106: Intercoolers and Methanol — Pointless or the Key to BIG Power Gains?

We wanted to keep it a bit more reliable and so we built a Dan, built to water the air in a cooler.

It was double stacked, thousand horsepower cores, custom tanks, all that stuff.

I tuned it on 40 pounds of boost.

It came on boost probably a thousand RPM earlier and it made another 400 horsepower through the midrange.

We took this car back to the track and it was like an animal.

Welcome to the HPA Tune In podcast.

I'm Andre, your host, and in this episode we're joined by Varun from 101 Motorsport in Australia.

Varun first got onto our radar because of his involvement building and running the mighty mouse Honda CRX that competed so successfully at World Time Attack Challenge.

However, diving a little bit deeper into Varun's experience and passion, it's really drag racing which he is most passionate about, and I also share that passion with my own background in drag racing.

In this episode we dive into Varun's background, basically how he built up his knowledge and experience and then how he took over the running of what now is 101 Motorsport at a very young age.

How he's now built that up to what is genuinely a world class workshop covering all manner and facets of automotive modification and performance.

We also dive deep into drag racing.

What actually is involved from a tuner's perspective when it comes to drag racing?

How can we maximize the performance of the car, particularly when we might be dealing with a car that has more power than it can actually put down to the track, at least for most of the past, down the drag strip?

So we'll learn from Varun how he approaches this, how he balances that power and traction, what he's looking for in the data and how he is making changes to the tune up in between rounds in order to get the best performance out of the car as the track conditions evolve.

Before we get into our interview with Varun, for those who are new to the tuned in podcast, high Performance Academy is an online training school where specialise in teaching people how to tune, how to build performance engines, how to construct wiring harnesses.

We also cover topics including race driver education, race car setup, car body modelling and CAD, as well as fabrication, and you can find all of our courses at hpacademycom forward slash courses.

All of those courses are delivered via high definition video based modules that you can watch anywhere in the world, provided you've got an internet connection, giving you the ability to learn from the comfort of your own place and learn at your own pace.

All of our courses also come with a 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee.

So if you purchase a course and decide it's not quite what you expected, no worries, let us know we had a full refund of the purchase price.

As a podcast listener, you can also use the coupon code podcast75 and that will get you $75 of the purchase of your very first HPA course.

We'll put that coupon code and a link to our courses page in the show notes to make it super easy to find.

Lastly, if you like free stuff, then have I got a deal for you?

Hpa is always running giveaways and we partner with some of the biggest names in the industry.

Maybe it'll be an aftermarket dash, maybe it'll be an ECU, it could be a set of tools or anything in between.

Basically, what I'm saying this is stuff that you absolutely want.

If you get into the draw and win, we will ship it to your door free of charge, regardless whereabouts you are in the world.

To see what our latest giveaway is and to get your name in the draw, head to hpacademycom forward slash giveaway.

There's no catch, no purchase required.

Alright, enough with our introduction.

Let's get into our interview now.

Welcome to the podcast, verun.

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to chat with us.

Let's start, like we always do, by finding out a little bit about your background.

Specifically, when and where did you form an interest in cars and motorsport?

Andre, pleasure to be here, mate.

My passion came from my father when we migrated to Australia.

Obviously, having older cars and fixing cars it was a thing like going to the wreckers and getting parts and fixing cars yourself.

So I used to always me and my brother I used to tag along with my dad to all the wreckers and just working on these old shit boxes and not shit boxes, but just older cars, yeah, older cars doing things that people don't do these days.

So I was lucky enough to have that influence in my life.

And then around that period also is when the Skylines started racing in the supercars at Mount Panorama and in Bathurst and stuff.

So we're talking late 80s, early 90s.

Early 90s, yeah, late 80s, early 90s and at that time my dad had an Nissan Pulsar and me and my brother thought it was the coolest car in the world.

And then all of a sudden these Skylines came in and smashed like obliterating everything on the track and we just became like GDR nuts sort of.

So ever since then, like my dad obviously watched the racing, so we took a real keen interest in that, working on cars like hands on and watching the racing.

And then my dad was also a bit of a rev head, only like little hatchbacks and stuff.

So we were exposed to that and when I talk to people I haven't clarified yet.

We're going to get into it.

You're obviously based in Queensland, australia.

I see this in Australia, I see it in New Zealand, where we're obviously based, and, differently, in the US.

So you sort of, as a car enthusiast, tend to go down one of two routes, and in Australia it's either the V8, what was Ford and Holden route or your JDM import.

Likewise, the same goes for further US and here in New Zealand.

So what was it about your family?

It sounds like even before you're sort of watching Bathurst with the GTRs, sort of taking down everyone, you already had that sort of passion for the JDM brands.

What was it about Japanese cars?

that kind of did it for you, I think just though a lot sleeker, they looked a lot nicer and yeah, that was it.

And coming from so where I was born and PG, like there weren't many V8s, like it was all Japanese imports, like there were a lot of V8s actually I'll correct that, but it was a lot Japanese imports so my father was also used to that stuff.

And where I grew up in Australia, ipswich that was, like you know, just your typical Aussie people.

So, like you know, my street was full of these guys with you know, with GTS, monaro's, with, you know, big 308s, you know stroke to 355 and all that stuff.

And there was a guy up the road he had a like a VH Commodore same thing V8.

But you know, all my dad has was a Pulsar.

But you know, we love Japanese stuff.

We used to see like an R31 Skyline on the street.

We used to lose our minds.

Yeah it, I don't know.

And in saying that my dad had a Cortina once upon a time so and he's always only had little cars, little hatchbacks, like nothing sporty that month he had never had anything crazy but for some reason, like he had that Nissan and the thing, the Nissans on Mount Panorama, like killing it.

It just made us like Nissan fans.

And then obviously the JDM scene got a lot bigger, like as as years passed.

Then the Supras came and you know.

Then Mazda's came and then the C8, you know, at that time the Sierra Cosworths were killing it because turbocharged.

So it was pretty much a turbo thing.

So as well.

So everything turbocharged, it seemed to be better, faster, yeah.

Yeah, that probably mirrors my, my kind of upbringing.

I kind of got into cars when turbo Japanese cars were were just sort of starting to find their feet and for me it was kind of a no brainer.

You know there's always been the no replacement for displacement but I'm like, yeah, there is, it's called a turbocharger, yeah, that's it.

And I mean that has really proven time and time again to be the case.

It was probably not until later that I actually sort of found a bit of a passion for you know it was mainly the LSVO as well and sort of started to see the pressure as for both sides of the coin.

But to me, basically, at the end of the day, for me if it's fast and powerful, I'm not really too fussy about how many cylinders it's got or what the brand is on it.

Let's come back to.

Obviously.

You've given us a bit of an idea there, getting some skill set from growing up with your dad around cars and obviously kind of learning how to actually be hands on the tools.

When did you sort of decide to go down this route as a career path?

Was this sort of?

You know, pretty much you had no option.

It was already already predefined for you.

No, not really.

My family are all like academic.

My parents are both.

They were both like medical.

My mom was a nurse and my dad was a pharmacist and then when we came here, my dad changed career paths but he always, they always used to push us to study, study, study, study.

My brother and sister, both, like you know, got two degrees and they're one works in the medical field and there's a teacher.

So I, as a kid, I was, you know, studying.

I was trying, but I just I couldn't.

I just used to get distracted by this and that, and I always had a passion for cars.

I actually wanted to be an aircraft engineer.

So that's what I was studying for.

I just loved going fast.

I wanted to work on jets.

I didn't really want to fly jets, I wanted to work on them.

And then what actually happened is in high school, I think grade nine, I went for work experience through school to this and I wanted to be an aircraft engineer.

But they sent me to this little workshop, like on an airstrip, and all they did is rebuild the motors, the air cooled, horizontally, opposed, you know, four cylinder Cessna engines.

Like continental, like home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, correct.

And that's when I first actually got the feel for like working on an engine and seeing seeing crankshaft and seeing conducts and seeing pistons and stuff like that and actually seeing how they work and the rotating assembly and you know, figuring out how an internal combustion engine works.

Then I was only young, I was only 14, 15, whatever it was.

Then it gave me this fascination of engines, even though I really loved planes.

I even I even sat the exam to get into the Air Force and I passed it.

I was ready to be accepted in, but I just had this fascination with these engines and then it kept going.

Then one of my cousins bought a Nissan Sylvia, sr 20, back then like an S 13, sr 20, sylvia, and back then there weren't many of those around and that thing was like, you know, a factory S 13, sr 20 with a bit of boost back then was like so fast and it just blew my mind how fast this car was.

And then I started sort of looking more into the automotive field and then Fast and the Furious came out and then that was it.

I was done and I knew, since I saw Fast and the Furious and then I was there.

I just knew this is what I want to do, and that was that.

So at that point, what was the path forward, once you sort of decided where you wanted to head?

Okay.

So I knew that I had to do an well, I had to be a mechanic.

So my parents still were like, yeah, okay, cool, do you know, follow your passion, but you still need to be qualified.

So I was like okay, cool.

So I knew I had to do an apprenticeship.

So then I started looking around at where I could do an apprenticeship.

It was a bit difficult to dive.

Even today it is difficult to dive straight into the performance industry.

Like you can't just walk into a performance shop and say I want to be an apprentice and saying that I have put on a few apprentices you know that have done their time through the shop.

So you know, if you're lucky you'll get in.

Yeah, Well, let's just talk about that side of things because this has come up a few times on different episodes.

Getting into the automotive industry and apprenticeship as a mechanic is generally kind of the obvious route.

But particularly with modern vehicles, you know there's not a lot of well less, I would say, hands on work than there used to be 20, 30 years ago.

You know, generally mechanics these days aren't rebuilding a factory engine if something goes wrong.

Camel saw almost a thing in the past, so a lot more of it now is diagnostics and there's obviously even with a skilled mechanic and I'm not trying to detract from that skill set, but even a skilled mechanic there's crossover but also a lot of difference between the skill set of a mechanic and what you need in the broader range for a performance workshop, isn't that?

Yes, definitely, because we're actually recreating what's already been made.

So you really need to know everything about what you're working with.

And, as you said, like modern day mechanical is a lot about diagnostic and using scan tools and even, like you know, down to bleeding the brakes.

They just hook up these machines and like, crack the crack, the bleed nipples and turn these brake bleeding machines on.

They don't even actually, you know, you don't have to pump and hold and crack the nipple anymore.

You don't have to do any of that.

You know there's no, there's hardly any manual cars anymore, so you're not working on clutches and you're not having to deal with any of that.

As you said, there's no cam belt, so you don't know how all that works.

You don't need to time an engine anymore, so you don't know how all that sort of stuff works.

Yeah, I've told this story, I think, before, but it probably sort of bears repeating.

I saw maybe the lack of skill in some of the current crop of mechanics at franchise dealerships really get highlighted when there was a recall on the Toyota 86 and Subaru BRZ.

