From RC Cars to Race Team Owner - Stephan Papadakis Reveals Everything

Yo, what's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Very Vehicular. Brought to you by Viper Industrial and as always, I'm your host, Brian Scotto. Today, we have a legend in the industry, none other than Steph Papadakis. This guy forged and pioneered his way during the early days of import drag racing was a big part in the whole world of drifting, especially behind building the cars. And we get into a lot of nerdy conversations as well as some very interesting conversations about what can make all the sports better, cars, all of that. Enjoy it. I did. If your favorite pair of safety glasses prevented a catastrophic eyeball loss, those things deserve their place in the trophy cabinet. But if you just got a bad scratch, write your line of sight, bummer. And Heatwave Visual knows this, introducing the SkyNet, an all new frame that's Z87 plus safety rated with zero horizontal obstructions. But the highlight feature is the new lens protection film. 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It's good to have you here. Thanks for having me. I was telling Nick before the show that like this is a show that I'm really excited about, because I don't think you and I have really had a very long conversation in probably a long time. Like I just want to pick your brain out a bunch of stuff. And you have been in this for like a really long time now. I'm not trying to out your age, but you're like, I remember reading magazines with you in them. And that was in a completely different sport. Yeah. Well, so I'm 49. Yeah. And I started getting into modding cars the moment I got my license when I was 16. Yeah. And I was already going to the racetrack at 17 or 18. So yeah, I mean, we're talking, we're close to 30 years now. And you grew up here in California. Yeah. Orange County. Yeah. And I've lived here pretty much my whole life. Yeah. I remember though you're originally from New York or you were born in New York? Yeah. So my mom's facade of the family is all from New York. Okay. And I was born in New York and my dad is actually Greek from Greece from the island of Crete. Oh, really? Nothing gives that away. So I lived there for a few years when I was really young. Yeah. But you know, around five years old, they moved to Orange County. Where about in New York? So they're from West Chester County. Okay. Yeah. And Huntington Beach is where I pretty much grew up down here. I was just asking because I lived in Astoria Queens, which is like a predominantly Greek neighborhood. So it's like, it's like one of the most like Greek neighborhoods in New York where if you're not Greek, it's like, it's hard to navigate your way around because you'll walk into restaurants. You're like, oh yeah, everyone's speaking Greek here. Like literally. So the opposite. So my mom's family is like Jewish New York family, her sister, and they all went to like the city after and then the only people person really Greek in the family is me. Yeah. And my dad, you know, they got divorced when I was around five or six. So I grew up without much of that culture. Much of that culture at all. Yeah. Just the name that like, taxes. So I read the other day, because I was like, I was like, I gotta do a little background because like, I obviously, I know you from a bunch of different things and a bunch of different series of both of our lives, right? From Meyer and the magazines, when you were still sort of making that crossover into drifting from drag racing. But I read the other day that so for all that started for you with RC cars, it's kind of how it all began, which is funny, because it's similar for me, but I think it's actually similar for a lot of people who are our age. So like, what was your RC car like kind of niche were you into? So I anything radio control from when I was single digits, like six, seven years old, I begged my mom to get me the RC car from radio radio shack. Yeah. And it had originally had the one with the cable that went from remote control or whatever. So it had the the controller and a cable that you're like leashed to the car the whole time. This is something that I think the younger audience doesn't understand is the running behind your RC car because it's connected to a cable. Oh man, I remember how much fun it was to walk into radio shack and there would just be like the craziest stuff there. I had the turbo lobo. I think it was like one of the it was like a RC truck that they had that I think was on a cable. It was like, yeah. The cable RC car and then the slot car tracks that you would build. I really love the slot car tracks. Again, you're you've got a cable going from a little remote to the slot car track and I had the one the basic ones in the house. And then I really begged my mom to get me the one the RC car from radio shack where eventually I had the antenna and it was wireless. And then found the actual racing track. There was an off road track in Costa Mesa called RCH. And I was probably around 10 or 11 years old and had a little to me a frog and it was the total POS. It was the worst car and eventually got a RC 10. So this is what the bigger kids and the adults were using. And that's all I wanted to do. And so at the time, this place, Radio Controlled Hobbies in Costa Mesa was kind of the epicenter for the engineers and the professional RC racers. This would have been in the like late 80s. And I got to see people doing this as a career and there every day. And I was like, Oh my God, I want to do this. So the next like four years, that's all I wanted to do. RC cars, go racing. They had club races, races every night. And I was, I wouldn't say I was mentored in any way, but like the guys that I would look up to, they were maintaining their cars and they were tuning it and figuring out the tires and lap times and all of these things. So already from like 11 or 12 years old, I'm racing and learning how to kind of tune these cars and maintain them and everything. So that was my life. I was ready to drop out of high school, go home schooling, because that's what I wanted to do. And so I could go travel more. Really? Yep. So you were, you'd gone so deep in it that you were competitive and going and traveling and doing that stuff in the area or? I was competitive locally for a 12 year old. Right. But not anywhere nationally or internationally. But I saw I was at the club nights with the guys that were. So I can see what my future could be. I'd be like, oh, I want to be like those guys. And I remember very, very precisely my mom saying, hey, are you sure that's what you want to do? I don't know if you're going to have much of a social life. And I didn't really understand what that meant until, you know, many years later. But by the time I was 15, there were some of the guys at the track that had modified cars, you know, it's a crossover with guys that are into modifying real cars and then the RC cars. Yeah, for sure. And I was like, oh, you could do this stuff with real cars? And I remember watching like Mickey Thompson off road and some road racing stuff. And I was like, oh, I kind of want to drive real cars, not just RC cars. And by the time I was 15, 16, and got a real car, the RC car stuff was out. And all I wanted to do was race and modify my real car. Yeah. Did you grow up reading like radio controlled car action and that as well? Yeah. So but the RC car action was a bit behind because I was literally at the track with the people that were on the leading edge. Interesting. Yeah. Because as someone who grew up in New York, and I was never as into it as that, but I was, I loved RC cars. I think for me, getting to a racetrack was really difficult. We had this one place called Queens off-roaders. And it was like, in kind of a, well, now it's a nice neighborhood, but it was kind of a sketchy area when I was younger. So it was like, my parents would have to bring me there and then like sit outside all day. So it was like, it was kind of a big ask to get my parents to do that, you know, on like the one day off on the weekend. So I only went there a few times, but like it was 100% the thing that made me love cars and radio controlled car action. I often give credit to being the reason why I wanted to make magazines. Because like for me, living in New York, which was not the hub of the culture at all, it was like, I needed that transformation or that transmission of information of what you guys were doing over to our side to like be cool, right? To be like, oh, this is what's going on. This is the new thing. And I also had, you know, the gold anodized tub RC 10. I was more of a Kyosho guy just because that's like what my local hobby shop really pushed. So it was like, had Turbo Ultima 2 and things like that. But the, I did eventually get an RC 10 because that was like the gold standard. No pun in 10. So the guys I raced with were Brian Kenwald. I'd go to his house and they'd make me like polish their dog bones and all that stuff. Cause I was like three or four years younger than them. But I'd go to the racetrack with them. And so Brian, for you, people that don't know, like he was like the pinnacle of like global RC car. Yeah. And the young kid in the group too. Yeah. So he had some medical conditions when he was young and, and was in and out of the hospital and couldn't go to normal high school. So he did home study. So during the week when he was bored, his dad will just drop him off at the RC track. So by the time he was like 17 or 18 years old, he had so many laps and he was, he was an intelligent guy as well, kid. He was just accelerating and did really well at it. And that was the reason why I was like, Oh, I want to get dropped out of school too and do that. What he's doing, because he's got the best life. He gets to play with this RC car and build that thing all the time and travel the world. So yeah, those were the kind of like Mark Pavedes and like Novak, like the actual Novak, all those were the, they were at my track. And so we would go to like rock and bowl bowling after and go to late night cocoa, like dinner at the diner and all these things. So I'm 13 years old, hanging out with these older guys. And so that's, you know, kind of thinking back. That's where I got a lot of my, I guess I struggled as a professional, but these guys were professionals. So already at 13 years old, I was seeing professionals having sponsors and living a life of developing vehicles and racing them and getting the cars ready and all of this stuff. Yeah. At the time, did you like the driving part more or like the, the building and like tuning the cars more or was it a balance for you? It was, it was a balance. It was, it was the whole process of I need to work on this thing and get it ready and I get these tires or this motor or whatever it is, make a little bit quicker. Now I'm going to go to the track and prove it out. The frustrating thing was when I couldn't drive as well as I wanted to. That was really frustrating and I learned what being disappointed was a lot when I was that age because I would just get beat or be out in the front and then crash. And so I was very mature, which, you know, all of us are 12 or 13 years old. I would try and have, you know, and, and, but, but I kind of got over that. I think that kind of earlier in my life, I got that out. Like I realized, oh, this is not helpful to fall apart and throw my transmitter down and just get upset at things because then I would see older guys do that. Oh yeah. And I'm like, yo, that doesn't look very like adults should do that. And so that just got stuck in my head. And then so, and not that I don't throw tantrums once in a while to get upset, but like I kind of learned at an early age, like that's not beneficial. And that's, that will, that's just not professional. Yeah. I mean, it's a good thing to learn. I think it takes a lot of people in motor sports a lot longer to learn that. And some people never do. I mean, I think that still to this day, I've watched, you know, especially in drag racing, I don't know why drag racing just is like a different breed of emotional crash outs than any other sport, but I've watched people absolutely lose their shit in drag racing and like, and it ended up being handcuffed and like taken off of track, right? And it's like, it's one of those sports where like, at least in New York, that's like somewhat normal. So yeah, how did the transition come where you went from 110 scale cars to real cars? So one of the guys in the track, this guy, RC track, this guy, Justin had a CREX and he had also had a carbureted Volkswagen bug with like a 21 CCN, 21 38 or whatever you probably know all the numbers, but so built, built motor and he'd built the carburetors and all this stuff in his house. So I got a 91 Honda Civic Si, basically right when I turned 16 and took a driving test the day I turned 16, got my license, drove that sucker straight to my buddy's house, and we pulled the springs off and cut them and lowered the car. And because I would just, I was already staged and ready to knew what I wanted to do. And that was because of the group of people you were around? Was there any, were you reading like, I mean, what magazines? That's mid 90s. So it's like sport car, car and turbo really, because like super streets really not a thing yet, right? Super street is still years away. So it would be sport compact car, which is mostly show cars and things like that. Turbo wasn't a thing either because it wasn't really important. So it wouldn't import yet. Yeah. So, and mini truck, because I think probably all of us kind of want a mini truck, so we were that age as well. So that was the other option of that I didn't go toward. Could have been a mini truck, a Mustang or a Camaro, but I wasn't about to get a V8 when I was that age and I, or a real wheel drive car. Yeah. So the Honda thing kind of made sense. And for you, did you or was there much of like a Honda tuning scene that you were aware of in Southern California yet? Or was that something that you were just like, oh, this is a good car to get? And because I asked like, because like nowadays it's so easy to see all of that. But back then, like no one was really paying attention to Hondas on the level that they are now. So not at the level now, but there was absolutely a tuning scene here in Southern California, even Orange County at Oscar Jackson that was based in Orange County. You had light speed racing that was up in LA. There's a place, I mean, San, San, Andreo or something like there was, there was dynamic motorsports in Irvine. There was already, there was Robo car, there's probably 10 or more shops in Southern California by the time I was 16. There was already a huge street racing scene that was already in the news and getting shut down by the time I got my license. And that was mostly based sort of South Bay area, right? Was the street racing scene from from my understanding of what I like talking to NADs and everybody like that was sort of the hub for it was up here. There was Long Beach kind of in