152: Building a Lamborghini Gallardo into a WTAC Weapon

So I think at our weight to be competitive, we probably need to be somewhere in the order of 1800, 900 wheel horsepower. And that brings with it a range of complexities, as I'm sure you can imagine. Straight away, I'm thinking about those poor intercoolers. Ah, I'm thinking about my exhaust valves, not turning back into the metal they started life as. Welcome to the HPA Tune-In podcast, I'm Andre, your host, Anne, and this episode, we're joined by Josh.

From specialized racing solutions in Australia. Now, Josh has just come back from World Time Attack, where they debuted their Lamborghini Gerardo GT3 race car in the pro class and claimed second in class and third outright, which is no joke considering the competitiveness of World Time Attack, clearly a production GT3 race car is never going to cut it at this level.

And we talk about what went into redeveloping the GT3 race car in order to make it competitive. I'm talking here about built engines, I'm talking about a twin turbo kit and around 1500 horsepower to the wheels.

Now, the Gerardo that they developed wasn't enough to keep Josh happy though, they also took a Nissan GTR GT3 race car and redeveloped that as well. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite ready for competition at World Time Attack, but we look forward to seeing that next year.

We also learn about Josh's background, how he built up the skill sets to run a business at this level and also to build cars at this level and we learn how he's leveraging more modern technology such as 3D scanning, 3D modeling and CAD as well as 3D printing, to fast track these projects and also develop parts that would be difficult or even impossible without these technologies.

Before we jump into our chat, for those who are new to the tune in podcast, high performance academy is an online training school, we specialize in teaching people how to build performance engines, how to tune EFI, how to construct wiring harnesses, we also cover topics on fabrication, 3D modeling and CAD, race driver education and data logging just to name a few.

You can find all of our courses at hpacademy.com forward slash courses. All of these courses are delivered in a high definition video modules that you can watch from anywhere in the world provided you've got an internet connection.

This means you can learn from the comfort of your own place and you can learn at your own pace. All of our courses also come with a 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee.

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And for podcast listeners, you can also use the coupon code podcast 75 that will get you $75 off the purchase of your very first HPA course. We'll put the coupon code in the show notes to make it nice and easy to find.

Lastly, if you like free stuff, then I've got a great deal for you. We are constantly partnering with some of the biggest names in the aftermarket performance industry to give away some great prizes.

You can always find our latest prize at hpacademy.com forward slash giveaway. It might be an aftermarket ECU or dash. It could be some engine components or engine building tools or just about anything in between.

They are great prizes and we will ship them free of charge to your door if you're the winner. There's no tricks here. No purchase required to get your name into the drawer.

Enough with our introduction. Let's get into our interview now. Welcome to the podcast. Josh, thanks for joining us today. And as always, let's dive into your background and find out how you developed a patient for cars.

Thank you for having me. Where do I start? So like most people that end up having a chat with you started out 15 to 16. Obviously into cars buying shipboxes and doing them up bearing car parts and mums front garden and all the things that go with that.

So started with little Ford lasers and master familiars, the 1.8.

Actually, I'll stop you right there. You're from Australia. So why go down the JDM path? Why not the old Aussie classic Ford this hold and battle?

Not sure. Not sure. I've done some work on them and I've had a few in my time. But the JDM stuff just just resonated also probably affordability.

When you're catching out of the KFC and $4.90 an hour or something like that, you go with what you can afford. So started with those and me and my buddies had those who are building gearboxes, putting their third gears in those things.

They used to fall out of them all the time and wide up a few old or trying to SMCs in the garage, build a couple of engines and just sort of stayed into it from there.

So at this stage is this all just self taught you not have any formal training and engine building or wiring?

No, this is high school days. This is high school days. So we were on our on our p-plates, our provisional plates and we had a little 3-2-3, which we piggybacked along trying to get SMC into.

That's a funny story. I'll say we're here. We go back then laptops were either big or bulky when we back then it was on that far back, but that was big and bulky and the batteries didn't last too long.

So we would tune it through a long USB or a long serial cable from the family computer in the front living room into the garden bed with the car parked in there.

I always recall back to that because you couldn't do logging the privileges we have with logging these days and data acquisition.

You basically had a video camera and an old innovate wideband controller and you were filming the car with the innovative picture to find out where you needed to add or subtract fuel.

I think on that note, the current generation of I say younger tuners I guess coming through do not know how good they've got it with the quality of the ECUs, the capability of the ECUs and built in logging. It was never that easy.

No, so you look back at that and mode flags and what not back at the old SMC time.

The Autronic was a unique device despite I think it was the control ECU for the Australian Supercars series for quite a number of years.

I wouldn't ever say that I was an expert with their ECU because we saw so few of them but when you came from Link or Haltech or Motek and they were all sort of over on one side doing their own thing.

And then Autronics just all the way off the other side completely out of the ballpark.

It looks like they saw what everyone else was doing and said here hold my beer and we'll make this as difficult as we can.

I'm sure there's a lot of Autonic tuners that are furiously disagreeing with me but that was my experience.

I think it was a matter of what could we get and what could we afford.

The very first brand new computer I bought was an SM4 and I think that was about $1800 back then which was insane amounts of money to buy.

We were looking in the Quakka or whatever the local magazine was for the second hand deals at the time.

No Facebook marketplace back then?

No, I think we were on SQL or MSN Messenger was the thing they can.

So I started with that and then finished up high school and then found an advertisement, the local paper for a trade assistant job

at a private mechanic workshop.

I think Dirty Dengie working on AU Falcons and all the things that go with that.

I walked in there with my little one-page resume and asked for a job and that's where I started my apprenticeship.

So I did my apprenticeship through there, sort of worked up to running that shop for the owner.

Incredibly grateful for all the experiences he gave me because it was a very hard apprenticeship as in

he's a hard old school mechanic, family business.

So yelling and being told what you're not doing right in an aggressive fashion was very common.

But I think it still probably definitely shapes you and you've become probably a better mechanic for it.

Or you have PTSD and just try yourself to sleep every night.

It goes one of those two ways.

Yeah, I couldn't go both ways but he meant it in the right way and he was obviously running his business

and he knew what worked and didn't work so to take those lessons.

So lots of younger apprentices after me sort of not do too well with that method of teaching.

But yeah, it worked and it worked well for me.

Do my apprenticeship there ironically started with the GDR market when I went out on my own.

So started off very by chance, we were actually positioned.

Our workshop was next to a Japanese record and small workshop in Perth.

And they were at the track one day and my very first customer actually drove up with a broken gearbox in a 32 GDR.

And they were closed gate shut so you drove into our workshop that wanted to do my apprenticeship at.

And asked if we could change a box, I'd never seen a GDR in my life at that point.

And that turned out to be our first ever full build when I went out on my own.

So did that, started doing weekend at night work on JDM stuff and bits and pieces had a couple of customers.

That work that the weekends and the night started to take over.

And it was every night and Saturdays and Sundays.

And so they had to have a conversation with my boss at the time and said I think it's time to go and have a punt at this myself.

So I had a little share and a little shop on the other side of the same industrial area.

And started my own shop there.

That grew pretty quickly probably too quickly.

And we ended up that probably three or four years later had eight hoists and about 12 guys at the time.

And all sorts of things.

But honestly, yeah, having my time again, that was too big too quick.

Okay.

There's a bunch of questions I need to dive into here.

But my first one actually want to roll back a little bit to your high school days and messing around with these electronics.

And the question here is when you're learning how to change the GDR in a gearbox or generally spanner on a car.

Not overly complicated in a lot of ways.

You can kind of normally sort of fudge your way through when it comes to ECU tuning, setting up an ECU, actually getting it running.

That kind of back then, and I'm taking a puntance to the sort of date range we're talking here.

But probably the information that is available now wasn't back then.

So I just want to get some insight into how you were developing those skills.

Lots of trial and error.

Unfortunately, we weren't making enough power that your margin for error was so, you know, as narrow as it is when you start, you know, with the kind of horsepower that we're at now.

You sort of, you ran it as rich as you could that the spark would actually, the coil would actually fire the mixture and came back a bit from there.

So was it a good tune by today's standards?

Absolutely not.

Did it make horsepower on the dyno?

Yep.

But it was pretty rough and ready around the edges.

And you didn't have the data that you have now to fine tune things for one.

And you didn't have the sort of technology around you or what not that you have today.

But you jumped on the forums.

You jumped on the internet.

We had a couple of local dinos that you could talk to and sort of ask questions and learn what you could from them and whether we're willing to help.

And sort of just aggregated the information and did what you could from there.

The hardest parts were where things were not as easy to know, you know, like ignition igniters and how to understand crank triggers and pulses.

I think the crank trigger is probably one of the most confusing ones for a lot of people that are new to this.

Particularly when it's not a case of picking from a drop down menu, your particular vehicle and everything's just good to go when you actually have to work it all out.

And of course these days as well things are again easier because most modern ECUs have a built-in trigger scope.

So essentially in a skillless scope function, you can physically crank the engine.

And I ensure that the ECU is in fact getting a trigger pattern from the crank and the cam.

And then you can deduce, oh, what is this?

So it says 60 minus 2, 36 minus 2, whatever it might be.

And also make sure that you're triggering on the right edge.

That was all, you know, I don't know any of that.

We didn't have trigger scopes.

I'd never seen an oscilloscope before.

So if it didn't work, you're in a world of pain.

Yeah, I remember this was shortly after getting it running.

And I just started at this workshop as a trades assistant.

So I was mopping floors and emptying bins.

But what they did have was what I call the big bear.

It was an old admissions testing machine and this huge thing on a trolley with an old TV look and monitor on it.

But what it did have was a really, really good accurate scope, multi-channel scope.

So the manual was in the bottom of the big cabinet thing that it sat on.

And I read that and worked out how to understand the scope.

And then from there was able to understand more about the home position and a trigger scope and all that kind of stuff.

And where those need to be positioned.

And then you could also understand your degrees of offset and whatnot.

And that sort of, that helped.

And that's essentially the same theory is running a referencing capture on a motec to that.

Yeah, totally.

Just in a laptop right in front of you, as opposed to this 400 kilo trolley that you had to wheel around the workshop.

So well, I think that the biggest pain in the arse is actually physically getting access to the triggers, the inputs,

even at the UC header problem is the easiest place.

But yeah, it's not easy to kind of clip onto those two wires and get your signal in the first place.

