Hit the Brakes!!

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:06
Unknown
Hey. What's up? Ken from Palm Beach Dyno here. Welcome to our brand new podcast called Hit the Brakes, where we sit down with industry leaders, racers and everyone in between. For the very first episode, I couldn't pick anybody else but Jerry Wroblewski. He's my mentor. Former Ford engineer behind the 4R70W Both at the OEM level and afterwards with the J mod, founder of one of the largest tuning companies out there and very much responsible for the growth of remote tuning.

00:00:36:10 - 00:00:53:14
Unknown
One of the forefathers of this whole deal, and I'm very honored to have him on the show. I hope you enjoy it. Well, welcome to the very first podcast, Jerry. There wouldn't be anybody else I would ask to do it first. Besides you, a lot of people know your history, but not enough people. And I can't wait to get into the conversations here.

00:00:53:16 - 00:01:19:15
Unknown
I think most people know you or that would know you or what you've done the biggest thing, maybe not in your mind, but in general in the public is, asked. So I think that's a good place to start. And then we can kind of jump around, since obviously that's how I met you. so real quick as I set up, back in, 2003, I traveled my car up to Cleveland.

00:01:19:15 - 00:01:34:15
Unknown
I never met you or even knew your name at that point because, it was being done under Ford ship.com. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that period of time and how it kind of got to that point, like leading up to, you know, me coming up there, obviously, you know, it was a dino day.

00:01:34:15 - 00:01:57:28
Unknown
I think you probably tuned somewhere between you would know better than me 10 to 20 cars a day on those things. So why don't you tell us a little about, like, what that was all about? okay, so what that's all about. You have to rewind the clock. there was some guy somewhere in southeastern Michigan, and unfortunately, I have no idea what his name was, but he had a 9697 cobra that he rode raised in.

00:01:57:28 - 00:02:15:00
Unknown
Somewhere along the lines, he gets a hold of me and he wants me to tune his car. This will be the this is the first car I've ever, ever tuned outside of anything. And, And I agreed to go to help the guy, and he wanted to go to Steve's place in Cleveland and had me tune his car at that diner.

00:02:15:00 - 00:02:33:27
Unknown
I mean, this is 2000 ish, something like that. So there weren't a huge amount of Jazzy Dino's out there. So we went out there and I probably spent the better part of a whole day working on this guy's car, and it picked up probably 10 to 15 horsepower. I mean, it was just an Na 9697 Mustang Cobra that he rode raced, but, you know, there was a legitimate gain.

00:02:33:27 - 00:02:53:13
Unknown
And we went back to the beginning to, you know, to show how much it gained and everything. And, and Steve, you know, and I were talking later and Steve said, you know, you seen a lot of people come in, but nobody ever really able to to genuinely make more power than when they started on a, on a relatively any car or relatively stock car, prior to me coming there.

00:02:53:15 - 00:03:12:14
Unknown
And that's kind of how me and Steve started way back in, probably somewhere around 2000. Those are probably some of the only files that I still don't have or that I don't have from that guy's car. One interesting thing I'd be curious to know is, you said, you know, it was basically your first one out, like in that format.

00:03:12:14 - 00:03:28:03
Unknown
Like, like, how did you reach out to you, like, like, did somebody recommend him or like, how did that happen? I honestly don't remember. You don't really remember, I don't remember I he ended up calling me. I don't remember how he got Ahold of me or who recommended him, but I'm like, sure, I'll give it a shot.

00:03:28:09 - 00:03:45:05
Unknown
Yeah. I was doing some stuff with Kenny Bell and helping Ken facilitate Kenny Bell up to this point, and maybe it came from somebody that Jim knew. If I had to maybe guess because, you know, Jim Bell knows virtually everybody in, in the automotive aftermarket. Yeah. And Steve was the owner of the place where you first tune in my car.

00:03:45:08 - 00:04:00:04
Unknown
Yeah. and that's. Is that what you did? The majority of you're done. I know you moved around to different deals, and we had a deal in Dayton. We'll talk about later, which is where we actually first met. We didn't even meet the first time between my car, because it was so busy and the way the system worked.

00:04:00:04 - 00:04:19:24
Unknown
And, you know, at that point, you weren't really putting your name, your personal name out there, from what I could remember. so I knew about you, but it wasn't like, you know, it was more at that point, I was getting tuned by for Trip.com. Not necessarily Jerry, which obviously we met after that, and we'll go over that, later.

00:04:19:28 - 00:04:37:06
Unknown
So from that first car, it did, it just slowly progressed from there. And you just did more with Steve until it it did. I mean, Steve and I talk after I worked in that guy's Cobra and Steve said, hey, can you do this for for other vehicles? And I'm like, yeah, I can do it for, for virtually any computer controlled Ford.

00:04:37:06 - 00:04:56:10
Unknown
He goes, well, if I get some together, would you come back? And I'm like, sure, why not? And then when I came back again, one of the very first cars I've done when I went back to Steve's was, a market for Mike Bowen. Okay. So it was actually a customer of Mike's. It, I don't remember all the modifications, but, you know, that was probably back in 2001 ish or something.

00:04:56:10 - 00:05:16:00
Unknown
And then initially I did probably, you know, every month or every other month I would go to Steve's place in Cleveland. You know, Steve made portable Dino's. You Steve used to say that he did not do, he did not do performance work. He specialized in data. So he would build a portable dyno and be able to give people all the data they needed to do what they needed to do.

00:05:16:02 - 00:05:33:02
Unknown
But he would not do anything from a computer standpoint at that point in time. Gotcha. Oh, I didn't know that about Mike. I mean, obviously I know Mike from you and, you know, he's a friend. We don't talk that often, but I had no idea. I knew he went way back with you because pretty much any time something comes up, you're like, you were probably there, Mike.

00:05:33:02 - 00:05:54:25
Unknown
But I didn't know that he was that early on. I mean, yeah, that's pretty interesting. So Mike's a great guy. well, okay, so we want to keep going with that, but let's talk about how you were able to be in that position. You know, let's talk a little bit about your background. what what were you doing at that time that gave you this knowledge?

00:05:54:25 - 00:06:10:27
Unknown
You know, so so we'll rewind the clock and we'll go back to the early to mid 80s. You know, I was always into cars. You know, part of that is, because of my dad's and over my left shoulder, so I, you know, I knew I wanted to be an engineer, and I wanted to work on cars.

00:06:10:29 - 00:06:26:14
Unknown
And I graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelors in mechanical engineering. And to be completely honest, I had virtually no idea what it meant to be an engineer and work on a car. I mean, I can honestly tell you sitting here that when I graduated in 1986, I had no idea what I was going to do.

00:06:26:16 - 00:06:46:01
Unknown
And then it just ended up being probably freak chance that my first job ends up being, powertrain calibration for for a black powertrain. Detroit working on, front wheel drive, 4 or 5, four nine Cadillacs and Northstar Cadillacs. And you think that's more of a result of the geography of where you were brought up and you were there?

00:06:46:05 - 00:07:02:09
Unknown
You think that was like, oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, then I have after 2 or 3 years of GM, I went to Ford, was at Ford for about ten years. Did mainly, you know, at GM, I did emissions calibration. I was the emissions guy for all the Cadillac stuff. when I went to Ford, I worked on transmissions.

00:07:02:12 - 00:07:22:26
Unknown
And then, and I left Ford and went to Roush. Roush basically has, like, a little extension, a little iron. That's an extension of Ford Motor Company. You know, it's difficult for Ford Motor Company to make money on low volume programs, because if it's a Ford Motor Company develop program, you have to dot every I's and cross every T.

00:07:23:03 - 00:07:42:14
Unknown
if they have Roush do it, Roush won't. They'll still dot every Iron Cross every T, but instead of running the test, they'll use engineering judgment and some tests and say this is going to be okay, so we don't have to run it. We're in a Ford did it. They would have to run those tests. So you can you can, you know, save money by having these low volume programs farmed out.

00:07:42:17 - 00:08:06:07
Unknown
So Roush had a whole little group, you know, they did they did the lightning. They did the SVT contour of the Mercury Marauder or, the Harley Davidson truck. They did the Ford GT powertrain. I think they even did the the, GT five hundreds, the initial GT 500. So there, you know, I went there and started, a little transmission unit at Roush for a couple of years before I ended up, starting set.

00:08:06:09 - 00:08:28:29
Unknown
Yeah. And we'll get into that in just a second. But you completely glossed over the transmission part of Ford and, funny story. you know, I got into this late for those that don't know, I mean, I think I didn't buy my first Mustang until 2001, and I had no interest in modifying it until I hit a deer with it and needed the hood and found forums on the internet.

00:08:28:29 - 00:08:46:06
Unknown
And that pretty much changed my entire life. because I was like, wow, I didn't I mean, I was not a car guy. I was a computer guy. I went to college for electronic media. I didn't change my own oil back then. You know, it was more just, hey, that's a cool looking Mustang. And that's why I bought it.

00:08:46:08 - 00:09:10:18
Unknown
Obviously, that's changed quite a bit. but even in the early days, I didn't even connect the dots to the Jamie, you know, and guys that have been around a long time, everybody knows the J mod for for 70 W. And that stands for Jerry. And I didn't know that for probably longer than I should have. so why don't you tell us a little bit about that.

00:09:10:18 - 00:09:35:27
Unknown
And that goes all the way back to, you know, wasn't that more towards like, you were really heavy into the Thunderbirds at the time I did, you know, we had a couple of Thunderbirds. We had a super coupe. We have, still have a 96 T-Bird that has a four, six two valve and a and that makes a whopping, like, 201 horsepower to the wheels and, you know, and all these guys are buying all these aftermarket shift kits in.

00:09:35:27 - 00:09:52:09
Unknown
The problem is, you know, the aftermath of the people, there are probably some smart people working, making shift kits out there, maybe now, but certainly not back then. And then, you know, when you would look and see what these companies would do. If you have an understanding of the transmission, you know, it was scary. It's like, well, this isn't going to accomplish what you want to do.

00:09:52:09 - 00:10:15:01
Unknown
Why are you doing this? So it's actually was very, very simple to turn around. If you can take the valve body or the main control off the transmission, you can literally drill out a couple of holes, either change or remove a couple of springs and put it together. And, you know, for the cost of basically, a fluid and a gasket, you can have yourself a transmission that shift way better than any of the aftermarket shift kits that were available.

00:10:15:03 - 00:10:32:20
Unknown
So I started, so I decided, okay, I'm going to put together an article on how to do all this stuff. And I believe the article is still floating somewhere around the internet. And it's a very detailed article is very deep. There's all kinds of pictures and and circles and arrows and all kinds of that stuff. And obviously, you know, you were involved in developing that transmission.

00:10:32:20 - 00:10:51:23
Unknown
Right. And yeah. So I mean, there's not a better person to tell you how to modify it, than you. Of course. So, you know, there's not as many people running that nowadays, but for a long, long time. That was the go to setup. You know, J mod 4 or 70 W no matter what you had, you were going to put that really until a six speed came out.

00:10:51:23 - 00:11:16:05
Unknown
Yeah. You know, the four hour 70 was a trend automatic transmission everybody used. Yeah that's very cool. So let's talk a little bit about how that came about. that's where my story starts. I'll tell my part entwined with your story. but I really want to hear, like what? And where. At what point did you say, hey, this is possibly a great business to get into.

00:11:16:05 - 00:11:40:15
Unknown
And, like, what kind of went into that decision? So somewhere in the northeast, I want to think it was in the Massachusetts area. There was a guy, his first name was Eric A, his last name escapes me. He made a device called an EQ tuner. You ever remember the EQ tuning? I would never use it, but I remember people talking to me, and it it plugged into the into the J2, J3 port, whatever it is on the back of a e4, E5, and you could do some stuff.

00:11:40:17 - 00:12:03:10
Unknown
And if you ever use the EQ tuner software, it was horrible. I mean, it was basically you would have to to do all this stuff in DOS and, and text files and all this stuff to make changes. So there was actually, ironically, a timber guy in, in southeastern Michigan. His name was Dan Temple. I've lost track of Don through the years, and he puts me in touch with a guy in, Atlanta called David Mosier.

00:12:03:18 - 00:12:23:03
Unknown
David has a neat tuner. All David wants to do is tune his own car. He has a 96, 97 Saleen. I remember I think it was a supercharged Saleen. All he wanted to do is tune his own car. But David was a pretty decent software writer. So Don puts me and David together and combined we, you know, came up with a guy EQ tuner interface.

00:12:23:03 - 00:12:44:25
Unknown
Do you remember the Greek tuner interface? So the Greek tuner was was me and David collaborating to make something that was actually user friendly for the piece of hardware that Eric made, and it actually worked quite well. I mean, I actually probably still have the some of the original load files for just, somewhere at home, but it was basically the, the predecessor to what is now seat advantage.

00:12:44:25 - 00:13:04:18
Unknown
It was the it looked very similar and everything. And so David and I started expanding it, to beyond just the common platforms. David made some tools. It was easy to make it to add into, to trucks and town cars and all these things that had, you know, that Ford had besides just Mustangs and and T-Birds. And then along comes Chris Johnson.

