's about to be put together is a bit of a track hack. So yeah I don't think I'm that brand loyal, I just assess the cars on what I like and don't like about them.

Is there anything here that we have stateside here that you guys can't get there that, I don't know how that works, but I know like in Australia they have, which I know is two totally different places, but like you guys still have the Ford Falcon over in that area there, which we don't really have here anymore. And there's some cars that are really cool performance wise that we never see here in the States. Does that work the other way around too? Is there anything here that you guys don't get there?

No not so much. I think probably if we looked 10 or 15 years ago, that probably was the case. I mean it's a bit unique in this side of the world where Australia did have a Ford and GM manufacturing base. So they were producing the Ford Falcon, which you probably didn't really miss anything there. The GM was the local hold in on HSV brands, but basically very similar LS powered vehicles, the Pontiac G8 I think it was, basically was a rebadged hold in. And then it kind of got to a point where in the last three or four years, maybe five years, they've kind of shut down all of that manufacturing. So now they're a kind of global brand bringing in all the same models from the US. And here in New Zealand, while you might not be able to buy all of those cars off the showroom floor, most of the sort of high end performance models, you can bring in from the US as a special import as well. So I don't think there's anything we miss out on. OK.

I'm curious, I remember seeing on that side of the world, there's some more development of the GR Corolla motor, the Yaris. Yeah. Have you seen a lot of that?

I haven't been personally involved. It's actually a car I really, really like. There's a bunch of them here in New Zealand. The first shipment of the GR Yaris got snapped up maybe a year before the first of them actually hit our shores. And I think Toyota got it all wrong there with the price point as well. I think they sold them maybe a little too cheaply, and that was over that weird time of COVID. So it was the first time I'd ever seen people were buying a brand new GR Yaris, they were lucky enough to get it on that wait list, picked it up, drove it around for 10 or 15,000k, and they were literally listing them and selling them for $10,000 to $15,000 more than sticker price, it was wild. I think that's kind of right at itself now, and Toyota did bring up the retail price as well. I don't think there's a massive amount of development maybe happening here in New Zealand but when I go to World Time Attack in Australia, there's a lot of companies there, Powertrain was one of them who are doing full upgrade packages. And what they're getting out of that stock engine is pretty wild basically. A turbo upgrade, ECU tuning, injectors, and yeah, you're off to the races. Very very impressive little cars.

Yeah I've heard that some people are getting like 800 horsepower out of them, which is, out of a three cylinder, pretty impressive. This isn't like Koenigsegg, the one that they killed off, the three cylinder Gamera, that's a hypercar, that's $4 million, it's a $30,000 three cylinder.

Exactly, I mean I think probably for me though, the best part of this is what we've seen is a genuine enthusiast spec car coming out of Toyota and I think sadly a lot of that's been lost. Mitsubishi, they've got no Evo now. Things have changed and I think the options that we've got available for modestly priced performance cars is quite limited. I mean even all of that stuff that I kind of grew up with, the GCA, Subaru's, the Evo 1, 2s and 3s, their popularity now, the price is just out the gate. Even the R32 GTR is still a car that I've got on my list to own. Back before we started High Performance Academy, I got the option to buy one from a customer of mine, and so this was maybe 13, 14 years ago, and I could have bought that for I think about $25,000 New Zealand dollars, so what would that be, maybe $16,000, $18,000 US? And it was mint, absolutely mint. And now a car of that spec's gonna be more in the vicinity of maybe $100,000 New Zealand dollars, so I don't have a calculator in front of me, call that maybe $65,000, $70,000 USD, I don't know how that actually compares to the prices you guys are paying. But it's hard for someone to, a young enthusiast, if they're looking for a car to modify, what are your options? Everything has just gone so expensive. Even V series Hondas, anything with a K series in it, those have all sort of just gone up and to the right as well.

Did you notice, same thing with you guys over there, COVID just took the car market and made it absolutely insane?

Yeah, it went absolutely wild. I think it's funny because we have an online sort of sales place called TradeMe here in New Zealand, I guess it's like your Craigslist or eBay, whatever. And I've still got searches set up for the likes of the R32 GTR. So I've kind of watched those prices over the last five years and over COVID, people were asking 120, 140 grand for these cars that absolutely weren't worth that. And now everything's sort of settled, obviously global economies tightened, interest rates are through the roof and inflation is out the gate. And people are still asking 100k for these cars, but I kind of see the same cars just being relisted and relisted month after month. You can ask whatever you want, but whether it sells is a different deal.