But yeah, necessary evil.

Or you're trying to back back probe on the top of it as a distributor and your engine mounts are that flogged out that you hit the starter mode and one of them flies out.

And you've got one pulse, but not the other and you don't know where you've gone wrong.

And then you realize your probes falling out.

So yeah, it's a lot easier now.

Okay.

All right.

Next, moving on to when you sort of decided to jump ship and start your own shop.

This is, you sort of glossed over that like it's something everyone does.

But that's usually a very hard choice to make.

You're going from the comfort of getting a paycheck every week and knowing that you're financially under control to the great unknown.

Plus, I can only imagine you had to pour a risk amount of startup capital into a hoist and tools et cetera.

So talk about your mindset at the time if you can remember that to that.

The mindset was essentially, I could make the same amount I was making on a day job by doing the two weekend days plus a few nights.

And I sort of convinced myself that it was that easy to go from one to the other.

As I said, it was sort of, if I'd had my time again, there certainly would be some lessons and courses I would have done before doing that.

But yeah, sort of bought a cheap hoist.

Obviously, I had my toolbox and everything with me had some basic equipment and then went, okay, that's how I can make it work.

I was already paying the share of the little unit we had.

So, you know, it could justify that I could jump from one to the other and I wouldn't be going backwards.

And that's sort of where where it came from.

And then I was extremely fortunate that the two, three, four clients that I had turned into 10, 12, 14, very quickly.

That same GDR with the broken gearbox that sort of lucked into the driveway at the time.

He was working up north in the mines, which was a big, you know, young people could earn a fair bit.

They still can over here in WA.

And he sort of sat down with me and said, hey, I want to strip this thing apart and build it.

And that went from a standardish 32 GDR to what was our flagship car once the workshop got up and going.

So, it was sort of a backbone build plus bits and pieces.

And then from there, it kind of flourished pretty quickly.

And the guys were coming along and giving me a hand.

And one of the mechanics ironically, the same guy I buddyed up with when I started my TA,

Mop and floors and empty bins left the workshop and came and worked for me about a year after getting into it.

So, it just sort of went pretty naturally.

Guru Organic, which is the easiest way to grow it.

So, on that basis was the any level of marketing or advertising, or is this just all word of mouth and it organically grew like this?

I had a spot on a local forum that a friend of mine owned and ran it was sort of the JDM forum, you know, at the time.

And it all sorts of different makes and models.

And then I think we had a Facebook page when Facebook sort of kicked off from there.

And that was that was it really, sort of all word of mouth.

There's this sort of one thing being qualified mechanic and having a general knowledge of how to service and work on vehicles.

But when you're sort of talking about building a high-powered GTR, albeit I don't actually know how much power this thing made.

But I'm going to assume if you're talking about it as your flagship car, it was probably a bit of a build.

How do you build up the model specific knowledge on the GTRs?

These days I mean, I think Australia and a little bit behind the New Zealand are both well-known countries for building some pretty high output GTRs.

So the straight scene, if you don't have 1,500 wheel, then don't even bring it out of the garage.

But yeah, we didn't get to that in one go.

So, yeah, how did your knowledge building work?

Lots, lots and lots of reading and learning and looking at people's builds and the components they chose and better trial and error along the way.

If I look back at where that build started and how that all sort of manifested to what we would do today, it's completely different chalk and cheese.

That car ended up making about 1,000 wheel horsepower.

And we started building it in 2013, so that was just before GTR started to really gain popularity.

You could pick up a 32 GTR for sort of $10,000 to $15,000 in average condition at that point in time.

That's a dream.

So pouring 100 into it was a bit of a crazy adventure.

So yeah, a lot of stuff came off the shelf, but as time went on, you started to develop your own stuff and engineer things into them.

But there was a lot of sort of, all right, this turbo manifold works.

This intake manifold works.

Okay, Tomo makes a stroke a kit.

Let's get that in there and then you fund them into principles of putting it in and measuring bearing clearances and bringing in gaps from all cars sort of just applied at that point.

Sure.

All right.

At this point, running this business, what would you sort of say your core skillset would have been obviously your mechanic, it sounds like you're building the engines as well.

Are you doing any fabrication?

Are you still involved in the tuning?

Are you sort of continued to build those skills or are you now outsourcing some of this?

Yeah, so we had pick a point in time where I had a couple of good mechanics that were working for us doing.

A lot of the day-to-day, I was doing a lot of the coordination tuning we outsourced at that point in time.

Beyond, you know, I could get it up and running and get it driving and do a bit of a run-in but the hype hour stuff left to the guys that were doing it as a living.

And then it was a lot of the coordination and then we did fabrication, somewhat in-house.

And then sometimes you have contractors come in and give us a hand and knock out a dump pipe and a couple of cooler pipes and things like that.

Talking about doing some of the coordination, I think this is one of the sort of entrepreneurial traps is you start a business because you want to be a mechanic and you're good at it and then quickly find out that you can only spend say half of your day actually doing the thing you like doing and then there's all of the other business aspects that come into it of quoting and ordering parts and dealing with customers that takes up the rest of your day.

How did you find getting you hit around that?

Terrible. It was honestly, like it's one of those things that one of the biggest lessons I learned is that it's almost impossible to make it really work.

There's a mile boss used to say to me, you can make money with one to two people or the next time you make money it's sort of like you're seven to ten people on the floor because you jump into different leagues and one or two people can kind of sell service themselves.

When you get to the three, four, five guys, they'd so dependent on someone else to do all the legwork and then when you're in sort of that sort of building car, bespoke type world that nothing's just there.

You can't call up cover trees and say can you send me a wastegate and scream a pipe for a GDR.

It's sort of everything required going and getting or doing or ordering or whatnot that it becomes quite inefficient.

I could never figure out how shops made money doing one off custom builds because I don't know maybe I'm doing it wrong or was doing it wrong.

But I don't see how you could quote a complete build that's at a very high level and come in to the dollar. I don't know that that's possible.

So I mean what I found that I don't know if this echoes your experience. It was the complete opposite of the franchise service dealership where you know they quote out a cambell with a book time of five hours and their texts are punching out.

Ten of those a week so they can do it in two hours so they're banking three hours of pure profit.

We were the opposite way. We're doing a job that took ten hours and not only be able to charge out five or six.

So you sort of the margins there are really tight. I'm keen if you can give us your experience on that.

It's exactly the same. So and then the the challenge is and probably where I'm going to say where I went wrong in that phase of my career was the customers because the market wasn't big enough both in size as in the population of where we are.

And the GDR scene hadn't fully popped off like yeah you go to Sydney now and they're everywhere sort of thing.

The customers and this is not against them but the customers were sort of dictating I want this bespoke thing with all of these things my way and I want to use these parts and often they come in with a truckload of parts.

One of the observations I made was was something like what Matooks do is you know they've got their method they've got their recipe they've got their ingredients they've got them on the shelf.

And you can choose your paint color you can choose your rock cover color you can you know choose what you want you know nowadays it's what you want on the rock covers.

But it was a very sort of he's he's the variables and he is what's fixed and he is what we offer and he is a price and they were able to give prices.

I think I think there's a learning curve and it you've got to get to a certain point both with your reputation your customer base where you can then dictate that though.

If you were starting out as a fresh shop and someone came in and they want to their GTR built and yeah here's my package there's no variation from this if you want a turbo smart wastegate instead of whatever that's not an option.

The turbo you know and it'll be $150,000 please they're going to look at you turn and walk away whereas the likes of Matooks quote in racing etc they've got the runs on the board.

And I think they've got to a point where they can dictate the rules of the game you know the experience I had when I was running my shop was a customer come in and get a quote for building an EVO to 400 kilowatts at the wheels.

And then they come back with the turbo the wastegate the manifold the set of injectors the ECU and intercooler half of it was wrong.

And they think they're saving money and the end they're going to have to pay twice but we also don't end up clipping the ticket on that so it's just such a tough business to make money in.

Yeah and yeah you're right with the runs on the board think we sort of weren't around long enough to do that but there is some blend of that or some blend of being a bit more firm in terms of.

Yeah I think the confidence is another part that plays into this when you're new in business because I do remember back to that you're going to take any job that comes in the door and it took me a long time to work out that sometimes the jobs you say no to are the most important jobs.

You can sort of sense the ones that are going to become problematic and you're just keeping a very clear pathway and these are the sorts of jobs we do these are the sorts of customers we're going to work for and that will set you off as a success I think.

Yeah and sort of once you've got once you've got staff and overheads and you remember this once you've got all of those sort of every day every week costs that are coming through the door no matter what way you look at it.

You do have to make sure that you've got a decent pipeline of work there to do and that's not always the same make a model of car that's not always the same type of job so you really got to a point where you could be efficient and sort of like you say the dealership where and I had a priest in working at Toyota you could bring in do a day of the same task so you've got the same tools the same work for the same mindset of of doing clutches for a day then you're doing time belts for a day then you're doing swivel hubs for a day.

The flip side of that though is I mean I'm sure there's a lot of mechanics a lot of text that they'll thrive on that and they can do that for the next 35 years of their life which is obviously absolutely fine for me and also naturally the mechanics that I tended to employ.

If you set them up for a month of doing cambells every day on the same make a model of car they'd absolutely lose the plot they'd end up probably locked up in a mental asylum.

They thrived on the challenge of building something bespoke something one off and they actually apply some creative license to it.

So I guess there's two different styles of mechanic and that kind of dictates what direction you're going to go in.

I also just wanted to back up a little bit just to clarify a comment I made about customers bringing in other parts and the shop therefore not being able to clip the ticket.

That sounds like it's just a case of I'm not making any profit on that so that's not going to fly.

There is a different element that as well because ultimately when the shop is fitting all of these parts and then tuning the car basically you're putting your reputational in fact

that at the end of the day everything is going to work when it rolls out the door and when the customers supplied half of these parts it's impossible for us as a shop owner to do so.

So it's not just about trying to maximize our profits it's also about protecting our reputation ultimately at the end of the day making sure that the customer gets the right result and a job that's going to be reliable and produce good power that's how I said anyway.

And you can support those components if there is a problem.

If you've supplied them through your relationships through your dealer networks and what not that you're dealing with and you can make a little bit of a percent even if it's open book and you say hey mate I'm making a hundred bucks on this part but it comes with the ability to call up someone if there's a problem.