00:13:04:21 - 00:13:24:06
Unknown
And Chris is a fantastic sales guy. I mean, you could probably sell ice cubes to Eskimos. And, and Chris comes and says, man, you guys realize what you have here? And we're like, no. And, and so, you know, Chris kind of becomes part of the two of us. And he's he's going to be the guy that's going to sell this thing and take it over and take over the world with it.

00:13:24:09 - 00:13:44:26
Unknown
And ultimately, the first step that that Chris did is he sold it to Super Chips. We developed a slightly different piece of the geek tuner software, the very first version of advantage, and sold it to Super Chips and Super Chips and used it for their own development, and they paid us a decent amount of money for that, that it worked and everything.

00:13:44:29 - 00:14:12:27
Unknown
And that's where we're really when we had that agreement with Super Chips, it started. Asked which stood for Super Chips, Custom tuner, super chips, custom tuning. In fact, like early on, we'll try to put some pictures up over the video. you know, originally we were using super chips hardware with Steve. Absolutely. Excuse me. Let's circle back real quick because, you mentioned Chris Johnson, and some people probably know who he is, and he's the founder and owner of James Chip.

00:14:12:27 - 00:14:31:02
Unknown
And yeah, it was, you know, been around for a long time and is still around in a big way. And I knew about David being involved, but I don't know his background. Like was he, a car guy or an engineer or just kind of an enthusiast that learned, David was somewhat of an enthusiast, but his his day job was writing software for a company in Atlanta.

00:14:31:06 - 00:14:48:01
Unknown
Okay. So he was a software guy because he was he was a big software. So you were basically the IP tech. David was the software guy and Chris was the front man. And you know, he obviously, you know, knows a lot too. But he was more of like the sales guy and the face of the company and kind of yeah, yeah.

00:14:48:07 - 00:15:04:24
Unknown
Okay. And then that's kind of where I, you know, met you the first time you took my car in Cleveland. It went really well. And there was one little issue. It's kind of a funny story because you were kind of like, you know, The Wizard of Oz back then. Like, you know, nobody knew how to get in touch with you.

00:15:04:26 - 00:15:33:15
Unknown
there was no social media to speak of. And you, if you were on a forum, you weren't on the forums I was on. Or maybe I didn't know exactly how to get in touch with you. And, through the forums, I knew Doug Johnson. I remember Doug. Yeah. And, at some point, I'm not sure exactly how in the conversation with him, I mentioned to him I was having one little issue, and I think, whoever was helping you with Ford Chip at the time was having I was having trouble getting in touch with them or whatever.

00:15:33:18 - 00:15:54:17
Unknown
And Doug was like, here's Jerry's email. You didn't get it for me, you know, and I that's basically when we met each other is when I first emailed you. So anyway, Doug gave me your email address, said you didn't get this from me. which I can understand that now, being the position I am, where, you know, if everybody had your email address, it would be chaos.

00:15:54:19 - 00:16:16:21
Unknown
but luckily, you didn't get upset when I emailed you. And, you know, it's been 20 years, so, my memory's a little fuzzy, but I think we had quite a conversation going back and forth, and, you basically told me, why don't you set up a dino day? Similar what we did in Cleveland closer to me, which we wound up doing it in Dayton, Ohio back then.

00:16:16:21 - 00:16:36:18
Unknown
Of course, like, I don't have any contacts. We just get a random dino and, post on the internet. Hey, everybody come here. Gerald. Ten years ago, I mean, back then, it was fairly inexpensive. you know, and I think looking back, you weren't really necessarily trying to make money at that. It was almost more about gathering the data to start more than anything.

00:16:36:18 - 00:16:57:07
Unknown
Or, you know, to to further on your deal and that's what made it so special in the beginning was all the data you provided. It wasn't just the software that could do it, it was the value files and all that. but I went to Dayton, and, you brought Chris to that? That's the first time I met Chris and you and, you knew in my car there was some funny stuff that went down there.

00:16:57:07 - 00:17:14:15
Unknown
I don't know if you remember, with Thunderbird Guy, you were pretty, You were pretty, I guess call firecracker or, like, a little bit, you've gone down quite a bit. You, So that was a very good, first introduction to Jerry, and it was awesome. You know, you just you were just so passionate about yourself.

00:17:14:15 - 00:17:35:06
Unknown
And if somebody said something that was wrong, you were just like, you're wrong, you know? And it was great. And that really attracted me to the whole situation because I could tell you really know what you're talking about. And then, we went out to dinner and that's kind of how our relationship started. I believe at some point you probably just felt I would be good at it, maybe.

00:17:35:06 - 00:17:58:07
Unknown
And you said, hey, you know, I'm starting this new company. I want to talk to you about it and to set the stage. I had a website back then called Modular depot.com, which was, a very popular forum, but I was not the typical car forum guy. I wasn't really like super educated on cars. It was a situation where I like, I was more of a computer guy and somebody pushed me to start it.

00:17:58:07 - 00:18:27:13
Unknown
And, you know, it really kind of blew up into a fairly decent tech. Mecca for, for modular motors. And then that's partly, I believe, why, you know, you wanted to get involved with me. and I think that's a very important story with seat, which was the birth of the pro racer package, which kind of happened, I don't know if you remember, in between Chris Johnson crying over, the hot wings that we gave them, we kind of came up with the plan for that.

00:18:27:13 - 00:18:46:02
Unknown
So I'd like you to talk a little bit about the pro racer package and how important that was. So. So the Pro racer package is geared towards somebody that that wants to tune their own car. They have some knowledge. Maybe they're going to make a lot of changes or do whatever things like that. We're constantly going back to a tuner becomes difficult to accomplish.

00:18:46:05 - 00:19:03:00
Unknown
You know, it becomes costly. It becomes, you know, time and, you know, not time effective and things like that. So, you know, the pro racer package was designed for that person that wanted to fiddle with their own car. The problem with that, and the reason, you know, that we talked to we basically rolled out the had modular depot control.

00:19:03:00 - 00:19:23:18
Unknown
The pro racer package is because, you know, when you have a dealer, that one dealer can tune X number of cars per year, maybe it's 100 cars a year or something like that. You could sell 300 racer packages in a month. Now you got to support all those 300 people, you know, and and it was still relatively small and it was not facilities to deal with.

00:19:23:21 - 00:19:47:27
Unknown
All those people had calling in and having questions. You know, our main focus was more towards the dealers and all that stuff. So it made sense to have someone, you know, like Modular Depot, like yourself B respond, you know, take on, sell the pro racer package and support all those people. Obviously you can't answer every one of their questions, but, you know, filter out the easy things and then just let the more difficult things come back to set and go from there.

00:19:48:00 - 00:20:09:12
Unknown
Yeah. And it turned out, you know, really, really well. Yeah. I mean, looking back on it to me and this may have been your motivation also is here. You're launching a new software. it's going to change the industry. You don't know that necessarily at the time, but you hope it's going to. But at some point you probably said like, okay, well who's going to be the actual tuners?

00:20:09:15 - 00:20:32:13
Unknown
Right. There's just wasn't that many tuners out there. So to me it was a very good way to get the software into the hands of many and filter it. It just naturally filter out into people that were like, hey, I can make this a career and turn it into that. And there's, you know, quite a few pro racer package people, that I could remember that, you know, and now professional tuners, I mean, we even sold of her.

00:20:32:15 - 00:20:55:15
Unknown
I really wish I would have done more with it at the time, but, Christian von Kona sig going to say supercars, you know? Now, back then they were, you know, still crazy cars, but they were using modular motors and I assume they were using, or computers. They were. And actually, Chris went in to Sweden, or rather based out of in tuned all those Ford powered, kono's.

00:20:55:15 - 00:21:09:23
Unknown
And yeah, I remember when that order came through my website, because we were the only place you could buy it. And part of the agreement was we supported all that through our forum, like a private forum. And, you know, you had to have access to and, you know, again, I said I didn't really know much back then.

00:21:09:23 - 00:21:28:01
Unknown
So you were basically propping me up to teach me to tune and, you know, contribute to teaching all the pro racer guys and answer the questions. And, you know, that was how we made this work, because I remember at the dinner, Chris was like, but how are we going to support it? And you're like, I'll do it.

00:21:28:06 - 00:21:46:00
Unknown
You know, I'll do it with, you know, Ken. And then over time, Ken will learn more and hopefully he can take over all that. And I believe it stayed that way for at least a couple of years. And then over time, you know, as it grew, they realized they wanted to sell it to more people. And, you know, it it, it all worked out great in the end.

00:21:46:03 - 00:22:05:03
Unknown
And, you know, if it wasn't for that, that version of shtty, I don't think it would have accelerated quite as quickly, you know, because instead you would have had like one dealer, one dealer, but now all of a sudden there's 300 guys. And then out of those 300 guys, if 10 or 20 of those become professional tuners, you know, it.

00:22:05:03 - 00:22:30:27
Unknown
Just the whole thing kind of took care of itself. And the big thing about it, and I said this earlier that made it so special. compared to any other software, which you didn't have a lot of competition at that point. But even like even if you look at HP tuners today, or any other software, they don't give you the data that you need, you know, and, you've been gone from it forever, and you know that they still do.

00:22:30:27 - 00:22:56:28
Unknown
Okay. But in the very beginning, it was to the point where even if you didn't know that much, you could basically load your value files, okay, it's a blown two valve. It has these injectors. It has this mass error meter, whatever. And the car would run, which was just amazing. You know, it was unbelievably amazing. I remember in the early days I would get cars at my shop that other tuners couldn't get to run.

00:22:57:00 - 00:23:17:22
Unknown
Whether, you know, I don't know if they were using Sata or not, and I would literally load your value files and do nothing else. And the car would idle and run almost perfectly, and it made me look better than, I really should have at the time. You know, it was like you fixed my car. It's like, not really like, you know, not not exactly.

00:23:17:24 - 00:23:48:11
Unknown
I basically have the right software. It's what I have. You know, I remember having a conversation with David somewhere in the late 2000 and, and we were talking and we both agreed that the value files were great in. The value files were also horrible because they're horrible because you have somebody that, like you said, doesn't know how to tune, can look good, but doesn't really ever get any better than that, you know, and they can't, you know, if it doesn't, if the loading the value file doesn't solve the person's problems, they don't know what to do.

00:23:48:18 - 00:24:08:24
Unknown
And they would, you know, blow up the car or do things like, you know, or have some other problems. And so there was a lot of discussion. Me and David had a whether it was whether it was either great or whether it was bad. Yeah, I can definitely see both sides of it from my perspective as being brand new to like even modifying vehicles in the first place, let alone tuning.

00:24:08:27 - 00:24:26:15
Unknown
I don't think I could have gotten this far. I mean, you were like, you know, basically there whenever I needed you. And that's, you know, how you encouraged me to become a tuner and open a shop was you were like, you know, I'm like, how am I going to do this? You're like, if you have a question, call me.

00:24:26:15 - 00:24:45:20
Unknown
And I remember, you know, being on the phone with you constantly and, you know, the value files got me, like I said, it would get me to a certain point, but then it's like, okay, now what? You know, I need to adjust this. And, well, actually, that's another really important topic beyond the pro racer package. Let me know a lot of thinking about this from myself, from my own perspective.

00:24:45:20 - 00:25:07:15
Unknown
Now, that's 20 years later is, you were very generous with your knowledge to, outside of the company, people like me and, you know, quite a list. And it's up to you on exactly who you want to talk about. My phone is one of them is obviously, most people probably know him today. More from his and array racing than his shop.

00:25:07:17 - 00:25:39:00
Unknown
but, you know, he's been around the whole time and he's benefited huge from me. I mean, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today if it wasn't for you. And I think there's quite a few people in that position. so the way I looked at it is at some point you kind of collected certain people that you felt were either deserving or could do well, or I don't know exactly how you decided to choose these people, but you kind of had a circle around you, that you would you basically mentored, you know, and like, at a very high level, not just, hey, Jerry, I need some help.

00:25:39:02 - 00:26:02:29
Unknown
You were doing, like, very detailed instructions. In fact, that's why Jerry is here today. He's here to help my, you know, some of my new staff and reviews, some, some training. Even 20 years later, he's here helping us, helping me, you know, move forward in the industry. What made you do that? I mean, and to be clear, you know, it's not like it was like, hey, for ten grand, I'm going to teach you how to tune.

00:26:03:00 - 00:26:24:08
Unknown
It was very benevolent, you know, and I think it was, at least from my perspective, it's probably a lot of motive, motivations for it. And one of them was, you know, you you wanted to see your baby succeed in the tuning thing. Succeed. And you needed people to actually learn it beyond the value file. So, like, what motivated you to do all that?

00:26:24:10 - 00:26:53:03
Unknown
The motivation was it, was for the the tuning industry is to turn into something that was quite good in quality, and people could modify their cars and have them run the way they're supposed to run, not just run well, but run great, you know, and have people understand how, why and how the OEMs did certain things and what compromises they made and be able to understand and make those similar compromises.

00:26:53:05 - 00:27:21:17
Unknown
And that was, you know, I, I mean, I could have done nothing and not helped anybody and then walked away. And then what good does that do to anybody? What does that do to anything right now. So so I wanted to make sure there was enough, of the correct knowledge out there so that when I choose to walk away, which I kind of did at the beginning of this year, although I still help you and I still help Dan at Livernois a little bit, and that's about it, that this industry would keep moving forward and not stop because I walked away.