I think there was a couple of years where they had to replace the valve springs and I mean, let's be honest, it's obviously not a small job, that's quite a significant job and it's a complex engine with the twin cam chain arrangement and obviously it's got quad variable cam control.

So I'm not downplaying this as not a simple job, not a five minute job, but I mean I'm on a few of the 86 forums and enthusiast clubs and I think at one point there was a success rate of about 50% on cars that successfully had the valve springs replaced and the cam chains put back on and timed up correctly, and then the other 50% were sometimes catastrophic failures and again, not detracting.

This is a complex job and it's not something that's done commonly.

So I understand why it was problematic.

But take that back 20, 30 years ago doing cam belts was the norm and they'll probably form a reasonably consistent part of your working week.

So those skills are, I think unfortunately being lost and as a performance workshop, these are skills that we need, correct?

Yes, correct, as you pointed out, they will never learn that and then that will only jobs like that.

They'll only get given to specific technicians or whatever in that dealership, not anyone.

And then Prenes' job is just to all change or do tires or do whatever.

But I think in the performance industry the most important thing is and I stress this to everyone the most important thing is you must understand what you're working on.

You must understand how it works in order for you to fix it and modify it, because you need to know what's going to happen when you change a certain thing.

What effects is it going to do, what you have to do to extract the most out of it.

And that's really in order to know that.

And in order to achieve that, you must know how the thing works in the first place.

And I think that has been completely taken out of mechanics that are being trained these days, because they don't know anything Like realistically and the things are too complex, as you said, like even for a mechanic these days.

If they were to pull an engine out of a BRZ, a horizontal T-pose engine, four cams, two cylinder heads, two chains that's a lot going on, like for anybody, but not many people these days, apprentices or young fellas are going to be able to do anything like that, and I think that's a real shame.

But that's just the way technology is.

I guess it's just the way the bull rolls.

And being a mechanic, if you want to be good, you have to want to be good.

Yeah, I think what you've touched on there as well it's sort of bears repeating, in that having an understanding of what you're working on is really, really important, and this goes into kind of all aspects of the performance on-the-route of industry.

I've said this repeatedly when it comes to EFI tuning, we have courses that teach people how to tune EFI and it will teach you the fundamentals of how the EFI system works and you come out of that and you will know how to adjust fuel and ignition and the effects and what you're trying to do to optimise them.

Obviously and we've never tried to downplay this there's obviously a level of the theory you need to understand and then you obviously also need to put that into practice and become proficient with actually making those changes.

That's something that only time on the keyboard is going to give you.

But where I think I have an advantage and I'm guessing this goes for you too is that I sort of started with the mechanical elements and engine building.

So I had a really good, intimate knowledge of what goes into the engine, how the engine operates, and then there's that crossover between engine tuning and the mechanical elements, and this is where, when you have a really thorough knowledge of all of the components and how they all go together.

When you're trying to find a diagnose on the dyno, I don't sit there trying to fix an ignition misfire on the laptop when the issue is that there's no ground electrode left on the spark plug, or you've got a coil pack that's faulty, or you've got no fuel pressure because the voltage getting to the fuel pump's only 10.5

volts instead of 14.

And that's the stuff that will trip up people without that broader knowledge.

Now it sounds like you are lucky enough to actually get your start with an apprenticeship in a performance workshop as opposed to a franchise dealership.

So talk us through how you managed to nail that perfect combination.

So at first I did try just going Shop to shop with a resume.

I had very minimal experience.

I used to work one of my one of my mates still very good friend of mine to today.

He's a few years older than me, so he used to run just a mechanic shop next to a service station and I used to go on my school holidays, like when I was in grade 11, grade 12, like at the end of my schooling, when I figured out what I wanted to be a mechanic, I used to go on school holidays and work with him.

So I was able to have experience there.

So I had a couple of references.

I had a couple of references and I just went around.

It was so hard I could know no performative shop would even look at me and they'd be like, oh yes, whatever.

But then I ended up just to fast-track it a bit and to get somewhere instead of doing nothing.

I enrolled into a pre-vocational course, into the local TAFE.

So the college and I did six months and that and at the end of that six months it was a certificate to in light automotive and during that period they give you three Blocks that you need to go and find work experience two week blocks, all up six weeks every couple of months.

You'd go Two weeks here, two weeks here, two weeks here, and I was just going to performance shops.

I went to two performance shops and this other shop, which is a paddle shop, that did performance cars.

That one day back then a lot of highway racing used to happen, so we used to.

We used to go hang out in my cousin's car, that s13.

We used to go out and I was lucky enough to meet the guys that had started 101 and I said, hey, like you know, you're stuck.

They had just started, like literally just started, and I'm just like, hey, like you know, if you want, I can come and help you guys.

Like you know, for two weeks I have to do work experience.

And they're like, yeah, yeah, sweet, no worries, I went there and I did my work experience and I and it was jamboree time it just so happened that I pretty much got two of their cars ready for jamboree and they were like, oh, you want a job.

And I was like, yeah, I do, and that was that sounds perfect and I was lucky enough.

I guess that for anyone that wants to get into the industry, you got to get in.

Just show you like I was this there for work experience and I ended up getting a job and actually I had already set up all three of my blocks work Experience and each one I went to offered me a job.

So but I took 101 at the time.

It was actually, it's actually, it was actually 10 to 1, like that was what the business name was, and it became 101 and it was when it was called 101 motor cafe back then.

So it was like a like a cafe and a performance shop.

So they were trying to really do the whole it's an interesting combination.

Yeah, they were.

They were trying to do the whole fast and furious vibe.

Yeah and I saw a Taiwanese, so a guy named William Wu, he was the, he was the starter, he he's.

He made 101 motor cafe.

It's got 101 motor cafe and auto mechanics and so he put me on as an apprentice and I just work under a couple of guys.

So a guy named Stefan and I fell in and Robert Novak.

So Robert Stefan, I taught me a lot of stuff, just general mechanical stuff and like just common sense how to use tools.

Like you know what tool to pick, you know when you're using something that I think that's very important like you know having an array of tools and knowing what to pick, and just like just very general knowledge.

Stuff like putting bearings in con rods and cleanliness, and you know how you know making sure everything's clean.

And you know just stuff like that, like how to use tools, how to hold them, how to, how to do this easier, how to do that easier, how things work.

And then Rob, robert Novak, in the drag racing scene in Australia's are quite a he's quite a quite a big name in tuning.

He's sort of backed it down a bit, but I was lucky enough to be his apprentice as well, which is where I sort of stood back it me.

Being an apprentice, I had to do a lot of.

I was working, I was on the tools, but I was lucky enough that Rob had a deal with the.

So this is when the second owners took over 101.

They so the first owners only owned it for like two and a half years and the second guys, they.

Then they bought 101 and they ran it for about two years and then that time I was just working under Rob and he had made a deal with them, even the previous guys.

After hours He'd tune race cars and his mates cars and stuff in his own time or whatever, and I just used to sit back, I used to stay there and just watch everything he did and back then there was no such thing.

You know, the dinos were very primitive.

They didn't give you much data.

All they gave you was power and a torque and that's it.

You know, afr reading, hardly any ECUs had on board Lambda at that time.

Like this is on, we're talking 20 years ago.

You know, nothing had not control.

Yeah, I grew up in that same era that it was very basic compared to what we, what we see today, simpler times.

But you know it's interesting.

I look back on that and these days I would very rarely Consider installing an ECU that didn't have closed loop knock and closed loop Lambda as standard, like those are what I consider to be non-negotiables really.

Yet I look back and it was very seldom ECUs for the mainstream had closed loop Lambda control or wideband Lambda control Incorporated and you know we could still develop a great reliable tune Generally would just be adding a little bit more of a safety buffer, because that was necessary.

I just want to roll back.

There's a couple of takeaways that I think are worth just Coming back to and and really digging into there.

I'm guessing here it's pretty clear that you showed a good work ethic with those two week block courses, given you said that you were offered jobs by all three, and this is something that I think it it's really important, no matter what you're doing for work experience, and often that's going to start by sweeping floors and empty Rubbish bins, correct, yeah, but there's many old tasks that seem more important.

But the attitude with which you take on those jobs and, you know, being able to Look outside the square and actually see the bigger picture and what I'm talking about by that of.

I've had work experience guys who are emptying rubbish bins and as they're emptying the rubbish bin and walking it through the workshop, they'll step over a pile of rags on the floor and Then continue and throw out the rubbish.

I'm like come on, let's open our eyes.

This is clearly rubbish, as it's part of the job, even if it's not actually detailed on a checklist.

Is that sort of attitude those who can see that big picture and do those little things that aren't necessarily strictly asked of them.

That sticks out to an employer and we see that attitude and that's the difference between being offered a position and Getting through your two weeks ticking a box and really being no further ahead.

So I think that's really important.

The other element there that I think is worth digging into is your sort of training or apprenticeship outside of time under Robert I think you said his name is Rob.

Novak, rob Novak, yeah, so you know most guys, probably younger want to get out of work at 5.01

, go and hit the beers and you know, go partying with their mates and you know that's not strictly going to get you ahead.

I know that's appealing but you know, if you really want to get ahead, that unpaid sort of Training and learning from one of the best, you know there's no price you can put on that and obviously look at what that's done for when you're at now.

So I just thought I want to come back and pick up those couple of points, because easy to overlook but so important.

100%.

Yeah, right, so you've completed this apprenticeship and You've obviously, because you've been at 101 motorsport, you've benefited from that broader range of performance based skills.

You own the place.

Now talk us through how that happened.

So pretty much the guys that owned it.

Second, they just ran it for a couple of years and kind of just lost interest and then they were selling and I actually Wanted to buy it when they bought it.

But I was still an apprentice.

I had a fair idea, like I had pretty, I was pretty confident that I could do it.

But you know, I'm glad I waited, obviously because as you grow, as you work, you do improve, you pick up more skills, whatever.

So I was about 20, I was 23 at the time, 22 actually, and it was getting sold.

I was just lucky because at the time I everyone had quit, I was the only staff and we had this one guy that used to come in and out and blah, blah, blah, like just help, like you know, just kind of like a subcontractor, like a subcontractor, and and that was it.

It was just me and him and I just went, look like, and they were trying to sell it for a certain amount.

I just said I'll pay you this much and they were like cool, and so I was lucky.

My father actually helped me fund that.

Like I'm not gonna say I did it all my own.

He lent me the money to do it like he got it.

Well, he, I borrowed against their home, my family home, I'm my parents home.

Yeah, he, he got a loan and he bought me the business and I just did the repayments and I just went from there and, yeah, and that that's how that happened and that was in 2008.

So, yeah, 15 years ago now.

Okay, so a lot obviously happened over 15 years.

Let's bring us up to speed.

Can you kind of give us the 30,000 foot view of 101 motorsport now?

Firstly, where are you based, how big is the premises and how many staff have you got so?