I think these days as well you know the margins on the aftermarket car parts just they're not where most consume most enthusiasts think they are we're probably lucky if we're making 15% on a lot of these parts.

Not that lucrative.

And you compare that to like road going service text you know the base margin was 30% exactly.

So you buy a set of Bendix break pads for Falcon and it was your cost plus 30% and that's what went to the client that's pretty standard many may have changed now I've not been in it for a while but that was fairly standard and the manufacturers that made those parts your DBA Bendix or whoever that was a valley in built model whereas in the performance game it's very rare.

There are some really good really good suppliers out there that sort of respect that mentality not to 30% but to you know like 15 20% sort of a range and they'll look after you when you buy direct as opposed to buying off the internet so you can work with those guys.

Yeah I think there's been in the aftermarket performance parts industry definitely a race to zero in terms of you know people sort of sitting up a side hustle out of mum and dad spare bedroom you know they've got a day job or they're at uni or school or whatever it might be.

You know if they can make 50 bucks on a wastegate that's cool they wouldn't they had that 50 bucks otherwise but you know that just becomes that race to zero because then the legitimate shops can't sell without sort of chasing down that price.

However I feel like we're getting right down in the weeds here and I'm starting to get a little depressed so I need to pick that couple a little bit.

Let's talk about you mentioned your growth was maybe too far so can we sort of wrap this all up in an art shell because we've got a lot to talk about today.

Yeah so yeah we ran like that for a while obviously grew up to that sort of 12 guy range and a number of hoists pretty pretty big floor space and got to a point you know like I said grew too big too quick and also as a person you hadn't learned all the lessons I needed to learn along the way so one of my key clients then gave me an opportunity to actually jump completely to the outside and sort of jump into a different part of my career

and he helped me and we tended for sorry I'll back up a second through that last part of that part of the workshop I was doing a lot of engineering work with the regulatory bodies on engineering vehicles for registration and and built up a quite a strong knowledge of road rules, ADRs compliance and the process.

So ADR is Australian design rules for those less than from other parts of the world.

Yep so had built up quite a strong part of the business doing that and we had an opportunity to tender for ironically the Apple Maps projects for Australia and New Zealand which was the driving around of all of the vehicles with the cameras on the roof to make the Apple Maps product that you see on your phone.

So I jumped on that tendering process and we ended up being successful in winning that and essentially left the workshop and the customers and what not to the guys that were working for me at the time and they've gone on to good success with continuing that on and I jumped out and then went into the corporate world for six odd years and that's where I learned a lot of lessons around business and everything that goes with that and we ran that project and that evolved into other roles and other positions

and from there got to have a far better understanding of running business, understanding a P&L, understanding a balance sheet and all the things that go with that that really when you when you start a workshop in your early twenties, yeah absolutely no clue on.

And yeah from that took a lot of lessons into the phase of career we're in now.

It's really unrelated but I genuinely do believe that some reeducation around just basic accounting practices should be hammered into everyone at school.

I think it's so important even if you're never going into business and how so still essentially runs a profit and loss.

And I think I'm a firm believer on if you could have a course or an option at school or something like that or even and I've seen so many people sort of do the same thing as I did is when you relatively decent at something and you go

out and you start hustling in a business and all of those other things around it are not known or those lessons haven't been taught.

It should be in my opinion it should be mandatory or some level of requirement to do your basic course when you go and open a company because it's all too easy to jump on online site and start a company or a business name and then realize you've forgotten the 10 steps around it.

Yeah that is literally the easiest part of the whole process unfortunately.

Alright so at some point you obviously came back into the more hands-on automotive scene so fill us out on how that went down.

So yeah obviously when did the corporate space kept a number of my hoist always kept a small little workshop and sort of just went back to the Saturday stuff.

So built a couple of cool cars through that process.

Some of us still have here today finished off a few projects that I kept on retained after going into that part of my career.

And then more recently that started to take over again very much a deja vu of the first phase.

And same sort of thing that sit down have a bit of a thing could go right what do I want to do here.

I've got some what I call once in a lifetime opportunities with some of this time attack staff and some of the builds we've got going on

and customers and clients that were very keen to do things.

And I sort of took a look, spoke to a partner and said right should we give this a crack and you know go have a bit of fun

and can always come back if we need to or can always do something else.

So let's take the opportunities while they're there and that's essentially you know the labo that we'll talk about

and the Nissan and other stuff are products of that decision.

Sure.

Well let's really quickly break down the business as it sets at the moment.

So give us sort of a high level overview of size, number of staff and services offered at this point.

Yeah keeping it really small this time round.

So 220 square meters, three hoists in there day to day it's myself and then I've got a really really good network of subbies that come in and help where we need to.

So when we've got a sprint of work to be done, you know all the parts are there or we've got a clear scope and everything's lined up.

Bring them in, let's go three, four weeks, go hard and then they'll take off going to some other projects that they've got.

And then we keep that cycle going.

So today, today, today, it's myself got really good fabricator and a couple of good mechanics that come in and out where the projects require their skills and that piece of work.

Pros and cons of running a mechanic as a contractor as opposed to a full time employee as same goes against for a fabricator.

You can, a obligation, so you can bring, you know, when you've got the work there, you've had the conversation with the client, you've got a detailed scope, scope is clear, it's agreed, got the parts.

It's all lined up ready to go, whether it's a mechanic or a contractor, fabricator is the same sort of thing.

And then when the job is ready for that task or for that skill set, you bring, you have the person lined up and bring them in.

I guess the lesson that brought me to that arrangement is, you know, when you have, let's say the mechanic there and let's say the car is getting fabricated, you can't be fitting an engine at the same time as the fabrications occurring or you can't be fitting a fuel system when the car is in the fab bay and vice versa.

And with the size of your 220 squares shop, you don't, you know, have the ability to have 10 projects on the go that you can sort of spread the stuff around.

Correct, correct, or you don't want 20 cars to then have 10 projects on the go or whatever the, whatever the relationship is between how many cars you've got to have in the shop, pushing them in and out every day or whatnot to then have two cars or three cars being worked on because they're all in a different phase.

You know, when the requirements there and you've got two or three cars that need, you know, need a lot of work and we just came out of the big sprint six months of building up the time attack, where there was plenty of work to be done so everyone was here every day.

And then then after that, it's like, all right, let's regroup, where do we need to be, what are our lessons learnt, what are we going to do for next year and then it's just sort of just me and one other guy pushing those projects along.

So you've got kind of the peace of mind there when the big push for a project like World Time Attack is over and suddenly the work evaporates for maybe a month or two and you've got some breathing space, you don't have to be paying a weight roll every week.

Correct, correct, correct. That doesn't come without it's, it's, it's downsides because you can't expect people to be around at your back and call.

So there's a bit more planning and thinking ahead and, and communication required and keeping, keeping the people that help you inform so they know where they're at and working around the fact that you, you're not always going to get what you want.

So you need, you need to sort of work around that. So I've found that to be a, and we're not ironically not here to get rich as in back doing this is because I love doing it.

I've always loved doing it but back doing it because I love doing it and there's cool projects to work on.

Not because you're trying to, you're trying to make millions out of it. You can't, you might get any can't.

So you'd be, yeah, hard pressed, there's probably only a very minor handful of people that are becoming truly wealthy off building cars.

It is definitely a passion project but it also is a case of money is not everything and you do have to, in my opinion, enjoy what you're doing otherwise, why you're bothering.

Yeah, and seeing, seeing the success of the vehicle but also that some of the people around you doing it, that's also a big thing.

Seeing some younger guys getting into the game and what they're able to achieve is also quite satisfying along the way.

Sure. In terms of your capabilities then, is it essentially a one-stop shop? Obviously we've covered engine building, wiring, general mechanical fabrication.

We'll talk as we go I guess about how you're dealing with tuning at the moment but you're outsourcing that. Is there anything that you just don't touch?

Not really because essentially the clients sort of want to bring the car in and drive it back out and go straight to the racetrack.

But, yeah, one-stop shop, yeah, under one roof but plenty of people involved from different specialty areas.

So I don't jump on the dyno and start doing anything in high horsepower sort of world. I'll get the car running and we'll get it integrated and talking and everything like that and then bring in the tuner.

And then essentially the mechanical aspect is what's done here, in-house and then everything else is brought to it.

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Alright, let's get back to the episode.

Alright, I think at this stage we've covered probably about 30 minutes of your background and mainly business.

So before the non-business-orientated list is fall off and all fall asleep, let's actually jump into some cars.

And one of the cars I really wanted to talk about is the Lamborghini Gerardo GT3 that you ran in the World Time Attack Pro class that's just been.

We did have the opportunity to chat on camera at World Time Attack, but I know not everyone watches our YouTube videos and likewise not everyone listens to our podcast.

So we're going to cover some of the same ground here.

For a start, I guess taking one step back, what was the drive to attend World Time Attack?

In our opinions, one of the most prestigious sort of events in Australia that you could go to, that's something that you can go and give yourself a really big technical challenge and try and be successful at.

You know, we've obviously, we still do have a presence in circuit racing and in tarmac rallying or rally sprints or whatever you want to call it, depending on where you're from.

But, yeah, World Time Attack, just the, we obviously attended a couple of times as a spectator and the crowd, the vendors, the traction that that event has is just truly, truly impressive.

Alongside when you're technically driven to try and push something to a lap time is also a really, really interesting target to set yourself.

So we'd had experience with the gliders before, which we can touch on, but yeah, we decided to have a crack.

So was it a case of, we want to go to World Time Attack, the gliders are platform you knew, so that seems like a sensible starting point.

Yeah, so it started with, we wanted to twin turbo the Lamborghini, so we'd previously run an older version of the car you saw at local events,

so heel climbs and rally sprints and things like that, which were relatively successful at the ones we went to.

And then we were, we're always on the back foot with horsepower.

So they only make, on a roller dyno, they make about 500 horsepower to the tire, depending on what dyno you're on.

And the guys were up against for 750 horsepower evos and added horsepower GTRs.

And we can only go so fast through corners and break as late as possible before they're going to catch us, so we need some more power.

So, you know, twin turbo in the Lamborghini was always on the cards.

And then it sort of fell off the cliff from there once we gave a great city compass.

It's a call and started talking about arrow and then it really kind of evolved into a fully fledged, fully fledged effort.

I guess let's start by talking about what a Lamborghini Gallo GT3 car is in comparison to the road going counterpart.