00:27:21:19 - 00:27:42:25
Unknown
Yeah. No. And that's exactly how I saw it. Because, you know, you could build the best system to do this, but there's nowhere to, like, truly learn this stuff. Even today, back then, when you were still at, and I, you had given some pictures from, one of the meetings we had, I think, up at Liver Choice of, like one of the first training sessions.

00:27:42:25 - 00:28:00:05
Unknown
I found more of those and it's funny to look at those pictures and see the faces, at that. I think it was one of the first ones. I don't know if was the exact first one like it was at headquarters, and it was like an official asset class. I'm not talking about that. What we were just talking about this was more of a personal thing.

00:28:00:05 - 00:28:14:06
Unknown
And it was probably. Yeah, there were 2 or 3 official short classes that I taught. And after that it was basically I'd call you or send you an email and say, hey, I'm teaching a class. You're welcome to come. Yeah, yeah. And there was typically well, that's it. But there was really never any charge for any of it.

00:28:14:09 - 00:28:28:21
Unknown
And then the last one I did four years ago, Dan Millen took it upon himself, which is perfectly fine. He asked me if it was okay to send a note out and everybody and say, hey, you know, Jerry's doing this. You know, it'd be nice if everybody contributed some small amount of money to pay him to do this.

00:28:28:24 - 00:28:57:21
Unknown
Yeah, because I intended to teach the last, you know, the the one four years ago and not charge anybody there was 1100 PowerPoint slides. Well, and not together. That's the point. That's why I'm brought it up. Because it's not like to do that and charge ten grand for it like or something is, you know, worth it. But to do all that work with zero return other than maybe just seeing, you know, people succeed with your information, that's I want to see it done right.

00:28:57:21 - 00:29:20:05
Unknown
Yeah. So and I think that's super important to do because and at that point you were not even directly involved in that the market you were helping. Because after that, I'd like to talk about that, because the important thing to remember here is like, you know, there's somebody like me who's more of an enthusiast that turned into a tuner, and I've done well with the information you've given me.

00:29:20:07 - 00:29:46:15
Unknown
but I'm not an engineer. you know, I'm fairly educated, but not at that level where, you know, somebody like you is, you know, ten times higher level. Like, you could kind of do almost anything that you'd want to do after, you know, you continue down a similar path that doesn't really relate to what we do. But it was, you know, the same type of deal, but on a much different level.

00:29:46:15 - 00:30:10:15
Unknown
Why don't you talk a little bit about that? Because that was almost more impressive to me than what you did with it, because you were just kind of fine tuning cars with it, and now you're going into like completely converting them to different fuels and all that type of deal. So the last training class I taught for Seat was actually up in Michigan, I believe was probably about 2005 or 6.

00:30:10:15 - 00:30:23:12
Unknown
I have to go back and look at the look at the records and stuff. And there was a sales guy, Mike Schumacher. You probably met Mike, you know, and that was in the industry for a while. And what Mike's doing now, but he was in the industry for a while, and he was a sales guy at the time.

00:30:23:19 - 00:30:47:05
Unknown
And, and Mike tells me there's going to be a couple of people coming in from a company in Texas that want to learn about Obd2 because they have some alternate fuel natural gas thing going on in, and they'd like to learn more about it. So, you know, normally when I teach a class, the only thing I talk about OBD two emissions is basically, you know, 30 to 60s of how you make it all go away so that it doesn't become a problem.

00:30:47:07 - 00:31:02:20
Unknown
But I spent probably an hour talking about, Obd2 and emission stuff at the end of that class. And it was a guy. There were two people there. I can learn what the one guy's name is. The other guy's name is Keith Thompson. Keith is became a very, very close friend of mine through the years. From that day.

00:31:02:22 - 00:31:27:04
Unknown
And, and he leaves the class and, he's getting on an airplane to fly back to his home in Jacksonville in his boss calls him up and says his boss asked him, well, let me back up first. What happened was, is when the, the things with with California or things with carb, when the OBD two was a requirement across the all cars and starting in 1996.

00:31:27:07 - 00:31:52:24
Unknown
So all cars had to meet all the Obd2 compliance. And that's a whole we could have, a long discussion talking about OBD and emissions, another podcast, if you so desired. But they the car people gave the alternate fuel industry a pass and you didn't have to do Obd2 demonstration in for like six, seven, eight years. So it wasn't until 2004 that the alternate fuel industry actually had, to meet Obd2 compliance.

00:31:52:24 - 00:32:13:26
Unknown
Well, they don't know how to do it. They're, you know, they would use what I call strap on computers. It was a computer that took over the feeling of the engine, took over the O2 sensors, and it would basically just do whatever they wanted to do. But you're never going to pass Obd2. I mean, you see immediately have, you know, all injector circuit codes are open because the OEM pkms not controlling the injectors and all kinds of other voodoo like that.

00:32:13:28 - 00:32:31:28
Unknown
So that has to go away and they have to be able to be compliant with all of that. So the goal of sending Keith and this other guy there was to understand what to do and how to do it, and and so they could go back and learn it. So Keith's talking to his boss, Roger, on the, the airport.

00:32:32:03 - 00:32:47:14
Unknown
And Roger asked Keith. Well, you learn enough to know how to do it. And Keith said something like, not a chance, but the guy who taught that class, yeah, he could do it. And, and so, I don't know, that's how I describe you. I can you do this now? But I know somebody who can in like a week or two later.

00:32:47:14 - 00:33:05:03
Unknown
I don't know if it was Roger or Keith, you know, call me back up and said, hey, we got a we got a car we're messing with here in Dallas. Would you fly to Dallas and look at it for us? I'm like, sure, I'll give it a shot. And, so I go to Dallas and it was a Crown Vic they had running on natural gas and, I'm not even exactly remember.

00:33:05:06 - 00:33:26:01
Unknown
Sure what I did with it at the time. But anyway, ultimately I become involved with, with this one company out of Texas, and we use the OEM computer to control the natural gas fuel injectors and and had the whole thing start, run and meet emissions. It was the first time that a aftermarket alternate fuel system was controlled by the OEM computer.

00:33:26:03 - 00:33:47:06
Unknown
So the only thing in the middle is if you remember those, you know, everybody loved those original natural gas injectors. They were the the big fat ones. The EV ones. Yeah. And they were low impedance. And so you had to have a box to handle the higher current of the, of the low impedance injector. And that was because back then you didn't have injectors that flowed enough for the natural gas.

00:33:47:06 - 00:34:09:01
Unknown
Yeah. Okay. Because it's just flow in a vapor. You only flow about one tenth the mass. So if you think about, you know, back then a mustang had a 19 pound injector, right? Yeah. That flow about 2 pounds per minute of of fuel. If it was if it was gasoline, if it was natural gas. So in order to flow, you know, 20 pounds per hour or whatever, it is a fuel, you got to have a 200 pound per hour injector of liquid.

00:34:09:03 - 00:34:26:22
Unknown
So they, you know, Bosch developed this injector and, and that's what they use. So, but they were only about one ohm. And the rumor was always, if you have those run on the OEM and injector driver, because at that point, you know, all the injector drivers would move to, to high impedance resistors that you would burn up the driver.

00:34:26:24 - 00:34:47:06
Unknown
So we had a little box that went ahead and, the OEM computer drove the drivers in that box, and that box had drivers handle high current to drive the injectors. And, interestingly, that aside, they did an experiment in DFW airport with a V ten, and they had the they got rid of that box completely, and that bus ran like two years and never burned up an injector driver.

00:34:47:09 - 00:35:11:13
Unknown
Okay. So so the box may have not even been. Yeah. Important. It's funny that you bring that up because these are all the things that like, I kind of forget myself is how challenging things were back then because we didn't have the technology, and parts manufacturers involved that we have today. like, back then, you couldn't there was no such thing as, you know, big injectors that were high impedance.

00:35:11:13 - 00:35:35:20
Unknown
It took a while for the aftermarket to get caught up, and sometimes they were taking OEM ones and modifying them. And everybody's the green lightning injectors. Remember those? Yeah. Those hot injector for a long time. Yeah. And you know think about that. That was a hot injector for supercharged vehicles. Yeah that went on and I barely run. Was only some pounds per hour right now on a, E85, a mustang GT that's injector, which is just amazing.

00:35:35:20 - 00:35:59:11
Unknown
I mean, you know, most of the, newer Mustangs that we have come through here. I mean, we just, download a stock Mach one and it made like 427 horsepower. And I'm just like, you know, become a little numb to that, you know, because nowadays, especially on blown vehicles, you know, if you're not making eight, 900, a thousand, it's like, not impressive.

00:35:59:13 - 00:36:18:08
Unknown
And then here we have a car that's making more power than most lightnings, which were like, everybody wanted the lightning. And it's just the acceleration of all that is just through the roof. and again, I think a lot of that has, you know, you're part of that because of things like that. You know, obviously there's other options.

00:36:18:09 - 00:36:42:28
Unknown
There's standalones, but you got massive amounts of people modifying their cars and actually running well, not necessarily with your hands, but because of all the work you did on it. So it's like you can't say that enough, you know, and there's other companies like Diablo and HP now, they were just a GM company for most of my training career, and they do well.

00:36:42:28 - 00:37:12:04
Unknown
And one of your, other people that you helped out quite a bit is a key person there, Eric Oakes, which I hope to have on the podcast as well. He's a friend of mine who's part of the Inner Circle. Yeah, very much so. And, you know, your inner circle is grew and shrunk and grew over time and, but there's definitely been, you know, certain people that have been there the whole time, like, you know, I want to point out, Dan Illinois, you know, we work with him on stuff, but, you know, he's a very good personal friend of yours, I believe.

00:37:12:11 - 00:37:41:02
Unknown
And, he's another guy that's been there for a very long time, as part of your circle. And, people. You know, it's interesting to. If you really sat down and I don't want to list every name that's been involved in, you know, there's obviously certain people that have come and gone, but, there's a lot of people that whole their whole entire career to you that, probably don't realize it as much as they should.

00:37:41:02 - 00:38:01:19
Unknown
So, so, so let me rewind briefly because the a question that people are going to be wondering if I don't answer the question is, why am I not with CD? I didn't want to bring it up, but I want it's a fair it's a fair question. And it's been a while. So yeah, let's hear it. and I believe it was 2007 eight somewhere in that time frame.

00:38:01:22 - 00:38:19:14
Unknown
And, you know, I'm not going to name any names or anything like that, but there were people at the company that wanted to come that wanted to go in a different direction than what I felt it would be. And I'll give you an example. They were at that time, and I don't know anything about that now, but at that time they were willing to sell software to anyone.

00:38:19:21 - 00:38:40:12
Unknown
They literally had sold software to businesses that were literally across the street from each other. And their answer was, well, whoever tunes the best will get the business. And I think that's a really poor business model. If you go back to, you know, the auto logic and Mike Wesley days, you know, Mike was very, very choosy who got to use the auto logic software.

00:38:40:15 - 00:38:54:18
Unknown
You know, Mike may have been a little bit more choosy than I would have been, but it's a good model to do it. You literally don't want to have 3 or 4 people in the same city tuning cars. You know, at least back then, you know, there's a lot more tuning going on now. Maybe it's different now.

00:38:54:20 - 00:39:13:28
Unknown
And and Celeste wanted to go that direction where they were basically just going to push software on to anybody that wanted it, irrespective of their ability to do it. You know, once upon a time when it started, you had to have a valid business license, you had to have a dino, and there was some other stuff that we criteria that we had that all falls to the wayside.

00:39:14:01 - 00:39:40:13
Unknown
And I was standing there, you know, screaming, no, no, this is not what we started with. If we build a great product and support that product, you know, we'll get the sales. And and people didn't see it that way. So we separated in about 2008 because of that. Yeah, I know I remember that very clearly. so and then when is that when you went directly to the CNG or was there a gap there?

00:39:40:15 - 00:40:02:17
Unknown
you know, I, you know, I had started doing some CNG work after that training class, but I probably jumped into a little bit more at after that point because it was an industry. And I'll give you an example, why the CNG industry took off. There was there's some stuff in California where and hey, this this stuff just finally expired recently, but there's different emission standards.

00:40:02:17 - 00:40:22:02
Unknown
And again, that's a whole nother podcast if you ever want to talk about emissions, but you have a NOC standard and a standard, and for a heavy duty engine, it's fairly high point two grams per horsepower. Our the units are not relevant. We'll just say point two, if you can certify an engine in the state of California, 2.1 and take a diesel off the road, they'd give you like 25 grand.

00:40:22:09 - 00:40:43:15
Unknown
If you can certify it 2.05 and take a diesel off the road to give you 50 grand if you can. Certified 2.02 and take one of these diesels off the road, they give you 125 grand. So that means companies like UPS, Fedex that have these delivery trucks that are diesels, they can literally have a brand new vehicle for free that runs on natural gas because, a UPS truck doesn't cost more than about $125,000.

00:40:43:23 - 00:41:01:17
Unknown
So I can turn around in and, you know, do the two valve and three valve, ten Fords, a six liter Chevrolet, the seven three. What was the last one I actually did for natural gas? And have all those things meet the 0.02 standard or lower, then, there's a huge incentive for people to convert their fleet vehicles to natural gas.