What's your favourite aspect to educate people on nowadays? Is it still more so at a tuning side, or are you trying to find... Is it like the more holistic approach? Is there anything that you're just like, I love teaching this, I could do this forever? And I guess to compound that question, where did the love for teaching start?

Great questions. I think it's still tuning for me. I mean, that's foremost still my main passion. What I really like about the tuning from just a tuning myself standpoint is, every time you're on the dyno, you're going to learn something new. Technology keeps changing, the ECUs evolve, they add new features, new strategies. For example, this MoTeC GPRP Pro torque based package, for me, that was a massive deviation from a conventional ECU and how it works. So steep learning curve, but that's kind of what keeps me passionate. The aspect we're teaching though, why I like that is it's been very rewarding. Obviously we teach a lot of home enthusiasts and occasionally we'll get an email like hey thanks, I tuned my car based on your course, I'm really happy with it. And that's obviously really satisfying. But when we get an email or a message from someone who's sort of actually started a business tuning cars based on taking all of our courses and are thanking us because they're now got a viable business that's making the money and allowing them to provide for their family, that for me, that's really satisfying. Essentially we've managed to change someone's life for the better. And I think that's probably usually quite hard to achieve. In terms of a passion for teaching, I don't actually know. When I went to university here in New Zealand and I did a Bachelor of Technology degree, which is a four year degree, and I majored in an option called Product Development. My fourth year, every week, we had to do an impromptu stand up, talk to the class of a couple of hundred people, basically about our product or the process of what we were doing that particular week. And what I found with that is, at the end of that year, public speaking to me was just nothing. I had no issue with it, I was very very comfortable with it, and I think over that time I probably developed a skill set for explaining things. And from there it sort of just developed even further. Yeah, really enjoy trying to break down complex concepts and explain them in a way that people can understand them easily.

Which by the way, I have to give you a compliment on that front. With your interviewing skill set, it comes from a place of knowledge. It's rare to see, and making it digestible as well is difficult to describe. But it's what I'm striving for as well in the long term. So I got to give you a compliment on that front, because it's very noticeable when someone knows their stuff and is able to extract more.

Yeah, I appreciate the compliment. And yeah, I think that does make a difference with the interviews, because I generally, I'm not maybe as expert as the person I'm talking to, but I certainly know enough to be able to again, as we were talking about earlier, dive in and get the details that I want, and I know therefore other people are going to want as well. So yeah, it just becomes often a discussion with two guys who really know their stuff, and it's just interesting for people to listen to, therefore.

It is very fun to be at a dinner with two very intelligent, like when it comes to people who build race cars, and I'm just a fly on the wall, it's very fun to be in a part of those conversations. A lot of you guys know Rattified 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 are 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 rattifiedmotorsport.com to get yourself booked today, and I hope to see you guys at the shop. I'm curious, right? Because right now one of the platforms that really sticks out to me is the S58 platform. I mean, it's just bonkers what you're able to do with that. Do you ever see anything being quite the level of the 2JZ?

It's such a tough one because I think the 2JZ and to a degree the RB26, I think 2JZ is greater than RB26. Sorry Nissan guys.

Yeah I don't think anybody's gonna argue with you.

It came from a simpler time. And emissions requirements weren't what they are now. So you've got a cylinder head on a modern engine that is developed with a very different sort of list of requirements. And really getting the engine emissions compliant these days is, well obviously it's 100%, the main driver of the manufacturer. If they can't get the thing emissions compliant, well it's never gonna make it onto the road, so nothing else really matters. So that kind of limits a lot of the development of the engine around just pure performance which is obviously what we're interested in. And I think that makes it difficult to a degree to kind of come out with a modern engine that would be a worthy adversary to the 2JZ. That's not to say it can't be done, but probably it's going to end up with requirements for a lot more custom aftermarket parts. Classic example there is the drive now with turbocharged engines is towards basically bolting the turbocharger directly to the cylinder head. So that works really well in terms of reducing the length of the path between the exhaust valve and the turbine wheel. But it becomes very very restrictive in terms of performance. So when you've got an engine like that, it's going to be hard to really get the power out of it that we could with a conventional individual port engine.