So the frame itself, so let's call it the monocoque, they're an aluminium chassis, they're not a carbon turbo or anything.

They're an aluminium chassis and the frame itself is largely the road car.

The engine is largely the road car, the engine that was in that white car actually started like as a road car engine.

That sort of tail light, headlights, things like that are all much the same.

And then there's a few little components like throttle pedals and bits and pieces that are carried over from the road car.

And then the rest is fairly well bespoke to racing.

So the uprights are different suspensions, different obviously they get a roll cage, bolted into them.

And then weight reduction and aerodynamic parts that they put on for the racing series are all very much bespoke to the GT3 version.

These are all homologated as well, so radar engineering who built those cars can't just do whatever they want, can they?

No, they sort of they can do whatever they want, but then they still have to meet the specification of homologation.

So there's weight, there's dimensions, there's downforce, and then that's all tightly controlled.

So when with the car comes a book of all the things you can and can't change, dimensions, weights, components, things like that.

And when they ran in the spec series as hurricanes do today and whatnot, they're all very much tightly controlled to stay within the windows that the FIA allow when they homologate the car.

The idea of course being that you've got a range of different cars from a huge range of different manufacturers or competing in the idea is that there is some balance of performance across them all.

So just allowing you to the competitors to do everything as anything they want is not going to maintain that balance of performance.

In terms of looking at the car, obviously you mentioned the different uprights, the suspension geometry, I'm guessing that that's going to be an advantage on a racetrack when you're taking a car that is developed to be effective on a racetrack versus just a road car.

The euro, obviously the GT3 car has euro, but it's nothing like what we see at world time.

So the question here is how much of an advantage is it was it for you starting with a GT3 race car versus just buying a road car going for gold from there?

Well, the road car has some significant differences like where its fuel tank is.

It's where its components are all mounted and springboarding off that.

The GT3 cars, ironically if you find the right deal cheaper or on par with the road car if you find the right deal at the right time.

So then you're starting with a platform where you've got motorsport brakes, suspension caponetry, oil and you've got all the starting fruit that you need to work with.

So it's just a case of adding power and downforce.

Yeah, it's somewhat faster than me has gone through, got the roll centers right and got everything where it needs to be.

So essentially adding power, downforce and controlling it was the high levels go.

Is there any limitations in the pro class rule set?

I don't read these rule books, I just turn up and interview people like yourself.

But what are the limitations at a high level with the pro class rule set?

There's widths and lengths, our biggest one that we toured with was weight.

So to run a 330 wide rear tire, we had to be, I think it was 1351 Kilo.

So the car is quite heavy compared to some of the competitors around us.

I don't know this for sure but I think the S13 and the S15 ahead of us were in the order of a thousand to eleven hundred kilos.

And once we put Alex in the car and the cooling for the intercoolers and everything where it just on 1,400,

which is a fairly significant weight disadvantage.

So the aim of the game was just to try and get out there this time round and see where we were even placed.

And we've taken a heap of lessons from that.

Well P2 is not a bad place to end up on your first event.

Just when you say that to run a 330 wide rear tire, you had to be 1351 KGs.

And I would say to assume there that if you were to run a narrower, maybe a 295 or something like that,

you could have been lighter and the follow-up question as if you could have been lighter, could you have got weight out of it?

I mean, there's a lot going on in that car.

Yes, I think the next tie down is a 280 wide slick.

Sorry, 300 slick.

And that brings you down to something in the 1200 Kilo range.

The car came out with a 330 wide, 330 710 rear tire.

So again, keeping with the principles of don't change what's not broken, we elected to stick with that.

In hindsight, if we could get the weight out of the car and we could bring the rear tire size down, probably would.

We were hurt and reattires across the course of the event anyway.

So we were only really getting one push lap out of the tire.

So if we could, we would, or we will, question is where, do we get the weight out of it?

And what can we change to bring the weight down?

There's not easy areas, put it that way.

No, that's sort of my point.

It sounds easy.

I mean, when you start with a full road car and you can pull out heavy factory seats and gut doors and things like that,

you can get a lot of weight out relatively easily.

And then it roughly just becomes more expensive and more difficult to continue to drag weight out of the cars.

Yeah, and then at some point you also, you look at it and go right, we did a 22 in reality.

We've all sat down and had a chat post event in reality with the changes that we know we can make fairly well as it stands.

We think we could probably go to a 20.

But will we ever get to an 18 or 17?

I don't think so.

It's probably not the chassis for that.

It's just going to be inherently too heavy.

Yeah, it's just again, it's just exponentially gets more and more difficult to drag every tenth of a second out of the lap time.

Yeah, and the whole principle of that car was, yes, don't get me wrong.

Building a car to do a 22 or any car to compete at time attack in the top, let's say 20 is not cheap.

But relatively from a purchase cost, what went into it, labour and componentry, dollar per lap time,

it's probably still quite realistic when we did the interview at the track.

I think the word you kept using to me was relatively, it is all relative.

Yeah, I mean, there's no other way I don't think you can put it.

I mean, you want to do a 122 around a certain motorsport park, you can't do it cheaply.

I don't think.

Yeah, so the aim of the game was how efficiently could we do a 22?

What was the least amount of money we could spend to get there?

And then also have a car.

It is a bit of a one-trick pony now, as you say, with the arrow on it, but the original GT3 arrow can go back on it.

And we've run it at local events and round the houses,

type sort of industrial area sprints and things with its original arrow.

That's one of the things every time I go to world time attack.

I mean, I love the event.

I love to see how far people are pushing these cars year on year.

And the arrow just gets wilder and the cars just keep making more and more power.

But also, I look at these cars that some of them would be well north of half a million dollars

by now with all the development that's gone into them.

And literally, that car is going to get six laps around a racetrack over a three-day weekend.

And then it's going to sit in a shed for 12 months until it gets stored all over again.

And to me, it would pain me to have that much invested in a car that I can really only use for one event

because things like the arrow box that you build within is probably either unrealistic

or illegal for just about any other event.

So good to know that you can bolt the GT3 euro back on and still use it.

And that's probably what we'll do.

I'm going to try and put a radial on the back of it and take it to roll racing.

And just try and use the car as best we can.

Short of an all change.

It's ready to go to the next event now.

And we'll do some other stuff with it.

But yeah, we've everything bolted on.

It's impractical to do anything with and some areas of the car.

We've designed ourselves into a bit of a hole.

Like it can't do two push laps at S&P.

You can't carry enough fuel.

That's a problem.

So yeah.

But then if the tyres are only good for one push lap, that's probably a bit of a moot point.

Yeah, whether that's the tyre or us, it's probably a combination of combination of the two

and what you put the pull tyre through with the amount of arrow load.

Yeah, I do remember when before they allowed slicks and they had the control,

Yokohama tyre, and the top cars would have to nurse the car around the out lap

and just get into it before that last corner.

And even then the tyre was going away about three quarters of the way around the lap.

So a second lap just wasn't an option.

I think the slicks are a much more consistent option now.

In terms of gripping in that particular issue,

which we've actually also experienced in tarmac rally.

And when you try and you basically fry the tyres too quickly,

you go from dead cold to red hot way too fast.

And our experiences, you end up just taking the whole tread block off the top of the tyre

and end up with a canvas carcass, which doesn't offer a lot of grip around it.

Around the tarmac rally stage.

The slick was really, really good.

But the amount of load we were putting through the sidewall.

Again, as I say, it's probably a fair bit of us as well.

You're trying to run the tyre pressure quite low to get the grip out of the tyre.

We were hurt in the sidewalls.

So you'd pull the tyre off the rim and you'd see cracks on that and sidewall.

A tiger had had a nibble at the inside of the sidewall.

So we ended up having to bump up the tyre pressure for that shoot out lap

beyond where we wanted to be just for a bit of safety.

But coming back to the fuel aspect, as a comparison,

we tested it at the band a couple of weeks before the time attack.

We were using 23 litres for an out lap, a push lap and an in lap.

And the thing only holds 35.

So you're definitely not getting a second.

And the challenge is, I don't run enough pumps in the in the cell

because the cell's so small.

I don't run enough pumps in the bottom of the cell to be able to fill the pot quick enough

when you're that low on fuel.

So when the fuel does start to slosh in the cell and one or two of your lift pumps start to go dry,

you're not filling the pot fast enough.

So it drains the pot very quickly.

Yeah, that makes sense.

All right, let's jump into some of these modifications and probably

let's start with the engine.

So 5.2 litre naturally aspirated V10,

direct injected in stock form,

but interestingly not in the GT3 guys?

Yeah, not familiar as to the reason why they take the DI out,

whether it's a control issue in terms of the computers that they had or whatnot.

But yes, it goes back to poor injection and then we've maintained that theory.

It's probably simpler, ultimately, for what you're trying to do anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, whether or not there's a horse power gain with DI and the natural aspirated form or whatnot,

I don't know, but DI would be a lovely tool to have when you start going forced induction

and the opportunities that brings you in terms of compression ratios,

but coming back to the engine, yeah, essentially it's a road car engine,

not much different, very little different other than the injection method to a road car engine.

We actually use road car engines as bases, as starting points.

And then the ingredients list is pretty simple.

To a point, it was probably when we started to really want to thing up,

we started to go or should have we done this or should have we done that along the way,

but we just wanted to keep it as simple as we could.

So rods, pistons, you know, J.E. piston, a Carillo rod, a GSE valve spring,

and other than that, it's pretty well standard.

The modification to these Lamborghini more, that's called it,

and Audi V10s pretty well trot in these days with the drag and roll race guys.

So I guess a lot of the component trees off the shelf now anyway.

I am interested in slightly technical side to this,

but when you run a direct and injected engine, the crown of the piston,

essentially I guess becomes part of the combustion chamber.

So what I'm getting at here is the shape of the crown is quite specific

to help direct the flow of the atomized fuel from the direct injector

and get it where it needs to go.

Obviously, irrelevant for you.

So if you kind of gravitated towards more conventional port injected piston crowns shape

or did you just go with off the shelf from J.E.

Yeah, traditional.

And we're brought out compression ratio down.

So the factory car in NA form is I think in the order of 12 or 13 to 1 static compression.

We've gone down to a 9 to 1 compression.

Subsequently, our boost pressure is up to get our cylinder pressure back up again.

And that was to just bring some margin back to the table when you start running port injection.

