In this episode of Drive Radio: The Extra Mile, John Rush pulls back the curtain on aftermarket performance parts and separates real upgrades from expensive mistakes. Drawing on three decades of hands-on experience in the performance industry, John explains why many popular mods—wheels, tires, cold air intakes, exhaust systems, programmers, and lift kits—often reduce performance instead of improving it.
From hub-centric vs. lug-centric wheels to misleading dyno tests, altitude-related power loss, gear ratios, suspension quality, and product liability concerns, this episode delivers a practical, no-nonsense guide for anyone considering vehicle modifications. John also explains why planning your end goal matters
SPEAKER 06 :
This is Drive Radio, The Extra Mile, with your host, John Rush.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back. Another edition of Drive Radio, The Extra Mile. And really quick, before I get into today’s topic, we’re going to talk about aftermarket performance products and some things along those lines, the good, the bad, the ugly. But I want to say thank you, by the way, for everybody that listens. A lot of you are not only listening, but texting in, texting in, questions and different topics that we can cover in the future. And I appreciate that greatly. And I know you all listen because while I’m on, you guys will even be texting me things during that particular time. This is a prerecorded show, of course. We do this earlier in the week. But you guys are always really good about texting me questions while we’re on air and even some follow-up questions. And last week, we talked about the best buying time of the year for a new car. And that dovetailed into, we had last week on Drive Radio a bunch of questions on… Basically, aftermarket performance parts, what works, what doesn’t. And I thought, you know, this is one where I might have to break this into two segments. I’ll try to get as much done in one segment as I can or in one particular show as I can. Luke Cashman, of course, my engineer producer of the day. And he’ll chime in on this as well, because there’s a lot of different things that come into, you know, what makes a part good? versus bad on the performance sides of things what makes something good versus bad in other words what works and what doesn’t and for those of you maybe that don’t know me and you’ve heard me on air for a long time but for some of you maybe that don’t even know i owned off-road performance stores for 30 years so three decades We did everything from, you know, performance upgrades, superchargers, programmers, gear changes, lift kits, tires, wheels, exhaust. I mean, everything you could think of to either take a vehicle completely, you know, off-road, almost to the buggy end of things, to regular diesel trucks that pulled that particular rig up the mountain and back, to rigs pulling fifth wheels, to construction guys, landscapers, snow plows, you name it. We kind of did the whole gamut, and I did that again for… 30 years before selling the two stores and still on radio and still do a lot with the automotive industry. But that’s my background. So I was a drag racer back in the day, actually raced at Bandimere for a long time. So I know a little bit. Probably more than I should when it comes to a lot of the performance things that are out there. And do my best to keep up on things as well. For those of you that don’t know, I own a lot of performance cars to this day as well. So I do a lot of tinkering and things like that even on my own vehicles. And so at the end of the day, yes, I understand the performance world very well. And I know there’s things that actually really do help. And there’s other things that I think people look at, and it might look good or sound good. But at the end of the day, you really didn’t do anything to upgrade the performance of your vehicle. In fact, in some cases, you may actually have downgraded it and don’t even know why. So before I get rolling along, Luke, you kind of have been down this path before. Again, you’ve talked enough on air with us. the folks now and they’re kind of learning more about you you’ve got some history when it comes to vehicles and the working on and so on so you start us off what you know in your world what’s a question you’ve always had as to okay is this really something that helps out in the performance world or is it just a lot of hype give me give me something and i’ll start there
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. There’s a couple things, especially when you’re looking at… Because a lot of my experience is with Toyota, with Lexus, that sort of realm. And you get some people, especially for me looking at Lexuses, people who want to increase the performance of their vehicle. And you got some people who are buying the cheapest parts they can and manually tuning to the nth degree. And then some people who are buying brand name parts for… price to performance. What are the upgrades you can make on your vehicle to really give it that extra oomph, that little extra kick without totally blowing your bank account on a brand new engine?
