HOT ROD Podcast: Nelson Racing Engines Founder Tom Nelson

MotorTrend

NHRA's Brian Lohnes and HOT ROD Magazine's John McGann chat with Nelson Racing Engines Founder

Transcript

00:00:00 (engine revving)

00:00:02 - Hello everybody, you are back watching

00:00:09 and/or listening to the Hot Rod Pod,

00:00:11 where it all began by Motor Trend.

00:00:12 I am Brian Lones, joined as always

00:00:15 by the editor of Hot Rod Magazine, John McGann.

00:00:18 John, we're gonna talk to a guy you've known for many years

00:00:20 in a very close fashion,

00:00:21 the proprietor of Nelson Racing Engines, Tom Nelson.

00:00:25 - He's a hilarious dude.

00:00:26 We got the bleep button gotta work out here.

00:00:29 - It was smoke coming off that thing

00:00:31 by the end of this episode.

00:00:32 - And that was tamed by Tom's standards too,

00:00:34 which is funny if you watch any of his YouTube stuff,

00:00:37 he gets spicy.

00:00:39 But that's part of his character,

00:00:40 that we knew he'd be a great guest,

00:00:42 just obviously because of his big personality,

00:00:44 but also he's an extremely accomplished engine builder.

00:00:48 And we get into all that stuff about how he got started,

00:00:52 self-taught machinist, engine builder,

00:00:54 going into business on his own.

00:00:56 And what I'm impressed with is,

00:00:59 he's always, his vision evolves,

00:01:03 but it's always kind of focused around a package

00:01:06 that people can buy and drop into their car,

00:01:09 and it's a drivable package,

00:01:11 that makes a lot of power, but it's also art.

00:01:15 - It is, it's art.

00:01:16 And he talks about himself as an artist

00:01:18 and as his business as artists.

00:01:19 We'll talk about the innovations he created,

00:01:21 we'll talk about some of the highest highs

00:01:23 that he's lived through,

00:01:24 and really some of the lowest lows.

00:01:25 And some of these stories, I can guarantee you don't know,

00:01:28 because I don't think he's ever told them in public before.

00:01:30 Whether it's plummeting off a cliff in Iceland,

00:01:32 or whether it's putting a 632 at Twin Turbos in an airboat,

00:01:35 or whether it's being an innovator,

00:01:37 and really a leader in terms of social media

00:01:39 in the aftermarket, he spills it all.

00:01:41 - It was a great discussion.

00:01:43 I was really looking forward to this episode,

00:01:45 and Tom didn't disappoint.

00:01:46 - And if you have ever taken one of those ear tests,

00:01:48 where they put the little beepy noises in your ear,

00:01:50 you'll feel like you're in one of those

00:01:51 during some of the parts of this episode,

00:01:53 'cause the language, well, it gets a little spicy,

00:01:55 but don't worry, it's fun for all family members,

00:01:57 and all ages, we got you handled.

00:01:59 It is a great episode, and here it is,

00:02:01 the gospel according to Tom Nelson.

00:02:04 Tom Nelson, Nelson Racing Engines fame,

00:02:06 seven time Hot Rod Magazine cover guy.

00:02:09 - That's awesome.

00:02:10 - We got a lot to talk about.

00:02:11 - Yeah, well, that was my favorite cover.

00:02:13 I think it was my taking over the magazine,

00:02:15 and we arranged that 40,000 horsepower

00:02:18 photo shoot with you at your place,

00:02:20 and just such a cool picture Wes Allison took.

00:02:23 - Oh yeah, it was sick.

00:02:24 I mean, for me, I still, you know,

00:02:28 print, everybody's saying I don't print,

00:02:31 but for me to get to cover a Hot Rod,

00:02:33 it's like being the playmate, you know?

00:02:35 (laughing)

00:02:36 Only certain people get to cover a couple times,

00:02:39 so I think it's actually, I think it might be 10,

00:02:42 actually, maybe, I don't know.

00:02:45 But Hot Rod's been good to me.

00:02:46 - It has been good to you,

00:02:47 and that's why we wanted to have you on the show,

00:02:48 not only to talk about your history of the magazine,

00:02:50 obviously, but to talk about kind of your entire history

00:02:52 in the industry, and for those of you that don't know,

00:02:54 Tom Nelson's been officially in the racing engine business

00:02:56 since 1995, but he's been into cars and Hot Rods

00:02:59 his entire life, and so, you know,

00:03:01 his involvement in so many things

00:03:03 is kind of what we want to touch on here,

00:03:05 and like we've touched on with everybody else,

00:03:06 I think there are fascinating elements

00:03:08 of the business that you're in that people,

00:03:10 really, at home, don't necessarily know

00:03:12 how this stuff works, right?

00:03:13 And so, I guess for us, you know,

00:03:15 the back title of this show is "Where It All Began,"

00:03:17 so if my memory is correct,

00:03:20 it begins with a Pantera and some turbochargers,

00:03:22 but for you as a kid, where did the hook get set?

00:03:26 Well, my dad, my dad was always like SCCA racing,

00:03:31 he had like, he had a, well, first he had a Corvair,

00:03:35 where he would SCCA race the Corvair,

00:03:38 then he got a Boss Mustang.

00:03:40 Nice.

00:03:40 He put a, you know, a 410 with the top loader,

00:03:44 me and my brother would be in the back seat

00:03:45 going like 55 on the freeway,

00:03:47 'cause the thing was winding out,

00:03:48 buses are passing us.

00:03:50 (laughing)

00:03:51 So we'd always be going faster, dad,

00:03:53 everything's passing us, he's like, "Relax, man."

00:03:55 You know?

00:03:56 (laughing)

00:03:57 And then, you know, then he got a Pantera,

00:04:00 and he twin turbocharged the Pantera in the garage,

00:04:03 and that, you know, I don't know,

00:04:05 I think he kind of set the bug in me, you know?

00:04:08 Which for the time, I mean,

00:04:11 obviously we're talking about a talented guy here, right?

00:04:13 'Cause to pull that off, and what I'm guessing is the '80s,

00:04:16 it's a lot different than today,

00:04:17 and we're gonna get into all that,

00:04:18 but the scope of that project at home in the '80s

00:04:21 seems pretty big.

00:04:22 - Oh, hell yeah.

00:04:22 I mean, you're talking about throwing tools and cussing,

00:04:24 that's where I learned it, you know?

00:04:26 (laughing)

00:04:27 But yeah, he took a set of old Ray J's,

00:04:30 and then made these kind of cool logs.

00:04:34 I think Hal Pantera had the initial kit,

00:04:37 and then it drew through a set of De La Rotas, you know?

00:04:41 - Oh, wow.

00:04:42 - So like, low speed drivability was not exactly good.

00:04:47 But which made it cool,

00:04:48 'cause he was always revving the (beep) out of it

00:04:50 just to make it work, you know?

00:04:51 (laughing)

00:04:53 But yeah, I actually have a video of when I was a kid,

00:04:56 or my brother was in the dryer.

00:04:58 I don't know which one of us was in the passenger seat,

00:05:02 but we have a video of like this road,

00:05:04 which is now all populated,

00:05:06 but he'd take this and there was nobody there,

00:05:08 and we'd just rip it, and it'd decamber the front wheels

00:05:10 like third, fourth, you could hear the turbos,

00:05:12 like one was behind your ear, one was behind,

00:05:15 and that kind of ruined me, you know?

00:05:17 I was like, man, it's as small as it has to be.

00:05:19 (laughing)

00:05:22 So, you know, and ultimately we kind of started our company

00:05:27 doing offshore marine.

00:05:28 So we did like 1471, you know, blown big blocks,

00:05:32 and it's kind of eye-opening

00:05:35 when you are running on a gas blown big block,

00:05:39 you think this thing sounds like it's making 5,000 horse,

00:05:42 you know, and it makes like 1,200 horse, you know?

00:05:46 (laughing)

00:05:48 But to do that in an offshore marine application,

00:05:50 which is basically at full throttle all the time,

00:05:53 and then bouncing through the water.

00:05:54 Yeah, I'll tell you one thing is like,

00:05:57 crankshaft manufacturer and how you cut that radius

00:06:02 in an offshore marine application,

00:06:03 if you even have like the stone has just a little mess up

00:06:08 in the radius, you just snap the rod pin right off.

00:06:11 Wow.

00:06:12 'Cause that, it comes out of the water,

00:06:13 bam, comes back in the water,

00:06:14 comes back out of the water, and it's just, you know,

00:06:17 it definitely teaches you how to build a motor right.

00:06:20 Oh yeah, that would.

00:06:21 'Cause you're gonna break it really quick.

00:06:23 And you're talking about the fillet between the crank.

00:06:26 Exactly, yeah.

00:06:28 The throw and the rod journal.

00:06:30 That little radius, which you wouldn't think much of.

00:06:33 I remember regrinding some pretty nice cranks

00:06:37 and the stone wasn't dressed right,

00:06:40 and it just had just a little,

00:06:41 like you could feel a little bit in the radius.

00:06:45 Both motors snapped in half.

00:06:47 Wow.

00:06:48 You know.

00:06:49 Wow.

00:06:49 So what's the mid-step?

00:06:50 How do we get from the Pantera

00:06:52 to building offshore engines?

00:06:53 'Cause that to me is a fascinating point too.

00:06:55 So what was A, either your natural innate training

00:06:58 or what was like, what went on between you being

00:07:01 enraptured by your dad's twin turbo Pantera

00:07:03 to then being able to be hired by offshore boat racing teams

00:07:07 to build these motors?

00:07:08 I think, well, first it was a go-kart, right?

00:07:11 So I wanted a go-kart and my dad was always like,

00:07:16 leaning into me to, you gotta earn it.

00:07:19 So we were the kids on Saturday,

00:07:20 like picking weeds for half the day.

00:07:22 So I'd saved up a couple summers

00:07:27 and I had the money to go get this go-kart.

00:07:30 So we went out and found this,

00:07:32 it was like a Penske Indy car.

00:07:36 It was like a Safeway giveaway type go-kart.

00:07:39 So it looked like a little Indy car.

00:07:41 It was all yellow, it had like the Penske graphics on it

00:07:44 and it had the three and a half horse

00:07:46 Technism engine in it.

00:07:49 To this day, I don't think I've ever had more fun

00:07:50 in something, even seeing these bad-ass things we built,

00:07:53 still not as cool as that damn go-kart I got.

00:07:56 And my one friend, Danny Gary,

00:08:01 ended up getting the same one in white

00:08:02 and it was just a little faster.

00:08:04 That's the problem.

00:08:07 Yeah, he just always, I think at the time,

00:08:10 I probably make this sound more than it is,

00:08:13 but there was a girl on our cul-de-sac,

00:08:16 I think her name was Noelle,

00:08:19 and we'd both be going around the corner

00:08:21 and he'd just have to shh right past me.

00:08:23 I'm just like, you know.

00:08:25 You can't have that.

00:08:25 And there was a guy working for my dad at the time,

00:08:28 his name was Garl, and I was telling him,

00:08:31 I'm like, "Man, how do you make this thing faster?"

00:08:32 And he's like, "Have you bypassed the governor

00:08:34 "in this thing?"

00:08:35 And I'm like, "What's a governor?"

00:08:36 He was like, "Oh, let's do this."

00:08:37 So he showed me how to bypass the governor

00:08:40 and man, it picked up like 15 miles an hour,

00:08:42 you know, I was like, "Oh man."

00:08:44 (laughing)

00:08:45 Saw me and Danny going around the corner again,

00:08:47 you know, I was like, "Yeah, something's wrong

00:08:50 "with my car."

00:08:51 I'm like, "I think something is."

00:08:52 You know?

00:08:53 So, at any rate, that turned into,

00:08:56 it was kinda like people would see me

00:09:01 driving around this like Indy car around

00:09:04 and it was kinda like a good promo thing,

00:09:06 so I opened up an auto detailing business.

00:09:08 So I think I was like 12 or 13

00:09:11 and I rigged up the back off the side

00:09:15 of where the motor was and I had vacuums

00:09:18 and all this stuff and then--

00:09:19 - Wow.

00:09:20 Wait, so you would drive this thing around

00:09:20 with a bunch of car care supplies attached to it?

00:09:22 - Oh yeah, yeah.