Even though we're on the ethanol fuel,

just bring a bit of margin back to us for control.

So you're still concerned about lock threshold and where that would come in

if you had kept a higher compression ratio, say 10, 11 to 1?

Mainly because of temperature,

because our intake temperature is climbed quite quickly over the course of a lap.

Again, there's plenty of experience in roll racing and drag racing.

And that's a very well-traveled road with a lot of people,

but a very different sport.

Very different sport to a minute 22 on the gas,

so that the whole weekend of time attack and in testing,

exhaust gas temperatures and intake temperatures were our enemy,

especially when you were trying to pull torque out of the car,

because not to dance around between engine and electronics here,

but with Motek's pro package to pull the torque out of it

and coming out of corners and lower in the rev range and different gears,

depending on where you are and what you're trying to do,

essentially closes the throttle blade,

and only runs a fraction of the throttle blade that you could run.

And then that backs everything else up.

So all your hot side, all your boost charge pipe,

everything's sitting there like a big coke bottle with Mentos in it

until it cracks the throttle blade.

But when we were running 900mm around the circuit,

for most of the laps we were running and as we tested the car,

where we've got like a bar of boost more on the front side of the throttle blade

or in the intercoolers, then you're doing the intake manifold itself.

So it was a bit of a catch-22.

On the outside, of course, when you do get back to full throttle,

you've got that air flowers right there waiting for you.

Yep, so we lost about 50, 60 degrees of EGT by running it at 1200m as opposed to 900m.

Yeah, which convention would not make a lot of sense.

No, it's a bit backwards.

Okay, we will get further into that, but before we do,

so just talking about the intake temperatures,

when you've got a mid-mounted engine and twin turbos,

it's very difficult to run an air-to-air intercooler.

So conventionally, the Lamborghini trot and path is twin water-to-air intercoolers.

Again, just coming back to that roll race and drag racing,

where it's very different sport, it's easy enough to use an ice water slurry

to keep that below ambient for, well, maybe not below ambient for the entire run,

but you'd at least be starting there.

That's not much good to you on a circuit application.

So what sort of temperature is it you're sort of seeing by the end of a push lap?

So we did have a nice box, but it was external to the car.

So we got a reservoir in the car to water it at very similar,

almost identical to what you'd see in the roll racing and drag racing cars,

except it's all a bit more custom bespoke in terms of where our turbos are.

So very similar concept.

We had a water reservoir, a heat exchanger at the front of the car

to try and take the peak heat out of the water when it did get hot,

but then ran a glycol ice box with dry ice sitting in the pits

that we would circulate through the system.

We would leave water temperature, we would leave the pit lane

at about zero degrees cooler temperature in the intercoolers

and I had a pre and post intercooler of water temp on the logging

and we would climb to about 45, 50 degrees by the end of a push lap

and our intake temps were in the 70s.

Yeah, that's hard to make power and make it easy on the engine

when you intake your temps are that high.

But it's a compromised installation realistically, isn't it?

Yeah, and again, it's a byproduct of a minute, 22 on the gas.

Like a single pull, the intercoolers are amazing, they're incredible.

But the system became fairly quickly saturated,

in terms of how much heat it could actually dissipate.

So, yeah, we'll probably try and run some dry ice in the car

or something to try and take the peak off the water temp.

Yeah, okay. Turbo installation.

Again, this is a path fairly well-troddened,

but you've gone with a slightly unique turbo location.

Most Lamborghini twin turbo conversions sort of bolt the turbos

but then adapt to essentially to the back of the exhaust manifolds

and their rear mount.

Yours are low and forward.

Can you give us some insight into what the driver was behind that?

A couple of different things.

So, weight belts of the car, turbo manifolds, turbos, waste gates

and everything, they're all quite heavy components.

The car already has a rearward weight bias

and not materially affecting that was part of the thinking.

The other part is space.

A road car can't put the turbos where we've got them

because all of its fuel tank and component trees sits around there

and then it's got its coolers and everything

and trying to keep the exhaust gas energy as close as

I could to the turbine wheel and generally speaking,

keep the heat into the turbine wheel as best we could.

It was also a driver.

So far, that decision was a good one in terms of turbo lag

and performance and whatnot but brought with it other challenges.

Yeah, I mean, there's no free lunches here.

That would also, getting all that weight closer to the center of the car

is not just about the weight balance but also

can you talk about a term, pole a moment of inertia

and what that means to a race car?

Oh, pendulum.

Yeah, a giant, if you have a giant lead,

brixing down the back of the car, it's certainly not going to do too well.

Doesn't like to change direction, does it?

No, no.

Yeah, so these are one of the sort of more subtle aspects

of where we place the weight around the car.

I mean, people do think about weight distribution to the front

and rear axle but it's also about trying to get the heavy items

as close to that center as you can.

The actual turbo's themselves, what did you choose there

and how you go about choosing a turbo for this application?

Did you look at what the rest of the drag racing fraternity

are doing?

That's what we initially did and probably got that decision wrong.

So started with some Garrett G30s, then quickly realised

that wasn't going to, they were going to be far too small,

then went to some G35s, did our first dyno session on those,

realised they were too small,

and then went to precision 6870s.

So that's what, that's what we ran at time attack,

6870s with a 96 rear end,

the band in and out.

Is that essentially the same as just looking at what would work

on a 2.6 liter engine, obviously it's 5 cylinder per bank

but if you looked at that and so what's the 2.6 liter,

like RB26 would be a good example.

What sort of turbo's work on those to give a certain boost

to their shoulders and usable rev range?

That certainly crossed the mind, is going back to the GDR days

and go essentially it's 2.6 liters,

yes with some Vcam on the inlet exhaust,

that'll have an impact, blah, blah.

But it was also looking at what others had done,

what kits were on the market, what turbos were they using,

I'd had some experience doing a couple of bolt-on kits in the past

and the G35, 10, 50s were on some of those kits

and we went like, well, you know,

it's a good size turbo for those kits,

let's start with that, let's run with that.

But yeah, exhaust back pressure was through the roof.

Again, not a big issue at drag racing,

roll racing or straight driving,

go and do a minute 20 minute 40,

bends a minute 40 lap, do a minute 40 with EBPs,

you know, as high as they were,

was going to be really difficult.

And can you share that,

this is sort of a metric that most people

don't get to hear about exhaust manifold back pressure,

versus inlet manifold pressure.

Yeah, we had nearly half a bar more,

again, compounded by what we were doing with torque management.

So it's probably not a great one for one reflection,

but we had half a bar more in the exhaust

and we had an intake when that was a true

or a fair comparison to make,

which was extreme.

And the EGT's and everything that were coming from that

were going to be racing the tow truck at that point.

So that's only a matter of time

that the pen has been pulled on the grenade?

Yeah, you can trust in your exhaust valves so much,

but when you see on the sensor

that they're about to turn to liquid,

it's time to make a change.

So yeah, out with those,

and in with the 6870s,

and for whatever reason the precision is just,

they do some amazing things

with how much they can flow.

Yeah.

So in terms of the ultimate results

with those precision turbos,

what was your sort of boost that you were using,

what's your usable rev range,

and you mentioned 1200 newton meters of torque before,

but what's that look like in terms of an horsepower figure,

or a kilowatt figure?

Yeah, so we've dialed it up to 1,500 wheel horsepower

and it'll essentially make whatever you wanted to make,

but we decided that 1200 around a lap would be safe

based on what we saw in the data,

and that's what we set the target to on the shootout lap.

We're running sort of a thousand for our other push laps.

The boost pressure that it runs to do that to about 1.6 bar,

so not a huge amount of entertainment of our pressure.

No, that's not crazy.

But again, I guess with all of the heat control issues you've got,

keeping that boost to a modest level

is probably pretty important to keep the thing together

for a full lap.

Well, that was the challenge, right?

We didn't know what we didn't know,

and from everyone we could call and talk to

not that many that have gone around a circuit

to interval application at that horsepower level.

So we had to get at least one event in the bank

and go, let's have a look at what worked, what didn't work.

And you come that far, we didn't really want to split the block

in half and end up with a bunch of conrods on the floor

for our first event, so tried to choose a bit of a tactical point

and go back and have a look at that,

and then wind it up again for next year.

The old saying to finish first, first you must finish is,

you know, it rings true here,

and I think for a first trip to World Time Attack

just getting to the finish line to that shootout

is a badge of honor anyway,

not to mention walking away with second place.

So I think that's, I'd be pretty happy with that.

Oh, no, we were stoked.

And we were still fighting sort of other challenges

across the course of the weekend.

The tie was one of them.

Our role center is sort of in no man's land,

so we're not in the window of the suspension performance

if you ever look at the on board.

Alex was trying his best to pull steering column out of the car.

So yeah, certainly some stuff to tidy up,

but you know, just keeping the engine in one piece

so we could focus on those areas who were important.

Flopping for a moment here, just with in terms of the suspension,

obviously we've already talked about the fact that GT3 cars

development, the roll centers, all of the bespoke

uprights et cetera.

So it's set up, but what it's not set up for

is the level of downforce you're now making

with this in the composites arrow kit on it.

What did you end up doing to, I guess, compromise

maybe low speed mechanical grip

versus keeping the thing from driving into the track

at the end of the front straight?

It's a never ending game of what type of bump stop you use

where you put the bump stop and your spring rate to go with that.

So what becomes your effective spring rate

is spring plus your density of your bump stop.

So you're purposely choosing to use the bump stop

at the end of the higher speed areas to keep the car

controlled the right height?

Correct, correct.

And how much packy runs?

So how much are you on the natural spring versus then

how do you, where do you come into the bump stop?

How loaded is that bump stop is a massive compromise?

Our challenge was the fact that to get,

so the back of a Lamborghini Gallardo,

it's kind of got like a box frame

and the back gearbox mount, if you have a C1,

it literally looks like a tractor's rear diff mount.

It's got this big RHS-looking aluminium frame

and that's what the gearbox mount sits on to.

But that becomes your limiting point

for your exit angle of your diffuser.

So if you saw our car that diffuses basically,

you know, two doors behind you,

but because you can't start exiting the diffuser angle

to get your benefit from it,

until effectively after that piece of chassis,

and yes, we all talked about chopping that up,

but that kind of defeated the purpose again.

So, but the ultimate sort of consequence of that

is that the car had to be run quite high

because the error, the error surface underneath the car

became quite deep, if you want to call it.