101 motorsport has always been so I've changed to shop a couple of times, just you know, finding the right shop.

We've always been in the Logan area, slacks Creek, underwood, which is it's kind of the hub of Sort of automotive and mechanical stuff.

There's a lot of shops around.

It's very Convenient running a business a performance performance business where we are always been in that area.

Now the current shop We've been in for about four years I think that's the forever shop had a few dramas with council and EPA and stuff in the previous ones.

You know a lot of guys around here have the same dramas but I'm lucky that where we are now no dramas.

Is this?

Can I go on a limb here?

Any of these dramas related to noise from dyno tuning?

Yes, a lot of a lot of dramas, yeah, yeah so.

I live.

I live that life for a fair while and it's just such a chore With trying to keep other tenants happy, and I mean obviously dyno tuning can be pretty obnoxious For those around you.

I remember when I first got my dyno we're in a little shop and it was only temporary.

I think we had six months left on the lease, so there was absolutely no point in building an expensive dyno sale to try and keep things quiet.

And we thought you know this dyno, hey, maybe to start with we might be using it two or three times a week.

Well, you know, as soon as we got out, we're using it more, like two or three times a day.

And it didn't take long to start pissing off the other businesses and I mean credit to them like, absolutely, if I'd been the roles had been reversed, I wouldn't be super stoked.

But you know, then you've got the council turning up and you deal with those.

And yeah, I couldn't wait to get into my actual shop where we did build.

We did our absolute best to build a Quiet dyno sale.

But I mean, even then when you're dynoing drag cars with open exhausts, I mean it's all but impossible to keep it truly quiet.

So you know, we still had the occasional, occasional complaint, which is just never fun to deal with yeah, man in, in where we are in Probably a two kilometer radius, there's probably six or seven Dino tuners and one of the guys who's like right next to me he's actually going through all the all those problems now his neighbors are complaining and he's in a unit complex.

So he's, you know, he's their wall to wall, they have people behind them, beside them, and those guys are complaining.

We're in a freehold building.

I think, actually the other element that's easy to overlook for tuners who are thinking about buying a dyno.

You look at the price of the dyno and maybe it's $100,000.

Maybe it's $160,000, whatever, and sort of like stretching to buy that, maybe, and looking at your financing options or whatever that may be, and it's much, much bigger than that because you could easily be spending the same, if not more, than you paid for the dyno To actually build a proper sale with noise, sound deadening, you know, extraction fans and all of that.

And that's the part if you haven't actually gone through it.

It's easy to overlook that and then find you're in a world of trouble, particularly if you're sort of tied on your finances.

Just coming back to the fact you said you've got so many Dinoshops in such a small area around you, does that hurt your ability to bring in work or is it a benefit?

It doesn't hurt the ability.

I guess one thing is I know a couple of them, like I'm.

The way I roll is I just try to be friendly with everyone, like I know I do know a couple of them, but everyone has their own customer base and there's there's certainly no lack of work.

There's enough out there for everybody to eat.

It's not really cutthroat, like we don't need to cut each other's grass to get ahead.

Everyone's just got their own thing going on.

You know, obviously, if you, if you, are the only one, then it makes it more exclusive to the area, but it certainly it doesn't hurt anyone, I think at all.

Like I think they're.

All.

The shops around us are quite busy, like I know.

You know one of them is like they just specialise in a certain car and one of them's just he just hires, he's dino out to people in.

Like you know, lots, lots of tuners are coming up.

There's all these new tuners popping up and, as you said, I think you and I have a bit of an advantage.

As you know, we, we work from the ground up and there's these tuners popping up who have not done that, so they just think they can rely on your closed loop lambda and your closed loop knock and just send these things to the moon.

I think that if you're in a large populace area where the large customer base, obviously, as you say, there's enough work to go around, if you tried to put six tuning shops here in Queenstown where we've got a permanent population of about 30,000 people, I mean that obviously is just not going to work.

I mean you have to be a little sensible about it.

I think the other element with this as well, which goes pretty much without saying, is, if you build a strong reputation and you're turning out good work, that word of mouth is your best marketing tool and people talk.

There's still forums, there's Facebook groups and the tuners who are turning out good work rise to the top and people know who they can trust.

Just talking about that newer generation of tuner coming through and I think that's worth touching on a little bit as well I see a lot of tuners coming into the scene.

Maybe they're tuning their own cars and their mates' cars to start with, and obviously these days good quality fuels like E85 are so prevalent and I think what that's doing is giving a false sense of security and confidence, because a turbocharged car on E85, I mean you can break it, but you're going to have to try reasonably hard.

It's pretty tolerant if your ratio is a little lean, probably not going to be able to add too much timing and make it knock.

It's a pretty safe fuel.

So I think that builds up this false sense of bravado and confidence that I've got on bulletproof.

Look at all these cars I've tuned and they all make keeps of power and the scary part for me is that's cool until you give one of those tuners pump fuel and maybe a poor grade of pump fuel, a turbocharged vehicle, and I mean a lot of these tuners as well.

I almost exclusively rely on audio knock detection when I'm on the dyno.

There's very few cars that I'll tune without that, and only them, because I know that the factory knock system is accurate.

So I'm always listening for knock.

I've got a very finely tuned ear to that and I know when I'm on that edge and I can pull it back.

I mean it scares the hell out of me watching some of them tune with no knock control.

I've seen videos on YouTube and I can audibly hear the car knocking and you know you're cringing.

So yeah, again, I'm not saying obviously we teach people how to tune, so I'm not saying that it's impossible.

I think it's just again comes back to a wider, broader understanding of what's going on, and particularly understanding how good E85 is, how bad normal low grade pump fuel is and what the implications are going to be for that, what tools and what sensors you need to help safeguard while you're tuning.

Alright, we've got a little bit off track there, but I needed to dig into it while the opportunity was there.

While we're on that one, I'm still a firm believer of E85 has single handedly saved the SR20.

I'd go one step further there.

And the VE cylinder head God, yeah, I obviously from my background I am a Mitsubishi guy through and through and I still have a real soft spot for the 4G63.

Yeah, the technology's moved on and there are way better engines these days, but back when I was running my performance workshop I would probably tune four or five SR20 DTs for every 4G63, they were just cheaper and more popular.

And you know the combination.

I'm probably going to get offside here with a whole bunch of SR20 fans, but this is the reality that, as I saw it, you put the same combination apart similar cam profile, similar sized turbocharger injectors, all of the works that you'd put on a 4G63, and it would make 300, 350 kilowatts at the wheels on pump gas.

And you do all that on an SR20 DT and it'd just be significantly down, maybe 50 kilowatts less.

And I just could never really see the attraction.

And then I was tuning for a controlled race series and I've been tuning this S14 for a few years, had an SR20 DT, nothing particularly special.

Garrett GT3582 turbo made good power, but nothing to write home about.

And then they put the VE cylinder head on it and that was my very first exposure to the VE cylinder head and on like five pound less boost it made like another 80 or 100 kilowatts.

It was just out the gate crazy and I was like what the hell just happened here?

And so that was my.

I opened there.

Obviously we've got a SR20 VE turbo combo in our 86 endurance car, so I kind of feel like I'm pretty well versed with that engine now.

So yeah, still with its own set of problems.

Nothing's ever perfect, but it's certainly a game changer.

And having that shaft mounted rocker and no problems with the rockers popping off is also another game changer.

Very hard to find parts.

But like going back to that rockers very hard, like last time I needed rockers for a VE, a guy in New Zealand had two sets and I just bought both sets so I just went, give it to me, yeah.

Yeah, we've talked about this with Mark from Mazworks on a previous episode, and you can't buy these parts new from Nissan anymore, and it is problematic because they do wear.

So it's a challenge, but anyway, we digress.

So let's get back to one-on-one motorsport.

How many have you got on your staff now?

I have two full-time qualified mechanics a manager, myself, and then our fabricator.

But here's his own business.

He just rents.

He does mostly our work, but he rents the back part of my shop.

So our shop, my shop, is, I think, just under 700 square meters.

Yeah, it's kind of divided up in a few different sections.

I've got the engine room and the dyno room in the front.

Behind that is Dan who is FabLab.

He's our fabricator.

He's got his back section.

We also do our own fabrication in our section, but Dan does a majority of our big stuff, as in roll cages or custom intercooler pipe.

He'll make intercoolers, all the sheet metal work, tubs, diffs, four-link ladder, bar, whatever, fire walls, engine mounting, engines, gearboxes, you name it.

From back to front that's him, and on our side we have obviously just our office, four hoists and our workshop and our fabrication area at the back.

So yeah, that's us all, up to five of us.

When you we took over this business 15 years back and you kind of alluded to the fact that it was just you at that time.

It was yeah yeah, there must have been a pretty steep learning curve.

You've sort of come out of an apprenticeship.

Obviously you've got the skill set there.

But I mean, something we quite often talk about in the podcast is that skill set of actually spinning spanners, tuning cars, building engines is quite dramatically different to the skill set of running a successful business.

Invoicing, emailing customers, pricing work all of that are they outside of the business that's so easy to completely ignore.

So how big of a challenge was it for you to learn that Well at?

first it was all just hand written stuff, like hand written invoices and blah, blah, blah, and then that sort of, and at the time, one of the guys, sarev, who is now the owner of Oceanicology Technology, who I built me and him, built that Supra together.

Oh, we're referencing here a Supra that we actually have on our YouTube channel it's an interview with Varun for that so we might put a link to that and we might talk about that Supra in a bit more detail shortly.

Anyway, Anyway.

So at the time he was the for the second owner.

He used to manage the shop and then he had stuff to deal with.

So he was away for about a year and during that period was when I took over, and when I took over then he came back and then he was like, hey, do you want me to manage the shop?

And I was like, yes, sweet.

So I lied, so I didn't.

So when I took over I was by myself.

But then he came back and he did manage the shop for me for a few years and you know.

Together we sort of knew what we had to do to you know, invoice and….

So you weren't kind of thrown in the deep end.

You had some support there for the business side of things from someone who kind of already knew the inner workings of that shop and he's very good business minded, so he's really good at all that stuff.

So I was lucky enough to be there and him to be able to, you know, run me through all that work, and we kind of did that together.

I've always had a manager, someone to take care of it.

But in saying that, I have also done a lot of that myself.

As a businessman, I'm pretty hopeless, I'll be honest, but it is a very important aspect of obviously running your own business and still to this day, I'm not the best businessman.

I just like doing what I do.

Well, I think most of us in this industry don't kind of get into starting and running a performance shop because we see potentially huge dollar signs.

No, definitely not.

It's probably not the most lucrative industry if you're really focused on becoming the next millionaire.

So we do it because we're passionate about it and we enjoy it and that kind of the skill set there, as I sort of alluded to, is different to what we necessarily need to run a successful business.

So sometimes getting that combination can be quite tricky.

Sounds like you've got a good way, you've gone about that a good way getting in a manager to do that side of things.