So I'm curious, some of the things, I can't remember exactly how you phrased it earlier in this, but there is something that you look at when you're trying to decide how to modify a particular platform. Is there a list of, let's say, again, I'm going to use the S58 as an example, when you take apart that engine, you're trying to figure out what parts are worth upgrading, where the stresses are. Is there a particular list that you would go down to be like, all right, well, maybe this needs an upgraded crankshaft or upgraded heads, or maybe this could be designed differently. Do you ever go into like mental exercises like that or not really?

Yeah, definitely, I mean, what that really comes back to is, I don't think it's always necessary to go and reinvent the wheel. If you are dealing with a platform that is almost brand new, you're going to be sort of breaking new ground so you're forced to go through that exercise that you just mentioned. I'll dive into it in a bit more detail but most enthusiasts out there aren't doing that. They're probably going to be walking a road that's been pretty well trodden in the past. So it's a case of jumping on forums that are specific to the platform, whatever that may be, and look at the build recipes essentially. So what is the proven path to XYZ power level that you want? And obviously there's going to be differences of opinion but you look at enough build recipes and you kind of start to see the common trends emerging. The con rod is a weak point, we've got to get rid of that. The crankshaft's good up to let's say 900 horsepower and at that point we start having problems with that. What the pistons are good for. Because they're not all created equal. And I think a lot of people, the mistake they actually make is not embracing the quality and strength of the factory parts. A lot of people think, OK I'm building a 600 horsepower engine so I have to replace every single factory component. But well, the reality is that maybe, but also maybe not. So again, do your research, whatever other people were achieved. And on that front, a lot of the failures that you'll see with a factory piston or even a factory connecting rod, actually can be brought back to poor tuning. So if you are dealing with a factory cast piston, there's actually a lot of advantages with a cast piston. They have a lower expansion rate, a thermal expansion coefficient than a 2618 forged piston. So what that means is that they can be set up with tighter piston to cylinder wall clearances, that means that they are quieter in operation, they seal better, we get less blow by. So all good things there. Downside with a cast piston is that they are quite brittle. Again not all are created equal, some are better and some are worse. But essentially with a brittle piston, they can be very unforgiving if they are subjected to detonation or knock. So that is a type of abnormal combustion. Essentially you could liken it to a pressure spike occurring, which is a bit like someone slamming into the top of the piston with a sledgehammer. So that can quickly destroy a cast piston. Whereas the forged piston, it's not immune to it but it will generally put up with a little bit more knock before it cries enough. Likewise the connecting rods. So these can, on a factory engine, be a very common failure point. But again, the same thing. Running the engine into knock, that puts a pressure spike that's being transferred through the piston into the connecting rod. That can bend or fail the connecting rod. And likewise the other thing that people completely ignore is what the torque curve looks like. So that torque curve is essentially airflow into the engine, which equates to cylinder pressure. And it's the cylinder pressure that is going to give the con rod a really hard time. I'll quite often, if I'm dealing with a factory engine, and I know I'm pushing it well beyond what it should be pushed to, I'll artificially limit that peak torque, and there's a couple of ways we can do that. With a turbocharged engine, we ramp the boost in a little bit more slowly. So we don't bring it in as aggressively as we can. Maybe through that sort of peak torque, 3.5 to 4.5 thousand RPM region, maybe I'm gonna hold the boost at sort of 20 psi peak. And then once we're past that, we can ramp it up to 30. We can also do similar with our ignition timing, purposely being a little more conservative with the ignition timing through that peak torque region. So these are the little things that a knowledgeable tuner can do to extract results from an engine that another tuner is just gonna end up breaking to pieces on his dyno.

It is really funny to, because I actually watched your webinar on that actually where you were discussing, you know what, you're replacing all these stock parts for no reason. They're perfectly key, so it's just funny, it just came to mind.

I think it's just a mindset that people get into, you know the internet is a great place, but we see all of these sort of amazing car builds and people think that they need to throw the complete parts catalog at an engine or their car in order to get a result. I'm a little bit more holistic in terms of looking at what I'm trying to achieve and then I want to basically replace the minimum number of parts possible to get to that sort of target power level.

I have found with the people that we've had on the show, those who look at their builds from a more holistic level, especially when discussing high power, typically have better results rather than trying to nitpick this and that. Where do you think that comes from? I mean, can you teach people to look at things holistically?