the South Bay. There was Ontario. There was, which is the Inland Empire. There was Silmar and other stuff in the valley. So it was, it was all over Southern California and it was a, I struggled to use the word continuation, but it was a reset of the old hot rod drag racing from the 60s and such. So now in the 80s and 90s, the folks were using, you know, import cars and stuff, but they were going to the same industrial streets to do their drag racing. And it was usually Friday night, Saturday night, there was some Thursday night stuff at Dodger Stadium, but they were going to the darkest, longest streets with no crossovers in them to try to do their drag racing. Very different than the street takeovers now where they go to populated areas and they try to do the intersections. It was very different. We were trying to find the safest, most out of the way where there's no traffic places. And then, and then that transition later into like Terminal Island opening and when I was around 17 or so, and that was kind of the beginning of like, oh, we can go to the track and do this. Yeah. Yeah. I forget that that, yeah, because you have Terminal Islands, it's like Brotherhood, like that whole race, like that group, because that probably made it a lot easier, a lot more accessible for you guys here. I mean, just like the RC car thing, there was, there was probably five tracks that we can go to all off road in Southern California area when I was 13 years old. When I started getting into the real cars at 16, 17, we had Terminal Island Raceway, Pomona would do an event once in a while. You had Battle of the Imports that was already doing events in Pomona. There was a San Diego track, there was Bakersfield, you can go up to Sacramento, there was a Vegas thing. So, and I'm probably even forgetting something, you know. So, I had Irwindale, even though short of track, but yeah. There was a ton of stuff. And that's, that's the, that's, that's the benefit of the Southern California situation is there was already, you know, in 1995, there was already 50 years or 40 years of racing and tracks and all that stuff that had, there was stuff closing, but there was tons of infrastructure already here. Easy to find people like mine did, easy to people, find people that were also into what I was into. There was all the car clubs and, and so I just immersed myself in the car culture that was robust, just like I did in the RC car culture when I was younger. Out here, did you find sort of like the old, you know, domestic guys to be welcoming on the street race side or kind of like annoyed that you guys were there? Because absolutely annoyed. Yeah. Absolutely annoyed. The front wheel drive drag racing thing was, it made no sense to them. Like, why would you make, why would you drag drag race a car that's worse? And they weren't wrong. It was worse. It just happened to be what we were into. And it actually worked out probably pretty well for a bunch of us with 130 horsepower cars, front wheel drive, which arguably much more controllable and safer than getting a bunch of 300 horsepower real wheel drive mustangs and sending them out when you're, you know, 16 years old. Right. Yeah. Or like today's generation that has like 1000 horsepower on tap, which is wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, growing up in New York, we obviously had a really healthy street race community that was actually oddly healthier before Fast and Furious than after. Like I just felt like there was way more places we could go and all of that. And to your point, it was like we raced sort of in the shadows. We actually worked as well as we could by trying not to upset the police. So we used to race Maurice Avenue on the Brooklyn Queens border. And we knew like when shift change was, which gave us like a window to race, but then when the cops would come, the Brooklyn cops would chase us to Queens and then we'd get to race for another hour. And then the Queens cops would come and they chase us back to Brooklyn, but they didn't want to cross, they didn't, they weren't going to cross County lines because they didn't want to do the paperwork for like what was a small ticket at the time. So it's like we could race for four or five hours by just crossing the borderline back and forth. I mean, it'd be like crossing into Seal Beach and Long Beach, like just back and forth all night and go for the whole night. And then obviously, it sort of changed because then it became like a bigger scene and it was less of just like straight racing. But when we were younger, going in Volkswagen's and Honda's, like, we were not welcome. Like all the old Mustang and Camaro boys were just like, what are you doing here? And, and this was, you know, late nineties, you know, and I think always New York felt a little behind kind of like what you guys were doing out here. So it was always sort of on a bit of the catch up. But I just remember how, you know, watching import drag racing kind of go from being this thing that seemed like, you know, a novelty to like, oh, wow, these cars are breaking into the nines, now the eights, now the sevens and so on. What was that kind of transition for you? Because you obviously were in, you know, this sort of building a cool fun street car. I assume that started getting faster. How did you go from just this being fun to you being sort of one of the biggest pioneers in the space? Like, what was that shift in in your head? Why, you know, did you think that there was a future, right? Because it's very easy to do something when you see a future in it. It's a little different when you were one of the first people to do it. Yeah. So there was when I was in the street racing, there was a parallel path that was like battle the imports. That was really the only import thing. And some of the street race guys had already stopped going to the street races, basically, because they had modified their cars so heavily. And the pinnacle was going to the battle the imp battle the imports and being the quickest front-wheel drive car. So around that time, cars were doing 14 second quarter mile, trying to get into like the 13 second quarter mile, which is sounds ridiculously slow nowadays. But back then when your car came with 108 horsepower, it was it was difficult to do. And so I blew up my car on nitrous by the time I was 18 or 17, 18 and rebuilt the engine. I said, well, go to the and I had been going to the terminal island and liked the idea of I could get a time slip, see my time, do an improvement, change the driving and then try to improve that time. And it wasn't, it was weird because I didn't think of like what I'm going to do for work. I just knew I want to do something in cars. So let me just graduate high school. And then it wasn't even about college. It was like, I just want to go work at a place that does car stuff, because that's where I'm going to go learn the thing. And by the time I was 18 and out of high school, my car had been broken or blown up so many times, it was never really running in a street car anymore. It was just something I was bringing to the track. And so these guys were running 13, maybe 12 second quarter miles and I got a job at this place called JG engine dynamics up in Alhambra. And he built race engines for a bunch of the Honda guys and I was able to work on my car there. And I just swept the floor, answered the phone, and he was nice enough to give me a job. And I was able to work my car there. And that was one of the perks. And eventually put a turbocharged, Integra engine in there and made, and this was before the V-TEC stuff really, made, I think it was like a whopping three or four hundred horsepower, but was big. That was big back then. It was big and had slicks and ran, I think it was somewhere in the 11, 12 or 11, 12 something quarter mile. But now the guys had been in 11 second quarter miles. I was always like a second behind the leading older guys that had more money and resources than I did. And at the same time, learning how to build the car as friends with everybody over there. And after a couple of years of doing that, Buddy and I said, Hey, why don't we open up a shop and we'll do, be a tuning shop and we're going to put the bigger engines into the smaller car. So it was Accurant, Tiger motors into the CRX is in Civics or the Honda Prail, it motors into the Civics or the Integra's because by that time I had a knowledge of building engines, the wiring on the cars and all and some mechanical stuff. And that was very popular. So people are buying a car, they'd buy the engine from the Japanese importer or from the wrecking yard, they bring it to us or we'd source it for them. And we'd put a Honda Prailude that makes 2.2 liter that makes, what they make back there, 180 horsepower in a CRX that weighs 2000 pounds and the things would rip. And so we knew how to do the wiring, the fuel system, the mounts, the shifting, all that stuff and get it done. And so we started having those cars in like Turbo magazine and maybe Super Street was around by that time. And they put our little, the shop was called Honda Pro. And so we just started getting more and more business. But in parallel, I was racing my 91 Civics still, still that first car that I got when I was 16. And after about two and a half years at the shop, I met this guy, Sean Carlson, who, great fabricator, he had worked with this guy, Jason Whitfield, and built him a really cool car. But they were never really able to get these cars to the start line of the track, to the finish line of the build or the start line of the race track. And he promised to help me or we kind of worked on a deal to help me with my old 91 Civic that was now pretty beat up, wanted to restore it in a way and make it better for the race track. And so I brought the car up to his place and the front end was all, let me give you, there's so much to the story that it's hard to get into the context. What year is this? This is like late 90s now? This is no, this is still mid 90s? This would have been like 1997, 1998. And I had put a prelude engine in the car, but they don't really fit in these old EF chassis civics very well. So I had used the plasma cutter at my old work and cut a bunch of the frame rail to make room for the transmission and the pulley and then just fabricated the mounts and drag races. And it was running 10-6s, but the front end was all tweaked up and had a primered hood. I didn't care at all about the look of the car. I just wanted to go faster. And Sean, who's really good at making stuff look good, and he was a really good fabricator, was like, look, you need some help with this stuff. I'll help you out. So we figured out a deal that he was going to help me out, brought the car to his house, and we realized that the front of the car was so bent, we might as well just tube chassis it. And this was Sean's MO, like everything snowballed with this guy. And because he was such creative and such, he always had the next better idea. He just never finished anything. So I managed the project a little bit or a lot, and then was like, okay, this is where we need to get to. So he did the fabrication, I did the engine and everything and the turbo stuff. And we brought the car out maybe like six months later, front half. So it still was a 91 Civic with the prelude motor, but it was tube chassis in the front. Ran it. I think it ran like still like mid tens. And we're like, it's still not great. I think that we could go much faster if we can get some weight down on it. And so we decided to just tube chassis the whole thing before the next battle the imports. So we had like, I think five or six months, and decided to like, all right, now we're just going to cut the back of the car off, keep the front tube chassis and tube chassis the whole thing. And we're like, you know what, why would we do that to a 91 Civic? Let's just do it to the current car. And at the time it was 97, that was an EK. And I'm like, oh man, I don't want to buy a whole car to just tear it apart. So we bought a roof and doors and rear quarter panels and basically parts, body shop parts from the dealer and hung it on the tube chassis. And the concept of this car was we are not going to have any of this, anything on this car that's not needed, only what the engine, the thing to make the engine work, the tires and everything else behind the front axle, including me, is just dragging along weight that's going to make the quarter mile slower. So get the weight down. So it was like minimal tubing, this little aluminum RCI seat, that was probably the most unsafe thing ever, like the floor was just thin aluminum on top of a round tubing and a little metal plate for where my feet went. And and we hung the body on it. And we came out with that car, I think in 98 or the end of 98. And we were the first into the nines with that car. Everything worked. Yeah. Yeah. The concept was right. Get the bigger tires on there, get the weight down. It weighed 1,650 pounds with me in it. Wow. So I mean, it was massively or minimally, you know, and that's officially the first ever front wheel drive tube car, right? At least in the US that we know of, like on record. Yeah. There were other tube cars being built, real wheel drive, but the guys again, couldn't get to the finish line to finish them for maybe they didn't know the fabricator that might run out of money. But for whatever reason, this moment, this was the tube chassis era. Everybody said I needed to build a tube chassis car, but we were really the ones to kind of come out and complete it and get it down the track consistently. And so that was yeah, first into the nines and the front wheel drive records, HKS in Japan had, I think, a Celica that they were doing that was around the same times. So like there was a bit of a race and then Apex in Japan came out with an Integra with a prelude motor as well, that they were going after the nines. So there was a lot, a company called Top Fuel out of Japan. There was just a lot going on at that time trying to break these front wheel drive records. But because we got this car done quickly, and then it was like, okay, I can see the next step here. Let's make a little bit more power. Let's put stage boost on it. Let's put a different tire on it. It was like these, let's put a wheelie bar on it because the Bergen Holtz figured out the wheelie bar thing soon after on the unibody, but they were heavy, and we made a little bit more power. So we're like, okay, we're going to take their idea, put the wheelie bar on it, but we're lighter weight and we make more power, and then boom, we're half a second faster than them. So like we're always- But let's talk about the wheelie bar for a second because I think that I remember we used to race a CNN performance team that I used to work with. We used to race a front wheel drive, Volkswagen Jetta, that we were the first into the nines years later. So like, you know, it always takes Volkswagen's while to catch up. It was like 2002 or 2003, we got into the nines. And I remember like the old like Chevelle dudes would be watching us pull up with the wheelie bar and having like the bigs up front and the littles in the back, and they just couldn't, like they just could not wrap their head around why we had wheelie bars. Like when Bergenholz first did that, when you guys saw that as an idea, like how did that all sort of come together? And why do you think it became sort of like the thing that, you know, really kind of moved the cars forward? But like, were you thinking in the same place or was that like an idea that really stemmed just from them? I was not thinking that way. This is something that stemmed from the Bergenholz. They had worked with a, I think a Volkswagen Drag Race guy, maybe Ron Loomis. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think together they had come up with this idea that, well, if we put the wheelie bar on there, it's going to extend the wheelbase and that's going to help grip. Yeah. I don't know exactly what their conversations were, but they were definitely the first ones to do it. And then after seeing it, I was looking at the car on track and really thought about it. I was like, oh, they're right. Yeah. So the way this works, the way the wheelie bar works on a front wheel drive car is, so let's take your front wheel drive car without the wheelie bar. When you launch and the weight transfers toward the rear, the, it has to, is picking up the front of the car. It's kind of pivoting on that back axle. So what we want to do is make as much weight as we can over that front axle and even in front of the front axle to have that weight that transfers is farther out on the nose of the car. And so if you put a wheelie bar on the car and that wheelie bar is basically touching the ground when you launch, now your pivot point is not the rear axle. It's all the way back where the wheelie bar wheels are and it has less leverage to pick up the car. It has to pick up the entire vehicle when it launches. So it, you have more weight over your front tires when you launch essentially and it helps grip. It keeps the front of the car down. And so they figured that out and then we kind of took it to the next step where I thought about that. I was like, okay, well then we want the lightest rear springs that we can get away with. So then on the car, what we did was we put like, I think it was like 80 pound springs in the back of the car. So when you pushed on the back of the car. Now you don't need them anymore because the wheelie bar is kind of doing the work for you. Yeah, we don't want them. We want, when that car, the front end lifts up, we don't want the rear springs to help lift the whole car up. We don't want them to do much. And then what we did is we tuned the rear shocks. So they had a ton of rebound, really slow rebound, but really fast compression. So when you launched, it could slam onto the wheelie bar, but it didn't want to come up. So it would basically lower the rear suspension and hold it up. So it just stayed on the wheelie bar the whole time. Before the wheelie bar, what were you guys doing for to kind of prevent the cars from squatting? What was sort of the tech before that? We wanted the rear suspension as stiff as possible. So when I had my 91 Honda, we got to the point where we literally took the rear shock and I welded the shaft to the shock body. So there was no rear suspension. And the concept there was, well, any weight transfer suspension, anything in the rear is going to cause more weight transfer. So let me just lock out the rear. And that was an idea that came up with from the top fuel cars. Top fuel funny cars don't use suspension. They just use the tires and the chassis flex. And I was like, what about drag racing? And I came from RC cars on the pan cars had almost no suspension. I was like, well, if the track is flat and the tires have compliance, then what do I need suspension for? And it did help, but it was dangerous if the thing got a little bit out of line, or if the track was a little bit contoured. But we pretty much stayed off the guard rails. At the track. So that didn't turn out too much of an issue. Yeah, we in our street race, VR6, we did lockouts for the rear. So that like right before we'd run, someone would have to go in the back and reach up and put in a lockout so that it wouldn't squat. So that way we could still drive on the streets to get there. Otherwise, it would just be miserable. But then we could like lock it out. So it was kind of one of those like little secret pieces. Because we basically had a we had a full blown track car. And then we had the same engine in a stock looking car for the street races, which was really fun because, you know, it was just a black GTI and like no one thought of it at all. You guys have some resources. Yeah, we I didn't have much money. I was 19 years old or whatever, 20 years old. And it was like, what can we do with just the tools in the shop? Yeah. So as well the shock, we would take the rear hatch off and take a piece of Lexan from Home Depot, kind of cut it to shape and then like tape it or try to screw it onto the rear to get the weight down. I mean, these cars were hacked. But but they when you guys were in the beginning of it, we were so many years later that we were just watching what you guys did and said, Oh, let's let's try that. But I remember when I saw the first wheelie bar, I was like, what, that doesn't really make sense. And then it makes perfect sense when you think about it, because you just don't want the car to squat and lift the front. It's like the same situation. Because even though it's not rear wheel drive, it's like it's still just like, you know, motion like force moves back. And that's kind of what you're dealing with. And that's a weight transfer problem. And you just don't want weight to transfer. So it's like that worked. How much do you think that like, how much different tech sort of, do you feel like that initial group was involved in, in, you know, in the sort of front wheel drive import drag era? Because if you think about it, at least from my perspective, it didn't run for very long, but it ran really hot when it was going like it really took over the space. And it was this huge thing for, I don't know, probably almost a decade. But it felt like every year there was like another like massive improvement, right? Where like, traditional hot rodding and traditional drag racing was sort of running steady, because that most of the technology that they had brought had spanned in the 50s and the 60s. And they were kind of continuing to develop there. Like, how often did it feel like, oh, there's this whole new technology and it's put this other team ahead? It was constant. Every next event, there was, it felt like there was, you know, every six months, there was another technology that was coming out. But in drag racing, we had the luxury of, there was 50 years plus of drag racing knowledge, just not front wheel drive. So then we would learn, oh, two step rev limiter. Oh, you know, a stronger axle so you don't break. So you find the axle shop that already exists. Oh, we do a little bit of arrow on the car. Oh, you know, you know, you just kind of like kept applying stuff that had worked in the past just to our front wheel drive cars. But in parallel, there was a whole real wheel drive scene. You had Adam Saratari with his RX7, you had Abel Abara doing tube chassis stuff already. So we weren't the fastest cars of the track. There were people running, you know, eights and sevens, I don't know about sevens, but there as well. And that kind of just led into, you know, the bigger stuff in the future. Is that why you shifted to rear wheel drive eventually? Yeah, so the front wheel drive car that I just discussed that it was a, that 97 Civic, ultimately the problem with that car was it used an H22 or H23 short block, but like a preload engine and transmission, we got to the point when we started running high eight, second quarter miles that it couldn't launch and last like three runs, we'd break the transmission. And the gears inside are like helical cut or bevel cut so they have an angle to it. And the best I could understand was when you launch the ring gear was trying to like shove out or the actually the counter shaft is trying to shove out the side of the transmission. And so after like two or three launches, we'd break the case. And so I'd go to the track with a couple of transmissions and break them over the weekend. And I was like, this is masochism. Like I don't want to do this. So I was at a SEMA show one year, there's been probably 99. And I was looking under the hood of an Audi rally car. It would have been like a 91. Yeah. And so the Audi's used similar to the Subaru's used an inline engine with a what seemed to be a trans axle on the front. And then part of the out drive would go to the rear. And I looked at this and I was like, oh, the engine is really far forward. And the transmission is narrow. So we could have more space for suspension and get the engine farther out forward to help front grip. Like this seems like the way to go. So then I started going down and sort of doing researching those transmissions and eventually ended up looking at like Volkswagen transmissions. I was like, oh, that's essentially the same thing, but it's just it's just two wheel drive, which is what we want for the front. Yeah. But all the Volkswagen transmissions were from the factory weren't what we needed. They didn't have enough horsepower. So I started looking after market stuff. The company called Fortin Racing in San Diego built a off road Baja type transmission that they would put in class one desert buggies and stuff like that. And it could deal with the transmission. It was straight cut gears. You could choose your gear ratios. There were dog engagement. So it was like a race transmission. He said he could flip the ring gear either side. He could flip the transmission upside down. And I was like, all right, well, this is how I want the configuration. He's like, no problem. I can build a transmission. So we then took the prelude engine that I was running before, then put it on methanol and used one of those Fortin transmissions and built a new tube chassis car around it with better front suspension, again, the weight farther forward still using the concept of really lightweight, the wheelie bars, all that stuff was already designed from the beginning. And Sean helped a bit like with that, but he was already doing some Ford stuff. And my buddy Rob Miller helped with the build on that car. And so he was did most of the build on that one. And that one we were able to get into the low eights, eight 12 at 184 miles an hour was that that vehicle. And that's still front wheel drive still front wheel drive. This would have been in you just put the engine further forward, further forward. And with the thing I hate about Audi's, it works really well in front wheel drive drag racing. And so this, let me give you some context here. This would have been in 1900s. This would have been like in the late, late, last century. Yeah, it would have been, yeah, it would have been 2000, 2001, because we brought it out to SEMA and we ran it for a couple of years, 2001, 2002. And this is sort of peak like import drag racing era. This is where like the money starting to run in like brands like General Motors are like starting to think about running programs, Mazda's involved with Bergenholz, right? Like this is where things are starting to kind of get bigger, right? Just to, I just want to place the time, right? So yeah, so 2000 ish, 2001 is when fast, the original Fast and Furious came out. Yeah. And now you have like DVD sales and you have a bit of internet and then you have all the magazines, like everything is... Just to take a quick pause, how was that impact for you? Because like as someone who enjoyed street racing, Fast and Furious had a little bit of a negative thing because it brought too much police attention, but for you who were now in the business side of it, like what was the change that you felt that that movie brought to the industry? The sense and the reality was this went from like these obscure front wheel drive cars at these obscure import races to more mainstream. And so you ended up having... I was also moved from the import car scene to the sport compact car scene because you had Chevy building cars for the front wheel drive performance cars. You had Ford building cars. There was, you know, not just the import cars of the Toyota's and the Honda's and such. It felt like, oh, this is our time. It's going to go mainstream. We're going to be professionals and we're going to be the next greatest thing in motorsport. But and it was popular for, you know, and it was popular and there were car shows and hot import nights and there was just so much to it. It was huge boom. But it also went along with the carryover from the street races. It was kids getting in trouble on the streets. It was news of crashes and street racing, all of these things, which I'm long out of. But there was a, it was sort of linked. Yeah, it still felt like it tainted it all, right? Totally. Yeah. And so it was challenging to get some of the bigger companies in there. And then our events were big. And, you know, we'd have 15,000 people, but they weren't NHA national events where they had 30,000 people. Definitely wasn't NASCAR when they had 60,000 people at these events. So in the world of motorsport, it was small. It was still small. So it was difficult to get bigger sponsors. But, you know, I was able to now make a living doing it and really enjoy traveling around and building these cars. And then we were competing against the Chevy guys and they were going after us in our record. So it was super motivating. And again, I'm still in my 20s. Yeah. And so it was, it was for sure a boom. And, and I was loving every minute of it. Yeah. Do you feel like that space sort of just like it was almost like someone turned the lights off one day? Because from my perspective on the outside, it was like, it was the biggest thing. And then all of a sudden it was gone. And then a year later, it felt like drifting, starting to fill the void. Do you, do you feel that way living in it? Or do you feel like it kind of slowly sort of petered out? And I know that there's still a ton of people racing imports, but the professional side of it seemed to sort of just turn off one day. All of a sudden, all of the, all of the brands that came running in seemed to either move to drifting or go do something different. So this is my take on it. I think it ramped up over a bit of time and it, and it, you know, but when you're 22, two years is so long. It is. So, you know, when you're older, you realize, oh, you look back, that was six or eight years or something, and it was a bit of a blip. But when I was living in it, it felt like an eternity, so whole entire lifetime. And this is what did it for me. So around 2002, I thought, okay, this is going to be a bigger series. I want to be in the fastest class at the track. And so we started building a