00:09:23 - Get out of here.

00:09:24 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:25 - That's cool.

00:09:25 - That's awesome.

00:09:26 - I actually, I went, I made flyers,

00:09:27 me and my buddy made flyers.

00:09:28 It was called D&T Auto Detailing

00:09:30 and we put flyers in everybody's mailbox,

00:09:33 everybody that I could get to.

00:09:36 - Yeah.

00:09:37 - And then we, I forgot who,

00:09:40 I think it was like a post office agent came to the door.

00:09:43 - Yes, you can't do that.

00:09:44 - It's a federal offense.

00:09:45 - Yes.

00:09:46 - It's a federal offense.

00:09:47 - You can't put stuff in people's mailboxes, yes.

00:09:49 (laughing)

00:09:50 - So luckily they didn't,

00:09:52 it was like per mailbox is a fine

00:09:55 or something like that.

00:09:56 - Oh wow, oh my God.

00:09:57 - So that advertising thing,

00:09:59 but it got me a bunch of clients, you know?

00:10:02 And so then I would just buzz the old Indy car

00:10:04 up to their house and pretty soon I was like

00:10:07 waxing turbo Porsches and doing all this stuff.

00:10:09 I was like, I remember my shoulder,

00:10:11 I got like an almost shoulder injury

00:10:13 from so much fricking polishing at my age, you know?

00:10:16 So that kind of started the entrepreneurship

00:10:19 of doing stuff and then that kind of led into street racing.

00:10:24 So street racing was really big time

00:10:27 when I was in high school and stuff.

00:10:31 It's obviously probably way more big time now,

00:10:33 but back then we thought Big Bet was a thousand bucks

00:10:37 or something, we're like, oh, it's big money.

00:10:38 - Yeah, yeah.

00:10:40 - But anyway, we started street racing

00:10:43 and it was doing quite well with it, you know?

00:10:46 And I was like kind of doing all sorts of crazy stuff,

00:10:49 hidden nitrous systems and like multiple

00:10:51 hidden nitrous systems.

00:10:52 So when they'd find one,

00:10:54 they'd take the bottle out of the car,

00:10:55 add two more bottles in the car.

00:10:57 So it was really pretty cool.

00:11:00 And so we started street racing

00:11:03 and then that got nasty.

00:11:07 Like gangs got involved and I saw a guy

00:11:11 like run across the street and they ran him over.

00:11:15 And then there was like an argument

00:11:19 over one race guy got shot.

00:11:21 - Way too dangerous.

00:11:21 - Yeah.

00:11:22 - Yeah, it's got out of control.

00:11:23 - And I was like, this isn't for me anymore.

00:11:25 You know, the scene used to be great

00:11:27 'cause you just get in there and come alive to cuss.

00:11:29 - Yeah.

00:11:30 - Yeah, so you--

00:11:31 - We've already gone down that road.

00:11:32 - Yeah, yeah.

00:11:33 (laughing)

00:11:35 I'm a sailor, so.

00:11:36 But yeah, so you just go talk

00:11:39 and that was half the fun was talking.

00:11:41 I actually trained my little brother

00:11:43 to go scam the cards and check for silicone

00:11:46 and I'd have him call out what the car had and everything.

00:11:49 It was just, that was half,

00:11:50 that was part of the deal.

00:11:53 But at that point I was like,

00:11:54 you know what, this is getting a little sketchy,

00:11:56 but I really loved doing it.

00:11:58 And I had a construction company

00:12:01 'cause my mom had a property management company.

00:12:04 So I would take on all sorts of weird things,

00:12:07 like, you know, whatever,

00:12:08 building fences for 50 houses or painting things

00:12:12 or whatever.

00:12:13 So there was like, actually,

00:12:14 like there was real money in that job.

00:12:15 Like our job right now is not--

00:12:18 - Not the same.

00:12:19 - Like I could buy a two by four for $2

00:12:21 and sell it for like four or five.

00:12:23 Right now I could buy a block for like 2000

00:12:25 and sell it for 2100.

00:12:26 (laughing)

00:12:27 And then they're like, it's the wrong main,

00:12:29 you own that block, you know?

00:12:30 (laughing)

00:12:31 So, but anyway, I didn't,

00:12:35 I didn't really love it.

00:12:36 You know, I just, I remember going to work,

00:12:40 like there's like a bridge on the freeway.

00:12:42 When I crossed that bridge, I almost felt like,

00:12:44 oh my God.

00:12:46 - Here we go again.

00:12:47 - Yeah, okay, I'm gonna pick glue off the floor

00:12:50 or something, you know, for a day.

00:12:52 So I started, my grandmother gave me her garage

00:12:55 and I rigged it up and we put 220 and three phase

00:12:58 and all that stuff in the garage.

00:12:59 And I had bought a vertical mill,

00:13:01 I bought a boring bar.

00:13:03 And I was buying, you know, equipment

00:13:05 to start building my buddy's engines.

00:13:09 And I suspected that's what I wanted to do for a living.

00:13:12 And then my good buddy, Cole Ballster,

00:13:15 his dad, he did like the body and white programs.

00:13:22 So he-- - Oh wow, okay.

00:13:23 - Yeah, so he would give out like, you know,

00:13:25 a car to a pro stock team or something.

00:13:27 So he had like a lot of relationships with different people.

00:13:31 And there was a guy, it was these guys,

00:13:33 the Scribner brothers.

00:13:34 - Scribner brothers, Harry Scribner.

00:13:35 - There you go.

00:13:36 - He won one pro stock race in his whole career.

00:13:38 The three brothers, Tom, Dick and Harry.

00:13:40 Those are the three brothers.

00:13:41 - No joke, no joke, yeah.

00:13:43 So the Scribner brothers, I think their cousin

00:13:47 was Bill Hyatt, I don't know if you know who Bill.

00:13:49 And Bill Hyatt had passed away and Larry Ballster,

00:13:54 the Scribners are like, do you know of anybody

00:13:59 who was interested in a machine shop?

00:14:02 He's like, matter of fact, one of my best friend's son

00:14:05 is actually building one.

00:14:06 And they're like, well, Bill passed away

00:14:09 and we're looking to sell this thing.

00:14:10 - Wow.

00:14:11 - And I walked in, it was in Reseda.

00:14:14 And I don't know if you know Hyatt,

00:14:16 but Hyatt was like, really good at what he did.

00:14:19 - I've never, I obviously never met him or anything,

00:14:21 but his name, I mean, I knew his name,

00:14:22 his name would show up in different places, so yeah.

00:14:24 - Yeah, so at any rate, I walked into this place

00:14:29 and it was like, the lights of heaven.

00:14:32 I still use this today, I had a SF600 flow bench,

00:14:37 which is my flow bench today.

00:14:38 Had a manual go power, where you're like,

00:14:41 (imitates engine revving)

00:14:43 Had a dyno in there and had a lot of equipment

00:14:46 that I still use today.

00:14:48 But the trick was that somebody had already put

00:14:52 a deposit on it, but it had been a year.

00:14:54 And they're like, look, whoever comes

00:14:57 to the finish line first.

00:14:59 And so I bid this fence contract in the middle of summer,

00:15:04 in Simi Valley, of all places,

00:15:06 it was like 115 degree summer, you know?

00:15:09 And I did like 100 fences in, I don't know what it was,

00:15:13 it was like, let's call it a month.

00:15:16 - Geez.

00:15:16 - And I ended up coming in with a cashier's check,

00:15:21 like as we finished the deal,

00:15:23 the other guy came in with a check.

00:15:24 - Oh, wow.

00:15:25 - Yeah.

00:15:26 So it was like, you know,

00:15:28 and that other guy is such a good guy.

00:15:30 Like it was kind of weird, but we're still friends.

00:15:33 He used to run a shop, like a production engine shop.

00:15:36 And what's even weirder about that is the line hone

00:15:40 that is in my shop, he was the guy who originally started

00:15:45 the shop before Hyatt did.

00:15:47 And that line hone, he like took a loan to pay for it.

00:15:50 I still have, not line hone, line bore.

00:15:53 It was a Torben Arp line bore.

00:15:54 And so I don't know, maybe it was for me to do,

00:15:58 or I don't know, but it was just one of those things

00:16:00 where we just, it worked out.

00:16:01 And that was the start of professional Nelson Racings.

00:16:07 That was in 1995 out of a professional shop.

00:16:09 And I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

00:16:12 I swear to God, I mean, I walked in there

00:16:14 and like every machine I didn't know how to use, you know?

00:16:17 But I was like--

00:16:18 - What does this button do?

00:16:19 - Yeah, exactly.

00:16:20 Talk about jacking things up.

00:16:21 So I actually traded a guy,

00:16:25 so he knew how to use some of the machines.

00:16:29 So he's like, "If I can use these machines,

00:16:31 "I'll show you how to do it."

00:16:33 And that was a mistake 'cause he didn't know

00:16:35 what the hell he was doing.

00:16:36 So he showed me all the wrong ways on how to do it.

00:16:39 - In retrospect, that probably may not be the guy

00:16:42 you wanna learn from.

00:16:43 The guy's willing to trade it for free,

00:16:45 may not be the guy, yeah.

00:16:47 - But you know, as you may know,

00:16:49 or actually both of you guys may know,

00:16:51 is I don't know if you know a guy named Gene Oli

00:16:54 from Evans Speed Equipment.

00:16:57 Is that name ring a bell?

00:16:58 - Like old school Evans Speed Equipment?

00:17:00 So Evans Speed Equipment,

00:17:01 like one of the early manufacturers,

00:17:02 like flathead Ford stuff.

00:17:05 Yeah, so I'm familiar with the name Evans.

00:17:06 I do not know the Oli guy.

00:17:08 - Okay, so Gene Oli, he was the guy in my dad's mags.

00:17:12 So I was selling a wet grinder

00:17:16 'cause this thing stunk like hell.

00:17:18 And I already had a surfacer.

00:17:20 So a wet grinder is like,

00:17:21 it's in the surface heads,

00:17:23 but with a stone rather than with a carbide.

00:17:26 It was actually, I was bummed after I sold it

00:17:29 because with the stone,

00:17:30 the heads that have the seats sticking out,

00:17:32 you can grind them without dragging steel

00:17:34 across the aluminum.

00:17:35 But at any rate, he had wanted that.

00:17:37 He came by the shop and like,

00:17:40 in just extremely gentleman fashion saw that

00:17:43 I didn't know what the hell I was doing, you know?

00:17:46 So I don't know, maybe he liked the idea that,

00:17:49 you know, I was a younger guy kind of.

00:17:52 So every weekend we kind of bartered for different things

00:17:55 and he just showed me how to do the stuff properly.

00:18:00 Like how to true in a line hone,

00:18:03 how to true in the rod hone,

00:18:04 how to, and you know, before you knew it,

00:18:07 I mean, he brought me from here to here in six months.

00:18:12 - Wow.

00:18:14 - And I'm sure that it's just,

00:18:15 it was pretty much invaluable, you know?

00:18:18 But I guess everybody needs somebody as a mentor in that,

00:18:23 you know, and he really helped me out

00:18:25 in my machining career, you know?

00:18:28 So that's kind of how Nelson Racing started

00:18:31 is we, you know, just, that's how it kind of started,

00:18:33 you know?

00:18:34 - What were the first projects you had

00:18:35 once you were up and running in that new shop,

00:18:37 what was the first type of stuff

00:18:38 that started coming through?

00:18:39 - I was whoring out, man.

00:18:41 - Yeah, anything, just anything.

00:18:42 - Dude, I was like, I mean, I was taking like a line boring,

00:18:47 babbit bearing flat heads, worst jobs of all time.

00:18:50 (laughing)

00:18:51 I mean, dog, you know, 350s where you just like,

00:18:56 it didn't, whatever, you know?

00:18:58 The first 10 years, I had a decent savings

00:19:02 from the construction company

00:19:04 and I lost money every year for 10 years, you know?

00:19:07 I mean, it was almost a joke.

00:19:09 Like, you'd come home and the power was off

00:19:12 and you're like, it's gonna be peaceful tonight, you know?

00:19:15 (laughing)

00:19:17 - Yeah, not gonna have to worry about anything tonight.

00:19:20 No one's gonna be bugging us.