We haven't actually touched on the specific services your offer, but it sounds like from the chat so far pretty much all encompassing anything and everything.

Pretty much, and it's not narrowed down to a certain vehicle either or engine type.

It is predominantly JDM.

Most of our work is kind of the medium to big build sort of stuff.

I don't really do many small things now, so it would be mostly like the run of the mill.

Stuff would be supply, fit and tune and ECU with the necessary sensors and fuel system upgrade, turbo upgrade, intercooler, custom piping, custom exhaust, all that stuff.

And then it's predominantly GDR stuff, what we do, like the 32 to 34 to the RB20.

Yeah, I was just going to say let's clarify, because obviously the 32 to 34 is massive in Australia.

If we're looking at North America, they're more focused around that R35 market, so I just wanted to get into that.

Yes, yeah, okay.

So it's mostly like the RB platform, but in saying that, we also do a lot of RB, a lot of R35 stuff as well.

So it's just GDR in general, and then a lot of 2J stuff, a little bit of Honda stuff, a lot of rotary stuff and, yeah, that will range from anything to engine building to building your race car, to just a lot of it's just someone's booking in for a tune or stuff like that.

In terms of choosing the sort of work that you take on.

I think if I look back to the start of my business, I was sort of in a situation where I had to take on anything that came through the door because I had to make money to keep the lights on and put food on the table.

So I couldn't really I wasn't able to be fussy.

And the other element with that is where we were based.

We had about half a million people population and there was maybe two, I think three, tuning shops, so there wasn't the ability to say, hey look, we specialise in just RB26 based builds, that's all we're gonna do, or LS Holden, whatever that might have been.

We didn't have that benefit and we did have to do everything.

But as we sort of grew, the reputation improved and we could be a little bit fussy with the jobs we were taking on.

What I found was there was a big benefit for me in turning away some of the lower end cars.

And I mean this might sound a little bit harsh, but when you get a car that comes to you for a dyno tune and literally it rolls off the trailer, take one, look at it and you know that you're gonna spend the next eight hours fixing all of the problems with it because the intercooler's held on with zip ties.

That work is really frustrating.

It's not rewarding for me as a tuner and ultimately it doesn't work well for the customer because they're expecting to come in for a $800 or $1000 tune and you might tell them at the start like, hey, it's gonna be more, because this and this clearly I can see right now are gonna need to be fixed.

So it just ends up being a horrible situation for the car owner as well as the shop owner.

So I found, kind of as I grew, focusing on the higher end work.

It gave us cleaner work, that was more satisfying, we got better results, customers happy, we're happy and we're also making a bit more money as well.

And then the other, the flip side of that.

I'm interested to get your perspective.

For me, what I'm always interested in is building the next big thing.

You know, where can we push the limits, where can we push the boundaries, where can we try and break a record?

Do something no one else has done and that's cool.

That's what drives me and what I'm passionate about.

What I also found is that it's really, really hard to make good money doing those sort of jobs, because they're so big it's difficult, if not impossible, to quote accurately at the start because you just don't know how the job's gonna play out.

How's your experience being with those sort of jobs, because I know you're involved with some of them?

So you've hit the nail on the head there.

So it's a very delicate balancing act.

So we do pick and choose, obviously, and, as you said, the ones that the builds that are done in their backyard and have these little niggly issues.

You always do find these other issues.

Manager Mo Muzzi is what we call him.

He often says I'm too nice to people because I'm always one to help you out.

If you need a hand I'll help you out.

But our shop is full.

It is full of mostly big builds, but we do occasionally take something small in just to keep the ball rolling because, as you said, the big builds it's big money but it's very slow turnaround.

It's a very lengthy process, like you're stuck in your workshop.

It's taking up room, it's doing all that so and it is.

But at the end of the day it is cool to do it.

Like we always try to do something different.

Like you know at the moment, like we've got a couple of A thousand horsepower GDRs or the last ones or the previous ones we've done it's always something different, we're trying to do something different.

Well, this one's got a big Single GT or G45.

Oh no, we're not gonna do that this time we're gonna put two big twins on Something different.

This time we're gonna do big, low-mount twins.

I'm gonna make custom manifolds and put them like that.

We're always trying.

Like you know, this one's got a Samsonas gearbox.

Okay, let's let's try an album.

So let's do a PPG, or you know, let's just try something else.

Let's let's put a different diff in the back of this one.

Let's let's do a different fuel system.

Yeah, I think that what you're talking about there as well, your customers end up benefiting from your broader range of experience, because you've now tried all of these parts, all these different combinations, and you know, slowly over time you start narrowing in on a path of like oh, you want this.

Well, this is the best way to achieve that for the least amount of money or with, you know, the, the broadest power band or whatever your target may be.

So I think that's important.

I also just want to come back because that conversation about the sort of low-end builds and I don't want to put off the younger enthusiasts who are listening to this podcast and you know, maybe there's one or two out there who do have their intercooler held on with cable ties Like no disrespect.

We all start somewhere and you know I probably look back at some of the stuff I did sort of 20 plus years ago and probably cringe.

But you know again, you don't know what you don't know back then and you kind of do the best you can.

But I think it's all about.

That's fine to start with, but always look at how can I improve next time, how can I do better, look at what other people are doing.

You know.

There's just so much information out there too, there's no real excuse not to be able to learn how to improve and do things at a better level.

A lot of it is this common lot.

And this is another thing I really drill into, like my staff, and if I have an apprentice who, it is common sense, like you look at something and you just you look at it and go, well, that shit, how do I fix that Like?

And so one thing that we really pride ourselves on is, um, like form.

Like you know, everyone says, you know, function over form or whatever, where we're sort of opposite, we'll form and then we'll Will find a way to make that work.

I don't care, like what it takes, you make that work.

So, and in Queensland it's a lot different, like it's so different Queensland, like Brisbane, to what it is down south, in Sydney they are, it's like Sydney, a number one and they'll just pull everything out, shave the engine bay, but blah, blah, like.

So we don't like.

You know, up here it is like you know, we'll make them look as good as we can, but no one really wants to pull the engine out of their you know $200,000 r34 and like shave the tubs and take it all the way.

They want it to all be sort of original like.

Up here is a little bit different not building a show.

Okay, well, we are, but we're not like it's a bit different up here, a bit more raw, and definitely there's not as much money up here there is down south.

That's a, that's the other thing.

So there's a lot less people spending that sort of money like and we do have the occasional one, and that's when we, you know, that's when we were able to do something big and something good.

But yeah, a lot of the time you just can't compete because a lot of people don't actually spend that much money and then so we do make the most of what we can with the minimal that we can do to like I'm lucky that a lot of our customers don't really work on a budget, not anymore.

Like back in the day, like, as you said, you got to start from somewhere.

I was exactly like you.

I used to just take anything and everything.

But I think that has built me into who I am today, because now I can do a rotary, I can do you to a J, I can do you ask.

I can do your Honda, I can do your RB, I can do your LS, I can do your Barra, I can.

I can do your Mercedes, I can do everything.

But in saying that we do pick and choose.

So if someone comes to us and says, oh, you know, I have a RX 7 on a 13b, I want to make 700 horsepower, it's like, yep, I can do it like.

But if someone comes to me and goes, oh, I have a standard engine, I want to make 500 horsepower, I got $5,000.

That's gonna, you know, I can't like and but slowly as things are progressing, people are starting to get a bit smarter.

So we're lucky enough as, like you know, back in the day I'd say Five, six, seven years ago.

Then you do get the ones that come in and they get off the trail and you just like, put your hand in your head and go oh my god, I've got myself into here.

And then you do spend all day fighting all these gremlins.

You know misfires and leaks and Pipes popping off, and you know and then you spend the next three hours cleaning up the oil off the dyno Bay floor as well, which is always it's always a good time as time is progressing, like you know, young guys are going to get better.

The more you do it, the better you're gonna get we all start somewhere and then guys who are doing it in their garage.

Everyone is getting smarter, so so on that subject, it is slowly getting better.

I'm lucky that I don't.

You know, not that I don't want to do the lower end stuff, but we don't really see the lower end stuff anymore, like it doesn't even come to our door.

I think there's a natural progression with a shop that has a reputation, and that natural progression is more towards the higher end builds and that's kind of you know.

Again, we do this because we're passionate about it.

That's what we want to be involved in, because it's more satisfying.

I just wanted to take a moment out of our interview with Varun here and talk about a package deal that we're offering which is gonna be perfect for those who have a real thirst for motorsport education.

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We're also going to get lifetime access to our gold member webinars.

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Let's get back to our chat with Varun.

Now let's move on, and I want to talk a little bit about your Dino setup, because we spoke before we started recording this and you're lucky enough to actually have two dinos.

You've got a rolling road and a hub dino yeah, correct.

So they're both in the same room.

All will drive mainline rolling road premium dino and then the two will drive mainline pro hub.

Mainline dinos are just so good.

I've had I'm not going to say names but I've had previous dinos.

I've worked on all other previous dinos and, touching back on the EPA and stuff in noise, I went through a phase of in my old shop where they were, the council fully put a ban on me.

I couldn't do any dino tuning until I had built a room and blah, blah, blah, just because of the complaints.

During that period I was lucky enough that a few of my friends who I've known for a long time Mark Godzilla Motorsport, good mate of mine, carlos, who is Millennium Motorsport, who is now BPP I don't know if you know Billip Performance Products, bpp.

No, not on a period.

It does like fuel, rails and coil kits and stuff.

Really high quality, really good quality stuff and Godzilla Motorsport.

That's Mark Jacobson.

Yeah, mark Jacobson.

Yep, I remember having from my drag racing notes.

Yeah, yeah, so I was.

I'm lucky enough to be good friends with both of those guys and I used both of their dinos.

At the time I had an old, like old analog dino and then I used Mark's, I used Carlos's and Carlos had a mainline and I used that mainline and I was just like, wow, this dino is so good.

Just the data acquisition you get from it, the back to back testing, how consistent they were, how, yeah, ever since I've had a mainline sorry, not meaning to blow their horn or anything, but the support is second to none.

Everything is just so good.

Without trying to make this into an ad for mainline, my experience has been exactly the same.

We came from from my old shop.

I used a dinopak hub dino, which the dino actually was was excellent.

The problem that I had with the dinopak dino was you were just constantly, with the higher power build, just constantly coming up against the torque limit which is an inherent limit in that design of dino.

And that was a problem when we were starting to build these high horsepower drag cars.

When we started High Performance Academy, we were fortunate enough that Todd and Craig actually did support us very, very well and we purchased a four wheel drive rolling road from them.

All started with a two wheel drive, then upgraded to four wheel drive and then, since we've upgraded again to their four wheel drive pro hub dino.

But I mean your point there about their customer service.

They will bend over backwards to answer questions and help you.

I would argue the nicest guys and the best customer service in the dino industry hands down.

I can ring Craig and Todd any time of the night and if they don't answer they'll message me back and I'll ring you back later and they're so good They'll help you fix whatever you need to fix.