real-wheel-drive car, and that's the one, the red one that, with AEM that we ended up building and ran into the sixes. And it was, it was twin turbo NSX engine. It was a really cool car. So we ran that from 2003 to 2005. But as we're doing that, I'm realizing, oh, these events are actually not that good. Like, we'd only have six to eight cars maybe in our class with the real-wheel-drive stuff. The front-wheel-drive stuff was kind of breaking down, and we'd always have oil downs at the track. And I remember very clearly my mom coming to one of the races at Pomona, and it was one of our big events in probably 2004 or so. And there were some oil downs, and it was hot, and she's like, honey, I love you, and this is great, but I think I'm going to go now. And so it was like... Even a sport a mother can't love. Well, and well, I just realized the show wasn't that good. At least that was my take on it, right? It was sort of built around us racers, and it was built around the magazines and like these moments that you'd see on the internet and whatever of the runs. And it was backed by an entire aftermarket industry. So there was a reason for it to be there. But I thought, I'm always into progression. So I was like, what does this lead to? And I didn't see a bright future. And I was like, this isn't leading to where I really want to be. And at the same time, we had done a couple of events with the NHA Pro series. They had brought us out there, and we had oiled down their track, and it had blown up. And I was like, oh my god, maybe we don't know what we're doing. But at the same time, I met these pro drag racers that had been on tour for their entire life. And they got their red solo cup and they're getting drunk after and they're just going from track to track. And I was like, I love cars. And I love going to the racetrack, but I don't think I love it that much. Like there's other stuff that I love to do. It's like carny life. It's like you show up, you build up the booth, you race, and you pack up and you go to the next town and that's your life. And so, you know, I grew up behind Den Beach. I'd go to surf class in the morning before high school. I went snowboarding. I love to go out with my friends and hang out. And like there's all these things that I love to do in addition to racing. And I wasn't prepared to make it, you know, 90 plus percent of my life. And that was that moment where I realized I'm a car guy, but there's all these other people that are more car guys than me. Oh, hey, please pardon this little storytime interruption brought to you by my good friends at FCP Euro. A few weeks back, we kicked off a whole new show called firing order. And now, I'm searching for BMW's late night on marketplace because I made a big argument that the BMW Z4M coupe should have been one of the top five drivers cars after 2000. While it didn't get into the top ranking, it definitely got into my head. And now I got a little bit of an itch to scratch. First thing, of course, you do at this point is you start looking up all the problems. 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Check them out, fcpuro.com. The adjustable wrench is a shameful little tool, right? While super convenient, it's definitely a jack of all sizes and a master of none. You wouldn't catch me dead using an adjustable on camera for fear of comment sections scorn. Thankfully, wearer tools created the Joker self-setting adjustable wrench, which as you apply pressure, tightens down the German engineered jaws to prevent rounding off. Finally, thanks to the Joker, we can use adjustable wrenches free of shame in the light of day without the stigma of that oh so convenient but not so precise multi tool. Come out of the shadows and proudly buy a Joker adjustable wrench at wearertools.com. There's all these other people that are more car guys than me, you know, and I started getting a wandering eye and the drifting stuff, I had been to one of the D1 events that they had here in 2003. I was there too. Yeah, and so this drifting event was, I couldn't get my head around it and I remember watching drifting in an option video. Yeah. Probably like three. This is the JGTC event, where it was D1 and JGTC at Fontana. Yeah, but they had that Irwindale one I think that I went to before that. Okay, okay, yeah. And so maybe it was before 2003, but I remember watching an old option video because that was some of the early stuff we'd seen like 99 or 98 or whatever. And there was multiple cars drifting on a mountain road at night and my brain couldn't comprehend it. Like I saw it, but I couldn't believe that people could drive cars on the road and drift in tandem in that way. Like it just didn't register. Like I remember later looking, thinking back that I saw this on a video, but I was so, I just didn't get it. Like I didn't think that there could be that much skill that they could do such a thing. So anyways, fast forward, I'm looking at these guys on track and I'm like, that looks pretty fun. And they're having more track time and I'm like, I feel like I could build an engine for that and I can kind of build a car. And so on the side, I built a Nissan 240 in 2004. We had been working a bit with Honda. So in 2005, we built a Honda S2000 and I was just kind of playing around on the side and I was like, oh, dreams of grandeur, like I'm a pro drag racer, I'm going to be a pro drifter. At the same time, I had a Honda Challenge car that I was running a NASA, I had a little shifter car that I was bringing to the track. So I was going to the track almost every weekend and I had a sand car that I was going off roading with. So my entire life was, I had no kids. I was unmarried. Everything was at the shop and everything was building stuff, but it wasn't just drag racing. There was other stuff that I wanted to do. And there was this moment that I felt like there was this moment in drift where I was like, oh, this feels like drag racing in 1997. I can backdoor motorsport again. Like it's something I want to do. The cars are inexpensive to build. The technology is relatively low. I feel we can get on the front end of the technology relatively easy. And I can learn how to drive these things and I could be a pro drifter. By then in 2005, I realized I'd crashed my car at my 2000 enough tour of like, oof, maybe I've missed the boat here or maybe I don't have the talent to do it, or maybe I'm spread too thin because I'm doing all these other things. Whatever the case, if we're going to do a pro drift team, I don't think I'm the A driver that can go win these events. Was that a hard thing to kind of grab? Because up until that point, you were one of the, you were, if not the top name, one of the top names in import drag racing. And now you're in this other space and you're making the decision of like, oh, I might be past my driving prime. I'm going to change to a team owner position. Like was that hard to, because I've worked with a lot of race car drivers. That's not an easy thing for most drivers to do. But I've heard you talk about it before and it seemed like maybe it was an easier transition for you. How was that? It was relatively easy. So step back to when I had my old tuning shop and I was, I had my tuning shop when I was whatever, I was 22 years old, but also drag racing on the side. And when Sean and I built that yellow car, I had to decide like, am I going to go full drag racing or I'm going to have the shop? And I decided I can't do both really well. I'm going to close the shop and I'm going to go racing. So, so went over a few, skimmed over a few parts of my life there, but one of them was I'm going to go for a pro, I'm going to move back into my mom's house. I'm going to go full pro drag, front wheel drive drag racing and I'm going to close the shop. So I had already decided some big life decisions kind of earlier. And now, so I'm here, you know, fast forward to 2005. And I'm like, I need to bring in someone else that could be a top level driver. So I had met Tanner Faust at the same time, because I was doing some of the drifting event or all the drifting events that year that farm the drift had, he was as well. So Tanner had some car trouble, but he was a great driver and I could kind of see like, because I was now driving, I could see the difference between the good drivers and the bad drivers. And I was like, Oh, this guy's a level up. So it was Reese Millen, Sammy Hubernett and Tanner were clearly the best drivers. And you had a couple of Japanese guys and a couple of Americans that were also good, but they were a level up. And so Tanner was looking over at our pit and was like, Oh, he builds pretty cool cars. And I'd talked to him about car setup and stuff with as far as engine stuff goes. And in 2006, worked with AEM for the drag racing for years, and I convinced them that, Hey guys, the drag racing thing may have run as course. Let's go to drift. And for the budget that we had in the drag racing, this real drive car, we could do a two car drift team. We'll put Tanner in the A car, and we built him a 350Z. And I'll be in the B car, which is the Honda S2000, and we'll go to all the form of the drift events and some D1 stuff that they had it. And they were with it. And so we basically retired from drag racing at the end of 2005 and 2006, built the two car program and were fully invested into drift at that point. And then that really exploded for you. It did. Yeah. And I kind of was watching the drag racing continue to have to struggle. Yeah. And the drift stuff just until this day, right? You know, fast forwarded 20 years later. And it's still as strong as ever. So, and then so we did the drifting for, we started the drifting program. And within the first three years, 2006, Tanner got third, 2007 won the championship, 2008 won the championship. And 2009, we did a deal with Scion with the Toyota brand. And we were going to build a TC, Scion TC for them, real drive converted, put Tanner in that car. And I made another decision. I was like, Oh, I'm kind of not having that much fun driving anymore. I'm spotting for Tanner. So I would not qualify, put the headphones on, go up and then spot for Tanner. And I was kind of almost looking for a way out. So we were able to, we reduced it to a one car program. We brought Rockstar on as the, they were already a title sponsor by this time on the Z. But now we're working with Scion, Rockstar Energy Drink, still AM. We're working with Toyo tires at the time. And we had a solid sponsored real program. And Tanner was also doing rally stuff. They were starting to do X games. That's how I knew Tanner was to rally. Yeah. And Tanner is, he's an amazing driver. I mean, just like his ability to get into anything and just instantly be able to wheel it. I had a brand new Z06, like no one had even driven it because I was in the magazine business and like handed it to him. And we just went sliding these roads and like the amount of commitment that he had from go was like, was just blew me away. Because it's like, this is a car you've never driven before, had never driven anything similar to it. And we was just like, yeah, I'm just going to casually put this like six inches off the wall. Like, great. And so there were moments like that. And there was a lot of those moments in addition to Tanner was good with the ladies. He was doing stunt driving. He was a really nice guy. He was honest. Like he checked all of these boxes. You're like, what a dick. Like how did how did he get so much when others get so little? When I first met him, I thought he was like six years younger than me because he looked so young. And I met him and I was, you know, I was probably in my late twenties. And I figured he was like years younger than me. And then we're talking. He's like, I have a daughter. I'm like, you have a daughter? He's like, yeah. And then he was like, I realized he was actually like a, you know, four or four or so years older than me. I'm like, how do you look so young? Like, and then he maintained that for most of his life. It's like, it was like, yeah, how did that work out for him? And he had an amazing work ethic. He was flying around the world, living out of a suitcase. So, so anyways, so Tanner did a great job with us. Eventually he retired and and then continued on the rally and the stunt and top gear and all the amazing stuff that he's done. Then we brought in Frederick Osbow and continued with the whole scion and the Toyota program. What was to rewind a little bit? I mean, obviously it was really controversial when you guys took a TC and made it rear wheel drive. I know that there was a lot of conversation of like, should that be, should it not be? What was sort of your perspective of it in the sport versus maybe some other people who felt like, hey, rear wheel drive cars should is what's all only should be allowed here versus scion coming in with, you know, sort of wanting to be in the space, but not making the car for the for the sport. What was one, what was your perspective in that from sort of a builder engineer, but then two, sort of what were some of the hurdles that you guys had to go through inside of like FD to make that car sort of, you know, legit and legal? Yeah, so I came in when drifting was already established from a the underground scene to the core drifters in Japan, and there was a core drifters here in the US. And there was a connection, I think that they had to the spirit of drift and the way that you drove and the way that the cars were and kind of looking to the Japanese history of it. I came in like, this is really fun. I want to kick ass at it and win. And so I just looked at the rule book, which was like two pages back then, brought in our driver that, you know, Tanner that that was an amazing driver that that then we just said, hey, what is the car that we could build that works within the rules for Scion and what engine do we want? So from day one, it wasn't about what the guys were doing before. If you're if you're thinking that way, then you're always going to be a step behind the idea. The concept was let's leapfrog to the next thing, but understand it when we're doing it, right? So we did that with the tube chassis stuff, we did that with the drag racing stuff. And so now we're doing that with the drag race, sorry, with the drifting. And so TC Scion only made front wheel drive cars and they want us to use the TC and but we need to make a real world drive. And if you want to have OEM manufacturer support in it's going to be Scion that cared about it, you have to allow a front a real world drive converted car like there's no other way around it. I guess I understand that some of the folks maybe wanted to say core or whatever. But the next if you want to do this for a period of time, you got to be professional and bring on sponsors. And that was one of the the I think the necessary things that had to happen. And for me, that was right up our alley. I've been in the engine swaps for many years. Let's do something unique to talk about. People love the car because it was again different. And so the car was