SPEAKER 02 :
Makes sense. Now, there’s an old saying, and it’s not too far off. And again, you can do speed sometimes on a budget, but there’s an old saying, speed costs money. How fast can you afford to go? And there’s a lot of truth to that because… Not always, but typically speaking, the more money you spend, the faster you are able to go when it’s all said and done. And that’s what this show is about today. That’s what this particular hour is about. Because there are exceptions to that. And what I mean by that is there are things you can spend a lot of money on. certain upgrades to Luke’s point a moment ago that really, at the end of the day, don’t make things any faster when it’s all said and done. It might feel good. It might sound good. At the end of the day, you might enjoy what you did, but really, at the end of the day, did you really have any performance upgrades when it’s all said and done? I was going to start today with mainly because it’s a hot topic for me, and that’s wheels. So I’m going to start with wheels and tires because most wheels and tires that people put on, especially trucks, are not only wrong for the vehicle, but I’ll go as far as to say borderline unsafe. And what I mean by that is I’ll see these guys running around, you know, Dodge trucks, Ford trucks, Chevy trucks, and they’re hauling a big old dump trailer or whatever, or even a gooseneck at times. They’ve got the huge wide offset tires, aftermarket wheels, and so on. And the reality is that truck wasn’t set up that way. it didn’t come that way the way you’ve changed it around you’re actually you know diminishing the overall capacity of the truck and i would highly advise that if you’re going to haul heavy loads and do those things stay away from that particular setup now i get it i’m probably you know poking somebody in the eye and somebody’s mad for what i’m saying but the reality is number one your truck looks stupid number two that doesn’t help you haul what you’re hauling at the end of the day. Number three, those wide tires sticking out because there’s no fender flares covering anything. You’re actually damaging the paint. I can go down the list of things that you’re doing that really, at the end of the day, don’t make that vehicle perform any better. That’s one of those things where you might like the look, But what you’re getting out of it performance-wise sucks. I have no other way to say it. It really does. The vehicle drives awful. That wide tire is terrible in snow and ice. I mean, your towing capability just went down. And a lot of that comes down to, when it comes to wheels, there are hub-centric wheels and there are lug-centric wheels. And I’ll just throw this out there. Luke, do you know the difference between hub-centric and lug-centric?
SPEAKER 03 :
I do not know.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, then there’s an explanation. And a lot of people don’t know. In fact, a lot of people buying wheels or even sometimes selling wheels and tires don’t know the difference. So here’s the main difference. Hub-centric means on every vehicle, and it’s been this way now for a long time, a long time, there is a little stub that sticks out from either the front hub or the rear hub. Sometimes it’s on the axle itself if it’s in the rear. In the front, it can be on the wheel bearing assembly. But there’s a step. per se so there’s a round portion on the inside of where the lug nuts are and that’s the hub itself and if you’re buying the right wheel and tire assembly hub centric means the wheel goes over that hub area in other words there’s an inset on the wheel itself that goes over that portion sticking out and it becomes hub centered All the lug nuts are doing then is literally holding the wheel up tight against the face of the hub itself, and there’s no pressure per se on the lug nuts. The weight of the vehicle is being held up through the wheel, through the hub itself, not on the lug nuts. That’s hub-centric. And for me, especially these guys hauling big, heavy loads, if you’ve got a three quarter ton, even a half ton, three quarter ton, one ton truck, you’re hauling heavy loads and so on. It is extremely, in fact, to me, it’s imperative that they be hub centric, not lug centric. I think even on performance cars where you’re out, you know, going around the track, you might be going out to Rocky Mountain, you know, out in Byers, you know, things like that. or high planes, rather, I should say, if you’re doing some of that, same thing. You need hub-centric wheels versus lug-centric wheels, because on a lug-centric wheel, the lug nut and stud is holding up the weight of the vehicle and all of that. It’s literally on the lug nuts, the lug studs. So you want hub-centric wheels, not lug-centric wheels. I’ve talked about this on Drive Radio many times in the past. I think there’s times where I still need to talk about it more like today because it’s a performance upgrade or what some people think is a performance upgrade on wheels and tires. And actually, when it’s all said and done, it’s a downgrade. They’re losing things versus gaining things. And I’ve always been one where if you’re going to make a change to a vehicle of any kind, I want an upside, not a downside. And for most of my listeners, I think you all would agree with me on that. We want upside, not downside. And