Yeah, I think so. I think we try really hard to do exactly that. I mean it is just breaking that sort of mindset, as I mentioned, of thinking, I'm building my car, I need to throat the kitchen sink at this thing. Everything in the parts catalogue is going on board. It's just about teaching people to be a bit more thoughtful with the process. Before you jump on eBay or whatever, let's do exactly what I mentioned, let's jump on the forums and look at the build recipes that others have used to get where we've got. Don't reinvent the wheel, people have gone before you and done exactly what you want to achieve. Let's save some money and learn from them. So I think yeah, that's the process of just getting people to be a little bit more thoughtful about their project and spend a little bit more time in the planning and strategy stage rather than sort of getting super excited and just going and ticking up a whole bunch of parts on your credit card.

There's a reason why you usually know where the limits are right? Because somebody's found that limit and broke something.

Yeah exactly, it does end up becoming a pretty well known sort of power level, torque level failure mode so that's what we need to understand. And as I mentioned before, the only area where this becomes a little bit more problematic is when you are kind of breaking your ground, dealing with a brand new platform that's just come out, and then you're the one that's pioneering and finding where things break, and that unfortunately can get pretty expensive pretty quickly.

Do you have any experience?

A classic example, Tony Paylowe, one of my podcast guests, another tuner in the States who I'm very fortunate to call a friend. So he runs T1 Race, one of the premier R35 GTR tuners in the world. And we're talking about the development of the VR38 engine block. And fairly early on he said that they were pretty much straight away going to a set of aftermarket sleeves in the block. And then having no end of other knock on problems as a result. And in the end, they actually went back to a factory unsleeved block. And I can't remember now, I think he said that they got up to around 1800 horsepower out of that factory block unsleeved and didn't have it fail. So people, the point of this is people sort of think that a set of Darden sleeves, that's an essential for an aluminium block if I want to make big power. So they go and do that too early. Same would be said for our SR20, we've got an SR20 VE turbo in our endurance car. For endurance racing, we run that at about 450 wheel horsepower, but I've got a push to pass button that takes it up to about 650 and we run it at that sort of power level for sprint races as well. Common theory would be that making that sort of power on an unsleeved SR20 block is impossible, or at least you'd be living on the edge. We have had absolutely no trouble with the block reliability, at least from that aspect. Did break a bunch of main caps very early on, but yeah that's separate. So again, you don't have to go that far straight away. Yes there are case studies where a sleeve is the only option, but it's probably not at the power level you maybe necessarily think.

And for reference, for anybody listening, T1 is the company slash GTR that won Texas 2K, I believe it was last year or the year before, which was crazy to see a car go that fast.

Yeah. They know how to build a fast GTR, that's for damn sure.

I think they've got to be like the number one shop at the moment. I mean they're just the one to look at right now. They've got everyone's attention.

I was going to say maybe world record holder but yeah I just, I can't tell off the top of my head if that's correct. And I mean the scene changes so quickly as well.

That's true.

It's always funny, we'll put up a video about a car that has set a world record on the drag strip. These things don't age very well so someone will watch that video in six months time and sort of call us out like nah that doesn't have the world record. Well, yeah, look at the date, it did at that point and world records are made to be broken.

Oh yeah, every single one of my highlights, sometimes they age poorly, but that's part of it.

We were just having that discussion before this started.

So when you were the record holder for the EVO platform, what would that development look like? I mean, was there anybody, and again, I'm definitely going to age myself here. Was there much head to head? Was it any direct competition? Okay, so there was.