00:41:01:19 - 00:41:23:05
Unknown
So yeah, kept me busy for a long time because of that. Yeah. There's, you know, I'm dabbling in the 73 market and, one big thing that we're seeing is a lot of drivetrains coming out of them, for electric vehicles. But, you know, basically this is the alternative to that. Like, you basically take this, the vehicle as it is and convert it to natural gas.

00:41:23:07 - 00:41:46:20
Unknown
And you mentioned, you know, helping that company in Texas, but that really kind of ballooned into a fairly big deal where you were doing, fleets and stuff. Right? It did. You know, I worked with a company in Texas pretty much exclusively, but not a real agreement per se. for, for quite a few years. And then, and then there was always problems and I'm sure, you know, nobody can relate to parts supply problems.

00:41:46:20 - 00:42:03:27
Unknown
But this back it's back in the late 2000 where, you that, you know, they couldn't necessarily get injectors, the wiring harness problems. There would be a wiring harness for the the box that changed impedance. We'd have to drive the factory fuel gauge. So there's some there's some voodoo in the wiring harness for that, fuel pressure regulators.

00:42:03:27 - 00:42:31:12
Unknown
There'd be problems in the field. I'd go in the field and in the in Ford injectors. I talked about those big EV ones. You'd see one side of the engine had one kind of injector, and the other bank of the engine had a different injector. It had a regulator on it that I never even seen before. So in my wife Tina would be with me a lot of the time on or probably pretty much all the time on the on these trips, and she decided to take it upon herself to, you know, we need to is we use this it supply all these parts and now we all the cars are the same, and you

00:42:31:12 - 00:42:57:20
Unknown
don't have to go in the field and fix things. And so, you know, we started a company and, she bought injectors from Bosch. She bought, regulators from a company in Luxembourg. We bought, harnesses from a, company was Chicago now, Denver or Colorado? Casper electronics. Most people know about Casper Electronics. And we put all these parts and pieces together, and we would ship those to, to the place in Texas and some other places as well to, to do that.

00:42:57:20 - 00:43:20:25
Unknown
And then then the whole thing snowballed because AT&T in like, 0809 decided they wanted to be green. So they're going to convert a couple thousand A350s, over the course of a few years. And they picked the, the company in Texas to do the conversion, and they picked the pressure regulator forward kit from Montana to put on their all their AT&T vehicles.

00:43:21:00 - 00:43:42:16
Unknown
Well, guess what? At that point, we literally have a 2 or 2 and a half person company that's now going to have, you know, eight figures in sales a year if we do this running out of our house, which becomes a little bit tricky. But the, the, the Arnold carrier drivers would come up and they'd have a forklift and they'd drop regulators in the driveway and all this stuff.

00:43:42:18 - 00:44:00:13
Unknown
but it snowballed. And then ultimately, everybody wants to buy the company because everyone wants to be able to brag they have the AT&T contract. We're not out there trying to sell ourselves to anybody, because we have more than enough than we could do. So we sold the company to, Italian Company and, and we had to work for them for three years and stuff like that.

00:44:00:13 - 00:44:19:12
Unknown
And, and she was the, the manager of the Michigan facility, and I was the engineering manager, and we actually did that for two years. the environment was so poor that we literally left $1 million on the table and walked away after two years. That just wasn't worth because it was just like they had all the right pieces and they had no orchestra leader, you know?

00:44:19:15 - 00:44:38:22
Unknown
So bringing up Dane is actually, something I wanted to to touch on in your dad's sitting right here is, One thing I really admire about you is, I don't know how close you are with your wife, your dad, your kids. You know, I see you guys, you post on Facebook about, your family. not everybody can do that, you know?

00:44:38:22 - 00:45:00:23
Unknown
And how important is that to you? Like, as you know, do you think you would be doing obviously. you know, she wasn't necessarily directly involved in that, but, you know, the CNG and everything you've done since, you know, ten is always by your side. How important do you think that was to push you to do those things?

00:45:00:26 - 00:45:27:27
Unknown
you know, I guess the point is, is like, how important is family support around you to to really get anything done? I would say it's beyond critical. Yeah. you know, the, the company in Texas, they, they when we were before we, before we formed our own company and started selling all the parts and stuff, they, they offered me a, pretty decent amount of money well into the six figures to work just for them.

00:45:27:29 - 00:45:48:09
Unknown
Could continue to live in Michigan, Florida, wherever I wanted to do, go into Texas periodically and do stuff and whatnot. And it was a difficult job to turn down. And I was ready to say yes. And Tina's like things like, look, we can form our own company, we can buy these parts, we can do this. We can control everything ourselves and we'll be better off in the long run.

00:45:48:11 - 00:46:05:01
Unknown
And and she's like, you know, do you trust me? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I trust you. So. So we did it. And it would probably be completely different if that conversation that her and I had didn't take place. And I agreed to do that. Yeah. That's the impression I get of her. She's very like driven and organized and like.

00:46:05:03 - 00:46:23:19
Unknown
Yeah, motivator type thing for, for a long time, you know, all the natural gas stuff that we did was certified through EPA and Carb. And up until 2016, she dealt with all the regulatory agencies. If she was sitting here, she would say, I did the fun stuff and she did all this stuff I didn't want to do. That's, pretty much a quote from her.

00:46:23:21 - 00:46:42:07
Unknown
Dealing with EPA and Carb is is not fun. EPA is not so bad, but but Carb is just ridiculous to deal with. Yeah. and then when her mother got sick with cancer in 2016, she walked away and somebody else took over. At that point, that's. Yeah. You know, that's funny. That's, probably I can describe, Brandy's involvement in here.

00:46:42:07 - 00:47:16:23
Unknown
She gets to do all things Tila. no. Like to do. Which is, you know, the important things. The bank accounts and paying bills and all that sort of thing. And, you know, I could not do it without Brandy. for sure. So that's, that's what I see in you guys. Like, you're inseparable. so, you know, and just to keep that, you know, for over my left shoulders, my dad and, and while he hasn't been involved in the things that I do for the last, you know, 20 years or more, you know, he gave me the, the, the work ethic and the foundation to be as driven as I am.

00:47:16:25 - 00:47:31:10
Unknown
You know, one of the things I tell people, and I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but you hear people say, well, I did my best. You know, doing my best, in my opinion, isn't good enough. Not I don't want to do my best. I want to be the best. And if I do the best I can, I am not the best.

00:47:31:15 - 00:47:49:11
Unknown
I will go back and figure out what I have to do to be the best and and that that's awesome. That's a good that also becomes a problem, right? You know, because you know, you're you're extremely critical of yourself, even if you've done the best you can do and you're not where you need to be, you got to figure out what you did, what you need to do differently.

00:47:49:14 - 00:48:10:24
Unknown
Well, I think that's what really gets a very key factor in anybody that gets that next level is pushing beyond. Right. Like, and I find myself doing that a lot where I get to a point where if I step back and look at it, I'm like, this is awesome. You know, like, this is better than I thought I could do.

00:48:10:24 - 00:48:30:11
Unknown
And at that point I could be like, I'm done. But I was here last weekend way longer than I should have for like ten hours, with the cam Gt500 on the dyno, because I just kept seeing more and I'm like, I gotta go more. I got other things to do and I'm like, yeah, but like every time I change something, it gets better.

00:48:30:11 - 00:48:46:05
Unknown
And like, you know, it's making more power than I've ever made with this guy by far. But like, I think I can make 40 more, you know? So then I came in Sunday and I was like. And then. Then I wasted the whole day Sunday going backwards, you know, but then I'm like, well, now you know, and it's a curse.

00:48:46:05 - 00:49:08:07
Unknown
But it's also like, what drives me, you know, like, it's okay. Great. you know, and it really like really it comes down to effort. You have to have the tools, the brain to get a certain amount. But so much can get done. And effort. And that's the thing that's always stood out about you because, you know, you've had many successful businesses.

00:49:08:10 - 00:49:24:18
Unknown
Obviously, you know, you worked at big companies. I'm sure you know, you're not out there like it's you're not you don't you're not money driven. You you don't see money driven. You're, you know, accomplishment driven. Yes. You know, and figuring things out that other people can't figure out is that is that partly what drives you? Absolutely. Yeah.

00:49:24:18 - 00:49:39:05
Unknown
I mean, I remember vividly the, you know, everybody when the when the boss 3 or 2 came out, you have the track key. Oh you'll never be able to track track the track key. And if you remember all the. Oh I remember. Yeah. And I remember, you know, we we bought a boss 3 or 2. We had a total.

00:49:39:05 - 00:49:56:24
Unknown
You ever had a 2013 boss? 302 that was taken as daily driver. And the purpose of that boss 302 was to crack the track key stuff. And I was actually at my at the house up in Michigan one winter evening, and I was sitting there on with my laptop, and I'm looking at it, I'm like, oh my God, I think I know what to do here, how to make this work.

00:49:56:26 - 00:50:14:14
Unknown
So, you know, I didn't have all this stuff in Florida for Tina to try to flash her car and put the track key in it. So I called Bruce Tucker out in California because I know they have access to a couple. I'm like, Bruce, you know, send me the file for Mikey's car or Vicki's car, and I'm going to do all this and you're going to tell me if it works or not.

00:50:14:16 - 00:50:38:04
Unknown
And, you know, within a couple hours later, he came back, says, oh, yeah, it works. It does. Everything is supposed to do. That's awesome. Which was cool. That was a huge accomplishment for such a small part of the market that almost no one cares about. And that's the that's the important thing. And I, you know, I, I feel like I do that sometimes to a fault where I'll get distracted with something that I'm just I gotta figure this out, but it's not going to make me any money or it's very little money.

00:50:38:04 - 00:50:53:28
Unknown
Definitely a loss based on the time involved. But I still like I feel like I still have to do it because that's where I get my like enjoyment in life is, you know, I was the kid that somebody was like, I can't figure this. Give me a I'll figure it out. Like I, you know, you tell me you can't figure something out.

00:50:53:28 - 00:51:16:00
Unknown
That is the absolute 100 cent reason that I want to figure it out, because, well, if nobody can figure this out and I can figure it out, then that's pretty cool. Like, you know, it just makes you feel good about things. And, and I think, you know, that's not as common as it should be. You know, people are result driven instead of like, the process of figuring things out.

00:51:16:03 - 00:51:32:19
Unknown
I want to switch directions here a little bit. you know, since we were on the topic of family and Dana, and talk about some of the things that you enjoy to do outside of this, you know, and one of the biggest things, it's not really like a hobby. It's more of like a pastime, I call it is cruising.

00:51:32:19 - 00:51:55:16
Unknown
Right? You I don't know, you know, you're still going on cruises. Not as much as you may be used to. I remember one thing that I really enjoy on your Facebook is, yearly. You post, a summary of, you know, you're a data guy, and it's very obvious from this post you'll say how many hours you're on a, on a cruise and how many miles you flew in an airplane.

00:51:55:18 - 00:52:14:00
Unknown
you know, on the cruising part, I mean, I'm talking things that people wouldn't believe, like one year, didn't you spend, like, a crazy number of nights on a cruise ship? Probably 100. I would if I had to guess in a in a year. So like, a third of the year almost. Was on a cruise ship. Like, was that just a good way for you, you worked on while you were on the ship?

00:52:14:06 - 00:52:48:04
Unknown
Yeah, most of the time, yeah. What, what what about that? Like was attracted to you just getting away from everything and being isolated or it was a combination of a lot of things. part of it is, is definitely getting away from all the distractions and focusing on things, you know, when, in the alternate fuel world and it never really took off in the performance world, you know, is you're aware flex fuel stuff has been around for a while, right, for fuel logic in the computers have been around for a while, and I figured out a way on the cruise ship to basically, you know, if you could poke, give an address

00:52:48:04 - 00:53:04:27
Unknown
of ram, you would make it, you could instantly, instantaneously make it think it was running on alcohol. Well, the benefit of that in the alternative fuel industry is you could have, buy fuel, run on gasoline or natural gas, and we actually have a bunch of biofuel vehicles out there with that technology. And I literally invented that in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

00:53:05:04 - 00:53:26:03
Unknown
And I was sending files back to, a guy that worked for me in Michigan, Adam, to, to try to see if it would work. And after 3 or 4 attempts, sure enough, it would work. You know, I thought it would. I thought it would be a great fold into the high performance industry, because you could have a real time change for a nitrous tune or a race fuel tune, but it it never really took off.

00:53:26:05 - 00:53:48:24
Unknown
And that's okay. Yeah, but if you didn't have that isolation, you know, I that happens to me occasionally. Unfortunately, I don't take the time to do that as often as I would like. But when I do, like, last year I lived at the racetrack for four weeks. I went there for one test session, and then I was like, I see something.

00:53:48:24 - 00:54:09:00
Unknown
And I was there, I think, for the first test. Yep, yep. And then I kept going and going and going and I, I definitely went too far with it. Stayed there too long. But it was priceless because it definitely put me back in other areas. But I'm like, almost nobody either could or would do this or have a wife that would put up with it or any of those things.