if you don’t do things correctly, you’re going to have a downside, and it’s going to come in multiple ways, including breakdowns, more wear and tear on certain components, and so on. And at the end of the day, it just doesn’t work. One other thing I should mention about performance parts. because I used to get this a lot when I had my stores. Well, why doesn’t the factory just do this? Why don’t they just build this vehicle this way? Now, they are starting to build some vehicles that way. Take the Ram TRX. Take the ZR2 truck that GM puts out. Take the Ford Raptor or the Raptor R even. So they are in some ways doing this, but no, they’re not making every single production vehicle a quote-unquote high-performance vehicle. And the reason for that is because when they build a vehicle, a sedan, a truck, an SUV. They’re building it for as wide of a market as they possibly can to get those people to buy that vehicle. because they know there’s a market for that. In other words, if they take an F-150, they know that they’ve got a huge wide swath of individuals from fleet owners to people that want to have a vehicle that they can put things in the back of, go get their groceries and so on, but yet if they want to go to Home Depot, they can. Maybe they’re hauling a trailer, et cetera. They know that they’ve got a wide market for that F-150, whereby, and this is a great example, the Raptor R, and they don’t build as many of them because they know the market for of people that will actually buy the Raptor or the Raptor R even is much, much, much smaller than what they’ll get on a regular F-150. In fact, to the point where there’s some folks that own a regular F-150 that money isn’t even the issue. They just don’t want to own the Raptor R for various reasons. The ride, the width, the performance sides of it, and so on. Insurance costs, by the way, or the cost of the vehicle itself. I mean, at the end of the day, there’s multiple reasons why a lot of people won’t upgrade to that. But yet… They may want just a little bit more performance out of their F-150, let’s say. So always got that question. Why doesn’t the factory just build this? And again, the answer is they’re starting to, but they never will do everything that you like because they’re building a vehicle that will reach millions of people, not thousands of people, or in some cases, hundreds or tens of When you customize a vehicle thoroughly and you’ve got it down to where it’s exactly what you want, keep in mind, you’ve now got a market that is in the tens or twenties, not the thousands. And that’s one thing to be careful of, by the way, when you go to actually outfit any rig, car, truck, whatever, which I should have started with this from the get-go, even before talking about wheels. Know where you’re going. Now, some are saying, what do you mean? I always know where I’m going. No. What’s the end goal of your vehicle? Where do you want it to be when it’s all said and done? And I used to get so many customers that would come in and they would say, you know, I had this done and this done and this done and this shop did this and that shop did that. And you know what? I’m not really satisfied and I want my vehicle to do this. And I would be like, yeah, well, here’s the bad news. Where you want to go, all of what you’ve done was wrong. We’re going to now strip the vehicle back down to where it would have been stock, and everything you’ve spent money on goes out the window, and we’re starting over. Because what you want ultimately, which should have been mapped out to begin with, you’ve gone completely the wrong direction in the decisions that you’ve made on the parts that you’ve already bought and applied to the vehicle, so we’re now going to have to back up and start over. Meaning, whatever that money was that was spent, was spent wrongly, Because now we’re starting all over again. So my thing, and I always loved customers that would just come in, and believe it or not, it was usually younger people that in some cases maybe didn’t even have their driver’s license yet. That frankly, a lot of stores like I had would have probably not even waited on those kids because they looked at them as a waste of time. I didn’t. Because generally, these were kids where I could sit down with a blank piece of paper and say, okay, Jimmy, where do you want to be when this is all said and done? Well, Mr. Rush, I want to be able to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we would sit down and build a roadmap. And truthfully, sometimes this kid would be 14, 15, even 16 years of age. And it might take him two or three years to actually get where he was finally going when it was all said and done. But because I sat down, took the time, guided him through the whole process, he was extremely loyal and every part he bought to do what he needed to do came from me. And by the way, when he was done, what a great feeling it was for me as an owner to see that he had done everything the right way and didn’t waste money in doing it. So my feeling is when you’re trying to build anything, I don’t care whether you’re building a Camaro, a Mustang, a Corvette, you know, some sort of another hot rod, one of the trucks, an SUV, a Jeep, whatever. What’s the end goal? What are you trying to do when it’s all said and done? Are you just wanting a