a 20, what's it's a 2011 Scion TC. And we talked to the Scion guys and we said, Hey, we want one of those NASCAR Toyota engines that they're using, you know, a NASCAR. And do you understand that these engines are not modified factory cars? They're they're pushrod. They have overhead valves. It's basically a small block of small architecture. But with like global engineering experience from Toyota. So like the block nothing is small block Chevy. The block is Toyota, the camp, like everything is like bespoke just for this NASCAR program. It's like a tens of millions of dollars into this thing. And I'm like, Hey, can we get one of those engines? And the Scion folks were like, we don't know anybody over there. So I was bold enough to like start making phone calls because I had known people from the Drag Racing and I was like, Hey, we want to use one of these things. So I connected someone at Scion with someone at TRD and eventually realized that they had this interesting story. So NASCAR, I hope I get this right. Toyota said we want to run NASCAR. And Toyota and so NASCAR is like, sure, but you got to start in this lower lower series, we're not going to let you straight into cup. Right. So Toyota built these custom engines for running in, I think it was the Bush series or whatever, like the lower end series and the truck series. And they were called the phase nine engine. And this phase nine engine made 800 some horsepower. And they made hundreds of them because they're in all the trucks and all these lower class cars and everything. And finally NASCAR let them run in the cup. They said, all right, we'll let you run in cup. But you have to make these changes to this engine. Like the engine was almost too good. And so they went to, I believe it was like the phase 13 engine, I may be getting that number wrong, but like the next evolution of that engine. So all of these previous engines, there's like 100 or so of these engines all became immediately obsolete. So it was the right timing where they're like, yeah, we'll give you a couple of them. Yeah. But you need to work like to buy 30 of them. Well, it was nice enough that they donated the engine to the program. But it was a used engine that had been run a short course. And we worked with a company called Ed Pink Racing Engines. And they worked with, and they were here in LA, and they worked with Toyota on their midget engine and some other V8 stuff. So the engine was over at Ed Pink. And we told them what we wanted to do with the engine, we want to go drifting. So they picked the cylinder heads with the smaller ports for the short tracks and a different intake manifold. That was for the short track. And we raised the compression because there were limited on the compression, but we weren't. So we raised the compression in it. What was the compression on that engine? I think they were limited to 12-ish or something. We went up to 13 and a half. It was a different custom cam. I remember the cam being like $2,500 or something like that for like, because it's, again, it's a bespoke part. So you got to buy the core and everything. And then we put fuel injection on it, because back then they were sterocarborated. So we put an AM fuel injection on it with eight injectors and a throttle body. And I think we made like 650 horsepower because we needed power from 3,500 RPM up. And we needed it to live idling and all of these things that the NASCAR engines don't do. Like they live at 9,000 RPM. So when you hear these 800 horsepower plus numbers, their power band is from like 7,000 to 9,000 RPM. So if we want to make some power at lower RPM, then we have to do a different cam, different heads that really restricted a higher RPM, but we have a much broader torque band and power band. So anyways, they built us the engine. We shoehorn that into the Scion TC. We put a GeForce GSR transmission on it, which is a basically NASCAR transmission and a Mark IV Supra rear diff and axles and everything. And it was relatively competitive out from the beginning. But we were, because now we're in this world of there was nothing available for this chassis. There was no steering. There was no suspension. There was no anything. We had to make everything. And so the development of the steering geometry, the development of suspension geometry took a few years to kind of get right. But back to your question, which was, you know, how did the scene and all this stuff feel about it? I think it was polarizing. You know, some of the people thought it was weird because it wasn't a competitive advantage. It was absolutely a competitive disadvantage. Because this was not a sorted car. And the engine was really far forward. To put some numbers on this, you want closer to 50-50 weight distribution on these cars, maybe 52% of the weight on the front, 48% on the rear to have a good road race or drifting car. And the S chassis and all that stuff had it. The limitation that we had on the Scion TC was it's a front-wheel drive chassis with what they were building back then. All these front-wheel drive cars, what they call a cab forward design. So the engine's out in front of the axle. The whole driver and passenger has moved forward in the car. So you have more space inside the vehicle. But the firewall in the engine bay is only eight inches behind the front axle centerline. So most of the engine bay is much shorter. If you look at the hood line on that, compared to any real-wheel drive cars, it's tiny. So the engine is mounted very far forward. So we found kind of a loophole in the rules where you could modify the firewall to allow like alternator clearance or intake manifold clearance. So what we did is we removed the firewall from the car. We basically reformed it by hammering it out and everything to have it sort of go rearward more and then reinstalled it into the car. So it was technically the factory firewall. But we had reformed it so we could get the engine I think 12 or 14 inches behind the front axle, which helped the weight distribution. And eventually they closed that loophole a few years later and they said you cannot move the engine rearward of where the factory firewall originally lived. So the next car that we built didn't have that mod. Well it's an interesting thing I think in any sport where there's always like in the in a recent episode of Firing Order we did, Chris Stewart from Gridlife said you know racers are going to race, right? Meaning like no matter what they're going to try to progress, they're going to push the limits, they're going to you know exploit the rule book, like that's just what racing is and that's part of it. And I think you get to this point in any sport where you go from this grassroots element where everyone just really enjoys going and doing it on the weekend to like okay now we want to win. And like when winning becomes the focus it's like progression comes. So I think you know in drifting a lot of people that I've had like these deeper conversations of like drifting is now you know it's been around for a while like it's not the new sport anymore. Like it probably still feels new to us because we remember before it but there are kids now who are watching drifting that were born after drifting started in the US, right? So drifting is like on it's like you know it's next generation you look Turks retiring this year. It's like the the old guard is like moving out right and it's like okay then there's a bunch of young kids I don't even know who they are anymore. But there was definitely this moment where between you guys and ASD like the it was changing like all of a sudden it went from this seems kind of grassroots to this feels like real race teams like really pushing the limit and kind of going that. At the time did you feel like it was you guys versus ASD? Was that sort of like that moment where it was they're building something that you know really feels like it's coming out of like the dirt track kind of world. You guys are re-engineering from the ground up and basically building you know sort of your own you know your own vehicle to go do this was like you said it's you don't have built-in geometry. How different was that moment and did you enjoy that moment? Because I feel like that's where you live is you live in the engineering side of it where it started to become not just a driver battle but it became a team battle and like all of a sudden people were now talking about like hey these are good teams to be on right like when Tony Angelo wanted to come back to drifting he was like yeah I want to go run one of your cars because he knew it was a competitive car right so what like did you and is that like a part that really fed you that you enjoyed? It was yes because I wasn't driving anymore yeah so the thing that I was applying myself to was the team ownership the engineering and the building of the cars and so that's where I wanted to win on the track because if you can't every weekend there's only one person that wins everybody else loses that weekend yeah so you have to have other goals got it you have to have other goals so my goals would be well let's come out let's let's people get people scared of this car let's make sure it's competitive show that we know how to tune the thing that it's reliable it drives back into the trailer at the end of the day which is not always the case but that was where I think my guys as well like the crew guys that we had Sean and Mario and then they came from drag racing as well yeah like they loved the building of the car and the maintaining of the car aspect of it we were not pure drifters right we were motorsports guys for better or worse you know and and I think Ian that ran ASD was the same way and when he linked linked up with Von Gitton with Von they they they connected on that thing because all of us kind of saw the same thing we want to do this professionally we want the sport to grow we want this to be a good show we want to have like there was these main things that you just need to have to do this professionally yeah I mean we don't want to shove off or like you know disrespect the past in any way we want to you know take that as well but we're going to evolve this thing yeah um and and because we saw eye-to-eye on that in that concept there was a whole separate competition you're right that was going on which was the car it felt like the arms race but it was like who was going to bring out a more competitive machine and those cars all started to look different on track too right like you know the the monster truck era of the of the mustangs because like they had so much grip that they were lifting the front and lifting that front corner and you know that era and just the the how I think fast your cars sort of were able to transition through and like you know just the drivability of them and obviously also I mean like Osbo was a weapon himself right I mean you always had those kind of drivers along with you um it was interesting because it definitely I think was the first time that I was on the rally side of it and it's the first time that like rally engineers and techs were like looking at the cars you guys were building where before it was like these that's cute they slide cars they've been sliding cars for 50 years you know but then all of a sudden it was like oh this is interesting that the development had sort of reached a point where hey this was really interesting and obviously when we built the unicorn you know Ian was heavily involved in sort of figuring out how do we take sort of everything that we want it to do and have weight transfer like a you know like a all-wheel drive rally car does but at the same time he was bringing in these different elements of like how it would transition and do all that from what they were doing there and it was it that was this moment of I think looking at it going wow there's like a real you know like I said an arms race of like building the best car possible in fd which I think changed fd and look some people will say that whether that's for the good or the worse and there's always the purists but the purists also have a place to play still in drifting um you know for you um where do you sort of and this kind of shift into into a different conversation I want to move into but um like you've now been in drifting for 20 plus years like how different does the sport feel for you from when like you got into it till now because we started the conversation we talked about how as big as import drag racing was for us at the moment when we were living it because we were in our 20s I'm 46 so I'm not much younger than you um you look back at it and it really was a blip drifting's not a blip like drifting has proven some staying power and is I would argue continuing to get bigger right like it's continuing to expand how do you see it now 20 years later and not just in fd but just sort of like the whole the whole space of drifting yeah um it feels like we definitely shifted it away from the core and the the history of drift a bit and into this kind of professional world where tons of horsepower tons of grip big tires uh understanding what the judges want conforming to that having a bit of strategy on the track like these were all things that we kind of brought in you know years ago um not that there weren't strategies and stuff before but it felt like a little bit more sneaky strategies the drivers were doing back then right then uh but but um like cutting brake lights and things like that you know nowadays you know it's it's a professional motorsport you've got kids that like you said came in that wanted to be drifters when they were young they now have the resources to potentially buy a car get an engine put a team together and try to make it in drift um they're starting at the track they're not necessarily canyon guys that have transitioned to the race track they're pure race track guys um and sometimes they're even coming over from uh motorcycles or maybe some kind of circle track or some other sort of motorsport which is going to give them a head start for sure I have debates on this whether the show is better now this before I can't answer that question I don't know I said there were some amazing d1 shows um and Formula Drift stuff 15 years ago when the cars were simpler the the driving lines were not as extreme uh but just amazing shows and I and I think having the diversity of the cars the diversity of the engines the obscureness of the judging from back in the days coming out emotionally charged because you thought somebody should have went one when they didn't not that I think those all led to a really good show I think it's backwards people want all the stuff to be black and white and I think it drifting not being black and white is the thing that is you get an emotional attachment to it yeah you go away saying god my that was terrible and you go and talk about it you go on the internet and right and and but you're but you come away with an emotion from it um I think there's become a actually there's still a lot of controversy uh but I think as these the the cars