00:54:09:06 - 00:54:29:00
Unknown
And it was such a unique situation for me to be able to, like, really try so many different things and analyze what was going on. It accelerated like it was almost a year of going to the track in four weeks, because it was like every other day, like they would have a test session or test in tune or I, I was racing if their race came through, I race the race.

00:54:29:00 - 00:54:53:23
Unknown
I just bracket race with my car. It was really cool. And, you know, I wish I had more time like that. And I think that's, you know, one of the probably biggest benefits of the cruise for you in so. Well, you know, initially cruising, let's back up a little bit more. So I have a friend of mine in in Panama, Panama City, Panama, the country, that I actually met tuning, in the, in the Mayor Alberto in the Maryland area.

00:54:53:25 - 00:55:08:01
Unknown
And, and I remember, you know, Alberto, if he was sitting here, he would tell you he was how you remember the day in the year. But somewhere in the in like the mid 2000, he's like, you know, he was he was getting a law degree at Georgetown. And when he finished up his law degree, he went back to Panama.

00:55:08:01 - 00:55:23:09
Unknown
And now he still comes back to the US periodically. He's like, Will you come visit me in Panama? No. Why did you come visit me? I don't have a passport. There's no need for me to have a passport. There's no reason to leave the United States. None of that stuff. It was a fairly rigid, you know, and. And Alex set out, and now, it's.

00:55:23:09 - 00:55:42:03
Unknown
I remember vividly saying that to Alberto, and Alberto is trying to tell me how I needed to go to other countries, and I could, you know, for a, for a very generic term, broaden my horizons of things by going to other places. I'm like, why do I need to leave the United States? And, in since then I've it was never a goal in my life, but it is now.

00:55:42:03 - 00:56:03:01
Unknown
I never wanted to visit 100 different countries, and I met like 95, you know, so, so cruising was a way early on to go to different countries and see what they were like. And if we liked it, we would just fly back and spend some time there. You know? And now for the most part, we don't cruise anywhere near as much as we used to, because how many times can you go in the Caribbean?

00:56:03:03 - 00:56:21:12
Unknown
Right. You know, but if it's a unique itinerary or a really good deal, we'll we'll do it. We just went through the Panama Canal from Fort Lauderdale to Long Beach. Got to see Alberto and Marie in Panama, but it was an unbelievably good deal. If you could spend two weeks on, you know, away, it was the best deal you would ever get going through the Panama Canal.

00:56:21:15 - 00:56:47:12
Unknown
So what flipped your opinion on the other countries? Like, obviously you went somewhere and probably had a very good experience and that kind of like made you more curious about different cultures or did. I mean, I'd been to some, I'd been on some cruises in the Caribbean and, and stuff like that, and that was fine. And then we, when we were using a natural gas regulator from Luxembourg, it was made in Luxembourg, a little small country in the middle of Europe.

00:56:47:14 - 00:57:05:09
Unknown
And, and we flew to Luxembourg, we flew to Paris, and we took a train from Paris to Luxembourg City. And it was actually I enjoyed it, you know, seeing those other countries and and what they do and how they act and behave and food and, and, you know, beer and drinks and stuff. It was actually a lot of fun.

00:57:05:12 - 00:57:23:19
Unknown
Yeah. So that's kind of what started all of that trip to Luxembourg in oh 7 or 8 somewhere in that. Right. So kind of like a curiosity on like, okay, this is very different. I'm kind of curious. Yeah. You know, I, I haven't traveled the turn other than the Caribbean. but I had a trip to Austria when I was fairly young, just random.

00:57:23:19 - 00:57:39:17
Unknown
And it was eye opening to me because it was just, you know, we, I, we knew somebody who was in college in the US, and he invited us there to go stay with his family. So we went and it was just like super eye opening. I'm like, this is completely different. And we were just in Austria in November, and some of it was in a very good way.

00:57:39:17 - 00:57:58:26
Unknown
It was just different, totally different. Everything was different, you know, and I really enjoyed it. I want to try to do that some more. But you mentioned beer, so I want to bring up beer. I did mention that's another really cool, cool thing. that, that you've recently got into, I think, I mean, at least that's from my perspective.

00:57:58:28 - 00:58:14:18
Unknown
so, so I used to say all the time that when I retired, I wanted to make beer and I wanted to work on cars again because, you know, you, I mean, I had a race car. I built the whole thing from the ground up, you know, I welded all of it, designed a lot of it, built the whole thing.

00:58:14:25 - 00:58:34:11
Unknown
And then when your day job is working on cars, even if it's literally a laptop in your lap and you're working on cars, the last thing I do is come home and work on cars again. So you get to the point where you hate working on cars. You'll change your own oil and stuff, but that's about it. and then I hated the fact that I hated working on cars, so I wanted to make beer, and I wanted to go back to enjoy working on cars again.

00:58:34:14 - 00:58:52:07
Unknown
So, you know, one of the, I probably would have waited a little longer to make beer, than I did. But, you know, this will be maybe the first time my dad here's a sitting over my left shoulder. You know, my dad's had cancer for 25, 26 years. One of the things is cancer feeds on sugar.

00:58:52:09 - 00:59:13:00
Unknown
my dad loves beer, but all beer has some residual sugar on it. I shouldn't say all the majority. Beer has residual sugar left in it. So you can actually, I when I started making beer, one of the goals was first I wanted to make beer and make sure it was good and didn't suck. And then I wanted to try to make beer that had no sugar, residual sugar left in it because he loves beer.

00:59:13:00 - 00:59:25:03
Unknown
If he has one beer a day, and maybe now he can have two beers a day, maybe the time he has left is a little bit more enjoyable because he gets to have a couple of beers a day instead of just one. So then I figured out how you go ahead and and you can make a beer. It's a very dry beer.

00:59:25:03 - 00:59:43:25
Unknown
Think of a dry wine and a sweet wine. It's a similar difference in taste, but you can actually make beer that has no residual sugar. And I've done all kinds of different experimentation with beer at some of the coolest things, as there's, you know, everybody thinks, oh, there's 4 or 5 beer styles, which I probably thought at one time, two beers, probably over 100.

00:59:43:27 - 01:00:03:06
Unknown
And I was making two gallon batches of beer, or one and a half gallon batches of beer of all different kinds of styles from all over the world, which were, you know, some I found to be incredibly good that I never tried before. Yeah. The part that I find super interesting is the which is probably how you attack everything.

01:00:03:06 - 01:00:23:28
Unknown
I'm guessing from a data perspective. Like, you know, you're not just like, oh, I bought a beer kit and I'm following the directions and that looks pretty good. And then I'll just try this, maybe like you're breaking it down, like, I mean, I, you know, I'd rather you explain it anyway, but I remember you showing me, like grass tags and spreadsheets and like, it was like, updating.

01:00:23:28 - 01:00:43:18
Unknown
And you could control it from, you know, you didn't have to be at home or what exactly was that about? So, you know, I tell people making beer is a lot like making tea or coffee. You basically have hot water, you pump across the grain and you end up with sugar water. And then when they're after, you know, the different grains and hops have different tastes and flavors, and then you have to ferment it.

01:00:43:21 - 01:01:00:21
Unknown
And then, from a fermentation standpoint, you know, there's a guy out there who's fairly famous in the beer industry for writing a lot of how to guides. And he always said that, that a good fermentation can make up for a bad brewing. So if you do have some problems with your brewing, if you get a good fermentation, it really won't.

01:01:00:22 - 01:01:18:06
Unknown
You really won't notice that you screwed some things up, you know, earlier on. So the fermentation becomes really important to control. You know, it's an excellent thermic reaction. So as a ferments it starts to generate heat. So you just can't have it sitting here on the table in a 75 degree room. You need to control it to like 6768 degrees.

01:01:18:06 - 01:01:35:12
Unknown
So I mean, I went through and I bought a little chiller and I got the biggest, plastic cooler I could and I have a thermocouple that goes in it with a wireless gizmo that I can control from my phone, and I can change the temperature that I want, and it'll turn the chiller on and off and control the the water to the exact same temperature.

01:01:35:15 - 01:01:53:26
Unknown
I have a little gizmo called a tilt that floats inside. And, it's I got an accelerometer in it, and as the sugar gets converted to alcohol, the angle of it changes and the sensitive enough for the accelerometer picks it up and starts to change. And then, like every 15 minutes, I get an update to, Google document in the sky.

01:01:54:00 - 01:02:08:23
Unknown
And no matter where I am in the world, I can look at it. I mean, I was literally in Europe last November, and I was checking on the fermentation of my beer back in Florida to make sure it was doing what I wanted it to do. And that, you know, was a good explanation of, like, everything you've done.

01:02:09:00 - 01:02:30:10
Unknown
It's. And, so, so here's the the opposite of all that is, my dad has a friend that he's known for years who lives up in Alabama. He would make beer that how long ago? 15 years ago. And you would when, you know, he would determine if it was done fermenting by putting a, a lit match over it.

01:02:30:12 - 01:03:00:02
Unknown
because if it was still blowing out CO2 would blow the match out. If it wasn't have exiting CO2 anymore, then the match wouldn't go out. You know, there's no data, he's just fermenting. And that's telling him how to make sure tell to tell. It's done. Me, I mean, I can I get data every 15 minutes, which is probably way more often than I need to, but that's a pretty good analog to the car world, really, because there's a lot of guys out there that are just, you know, been doing it a long time, and they have all these things that almost make no sense to us, but they've kind of found their way to

01:03:00:07 - 01:03:21:01
Unknown
get some results with the match versus the data. Yeah. But at some point that's going to stop you, right? Yeah. If you're the match guy you're going to hit a wall. But with data you're, you're you should always be able to find your way if you don't give up. And that's what's important. I mean, I can get you exact numbers, but these are going to be pretty close.

01:03:21:03 - 01:03:40:19
Unknown
If you go back to the original, A9, XL Fox body computer, there was something like 7 or 800 total calibrate parameters. Now, most software only has maybe 100 of them in there. There's a lot of filter constants and timers that are completely in diagnostic stuff that you would need in all the software when you fast forward to now.

01:03:40:24 - 01:03:58:00
Unknown
Yeah, there's about an an automatic car. Yeah. You're looking at probably 40 to 50,000 parameters. Yeah. Which is mind blowing. And then you can't do that without data. You could you could find you could get your way through an A9. No. With no data other than maybe a wideband or something like that, or a dyno to see how much power you're making.

01:03:58:03 - 01:04:17:12
Unknown
But you can't do that anymore when it gets that complicated. And, you know, that kind of goes back to my beginnings and tuning because so I believe it was end of 2003 that, you know, we had talked about the pro racer package. And I mean, at that point, we didn't I didn't even nobody knew the name T yet, I don't think.

01:04:17:14 - 01:04:36:26
Unknown
And you were just telling me, hey, this is a new company that's coming. And, you know, so that was like 2004 was when I opened Modular Depot. So at that point, you know, Fox bodies are almost ten years old, but at the time they seemed old. But now, you know, a coyote is over ten years old. So it's kind of like the same, same time frame.

01:04:37:00 - 01:04:54:28
Unknown
So I was tuning a lot of those and it was that way for the most part. You know, people came out with different options to data logged in the most stuff and that. But for the most part, we were telling those things without much data or like, yeah, look it up a bolt meter to the mass air meter, you know, things like that.

01:04:55:06 - 01:05:18:12
Unknown
So, I miss those days a little bit because it was more like, you know, a seat of the pants, kind of like, you know, just make it work mentality. Whereas now there's no way you can do that. No way you can do that. You know, the GT 500, the perfect example. There's you know, the technology is made, you know, I had a conversation with Kobe about this recently.

01:05:18:15 - 01:05:47:11
Unknown
I said, where things really took a turn for the positive and negative at the same time as, you know, the coyote, because of wide bands and really dependable knock sensors and things like that. It allowed in this similar way that we were talking about value files. It allowed people to get by somewhat. You could still blow a car up, but it was much harder to blow a car up or, you know, hurt it or whatever because of the wide bands, because of the knock sensors.

01:05:47:11 - 01:06:10:24
Unknown
You know, you do a poll and unless you're, like, way out in left field, the wide bands are going to get the fuel right. The knock sensors should pull the timing. And, it created a lot of dangerous situations. I think it helped, but it made dangerous situations because, you know, we were talking about tuning older vehicles, you know, and we had done a poll and there was something wrong with it.

01:06:10:24 - 01:06:37:27
Unknown
And the wideband saved the feeling, you know, and and he lifted also because he saw it, but it made it safer. I said back in the day, you wouldn't even have made a poll. You would've hit the gas pedal. And I just sort went by the, you know, like, that's it. And then you're like, you know. So at least not only are you able to do a small poll and realize you're lean and, you know, you get you have more data and you get enough of a poll to where okay, I see what's wrong.

01:06:38:00 - 01:07:04:11
Unknown
You get to a point on an older car, even though it's simple, that you can't even get it to do enough to get the data, like whether it's idle or wide open throttle. So all the technology is beneficial, but it's created a situation where, like Gt500, you know, I think there's plenty of good tuners around, around the country, local tuners.

01:07:04:14 - 01:07:24:12
Unknown
but I just don't see how somebody could show up with one of those at a local tuning shop at the level that we're doing them thousand plus horsepower and be able to do it right. You know, they could do pretty good. I would agree, you know, and and you know, and I feel bad almost. And, you know, it's made me think about it long term.