They're very experienced like.

Todd is a very, very high end tuner, he knows everything and Craig also knows a lot and they're good guys.

I would never get any other dino ever again Converted for life.

I assume that the pro hub was purchased for the high horsepower stuff where you're starting to run into problems with traction on the rolling road?

Yes, it's for the big power stuff.

We do do a lot of big power because we do mostly a lot of drag racing stuff and obviously drag racing stuff is big power stuff.

On the all wheel drive dino I do always find for a street car someone that's going to be driving a lot.

The rolling road is better because you have the inertia of the wheels to actually simulate that you are driving on the street.

It's a bit hard to hold a hub dino at a steady state at a very low load, as you know.

They start bucking around and carrying on and you can't really tune the cruising elements.

I think that's something that most people would not think too much about.

But that sensitivity to be able to tune those really light load areas and what I'm talking about by that is, let's say, 1500 to 3,000 RPM, that area where you're cruising along on a flat piece of road or even marginally downhill, this really highlights it.

On the road you're just backing out, you've almost got the throttle closed, but not quite.

Those areas of the map are very, very difficult to get to on any type of dino, but a hub dino even more so.

Because what Vareen's talking about here, with the lack of inertia, what that means is you need a certain amount of torque to keep the dino operating at a certain speed, and that speed relates to what the engine RPM is where we're mapping.

So as you want to go lower and lower in the load, you obviously close the throttle, but at that point, at some point, the engine stops making enough torque to maintain dino speed and the dino simply slows down.

With the rolling road you've got that inertia of the rollers.

So while the engine's no longer making enough torque to keep that constant speed, it doesn't immediately slow down, it's a much slower process.

So you get a better look, a better snapshot of those light load areas.

And for people who are thinking well, why does this matter?

It does, because for a street driven car you aren't going through these areas and if you can't tune them it's almost certainly going to be either too rich or too lean, and there's nothing worse than sort of getting to that point where just about to completely close the throttle and the car starts bucking around and just feels horrible.

So for me that's a no brainer.

So yeah, the rolling road definitely superior for that side of things.

What sort of power level do you find that the rolling road starts to become problematic for traction?

This also comes down to what kind of car, what kind of engine, what kind of turbo, because things that are pretty aggressive that come on boost at the power band is very like sharp things that come on like a light switch.

It is very hard to make them hook up, even if they're making 500 horsepower, 550, 600 horsepower that's where I can have dramas with cars.

Also depends on the tyres.

There's so many variables on a rolling road what kind of tyres, how big they are, how you're strapping it down, the heat, how much air is in the tyres.

So it's so many.

So, to be honest, anything over 700, 650, if I think it's going to make more than 650, 700, I'll just put it straight on the hub.

But if it's going to be a street car that is going to be daily driven or whatever, I'll cruise around, I will start it on the roller dyno and if it's all wheel drive, I'll go 1200 horsepower on the roller dyno, no dramas, all wheel drive is easy, like GDRs and EVOs or whatever, straight on the rollers.

And if they want a bigger figure, we've found like back to back.

I've done back to back testing, I've taken it off the rollers and I've put it on the hub.

It's about 15%.

Okay, that kind of matches.

What I saw with the ours as well.

So sometimes, if people just want a big figure, I'll just take it off the rollers and I'll put it on the hub and I'll go here, you can have your big figure.

The internet breaking right number.

Yeah, correct, but yeah, it's about 700 horsepower, anything on a two wheel drive car.

And then also the advantage of big power stuff putting it on the hub, like being able to have you do take away the other aspects of the tyres, the wheels and the tyres and the strapping down.

You take away all those other elements so you have a more accurate tune on big power stuff because it is back to back every single time.

You'll just do that.

You've taken away all those variables.

So when you're doing big power stuff, like power tuning in general really, to be honest, is better on the hub dyno.

It doesn't matter what power level but to get that drivability right and, like you know, if I'm doing flat shift, you know I can, because you do need that inertia like a flat shift manual so I can bang that on the rollers.

You can't do that on the hub Big power autos.

I can punch through the gears on the hub like I can do a full simulated drag pass on the hub.

You know, add 2000 horsepower, no dramas.

Just basically different products for different purposes.

I think that the thing that was an eye opener for me with going from the DynaPak hub dyno to the rolling road was all of those things you were just talking about for consistency the type of tyre, the tyre pressure.

Now the tyre pressure also changes as you go through a dyno tuning session because the tyres heat up, so the pressure increases.

The tyre compound gets stickier as it heats up, so again that changes.

And then I was quite often tuning cars that were developed over maybe a couple of years, so the car might come back three or four times as the owner fitted different turbos or camshafts or whatever it might have been, and I found that problematic.

With the rolling road and this isn't mainline, this is just the rolling road in and of itself you had to strap the car the same.

What happens if the customer comes back and it's now got a different brand of tyre that's either stickier or less sticky?

All of these affect the power reading and the last thing you want is the customer to go away and put in a different turbo and a different set of cams that on paper should be making another 50 kilowatts and you do a baseline and it's down 20 kilowatts over where it was last time, so straight away you're scratching your head like, well, what's gone wrong here?

Is the engine down on power?

Is there an actual physical mechanical problem with it, or is it just the way we've strapped the car on the dyno or some inconsistency there?

So these are challenges that need to be kept in mind.

Whereas, obviously, the hub dyno just takes that element out of it, the back to back consistency is guaranteed, and the run to run consistency as well is second to none, I find anyway.

Yeah, no definitely I'm interested in your technique.

When you've completed a tune on the dyno, particularly if it's a street car, maybe you've used the rolling road to get that drivability dialed in.

Do you also confirm that tune out on the road, just to make sure that everything you saw on the dyno does match in the real world?

Yeah, it depends, obviously, a lot of the cars, things that are making 1000 plus horsepower.

I'm not taking that out on the street to test that.

So, yes and no, some cars while you're rolling you might have a bit of as you know, you might have a bit of dramas with the transient throttle.

In some cars it might feel a little bit dicky as you're cruising around, or a lot of cars these days have no idle control.

They take the IACVs off and they take all that off.

And if you have drive by wire then that doesn't matter.

A lot of things are drive by wire these days, but you just want to make sure that their cruise okay when you slam on the brakes that the engines install, and because you can't do that on the dyno Stuff like that, sometimes hardly ever if I'm having difficulty with a certain car, I'd like to check, but you do always find that tuning cars on the dyno, especially turbocharged things that are throttle overmap, they are always different on the street for

some bloody reason all the time.

So when that happens, then yeah, and especially now these days, as you said, everything's got closed loop lamda and closed loop knock and all that stuff, and then you can set up your engine protection parameters like lean protection and a lot of things.

That One thing that happens a lot with 32 to 34 GDRs with factory sumps is you start giving them a real aggressive power curve and it pushes the oil away from the pickup and then you find, like when it's accelerating, the oil pressure goes low.

So you have to just you obviously don't get that on the dyno because you're not moving.

Sometimes we have to check that just to make sure, like you know then Implement engine protection function so if the, if the oil pressure does go low, it will cut it and things like that.

You know, look, but these come along with.

If I'm now from building a GDR that sort of caliber, just say, mate, when we're putting engine out we're going to do an extended something baffles like that's just tough to ease.

It is what it is.

Yeah, I think you sort of learn that the weaknesses that just have to be addressed in certain certain types of car you do have to take that on the street and figure out what's going on.

But yeah, look, I do sometimes take them for a drive.

I send one of my mechanics camera and he's pretty good at Taking something for a drive and just making sure it's all good.

He kind of knows what I need to look for.

Pretty much I just get me to take for a drive, quick, rip around the block.

I just check the logging, make sure it's all good, because Depending on the time of the day and you know what season it is, how much power this thing makes, it could be just using up all the air in the room and then you go out on the street and all the sudden it's lean.

Sometimes you need to just make sure that it's all good.

I've always been a strong advocate for confirming a tune where possible on the road or the racetrack, if that's where the car is going to be used, and the reality, as you kind of just mentioned there, is that even in a well designed dyno cell it can be difficult sometimes to replicate the air flow and temperatures that we're actually going to see under normal road driving conditions.

I've already talked about the issues on certain dyno's getting down to those light load areas, so for a street driven car, I would have traditionally, with my old dyno pack, got those dialed in out on the street, so I want to make sure that the drive ability is perfect.

It's not uncommon, though, to take a car off the dyno and find out that your perfect 12.2

to 1 air fuel ratio that you're seeing on the dyno all of a sudden is 12.5

to 1 or something.

It's just moved a little bit.

The other one I quite often find is you could get boost control perfect on the dyno, like, literally, you could run a ruler through the boost curve.

It's just perfectly flat if that's what you're trying to achieve, and then you take it out on the street or the racetrack and all of a sudden you've got overboosts on gear shifts and particularly the test I always used to do is let's say you've got full boost by 4000 RPM.

So I'd roll into the throttle, get well above that boost threshold maybe 5500 RPM lift the throttle completely, close it and then smash it back to the floor and just see what that boost does.

Does it come back up nicely to the target or quite often it'll overshoot.

So quite often I found I had to fiddle around with my boost control setup on the road compared to what I had on the dyno.

But I mean it's on a case by case basis.

Definitely can't say it's always going to be problematic, but sometimes it just is One way I sort of combated that.

That's your 100% right.

Like you get your boost control correct, go out on the street and it's all over the place and close the boost.

Like no matter how quick they are, sometimes they just accelerate so fast like it can't pull it back down and it'll just hit boost curve like this.

It's just how it is.

So one way I combated it I just I ramped them really fast and it seems to if it's going to overboost you'll overboost, sure.

Yeah, that's actually a good point.

Yeah, we haven't talked about ramp rates and literally that is just the speed with which the dyno is going to allow the engine to accelerate.

So I mean, traditionally what I'll try and do is match something pretty realistic for a higher gear, maybe how quickly the engine will accelerate in fourth or fifth gear if it was out on the open road, because obviously that's then realistic conditions, a good place to start.

I mean, obviously it depends on the engine, the gearing and how much power you're making.

But a good place to start I always found is around about 500 engine RPM per second.

That was a pretty good place to start.

And if we're sort of talking about a 2000 to 7000 RPM run obviously that's a 10 second run then it's enough to really put some load on the engine and it's realistic.

But yeah, a faster or a slower ramp run can actually highlight some problems that aren't necessarily obvious straight away.

Yeah, so I'll ramp them fast and slow, just to see if it's all good.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Ecu of choice.

What are you guys supplying and installing?

Is it anything and everything?

Pretty much so.

We are a Haltech dealer, a Link dealer, an MTRON dealer, like my GDR, and both my GDRs have Motex in them.

I do a lot of cars with Motex in them, the new stuff and the old stuff.

You know, we still get the occasional power of C and micro tech, but I guess it all comes down to the customer what the car is being used for, what functions they are going to implement, what they're going to benefit from.