00:19:22 - I don't even have to listen to the fridge

00:19:23 'cause the fridge is gonna be dead, you know?

00:19:25 - But don't open it.

00:19:26 - Yeah.

00:19:27 (laughing)

00:19:28 But I do remember, you know, I do remember

00:19:32 I had this guy, Ron Thal, he was one of my,

00:19:36 wasn't my first employee,

00:19:37 but he was one of my first serious employees

00:19:41 and the guy was absolutely amazing, you know?

00:19:44 And he'd come in eight o'clock exactly,

00:19:48 he'd leave five o'clock exactly,

00:19:50 he'd take lunch at the exact same time.

00:19:52 Me, if you know me, I'm running a million miles an hour

00:19:55 all the time, so I'd be like trying to speed him up,

00:19:58 could not speed him up, could not slow him down,

00:20:00 but at the end of the day, he did more than me, you know?

00:20:03 And anyway, I remember being in my office thinking,

00:20:07 I don't know how I'm gonna make his payroll, you know?

00:20:09 And he's getting paid nothing.

00:20:11 And his wife is like doing him a salt

00:20:13 to let him go after his dream of being an engine builder,

00:20:16 you know?

00:20:18 And it had gotten to the point where I'm like,

00:20:19 I don't care if we close the doors,

00:20:22 like I'm doubling my prices

00:20:25 and you know, if we don't get business, then cool,

00:20:28 I'll go back to doing construction.

00:20:31 At double on prices, got double work, you know?

00:20:33 - Wow.

00:20:34 - And then double on prices again, got double work again.

00:20:37 - Wow.

00:20:37 - You know, so that was like a big,

00:20:40 and I still don't understand it

00:20:42 'cause I still don't think we charge enough,

00:20:44 but you know, know your value

00:20:46 is like one of the biggest things, right?

00:20:48 So, but back then you needed to, you needed to kinda,

00:20:51 you needed to know how to do it before you had value.

00:20:55 - That's true.

00:20:56 - Yeah, if you go double on the price

00:20:56 with half the knowledge, you got a big problem.

00:20:58 - Yeah, but at a certain point you realize like,

00:21:01 hey, you know, I know what the hell I'm doing

00:21:04 and I'm putting way too much time for what, you know,

00:21:08 every machine shop in the world would be like,

00:21:11 Bohr and Hone or like Bohr 75, Hone 50,

00:21:15 like R&R Cambridge 28.

00:21:17 And you'd like, you'd look at all that

00:21:18 and you'd be like, how the hell do I make a living doing this?

00:21:22 And all the machine shop guys were all so dumb.

00:21:24 Like we were just like, well, this is just standard pricing.

00:21:28 - Yeah, right, right.

00:21:29 - And then, so I got out of the machine part of it

00:21:34 and decided to start doing packaging.

00:21:38 So you could come up with, you know,

00:21:40 you know, a bill of materials,

00:21:42 how much time you put into that and sell it as a crate,

00:21:45 you know?

00:21:46 And those were failures too,

00:21:48 'cause for some reason I thought like,

00:21:50 I could get all this stuff for really cheap

00:21:51 and do it really a lot faster than.

00:21:53 (laughing)

00:21:55 Do you know, you guys know Keith Eichert?

00:21:59 - Ah, Keith Eichert, yes, I've met Keith Eichert.

00:22:01 - Okay, so that is a funny story behind that

00:22:04 because my first PRI show, I'm in Indianapolis,

00:22:08 I had brought five motors, we got these engines on a crate,

00:22:11 we made like these big price tags that we hung on the motor.

00:22:15 And I had a supercharged three to three small block,

00:22:20 like 89.95, like what the, I can't even think,

00:22:25 I was so crazy that I was selling stuff like this.

00:22:28 Right next to me was Keith Eichert,

00:22:31 like calling PRI saying, "Move me from this numb nuts."

00:22:35 'Cause he had a blown big block for 89,000 right next to me.

00:22:39 (laughing)

00:22:41 - Move me from this numb nuts.

00:22:44 This guy's gonna sink us all.

00:22:46 - Exactly, exactly.

00:22:48 So yeah, I mean, it's like 28 years,

00:22:53 I think going on 28 years, it's nuts, you know?

00:22:56 It's like time flies, you know?

00:22:59 - One of the things that I really wanna get into about

00:23:02 is the fact that you may be ahead of anybody else

00:23:05 in the business that you're in, recognize the value of,

00:23:08 before it was even really social media, it was social media.

00:23:11 You had NRE TV back before anybody was doing anything

00:23:14 like this with video.

00:23:16 So one, what made you look around and go,

00:23:19 "Okay, this is something we need to do."

00:23:20 And then two, it became wildly successful

00:23:22 and it still translates today.

00:23:23 Your presence on YouTube and across social is huge.

00:23:26 So thank you for the business that you're in.

00:23:28 - Right, yeah.

00:23:29 So probably the biggest eye-opener was there was a blue

00:23:34 Pontiac, well, first, my really good friend, Mike Artman.

00:23:40 - Mike Artman, great guy.

00:23:41 - Okay, Mike Artman, he is so talented

00:23:45 that I try to tell him how talented he is all the time.

00:23:47 And he's like, "Eh," he doesn't realize how badass he is.

00:23:51 And he had a guy, Ron Rotto, working for him.

00:23:54 Ron Rotto, who I'm still really good friends with today.

00:23:56 So he made me a website.

00:23:58 It was like Flash, back then that was-

00:24:01 - I remember, yeah, yeah, yeah, animation.

00:24:03 - Yeah, and you'd click into the site

00:24:04 and it had him going like, "Bah, bah."

00:24:07 This is new stuff, right?

00:24:09 This is like, at any rate, he did this site

00:24:11 that was just like, nobody else had something like this.

00:24:16 And then we had downloadable, we started filming videos

00:24:21 that you could have, and so you wanted to see

00:24:24 this engine package, I had a video of it.

00:24:26 And so that was a way to help me sell

00:24:30 the stuff that we did.

00:24:31 But then we had a video released

00:24:35 on what was called Streetfire.net.

00:24:38 - Streetfire.net, for those of you that are not old

00:24:40 like the three of us, before YouTube really became YouTube,

00:24:44 Streetfire.net was where car videos lived.

00:24:46 That was where you went to watch stuff.

00:24:48 - Yeah, so I remember walking into this place

00:24:51 called Plumbing City, and I didn't even release it.

00:24:55 Somebody took it off my website, the download,

00:24:59 'cause they owned it at that time.

00:25:00 And then they put it on Streetfire,

00:25:03 and this guy's like, "You're the guy from Streetfire.

00:25:06 "You're the guy from Streetfire, oh my God,

00:25:08 "what's going on?"

00:25:08 I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

00:25:10 And that week, it must have been 10 people came up to me

00:25:14 and were talking to me about this video.

00:25:16 I'm like, "What the hell?"

00:25:16 Look, it had over a million views immediately.

00:25:21 And my dad, lucky that I, my dad, I don't know,

00:25:27 he just, I wouldn't have my company the way it is

00:25:32 without my dad, 'cause my dad cut all these crappy videos

00:25:37 that I would hand.

00:25:39 We had the worst cameras in the world,

00:25:40 and we would just, I would just talk around and whatever,

00:25:43 and then he would cut it, and for whatever reason,

00:25:46 he liked porn music or something,

00:25:47 and he would mix everything with his own version

00:25:51 of porn music, and that's what became NRETV.

00:25:56 And so he just started cutting each one of these videos,

00:26:01 and that, I used to pay $3,000 a month with,

00:26:05 well, it wasn't Prime Media at the time,

00:26:08 I don't even know whatever it was.

00:26:10 You'd buy an ad in Car Craft, and then you'd be like,

00:26:12 "Oh, I can afford a black and white little ace ad."

00:26:16 - Right, it's not bad. - It does nothing.

00:26:18 And then after I saw how much that did

00:26:22 versus what you paid for an ad, I was like,

00:26:26 "This is crazy, I'll put the extra time,

00:26:29 "I'll film these things, and we'll put 'em up."

00:26:32 And that became a 24-hour salesman.

00:26:33 And that almost made us recession-proof,

00:26:38 because in '08 when everything went to shit,

00:26:44 like, Australia went crazy.

00:26:47 I might as well have lived in Australia,

00:26:49 'cause every engine was Australian.

00:26:50 And then Australia went to shit,

00:26:53 and then it was Scandinavia.

00:26:54 Like, it was like, so wherever the dollar was

00:26:58 rotating around decent, and that was--

00:27:01 - But because of the reach of those videos,

00:27:02 they would've never found you.

00:27:03 - Never, never, yeah.

00:27:04 Our international audience, and it was awesome.

00:27:08 - Yeah, I remember the first time I met you

00:27:10 was on Road Thrash, there was that cop,

00:27:13 the issue of Hot Rod, where Rob Kahn put it together.

00:27:15 We went out there with like, this was in probably '07,

00:27:19 '08, something like that.

00:27:19 It was like a bone stock '69 GTO, the F-Bomb was out there.

00:27:23 There was this wide range of cars,

00:27:25 and we drove 'em around all day,

00:27:26 and everybody rotated through.

00:27:27 And I remember driving the F-Bomb,

00:27:29 and the guys would get in this thing,

00:27:32 and they had a trans brake, and they put it in reverse,

00:27:34 and they couldn't get it to back up.

00:27:35 - Marlin.

00:27:36 - Yeah, Marlin Davis, a couple of the guys

00:27:38 were not getting that.

00:27:40 I got to drive it after lunch, and we got in,

00:27:42 and we were putting our seat belts on,

00:27:43 and he's like, "Well, it has a trans brake."

00:27:45 I'm like, "So I hit the button when I put it in reverse?"

00:27:46 He's like, "Yeah."

00:27:47 He's like, "You're the first guy."

00:27:48 So I felt cool.

00:27:49 (laughing)

00:27:49 The one time in my fricking life, I felt cool.

00:27:50 - That's good.

00:27:51 (laughing)

00:27:52 - Yeah, but you guys were, I remember you were filming there.

00:27:54 I mean, you guys had your video cameras out there,

00:27:56 and I thought to myself, geez, okay, this is,

00:27:58 I had been watching the videos,

00:27:59 but then it was such a foreign thing at the time

00:28:01 to not, if you're gonna film something back then,

00:28:03 it was like, you needed the whole crew,

00:28:05 and you needed everything.

00:28:06 And it was just such a shotgun deal you guys did.

00:28:07 It was so successful.

00:28:08 - Yeah, yeah, actually,

00:28:10 we're gonna start the YouTube channel again.

00:28:12 I haven't been, it's been years and years.

00:28:14 We actually had, like, we had,

00:28:19 I think Kyle released this video of Maximus,

00:28:22 and I had no windshield in it,

00:28:23 and we were doing 100 mile an hour burnouts in it,

00:28:27 and the police didn't like that.

00:28:29 (laughing)

00:28:30 - You got a phone call?

00:28:31 - They got a visit.

00:28:32 - Oh, yeah, wow.

00:28:33 - So, at any rate, and we filmed a TV show

00:28:38 that never went anywhere for like three years,

00:28:41 so I kind of stopped all the YouTube, but--

00:28:45 - And since you brought us there,

00:28:47 I wanna talk about that,

00:28:47 because that turned into kind of physically

00:28:51 a disaster for you, right?

00:28:52 You got hurt.

00:28:53 And so let's talk about the genesis of that show,

00:28:55 and then ultimately, not to bring up a bad memory,

00:28:58 but what happened?

00:28:59 - Yeah, so we filmed this show,

00:29:02 I mean, the name of it, I don't know what it is now.

00:29:05 At the time, it was Driven.

00:29:07 So one of my, like, the best customer I ever had,

00:29:12 this guy, Matt Swanson, like, was around the shop,

00:29:16 and he saw everything that was happening,

00:29:19 and he was like, "We gotta turn this into something,

00:29:22 "you know, 'cause you're doing stuff that's just,"

00:29:25 everybody thinks that we're just an engine builder,

00:29:27 but like, we had like 25 full car builds going at once.

00:29:31 You know, it was crazy.

00:29:32 When we're doing, you know, aluminum 3D printing,

00:29:35 full CNC, all the CAD design of,

00:29:38 we're making frames in-house, it's crazy, you know?