01:07:24:12 - 01:07:41:20
Unknown
Like, I don't know that I'm qualified to do it or I want to do it, but like, you know, at some point, do I have to transition to doing some of what you've done, which is try to help other than my employees, of course I'm teaching them. But like, you know, maybe try to help people. I don't know the right path there.

01:07:41:20 - 01:07:57:12
Unknown
But like a good example, I just turned one yesterday and the guy was asking me, you didn't ask about it. You only asked about shops or Gt500, and then I answered them because I had aftermarket shops online. And and then I was like, wait a second, why are you asking about shocks? And he's like, oh, my car's bogging off the line.

01:07:57:14 - 01:08:21:02
Unknown
Go has nothing to do. It shocks and he's like, what is it? I go, don't tell me who to in your car because I don't want to like, bad mouth anybody. But it's your turn for sure. And he's like, how do you know that? I go because I've tuned. I've had one for three and a half years. That's probably has 400 900 poles and 500 track passes, but we've tuned so many of them that that's what that's what makes us who we are.

01:08:21:02 - 01:08:41:06
Unknown
It's not just that we're good at it, it's the volume, right, that we can test series. Yeah. And that comes down to experience. Exactly. And but that makes me feel bad a little bit. like, what about that guy in the middle of the country that doesn't have you or me or somebody to help them, and they're trying to tune cars and, you know, they're good guys.

01:08:41:06 - 01:09:09:17
Unknown
Like, there's just nowhere for that person to learn what I know on that GT 500. And that is and I you know, it's a positive for sure. Obviously it makes me money and makes me valuable. But I also I'm concerned with the longer term, even in today's day and age where there's so many tuners when it comes to that level, how many guys actually can tune that right in in the country, not counting you like, because you just can figure it out.

01:09:09:17 - 01:09:26:18
Unknown
But like that's actively doing them, you know, and just boom, I can do it. Probably less than a dozen. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. Like ten, 12 people, you know, and there's, and a lot of those are not remote teams, right? They're just guys that are really smart and can do it. So there you go.

01:09:26:18 - 01:09:46:08
Unknown
Okay, now you got a guy in some random I'm not going to say any stay because I don't want anybody to get offended. But like a real small state that just has nothing going on there. But the guy has a car. His only choice right now is probably to get a remote in. And, you know, I think long term, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot.

01:09:46:08 - 01:10:14:13
Unknown
And, you know, I was thinking about, like, the whole pro racer package and things like that. Like, I think we really I kind of want to almost pivot how we're doing things. And it's like, okay, I've done this 20 years. I've garnered a huge amount of knowledge and financial gain from the information you gave me. But I'll be 50 next year, and that's, you know, I mean, when I met you, you were 40 or so, I guess.

01:10:14:13 - 01:10:33:12
Unknown
I think I was late 30s. And yet when you're late 30s and 30 and like, that makes my brain go crazy because I'm like, I'm like, over ten years older than when I met Jerry. So, like, I'm not that guy because I don't have your background, but I have the experience in doing it daily that I think is very valuable.

01:10:33:12 - 01:11:01:07
Unknown
So like, you know, what's your opinion on that? Like long term? Like, you know, should me or somebody else pursue, you know, passing off this knowledge on the stock computer stuff? I, you know, I'm not sure. Yes. Yeah. You know, I think yeah. Now there's, we're in a weird place right now in the country because, you know, Dodge and GM no longer offer are going to offer gasoline.

01:11:01:07 - 01:11:24:19
Unknown
High performance vehicle. Well, that may or may not change, but that's the case right now. You know, Ford is going to have one more variant of Mustang. And then allegedly after that the Mustang will become electric. a lot of that could change. But I mean, GM and Dodge, the stakes are in the ground. I mean, the last gasoline powered, high performance Dodge Hellcat or V8 Dodge like that rolls off the assembly line this year, you know, and that's it.

01:11:24:26 - 01:11:48:03
Unknown
You know, they've they've walked away. They could go back if they needed to. So so you know, the only thing going forward left is really the new the new Mustang. You know, and I know I know Eric Brooks is diligently working on supporting it with HP tuners and stuff like that. so but there's definitely a need, in my opinion, to pass that knowledge on because you're going to have some people.

01:11:48:03 - 01:12:05:20
Unknown
Gt500 is a unique case. So we're not going to talk about necessarily GT 500, because those people will buy that car and throw the warranty out the window and pay you 5 or 6 figures to modify and do what they want to do. A mustang GT guy isn't necessarily the same guy. He may wait till his warranties expired until he wants to do that.

01:12:05:22 - 01:12:25:00
Unknown
So I think you have a lot of people still coming up that in in the Mustang know you know, Mustang GT world that will want their vehicle modified because now they're out of warranty and they want to go down that path. you know, and you know, the Mustang GT is not as challenging as the GT 500, but it's not easy by any means.

01:12:25:03 - 01:12:43:06
Unknown
You know, with the ten speed transmission, the variable cam stuff and all those things, you know, and then, you know, their their 12 to 1 compression ratio. I remember, you know, here's a, funny tidbit. Kenny Bell doesn't offer a 2018 or newer Mustang GT kit. because I, you know, there's 3 or 4 of them out there in the wild.

01:12:43:11 - 01:13:12:23
Unknown
Okay, one of them is actually here in Florida that I've worked out a little bit. but I remember standing there with Jim Bell in somewhere in probably 2018 or 2017, and we're saying we're all standing around looking at this underneath the hood of this car. And I'm like, Jim, 15 years ago, if you told me that or if I told you I wanted to put a supercharger on 12 to 1 compression ratio engine to make it run on 91 octane fuel, you looked at me and told me I was crazy and I said, you're asking me to do something that, you know, you think you would have thought ten years ago or five years

01:13:12:23 - 01:13:31:29
Unknown
ago would be completely insane, you know, so, I mean, even when the coyote first came out, that was the talk. It was blowers are over 11 on. Forget it. You know? You know, but you could get there from here. But it's, you know, you got to have the right knowledge to be able to, you know, there's a lot of people out there putting blowers on 18 and newer mustangs.

01:13:31:29 - 01:13:49:13
Unknown
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of blown up 18 and newer Mustangs out there, too. Yeah. You know, the number one and number two selling short blocks delivered by motorsports. I don't know which one's one in which ones? Two, six, four Dodge, five liter coyote. because those are the most fragile engines out there. They put blowers on them and they blow up.

01:13:49:15 - 01:14:09:15
Unknown
You know, if you get somebody, just makes one little mistake. That motor is done. Yeah. And that's what I tell people, you know, unlike, you know, when people are really chasing a number on the coyote, the newer coyotes, especially on 93, you know, we just did one the other day, and it made right at 700 at the wheel with the twin turbo Mach one.

01:14:09:18 - 01:14:26:01
Unknown
And, you know, everybody's like, well, you know, I think we can run a little bit more boost. I got I don't care if we can make more power even safely here on the dyno. Like, 700 is like my limit on roughly on 93. And I don't even like to see him that high, but it was a turbo vehicle.

01:14:26:01 - 01:14:49:15
Unknown
So, like, with a blower cards, you know, if you're over 600, whether you're blown 18 plus you should just be happy with that unless you go E85. And then that changes things. And you know the introduction to die helped that quite a bit. But that's also when the compression got bumped up. Yeah. What's your opinion on like that whole situation with the dual fuel like wise Ford.

01:14:49:15 - 01:15:18:21
Unknown
Add something like that in this situation. Like why not one or the other. Add one in the like do it like a die and port injection. That's easy. so gasoline is really an amazing liquid. It does all kinds of different things. One of the things it does, it lubricates valves and valve seats really, really well, you know, if I can go back to my natural gas experience, you take that vehicle, you run out of natural gas, you're still injecting it in the same spot where the gasoline injector was.

01:15:18:23 - 01:15:36:28
Unknown
And if you do nothing to that engine, here's a good example. You know, we had, v ten Fords, in a shuttle bus that's like a bread loaf going through the air. Right. And so you have high, low just to even cruise, you know, when you're out in California, in Palm Springs and it's 100 degrees out, you're probably cruising in zero vacuum the entire time.

01:15:37:00 - 01:15:56:07
Unknown
You're not variable cam engine, you're zero vacuum. Just cruising around in. There were engines that that had valve seat recession within like 30 or 40,000 miles. The stock cylinder heads, you know, you go to an E85 head. we had some Crown Vics on there in California. They would make it 120,000 miles till they had valve seat recession, you know.

01:15:56:07 - 01:16:20:02
Unknown
So when we do natural gas, we actually use a very, special valve seat material and valve material to prevent valve seat recession. The problem with for the reason for Did that is because, is really twofold. One becomes the high mileage valve seat recession, because even with all the right parts, you're still going to hammer those valves into the valve seats and have some problems, potentially in the warranty period.

01:16:20:04 - 01:16:37:06
Unknown
so you need if you if you inject the fuel through the port, that port is lubricating the valves and seats and mitigates all of that. The other problem is, if you pay attention, pay. Well, I think you've experiences with your old explorer. You had to have it walnut blasting, right? Yeah. Why do you have to have a walnut blasted?

01:16:37:06 - 01:16:56:03
Unknown
Because the valves are totally coked up. And. And if you spray fuel upstream, see, that's all being sprayed downstream, you have a little overlap period where the pistons coming up, the exhaust, you know, so there's some stuff blowing back slightly into the valve. And then when it comes the piston comes back down. You're spraying fuel directly into the cylinder.

01:16:56:03 - 01:17:16:03
Unknown
What's cleaning the backside of that valve. Nothing. Yeah. You know so Ford did that to keep the for valve seat recession and to keep the valves clean. You know you look at A36 GM, I did some natural gas three, six GM's that were direct injection for, Las Vegas for some limos. And we switched it to port injection.

01:17:16:03 - 01:17:38:29
Unknown
We actually use these little tubes and stuff like that to put it into the manifold. It's a vapor fuel to gaseous fuel. So who cares about that? And, man, we ended up with, all these pretty. Not every vehicle, but some of the vehicles, you'd pull the intake off and you just like your explorer, you'd see all this coats build coking build up on the backside of the intake valves, and they're blaming it on natural gas, you know, which it is.

01:17:38:29 - 01:18:03:21
Unknown
And it's just the way it's designed. But it's bad as some engine designs, some are okay, some art. And you think, is that how they make the decision or is it cost based. Because obviously there's eco boosts that are Di only that don't have the port injection. Yeah. When you look at the, like the one five, the two four cylinder, the two seven and the three liter EcoBoost, those engines were pretty much designed from the ground up to be direct injected turbocharged engines.

01:18:03:23 - 01:18:22:15
Unknown
And when you do that, you can make some design changes to, to mitigate a lot of that. And everybody remembers the three valve spark plug. Remember the original three valve spark plug? Yeah. You know, I mean, yeah. Break one off. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And why was the spark plug that way? Because that was originally designed to be dry and they changed it at the last minute.

01:18:22:19 - 01:18:43:16
Unknown
And that's where they put the spark plug where the injector was going to be. And it was the inject the spark plug from. Hell. Yeah, it definitely was. so now let's go the other direction. You know why I added to the Mustang? You know, obviously that's easy amount of cost, but is it mostly due to for the high compression and to deal with that?

01:18:43:16 - 01:19:04:14
Unknown
It's the high compression and the high compression. Get some fuel economy. You know, the fuel economy standards, most every year continually to slowly bump up, you know, where you have to have that the cafe I should say corporate average fuel economy you take away, say, weighted sales volume, average of all the vehicles you sell, and you have to be above a certain amount.

01:19:04:16 - 01:19:26:06
Unknown
And, you know, obviously you have things like mustangs that are going to be below that amount. So you're going to do you're going to do die for two reasons, mainly one for fuel economy and two, you do get some emission improvement in them because you don't have as much hydrocarbon generated hydrocarbon. The best way to describe it is fuel trapped in cracks and crevices.

01:19:26:09 - 01:19:44:02
Unknown
And there's places on intake ports and things like that for that fuel to trap. And then, and then that fuel gets pulled out on diesels. If you're spraying it right in the cylinder, you're going to minimize the amount of hydrocarbon you make in on a gasoline engine. There's three relevant emission constituent s that are measured hydrocarbon Co.

01:19:44:02 - 01:20:05:04
Unknown
And that's in most gasoline engines are you calibrate them to the hydrocarbon standard. That's the one you're always concerned with. Most natural gas it was always NOx a higher cylinder temperature and pressure makes knocks. And natural gas has a hotter flame than gasoline. So we were I was always concerned about NOx on natural gas and the gasoline. People are always concerned about hydrocarbon.

01:20:05:06 - 01:20:35:12
Unknown
Okay. So this is a much bigger question. And maybe we'll do another podcast, like you said on emissions. But I just want your general thoughts on this. We talked about the program where if you take a diesel off, you get all this money and the Cafe standards and Ford's spending all this extra money to lower their, or raise their fuel economy by a small percentage, do you feel, you know, taking out the facts of if it's really an impact or not?