Like, if it's just someone with just a daily driver that wants to come in and something simple, then I'll always send them the plug-in route.

So Link or Haltech, mtron, whatever.

And then obviously budget and some ECUs can do certain things better than other ECUs, so it all sort of depends.

So at the moment we're doing a lot of stuff, a lot of different stuff Link, haltech and MTRON, a lot of Link stuff recently, just because they are a bit more cost effective.

Yeah, they make a good product for the price point.

And they're very good.

They're simple, they're fast.

We get along really well with the people at Link Australia so we can get stuff really quickly.

Jade, I think, is their media manager or something.

Manager Jade hooks us up really good at Link Haltech also like Mighty Mouse Haltech, my Supra Haltech.

The Civic is Haltech.

I mean, I don't think you could run a tuning workshop in Australia and not support Haltech.

Obviously it's Australia made and it's probably one of the more popular entry to semi-professional level motorsport ECUs over there.

Correct.

They do have functions that do really appeal for drag racing.

Use just all their time based control things like that, their nitrous controller.

They just have little things that do excel over the others and it is simpler.

That stuff is a lot better.

And then, yeah, MTRON, that can just pretty much do anything and everything.

I mean, I think, to sort of tie a nice neat little bow around this.

The takeaway is, if you're running a performance workshop, you cannot realistically get away with only offering or supporting one single brand of ECU.

So it's just going to be too narrow, because the ECUs that you've just mentioned span a pretty wide range of price points and feature set.

So it really has to be selected to suit the customer, what they're trying to achieve and ultimately, what their budget is.

There's no point speccing a high end MTRON or MoTeC for a very simple street car where the feature set isn't necessary unnecessary expense, particularly if your customer's on a budget and, let's be honest, every customer is on some kind of a budget.

Let's move on.

We've got a bunch of project cars that I wanted to get a bit more detail on.

We'll try and keep this a little bit quicker and see how much we can get through here.

Let's start with the Supra X275 drag car and, as I mentioned, there is an interview on our YouTube channel which we'll link to, so if people want a little bit more detail than we get into here, they can go find that out.

So drag racing, you could have already said, is your key passion here.

What is it about drag racing for you as a performance workshop owner, that kind of ticks your boxes and makes it interesting.

I guess number one pushing the limit of things that aren't supposed to do what they're designed to do, I guess.

And just that rush, like I love going fast.

So I haven't really delved into circuit racing which I probably will soon in the near future but I just love that rush.

You're going fast and you're vision going blurry and you can't see.

I just love it.

And just the sound, the noise and the feel like you're strapped in this car.

It feels like you're flying a plane sort of thing, and when you're going six seconds at a quarter mile it's just an adrenaline rush like no other.

And just pushing the boundaries of these little engines, I guess extracting all this power from these little engines does put heaps like a lot of strain on them and it's just interesting just doing different things and figuring out how far they can go and what's going to do what and how to do.

You know we've done something different and how we're going to get it and how are we going to put the power down and how are we going to keep this engine in its power band?

Like you know, this small engine with this massive turbo, how is this going to work?

Like it's just, it's good, it's challenging.

One thing that sucks about drag racing is your campaign can be over in a split second, you know.

Or if it rains, it's all you know.

You could put in months and months of work and you go to the event there, and you go to the event that you're racing for and it rains.

You just sit there, you know.

I remember I took my car to Australia many years ago to compete at the Jamboree in Queensland.

We've made some wholesale changes to the car prior to that event and obviously I needed to shake the car down, which was fine because we had time and there were three events that we had scheduled in New Zealand before it had to go in a container and we literally towed that car the length of the country to three separate events and three separate events got rained out.

So ended up shipping a car to.

Australia completely untested and it went about as well as you'd expect.

It completely bit us.

So that was really frustrating For me.

I kind of.

I know there's a mentality of those who haven't been involved with drag racing well, you accelerate an Australian for 400 metres, like how hard can that be?

And I mean, admittedly, if you're running 13 or 14 second passes, well, yeah, there's probably not a massive technical challenge to it other than cutting a really good light, and that in and of itself is a different skill.

But once you start running sub 10 seconds, sub 9 seconds, 8 seconds and into the 6s, yeah, there's a bit of driver skill involved.

I mean, it's a different set of skills to driving around a racetrack, but there's definitely some driver skill involved.

For me, I always sort of gravitated towards drag racing because, primary as an engine builder and a tuner, I found there was no better place to prove the worth of your product than the drag strip.

Everyone's probably seen unrealistic cheetah dyno sheets and those are pretty meaningless.

But it's pretty hard to cheat the ETN mile an hour.

So for those who know how to read a time slip, that time slip will tell you just about everything you need to know about how much power that car's making.

So what I did find is, obviously, when we were trying to break world records with a 1200 horsepower car that came out of the factory with 300 horsepower, drivetrain reliability was hugely problematic and you ended up spending more and more money on the car in order to spend less and less time in the driver's seat.

Since moving to Queenstown, we've got no drag strip and I've sort of shifted to circuit racing, which I must admit I'm really enjoying, but it's a different set of challenges and a different level of enjoyment.

Alright, coming back to the Supra, can you give us a quick overview of this X275 radial class?

What is it and why has that become really popular?

Because obviously it's just controlled tyre.

It's a little tyre and the way you have to manage the power to actually make this tyre hook and go is I think that's, the challenging part.

Once you have that tyre to hook, you can just feed it in and let it eat.

Pretty much and I think, as we touched on earlier, a lot of it is eighth mile racing, which is half track.

I personally don't really do much eighth mile stuff, I just stick to the quarter mile events.

But running the eighth mile is half the time and you often find that a lot of catastrophic failures happen on the second half of the track.

That's where the engine really heavily loaded, so you kind of get away from that side of things.

Correct.

Yeah, so it's a lot more affordable for people and it's just not the X275, but the radial stuff is in the X235, x315 and the X315s are like the pro classes, but the X275, I think, is really challenging because there's just all kinds of different cars that can run there.

We're running a 2J Supra, but then there's big block V8s in it, there's the Barras, there's RBEs, there's all kinds of cars.

So that X275 tyre becomes the leveler across the field.

Correct, yeah.

And you can't just go and throw as much power at it as you can make, because you're just going to blow the tyres off it.

Yeah, but then a lot of people are running live axle rear ends.

They're running IRS rear ends, they're running rear clips, so just the chassis.

Back then they're doing big four links and big diffs.

So there's a lot of different cars but, as you said, the leveler is the tyre and, depending on you know, you got Outlaw 275 which is do whatever you want as long as you got a 275 tyre.

It's like OG 275, it depends which event you are running in.

Like the Kendo rounds they will have like Outlaw and then OG and then there's same tyre.

But it just comes down to what you've actually done to your car.

So you know, you got full pro mods that are like a full pro mod chassis with a carbon body, blah, blah, blah.

Put a 275 on it and it'll run in.

You know Outlaw 275.

So you know, you got cars that are 500 kilos different in weight and just like how you're going to compare there.

I'm just imagining a pro mod with a 275 on the back is going to look a little bit odd, but that's probably beside the point.

They do look funny definitely.

Give us some sense of the sort of ETM mile an hour that the Supra is running on that 275, just so people can kind of get an idea of what we're talking about.

$679, $212 is my quickest, so this isn't hanging around, that's no joke.

So we are still one of the quickest.

We used to be the quickest in the country, but we are still up there.

I think we're in the top five or something on the 275.

We peaked very early with that car.

It was quite a new car and we just kept going, kept going and we got to there and then from then it was just gearbox dramas and then we fought gearbox dramas for two years and finally got a new gearbox, new converter sort of set up and now we've found limitations in other places.

Now we've run out of turbocharger, we've run out of intercooler, but there are some cars that are going really quick.

But we're still up there with them.

But yeah, it's going over a full, giving it a bit of a birthday for next time when it comes out.

Yeah, do you just mention the transmission and torque converter.

So obviously it's an auto and this must be a big consideration with that small tire and sort of managing the power delivery to the tire and not sort of breaking it free.

So is the auto really the proven way to go, as opposed to a clutchless box, which we also see in drag racing, the likes of a Liberty or maybe a G-Force clutchless?

Well, from.

I might be wrong, but from my experience the only clutchless radial car I have seen is Titan Motorsport with their Supra.

That's a full chassis car, but that's quite an impressive car and it's very fast.

I think they've gone 640 or something.

I will say, having seen that car run and I think we watched that at TX2K back in should it must have been 2019, before COVID now and I mean they got it down the track and yes, it was very fast, but it took them, I think, three or four passes to get the car and yet the clutch dialed in to the point where it would actually leave cleanly and go down the track.

So I think when your traction limited the flexibility that you get with a converter and an auto, it just gives you more flexibility to get the car to go down the track, particularly if the track prep isn't like right on point.

Is that fair?

Yeah, yeah, well, track prep for radial car is very crucial.

They put a lot of glue down for these tires to hook up, but, yeah, the converter does take a lot of that away, instead of stuffing around with clutches.

As you know, you got your base pressure and then you got all this other stuff going on and the clamping force and some trivical force and weights.

There's a lot of science and a lot of art to setting up a slipper style clutch.

Yeah, setting all that up is so hard.

With a converter you have a certain you just you have converter slip and obviously that changes.

You change that pretty much with the amount of power you're putting in on the start line and that will determine how much that converter is actually locking up.

Like are you getting it to its stall speed, like to the lock up, or, you know, are you below it, or it does really help and it takes a lot of strain off the drive track.

Initial sud.

Initial hit.

Yeah, I'd say the bigger thing as well.

Well, maybe not the bigger thing, but another equally important element with the auto is the way the shifts progress and it doesn't tend to unload the tyre on the shift.

Not a 275 car, but I relate back to when I was involved with tuning the heat treatments racing R32 GTR.

At the time that was the fastest.

I think it was the fastest four wheel drive outright in the world.

I think it ran the 741.

Obviously, times have moved on a mile from there, that's Reese McGregor isn't it.

Yeah, reese McGregor correct.

I loved that car.

yeah, I think we were sort of circa 1600 wheel horsepower, which again these days doesn't really sound like much.

But the limiting thing for me is I could put more power into the car, but watching Reese drive that thing standing behind it on the start line and it was a handful like shit it had used, that was a liberty, wasn't it?

That was a liberty.

Yeah, air shifted liberty.

But every shift you just see the car move and sometimes it's like on the centre line almost rubbing up against the wall on the next shift and it's like God, this is respect to Reese for keeping the thing shiny side up and that was sort of like, basically, that car stalled out around about that time that would sort of hit this glass ceiling and couldn't go quicker.

I mean, these days, particularly if you look at the likes of Matux and Croydon, they've all gravitated towards the auto and that's just been one of the keys to really unlock the ETM mile an hour in that platform, I think, because it doesn't unload so much on the shifts.