00:29:41 So he's like, "We gotta do something with this."

00:29:44 And so I met up with this guy, Michael George,

00:29:48 who is a producer, and then we decided

00:29:50 to make an automotive show not based on, like, deadlines,

00:29:54 or drama. - We're gonna lose the shop.

00:29:56 - Yeah, yeah.

00:29:57 So just on craftsmanship, and then the story

00:30:00 of like, the owner and why he did it and everything,

00:30:02 and it's probably the best automotive show I've ever seen.

00:30:07 Like, they came in and Matt, if you know my,

00:30:11 this guy Matt, he does not mess around.

00:30:13 Like, if he's gonna do something, he does it all the way.

00:30:16 So they brought in a crew, and everything was filmed

00:30:21 on what these cameras called a RED.

00:30:23 - Oh, RED. - Ultra Prime.

00:30:25 And then they lit the shop, we have like 70 foot lights,

00:30:29 so you turn the house lights off,

00:30:31 and everything's lit with a certain K,

00:30:33 you know, I think, let's call it 5K,

00:30:35 but they had a special look that they were going for.

00:30:38 And I mean, like, when we're at, give you an idea,

00:30:42 we went, I put a twin turbo 632 in a fucking airboat.

00:30:47 And then we flew to Homosassa and got in this thing,

00:30:54 and me and my buddy Scott and this nutbag Nevin

00:30:58 were driving this thing, like he was dipping his neck

00:31:02 full of this bacteria, freezing cold, fricking water.

00:31:06 And we got a helicopter with an arm, not an arm,

00:31:12 it's like, it had like this crazy carbon fiber camera

00:31:17 attached to the nose of the helicopter following us.

00:31:20 - My gosh. - Like, I had a guy

00:31:22 who won the Canadian lottery,

00:31:25 and one of the biggest things on the internet,

00:31:30 is when I win the lottery, I'm going to Nelson, you know?

00:31:38 So he won the lottery, I didn't know this,

00:31:41 and he started talking about these pretty elaborate builds,

00:31:44 and then he's like, I'm gonna come down tomorrow,

00:31:46 I'm like, you're gonna come down tomorrow?

00:31:47 You know, okay, whatever, you know?

00:31:49 And like, you get weird calls like that all the time,

00:31:52 you're like, what a click, you know?

00:31:53 And he showed up the next day,

00:31:56 and he saw this like twin turbo Camaro that we had done,

00:31:59 and he was with his dad, and his dad's like,

00:32:01 man, I love this car, you know?

00:32:03 And he's like, happy Father's Day.

00:32:05 So he bought a car, or got a car build,

00:32:09 and then got his dad a car build.

00:32:11 So for Father's Day the next year,

00:32:14 we built this twin turbo fifth gen,

00:32:17 he bought a P1 by the way, and then he shipped the P1

00:32:21 down to Famoso, Freiburger and Dulcich were there.

00:32:25 - Okay, okay.

00:32:26 - Yeah, I think, yeah, they were there.

00:32:27 Freiburger ended up driving with no race suit.

00:32:30 - Really?

00:32:31 - Yeah, we didn't have a race, he just showed up,

00:32:32 like, I'm not gonna drive, I'm like, dude,

00:32:33 I don't want the responsibility, you know?

00:32:36 And, Bob, if you're gonna let me, I'll do it.

00:32:38 And then he's like, see, he has like the underpant,

00:32:41 the--

00:32:42 - Nomex or whatever?

00:32:43 - The Nomex, so he drove a Nomex, you know?

00:32:45 Typical Freiburger.

00:32:47 - That's what I'm talking about,

00:32:48 wash my eyeballs out with bleach.

00:32:50 (laughing)

00:32:52 - His dad took delivery of this car for the first time,

00:32:58 got in it and raced his son's P1 at Famoso

00:33:02 and smoked the P1, you know?

00:33:04 It was so awesome.

00:33:05 - Wow, that's cool.

00:33:05 - Yeah, and Freiburger took the F-bomb and smoked the P1 too.

00:33:09 (laughing)

00:33:09 - Even better.

00:33:10 - Freiburger, crazy man, he got like all the way

00:33:14 in the middle lane and didn't let out,

00:33:16 and was like in the McLaren and got back in it

00:33:19 and ran this horrible like nine second time,

00:33:21 but didn't give a shit anymore.

00:33:24 - That's cool.

00:33:26 - At any rate, we did all these crazy things,

00:33:28 even, and we went to Iceland and I had a customer

00:33:31 who holds a record for driving on water.

00:33:34 So he goes like 60 miles an hour on water

00:33:37 and he did it for like a mile or something,

00:33:39 so we're like, oh, cool.

00:33:41 And it's a Formula off-road race car.

00:33:42 These things are, you don't wanna be in 'em.

00:33:45 - It's like a, and for those who've never seen one,

00:33:47 like think of a, think kinda like a rock buggy,

00:33:50 but with way more power maybe, way more articulation.

00:33:53 I mean, how would you best explain

00:33:54 to somebody who's never seen one?

00:33:56 - Sketchy, you know?

00:33:58 Like, obviously, I don't wanna like,

00:34:02 you know, piss anybody off.

00:34:05 - No, but it's an off-the-wall thing.

00:34:07 - It's a nutty, nutty thing.

00:34:08 It's like, you know, this thing had a 1500 horse

00:34:12 twin turbo Ford in it with paddles and like, you know,

00:34:16 and when we got there, like, it wasn't even like,

00:34:19 I'm like, I love this guy above you,

00:34:20 but I was gonna kill him when we got there.

00:34:22 'Cause he showed me a picture of like,

00:34:24 at the, what is that in England?

00:34:27 The Goodwood or?

00:34:28 - Oh, Goodwood.

00:34:29 - Goodwood?

00:34:29 - Yeah, Goodwood Festival.

00:34:30 - He showed me a picture of a Goodwood like flying

00:34:32 like two weeks earlier.

00:34:33 I'm like, oh, this thing's ready to go, you know?

00:34:35 We're gonna fly out there

00:34:36 and break some records in the water, you know?

00:34:37 I get there and like half the car's not built, you know?

00:34:40 So we built, and you know, Iceland, there's no,

00:34:44 it's night, it's like the sun never,

00:34:46 like we worked like for four days.

00:34:50 I don't even think I slept maybe four hours

00:34:52 putting this thing together.

00:34:53 'Cause we had talk about like a bill.

00:34:55 We had flown everybody to Iceland

00:34:57 and we had all this crazy crew and everything.

00:35:01 And at any rate, we, you know,

00:35:03 had like this 62 shot list that we were gonna do.

00:35:07 And the first shot was,

00:35:11 we're gonna go off 50 foot cliff, you know?

00:35:14 And I'm like, why the hell do we have,

00:35:16 like we're gonna go off a 50 foot cliff?

00:35:18 Like, I'm not even like a gnarly off-roader.

00:35:21 We're gonna go 50 feet off a cliff, you know?

00:35:24 Like, and so I remember sitting there with Bubby

00:35:28 and I'm like, so you do this all the time?

00:35:31 And he's like, eh, it's no problem, whatever.

00:35:32 And then this girl, Elva, who was with him was like,

00:35:35 we've never done it.

00:35:36 I'm like, you never, what are you talking about, man?

00:35:40 Like we're going off this thing.

00:35:41 You haven't even done it before.

00:35:42 It's no problem, you know?

00:35:43 No problem.

00:35:44 So anyway, we ended up going off this cliff

00:35:48 and he knew what he was doing.

00:35:49 Like we basically went vertical

00:35:52 and somehow he throttled it to kind of kick the nose

00:35:54 at the bottom and doesn't endo.

00:35:57 And like, after a little while, I was like,

00:35:59 he knows what he's doing, you know?

00:36:02 Yeah, you get comfortable.

00:36:02 All right, this guy's got it, yeah.

00:36:04 But he, you get a camera on somebody

00:36:07 and they don't act like they normally do.

00:36:10 So we had a, I guess you could call it,

00:36:13 it's not a fire road, but we had this like a fire road

00:36:15 and then there was like a cliff on the right hand side.

00:36:19 And then we were following it with another Icelandic car

00:36:23 that by the way, you know, like I get so enamored

00:36:25 with all the film stuff, but they had this,

00:36:28 'cause it was raining, they had this thing,

00:36:31 it spins at 10,000 RPM in front of the camera

00:36:34 to deflect the rain.

00:36:35 Oh, no kidding. Get out of here.

00:36:36 Wow. It's crazy.

00:36:37 That is cool. That existed.

00:36:38 It's crazy. Yeah, I'll have to look that up.

00:36:39 So it's like raining, but it's totally clear, you know?

00:36:41 Wow.

00:36:42 At any rate, he got it in full boost in first,

00:36:46 there's a cliff right here and like regain composure.

00:36:51 I was like, oh, like that was almost death.

00:36:55 Puts it in second, clicks it in full boost again, you know?

00:36:58 And then so he tried to regain it

00:37:02 and then we were going like straight head on

00:37:05 into a six foot volcanic rock.

00:37:07 I'm like, oh, cool, we're gonna hit this rock.

00:37:11 Then we're gonna fly off the cliff, you know?

00:37:13 And so he managed not head on in the rock,

00:37:16 but my rear tire hit the rock

00:37:19 and that control arm was basically connected to my seat.

00:37:22 You know? Yeah.

00:37:23 And so I'm pretty sure I broke my back

00:37:27 right when we hit the rock.

00:37:28 Oh my God.

00:37:29 But then we flew off the cliff after that, you know?

00:37:32 And so I ended up just,

00:37:35 I was in a body cast for six months, you know?

00:37:40 Wow.

00:37:41 In the moment, you know,

00:37:43 'cause people that have had that type of a crash,

00:37:45 they say it just doesn't feel like it's ever gonna stop.

00:37:47 The first thing you think is, can I move my feet?

00:37:53 'Cause I knew it was serious.

00:37:54 Like the concussion when we hit the rock with the rear tire

00:37:59 was like nothing I've ever felt.

00:38:01 I've been in, I hit a freeway divider at like 80

00:38:06 and that was nothing compared to this concussion.

00:38:09 You know? Wow.

00:38:10 Matter of fact, when we hit that freeway divider,

00:38:11 my friends, you know the Mustangs,

00:38:13 how they have the hard back seat?

00:38:15 His face print was in the back of that, you know?

00:38:18 And I had the hugest bruise from that double seatbelt.

00:38:23 You know the Mustang where you got the one seatbelt

00:38:25 and then you got the other seatbelt?

00:38:26 I had like that raddest black and blue bruise

00:38:29 'cause when I hit, his face just ate the back of the seat

00:38:32 and pushed me even further, you know?

00:38:34 Oh my God.

00:38:37 But that was nothing.

00:38:38 That was nothing compared to this.

00:38:40 So when I hit, I was like, oh, I'm in trouble.

00:38:42 And then we flew off and then I'm like,

00:38:45 let me try to get out of my seat.

00:38:46 And I was like, there's no, you know?

00:38:48 And then I remember we're in the middle of nowhere

00:38:52 in Iceland, in like lava rock.

00:38:55 So who's gonna get me?

00:38:56 They didn't have a copter.

00:38:58 So they had a four by four ambulance, right?

00:39:01 So they came out and I'm like,

00:39:02 when are you gonna give me the morphine?

00:39:05 He's like, we gave it to you 15 minutes ago.

00:39:06 Oh God.

00:39:08 And that was an interesting experience.

00:39:11 Yeah, they gave me something called ketamine.

00:39:13 And like--

00:39:14 Force tranquilizer.

00:39:15 Yeah, everybody said I was asleep, but I was awake.

00:39:17 I was just like concentrating on a Kleenex box going like,

00:39:20 it's okay, okay, stop spinning.

00:39:21 You know, like it was crazy, you know?

00:39:24 But that's--

00:39:26 Were you in a hospital then in Iceland for a while?

00:39:28 I went to Reykjavik for 11 days.

00:39:31 And then they said I was fit to fly.

00:39:35 And they're like, you broke your back,

00:39:36 but you know, rib cage is supporting it.

00:39:38 So you're good.

00:39:38 Are you good?

00:39:39 Yeah, you're good.