01:20:35:14 - 01:21:04:15
Unknown
Do you feel all that money involved in that is worth while? You know, like, do you think it's more a case of like and there's nothing wrong with that, right. We're a capitalist society. Everybody should game the system if they're not, like breaking the laws, but not being educated in the details, which you are. When I see, like, you know, somebody getting 50 grand to take diesel off and they're doing this in volume, huge amounts of money, what is what's your opinion of that?

01:21:04:18 - 01:21:22:14
Unknown
Like, do you think it's worth our money to do that? It's because it's our money right at the at the base. Like it's not it's not it's taxpayer money. Taxpayer money. So we're paying this company of $50,000 to make the air cleaner. And if it was truly making an impact, then, you know, you could justify it. And that's probably the argument.

01:21:22:14 - 01:21:41:19
Unknown
Is it really doing anything? Is it just people taking advantage of government programs to gain money? You know, so so here's what I can tell you from a practical experience standpoint. The first trip I ever took to California was in the fall of 1986. a friend of mine who went to college with took a job with Hughes Aircraft and, and they would only move so many vehicles.

01:21:41:19 - 01:22:04:09
Unknown
He had a race car and whatnot. And so even we drove from southeastern Michigan to Manhattan Beach, California over the course of three days, I believe. And in in 1986, we were coming down, I-10 through the Riverside area. The smog was so bad people would have their headlights turned on, and it was like a reddish, rust colored haze.

01:22:04:12 - 01:22:26:20
Unknown
Okay. and that's what it was like in 1986, you know, now when you go out there, I've been out there a bunch because Kenny Bell's in Rancho Cucamonga, which I worked a lot with, and they're near another Riverside, Ontario area now. You probably have, you never see any red haze out there anymore. hot days, you'll get like, a white haze in a little cooler days.

01:22:26:20 - 01:22:48:03
Unknown
It's actually clear. So. So without a doubt, you know, does taking a diesel off the road help? Absolutely. Because diesels are horrible emitters. You know, but all the emission standards lowering is, you know, from my standpoint, is actually cleaned up the air in California. Most of the a new car driving down the road in California is probably has cleaner air coming out the tailpipe than what's going in.

01:22:48:06 - 01:23:06:04
Unknown
Yeah. And I you know, I see obviously there's a practical example you're given. But I think with a lot of things in this world, a lot of things start out for good reasons and good results. And then they accelerate to the point they go too far, too far. Yep. And to me, it feels like it's kind of gone that way.

01:23:06:04 - 01:23:24:01
Unknown
And I was going to say that because we're in the time when our air is cleaner. And so, you know, it's just like anything else. It's like, well, things are good. So of course you're going to think you don't need that. But then if we didn't do that, where would we be? Like you said. But just with anything government involved, I think it just turns into excessive spending.

01:23:24:01 - 01:23:45:00
Unknown
And also it's not just you're getting hit in multiple ways, right? We're paying that $50,000 to that company to take the diesel off the road. Plus, my Mustang's more expensive because they're putting all this extra technology in it to meet all the standards. And it's getting to the point where you know it's going to. They may be taking that away from us completely because of these same laws with going electric.

01:23:45:00 - 01:24:14:03
Unknown
And what's your opinion on electric vehicles? I don't even think I was going to ask that one, but I don't like electric vehicles in. You know, I think there's, I think a dedicated electric vehicle is horrible. I know there's people out there. They're going to vehemently disagree with that. But if you're purpose of an electric vehicle is to be green, you know, what about you have coal fired power plants, you have natural gas power plants.

01:24:14:03 - 01:24:30:00
Unknown
Where is the electricity coming? What about the lithium it takes for that battery? You know, things like that, that that argument's a lot of people have heard, but let's just go one step further. A couple of years ago, my dad and I drove from his house all the way up to Michigan. We told a boat up there to, to give him my cousin Randy.

01:24:30:00 - 01:24:45:25
Unknown
You know, Randy. And, so we told him we use my F-150 and went up there and we literally stopped. One time on the way up, we stopped in, I think in Tennessee. we did. We had to stop for gas, obviously, but we we made it in two days. If that was an electric truck, how many days with that same same trip have taken?

01:24:46:00 - 01:25:06:18
Unknown
I mean, seven, eight. Yeah. Based on the testing of the, the light lightning's crazy. How about it? You know, that's that's not practical. I think if you want to do the right thing for the environment and in the big picture, obviously, if you go to France, France is like 80% nuclear power and electric vehicle. And France may not seem to be a bad idea.

01:25:06:25 - 01:25:23:05
Unknown
You still have some range issues, but people don't travel around France like they they more like we do here in the United States. That's probably a great solution for France. It's not as that solution for United States. I honestly think a plug in hybrid is really the the best way to go, because, you know, those will get driving around town.

01:25:23:06 - 01:25:48:22
Unknown
They'll get 150, 200 miles to the gallon. But if you want to drive across the country, you have a gasoline engine and you'll still get 40 or 50 miles to the gallon driving across the country. But you don't have to take 3 or 4 days to go, you know, a short distance. So do you think the lightning, for instance, is a good example of how things kind of almost went a little wrong because, like, there hadn't been somebody at Ford that knew if you towed with that vehicle, it was going to be awful.

01:25:48:25 - 01:26:11:12
Unknown
And you think they just pushed through because it's green and we got to do it. And, you know, you think I mean, so so I don't I don't know much about the Ford aspect of it, but I can tell you I read an interview with the, the North American CEO of Stellantis, which is Chrysler. And, and he they were talking about the demise of the Hellcat engine and all that stuff in, in going to electric.

01:26:11:13 - 01:26:29:22
Unknown
And he flat out said in this interview, which was about a year, year and a half ago, that it's all driven because of the current administration in Washington. If it wasn't that administration, they wouldn't have the pressure on them to do with the things that they're doing now. So my gut feeling would be, yes. And now Ford is the one company that's resisting.

01:26:29:22 - 01:26:55:13
Unknown
I realize they have the lightning out there from a high performance standpoint. That's a great vehicle. Yeah, from a truck standpoint, that's a horrible vehicle. Exactly. You know, but Ford is probably out of the three manufacturers. They're the ones dragging their feet the most and doing all that stuff. In my opinion, when you look at what's going on, you know, again, you have a gasoline internal combustion engine, gasoline Mustang, it's going to have a new generation come out for the next month or two, the Mustang.

01:26:55:15 - 01:27:18:04
Unknown
And it'll be around for 4 or 5 years, where all the high performance gasoline engines are gone from from Dodge and GM. And it's it's interesting you say that. And I put those companies against each other like that, because I do find myself, happy that I'm a Ford guy for those reasons. But I see other choices being made that I wish they were more like Dodge.

01:27:18:04 - 01:27:41:03
Unknown
Right? Like when the new GTI came out, the decision to go EcoBoost. Right. I understand why they did it and all that. or, you know, you've got the new Corvette, which is I don't love the, the standard car, but the Z06, whether you think that engine is going to last or not, it's pretty amazing. And then they're going to do a twin turbo version of that.

01:27:41:03 - 01:28:02:06
Unknown
It's like, that's what dreams were made of. And yes, Ford gave us the GT 500, which I dreamt about for the last ten years before it came out, because I'm like, you know, and, you know, you see, the GT is out there and like the kind, you know, the DCT and just a well-balanced car. Period. Right? Like the 1314 Gt500 was awesome car.

01:28:02:06 - 01:28:25:11
Unknown
I would love to have one long term for my collection, but it's not even the same conversation at all. It's completely different, you know? So Ford did give us an amazing I would it's not considered a super car. It is to me. but they never like, made that. Like, it seems like they just pulled back at the last minute on the really high end things.

01:28:25:11 - 01:28:48:11
Unknown
And you think that's. I had this conversation with somebody recently. Do you think that's more related to the environment, or do you think there's just not that one guy at Ford that pushes to go in that like, do you think you know, it's to me, it's so odd with billions of people in this world that you are responsible for a lot of things that happen in the performance world.

01:28:48:11 - 01:28:57:09
Unknown
And there's other people that there's like one person that's pretty important.

01:28:57:11 - 01:29:22:15
Unknown
They don't do that while you're talking. Oh, that's okay. I have a great, answer for that about being one person. Let's keep going. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, it seems like to me you're not even just in the car business. Anything, really. There's. With billions of people in this world, we can identify a small number of people in almost any field that were critical in getting us to this point.

01:29:22:15 - 01:29:45:00
Unknown
And now you could say, well, if it wasn't them, it might have been somebody else. But I'm not so sure if that's the case. You know, in your case, you were a mentor to probably two of the biggest remote tuners ever in Ford. Yeah, I hopefully I can consider myself one of them. so, what if you didn't exist or you didn't care to do that, would I?

01:29:45:00 - 01:30:07:00
Unknown
I wouldn't be doing this. So would there be somebody else to have filled that gap? so when it comes to Ford, do you think that's the problem? I do think it comes down to possibly one person. I'm going to tell a story that few people know. I've told it to a few people. The 1999 Cobra, I think, you know, knowing what we know now, you probably said that was a disaster for Ford, right?

01:30:07:00 - 01:30:25:22
Unknown
All the the lawsuits of lack of power and all this stuff. Did you know that car was supposed to be supercharged? I did not there were prototypes built. There was a guy at Ford. His name was Tom Johnson. he was Mr. Supercharger. Time for development and trying things out. He put a supercharger or anything. We had supercharged Crown Vics.

01:30:25:22 - 01:30:45:09
Unknown
We had supercharged town cars. We had a supercharged minivan. You put a supercharger on A38 Windstar? in town, put blowers on everything. And he got to the point where he sold the 99 Mustang is a I believe it was an Eaton M90 with no intercooler, which I know we all think is bad. But you got to go back.

01:30:45:12 - 01:31:03:20
Unknown
You know, we're talking about 25 almost, you know years ago when these town selling this program. So he's getting sold. This thing is 464 valve M 99 intercooler, 4 or 5 pounds of boost. That that car would have been a game changer, you know. And they were prototypes built. They were developing them. They were in the emissions lab, the whole nine yards.

01:31:03:20 - 01:31:22:09
Unknown
I mean, this was going to happen. Tom was actually a friend of mine. Tom goes on vacation in North Carolina, and he's jogging on the beach and has a massive heart attack. And dies. And, at that point, and you can probably talk to Brian Wolfe about this when you talk to Brian, because the modular mafia does really exist.

01:31:22:12 - 01:31:46:04
Unknown
to some extent, at least in my opinion, in Ford Motor Company, the modular Mafia comes in and they go to, to, the Mustang program manager. and they're like, hey, you know, you can get rid of this thing called super, the Super Charger. We have this new idea called Tumble Port Edward got weld in it. and you can save so much money in the tumble port engine, you can add IRS to it, and your car will be just as just as powerful.

01:31:46:06 - 01:32:10:07
Unknown
And the Mustang program manager bought it, and that's what it ended up being. But if Tom was still alive, I would be stunned if the 99 Cobra was not. 464 valve niner called supercharged power. Yeah. So it just took that one guy to stand up for the program. And, you know, that's that's kind of how I said it's it's amazing how one person can change the course of so much stuff like that.

01:32:10:15 - 01:32:40:23
Unknown
Yeah, that's I think about that a lot. Just in the world in general, whether it be politics or whatever. It's like, how how do we get in that situation where one person is influencing millions of people, and not even, like, consciously like that guy. Right? Like he's just doing his job. He loves superchargers and all that, but like, he's in a position that, you know, determines the direction that things are going to go.

01:32:41:00 - 01:33:07:24
Unknown
You know, is there anybody in this industry that not necessarily is a mentor to you, but you find very kind of important and how things have gone is or is there anybody you want to point out? Yeah. We haven't already. let me think so. So, you know, one of the early on things that, that I think was important is you know, I, I mentioned to you how Steve, you know, used to build the portable dinos.

01:33:07:24 - 01:33:27:19
Unknown
And Steve used to always say that he specializes in data, you know, and he was the first guy to, like, put, you know, voltage inputs in his in the dino jet screen and be able to get a, a trace of the a power and torque along with the wideband. But along with anything else you could put boost on it, you could put master meter voltage on it.

01:33:27:24 - 01:33:45:20
Unknown
And Steve said, you know, my job is data. And he, I feel that in those early days of Steve, when he kept pushing me like, well, what is this doing? Can we measure this? Can we look at that? you know, and he's probably one of the guys, that, you know, convince me that, hey, man, I you got to have all this stuff.

01:33:45:22 - 01:34:04:28
Unknown
Because if you don't, you're not. You're not doing the right job. I think that's a great example, because I've found myself in that position before, and I don't think it's necessarily out of laziness. It's more perspective where you have somebody around you like that that actually pushes you, but not because you're lazy, but just to, like, give you a perspective you don't have.

01:34:04:28 - 01:34:31:11
Unknown
Right? Because you already know more than Steve. But you need to have his perspective from a less educated perspective on that to go, hey, we need this and we need that. And, you know, I think that's really key. So we talk about the one person. But by who you surround yourself with is very important too, right. You know, and then another person is which is a little bit different is is Bruce Tucker, who just retired at the end of last year.