pavement princess that goes and gets groceries that you want to look good? Do you want to really haul some heavy loads with it? Are you going to put a fifth wheel camper behind it? Are you putting a regular camper on the back of it? Are you hauling horses? Are you going four wheeling every weekend? On and on we go and deciding on the front side, what is it you want the vehicle to do? And then building accordingly, it’s sort of like building a custom house. You need to sit down. What’s the piece of property? What kind of house fits on that property best? What direction should we put the house and the garage and the outbuildings and whatever else you’re doing? And when it’s all said and done, you’ve got a blueprint, per se, of how things are going to get built. Most people do that when they build a house. Well, you can’t get permits and so on without it. Unfortunately, when it comes to cars, there’s no permitting process. No one has to build the blueprints to determine how’s the vehicle going to look when it’s all said and done. They just start throwing things at it. Or they see an article and, oh, this looks really cool. Or they see a buddy that did this and that looks really cool. Or that sounds really cool. Or I really like the way that looks or whatever the case may be. And the reality is… Totally the wrong way of going about it is the way I want to say that. You really need to decide from the get-go, foundationally speaking, what am I going to do with this vehicle when it’s all said and done? And by the way, folks, that even includes somebody that just wants to modernize the vehicle and maybe even make some things look on the paint sides of things a little bit different, better, pinstriping, window tinting, whatever. I mean, at the end of the day, what’s your look – wanting to be on said vehicle, and then build accordingly. Because there’s nothing worse, and everybody in the industry will tell you this, nothing worse than taking something off somebody else did. Because at the end of the day, you know somebody spent good money on something that you’re now throwing away. And I don’t know about everybody else in the industry, but for me personally, oh, man, those were sad days. Because you literally would – you’d know that that was good, hard-earned money that was spent on something that now today you’re literally taking off and in some cases throwing in the scrap bin. Because it wasn’t going to fit and do anything for anybody else either because it didn’t work in this application either. So I’m going to move into the performance end of things because this applies to a lot of different vehicles, whether it’s something that, you know, one of the small imports where you’re trying to gain some performance, whether it’s a Lexus like Luke talked about, whether it’s a heavy truck. There’s a lot of companies that sell exhaust systems and cold air intakes. And not against either one, by the way, because I’ll get into the differences. But in a lot of cases, yes, you can gain decent power, especially at our elevation. Now, I get it. I get a lot of people listening coast to coast. We’re in Denver, and where I’m recording this right now, we’re probably sitting at about 5,600 feet elevation, 5,500 feet elevation. And as you go up the mountain, that continues to get higher, meaning there’s less and less air. So given the fact that an engine is nothing more than a big air pump, More air in, more air out means we make more power because we don’t have much. We’re at about a 30% deficiency, 25% to 30% deficiency at our elevation as opposed to somebody at sea level. And you notice it, especially on vehicles that are naturally aspirated. Now, if they’re turbocharged, supercharged, you won’t see quite the drop. you’ll still see a drop, but not as significant as a naturally aspirated engine is. So one of the ways to help gain performance at our elevation is on a four-wheel drive, I’ll get into the gearing sides of things in a moment, but the best way to do that is to add air in the front side, allow more air into the engine, get more air, feed more air, and get it back out, and that’s on the exhaust side. So I’m going to concentrate for a moment on the cold air intake side because there’s a lot of companies out there falsely, I’m going to say this correctly, falsely advertising their performance and dyno gains on cold air intakes and it’s just not there. So here’s a few tips. And some of this I have learned from the master of this, which is Gail Banks out of California. Gail Banks is somebody that has worked in the performance industry forever. He’s in his 80s now, still working on a daily basis. The guy is phenomenal. He’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know. And he is a pioneer in a lot of the things I’m going to talk about today. But cold air intakes, one of the things Gail Banks will tell you is, If you watch anybody online, on a website, whatever, advertising their product, telling you they’re going to get this much gain and they’re dynoing it to show you that it’ll get this gain but the hood’s open, turn the video off. Find another company because it’s false advertising. Because if the hood’s up, all bets are off. In fact, they’re not even doing the dyno test correctly when they’ve got the hood up. So the only way to really tell if you’ve had performance gains is on