00:39:40 Get out of here.

00:39:41 I remember on the flight,

00:39:43 I was like biting a wallet on the flight,

00:39:45 like almost the entire flight.

00:39:47 And then we had a walk,

00:39:48 'cause I couldn't sit in the chair.

00:39:50 Like they were trying to wheel me.

00:39:51 I'm like, I cannot sit in this chair.

00:39:53 And then I ended up walking.

00:39:55 By the time I got to Los Angeles,

00:39:56 I was like sweating.

00:39:58 I was like pale.

00:39:59 I was just pure, it was insane, you know?

00:40:02 And I don't really like drugs.

00:40:03 So Michael George, my producer,

00:40:05 is like, just take the damn,

00:40:06 I'm not gonna take more than I need, you know?

00:40:09 It was just, it was a weird situation.

00:40:12 But I ended up getting another evaluation over here.

00:40:16 And after I took the MRI,

00:40:19 I was driving home and a doctor called me.

00:40:20 He's like, you have to turn around.

00:40:25 I want you to turn around very slowly.

00:40:27 And when you get, if you're gonna walk,

00:40:30 you need to walk very slowly back to the, you need to.

00:40:33 And so basically, it had impinged my spinal cord.

00:40:38 And I was about to be a paraplegic, so it was nuts.

00:40:43 - So it was the high up injury.

00:40:44 - Yeah, yeah.

00:40:45 So it was a life changer.

00:40:50 So now it's like, I won't even race.

00:40:53 Like I screw around in a car,

00:40:55 but if it's gonna be something serious,

00:40:56 it's like, you watch your wife take all the load

00:40:59 for six months and your kids,

00:41:01 and you realize I might not be able to do any of this stuff.

00:41:03 It's like, puts a different damper on things, you know?

00:41:08 - But that's when you ended up in the body cast

00:41:11 and the six months recovery for that.

00:41:14 And then, like, what was the recuperation after that?

00:41:16 Then was there a lot of rehab?

00:41:18 - I'm super lucky.

00:41:19 Like, I'm like pain-free, you know?

00:41:22 - Yeah, that's great.

00:41:23 - Like back injury sometimes, just, yeah.

00:41:25 - I mean, obviously there's always gonna be

00:41:28 a little bit of something from that, you know?

00:41:31 Like, you kind of move wrong, and since it's already,

00:41:35 like I'm a hunch, so since it's already,

00:41:37 the ligaments or whatever are stretched.

00:41:41 So like, if you kind of,

00:41:43 I remember I was torquing an LS crank bolt, 240 pounds.

00:41:47 I was like, "Ugh!"

00:41:48 It was like two months of not moving right for that.

00:41:51 (both laughing)

00:41:54 So I gotta kind of pick and choose what I'm doing,

00:41:57 but really like the most lucky, grateful dude ever

00:42:02 after something like that, you know?

00:42:03 - That's crazy.

00:42:04 So there, once this kind of stuff happens to people,

00:42:06 obviously you're incapacitated to a degree.

00:42:08 So the only thing you got to do is sit around and think.

00:42:11 So if anything, what changed in the business

00:42:14 or what did you think about, analyze, come back and change?

00:42:17 Six months away from being able to do anything,

00:42:19 what did you kind of use that for moving forward?

00:42:21 - I think the one thing you realize is that,

00:42:25 and even like, I've been through some stuff recently,

00:42:30 and like finally it's been drilled into my head,

00:42:32 but time moves fast, and I've got kids,

00:42:37 and the one thing you really realize is that this business,

00:42:40 it'll never, like I think this guy,

00:42:45 Jay, I was talking to the other day,

00:42:46 he says like, "You can feed it

00:42:48 and it will never stop eating."

00:42:50 I could be in that shop 24 hours a day

00:42:53 and always have something to do,

00:42:55 and since I'm excited about it, my mind doesn't stop.

00:42:59 And so probably the biggest thing for me

00:43:04 is slowing down enough to where I'm doing stuff with my kids,

00:43:09 me and my wife are doing things,

00:43:12 and before it was like, I'm doing this for them,

00:43:17 but really it was for me, and I was grinding,

00:43:20 and I missed a lot.

00:43:22 I still was a good dad,

00:43:24 and we did stuff on the weekends and stuff,

00:43:26 but man, if I had a chance to go back, I would do more.

00:43:31 So now I'm lucky enough to have realized this.

00:43:35 I got my one boy, he's 11,

00:43:37 like where I taught him how to like,

00:43:39 he's kind of interested,

00:43:42 so I'm like, "All right,

00:43:43 well, we're gonna build a go-kart."

00:43:44 And he's like, "Okay, I want this one."

00:43:46 I'm like, "No, no, we're not buying a go-kart.

00:43:49 You're going to build it from scratch."

00:43:52 So he's used all the machines, cut all the tubing,

00:43:55 he's MIG welded it all together,

00:43:57 so this thing is gonna be a little Jeep

00:44:00 and he's gonna have made it.

00:44:02 So that right now, if anything happened with that,

00:44:08 that was like a big deal.

00:44:10 As far as on the business end,

00:44:12 when that had happened,

00:44:16 like a bunch of things had happened.

00:44:20 I'm not even gonna go into the drama

00:44:21 of like some of the employees and stuff,

00:44:24 but I never had sold my turbochargers to the public.

00:44:29 And I'm like, "Man, I'm gonna lose the business.

00:44:31 Like I'm sitting here, you know,

00:44:33 and I'm like a terrible micromanager, right?

00:44:36 So I gotta have my hands in everything, you know?"

00:44:39 And that's one thing I'm learning more

00:44:43 is to give some more responsibilities to others.

00:44:45 But at the time I'm like, "Well, I could sell these turbos

00:44:49 and I could possibly get by with selling the turbos."

00:44:56 And so my fabricator made me this like a screen

00:45:00 that if you ever go into my office,

00:45:01 it's still in my office,

00:45:02 but it can rotate like this and the list.

00:45:05 So I was laying on the couch in a body cast

00:45:07 with a computer vertically.

00:45:10 And so I could take all the phone calls

00:45:12 and make sales, do like PayPal invoices

00:45:15 and everything in my freaking body cast, you know?

00:45:17 - Wow.

00:45:18 (laughing)

00:45:21 - So at any rate, we sold like, you know,

00:45:24 I don't know, three or $400,000 in turbos and that.

00:45:27 - And we're talking about the mirror image turbos.

00:45:28 - Yeah, yeah.

00:45:29 So like we patented those turbos and, you know,

00:45:33 you know, they're basically in hot rod.

00:45:36 Nobody ever had mirror image.

00:45:37 Sure, you had a reverse rotator for like Mitsubishi

00:45:39 and (beep) but nobody did it, you know?

00:45:41 That was like Freiburger's car and a Pontiac.

00:45:43 For me building all those systems,

00:45:45 I'd have to try to put them at 45 degrees

00:45:47 or snail them in the front.

00:45:48 I hated that un-symmetry look.

00:45:51 So, you know, we started making them,

00:45:54 the first ones we started making out of solid Inconel,

00:45:56 you know, like it'd take 14 hours to cut the turbine.

00:45:58 - Solid Inconel?

00:45:59 - Yeah, like with a turbine.

00:46:00 - Yikes, yeah, yeah, but just the price of that.

00:46:02 - It was like three cutters and 14 hours to do the turbine,

00:46:05 you know, but I'm like, "I don't care, man.

00:46:06 "It's a mirror image, you know, it's cool."

00:46:08 Somebody's like, "How much for that?"

00:46:09 I said, "25 grand for the set, man."

00:46:11 They're like, "What are you talking about?"

00:46:13 (laughing)

00:46:15 - Like, "No, that guy's big block's 89 grand."

00:46:17 (laughing)

00:46:19 I'm just trying to keep up.

00:46:20 - Yeah, but we did, so I ended up partnering up

00:46:23 with Brad over at Turbonetics and, you know,

00:46:26 we had our own designs and stuff

00:46:28 and then it became like available to the masses, you know?

00:46:32 And I used to sell them at $4,000 a set

00:46:34 and then I'd work to deal with Brad

00:46:36 if we bought in quantity or whatever.

00:46:38 And I was like, you know, I won't make much on a turbo

00:46:40 when I had broke my back,

00:46:42 but I'll sell them for $2,000 a set.

00:46:44 Let's see what happens.

00:46:45 And maybe we make, you know, 10% versus like a big amount.

00:46:50 And we went from selling like, you know,

00:46:53 40 sets a year to like insane amount, you know, at the time.

00:46:57 Now we're back to down selling,

00:46:58 but basically nothing just 'cause I've kind of,

00:47:00 I don't know, my mind's elsewhere,

00:47:01 which I need to turn that back on again.

00:47:03 But at any rate, it was, that kind of taught me like,

00:47:08 okay, well, if you can't be at the shop,

00:47:12 what, how does the business run?

00:47:15 So then we came up with,

00:47:17 so I had 141 engine combinations that we were selling.

00:47:21 Like how the hell do you run a business

00:47:23 with 141 engine combinations, you know?

00:47:25 - Wow.

00:47:26 - So we changed that to, you know,

00:47:29 you know, now if you look at my offerings,

00:47:32 so we've got a bunch of LS stuff,

00:47:33 but if you look at my Ford offerings, I have two,

00:47:36 you know, if you look at my Chrysler options,

00:47:37 I have three, I think, you know,

00:47:39 so we shrunk it down to, I don't even know anymore,

00:47:42 let's call it 30 or something.

00:47:44 And then we based everything on one size motor.

00:47:47 So like, if you want an LS, you're getting a 427 from me,

00:47:50 rather than I could do a 388, I can do a 360,

00:47:53 I can do a 454, I can do this, you know?

00:47:56 And especially during COVID, it was like, you know,

00:47:59 and even still right now,

00:48:00 like nobody stocks anything anymore.

00:48:02 Like crankshaft manufacturers,

00:48:04 I don't know if you guys are, you know,

00:48:07 going through anything like this, but it's like,

00:48:08 oh yeah, I'll take a good crank,

00:48:10 it'll be 10 months, you know?

00:48:12 - 10 months?

00:48:13 - Yeah, I heard about it from a lot of builders.

00:48:15 It's crazy.

00:48:16 - So, and then the customers call, how long?

00:48:19 You're like a year, they're like a year?

00:48:20 It's like, what's it gonna take 10 months to get the parts?

00:48:22 You know, so now we buy in quantity, you know,

00:48:25 really good blocks, really good cranks in quantity,

00:48:28 and try to, we're still behind,

00:48:31 'cause we still can't keep up,

00:48:33 but at least it makes it a hundred times easier.

00:48:35 So like last year, and this sounds like really small

00:48:39 potatoes, but last year we shipped like, I don't know,

00:48:43 50 some odd motors, but those were mostly customs.

00:48:47 This year we're gonna ship like 120 engines,

00:48:51 and like it's over double, you know, the engines.

00:48:58 And the engine packages are so much fricking better.

00:49:01 Like I got Billy doing spin-tron tests on camshafts.

00:49:05 We're doing like, you know, we're probably on our 400th

00:49:09 twin turbo pro-tuning series right now.

00:49:11 So I was just talking to Brian at CP about doing like

00:49:15 abradable coatings so we can start designing the skirts

00:49:17 exactly the way I want them, rather than you build it,

00:49:20 the guy runs it, and then we're off to another combination

00:49:23 with a different set of pistons, you know?

00:49:24 So even Airflow Research, like we just made a deal

00:49:28 with Airflow Research, we specify the CHE seat,

00:49:31 the CHE guide, the CHE retainer, the what valve job,

00:49:35 all this other stuff, so we're able to like,

00:49:37 when you're buying this package from me,

00:49:40 it is legit, you know, for the money.

00:49:43 Obviously I could build something even gnarlier

00:49:45 if you wanted to spend double, but a lot of people

00:49:48 aren't in that, you know.

00:49:49 - You do a lot of durability testing on those too.

00:49:52 I've seen your Instagram videos where you run those things

00:49:54 for like hours.

00:49:55 - Yeah, so like that, our Twin Turbo Pro Touring series,

00:49:59 when we developed it, I had like four or 500 pulls on it

00:50:02 before I okayed that the parts were okay, you know?