Yeah, that's the only reason I went as fast as I did. So competition, as I was mentioning earlier, is really, really good for everyone. So I mean, at the time, I was getting involved, and while it wasn't directly comparable, John Shepherd in the US was the gold standard with his Talon Eclipse, and I think he'd gone into the high sevens, I think. He was just in another league. There was nothing that came close. And I just wanted to run into the tens but I did that on my second pass, and it's like oh cool, now what? But in New Zealand, we had three of us with EVOs who were competing. We had a guy called Zoheb, we had another guy called Brett Lesang. Brett Lesang was actually the first to run a 10 second pass in a four wheel drive here in New Zealand and two of them, the other two were based up in the biggest city of New Zealand, Auckland which was a long way from me. I was in Wellington, other end of the island, about an eight hour drive away. And some weekends, they would go to a drag strip up there called Merry Merry, they'd have a Friday Night Drag Wars and one of them would break our own internal record, he'd go a bit quicker. And then maybe on Saturday, I'd go to our drag strip locally and then I'd break his record. So we're sort of always trading records but it just drove all of us to go that much faster. Then there was also APC over in Australia, there was actually a couple of guys over in Australia, and APC ended up taking my record in the end, I can't quite remember how fast Nick went. But yeah, absolutely, it really drove us. The development of that car was pretty dumb if I was honest. I mean, the reason I got into drag racing wasn't so much because I liked drag racing. For me, first and foremost, I'm an engine builder and a tuner. And the dyno's obviously a great way of figuring out how well you did with both of those elements. But we all know that dyno numbers kind of get thrown around and kind of a little bit meaningless and some of them are sort of bolstered up a little bit and maybe a little bit hard to believe. When you take your car to the drag strip, the dyno doesn't matter. The ET in mile an hour will tell you everything you need to know about how well you really did. The other thing I like about drag racing as I got into it is that you can compare yourself on a world stage. So I go and do a lap around our local racetrack here, Highlands Motorsport Park, and I tell you I did a minute 38, who cares, whatever. Is that fast? You don't know. So it's very hard for people to kind of relate to that, but 13, 20 feet's the same here as it is in Texas, as the UK, wherever. So we can compare these times. So that's what I really liked about it. When we were developing the car though, after we ran that 10 and we were like well what's next? Obviously nines. So we took a bit more weight out of it. At this stage the car's still road legal, made a little bit more power, and lo and behold went and ran a 988 I think it was. Obviously then the next targets the eights, and obviously you get to this exponential growth in terms of cost and power that you need to make at each point, and you start making more power and put stickier slicks on the car, and you start breaking more and more drivetrain components. We've got a gearbox and diff and transfer case that was designed to take 300 horsepower and now we're putting probably closer to 1300, 1400 through it. So obviously a limit there. I think the mistake that I made was trying to always make as much power as I could. And again, tuner and engine builder, that's sort of tick in the box for me in terms of yep I did a great job, but what it did was it made the car very very difficult to get it off the line. It would either bog or it would light up in wheel spin so we had terrible 60 foot in that car and there's a general thumb in drag racing that every tenth of a second you can gain to the 60 is going to be two tenths at the end of the track. So that's the place, that's the easy low hanging fruit in terms of getting better at ETs and we just never did, even on its very best 8.2 pass, I think that was like a 134, 138, 60 foot, it's pretty disgusting. And then the flip side of that, we built an Evo 9 for a customer who wanted to take down the late model Evo World Record which at the time was held by, I think it was AMS in the US with a 8.42. And with that one we sort of did our sums and decided that we probably needed at about 1000 wheel horsepower. Car could have made more but we capped it. We thought let's just make what we need and then focus on getting everything else working. And we worked really really hard on getting that car to 60 foot. I mean it would do consistent one, two, sixes. Which I mean these days is probably not amazing but still pretty good. And it went in the end 8.34 at 169 mile an hour. So the mile an hour kind of shows you that car, 169 versus my car at 180, the car definitely wasn't making the power of mine but it wasn't too far behind on ET, all things considered. The other benefit, because we weren't pushing the thing so hard, the engine reliability, the drivetrain reliability was just that much higher as well. Which then meant that the car could go and do laps, the driver got more experience, we got more experience with dialling it and intuning it. So it just all worked together to give us a really good result which is super satisfying.

There's so many ways I could take that, just from spectating. Again, I'm a big Viper fan, just because our hometown heroes, we do have Enthimoto right in our backyard here. So watching them set up their cars and, you know, set, you know, I mean, they beat Hurricanes to the sixes, you know, with a platform that nobody really was paying attention to, however many years ago. So when it came to setting it up, what were some of the key lessons along the way? Like, what did you find that was most important? Like, for example, we had Tim Romanon who had the Miracore, and when he was dialing in his all wheel drive setup on there, you know, he realized that setting it up this way, this caused catastrophic results. Was there anything, I guess, that you learned along the way that was more important than you initially thought?

