Vinny Ten Calls Out Fake Shops, F****d Up Cars & Frustrated Tuners!

 

Thanks for posting this. Love what he says at the 14 minute spot. Referencing the internet. So true.

 

He makes really good points about the broad knowledge needed for 1 or 2 guys to put together a car: electrical, plumbing, etc.

Also, the whole balancing act of WOT performance and longevity + driving manners. People don't want to hear that they have to give up horsepower.

On the whole internet dyno numbers thing... you gotta remember, that you get a skewed sample from cruising a car forum. Lots of guys don't post their numbers, often because those numbers didn't "measure up" to something they already saw online. So the sample remains skewed.

 

Pretty good stuff, a lot of what Vinny said is very true. Gotta do your research and be mindful of what's actually out there.

It's a lot better to just save up and spend the money at a good shop, and drive out with a worry-free mindset, while knowing that the shop will back you up in case anything happens.

 

Awesome video, gives a good point of view coming from the shops.

 

agree to many of the above, however, just one thing I would like to point out:

WE ALL STARTED SOMEDAY AND SOMEHOW..... AND MANY OF US WERE YOUNG.... )

I'm sure, Vinny had the same hard way to go to the level him is in to as many of us. Maybe some one would agree....

 

well the point he makes about age I think still needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. There are 20something guys who have learned a lot and had a lot of experience compressed over say 3-5 years. And then there are older guys who haven't kept up with the latest ways of doing things, or were never that good in the first place. My grandfather ran a repair shop in Brooklyn for 40 years. When a potential new hire told my grandfather he had 10 years of experience, my grandfather would ask "Ok, is that 10 years or 1 year 10 times?" The point is this: what did you learn in those years? Is the experience relevant and did you grow in your skill?

The age of the guy working on the car and the experience do matter a lot, and someone who has been successful in the game for a long time is more likely to go a good job, but like anything you have to be mindful of overgeneralizations and do your homework.

 

Is that like the big bang theory, or m-theory?
Some of us we born older because of re-incarnation.

 

i've seen plenty of rotary shops claim over 10 years of experience. i've also seen those same shops build pure and utter crap, what did they learn in those 10 years?

i also tend to laugh when i hear thing akin to: "over 30 years of combined experience". like having 2 people with 15 years of experience automatically doubles cumulative experience. i'm at a handicap since i do all this **** by myself... i don't get to make exaggerated claims.

my claimed 10 years of experience is in rotaries only, that doesn't even include the 12 years prior when i was a factory technician.

it's much easier to learn now with the resources on the internet. when i started working on cars we didn't have this great pool of knowledge, i had to go and bother the old guys.

 

I work at Boost Logic and this is the reason we SPECIALIZE in GTR's and Supra's mainly. When a customer heard we made 1300whp on a R35 they want to bring us their cobalt and we honestly turn them away politely. Hell, im the only rotary guy at the shop and our tuner is known all over the tuning world, Justin Nenni, and he wont touch a rotary. Not even mine after knowing him for over 10 years. Do what you know period.

 

you're wasting your time, but we actually switched from the FC to the integra as a race car, soooOOoo.

in the car world the integra is a butter knife, you can sharpen the butter knife, but its still a butter knife.

so we have a fully built road race integra, and we just dropped a 180FWHP B18C into it, and its almost as fast in a straight line as a stock Rx8 now.

for the handling portion when we went from FC to integra we dropped 2 seconds off the lap times, on the same tires. there is so much more to handling than 50/50 weight distribution.

 

i don't touch tuning on piston engines, they scare me!

BUT you can make any engine quick, with enough work. look around and you will see those little B18's creeping up on 1000FWHP. that IS impressive no matter how you slice it, no pun intended. granted the window that they actually make power in is quite narrow.

one of my customers has a K20 late model civic with 500FWHP with a 35R pushing only about 14psi. it's a street car also, and they did break a motor figuring out the lubrication issues that the K series block had to #4 in the oil galleys. (not my work, i hate grocery getters/FWD)

 

this man knows his ****.

 

Good video. I think the only topic he didn't touch was how some people only care about horsepower numbers, and don't think about safety margin or reliability. Anyone can crank up the boost. In the simplest possible way of thinking about a turbo, it can generate a constant exponential amount of power. exhaust = more air = more exhaust = more air... etc. But there are many other factors.

I'm just now at 25 starting to learn to choose my shops better based on experience with whatever I'm working on. And I still make mistakes. Guilty at times.

 

I had the opportunity to observe the workings of the Racing Beat shop and talk to Jim Mederer in around 1980 and I realized from that experience that most of the so called tuners are 'stroking' themselves.
Just my opinion.
Another one was the John Morton 510 tuning shop in El Segundo- that guy was good too!
These guys I saw are engineers and good ones at that!

 

We have plenty of those here in australia. Most of them big name shops too.

 

One thing that should really raise a red flag is when a tuner sounds like he's telling you what you want to hear. He doesn't ask a lot of questions or give complex answers to difficult issues.

The reality is, tuning of all aspects is difficult and involves tradeoffs.

 

to add something very important....


#1 Do your research on your own car. Know how do do the basic stuff on your own
#2 Know your car as well. Espically how the car reacts, feels, sounds.

#3 Inspect your car weekly. check the oil, plugs, & everything else.....

Remember the tuner & the Builder are there to do one thing. Tune & build the motor.. its up to you to maintian it, and know & feel if something is wrong.

having knowledge also helps you know if someone messed up a part that they did for you.......



example... had a friend who had a motor rebuilt, but they replaced the housing with old ones, and after the motor was done he was wondering why it had very low compression for being a rebuild....

 

That is pretty awesome video!

 

even NA the K motors will do 225hp to the ground, which is kind of amazing. the guy who used to build our engines had a 900+hp car. it lasts about half a season of drag racing, so ~7 minutes. its not cheap either!

on the Honda we've been bit by this a few times. we had our "builder" freshen up the engine for the 08 25 hours of thunderhill, and when we put it in the car and fired it up, it sounded like a tractor, we should have listened to our instincts and pulled it out, but we ran it, and it eventually blew a head gasket from detonation. we finished, but instead of on the podium, we had to stop and fill it with coolant and oil every hour. upon teardown we found that the .040" over block had stock pistons in it..... the new builder gives us a build sheet, so we actually KNOW each step they did. new engines are WAY better.

the best experience we had was when we went to go tune the 2009 engine, we made a list of priorities. we told the tuner what we were going to be using the car for, and asked what he thought and he came up with the same list as we did. reliability is key on an endurance car, and even an NA honda will detonate itself to death if its lean with advanced timing if you stand on the gas long enough

 

So true

 

this guy is going to become my hero lol
The truth that he speaks, especially about the internet and the compromises you HAVE to make when building the engine.