00:50:04 And that's all 1,000, 1,500 horsepower,

00:50:06 so you know, four or 500 pulls.

00:50:08 My dyno pulls are long.

00:50:11 I run them in like the slow setting,

00:50:13 so it's like 10 to 15 seconds, four or 500 times.

00:50:17 You can pretty get a good idea if this thing's

00:50:19 gonna take a (beep) or not, you know?

00:50:21 (laughing)

00:50:24 - So when you talked about shrinking the number

00:50:26 of combinations down, is it the idea that,

00:50:29 almost like going to McDonald's, right?

00:50:30 You're gonna order the number one through 10 meal

00:50:32 type of thing, but the idea that people now are swamped

00:50:35 with so much information from so many different sources,

00:50:38 the normal guy at home that wants to buy an engine

00:50:40 can drown in all that, right?

00:50:42 - Yeah, that and we are making more power than anybody.

00:50:47 Back in the day, it was like, "Give me 500 horse,

00:50:52 "got these Airflow 210s, I got a mechanical roller

00:50:57 "with Herbert lifters in this thing, man, it's nasty."

00:51:01 And they did, they sounded badass, but now,

00:51:04 I can literally give you a 1,000 horsepower engine,

00:51:08 you can drive it to Vegas, you can get on the freeway,

00:51:12 16 miles at a gallon probably, and never adjust the valves,

00:51:17 go up in elevation, it adjusts itself.

00:51:21 And it's stupid, and then if you've got a car that hooks,

00:51:24 for example, we have like, now this car isn't like,

00:51:29 so much of a street, even though he drives it on the street,

00:51:31 like one of our packages, it's like a mix between our hot,

00:51:36 it's like a hot rod series, so on the dyno,

00:51:39 a correlation horsepower to a quarter mile,

00:51:43 on my dyno, it made like 1,750 horsepower,

00:51:48 you can drive this thing, and look,

00:51:50 the valve springs are inch 280, right?

00:51:53 So it's got like 380 on the nose, like nothing,

00:51:57 hydraulic roller, and that car goes like 193 and a quarter.

00:52:00 - Wow.

00:52:01 - Okay, but I can go take that to Arizona if I want to,

00:52:06 and I could have the AC blasting with the tunes going on,

00:52:11 but that's obviously, if you're gonna get a car

00:52:13 to go that fast, it's a really set up car.

00:52:15 - Yeah, absolutely.

00:52:16 - Most of these guys, it's in a pro-touring car,

00:52:17 and you're burning tires at 200 miles an hour.

00:52:21 - Yeah, spring rate like a dump truck on the corner, yeah.

00:52:25 One of the things I think is interesting is,

00:52:27 to me, when you really came on the scene,

00:52:29 and people really started to understand

00:52:31 what you were doing, it was the horsepower numbers

00:52:33 that people were just blown away with,

00:52:34 but I think at some point, even you realized that,

00:52:37 "Okay, I have to keep topping myself to a degree,

00:52:41 "but just the horsepower number is not what you need

00:52:43 "to keep topping," so when did that transition happen?

00:52:46 Because to me, you could have got lost in that.

00:52:47 You could have just rode that right to the end.

00:52:49 "Oh, here's the 4,000 horsepower on the sixth,

00:52:51 "so what are we doing?"

00:52:52 - Yeah, I mean, we got a 700-inch semi-hemi Sunny's motors

00:52:57 with two 106s on it, but that's not really exciting me.

00:53:02 What excites me is I like driving.

00:53:06 Even driving here, in two-hour traffic,

00:53:09 I was listening to music, and sometimes those

00:53:12 are the best times, just chilling by yourself,

00:53:14 listening to music and driving.

00:53:15 So for me, now, we provide a package,

00:53:20 so you're gonna get headers, you're gonna get wiring,

00:53:24 you're gonna get it tuned, it's gonna fit your car.

00:53:27 So if you have an LS, I can pretty much fit this thing

00:53:30 in anything American muscle, name it,

00:53:33 and I've got a fixture for it.

00:53:35 We don't do the intercoolers anymore,

00:53:37 'cause that was like, "Oh, we fixture the intercooler,"

00:53:40 and be like, "Oh, I got a roaster shop chassis.

00:53:42 "Oh, I have an Art Morrison chassis.

00:53:43 "Oh, I have this."

00:53:44 You can't keep up with all those combos.

00:53:46 (laughing)

00:53:47 So I just say, "Go to Bell or go to whoever,

00:53:50 "and they'll make you that stuff."

00:53:51 But we have blower NA combos.

00:53:54 But all of that stuff is, I went,

00:53:58 instead of going higher, higher, higher horsepower,

00:54:00 I went better for the customer, better for the customer,

00:54:03 better for the customer, and that's what we're trying to do.

00:54:06 We still are, good luck, a year to get a motor from me.

00:54:12 But when you get it, it's complete, it's badass,

00:54:17 and it's a real street engine.

00:54:19 It's not bucking, you know, like,

00:54:22 you got a too little low speed in second

00:54:26 when you let the clutch out,

00:54:27 and you're like, almost, ah, ah, ah, ah, you know?

00:54:29 (laughing)

00:54:32 So yeah, no, it's great.

00:54:36 I still have to have those passion projects,

00:54:39 so we still have a lot of these crazy little builds

00:54:41 that we're doing, but I drove, somebody came by

00:54:45 just for like a, hey, could you, the idle was falling

00:54:48 too slow, and it was a stick car, can you come by,

00:54:51 and he bought one of our blower packages.

00:54:54 And you almost forget how gnarly these things are,

00:54:56 you know, I mean, I was just putting this thing around

00:54:59 like it's, like a great motor, you know,

00:55:02 and then you get in it, and you're like in third,

00:55:04 and you're just like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,

00:55:07 what, it's like electric torque, the Whipple stuff,

00:55:12 I mean, it's like, ka-bang, you know, it's crazy.

00:55:16 And the turbo torque is like, that's where the devil

00:55:20 and the angel have a conversation, you know,

00:55:22 you're like, this is the sickest thing ever,

00:55:25 and this guy's like, you're gonna die, let out of it,

00:55:29 let out of it already, but it just keeps pulling

00:55:31 and pulling and pulling and pulling,

00:55:32 you go another gear, it's pulling and pulling and pulling,

00:55:34 and you're like, okay, that's enough for me,

00:55:36 I'm past my limit, you know?

00:55:38 - Yeah.

00:55:39 Do you have a hard time, do the customers

00:55:43 having a hard time understanding,

00:55:45 like what you're talking about, here's a thousand horsepower

00:55:48 that you can drive anywhere, and they're like,

00:55:49 well, no, I need, 'cause, you know, a Hellcat

00:55:52 has 800 and whatever it is, I need more than that,

00:55:55 like, you know, this much more.

00:55:57 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, we get that all the time.

00:56:00 I think what I like to do now is like,

00:56:02 I think I like to think that we're artists.

00:56:07 So I like, like, I think I build functional mechanical art,

00:56:12 you know, so usually if you're coming to me,

00:56:15 you're coming to me not only because we make power

00:56:18 and it's pretty complete, but it also has a specific look

00:56:22 that we do, you know, and so, but yeah, it is,

00:56:29 for example, we built a twin turbo Chevelle for this guy,

00:56:33 right, and I told him, make 1800.

00:56:35 So on the dyno, I tugged it, it made 1600,

00:56:38 he says, "Tell me, make 1800."

00:56:39 I'm like, "I'll turn it up and make 1800," you know?

00:56:42 So we did, but I remembered that.

00:56:45 So when we got together, I put it in the car,

00:56:47 I had it set at 900, you know?

00:56:49 I got into third and he grabbed my hand,

00:56:51 he's like, "Dude, shut it down."

00:56:52 I'm like, "We're gonna turn it up to 1800."

00:56:54 - Yeah, yeah, we're not even halfway in yet.

00:56:55 - What are you talking about?

00:56:56 This is Pustefield right here, dude.

00:56:59 It's a whole different ball game.

00:57:01 1800 on a street is like, it's, it's,

00:57:04 there's one guy that actually, there's two guys,

00:57:10 but one guy is a VP of Shelby, Gary Patterson.

00:57:13 We built a twin turbo code red for him.

00:57:16 And that car was brutal.

00:57:17 It made 1160 to the tire.

00:57:19 It was like, they were gonna sell it as a package

00:57:21 before Carroll died, and I'm not gonna tell you

00:57:25 how fast we're going 'cause he's VP of Shelby,

00:57:27 but he would get into fifth and I'd be screaming at him.

00:57:32 And I was clipped out, man.

00:57:33 That dude, I didn't even know it was in the car.

00:57:35 He's just like, "Ahhh!"

00:57:37 On regular freeways, you know?

00:57:39 I'm like, "We don't have a, what are you doing?

00:57:41 "Get me out of this car, man."

00:57:44 And he's just like, it's like, he just clicked into heaven

00:57:47 when he got into fifth.

00:57:48 It's like the birds were singing, man.

00:57:50 (laughing)

00:57:51 And there's nothing, I literally was screaming at him.

00:57:55 He didn't hear me.

00:57:56 He was just in his little zone,

00:57:57 and I remember giving him the car.

00:57:59 He's like, "Well, I just had to make sure

00:58:01 "that it was good enough to drive back to Vegas."

00:58:02 And then he showed me an obscene number

00:58:06 of how fast he was going to Vegas.

00:58:08 Wow.

00:58:09 So that guy probably wasn't scared of me.

00:58:12 But most people--

00:58:13 - Yeah, most people have no conception.

00:58:14 - Yeah, at all.

00:58:16 - So we have to talk about F-Bomb

00:58:17 'cause this, after all, is a Hot Rod podcast.

00:58:19 And how important was that car for you?

00:58:22 And by the time you built that car,

00:58:24 you'd been in business forever.

00:58:25 You'd established yourself.

00:58:26 But what, if anything, did F-Bomb do for your business

00:58:29 or for your image or any of that stuff?

00:58:31 - I mean, Freiburger, I was like the plagued Freiburger.

00:58:36 (laughing)

00:58:40 I was that upcoming guy that saw him at SEMA.

00:58:43 I'm like, "There's Freiburger."

00:58:44 (laughing)

00:58:45 And then he'd be like, "Oh, (beep) Nelson's

00:58:47 "coming down the aisle."

00:58:49 (laughing)

00:58:53 And I twisted him so bad

00:58:55 'cause what we were doing with Turbo Stuff,

00:58:58 I wanted the world to know

00:59:00 what we were doing with Turbo Stuff.

00:59:01 There was guys like Moran was killing it.

00:59:04 And then there was, I forgot his name,

00:59:07 really good guy in Detroit used to do Stelo's stuff.

00:59:13 God, I can't believe, Wheel to Wheel.

00:59:17 - Oh, Wheel to Wheel, Kurt Urban?

00:59:18 - Kurt Urban.

00:59:19 He was doing badass shit.

00:59:21 - Yeah, he's down at Skag and Dickey now.

00:59:22 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:23 So he was doing badass stuff.

00:59:24 And we were doing badass stuff.

00:59:27 So I wanted, we were doing the Turbo Stuff.

00:59:30 Moran was doing crazy drag race Turbo Stuff.

00:59:34 And I was doing street Turbo Stuff.

00:59:36 And I wanted to bring that to be seen.

00:59:40 And Freiburger, I was like, "Man, let's do something.

00:59:44 "Let's do something, let's do something, do something."

00:59:45 Finally, he knew he wasn't shaking me.

00:59:48 I think it had been two years.

00:59:50 - Really, just persistent, busted his ass.

00:59:53 - I mean, emails, like, "Look at this video.

00:59:55 "Look what we're doing, we're doing, we're doing."

00:59:57 - "Love me."

00:59:57 - "Oh, no, Nelson again."

00:59:59 - "Love me, David, love me."

01:00:00 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:01 And finally, he's like, "All right, all right."

01:00:03 And they had this motor, it was called the Anvil.

01:00:05 - Yeah.

01:00:06 - Okay, so the Anvil had been through all these

01:00:08 reiterations of, you know, with tunnel ram,

01:00:11 whatever it was, I forgot how many iterations

01:00:13 they did with the Anvil.

01:00:15 So he's like, "Look, I got this Anvil motor.

01:00:17 "Could you do something with this?"