So the actual flat floor of the car

is about 25mm from the actual floor of the car.

The perfect well, that would be on the floor or is the floor.

So subsequently, the mechanical setup

out of the car came up, even though it looked low,

and it was still hit in the ground.

The mechanical setup of the car was higher than we would have liked.

So it was a bit of a challenge and compromise in that space as well.

But yeah, big learning curve in terms of understanding the shoppots

as well as working with the guys on where to put that.

Yeah, okay.

Let's move on and talk about the electronics package.

You've already mentioned Motec with their pro or torque based package,

GPRP Pro.

What does that actually mean to the average punter?

Think of a disconnect between the throttle pedal

and what the engine's actually doing.

And the tools at the engine can use to do what the driver's asking.

So in the simplest sense, the throttle pedal is now a torque request

or a torque demand pedal.

That then goes to the computer, the computer then controls the engine

and then will use a range of tools to make that talk.

So a combination of throttle angle, timing, boost level,

it's all internally calculated.

So that's probably the biggest thing.

So rather than, for instance, where that becomes incredibly beneficial

is rather than have a situation where your throttle pedal is linked to a cable

which is linked to a throttle body, the driver wants full everything.

The throttle is open and let's say you come into a wheel spin event

that the computer doesn't have a lot of tools at its disposal

to be able to deal with that.

And most of the time you're just going to end up with a series of ignition cuts

to try and bring the wheel spin under control.

And then, inherently, that brings with it new problems of heat management,

valve spring, and all the things that that could affect.

Cuts also are just not real nice if you can avoid them you want to.

Yeah, so that's probably in a real world scenario,

one of the best aspects of the pro package,

as well as you literally put in a box 1,000 Newton meters,

it'll make 1,000 Newton meters.

So, but in the traction as a driver,

probably the thing you feel most or the thing you benefit from the most

would be around that traction control.

As I understand it, that essentially was one of the main drivers

with the development of the GPRP Pro was to just go to that next level

of traction control.

I think I've probably explained this on the pod before,

but just for those who are new to it,

if you take a turbocharged engine and you put it on the dyno

and you go to, say, four and a half thousand RPM,

somewhere where you can make full boosts,

and you go to wide open throttle and let's say you make two bar of boost,

one and a half bar of boost, whatever it might be.

And it's whatever Newton meters, you know,

that's called it 700 Newton meters, just for a round number.

And then you back the throttle off to 95%.

And chances are, you'll still be making 1.5 bar boost,

and you'll probably still be making 700 Newton meters,

maybe 696.

And then you keep back in the throttle off,

and you realistically, until you get down to about 40%, 50 throttle,

you don't really start to see a noticeable decrease in your torque.

And the problem with this is the relationship between the driver's foot pedal

and the amount of torque the engine's making is just completely non-linear.

And that makes it very difficult for the driver to modulate the throttle,

particularly in a low traction situation.

So this is even before we start bringing in traction control,

whereas with that torque model, you could literally set 50% throttle

is now 350 Newton meters, you've literally got a linear relationship

between foot pedal position and torque.

The computer will deliver that, as you mentioned,

with the combination of boost pressure, throttle position,

ignition retard, it can just give you exactly what you ask for.

Now, probably don't quite want that linear relationship,

but you can get whatever the driver actually wants to make the driver happy.

So it just makes the control, the ability to control the car,

particularly where it's right on the limit, just so, so much finer.

Now, in terms of the integration of that MoTek ECU

with the rest of the other trunks of the car,

seem to recall talking to about a few tricky parts with that.

Can you refresh my memory and talk about what those were?

Well, we run an M150 ECU, and with 10 cylinders,

there's a quarter of a VTI to throttle bodies you're using

just about everything that computer can do.

One of our biggest challenges is the complexity of the Canvas

is there's multiple on the car.

And then having enough capacity in the computer

to do the engine computer, to do all the engine things.

And then still be able to reference the rest of the car

which has some component tree on it, the factory component tree

that talks at a very, very, very high rate.

So one of the challenges that we experience

was how do you get the relevant information to the computer only

that it needs, or say computer, I mean engine computer.

How do you get the relevant information that the engine computer needs to see

without overburving it with a thousand messages from other modules on the car

and essentially choking it?

Because if you let the M150 look at all of those messages,

it still has to see them to understand if it's relevant for it

and that inherently carries within a processing overhead.

So segregating the Canvas on the car and then using the dash

as the integrated or the interceptor was probably the biggest challenge

alongside just the physical reverse engineering of

it's all the engine, everything on the back of the car,

the engine harness side, all the ABS wiring is all

as run in GT3.

And then from the inside of the firewall,

there's two autosport connectors and then a body harness autosport connector

that we basically made a new harness off to the M154.

So just reverse engineering that plus the theories of how that was

why it was the challenge.

But mainly around the Canvas was the biggest challenge we had.

Now if you go for off the shelf,

MoTec package for Huracan, for example,

which is essentially still the same engine,

although this time retaining the direct injection,

you're going to end up with two MoTec thinking 142s.

I think.

Yeah, obviously that's to run the engine as well.

We've got now 20 injectors or whatever you've got,

going on there.

But is part of that also getting around this Canvas complexity that you

struck or is that only really related to the GT3 car?

I'm sure in a road car.

I mean, I've got a couple of cars here with that exact combination,

but it's sort of set and forget you plug it in that works.

I haven't delved into any of the under the hood stuff of that.

But it was really for us.

It was around the Canvas and mainly the ABS.

Okay.

So what are the symptoms?

What's the problem with this Canvas basically being overrun?

So the wheel speed outputs from the ABS

onto the bus for a thousand hertz.

So the four,

and then every other sensor output from the ABS system

was at a rate far higher than what we're used to,

like when we're dealing with a Bosch ABS system or something similar.

That was essentially a thousand hertz out of your wheel speed sensors.

It's probably a bit excessive for what we needed.

Yeah, a little overkill, I think.

So we had to break that off.

And then all of the PDM,

so it runs an olibule racing PDM as it's spec PDM,

that has all sorts of channels coming out of that

about everything's amp draw on off,

what it's doing, what it's not doing,

and that all sat on one bus

and then trying to open that bus up then to the M150.

Essentially it was looking at so many messages

that it was impossible to try and keep the processor load down.

So we just segregated the buses out.

So the computer spoke to the dash.

The dash spoke to the E-triple lights.

The dash spoke to the ABS.

And being a 1-8 dash,

it has four buses that you can then use,

and then start to bring the messages in,

but then output them at a lower rate back to the computer.

So essentially just using it as a can gateway to give the ECU

just what it needs and nothing it doesn't?

Yeah, correct.

And then there's certain things that when you start to bring into the computer

like you put an E-triple light on the same bus as the ECU,

it takes load up.

It takes load in the computer as well

when it's trying to do as many things as it needs to do.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I think I've done overlooked most people thinking

when they're new to CAN that you can just fire as many messages

from as many devices onto that bus as you can,

but it's of course not that case.

And one of the things we do need to be looking at

aside from just overloading the ECU

is just the sort of occupancy on the CAN bus

or utilization I should say of the CAN bus anyway

and you start getting that up over about 80-85%

and you're likely to start dropping some CAN messages

and maybe that doesn't matter,

but maybe it's for a shift request from your paddle

and it absolutely does matter

because the car doesn't change gear.

For your opportunity for conflict,

the opportunity for CAN conflicts is far greater.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so let's move on.

P2 obviously couldn't have really got

too much of a bit of a result.

There's only one step to move up

given what you've learned,

if the car's to go back next year,

what changes are in the pipeline?

We would definitely try and run some more power.

So I think for at our weight to be competitive,

we probably need to be somewhere in the order

of 1,800-100 wheel horsepower,

and that brings with it a range of complexities

as I'm sure you can imagine.

Straight away, I'm thinking about those poor intercoolers.

Ah, I'm thinking about my exhaust valves,

not turning back into the metal,

the metal they started life as.

So we need to address exhaust temperature.

We need to address probably some airflow

through the cylinder heads.

We need to understand if the cast block

is going to hang on at that level

and or are we going to run into issues

with its bore and things like that?

You know, we don't have liners

that are still running on the factory bore.

So learning and understanding all of those

and probably to be honest,

probably engaging with a partner

that's got experience at that kind of horsepower

maybe out of the US or something like that

to help us with that aspect.

Clutch with good gearbox,

we're good.

Gotta get the rolls in as back to where they need to be.

We need to get the mechanical setup height of the car

back to our set-up sheets.

So we can get back to the goodness

of the GT3 that it is

and probably work on some cooling

to get the intake temps down.

Everything else is kind of in the sun.

So just a short list then.

Just a couple of things.

Well, I mean, the knowledge

based on making the power out of the engines

is clearly there

but again to reiterate

what works for a drag or roll race application

does not necessarily work

for a minute-twenty lap around

Sydney Motorsport Park.

So there will be some challenges there.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's really going to be

how can we bring those GTs down?

And at what point do you give it more torque

and they keep coming down

versus they're just going to, you know, once you start.

Obviously, because it's a rate of diminishing returns

as you start going higher and higher

and the boost threshold

and we start to want more torque into it.

So you have to be seen

and you can only learn these lessons

at the track of your reality.

So getting back to it

and representative circuits.

There's not a lot here in WA

in terms of circuits

that you can really test out.

You can definitely shake it down

at our local circuits

but really it's the bend, SMP,

those kind of locations

where you've got enough high speed

cornering and an average speed

that you can really test what you need to test.

Okay.

All right, I think we time to move on.

We'll stay on the theme of GT3 cars.

Another car that you took along

to a World Time Attack

but just to show off

was an R35 Nissan GTR GT3 car.

And I took one looking

to the engine bay

and I don't see a lot of Nissan GT3 cars

but something wasn't quite right.

And you'd move the engine

right down and back in that car.

Is that correct?

Yeah, correct.

Correct.

So yeah, that car started life

as a 14, 15 spec GT3

that ran in the 12 hour back in the day.

And it had a bingo

and in the front

and we picked it up

off a guy that had bought it

post-accident.

He'd repaired it.

It's done a good job.

And then we picked it up

and similar sort of

similar sort of theme

to what we've just been discussing

about the Lamborghini

is going what's also about this car

and what could we do differently

or better.

And in 2018, Nissan ran a program.

They took the GT3 program

internal to Nissan.