Oh, there's so many parts to this. Yeah, I think a big part of it is exactly what I was talking about before when we were talking about traction controllers, this is the power management. So trying to adjust the power delivery as the car went down the track, and we would do this with boost versus gear or boost versus speed. I would also, because we're, you're trying to leave the line with let's say 20, 22 psi of boost. So we've actually probably got more power than the car can put to the track. But if we leave the line with less, let's say 15 psi, once we get into second gear and we can now put more power to the track, the turbo's big and lazy, it takes too long to spool up. So what we wanted to do was leave with more power than we could really put to the track. And then we'd manage that by using a timer based ignition retard to sort of pull the torque back. So then once we got into second gear, we could put the timing back in but we've already got boost. So that, and just learning how to use the data analysis, data logging and then optimise the car after each run as the track evolved. So that was really important but easily the most important part to my life in four wheel drive drag racing was developing the worst kept secret in drag racing which was a clutch slipper unit. So these days they're available off the shelf from I think Magnus Motorsport, make a really nice option but back then nothing really existed or no one was talking about it, I think anyone fast was using one. But essentially what I did, actually we'll go back one step, if we look at a clutch style drag car, maybe a pro stock car, all of them use a slider style drag racing clutch which has an adjustable base pressure and then it has adjustable weights that we can put on the fingers of the clutch which basically make the clutch clamp harder as the RPM increases because of the centrifugal force acting on these weights as the clutch speed increases. So you can basically tune the clutch to slip off the line so that we stay hooked up, we don't get excessive wheel spin. But then as the RPM comes up and the wheel speed comes up, the clutch will start to lock up. So a very fine art to tuning one. When done right, they're amazing. But they're also very high maintenance, the clutch needs to be adjusted back to its base setting after every single pass. So very very time consuming. So I sort of looked at this and went well how can we get that effect without trying to fit a slider clutch which would be near on an impossibility in a four wheel drive car like my Evo. So I decided to take what was then a Turbosmart pneumatic boost tee. So the old boost valve that you used to put in your wastegate line and turn the boost up. And essentially all that was is a needle in seat that allowed an adjustable air bleed. So I looked at that and thought well, if I just drill and tap this for an 8th MPT fitting and put this in the clutch line between the clutch master cylinder and the clutch slave cylinder, I'm going to be able to adjust how quickly or slowly the clutch releases. So when you use that, you'd put your foot on the floor on the clutch and then if you sidestep the clutch, the clutch pedal would take approximately two seconds to come all the way back up. So what that does is it forces the clutch essentially to slip through first gear. And that was the key element in getting the cars to stop breaking drivetrain components and to stop sort of lighting up and wheel spinning or bogging on the line. Downside is you couldn't use that system with anything that required the clutch for a shift but we were on sequential dog boxes, no problem. All we needed was an ignition cut for the shift so that was fine. And it did make the car hard to race because it was very difficult to cut a light because there was a latency between when you sidestep the clutch depending on where it was and its take up point and when the clutch actually started to engage and the car would move. So yeah difficult to cut a light. But at that time all we were doing was racing for PBs, I didn't really care if I beat the guy on the other lane. Just if I set a world record, nothing else mattered so it kind of worked for us. Downside of that of course is 10 passes and the clutch was toast and we're on a triple plate clutch so it was fairly labour intensive anyway.

Was there any other platforms as you're going through or moments of frustration or as you were getting started that you had your eyes on? Was there other runner ups to I'm gonna get rid of all this and get at this situation?

No I think I was so far, so far in the hole with that car, it would have been difficult to come back and start again. But I mean I guess I'm pretty stubborn as well and I could kind of see the potential was there. The 4G63 makes great power and is pretty strong. So yeah I didn't really have an issue with that, it was like just developing the rest of the car around the engine and the drivetrain was the challenging part. And I think if we had kept going with that car, it would have got into the sevens. I mean I don't think I want to work as hard as I worked back then to get a world record. It's a lot of work, a lot of commitment, a lot of financial commitment as well to do that. And I can't quite remember where that record sits now for the Mitsubishi platform. I maybe, boost in performance, have got that with Red Demon, but yeah I've lost track. I don't watch it every week like I used to.

So, one of your favorite phrases is if you've been living under a rock, which I have been. At what point did you decide to hang up the racing boots?