01:00:18 And so I'm like, "Sure, let's turn turbo."

01:00:20 And he's like, "That's gonna be it."

01:00:21 And so we started building the twin turbo for the Anvil.

01:00:25 And I called him, I said, "You know, we really,

01:00:28 "probably be a good idea that we test fit this in a car

01:00:31 "if you wanna put it in something."

01:00:32 And he's like, "I got this junk Camaro."

01:00:36 You know?

01:00:36 I'm like, "Would you think you'd wanna put that in there?"

01:00:41 And he's like, "Sure, we'll throw it in the Camaro

01:00:43 "at some point, you know, but you know,

01:00:44 "Friburg's got like 7,000 cars, you know,

01:00:47 "and none of them run, you know?"

01:00:49 - Right, right.

01:00:50 - So I was like, "Okay, cool."

01:00:52 So I called my tow guy, Mario,

01:00:54 and Friburg didn't even know.

01:00:55 I'm like, "Go steal this car, you know,

01:00:58 "like go take this car."

01:01:00 So we took the car out of Friburg's,

01:01:02 and I got pictures of this thing, it was junk, you know?

01:01:05 And we took it, I didn't tell him,

01:01:07 we blasted the body, did everything.

01:01:09 I was like, "We're building this car," you know?

01:01:11 - Yeah.

01:01:12 - And so he came by and I'm like, "Dude, check it out, man."

01:01:16 He's like, "Dude, what are you doing, man?

01:01:18 "I thought you were gonna fit headers."

01:01:20 But then he got jazzed about it, you know?

01:01:22 And then I just drained his bank account, you know?

01:01:24 (laughing)

01:01:26 - He tapped in.

01:01:27 - Yeah.

01:01:28 And then we built F-MOM, and Friburg,

01:01:30 like, you know, Friburg is somebody

01:01:33 that's special to me in the industry,

01:01:35 because a lot of times you can put out a lot of effort

01:01:38 and then not get a lot of return.

01:01:42 But I don't know how he manages it all,

01:01:44 because he probably has to like, you know,

01:01:47 help this guy and this guy and this guy,

01:01:48 'cause all these guys, they help everybody out, you know?

01:01:52 But he paid me back tenfold, you know?

01:01:55 So whatever we put into the car, it was like,

01:01:58 "Hey, you know, Hot Rod TV's doing an episode

01:02:00 "on the car now, and oh, we got the cover twice

01:02:03 "for the motor and for the car,

01:02:05 "and this is an eight-episode,

01:02:08 "I forgot how many episodes in the mag that we did."

01:02:12 So the car was huge for me.

01:02:13 That, and we did like a thing with Coddington early on,

01:02:16 did a twin turbo vet for American,

01:02:17 Hot Rod and Discovery and stuff.

01:02:19 So between Coddington and Freiburger and everything,

01:02:24 all the little publications that were happening,

01:02:25 F-Bomb was, it's almost like, I don't know,

01:02:29 you know, it's just one of those cars

01:02:31 that'll always be linked to Nelson Racing, you know?

01:02:33 Matter of fact, we're, Freiburger won't,

01:02:36 he's gonna be pissed 'cause I'm telling you this right now,

01:02:38 but we're redoing it a little bit right now.

01:02:40 It's not gonna be crazy, but we are--

01:02:41 - Same motor?

01:02:42 - It's still, I like, we still made a 406,

01:02:46 it's still 23 degrees small block.

01:02:48 - I'm good with that.

01:02:49 - 'Cause I didn't wanna change it, you know?

01:02:51 I could've easily put like some big block

01:02:54 and made it a six-second car or whatever,

01:02:56 but I was like, then it's not the F-Bomb anymore, you know?

01:02:59 So we tried to make it all, but we are gonna,

01:03:02 it's probably make another 300 horsepower, you know?

01:03:04 - So that'd be 1800, right?

01:03:05 - Probably, yeah.

01:03:06 - That sounds good.

01:03:07 - Yeah, so we'll see.

01:03:08 But with my schedule and his schedule, you know.

01:03:13 - Coming this summer, it's 2029.

01:03:15 (laughing)

01:03:16 - Exactly, you know?

01:03:17 But the turbo system's done for it.

01:03:20 I put some of our new turbos on it,

01:03:21 and we got everything, you know, everything's machined.

01:03:24 So he's gonna stab me for telling you that.

01:03:28 - That's good.

01:03:28 I'll take a little jab on the side, it's fine.

01:03:31 - It'll be a good social media moment.

01:03:33 - Yeah.

01:03:34 - So what keeps you excited about your business?

01:03:37 I mean, to me, you know, the alien intake manifold

01:03:40 was one thing that obviously was a signature of yours,

01:03:42 and the mirror image turbo is the F-Bomb.

01:03:44 Like, what are the things that kinda keep

01:03:46 that adrenaline gland firing for you?

01:03:49 - I mean, now it's like, there's so much right now.

01:03:54 Like, from when I started to now, now, like, the arena is,

01:03:58 like, you're almost like a mini OE if you wanna be, you know?

01:04:02 I've got some CAD designers that are really good, you know?

01:04:06 Like, it's funny, 'cause they're half,

01:04:10 like, most of the guys that are really good

01:04:12 are just eccentric, you know, crazies that you love.

01:04:17 But they're a hard pill to swallow at first,

01:04:20 but then you're like, this guy's awesome, you know?

01:04:23 And I've got fabricators that are, like, I'll watch them,

01:04:28 and I'll just see how they're using the file.

01:04:30 I'm like, why are you using the file that way?

01:04:32 But they're, like, they're way beyond me, you know?

01:04:37 Like, I build engines, and I have this vision, right?

01:04:41 And I'm the guy with the drive and pushing everything,

01:04:43 but the guys that are doing stuff now are so good that,

01:04:48 I mean, like, on, for example, like, Maximus,

01:04:52 like, that car, those panels are handmade, you know?

01:04:57 That car's six inches wider.

01:04:58 That's just steel sheet that got shaped into a charger,

01:05:03 you know?

01:05:04 And you can't even, like, well, you can.

01:05:06 That's the beauty of it is that if you look close,

01:05:08 you can see the seam weld and the color of the weld,

01:05:11 but the car is, you know, like, I'll never do it again,

01:05:15 you know?

01:05:15 For two years, all you heard was a hammer and a dolly,

01:05:18 you know?

01:05:18 But it was like, let's see how far we can do this.

01:05:21 And then, you know, we stopped doing cars

01:05:23 at the beginning of the year just because it was just

01:05:25 taking away too much time from, like, my mind,

01:05:28 even though we have probably three years of cars

01:05:30 to finish.

01:05:31 Yeah, you're not taking new orders.

01:05:34 We're done with the cars, you know?

01:05:35 Maybe at some point we'll do them again,

01:05:37 but right now, you know, I've got so much

01:05:40 to do with the business of the cars, you know?

01:05:43 But we are working on an all-wheel drive

01:05:46 GTO, which is going to be the sickest thing to hit the floor

01:05:51 ever, you know?

01:05:52 And we've done everything.

01:05:53 We made the frame.

01:05:54 We made the transfer case.

01:05:55 We made the rear end, which is like, to get equal length,

01:06:00 half shafts has, like, three pinions on each side--

01:06:03 or three gears on each side.

01:06:05 This thing is so frickin' bananas, it's not even funny.

01:06:10 So I can't wait to finish that one.

01:06:15 But everything gets me excited, like the metal printing

01:06:20 right now.

01:06:21 And then if you get the AI involved

01:06:23 with the metal printing, that's some weird [AUDIO OUT] too.

01:06:25 That's, like, brand new to me, you know?

01:06:28 What's that process, and what does AI solve that?

01:06:33 Like, you want it really light and structural,

01:06:35 and you give it some ideas, and it basically

01:06:38 comes up with this design, and it looks

01:06:40 like an insect or something.

01:06:42 But it's super weird, you know?

01:06:45 I've seen-- we toured Singer plant in Torrance.

01:06:49 When they do it, it does-- it looks like a thing that--

01:06:53 like, you poured steel down an anthill.

01:06:55 You've seen that?

01:06:56 Or molten aluminum?

01:06:57 You've seen that video, and it's the shape that comes out.

01:06:59 It looks like nothing--

01:07:00 It's going to change.

01:07:01 It's going to change a lot of stuff, you know?

01:07:03 I mean--

01:07:03 It's the strength where it needs to be,

01:07:05 but none of that in-between stuff.

01:07:07 On that Tutara car, the fastest production car in the world

01:07:09 that we do the powertrain for, I've

01:07:11 got printed collectors, Inconel printed collectors

01:07:15 on that thing.

01:07:16 They do not break, you know?

01:07:18 And they're printed.

01:07:19 I thought, oh, we're going to crack these things.

01:07:22 But it was this real elaborate design where we had two scrolls

01:07:24 going into one, and it'd be really hard to hand make that.

01:07:27 So we 3D printed it and put the Tutara crest on it also.

01:07:32 Wow.

01:07:33 They're crazy, you know?

01:07:34 So the world is-- it's the Wild West right now.

01:07:37 It's the Wild West for hot rod builders.

01:07:39 And even in that, the Tutara stuff

01:07:41 is kind of down that road as well.

01:07:43 Like the ability of a boutique small manufacturing

01:07:46 outfit to create something on the level that they've created.

01:07:49 How did that partnership come to pass?

01:07:51 I had built him some motors for the Aero TT.

01:07:56 That was their predecessor car, which broke the record.

01:07:59 Yes, when they were Shelby supercars or whatever.

01:08:01 Yeah.

01:08:02 So they had broke the record.

01:08:06 They took Bugatti's record, and then Bugatti took it back.

01:08:09 And then Jared kind of went silent for a little while,

01:08:12 and he came out with the Tutara.

01:08:14 And then he's like, what can we do with this?

01:08:16 And then we came up with this crazy twin turbo flat plane

01:08:19 thing.

01:08:19 And let me tell you, I was there when it went 295 at Kennedy.

01:08:24 And that's insane.

01:08:25 As an engine builder, you're like--

01:08:28 it goes into fifth, right?

01:08:32 And then it gets into sixth, and you can't see the car

01:08:34 anymore because you're at the starting line,

01:08:36 and you almost can't hear it.

01:08:38 You're like, oh, he's out of it.

01:08:40 And then you're like, damn.

01:08:41 As an engine builder, you're like, oh, I made it.

01:08:45 And then two or three seconds later,

01:08:47 you hear him click into seventh.

01:08:48 Ah!

01:08:50 You're like, oh my god, it's still going.

01:08:53 It's still going, you know?

01:08:55 30 pounds of boost for--

01:08:58 What feels like a year of your life.

01:09:00 I think it's only like a minute, but it's not an eighth mile

01:09:05 or a quarter.

01:09:06 It's a minute.

01:09:07 It's crazy.

01:09:09 And we've blown some shit up, too.

01:09:12 I bet.

01:09:13 But it is unbelievable how reliable that thing is.

01:09:18 We got a thing--

01:09:21 a computer.

01:09:22 It's called Life Racing.

01:09:24 And my good buddy Chris Danzio is the US Life Racing.

01:09:28 This guy is like--

01:09:30 he's Yoda when it comes to tuning.

01:09:34 Love this guy.

01:09:35 And not only that, we'll be in the most stressful situations.

01:09:38 And he has a way of just making everything funny.

01:09:42 You're like, you're going to lose your leg.

01:09:44 You're like, no way.

01:09:45 I'm losing my leg.

01:09:46 [LAUGHTER]

01:09:50 So that thing has safeties upon safeties upon safeties upon--

01:09:55 we got 1202-- wait, no.

01:09:57 We got 10 lab-grade wide bands on that car

01:10:03 with eight pressure transducers.

01:10:07 It's fucking insane.

01:10:08 That car is awesome.

01:10:09 What are the basics of that combination?

01:10:10 It's an LS, basically, like an LS architecture engine, right?

01:10:14 Yeah, so I mean--

01:10:16 Nothing LS about it left.

01:10:18 Yeah, but it's a flat plane.

01:10:20 It's got a Bryant flat plane in it.

01:10:22 It's got Potter titanium rods.

01:10:26 So the bob weight on that thing, which handles now

01:10:29 like 2,200 horsepower, is 1,500 grams.