01:34:31:11 - 01:34:49:08
Unknown
I think Bruce is a super interesting guy. you know, he's a very interesting guy, even outside of the tuning realm. Yeah, but, you know, he would send me a note or give me a phone call and be like, hey, we got a customer that came in, they got an 88 five liter bank Fire Crown Vic, and they're paying us to build an engine and port the iron heads.

01:34:49:08 - 01:35:10:24
Unknown
And I'm like 40 iron heads. There's carb legal aluminum heads you could put on. He goes, I know. Customer one stock heads, you know, can you reverse engineer the file and, and make it so I can tune this thing, you know, and he, you know, he the weird stuff that he brought up through the years kept me to some extent sharper on the older things.

01:35:10:24 - 01:35:31:10
Unknown
You know, this Bruce would come up with some completely bizarre stuff. you know, another person, in the industry, I don't if, you know, you know, Clint, wasn't he was he was involved with some software, right? He makes he makes binary. Yes. Yes, yes, that's how I know him. You know, I remember his last name in,

01:35:31:13 - 01:35:55:27
Unknown
Yeah, it'll come to me, but, but but, you know, Clint and I work together, and he has this whole I realize he offers newer stuff is still. But, you know, if you have an ego four or even an ego five, you know, like I told Dan, I mean, I've Dan has got the original, I call it the Chris Con because Chris Danner made it, you know, that I probably tuned your car with the big box and everything Dan has that, you know, and I showed him how to use it.

01:35:56:00 - 01:36:16:06
Unknown
Also dynamite that I didn't know that. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. and Dan has that I've showed Dan how to use it. And you know what? He never uses it because he's, you know, Dan starting to do some work for stuff and some older stuff, which, you know, you and I can talk about another time because again, industries, you know, there's like an end line coming of new cars.

01:36:16:06 - 01:36:31:27
Unknown
Right. So so you know I told Dan it's like, man, you need to, you need to call Clint and you need to get binary editor, and you need to get a tweaker from the the dude in Texas or whatever. And that's how you're going to tune the car, you know? And and because you can get all data, all the data logging and all that stuff.

01:36:31:28 - 01:36:55:03
Unknown
Right, and, you know, and everybody that uses Clint stuff, it's, which is, you know, again, it's based off of the original geek tuner, but, I mean, everybody does it for the uses. Clint stuff is is just amazed at how well it works. Yeah. And for the for everybody watching this eek. For an eight five is the computer that came in Mustang's EC four was through 95 right or.

01:36:55:09 - 01:37:35:13
Unknown
Well? Well, the five liter, the through 95 on for the the GT 96 was a EC five, but the three eight when EC five and 94. Okay. Gotcha. And then that lasted till 2004. And then. Yeah, they often change with, you know, the model changes. Yeah. And for various reasons add features and things like that. one thing I wanted to ask you about is, your opinion on all the security stuff that we've been dealing with since, I guess it really came really to the to ahead in the Dodge days.

01:37:35:15 - 01:37:58:01
Unknown
but now things I think they've done it for different reasons, though, haven't they? Or why don't you explain it? Because I don't know much about the reasons behind why they locked down the pkms. So Dodge does not want anyone to ever tune their vehicles. I mean, they'll they've made that clear. They want nobody modifying anything. I think that's, poor standpoint.

01:37:58:04 - 01:38:13:01
Unknown
You know, when the six four challenger came out in 2011, there was a huge spike in sales, and then the sales dropped because it was several years later. Until you can ever flash that processor and people want to get that challenger with a new six four engine and they want to put a blower on, they want to do this.

01:38:13:01 - 01:38:33:21
Unknown
You wanted that and they couldn't do anything, you know? And that's when, you know, Tim Millican, you know, is at least what I was told about by Tim figured out how to, to flash the Jeep to that they made it so it was, you know, unflappable. And to be honest, no one's ever no one's ever figured out the checksum algorithm for a dodge.

01:38:33:24 - 01:38:51:18
Unknown
I absolutely can promise you that. They've just found a way around it, you know? And then when they found that way around it, when Tim found their way around it, they changed it again in 2015. So now all of a sudden everybody's got a 2015 Dodge has to set your processor in to basically put in the old 2011 and 2014 boot loader.

01:38:51:20 - 01:39:10:02
Unknown
So you can use that workaround to flash it, because Dodge just doesn't want you to do it for whatever reason. They just don't. Right. but now Ford well, let's go to GM because GM is locked everybody out as well. The GM came from. Do you remember I remember seeing I don't know if it was 60 minutes or one of those.

01:39:10:06 - 01:39:27:22
Unknown
They had some guys that took over some Dodge Durango or something. Right. Remotely or remotely and were doing stuff. And so that's what forced basically GM into like, oh my God, if we're going to have this drive by wire. And now you have, you know, the, lane assist departure stuff so you can move the steering wheel to some extent.

01:39:27:27 - 01:39:44:00
Unknown
You can break the car to some extent, all electronically without a driver ever, even in the seat, you know. And then GM got scared. The GM actually brought every tuning company. And I don't know if you ever heard that. Oh, God, it's got to be five years ago. Something like that. They brought every tuning company in and saying, we're locking you out of the Camaro.

01:39:44:03 - 01:40:01:27
Unknown
We're going to do this Camaro, and we're going to use, full encryption, and you're never going to get into it in there, right? No one, to my knowledge, I think everybody's ever gotten through it, just like the Dodge. I do think HP tuners may have some finally have some workarounds, but that's going to be, open it up and change all the stuff inside, most likely.

01:40:01:29 - 01:40:21:10
Unknown
you know, but but in and all the tuning companies that the GM and violin, they, they're like, hey, we and we accept that. How about you offer us a processor that the, the customer that owns the car will sign a waiver taking, you know, hold you harmless. No liability. But let us modify it. Nope. We'll do it.

01:40:21:12 - 01:40:44:22
Unknown
You know. So that's what GM did. so and again, Ford resisted this longer than I resisted it. Yeah. Again, another reason that I love Ford. In fact, you know, you can ask Brian Wolfe when Brian Wolfe was in charge of Ford Racing, I, I, I heard this indirectly, but you can ask Brian. Brian actually said at one point that as long as he was in charge, nobody was ever going to lock anybody out of the Ford.

01:40:44:24 - 01:41:03:18
Unknown
Yeah, because the aftermarket, you know, Brian, smart enough to understand I mean, Brian's a super smart guy. They have to understand that aftermarket for the Mustang is a huge sales driver, you know? And on top of that, he was a very big racer. If you asked, he was like ten of the top influential outlaw Mustang racers from like the late 90s early to dead sprint on that list every single time.

01:41:03:18 - 01:41:21:12
Unknown
And we're gonna have Brian on the show. so what what what what do you think has motivated Ford to do it now? Is it have a lot to do with the over-the-air updates? Is that the main reason? Yeah, I know it's all has to do with over-the-air updates. And it has to do with there's, you know, in California right now.

01:41:21:14 - 01:41:49:17
Unknown
And for the most part, the stuff that happens in California eventually works its way into EPA and the rest of the country. And so you have what's called a CVN. And a CVN is a calibration very for verification number, validation number, something like that. And it basically performs an algorithm on the calibration portion of the processor. And it reports back a number, hexadecimal, very large hexadecimal number in all the OEMs, including the natural gas stuff.

01:41:49:17 - 01:42:06:02
Unknown
And we sold stuff in California. You have to report the CVN to California. And when you get smog and they press you, you plug you in, your CVN better match what was in their database of what was reported. And if not, guess what? You're not going to be smart. You you will no longer be able to get your license plates.

01:42:06:02 - 01:42:28:03
Unknown
I know a ton of the initially they targeted California target all the 00304 Cobras heavily modified car right. And and they, you know, they basically were not they were not allowing people to modify. They were they were not allowing them to renew their plates because the cars have been modified, because the CVN didn't match. you ever see that coming out of California?

01:42:28:06 - 01:42:44:16
Unknown
I do, yeah, I do, and that's and that's I think as part of the over-the-air updates and all this stuff on emissions is, you know, they want to make sure that nobody's going to modify it. And the best way to do that is to have all that happened. so very, very interesting. This is where, you know, you and I talked earlier.

01:42:44:16 - 01:43:08:26
Unknown
I wish, I was to Millikin was still here because, Tim would take it a personal challenge to figure a way around it. You know, let's let's talk about him real quick, and then we'll wrap it up. because Tim is a very interesting character. I worked with him at Diablo Sport. very interesting characters, but it's a way to put it if you go very interesting character, if you go back to Modular Depot days, don't remember the name of the software, but he was trying to compete with.

01:43:08:26 - 01:43:29:18
Unknown
Yes. Right. He actually stole a bunch of the stuff from us. Yeah, all the descriptions and all that stuff. My first dealings with him was poor. Yeah. You know, I mean, the way I look at Tim is, you know, there's certain people that are, you know, like, you, you know, college engineering have a very, good resume.

01:43:29:18 - 01:43:55:10
Unknown
And the way you came up and Tim and I don't know his background at all, but he seemed more like just a really smart hacker. Right? Like just a very good way to put. Yeah, just not like a, you know, a typical, person, like, you know, not that your typical, but I guess it's hard to explain without like, negative, but like, just like a kind of like a loose cannon kind of personality and just super smart and, like, does it?

01:43:55:10 - 01:44:18:21
Unknown
Because you can't do it. I'll show you. And then he does champagne and beer. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. so, yeah, back in the day on Mojo Depot, when it came out, he was trying to launch his software. And there was all this, you know, back and forth constantly. And I think I find it very interesting. and I didn't know that because I knew him from back then, and it was just totally negative, right, because of all the controversy.

01:44:18:24 - 01:44:39:24
Unknown
And then I find out that he's in the background of a lot of very important things in this industry. And one of those was the the Dodge thing at Diablo. We worked together at Diablo and he worked remotely, but he was there occasionally. So we got to know each other a little bit. And, you know, unfortunately he's not with us anymore, but, I think that's another, you know, pretty important name in this whole deal.

01:44:39:24 - 01:44:59:08
Unknown
You know, Mike Wesley, you mentioned, I think you guys are friendly. there's quite a few people that were important in this, and we're going to bring them in on the podcast eventually to to talk to you. but anyway, is there any, anybody you want to thank or, you know, mention here before we wrap things up?

01:44:59:11 - 01:45:15:04
Unknown
yeah, just a couple of things. You know, first off, if it wasn't for for my wife, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here. and that's really over the last 20 years of with with Tina, you know, my dad for giving me the foundation to be able to actually get to this point, you know, of, of growing up and stuff like that.

01:45:15:07 - 01:45:36:00
Unknown
You know, those are two, without a doubt, the two single biggest influences in my life. You know, early on and tuning, you get to, to Steve at, from Cleveland because Steve was big on, I said earlier, he always told me he specializes in data. And, you know, I would mention to Steve something, and next time I would go to Cleveland, he would have that data in there.

01:45:36:07 - 01:46:07:15
Unknown
We would be doing dino polls. And, you know, he'd be like, well, can you monitor this? Can you tell me what this is doing? And I can't even think of that. And Steve really pushed me to the limits of, of, making sure I had, you know, have all the right data before you make a decision to do anything, you got to have all the right information and then change something, you know, and then, and then Bruce Tucker, because he was always I refer Bruce Tucker's nickname was the patron saint of Lost Causes because he would work on these vehicles that nobody else would ever even consider tuning in 88 speed, density bank

01:46:07:15 - 01:46:22:18
Unknown
fire, Crown Vic and and he pushed the limits for me with older stuff, with older EC fours and even some of the E5 and and you know, some things like he calls me up one day and wants to me like, hey, we need, the cruise control on the boss. 302 only works 200 miles an hour. We need to raise that.

01:46:22:18 - 01:46:39:27
Unknown
And I'm like, the hell you do. How do you do? Have somebody have cruise control on more than a hundred miles an hour? Come to find out, they have a guy running the Silver State Classic, and, and they, you know, that's a timed event through a section of highway in Nevada, and you got to run it. Like, if you're in 150 mile an hour class, the goal is to average 150 miles an hour.

01:46:39:27 - 01:46:54:28
Unknown
And there's a huge amount of math behind it. But they use cruise control to keep the speed consistent when they need to do that. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'll add that in for you. You know, that's awesome. There's bizarre stuff like that that Bruce has asked for, for the years that nobody else would ever even think.

01:46:54:28 - 01:47:14:19
Unknown
And the funniest thing is about Bruce is, you know, he didn't really he he was almost tuning was almost part of his, like, longer term retirement. He was a lawyer. And then he was a radio guy. Right. Well, he was, he was in a band. He was a disc jockey. disc jockey. Then he became the, the the, program manager at the radio station, and he became a copyright lawyer.

01:47:14:21 - 01:47:31:12
Unknown
Worked in a lot of music, copyright stuff, land speed racer when, the music company got bought out by a bigger conglomerate, he ends up with, you know, no place to go, and he ends up in charge of JBA racing for, about 20 years. Yep. And he's recently retired. He's retired at the end of the year. Very cool.

01:47:31:12 - 01:47:51:29
Unknown
So. All right, well, I really want to thank you for coming on, Jerry. you know, you changed my life. You put me on the right path. And I really appreciate your help, you know, to this day. So thanks for coming. Hey. Thanks again.

01:47:52:01 - 01:48:05:01
Unknown
Hey.