Maybe just to side

by the original series.

So from sort of 13,

14 through to 18,

it was run out of the UK

by a third party race car

builder organization.

And then Nissan took it back.

When they took it back in 2018,

they actually moved the engine

into a similar position

to where we have ours.

And there's not many

of them out there.

I don't think there's all too many

post-18 and then obviously

COVID came along in 20

and that was sort of it.

They moved the engine

about 180m down and back

and we're about 200m down and back.

So you beat Nissan?

No.

I think they probably got the

measurement right.

We maybe went a little bit too

aggressive because

Turbo plumbing on that car

is a very, very interesting,

very interesting problem

because it's got large turbos

and nowhere to put them.

Yeah, that's definitely a problem.

Let's just sort of take it again

at one step back

and if we couldn't

compare the two platforms,

the Gerardo GT3 versus

the GTR GT3 car.

What are the pros and cons

of each?

To me, obviously,

very different platforms,

one mid engine,

one front engine,

trans axle

on the back of the GTR,

though, you know,

give us your sort of

high level overview of the two.

The GTR is light up

by reasonable margin

and it also allows for

far greater range

of adjustability

in terms of a window

from a suspension

and set up perspective.

So inside that car,

it's got the GTR.

It's full tube rear end

with the trans axle sitting in the middle.

It's got sort of infinite positioning

of control arms,

anti-dive, anti-squat.

We've got a large window to work with,

whereas if you think about the

Lamborghini, especially around its rear suspension,

because it's got the engine back there,

it's quite wide,

the chassis rails are inherently wide,

so therefore, the control arms,

the motion ratio of the shock,

it's all quite narrow

to where the wheel is.

The front end of the GTR

is the same,

it's a full tube front subframe,

but ultimately,

when Nissan heads through

and through,

and start of the GTRs

and that was also a big driver.

That's fair.

In terms of the technology

you're leveraging on both of these cars,

are you doing anything here

with the likes of 3D scanning,

cared, 3D printing,

to develop parts

or a pathway forward with the cars?

Yeah, all of the above.

Again,

a bit like the early days of tuning,

self-taught,

watching videos like what

you guys put out,

and then got to the Fusion 360 world,

a bit of self-teaching

from flat brackets

to more complex shapes now,

and understanding that whole workflow

of taking,

because it's often seen as,

I know I have this conversation with clients a lot,

where they say,

just scan it

and then put it into CAD

and build it.

There's such a misconception about the workflow for that,

and I mean,

I fell into it to start with as well,

but it's not quite that simple, is it?

No, no,

and you know,

it actually costs yourself a lot of time

by thinking that it's always the best,

it's always the easiest workflow

to scan and reverse engineer

and then

bring that into a solid model,

make your changes,

and then,

and then print,

sometimes the good old fashioned,

trace it out on a piece of paper,

and make a cardboard template still has a place?

Oh, no doubt.

And on that note,

how do you decide what justifies,

you know, firing up the laptop

and breaking out Fusion

and what's just a pair of scissors in some cardboard?

When the part is complex enough

that you know you're going to have a range of variations,

or where you ultimately,

you know,

we work with some local CNC firms here,

work with high-speed engineering,

just around the corner here,

and we work with them,

and other firms,

and then sometimes you,

when you're working with people that aren't in front of you,

so you then need to print it out of plastic,

physically fit it to the vehicle,

whatever the component may be,

bolt everything around it,

and go,

yep, okay, that's done now.

We're happy,

we've made our different changes

in our variations to it,

cool,

I'm happy to now go and send that file off

to a firm that might not be in front of me,

or I can't take around a sample,

or, you know,

if they couldn't come here

and we could talk about it together,

sort of need that confidence

before you go and invest in the real thing,

whichever part that may be.

So, yeah,

normally when it's a big enough part

that you're going to go down

the road of changing

in a number of times.

I mean, I could be completely on the wrong path here,

but where something as complicated as moving

and Nissan GTR engine

rearwards and downwards by,

I think you said 200 millimeters,

could be wrong there.

That to me would be a pretty good,

sort of use case

for 3D scanning

and 3D modeling,

is that how that went down?

I'm just thinking here,

if you scan the engine,

you scan the engine bay,

you can then play around in the virtual world

and kind of make sure that,

wherever you locate it,

you are going to have adequate clearance

to everything.

Yeah, absolutely.

Bit of column, my bit of column bay.

You certainly can do that

and then know how big your problem's going to be

if you still want to commit down that path.

We had another sort of consideration

we had to look at,

which was where were we going to put a steering rack

that was in the right position

that you didn't have that much bump steer

that it wanted to rip the steering wheel out of your hands,

but clear the engine.

So, I'll send you a photo,

but the steering rack itself

was about 8mm off the front of the harmonic balancer.

So, it was a bit of a,

a bit of a,

it's got to go that far back and down

if you want to undertake this exercise at all

or you don't.

It's just saying you say that

we've got an EF Honda CRX

that's powered by a K20

and there's a little race car

and we bought it

as a modified club-level car.

It was a bit rough around the edges,

but it was fast

and a huge amount of fun to drive

and the factory crossmember,

I'll try and get this story short,

the factory crossmember just obviously is

an up to 300 horsepower

and 1.4G of lateral cornering force

so every season

that CRX unfolds apart.

So, we decided we'll make a chromoly subframe

that's going to be reliable.

Oh, look, that allows us to move the engine back

on top of the fact we've got rid of

the firewall mounted brake master cylinders

which were fouling on the cylinder head.

So, great, we can move the engine back

and it was a lot,

I think it was maybe 120-140mm

so not an insignificant amount.

So, this is all done and cared

and everyone's happy, everyone's smiling.

We'd actually mock the engine up back that far

and then I think we used optimum G, optimum kinematics

and basically mapped out

where the new steering rack would have to go

and we found out that

in the next we mounted the steering rack

inside of the front differential

which would have been challenging,

let's be honest.

I think we ended up with something like 25mm

of bump steer which just obviously wasn't going to fly.

So, we ended up with the engine

almost essentially right back where it was.

Which was the next exercise of frustration,

but now at least we've got a nice chromoly subframe

that should hopefully never crack.

But it's just a case of unintended consequences

that maybe you don't think about until you realise.

I mean, thank God that we did run all of those simulations

because it would have been

a horrible, horrible thing to drive

and when you then find the problem that you've got,

there's no easy coming back from that.

No, no.

And it's...

I remember as we got into that

because we didn't have a lot of a long build time

with that vehicle.

We got into it.

There was a couple of times we sort of all stood there

and scratched our head and said,

maybe we should just put the engine back

where we got it from.

But the client was having none of that.

So he's never admit defeat.

No, yeah.

The client quickly sold up that particular thought process

and threw it in the den and said,

I don't know.

I'll keep going.

So yeah, had to figure that out.

And then quickly realise when you go

from a trailing steering rack to a leading steering rack

if you try and use that same rack,

you're going to turn left to go right and right to go left.

So that would have been challenging driving it off the hoist.

So what's the solution to that?

Are you sort of talking custom steering racks?

No, I had to get to the thinking board

and think what we do here because the car's left hand drive.

So I said, how are we going to make that work?

So I took a right hand drive, R35 GDR rack,

a standard rack,

and then turned it upside down

and backwards to point back in the left hand

up to the steering column.

And that worked.

So yeah, then obviously made the mounts to make that work.

It ran a factory rack as a race car.

So it's still the same rack with the same ratios

and the same sizing just upside down.

Okay.

I don't know if you're going to be able to give us

any sort of indication on this,

but I'm assuming that a bunch of people will probably be thinking

how much of an advantage is moving this engine backwards

and down to the extent you've done,

given the headache that you created for yourself.

I don't know if you could give us sort of an indication

of what that might feel like from the driver's standpoint

and how that might relate to that time.

It's kind of a bit of a case of how long's a piece of string,

but give us your best shot.

Yeah.

It's one of those complete unknowns.

And I don't think it'll ever be known.

You'll never back to back it, will you?

Never back to back it.

And all the changes that are a consequence

or come with doing that, i.e. suspension geometry

and motion ratio of a shock and pick up points

and all the things that go with that are so material

that you probably wouldn't get a good rate.

Theory says, theory says,

we've discussed it before with the Lamborghini.

We're putting more weight towards the centre of the vehicle

from being that pendulum and that swing effect

and not wanting to turn.

And then, generally speaking, the lower you can get the weight,

the better.

Alongside while those activities took place,

a lot of weight got stripped out,

because the turbo, the dump pipes are a lot shorter.

The intake pipes are a cleaner run.

It's sort of a catch-22 of reducing weight,

centre of gravity, all theoretically goes faster.

But so many other changes with the car generally

I'd never be able to say how much that contributed.

But I guess it sort of comes back to industry best practice.

You want the weight as low and as central to the car as you can.

Yeah, correct.

And then that sort of brings with it,

the gearbox needs to become lower now,

because you can't leave the gearbox in its original position.

So the actual lowest point on that car

is the bottom of the clutch housing,

and it's only a five and a half inch clutch.

So you can kind of theorize that the box is very close to the ground,

because the engine is so low,

so the centre line of the crank is so low.

So then the input shaft of the gearbox needs to be

very close to the exact same point.

Okay.

In terms of things that were holding this back

from actually competing at World Time Attack,

we've got a laundry list of tasks to complete

or is it pretty close?

It's pretty close.

I mean, to the point where you saw it,

it ran and drove to that position,

and the night prior had been on the dyno.

It ultimately just came down to a bit of a safety call,

of brand new uprights, brand new wheel bearing, suspension, ABS,

just so many things are new,

that once we went into the event proper,

and out of the test day's prior,

which is where we were trying to shake the car down,

it just got to a point where you don't test and competition.

No, sometimes it's important to know when to pull the pin on something.

There's always going to be next year.

It's always a difficult conversation,

but sometimes you just got to have it,

and say, hey, look, we got it here.

It runs, it's an awesome looking car.

Let's not cook it just for the sake of doing a lap today.

Yeah, totally.

Just circling back to the 3D scanning,

modeling and 3D printing side of your business

and how you're leveraging that.

Could you give us insight into what sort of investment

in product someone's going to need to have those capabilities?

Obviously, when we're talking about both 3D printing and 3D scanning,

there is a range of products that are huge different,

sort of vastly different price points,

but could you give us some guidance?