01:10:32 Wow.

01:10:33 Yeah.

01:10:34 It's crazy.

01:10:35 And it turns over 8,000 RPM.

01:10:37 It's got all-- it's pretty basic, really.

01:10:42 But it's intelligent, I guess.

01:10:49 Yeah, I mean, and you could make some crazy--

01:10:52 make dual overhead camshaft.

01:10:54 You could go down that road just to say it's there.

01:10:56 Yeah, right.

01:10:57 And just make it that whatever kind of sexy thing

01:11:00 that you can just brag on all the stuff.

01:11:01 But at the end of the day, the thing makes, however many,

01:11:03 what, 1,800, whatever it makes for power.

01:11:05 Yeah, and the new one makes 2,200 horsepower.

01:11:07 So it makes 2,200.

01:11:08 And to your point, what you talked about a few minutes ago,

01:11:11 aesthetically, it's a beautifully clean look.

01:11:13 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:15 That's the beauty is that not only does that-- that thing

01:11:18 looks like--

01:11:19 there's a front view that looks like a Darth Vader helmet.

01:11:21 It looks so sick.

01:11:23 It's got all the stainless pipes.

01:11:25 And it's just doing a most muscular

01:11:27 for me or whatever.

01:11:28 But it also-- we've had a couple out in the field

01:11:32 for like three years.

01:11:33 We had one come in for a teardown just to look.

01:11:36 And the thing was like, dude, the thing's money.

01:11:39 It's so nice.

01:11:40 And a flat plane usually rattles themselves to death.

01:11:42 But we made the Bob light so it didn't.

01:11:46 You had the engine in the Riddler--

01:11:48 the car that won the Riddler in 2019.

01:11:51 So does that tick off something in a box

01:11:54 you had in the back of your mind?

01:11:55 If you want to validate this idea of artistry

01:11:58 and a presentation, how much did that

01:12:00 carry weight with you versus somebody

01:12:02 winning a race or whatever?

01:12:03 That one was special.

01:12:05 Do you know the story behind that one?

01:12:07 No.

01:12:07 OK, so we went to SEMA.

01:12:10 That actually was part of the show, too.

01:12:12 But we went to SEMA.

01:12:14 Jordan from Super Rides by Jordan approached me.

01:12:16 He said, we got this Cadillac that we're building.

01:12:21 We need a special motor for it.

01:12:22 Somebody was building the V12 or 16 for it

01:12:24 and it never panned out.

01:12:25 Can you do it?

01:12:27 And then he's like, but you got to meet the guy

01:12:31 to make the deal because he's just that way.

01:12:34 And I was at the SEMA show.

01:12:35 He's like, can you come to his house?

01:12:37 He lived in Vegas.

01:12:38 So I was like, I don't know, man.

01:12:40 You know how SEMA is.

01:12:41 It's psyched.

01:12:42 You're tired.

01:12:44 All right, I'll meet him.

01:12:45 So we go to his house.

01:12:46 His house-- he's got an elevator.

01:12:51 I'm taking a piss in his house.

01:12:52 There's a fucking Rembrandt on a toilet.

01:12:55 In a bathroom?

01:12:56 In the bathroom.

01:12:57 The real Rembrandt.

01:12:58 He's like, no cameras in the house.

01:13:00 No cameras in the house.

01:13:02 Anyway, we go downstairs in this elevator.

01:13:05 He's got like prototype Cadillacs,

01:13:08 50 fucking cars in this garage that he has in this house.

01:13:12 And we shake hands to do this.

01:13:14 And he said, look, this is my life goal to win the Riddler.

01:13:19 This is something I've always wanted to do.

01:13:21 I want to win the Riddler.

01:13:22 So you got to be building me something special.

01:13:25 So we built him the motor.

01:13:28 Jordan continued on with the car.

01:13:30 Steve passed away.

01:13:32 Wow.

01:13:33 Steve passed away.

01:13:34 So his brother on Steve's--

01:13:40 I don't know, death, whatever--

01:13:42 told his brother, you got to finish the car for me.

01:13:45 You got to finish the car.

01:13:46 So his brother funded the rest of the car.

01:13:50 And we went there.

01:13:52 And we had another client there with this Nova.

01:13:56 So it was a contender, too.

01:13:58 So there was a couple of our stuff, cars that were there.

01:14:04 And so he fucking won the Riddler, dude.

01:14:09 Yeah.

01:14:11 I mean, dude, everybody was crying.

01:14:14 Jordan built the car with his son.

01:14:19 So I know how important that is.

01:14:21 So his son and Jordan built this thing,

01:14:24 I don't know over how many years, but just crazy.

01:14:27 So they're crying and hugging.

01:14:29 We're all hugging.

01:14:30 I mean, it was--

01:14:31 Huge moment.

01:14:32 It was insane.

01:14:33 We didn't think we were going to win.

01:14:34 Because Jordan just pointed out the fly.

01:14:37 You get those judges, like fucking 10 ants crawling

01:14:40 on the car.

01:14:40 And they're just like, this is [MUTED]

01:14:42 This is [MUTED]

01:14:43 This is [MUTED]

01:14:44 But Jordan kind of took a different approach.

01:14:46 He's just like, look, look, I screwed up the paint here.

01:14:51 But I think it won based on--

01:14:54 the Riddler's essence is custom.

01:14:57 You win based off of custom.

01:14:59 So that thing had the tranny in the back.

01:15:01 It had IndyCar A-arms.

01:15:03 It's like everything about it.

01:15:05 If you didn't like it, fine.

01:15:07 But it was custom.

01:15:09 Right.

01:15:09 Everything was touched.

01:15:10 Everything was changed.

01:15:11 So to have won the Riddler was awesome.

01:15:13 And what's even crazier is I did--

01:15:17 for Boyd, there was a guy named Snicks.

01:15:19 I did a whole engine bay for Boyd in '03, maybe.

01:15:25 And the car disappeared.

01:15:27 And I got a call for people freaking out on me

01:15:33 because I just made them lose the Riddler.

01:15:35 This is 2018.

01:15:37 And I'm like, what do you mean?

01:15:39 I'm not even doing a Riddler car.

01:15:41 Well, I had posted a YouTube video of the engine

01:15:43 bay of this car we did for Boyd.

01:15:46 And it reemerged in '18.

01:15:48 No way.

01:15:48 Wow.

01:15:49 As a Riddler contender?

01:15:51 It won the Riddler.

01:15:52 Get out of here.

01:15:53 It won the Riddler in '18.

01:15:54 I built that engine bay in '03, dude.

01:15:57 '03.

01:15:58 It was crazy.

01:15:59 So they're pissed off at me.

01:16:01 And Shaun Dove calls me.

01:16:03 He's like, dude, what did you do?

01:16:04 I'm like, what are you talking about?

01:16:06 In '03, it was OK to show a car in metal for the Riddler.

01:16:09 Of course.

01:16:10 So they kicked him out.

01:16:12 And then he freaked the hell out.

01:16:14 And then they judged that it was legit.

01:16:17 And they won the Riddler.

01:16:18 I hadn't seen a car in--

01:16:19 Yeah, right.

01:16:20 And what a random thing.

01:16:21 You're like, oh, this is cool.

01:16:23 After that, it turns into some giant disaster.

01:16:25 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:16:26 So I'm glad he didn't lose the Riddler because of me.

01:16:30 You don't want to be that guy.

01:16:32 So I guess as we're kind of getting

01:16:34 to the end of the conversation, I

01:16:35 think a natural question is, you look at your business.

01:16:37 You look at the marketplace.

01:16:39 You look at trends.

01:16:40 Like, what is Nelson Racing Engines look

01:16:42 like in five years from now?

01:16:44 Products, probably.

01:16:45 We've got a whole ton of products.

01:16:46 And really, really nice crate engines

01:16:49 that you can-- that are really refined.

01:16:53 But products-- I've got so many awesome products

01:16:58 that I haven't launched that that'll

01:17:01 be in the next couple of years.

01:17:02 We'll get all those.

01:17:04 I got 18 products right now that are just--

01:17:07 Waiting.

01:17:07 They're just like, what are you doing?

01:17:09 [LAUGHTER]

01:17:10 Get them on the market.

01:17:13 So probably products.

01:17:16 Well, I've always been impressed with the way

01:17:18 you package everything.

01:17:19 I remember the first time I saw one of your 1,000 horsepower

01:17:22 crate engines at a car show.

01:17:24 I think it was in Simi Valley.

01:17:25 And just the way it's presented with the crate, the wooden

01:17:28 crate and everything.

01:17:29 And I'm just--

01:17:31 I'm happy we were able to do that photo shoot with you.

01:17:33 Oh, man.

01:17:35 You held engines-- you just delayed

01:17:38 shipping them to customers so we could do that photo shoot.

01:17:41 And there was something like--

01:17:42 I think there was 38 engines or something.

01:17:45 That was the 40,000 horsepower.

01:17:47 Wow.

01:17:47 The cover blurb that we did.

01:17:49 I mean, you are probably the nicest editor of Hot Rod--

01:17:54 Thank god.

01:17:55 --in the history of Hot Rod.

01:17:57 I don't think I've ever met a better guy.

01:18:02 And then you're like, would you be

01:18:05 interested in doing a shoot?

01:18:08 I'm like, yeah, sure.

01:18:09 And you're like, it's for the cover.

01:18:11 I'm like, yeah, let's do this.

01:18:13 That was pretty great, though.

01:18:15 I've never-- we stacked 40 turbo and blown motors together.

01:18:19 That was awesome.

01:18:20 It was like something.

01:18:21 And even Larry, who was shooting it, was like--

01:18:23 oh, no, Wes was shooting it.

01:18:25 Larry shot the Maximus--

01:18:27 Maximus, yeah, probably, yeah.

01:18:28 --like the cover with the three motors, right?

01:18:30 Was that Larry?

01:18:31 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:31 That's correct.

01:18:32 But Wes was the first cover I ever had photographed

01:18:38 was the F-bomb engine.

01:18:40 And I remember I was telling Wes what to do.

01:18:42 It's a great picture, too.

01:18:43 So you know Wes a little bit.

01:18:45 I don't know Wes a lot.

01:18:46 I know Wes very well.

01:18:47 He doesn't [MUTED] around.

01:18:48 Yeah, he doesn't.

01:18:50 And so he had the motor up there.

01:18:52 And I'm like-- he's like, let's just put this pulley on him.

01:18:55 I'm like, dude, what are you doing, man?

01:18:56 He's like--

01:18:57 [LAUGHTER]

01:18:59 And he looks at Fryburger.

01:19:00 And Fryburger is kind of nervous or whatever.

01:19:03 He's like, just do what he asks.

01:19:06 Do what the guy asks.

01:19:08 And then all of a sudden, you see the photo.

01:19:10 And I'm like, that's such a dumbass kid, man.

01:19:12 Like, I was trying to tell this guy what to do.

01:19:14 [LAUGHTER]

01:19:18 That's great.

01:19:19 Nah, man, thank you so much for coming in and take the time.

01:19:21 I think your story is fascinating.

01:19:23 And to share some of the stuff you did with us is great.

01:19:25 And I think it just gives people perspective.

01:19:27 I think the big part of this series that's

01:19:29 been so fun for us so far is just

01:19:31 getting into the weeds a little bit with people

01:19:33 and just kind of getting a better picture about what

01:19:35 day-to-day life is like.

01:19:36 Yeah.

01:19:37 Thanks for having me.

01:19:39 When you called, I was like, for sure.

01:19:41 Awesome.

01:19:42 What's waiting for me on the other--

01:19:44 I had no idea what I was walking into.

01:19:45 I actually texted Fryburger and said,

01:19:47 what am I walking into?

01:19:49 He didn't know either, did he?

01:19:51 Hopefully it wasn't bad.

01:19:52 Yeah.

01:19:53 I think this was great.

01:19:54 Yeah, that was great.

01:19:55 And thank you to John, of course.

01:19:56 Thanks to Tom Nelson for coming in.

01:19:58 And we will continue this series, The Hot Rod Pod,

01:20:00 Where It All Began, with more guests and more great stories

01:20:02 down the line.

01:20:03 But today, we're done talking about horsepower.

01:20:05 We'll see you next time.

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