and drivers and all this stuff become more technical yeah uh I think you kind of lose some of that but just looking back at this last Long Beach event it was chaos I was going to say are so are you a fan of the more robotic sort of judging that they brought in and for those who don't follow drifting fd has started to um sort of roll out this like would you call it like computer aided sort of vbox sort of oriented scoring system right is that yeah how do you understand it to work yeah so uh yes so the the electronics in the car can measure your angle your proximity to the other car yeah you're driving like all with with huge accuracy um and I think there's merit there but I think for the show I don't think that helps I think all of that stuff hurts the show but if you don't really know what the judges sort of want right and having a variety of ways that the drivers drive right like you can have Chelsea or a Japanese guy with this huge angle then you have maybe uh Frederick when he first started driving like very extreme to people that are more controlled and more precise like that variety of driving is the thing that makes the show good as you go to electronics and you start making it more into this is the thing you need to do to get the round win you have a conformity of the driving styles which means there's less driving styles and then overall I think that takes away from uh the the impact of the show over time I agree but I'm actually really surprised to hear you say that I always see you as very engineer minded so I would think that you'd appreciate something that feels more like a constant because a constant is always something you can build to win against right but you actually you think from a show side as a team owner do you like it better or you still don't really know I don't like it you don't like it okay and and and I would argue your point which is you need to understand what the judges want and what's going on on the track and adapt to that and that's part of the competition for you part of that is the competition yeah the competition isn't going in there and they're saying cross the finish line first right the competition is figure out what the judges want and the things that they don't even know that they want and give them that that creates progression that creates us figuring out new stuff in the car that keeps the drivers continuing to figure out new ways of driving and more exciting ways of driving and a new driver can come up and perform better even with a worse car because they have some style that no one's seen before I believe that all leads to a better show and that all leads to a more opportunity for all of us to continue to do this as a profession because the show is better so let's gear shift you were at the racer creative summit two weeks ago I asked a question to a bunch of panelists who are up there talking about motor sports and the future of motor sports and one of the things that they said was that you know the pureness of racing is more important than the entertainment side of it and I interrupted and kind of said you know hey I I don't actually think that's entirely true because without entertainment we don't have eyeballs without eyeballs there's no business without business there's no reason to go racing right and like that's the reality of it you came up to me afterwards and kind of said thanks for asking that question you know what how does that and you now have you know 30 years of being in the business of this and and racing you've watched series get a massive amount of eyeballs because of its adjacency to fast and furious and and this massive mainstream exposure you've been through probably a ton of peaks and valleys on drifting I mean early drifting it's like gq and maxima writing about it it felt like it was going to also be the next biggest sport and then it had its lulls and and then it has it back up again and I would say I think that there's I think drifting culturally not just fd is it's kind of in a peak moment right now I mean everyone knows what drifting is like it's not this obscure sport that lives in the hills of japan anymore it's like you know it's like parents have heard of drifting and young kids all know what it is and rappers talk about it I mean it's really kind of grown up but looking at all of that and seeing sort of you know this like you know as we talk about the show of it what do you think is important for not just the future of of that but just you know not just the future of drifting but just motor sports in general because like we didn't get to talk quickly that day but I kind of felt like you were you know you were agreeing that the purity of racing sometimes isn't as important as the show like where how what are your feelings on that so I would like I like motor sports because I like the engineering and the cars and watching extreme things on the track I'm not interested in watching 40 cars on the track that make within five horsepower chase each other down for two or three hours like that's just not interesting to me I like seeing diversity and someone coming out with something interesting so so think back to like old indycar stuff when there was different engines and different chassis and compared to nascar nowadays which is built around a profile same thing with indycar which is basically one chassis and a couple of engines right they've kind of turned into spec series and and I think maybe you can make an argument that it's about driver versus driver but I don't really care that much about the drivers I care about the cars so if they would show us more of how are these cars built like how is the engine being used how is the tune up being changed it could be indycar it could be all these formula they're so secretive about it and I talked to one of someone important in indycar on one of the teams and and he said it's war out there that was his quote we can't show those things there's war out there it's like what are we doing here is it about you guys racing on track or is about us wanting to watch the things on track and being interested in starting to get attracted to connected to one of these cars yeah kind of shifting around a little bit here because it's it's hard for me to get all this out because it I don't have a favorite driver right I have I don't even have a favorite car anymore in like traditional motorsport because it's all the same car to me with a different livery on it and there might be something different in the cars but they don't show us what the difference is or how they're doing a difference so then there's no link and then so I end up not watching any other motorsport because it just isn't interesting to me right and maybe because I'm I grew up where it was mickey tomson off-road and you had these off-road vehicles and I actually like Baja racing now because the trucks are just amazing the what they're able to do with the suspension and get the engines to live and the different terrain that they go through like all of that stuff is in the top class you still have rear wheel drive and all wheel drive there's all different engine configurations like there's no set standard still yeah I don't I don't know I'm going with this other than saying that I like the diversity and I like the people to have a rule book where they can come in and innovate still and and arguably most mainstream motorsport has stifled that yeah no I mean look I absolutely love motorsports but I can't help but notice that there's just this steady decline sure formula one has this peak right now I think where everyone's you know excited about it and mostly probably because they actually told a good story about a driver about the drivers and that sort of has sunk in but I don't I don't find it as interesting as other spaces and I was thinking about this while you were talking about you know how cool Indy was back in the day because yeah you had all these different sort of it was different motor configurations and different setups do you think that in some ways like drifting actually is the like spiritual sort of you know follow-up to to that era of drag racing where it was a bit of a run you know run what you brung type of mentality because think how many other sports are there where you have turbo four cylinders competing against you know v8s right and and and so many different platforms all in the same place and I think that one of the last places that that really did sort of exist was in drag racing and sure there was a lot of rule books that sort of continued to tighten that up but it was one of the few places that you could see two very different vehicles compete against each other where like that just doesn't really exist anymore like the era of touring car racing where you have all these different stuff racing just does it's not on the high level anymore yeah no I I think that's one of the reasons why it continues to stay popular because of the diversity of the cars and diversity of the drivers and the rule book is relatively thin so you still keep new still seeing new builds coming in that are that are different yeah and the evolution is still happening yeah so yeah I think that's that's continued to be helpful for drift did you ever do much in time attack was that ever a space you looked at uh no I never did a time attack I uh I I feel like that was like everyone got off the drag racing train and it was like you're either getting onto the time attack boat or you're getting onto the drifting one and I think the drifting ones obviously had a bit more success but because I think in the same way time attack has that similar mentality of like you can put a bunch of different things up against each other yeah I my perception at the time uh was that time attack couldn't you couldn't do it professionally so it just there wasn't a space for me there still not sure if you can yeah so so I like some of the main things that are important to me is I I love doing cars I love building things and I want to continue to do it so whatever we're going to do has to have some endurance and it has to see where there could be a professional outlet to it if it's not it's could be something to fun to do as a hobby yeah right um so we can go skiing or we can go mountain biking and I'm not pursuing any of those things professionally although there's many people that do that professionally but I just do it as a hobby and it's something fun but you can go pick your bike off out of the garage and go take it out you can go uh get your skis your snowboard and head up to the mountain for the weekend and go do that if you want to build a time attack car there's a huge amount of uh infrastructure that you need to have and continue to develop develop it um the cost and the uh yeah the continuation of and the development of something like that is beyond the resources that I have yeah uh so if I can't I thought I don't have the resources and I can't do it professionally um I just sort of put a little bit of a blinders on so I don't get distracted uh and and take myself down a road that I can't you know maintain yeah it's the snack intermission brought to you by Viper Industrial welcome to snack cart that moment where we take a little bit of a break brought to you by Viper Industrial today because I knew this Zach was going to be here I figured I'd try something a little healthier it's a granola but it is coated as the young kids say as chocolate chip cookie dough it's clean it's top nine allergen free it's kosher it's whole grain it's ancient grains it's plant-based and uh some gluten-free bullshit I'm sorry guys it's that's horrible let's give it a whirl it tastes like a little bit of science I love cold cereal it's like one of my favorite foods so if you if you put this in a bowl with milk I would eat the whole bag I like the expression science as a flavor yeah definitely is it's got some science it's got some science in there very engineered I mean you're going for more I'm starving you just yeah good score as a handheld snack it's like a two I think this would be good like in a in like a yogurt like throw this up in a Greek yogurt this is kind of like a seven out of ten for me I'm gonna go to five or six why don't really eat bad you only eat healthy and it's a little dry is it like a weird burn after there is a burn yeah no is that okay is there like a side effect on here anyway back to the show let me ask you a question um back to the like kind of the the idea of the show versus you know the sport of it how do you make the show better like like how would you if you were in control let's just say fd because it's something that you're involved in much but like you know how how would you try to improve the show I mean that's that's the that's the ultimate question right um I think the flow of the of the event needs to go smoother I learned this from the drag racing when there's the oil downs and the stalls in between the runs and everything yeah it's the mom litmus will mom stick around the whole time that's right and so d1 had a solid tight two hour show yeah they even had a really tight qualifying and so they would they would be cars like let's say in qualifying the car was barely at the finish line finishing the run they're already sending the next car into smoke yeah and they were able to run the whole qualifying within like 90 minutes or something like that the same thing with with the the events there's no replays there's none of this stuff the judges were like oh we got a winner move the next pair move the next pair and what ended up happening was the show was tight you'd have people placed where maybe you didn't think that they should have uh and then so again back to the whole thing where you got a little bit emotional about they should have won or they should have but it didn't matter you moved on to the next thing you forgot about that or maybe you didn't forget about that and the show was good and tight by the end by the end of the night what we're doing now is we're adding extra layers we're adding more we're basically building this now around the drivers so they're happy and they're not marching up to get angry at the judges or the series or getting an instagram uh getting upset where someone at the series has to come in and start writing paragraphs to such so cringe when that happens yeah to try to defend themselves it's like and and implementing more judging more replays more electronics to still have the same people complaining at the end of the events so all of this extra infrastructure and complexity has not fixed the underlying issue of it's a judge sport and people are going to be unhappy when they lose and they're going to complain we might as well just tighten that whole flow of show up put a better show together and let the things you know fall out as they may and us as a competitor have to look at it and and i've watched enough sports where i'll watch basketball and you have the top players get called on a foul and you they're like that and sometimes they don't get called on a foul you win some you lose some and at the end you hope