It's an interesting story. No, well I've transitioned. So, I started out in karting. I got involved in some sort of local car club hill climbs when I was younger, and then kind of went to university and that all stopped because university students don't have any money. Then when I started my business, that was really around drag racing, as we've already discussed. Where it stopped was probably a couple of years before I sold the business. And yeah, I was getting to a point where we'd probably done it for 10 years. It takes its toll. And it was not good for the business. While yes it did bring business in, on a race weekend or a race weekend coming up, usually the week prior to the event, no customer work was getting done and we were prepping the race car. So you know, money's going out, no money's coming in. That's some long hours as well and then of course you break something so that has to be fixed. But yeah last time I raced that car, we were at the drag strip and we were sponsored by Turbosmart and we had one of their, I think it was called an eBoost 2 electronic boost controller. And we had been having some problems with it, it was getting interference we think from the CDI ignition system. So what it would do is halfway down the drag strip, sometimes it would just shut down and you'd go to wastegate spring pressure, which obviously is the safer option but yeah that's what it did which wasn't great. So I did a test pass at this event, that's exactly what happened and we're like right, we'll just revert back to the, I had a Motec M800 in the car, we'll revert back to the Motec controlling boost because that's how we had previously run it. What I'd forgotten was that between the previous time we'd been running the Motec for boost control and this time, Motec had had a very major revision to their firmware. And it brought in one more parameter for the boost control. Basically, I think off the top of my head, it was basically a parameter which would say whether 0% in the duty cycle table was requesting minimum boost or maximum boost. And we hadn't run that so that was incorrectly set. So we put the Motec back in control of boost and I asked for just a modest amount of boost just to go and make sure the systems were all working, wasn't really running it on kill. I left the line, the car hooked up really good. I thought yep, we're on. Pulled second gear and a warning light came on for high EGT. But it was still going pretty good so I was choosing to ignore that as you do. Still at full throttle, the car is absolutely hooked up and hauling. And maybe 100 milliseconds later, there's a jet of water all up the windscreen and that's all that happened. So yeah, torched the head basically as a result. After I had a look at the data logging, I think we ended up at something like 60 plus psi of boost which was the limit of the map census. So where it actually got to is anyone's guess. So at that point I thought, you know what, maybe enough's enough.

Now obviously we're coming up on that two hour mark. So have you ever heard of the Minnesota goodbye by chance?

I have absolutely not.

All right.

Well, I'll introduce you to that in a second.

So I have one question and Dan's going to have one for you as well. The one question that's been kind of lingering in the back of my head this whole episode is, does any success story come to mind? And you mentioned like sometimes you've, or in many cases, you've enabled people to create businesses and build a life for their families. Is there anybody that comes to mind to you?

Well, actually, interestingly, something that's gone full circle, I won't mention a name because this may not come to fruition. But a little while ago, a friend of mine put me onto a YouTube video. And it was a guy over in Australia who had turbocharged his Lexus IS200 and was tuning it and he had done so off the back of taking our courses. And at the end of his video, he gave us a nice big shout out which was really impressive. And he spoke really really well. He was clearly pretty smart and the fact that he had already created his own YouTube channel was kind of cool as well. And as I was mentioning earlier, it's kind of hard to find people with the skill set needed to understand what they're doing, teach what they're doing and also be good on camera. So we actually brought him over from Australia last week for a bit of a trial to see if we felt he's gonna be a good fit as a content creator for HPA. At this point, we think he is. He really enjoyed himself here but there's a whole lot of complexities in bringing someone from another country and shifting their whole life, plus a house, plus a partner, plus some cars. So as I say, at this stage, that's a watch this space. But if that goes through, I'd say that's a pretty cool success story that's gone full circle.

Well, then on that note, Dan, do you want to pop the usual three?

Absolutely. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. You have an unlimited budget, swaps are okay, whatever your imagination can come up with. But we need a daily driver, a show car, and a track car.

It's a tough one, so many options. Let's start with the track car. Even here I've got two options. I'm just going to name the two options. The 992 GT3 RS, I think, is an amazing car. The results I hear from them on the track, everyone absolutely loves it so I think that would be amazing. But while that's a pretty expensive car, if we're genuinely talking no budget, I think this new, what is it, the Red Bull RB17, Adrian Newey's sort of no holds barred track car. I mean I heard they put someone on their simulator in the UK and he was a good amateur driver and would have put that car on pole at the Silverstone Grand Prix by a second. That's insane. So yeah, that'd be the track car. The daily driver, it was a bit of a tough one. I mentioned I drive a Porsche 964 and I mean it's not fast, it's a cool car, it's fun and I like the look of it. I think something up from that, I'd probably look at maybe an Audi RS6. What I like about those is they're fast in stock form. They're cool but understated. I don't think non car people would sort of look twice at an RS6. Plus I've got a golden retriever and he needs a bit of space in the boot. He's real awkward in the Porsche, he just kind of like awkwardly sits on the seat and doesn't really know what to do. So yeah, good boot space in the RS6 plus plenty of room for the family. So that I think would tick that box.

I just had a friend show up at my house with a Great Dane and an R8. So yeah, I am sure that gets awkward.