Yeah, I think that range is actually the biggest call out,

is because the scanners at our level,

they're fairly entry-level by comparison

to some of the things you can buy in the professional space,

like the hexagon and Lyca space and what they are able to do.

So the brands, I've got Bamboo Lab's printers,

I love them, they're easy to use and they're reliable.

I think they're the 3D printer for people

who just want to 3D print as opposed to those who want to build

and work on 3D printers.

Yeah, I see all these sort of open frame things

with fans lying on them and custom beds and glass this

and I just really want to press go

and pick my part up at the other side and bolt it to a car

and see if it works rather than become a 3D printer specialist.

We started with a Creality 3D printer,

which was exactly that,

and I think both Connor and Brandon,

just the amount of man-hours they were losing,

levelling the bed or prints that didn't stick

and just had to be done again.

By the time you put your hair out that many times

it just made sense to actually just buy a proper 3D printer.

Yeah, I, in the lead up to time attack,

this thing was running 24-7,

just banging out prototypes of different things

for the GDR primarily.

It had a print head, a hot end failure

and just decided to print itself into a block of plastic

and I just looked at it and just closed the door

and said that's enough 3D printing for now.

I'm not, I'm not going to deal with that.

Maybe I was trying to tell you something.

It got a bit sad, so it's back up and running now.

And then Scanners, really the Iron Scan and Iron Star products

so we've got two.

We've got a little handheld, the little blue,

$1300 thing, Iron Scan Pro, I think it's cool

and then a H2 pro for the bigger stuff.

So they each have their purpose

and they can do some awesome things

and then they've got their limitations

and you know where you've got to step it up to the bigger one.

I mean, I think from what I see,

I know enough in this part of the industry to be dangerous,

but definitely not enough to be an expert.

But what I have seen is just the price point on the Scanners

in particular is just being tumbling

and now what we've got access to, you know,

Circa, so call it 3 to 5,000 USD,

is probably where they were a 20,000 USD price point

not that many years ago.

And the great news is it's only going to get better for the enthusiasts.

Yeah, and it all comes down to what you're trying to do with them.

Like if you're trying to scan something to be

hide the accurate, let's say an upright

and you need to work out the engineering fit

for a wheel bearing pression or something like that.

These Scanners, they're not going to be accurate enough for that.

And then you probably need to do some manual reverse engineering

on top of that.

But for our use case here,

where for instance yesterday it came out,

it scanned the front of an engine

to then start working out a super-charger drive,

poorly arrangement, perfectly fine.

Oh, it's just fit for purpose.

Yeah, I think Connor just did a bit of a comparison

with the Einstein Vega, which is the self-contained,

you know, it doesn't actually need a PC.

And he scanned Honda B18C block

that we've had sitting around the workshop.

And then I compared the measurement of the Einstein

to the board diameter.

We're actually measured with a board gauge and a micrometer.

And I think it was within 0.15 of a millimeter.

I mean, it's not...

No one's going to be checking the person's

a cylinder ball clearance with a 3D scanner.

But for it to get that accurate,

I thought was pretty impressive.

Yeah, and if they do have limitations

in terms of the professional scanners can do shapes

that are more difficult than the smaller scanners,

the smaller scanners gets confused.

If you try to a wheel with one of the smaller scanners

and you don't have all sorts of markers

and scanning blocks and things like that

sitting all over the wheel, which defeats the purpose,

they'll get confused and lost and whatnot.

They don't tend to wide open spaces

that don't have any definition or repetitive features.

It is definitely a case of understanding

the limitations so you can work with them.

But again, they're getting better at that.

And I mean, otherwise you just end up

with positioning targets everywhere.

And I don't know about you, but I find my guys

who do our 3D scanning, the positioning targets

are a one-way street.

They go on and they absolutely never come back off.

I'm sure there's a hundred of them under the back

of my 86.

Yeah, and then if I were ever finding them around the workshop,

like you put on your best dress shirt

to go out to dinner on a Saturday night,

you'll find a scanning target somewhere on your shirt.

They just, they're like anti-sees.

If you touch anti-sees, and you're doing one bolt

you're doing one bolt with anti-sees,

you guarantee to look like the Tin Man just every time.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.

All right, I think it's probably time

to start wrapping this interview up.

I want to respect your time here, Josh.

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

at the end and the first of those is

what's next in the future for you?

At the moment, it's to push more into

that design and engineering space

that we've just been talking about.

So at the moment, working on some part production

and really trying to move into the product space as opposed to

just sort of doing things by an alley, you know, an alley basis.

So moving into that design and engineering space

for products, we've got a couple of clients

that were working with the moment around getting newer cars

and tow bars, bull bars, things like that

and sort of applying what we've learnt in motorsport

towards those.

Finishing all the cars that we've got,

getting them out on track.

There's six cars here in the shop at the moment

of a three of them went to time attack

and then there's three more to finish.

So some interesting projects to finish off there.

Are project cars ever really finished though?

That's the million dollar question.

No, no, they just inherently want to just stay at the shop

even though they're ready to drive home.

And then, as I said earlier in the interview,

is probably finished off some personal projects

in the manufacturer and then see where that takes us?

Just in terms of the manufacturing and product development,

obviously the technology we've just talked about

is a great place to get started.

In terms of the actual manufacturing,

is that something you would start looking to gear up

and produce in house orders that just not make any sense

and you'd just outsource the actual manufacturing?

For some components it does.

So talking with a couple of indoors

or suppliers at the moment about investing

in a metal 3D printer,

where parts could actually be productionised

when they're the right size and shape for that purpose,

rather than fabricated units.

For some of the other stuff, no, it doesn't.

Certainly not.

We're certainly not geared up to start looking at

making those bigger fabrication pieces

as far more efficient ways to do that.

But using the whole scan to beam

to CAD to 3D print methodology

and using that is our first port

is something we're really trying to push into.

Well they are trying to derail this

and add another half an hour onto it,

but I just got to keep asking a few questions here.

When you're talking about purchasing a 3D metal printer

for production runs,

I'm just interested, obviously,

3D metal printing is a great technology

for producing parts that could not be manufactured

using traditional methods,

CNC machining, for example.

But when you're looking at design for manufacture,

there's often ways around that particular

if you're not looking at very exotic or intricate parts.

What is the use case for a production part

still being 3D metal printed

versus just prototyping?

Or one off, so I should say?

Yeah, so it's a great question actually

because it's a very narrow window.

Yeah, that's what I would have thought.

There are some parts that we do

that even at production sort of levels,

it sort of comes to your first reference point

where it's too complex to CNC

or too pricey to CNC.

It's probably the best answer to that question.

I guess this is back and forth on this as well

because if you're doing a one-off part

where maybe money isn't an object

and you really want something specific

that again couldn't be manufactured traditionally,

that's a great use case.

However, I would think as well

when you're starting to look at production runs,

you do everything within your power

using design for manufacturing techniques

to try and redesign the parts

so it could be.

Obviously, there's parts,

places where that can't be.

Otherwise, you wouldn't be looking at it, though.

Yeah, and it's probably when I say production runs

and I say manufacturing,

we're still talking quite low numbers

so we're not talking thousands

and whatnot where you're investing

in the tooling that goes with some of those things

like casting, for instance.

When you start to get into enough volume

casting makes sense

and you can justify the expense in the tooling

and of course that takes over

and there's some very smart ways to do that these days.

I'm talking far lower in the production run world

but yeah, designing around that

is definitely something that you're trying to trade.

And one last promise,

this is my last question on this point.

When you're looking at 3D metal printers

that probably start at $50,000

and rapidly increase in price from there,

I'm assuming this is a piece of equipment

that you'd really need

or ideally want to be running just about 24-7.

At what point does it make sense

to purchase outright vases

using one of hundreds of external

jobbing shops that you can just send a file to

and your part turns up a week later?

Just turn around time.

Turn around time because my experience

is it seldom a week.

I've explored all of those sorts of...

especially there's some great options online,

amazing stuff and I've used them

on a number of occasions and still to this day

when you've got time up your side

but in the sort of space we play in

and the clients I'm working with at the moment,

it's literally sort of like days

get this thing to market within a month

which the workflow for that

is more intense than just the branding part.

The speed to market for some of those clients

is really important.

Yeah, I mean it's not...

the cost is not always the only consideration

it's about balancing out all of your requirements

for a particular part.

All right, we'll park that anyway.

Second of our three questions is

is there any advice you give to a younger version

of yourself to help reach where you are today

in your career faster?

Maybe don't grow your first shops so quickly.

Oh, that was going to be it.

But one of the lessons I definitely learnt

is always be willing to have your work reviewed

or have a peer review

or someone come in and check your work off.

So I think the bit of advice would be

is never be too proud

or too cocky as the word I want to use

to be unwilling to take that advice

if it's there for you

and if someone's willing to...

Whatever the category is

that the advice is offered in, always listen.

Yeah, I think great advice

and so much so that

this just keeps coming up continuously

through my podcast guests.

So yeah, thank you for again reiterating that.

Lose the ego, understand that

no matter where you are in your career,

nobody knows everything

and you can always learn from other people.

So I think if you've got that humble attitude,

you'll go far.

100% 100% I think

if you can go into every part,

especially in business,

especially in this industry,

if you can go in with that mentality

and mindset,

you'll jump ahead really quickly.

Okay.

Last question, Josh,

if people want to follow you

and see what you're up to,

how they're best to do so.

Mainly around Instagram,

specialised racing solutions on there,

pretty active in that space at the moment.

Not huge presence on social media

is in, but if you want to get in touch,

where also it's specialised racing solutions.com,

and some contact forms and photos

and bits and pieces on there.

Oh, as usual,

we'll put links to those in the show nights

to make it easy for people to find.

Look, Josh, it's been a pleasure catching up again

and we do really appreciate your time.

It's some really interesting projects

that you're involved with, probably.

I'm guessing more interesting than mapping streets

for Apple Maps.

So maybe the jump in career was worth it.

That was not without interesting times,

that's for sure,

but yeah, it's good fun.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for having me.

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Can we get an update on your project builds?

Well, how long have you got?

Project builds, let's see.

We're actually deep into work

on the Toyota FJ40 builds,

so we're hoping that that might

see the light of day

maybe early 2026.

The SR86 is an ongoing project.

I don't think projects like that

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And the CRX is kind of

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152: Building a Lamborghini Gallardo into a WTAC Weapon

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