Interested to sort of talk about torque management strategies or most classes of drag racing, traction control is not legal, but there's other ways of working around that with profiling drive shaft speedy doing anything around that.

No.

So we log it all like obviously just input shaft speed, tail shaft speed, drive shaft speed, but the way that so far we've been lucky enough to be able to do torque management, just simply, I have time based boost control.

There's two modes of boost control obviously the wastegate on the turbocharger and then we have a charge bleed on just before the throttle body.

If I need to bleed boost there I can.

And also then time based ignition timing maps.

Obviously I'm going to trans break on the start line and I let go, not on the Supra itself but like on that CELICA.

It has wheelie control.

So we've got a laser pointing, a laser mounted on the chassis on the front, and we calibrate that.

So you know, as it lifts up or as the laser starts measuring, like you know, an increased distance depending on the distance, that we have a timing table so it will start pulling out ignition timing.

But to pull the car back down you can't do it too much because then you know it will fall over and like sort of hit a hole and come back up.

And obviously you know pulling too much ignition timing and big boost can be quite detrimental as well that can cause its own set of issues.

Yeah, yeah, correct, so you can't do too much.

So you know, there's a few things that we've implemented without going into too much detail.

Yeah, then we also with the Supra, we use transmission pressure control, so controlling the torque converter pressure and stuff like that.

We can use valves to shift the power, that, like you know, using the converter dump, internal and external dumps to do that sort of stuff for power management.

And yeah, it's all pretty basic really.

We're not using any forms of sort of torque management like traction control, anything like that.

It's just all raw.

I'm literally just making the engine and the turbo make less or more.

So basically, do a pass, look at the data logging.

Was a wheel spinning, in which case you need to pull a little bit of power out of it?

Was it hooked up the highway on the strip?

Great, it's going to probably take more power for the next pass and then make it.

A lot of changes like that.

I'm interested with the drag cars, with your tuning philosophy.

When you're on the dyno with these sorts of engines, are you tuning them to 100% of the power that you're going to use on the drag strip, or are you sort of getting a baseline tune in them?

Maybe you've got an engine that ultimately is capable of 2000 horsepower.

You're sort of doing some runs up to maybe sort of 12 to 1500 horsepower, then dialing in the rest at the track, or how do you approach that Well, I approach it personally.

I try to give it everything on the dyno and not give it everything just so, and not not down To every last horsepower.

Like we'll just say this thing's good for 80 pounds of boost, I'll try to run it.

I'll try to run 80 on the dyno just to make sure, because at the track You're never gonna go if you've never run 80 pounds, you're never gonna go and just put 80 pounds straight into it.

You are gonna creep up on it.

But then in saying that you can also there's so many cars, like pretty much all of them here we only, we only do tune up to a certain point and go.

Maybe we can push this further and we end up do pushing it further At the track, but often after it leaves the dyno, if it's a pretty fresh build or if it seemed like a major change, we'll just get it out there and, like you know, do the launch, do a half pass, get off and let's have a look like where, then look at the data, see where everything is heading, and then, until you know, and then we see that if that all looks good, then give it a full pass and then if that all looks good, then we'll creep up on it.

So we don't exactly tune like, go out with the power that we had just made in the super.

For instance, I've only run it at 75 pounds of boost.

Oh, that's the max before the turbo ran out.

I've only done that like four times or five times, just because we always go back doing some big major changes and we go back and we're not not knowing what we're gonna see and, yeah, just creeping up on it really.

But yeah, having a dyno there, like you may as well Just turn it right up and see what it's going to do, because you often find that when you do go on the track it's all gonna be a little bit different.

Yeah, we try to Get a proper baseline of everything so all bases are covered, but yeah, often we do end up giving it a bit more.

So, yeah, half and half really.

Sometimes we do give it everything because you know you do want to see what this thing's capable of on the dyno.

But a lot of the time we don't because, especially when we have like big door engines, aluminium rod things.

So you know we don't want to be don't want to put undue we're in tear on these things.

I mean, personally I always found it was terrifying Running our drag engines that sort of.

You know, we were only back then 50-55 pound of boost or thereabouts.

But it's not so much the boost, but when you're revving these things out.

I mean, my engine didn't make full boost until seven and a half thousand RPM and you're revving it to ten and a half and it's just like Please, let this run be over.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just a sensation that is so different to driving the car down the strip.

You just feeling all of the vibrations and everything, and I don't know.

For me, I just I didn't find it a Pleasant sensation.

I kind of was more of like let's just get a baseline in here.

We'll run it to 45 pounds, I'll do a pull out to nine and a half thousand RPM.

I've already it's already mapped.

I've run this thing for the last two seasons.

Just need to check it out, make sure that everything matches up and like let's just let's go to the strip and do it there.

Coming back to the Supra, you've just seen it sort of going through a bit of a birthday now.

Obviously, we've already talked about the 275 tyre, which kind of becomes a limiting factor.

You see, you're out of turbocharger Previously, so it sounds like, in the deep end at least, it's gonna take more power.

Is that the way to go faster?

Bigger turbocharger, more air flow and Manager, you know, for the short track, so that you're not overpowering the tyre, and then let it eat for the deep end, yeah so we have run out of turbo.

Right now it's a 98 mil GTX 55 Gen 2, so we're going to a 104 mil G57 and that's what will that sort that'll go to.

But then the other thing is we've had a few dramas with intercoolers with that much Boost and you know them sort of shaking around, it ends up splitting, running the water to air and we've had, um, you know, intercooler splitting and boost going into the water system and spraying water all through the car and it's a little bit dangerous.

Yeah, right now we just got this intercooler that we had just found and this American company makes them, um, they're good but they're big and they're heavy and it's not as effective as our old intercooler.

So now we're we've been making heaps of other water to air intercoolers just using the Garrett cores.

Pretty much each core is rated 2000 horsepower.

So you just end up stack, you just stack them up, and the more you stack them up, like you know, 2003,000, whatever, that's how they work.

And then you know going to obviously Try to design a billet tank, you know to, just for a bit of safety there, stuff like that.

But I think just making them out of 3 mil and then bracing them and stuff.

That's what we're just gonna do for now because I don't think I'm gonna run the super for too much longer anyway.

But yeah so turbocharger intercooler.

I did a bit of damage to the cylinder head so it needs a cylinder head.

That head's been on it forever.

Like you know, it's a pretty old car so it's copped a bit of a beating.

And Will at JHH, who does our cylinder head, said it's, it's getting a bit on the soft side.

So he said next time something happens we need a new one.

It's uh, it's not something that most people would think of as a consumable, but at these sort of power levels they unfortunately do tend to be relatively expensive consumables, as is most of the engine component tree.

Looking into your crystal ball, with all of these changes, complete what, what do you see you've been able to get to in terms of ET and mile an hour?

Well, as I said to you before, we peaked in that car really quickly, but since then I've been able to mile an hour more in some parts and I've been able to 60 foot better.

And the 330 is Another thing I'm going to really concentrate on because I know that I can put the power in and bring it home.

There's no dramas.

But I've always tried to implement the charge valve on the intake, meaning that I keep the turbo speed up.

So when, even though we're launching on you know, 18, 19 pounds of boost, which is not a lot of boost it is a small tire so we can't give it too much but then you know, waiting for that turbo to accelerate Obviously the larger turbo you go, the stress loads going, accelerate, and then waiting for that turbo to accelerate, you know we're losing power there.

So you're purposely introducing an air leak pre throttle body.

So the turbo speed is more what you'd expect around 70 pound of boost or 75 psi, but the engine's not seeing that because of this boost leak.

But the benefit is then you close that valve and rather than waiting for the turbo to spool up, which could take Quite a long period of time with such a big turbo You've almost instantly got that boost.

Correct, yeah, and I think that's going to be our key factor on getting the 330 down the 330 foot.

But the filter is the first 330 feet of the track.

And yeah, and obviously we have a new gearbox now which has different gear ratio as well.

It's got a tighter torque converter which it needs more power now to get it going and just relearning all that stuff.

It is a new gearbox combo, a new converter combo and, yeah, the turbo is maxed out at 75 pounds of boost.

We're seeing there like, compared to the old intercooler, air temps are, you know, a lot higher than what they used to be.

So we're going to redesign our own new intercooler.

Dan fablab, our fabricator, he's been making some pretty good water to air intercoolers lately.

We've been, like you know, just stuffing around with a few different designs and really getting them working very efficiently and seeing A really good power gains from obviously cooler air and being able to build something lighter.

Yeah, we haven't specifically talked about it, but with 75 psi I'm safe and assuming that you're running on methanol fuel here, yeah, yeah, okay.

So with methanol there's sort of two schools of thought.

We see almost as many turbocharged cars running methanol with intercoolers as we see without, and I think it comes down to almost a from one turn or to another, their preference.

But you know, with the, the cooling effect that the methanol fuel has on the charge temperature, basically it draws the heat out of the, the combustion charge temperature, as it goes through a phase change from liquid to vapor.

So it has a massive cooling effect, also aided by the fact that we're using so much of the fuel compared to a gasoline based fuel.

How much Importance do you place on that air temperature out of the intercooler?

man a lot.

I'm a big believer in intercoolers and I'll give you like a perfect example.

So there's this Rx8 that we do.

It's a 13b methanol drag car.

It's got a pro mod 88 precision turbo on it.

We just saw at the end of the run air temps was like at here, air temps were at 150 160 degrees Celsius and we had upstream injectors in the pipe, heaps of auxiliary injectors putting the methanol to keep the engine alive.

And it did it flawlessly, did it for ages.

So I just figured, you know, at the end of every meet when we'd be turning the boost up and really getting on it, we pulled the engine apart and the apex seals would be a little bit sort of furry.

You know that it'd be every time apex seal overxil, which is fine.

You know it's quite cheap for a rotary to do that easy.

But then I was like man, look, that's just, I just want to try, put an intercooler on it.

Like I think we'll really gain some power with some consistency and rotaries.

You know they're great engines but they're a little bit fragile.

They're not fragile, you just have to be very attentive.

You know, like if something is out of spec, like you know, if we add a target, then it doesn't take long for them to.

They're not as forgiving as a piston engine.

So, um, we wanted to keep a bit more reliable and so we built a Dan built toward the air intercooler.

It was double stacked thousand horsepower, cause Custom tanks, all that stuff.

I tuned it on 40 pounds of boost.

It came on boost Probably a thousand rpm earlier, just because I think the pure air density and the like you know the amount of air that it was actually using.

Now I didn't need all those auxiliary fuel injectors anymore, I didn't need the upstream injectors and stuff anymore, which simplified that.

And you know it did put a little bit of weight in the car, I think 40 kilos in total, a bit less like when it was full of ice and water, and it made another 400 horsepower through the mid range.

Shut, that's no joke and up top it made another.

It made another on the same boost.

It made another 150 horsepower up top.

So all up, it made 1200 horsepower, used to make 1050, made 1200, nearly 1200, and then it made 400 horsepower through the middle.