that the universe sort of equalizes out and you be a good sport about it and you realize that the flow of the game is more important and i've sort of applied that to rationalize myself at these drift events where sometimes we get a call and sometimes we don't but at the end of the day uh we have to understand that hopefully there's a balance but the flow of the show and the event itself is the primary concern because if that doesn't work well none of it matters yeah have you done a drift masters event no no yeah i i had adam elz on the pod a couple weeks back and um he i asked him to compare sort of what it's like to be an fd versus drift masters and he said that the show is better in drift masters um but as a driver fd is better because drift masters doesn't care about your like five minute rule or any of that like they just keep the show going and he's like so as a driver like fd is more lenient and allows you to sort of you know worry about this or or complain or do whatever and in drift masters it's just like oh your car broke that's cool we're moving into the next race or the next round because we we have an audience that we have to care about you know and because from i haven't been to a drift masters event but i've obviously seen a ton of it online and it looks crazy right like it looks just like such a bigger show so i was asking him like kind of how it got there it's kind of curious because you're sort of saying the same thing that maybe fd's a little too concerned about the driver but then on the flip side i think there's a lot of other motorsports where their failure is like not worrying about the drivers at all right so it's like it's this weird mix of how you get there so i would i would ask this question and it's impossible question answer but if we could have i would go for the the the solution that would probably build the series if you could say look there won't be any more five minute rule or and you might lose a little sometimes and you're not sure why but the series can be twice as big three times as big you know you know five x and it's a real thing absolutely uh and then some drivers will not conform to that and not want to compete anymore yeah but you might be missing out on a on a big growth uh but if it was not to build it and the drivers are unhappy then i think that's the worst of everything right and that's what i think everybody's worth that's that's the thing that's impossible to answer right it's it's what changed the whole format so the drivers are unhappy and the sport doesn't grow nobody wants that yeah no that makes sense shifting gears a little bit but sort of in the same mindset one of the questions i've been asking everybody who's been around for a little bit you know not like guys like nads although he's been around a lot longer than us have um you know where do you think sort of the health of the entire you know industry is for us when i say industry i mean car cultures not just drifting but just like everything that's going on we've all lived through sort of these different peaks and moments do you where do you think we are at right now do you think we're in you know a peak a lull like how does it see from from sort of your perspective and i and i you you know you work directly with the automakers you're involved in a lot of these different pieces you're obviously involved in the competition side you're still involved in seaman things like that how do you see like the general health of you know where we're at at the moment compared to you know your experiences from the 90s all the way till now um i don't want to be too much of a pessimist here yeah i i i i i think we're definitely on the the downside of it i mean with uh the tightening of laws the epa and a lot of shops getting in trouble uh it's really limited uh the motivation we're not there's there aren't no there aren't new tuner shops there's less right there aren't new tuning companies there's less it's sort of sliding back into the underground again um i've been building oem plus cars for myself to drive around i were in california it's very difficult to uh to pass smog over here yep um so the extreme builds are hiding in garages and uh and you know obviously this whole thing with people which put them on montana plates and now there's a whole task force cracking down on that whole thing so uh it's it's way more challenging um and you have the guys on the the the intersections taking over still and doing burnouts and all that stuff so for the you know how do they know what's an enthusiast like you or me versus like the kids that are you know doing burnouts all over the intersection um so there is still a probably some negative uh uh perception of the automotive aftermarket folks um so yeah i think it's we're in a challenging situation at the moment it's i've heard this side of it um i so actually let me let me i want to i want to put some positive spin on it yeah but i have a 72 silica and i want it has carburetors on it and i want to put fuel injection on it and so i could do right custom stuff as much as i want there's electronics wazoo there's fuel injectors wiring stuff like anything i want to do to it i can just do i can dream it up i can go online i can buy the parts if it doesn't exist i'll go on solidworks or some kind of CAD software design it get it made like the ability to build stuff now is unlike any time in the past and the speed to do it and the knowledge on how to do all the dude i will go and i used to go around google and search on how to do stuff on forums and everything i will have engineering questions and go and chat gbt and a whole the whole conversation about something i'm planning on building and and get more information there than it would take me hours on the internet or have to like phone a friend so like the ability to have a concept and get to a design and get the parts and put it on the car nowadays is unlike any time in the future and it's way better today yeah i'm gonna put a little pin in the AI thing because that was a question i was i had on my list of things to ask you but i think that what's interesting for me and like kind of the health of where we are in the culture is the negatives i'll roll out first i agree with everything you've said i think from i think it's really difficult to be a tuning company right now the risk of getting a 15 million dollar fine you know for for evading carb and things like that it's just it's just a nightmare situation and i don't know why any business would want to be in it right i know that when i was uh you know at wheel pros um they were like strict like we do not want to do anything in the tuning market like we don't want to be involved with tuners we don't want to be involved with exhaust systems like those were those businesses were businesses that they did not want to buy they just wanted to live in sort of the aesthetic or suspension world because it was the only thing that wasn't going to get them in trouble with you know epa or something so like that's a nightmare situation for that side of the industry um i think that then from the ownership side like yeah it sucks there's task force and all that that being said there's probably more wild cars on the streets of california right now than there were 20 years ago right like there's more people running crazy thousand horsepower swaps and all that stuff it lives in the underground again and everyone figures out a loophole around it right um but i think that culturally like car culture feels really big to me right now so i think on you know i always was sort of on that side because i was always on the media whether it was as magazines or through hoonigan or whatever i was always looking at like what is the the sort of pulse and like the lifeblood of the space right now and you know when i first got into it it was in the mid 90s and import tuning was growing and then got big and fast and furious and that felt like this one peak and then there was like the hip hop car culture sort of exploded you know and made semen to this massive thing and wheel culture and all of that through like the mid aughts and then there was this like real lull like it just felt like the prius era where everybody was driving priuses like if everyone was talking about how young kids weren't driving anymore and we we rolled through that era and then like about i probably i guess pandemic you know right you know maybe right before it really started to kind of grow um and a lot of times i think like man we ran hoonigan during sort of like the malese like slowdown era like yeah it felt big to all of us who were there but when i was looking outside of you know the endemic sponsors like nobody wanted to do automotive now you've got like fashion brands doing automotive you've got you know all these other people and not just automotive but like our culture right you're seeing you know people using golden era jdm cars in ads that have nothing to do with car culture right you can go to a coffee shop and there's a 9 11 parked inside of it and they don't even know the spec on the car right and it's like as a culture that has really gotten to an interesting place and then the other part um i think that's a positive i think one of the negatives again though is i don't know what the future enthusiast car is right like we all an enthusiast car was always a car that was like 10 years old because it was now affordable and you could get into it right for for you it was you know civics for me it was volkswagen golfs um you know these were approachable cars i don't know what the modern approachable car is outside of the the twins or the you know the brz and the you know the gt86 like that's really the only current car in the marketplace that hasn't really become a car that feels like it's too big too heavy too numb doesn't really feel as much like an enthusiast car in the lower in the lower price point i think like that's a certainly um a negative side of it but then to your last point like i can get a 3d printer and like make stuff like that's incredible i wish i could have done that when i was into rc cars i mean think about when you were like being able to do something like that even at that young age so i don't know it's it's an interesting one and i i don't know which i i don't know the answer to it because while culturally it feels like it's exploding i do know that when that happens sort of like a tidal wave the water eventually pulls back out like the trend pulls back out and we end up in that era of pre-issue again where the trend goes the other direction um and then all we're faced with is all these other problems that we have so i don't know it's a it's an interesting one i just like to ask those who've been through it a bit because i think everyone has a different vision you and nads have a similar one the things are on the down i think things are on the up but maybe i'm just trying to be an optimist yeah look bagged on the kids doing burnouts in intersections and stuff but the word i just said kids yeah and so i'm starting like all the infinities and three disease and all the vq cars no but it's clearly a surge in those yeah uh there's a surge in the the mopar of course and i'm starting to see a bunch of old 90s hondas on the road again yeah yeah um so and they're young kids in those things like they're teenagers early 20s yeah so i mean as bad as the takeover thing is there is and like i i really i really am not a fan of what it's done because it's so like and i hate to be we're like old being like when we straight erased we did it with you know with class and we were we were we were composed and we didn't take the risks but there was a reality to it because it was like in the dark industrial park so it was no one there like this is a completely different space where it is and i've talked about this probably too much on the pod but unfortunately i think it's just this thing that we're all we're all trying to kind of figure out and deal with because for me and when i worked with the sheriff's department here in los angeles it was like i want to be able to just give these kids a place to do it and and have it be something that's legal and that's why we were doing the burn yard stuff at urwindale but we quickly realized that the people who were showing up to our events were not the same people who were showing up to the takeover it was like part of what made the takeover cool to them was that it was illegal and it was disruptive and like it wasn't disruptive to go to urwindale and pay ten dollars and sit in the stands and watch it like it wasn't the part that i thought which was cool which was which is the actual automotive building a cool car sliding it around and doing that like that wasn't what was sort of you know moving moving that side but at the same time it's like there is we aren't in a place right now where we're dealing with a younger generation that doesn't care about cars they just care about cars in a way that is probably detrimental to the rest of us all caring about cars it's like between that and you know diesel trucks like you know um coal running and stuff like that it's like both of those are bad for the the culture as a whole the industry doesn't need to always i mean as long as there's something there and and they don't you know limit us with too many laws yeah then uh i kind of like having a little bit of an underground thing with my mod car and and whatever i do i don't i don't i don't have i don't i know why any of us would have ambitions for it to be some big mainstream thing again yeah and i i don't actually think that being mainstream has ever been good right i think i think it gets too close to the sun and whenever that does there's an immediate sort of backlash and we lose a lot of rights and i think we're also forgetting that automotive aftermarket includes truck yeah and i can't go anywhere without watch looking at a modified truck so and there's cool jeeps toyotas everything so they're all over the place yeah yeah no and that's that's obviously a space that is just continuing to grow like it was i think it was like 80 percent of the wheel pros business was trucks which is funny because my mind is still very much sorted in cars but like you go to the you go to middle america and it's like there's a bunch of really big trucks like parked in every town like that's there just a little i mean i like i like trucks too i got f600 that'll eventually build one day so yeah i mean you got a really cool rav 4 so i i actually sold that to a buddy yeah he's been hounding me for years for it and so he drives it around the west side you took me for a spin in that one when we when hoonigan did the rally event and uh you came out to that and i got a little quick i was it was funny because i wasn't even working at hoonigan anymore i showed up for something else you were there and i was like oh sick when we get a let me get a ride in this thing that thing was super cool yes i sold that now i have a lexus gx 550 one of the new gx's but i've got 35s on it and and suspension and so that's my new