Yeah it's not ideal pet transport if you've got a two seater car, that's for sure. The show car, I must admit I'm probably not really that much of a show car guy. I kind of did my time with that but I was only ever showing my Evo drag car at our local shows. I'd probably actually say our C10. I already own it so the budget doesn't really matter but that is probably the fleet favourite. Like I said, patina paint, I think that's show worthy. Pretty much ready to lay frame and we've actually got a roadster shop chassis that's airbagged, that's gonna go under that body and a fairly healthy stroked LS that's gonna go in it as well. So yeah I reckon that'll be show worthy and just a cool car to cruise around in.

And just to clarify, you are locking in the RB17, right?

Yeah, 100%.

Okay. I'll get my order in now. I'm gonna introduce you to the Minnesota goodbye. Have you read Adrian Newey's book, How to Build a Car?

I think I'm on to my eighth run through that book. It is absolutely my favorite. It's insane hearing his story from his own perspective.

Okay, I'm gonna have to read through it a second time. I got it a few months ago. I was like, man, this is a really expensive book, but I have to read it. And it was worth, I mean, I think I read it in three or four days. I don't think I've done that since middle school.

So yeah, once you pick it up, you really can't put it down.

And I'm curious, again, Minnesota goodbye. I'm curious, where do you think he's going to land team-wise if he doesn't retire?

Yeah, it's a million dollar question, isn't it? But I mean he's pretty open in the book about his sort of being courted by both Ferrari and Mercedes in the past. And personally at the age he's at with the success he's had and no doubt the net worth he's built up, I would think that probably it might be time to hang up the drawing board and retire and just enjoy life. But I sense that he's probably not that sort of a guy. I think he's maybe still got some unfinished business. I don't know, I kind of feel like for better or worse, Ferrari just has this weird appeal that maybe they're not always the fastest but all of the drivers and maybe the designers kind of want their time at the helm of Ferrari. Having said that, I think he's actually stated he's not going there so maybe it's gonna be Aston, I don't know, I don't know.

Yeah, Aston would be interesting because he's always wanted to work with Alonso. Obviously, he's wanted to work with Hamilton, but then you could also come full circle with Williams too. I mean, I don't know, just this is an opinion puff piece at this point.

Yeah, Williams really have got themselves into a bit of a hole that I think is going to be time consuming and more importantly, incredibly expensive to drag themselves out of. Yeah, I hope they can come back. I mean, it's always sort of, they go in, it's a cyclical nature, I think, in Formula One. You'll have a team that's absolutely at the peak of the sport, which Williams absolutely were, and then maybe they drop off a little bit. But it's also such an incredibly expensive sport as well, getting that funding consistently, even with a budget cap, it must be so hard. So hard to navigate.

On that note, when I was talking with your team, obviously, where can people find you guys?

Oh of course. We're kind of everywhere you'd expect. hpacademy.com will get you to our website, we're hpa101 on Instagram, always posting interesting stuff up there. We're on TikTok as well. And our YouTube channel, search for High Performance Academy on YouTube. And we've got an amazing amount of content on there. I kind of always say that we give away about 95% of our paid content on our YouTube channel for free. So if people wanna spend a few hundred hours on there, there's some absolute gold nuggets of information in there. We've also got a coupon code as well that your listeners can use. So that coupon code is Minnoxide100, and that will get your listeners $100 off the purchase of our tuning starter package. So that's a package of courses that basically takes you from zero previous knowledge through to having the theory and practical knowledge required to start tuning your very first car. So with all of our courses as well, I kind of mentioned at the start, once you purchase, they're yours for life. You can get to rewatch them as many times as you like. But we also offer a 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee. So if someone purchases and decides hey, you know what, this isn't quite what I expected, let us know, get a full refund of the purchase price. So absolutely zero risk giving it a test drive. And if people wanna have a look and see what I personally do, I'm on Instagram, just Andre Simon.

Which, by the way, I strongly, strongly, strongly urge anyone to check out the YouTube channel. And I have proof if you need it. I think I have maybe 20 hours of watching in the last two weeks. So I think it's made me a stronger interviewer, and I do hope to see that, and I do hope to apply that knowledge in a physical sense in the future as well. So I mean, thank you for everything you guys do. And thank you so much for you and your team for reaching out to getting you on the show.

Yeah, no problem. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, we try. Dan, thanks for existing. And we'll see you all next time.