Just that amount of boost.

And and we took this car back to the track and it was like an animal, like first and second gear, where it was kind of struggling to get going.

It was now Lifting the tires and he was, you know, like lifting the front wheels up off the ground.

He was like fighting it and like it just became a completely different car.

We ended up p-being and now that car is the fastest 289, 30 in b In Australia.

Like you know, people are, like you know, go.

Wow, what did you do?

We put an encore on it.

That's a very compelling case study for adding an intercooler to a methanol fuel drag engine.

Yeah, and methanol look, methanol with cool air can be a bit tricky what we've seen, especially with nitrous.

It can be a bit tricky and like adding, adding all that air and adding all that methanol.

Obviously you know methanol, the way it oxygenates and when it, when it combusts, like you know it's, it's pretty crazy.

We had to, we had to do things with the ignition system because all of a sudden it wasn't sparking it.

So it was, it was.

It was pretty hectic, like that car's got a cdi, but you know, then we had to look into, you know the cdi Say it came a bit, it became a bit weak and it's pretty hard to light off the charge on methanol fuel, particularly Exceptionally high boost levels.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm, I'm still so that, really, like you know before that my super is water to air.

So, and everything we build is intercooled, like you know.

There is a thing, you know it's lighter, less things to go wrong, blah, blah, blah, but it does make more power and especially, you know, if you're trying to put weight in places, this is another advantage like certain cars, you need to add weight into certain places and with the water to air, you can, you can put the tank here.

You know, you can.

You know you've, all of a sudden you got an intercooler at the front.

It puts a bit of weight on the front, like to keep the front down, and yeah, but more flexibility.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm a big believer in it.

I think, yeah, I think it's, it's a lot better.

I definitely spear everything in that direction.

Oh man, when you've seen those results firsthand, yeah, it becomes a no brainer.

I mean, I went the the ice water to air intercooler on my Evo because I wanted the confidence of knowing that my air temperatures were going to be under some form of control.

And you know, that was probably one of my first experiences moving to methanol fuel as well.

So I felt like I had enough of a learning curve ahead of me With just learning the properties of the methanol fuel, what it wanted in terms of timing and air fuel ratios, that if I could stick to, you know, a more controlled intake air temperature.

It just took one more variable out, so I never actually back to back to it with and without the intercooler, which, thank you back.

Now I'm not really too sure why we didn't.

It wouldn't have been that difficult, but your example, there is probably enough evidence for me.

Anyway, look, varun, we could talk for a lot longer and there's a bunch more of your projects that I would have liked to get into.

But we're sort of getting on towards a couple of hours now on this and I do want to respect your time.

So I think we will move towards wrapping this up and maybe we'll get you back on in the future To talk about some of these other projects which I am excited about and are really cool.

But We've got the same three questions we ask all of our guests here.

The first of those is what's next in the future for you and 101 motorsports?

We're pretty good.

I think I'm pretty proud of what we've achieved and we're pretty comfortable doing what we do now.

Really, I've been sort of telling people that I want to sort of slow down a bit, really Like less builds.

Right now the shop is full I think there's 20 something cars and then every day we've got to push them out and work pushing me in and we're lucky to have a lot of good customers the customers that keep coming through the door.

Really good, and what we're working on, where we're comfortable working on those sort of things, doing a lot more r35 stuff.

So trying to do a bit of bit of newer stuff just to keep with the times, because you know, no, everyone's going to do this stuff forever.

So I have to do like things a little bit different.

But, you know, work smarter, not harder.

But, as I said, I'm not a very good businessman.

I'm not a very good businessman.

I just like battling along doing what I do, but, um, it's more of the more of the same.

Yeah, actually we are.

I am expanding, but yeah, that's a story for another day.

I guess I think here's a, here's a guy that you actually know.

You've been to Fiji to tune.

Ah yeah, so satan, the guy named satan yeah, I'm actually taking a dyno.

Oh, that's where I was born.

Yes, so I actually went and I went on holiday with my family and I'm actually sending a dyno to Fiji and I'll be spending sort of next year half half, just, you know, just chilling.

You know I'm an interesting car culture in Fiji.

That was many, many years ago.

I went over to Fiji and tuned I think it was three cars it was.

It was an eye opener, first of all because it was Suva, which is not the tourist side of Fiji.

That's kind of the the real aspect of Fiji.

There was no dyno there.

So I'm road tuning these three cars I think there was in, was it two cars?

Maybe there's an EVO on a Subaru anyway, and I distinctly remember that the roads in Fiji are not that great.

And literally this GC8 Subaru STI that I tuned and I think it was a basic engine with a turbo upgrade injectors and a plug and play ECS.

So it was like it's nothing crazy.

It might have been on a good day, might have been 300 kilowatts at the wheels if that, probably not quite that.

I'd pretty much finished up tuning it and we're doing an acceleration run just to sort of final check mixtures and everything.

And the road was so rough it literally lit up over a bump in second or third gear and when it landed obviously it gripped up and it smashed the transmission.

And I mean anyone who's dealt with the GC8 knows those gearboxes are made of glass at the best of times, so I'm like well, I am not coming back here, I think, my days of road tuning cars at that sort of power level.

I think I'd had enough of that.

He spoke very highly of you.

He was like tell Andre he knows me.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, yeah, yeah.

No, I still look back fondly on that trip, even if it maybe wasn't entirely successful in terms of gearbox life expectancy.

All right.

Next question for you, varun Is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself to help reach where you are today in your career faster?

All right, kind of.

From the story you've given us, I think you've sort of ticked all the boxes along the way, but I think I got there pretty quick but to follow my lead.

Really, you know, if anyone ever needs you know, guidance or any kind of advice, I'm happy to give it to him.

But I think in this industry if you want to be good, then you have to really work towards being good.

I guess what I mean is you just have to work towards what you want to do.

Like you can't sort of slack off.

You have to put in the hard yards and the more you do, the better you're going to get.

Like, the biggest thing I can tell people is you know, if they want to be a tuner, learn the mechanical side of things first, learn how everything works, get your hands dirty, do all that and then, you know, do a HP Academy course and it will really put things into perspective.

And then add everything you know together and do it.

Just jump in and do it, because the more you do it, the more you'll understand, the more you'll get better, the more you can, like, carve your craft and do that.

So there's a couple of things I'll add to that, and I think, again from the story that you've told us of how you've sort of got to where you are, I think for me, the key takeaways there is you obviously showed a work ethic and were committed, so I think that's really important.

You've got to have passion for what you're doing and, again, as I mentioned earlier as well, being able to see the big picture, like thinking outside of the box.

That's really important.

You mentioned earlier as well common sense, and I didn't pick up on it at the time, but common sense is a term that's thrown around so often, but, honestly, the longer I deal with people in the industry, I would say common sense is actually, unfortunately, not very common.

So those sort of things to keep in mind, speaking about being the best, and I think the tuning industry is an arrogant industry, and I think this kind of feeds into the secrecy that a lot of tuners try and sort of make out, that what they do is some secret source, and the reality is I probably fell into that trap earlier in my career as well.

You learn quickly, though, that that's not the case.

There's no secret source here.

You take an engine to two competent tuners who understand the principles of tuning and you're not going to get a situation where one can make 200 horsepower more than the other.

That's just, that's not possible.

The engine, ultimately, is going to define how much power it can make, and our job is just to give it the correct amount of fuel and ignition timing.

If we do our job properly, the engine will make what it's designed to.

We are not magicians here, and that's always been HPA's logo.

Tuning is not magic, it is a science I don't personally buy in these days to the, this person is the best tuner.

What does that even mean?

Best at what?

Because if we're into drag racing, okay fine, we're defining best by ET and mile an hour, but there's subtleties in that as well.

If you've got a 275 car, that's traction limited, you're walking an absolute razor's edge in terms of dialing in the power to the track the whole way down, and that's changing as the track evolves day to day, track to track.

So that becomes power management as opposed to outright tuning.

Yes, it's an element of tuning.

For me, I actually believe that the hardest challenge with tuning is to replicate factory drivability on a modified car with an aftermarket ECU.

Getting a car with a big set of cams to start at minus 5 degrees C on a winter's morning here, when there's snow on the ground in Queenstown, and idle at 1100 RPM perfectly, and then drive just like a factory car, yet still make yo, what would it be?

6, 8, 1200 horsepower, whatever that might be.

That for me is a challenge.

That is a real challenge, probably more so than getting a 2000 horsepower car to go down the drag strip.

But the reality is they are just different challenges.

So I don't think there's a best.

I think there's always challenging yourself to be better than you were yesterday.

I think that's my take on it.

Yeah, you got that exactly right.

Like I really pride myself on exactly what you just said.

Like even our drag cars, I just like to lean in, bang, you start it and you walk off like and that is the most challenging thing just making the thing start, making it rev nicely, making it drive nicely.

Agreed.

Alright Varun.

Last question for today.

If people want to follow you and see what you're up to, where are they best to do so?

What are your social media accounts?

Social media.

So Instagram, obviously, is a 101 motorsport 101.Motorsport

.

So just the numbers 101 and dot motorsport.

Facebook, same thing 101 motorsport.

We have a website, www.101motorsportcomau

.

That's pretty outdated, we'd be able to go on that, but we're pretty active, like you know.

If anyone's got any questions, you know, just hit us up on Instagram, facebook, you can call our office, whatever.

You know, I have my personal page, mr101 motorsport.

I'm always stuffing around, posting funny stuff on there.

It's kind of annoying, like you know, if it's not on social media.

It's like you haven't done it or people don't think you've done it.

So just lately we're starting to be a bit more active on social media where, before you know, we do so much cool things and people don't know that we've done them.

So you know I don't need more work, but it's just to show that you know we've done this, we've done that.

You know, if anyone's building the same overseas or wherever you are and you want to know something, you know I'm not a secret keeper, I don't care.

You know, if you want to know something, I'll tell you.

It's like that.

Alright.

Well, as usual, we'll put links to those in the show notes so it's easy for people to find LitVaroon really great to chat.

Always a pleasure to chat to you and really interesting to learn a little bit more about your back story and the history of 101 motorsport.

Like I say, a bit of a shame we couldn't get into some of the other cool projects that you've got going on, but I know there'll be another time.

So wish you all the best for the future and particularly look forward to seeing your new projects come out and maybe the ET and Myla now improve on your Supra.

Thank you.

Andre, always a pleasure really good talking to you and, yeah, I love seeing what you're doing for the industry.

Yep, appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks, mate.

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106: Intercoolers and Methanol — Pointless or the Key to BIG Power Gains?

Honda Crx

Nissan Skyline

Nissan Pulsar

Nissan Gtrs

Peugeot 308

Holden Monaro

Ford Cortina

Toyota Supra

Chevrolet C8

Subaru Brz

Toyota 86

Chevrolet Spark

Lancia Lambda

Cadillac DTS

Toyota Celica

Mazda Rx8

About this episode

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