off-road thing yeah um all right this is a complete gear shift but about i don't know i guess about six years ago so it's like 2020 you dived into youtube and you were on a tear like i you did i don't know like six or seven videos in a run row that were all a million plus views and i will tell you as those of us who are working in youtube every day we were like who's this motherfucker like like how did you just show up and you were absolutely crushing it um i think i know one of the ones i remember taught my head was like thousand horsepower like you know jz build i think you did a tear down of like the new inline six um and you were doing these like really nerdy um but well sort of explained engine stuff and then you got into more technical stuff and you had a pretty good run on on doing the youtube stuff i've seen you haven't done much recently but you're still you're still tapping in it you obviously went to a creator summit so you still see yourself in the creator space that's like a whole different chapter for you and honestly one that i would have never have predicted because you always were in the race car race team that side of it um how did that really all sort of come about and did you a did you really study it because it's not very normal for people to come out of nowhere and have that instant sort of like success on it yeah i i did a lot of studying so uh in high school i took photography we did we had a dark room and um so i learned some competet composition and some stuff uh and then later uh we realized so in you know 2018 20 even before that we realized that in order to be a professional motorsport team you have to have a strong social presence yeah and um we realized that tanner was a big poll there same with fredrick over the years uh but the team wasn't doing that much and if we lost a driver like it would be difficult for us to continue because we'd maybe start with a new driver that didn't have much social so we should have our own and then and uh so that was sort of the impetus on on starting some youtube stuff and i looked around and said well what would i want to see what do i enjoy talking about like yeah it's i love engines and i love this stuff and so i started doing some research on so i started filming a youtube video at first and i it was so overwhelming that i couldn't even get through it and i'm like okay i need to stop try to do it with cameras and editing and everything so i just got my cell phone and i said okay i'm gonna do 15 seconds and i'm just gonna do instagram uh little videos because it's before reels and all that stuff and so i just started i'm gonna film something do a little better and so at night i would go watch um uh youtube videos on how to film about different gear and i and i realized oh my gosh the people that were some of the best storytellers and had the best production were the people that were explaining the camera gear because they were gear heads and they were watching so it was this sort of like self like revolve like they were building content for themselves like it was this weird thing so there i'm watching a video and they're talking about how the camera works and but they knew how to use cameras really well so the way that they were framing the video and the way they were doing the voiceover with the narration narrating it and everything i was like oh this is my format yeah so i took the format of the guys that i was watching the videos that i like to watch on learning something about cameras yeah and just applying it to engines so it was somebody else's kind of format just applied to a new uh a new new industry yeah and people i guess weren't doing that and i talked to mickey the other day and he's like oh yeah you did that then then then the oh the doped over thing like the narrated thing yeah like that was the thing you just didn't do and i was like oh i didn't know that i just did the stuff that i was interested in because i couldn't get i i'm not good at like sitting standing in front of a camera and just being able to rattle off right entire youtube video for 15 minutes so i'd i'd film the whole thing i would edit it so it told a story visually first and then i would narrate over it but i'd have like 50 takes and then so i would spend dude hours editing my audio and putting it into something that was actually you could actually listen to and then that was sort of the the the concept that i came up with no we were all surprised because it was one of those like all of a sudden you're looking at you know top videos in the automotive section and it's like donut hoonigan stephawk guards were like wait what like what did you make like wasn't he just on our show last week like what is he doing um and it was cool to see and i you know i remember reading like the comments i think there was just something kind of like oddly therapeutic and soothing listening to you explain stuff that is pretty high tech and nerdy but in a way that people were learning and like that's just a it's a huge spot in the youtube space which is like educational stuff just does so well and if it can be you know that sort of crossed the line of education and entertainment that like infotainment world it's like it checks all the boxes right so i i did enjoy doing it i still would enjoy doing it now uh but the reason i've tapered off is i just don't want to film my life yeah i feel that yeah and so i i literally saw what the future had in store for me and i had a couple of conversations with tj hunt uh adam lz um and realized from their stories on how much there is really the the youtube treadmill and uh i i looked into the future and said i don't want to do that and and the moment i did that the motivation just dropped and uh and sorry i know people love the videos and i tell you i really do like making them and and uh i just i just we talk about on this pot all the time the the youtube trap right it's like vinny and i talk about it um that the every week you got to do it um it's the hamster wheel i talked about it with lz last time like it's just the way the platform works is like to be successful you just have to keep cranking out more and more and more and the reality is that that eventually you end up cranking out stuff you don't want to make and that doesn't feel good right like to be in this thing where like oh this i didn't enjoy making this but i had to make it because i had to have an upload otherwise i was going to lose my viewership and all of that so like and it's also the the i think at a certain point too it's like how much of your life do you want in front of camera or to be to be kind of like attached to that yeah i can't believe i mean you put your wife in there i think maybe you've had pictures of your kids and you know what i'm saying i watch folks do that and i'm like yeah that's just not my that's just my style not my style like i'll show you all the tricks on my race car and stuff like that yeah but at some point yeah i want to be able to turn i mean some people's lives get really really there like you know as as hudson's gotten older like i kind of make sure he's if you see him you're just seeing the back of his head and he's not really like involved in stuff ashley exited out of content pretty quickly at hoonig and she did a couple things and was like yeah this isn't what i want to do so you know um and for me i never really wanted to be in front of camera i enjoy the behind the camera thing but you know i enjoyed podcasting too but all right so i know you've got a hard out um i'm gonna ask you one last question uh i read an interview you did and you said that you looked up to robbie gordon because robbie gordon did it all um you are now sort of in this world where you you know you've you've done drag racing you've done some amazing builds you've been very good at running a team um everything and drifting uh you you in this conversation you've teased things like bahas interesting like what is next what's what's sort of the next chapter for you so we have a whole another division of the company called papa docus engineering yep and so we've already done several large projects uh in the non-automotive space we're doing a couple in the energy sector for large hydrogen energy storage device and things like that so with our understanding of mechanical fabrication and everything from wiring to uh heat management to you know the car has all of those things and because we understand how to lay out a project get that done get to the start line you know on time on budget it applies itself really well to uh some of these industrial builds and really an industry that's challenged with that uh you know we're all used to these projects in industry where they go over budget way past their deadlines they ask more money from the from public that's just public stuff but also like these private companies will go to build things as well um so we're supporting like uh like vc venture capital startup companies where they've got an influx of capital they have a product that they want to build but they may not have the time to get a rnd facility and staff it and go through the trials and tribulations of having to get you know to the point to where they can produce like a first article they just want to you know work with somebody and so we we have a services that we can help i was not expecting this is the answer i was expecting you to be like i don't know maybe the car maybe this you're like i'm doing stuff in the public sector now hydrogen so i like that you're on to the next i like to do things that don't have instructions yeah um but that we can continue to continue to build with and in motorsport because things have gone so uh everything's kind of the same and spec it's it's a huge turn off and spending so many time in so many days at racetracks i mean sorry to like kind of but no i i'm 49 and i've been going to racetracks for you know so many years it's nice to have some weekends off when i can do some other stuff yeah yeah i know i get it one of the best things i did in my life was buy a farm because i go there and i just don't do race car stuff so or car stuff well sometimes i do car stuff but it's amazing how much fun uh tractoring has become like it's just something yeah something i just never thought i'd i'd have an interest in city kid but it's like i i spent the past week like researching you know different strains of kumquats and it's like oh i didn't know that was going to be a thing that was going to scratch an itch for me but it does but that's the thing right is i don't know a thing but i should know a thing i want to research it and then kind of bring and then bring that to fruition like that whole process and i think that that's just a mentality and a certain personality you landed in in automotive but that could have been in a bunch of other industries with that and succeeded in that yeah i think that's a place where you and i are very similar is i really enjoy the researching something and doing something that that not that hasn't been done because i'd want to do something that has been done i i vinny and i get into this argument all the time because vinny's like oh you just like to be different it's like it's not that i like to be different is that i like the challenge of doing something someone hasn't done before and that's very different than being like i just want to be different so i'm gonna paint my car like pink and green it's like no i i like building a something that someone hasn't done so that i have to like go figure it all out or that a few people have done but they i'm gonna try to do it different because like i enjoy the weird challenge or the hurdle of doing that right and whether that's building cars or building brands like hoonigan was sort of this like we're just gonna figure it out as we go but you know there was it was always a different thing but we were doing a lot of it first and it was like okay how how do we make this how do we make a skate video for cars and it's jungkang oh okay cool how do how do we figure how to shut down roads like it was all this stuff and that was like really interesting to me so seems like you kind of get fueled by the same thing yeah and if you're able to get to the finish line and finish the project yeah then you might be able to make a living at it yeah i don't always get to the finish line but on the things that make money i do yeah it's the personal stuff that it's the personal things that don't get well sometimes you know having some of that stuff out there is i think important i've gotten to the point where i've completed my list my inbox out of my email is pretty much gone i clean up my house and i'm like 12 000 unread emails you and i are different there it's but it's a different that goal to get to the end where i've completed all of the stuff isn't a great feeling because now it's like what do i do next yeah and so what i do is just okay well that's the next the project what's the next project so i'm starting to learn as i mature more that managing projects and having them overlapping and realizing that i don't have to finish every project there can be projects that go on like your car bills and stuff like that that can take decades like as long as you enjoy it like i always tell people i'm like i'm not in a rush you're in a rush for me to finish my car exactly i'm completely happy at the pace at which it goes you know so there's a entire baker's cart full of parts for like three different projects i've got going on it's like i don't know i'll pull out a drawer at one point and fix something it's just how it is it's like it services me so cool man well thank you for coming on i wish we could talk for another hour but i know i know you got to go so the audience will have to just forgive you all right thanks for having me brad thanks man all right of all the sunglass companies out there you might ask why heatwave aside from them being friends of mine they just make great shades awesome styles cool collabs smart tech they even have extra large sizes for big heads like me and for those of you wearing this on the job they make ansi z87 spec safety glasses too but what really attracts me to heatwave is that they are physically a part of our culture you will find them everywhere from king of the hammers to formula drift you'll see everyone wearing heatwaves at your local track day event damn you might even turn laps with the co-founder justin because they're one of us so one more reason to choose heatwave visual to fix your face i'm a tool dork my obsession might even dwarf my addiction to cars i love collecting unique and specialty tools which is how i initially fell in love with wear first off they just make aesthetically pleasing tools you feel good in your hand they have a great finish their sizes are universally color-coded and they are super strong in two decades i've never broken a tool from wear i wish i could say the same about my other tools but the thing i like the most about wearer is that they create clever solutions for your 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