a dyno is you have to A, take that vehicle as stock and dyno it, hood closed, add the product that you think is going to increase horsepower, hood closed, do another dyno run. Now, here’s the other thing about dyno runs that most people don’t talk about. Depending upon where they are, what time of the day they’re done, the conditions outside, atmospherically speaking, pressure, moisture, all of that, dynamometer readings can vary greatly just with the weather. Meaning, you need to try to keep as much of that controlled as you possibly can. And I’ll be straight up honest, most of these guys dynoing vehicles don’t even consider what I just said. Don’t even record what I just said. For example, you could be in Colorado, and this is not an exaggeration, you could be in Colorado and take a really dry winter day where the air is a little bit cooler and run a dyno test and get X horsepower. You could then jump into, I don’t know, early April where we’ve got a little bit more moisture in the air. Maybe it just rained and maybe it’s a little bit warmer out and the air is denser and you could do a dyno run then. Or you could do one in the middle of July when it’s 100 degrees outside and again, might have a little bit of moisture in the air, but it’s 100 degrees. In the examples I just gave, all three of those examples, each one’s going to give you a different reading on the dyno. And what most of the guys running the dyno will tell you is, well, it doesn’t make any difference. you might be a little bit off here or there. Well, keep in mind, when it comes to cold air intakes, when it’s all said and done, the performance upgrades you actually see on a cold air intake in some cases is as little as 10 to 15 horsepower. And by the way, what I just told you in regards to the different air conditions, the atmospheric conditions that could be outside could actually be that same difference. And I’m not lying in what I just said, meaning that depending upon when you put the cold air intake on and do the testing compared to when you did the last testing, you might see a percentage gain just based upon atmospheric conditions only, having nothing to do with the parts you just applied to the vehicle. So point being, don’t believe everything you see on the Internet when somebody does a video of a dyno. It could be spot on and it could be very reliable or it could be totally false advertisement. And I told this to somebody last weekend on Drive Radio. If you really want to know more about this, go to YouTube. Look up Gale Banks. He’s got specific cold air intake videos he’s done to explain everything that I just explained in depth, showing you literally on screens and so on how this all works. And he gets into a lot of depth, even more so than I just did, proving everything I just talked about. So again, cold air intakes, they’re not all equal. If you’re watching somebody give you dyno numbers with the hood open, turn that video off, go find a different product. and the other key to cold air intakes is if it’s sucking in hot engine temperature air it’s not helping because cold air intakes are supposed to do just that bring in cold air and the reason why you want cold air is because it’s more dense than warm air that’s why we want to try to force as much of that air from in front of the grill as we possibly can because it’s cooler there than it is behind the grill because of the radiator and everything else that’s inside of the engine compartment so we want to draw cold air and that’s why a lot of intake systems even from the factory will draw behind a headlamp Or they’ll draw out of the fender, for example. And a lot of guys will look at that and think, oh, there’s no air coming in there. How are they doing? It’s cold air. It’s better air than you taking all of that off and flipping the air cleaner over like we used to do back in the old days because it sounded really cool. But at the end of the day, it did nothing for performance. It sounded great. but really wasn’t doing anything to help things out when it was all said and done. The best way to get that engine to perform better is to get that cold air, that denser air that’s out there into the engine, forcing it in any way you possibly can. So what I mean by that is if that cold air intake does not have some sort of a box or aluminum tray or something that seals with the hood whereby it’s in its own area drawing from that cold section I just mentioned. If it’s just drawing right off of the engine compartment, you’re going to lose power. You didn’t gain any. It’s going to sound cooler because you can hear the throatiness of the engine coming through the filter, but you didn’t gain anything performance-wise, and in a lot of cases, you might have actually lost some. So, all right, I’m going to go on to some other topics, but that’s kind of it on the cold air intake side. And that’s one of those areas, too, where just to close out on that, it’s not you get what you pay for. Some of what I just mentioned, some of the ones even that draw right off of the engine compartment that have a chrome tube and so on, they’re expensive. These aren’t cheap things. And they market really, really well. But at the end of the day, there’s no gain. It’s all looks, it’s all sound, and you’re not gaining a thing when it’s all said and done. You’d have been better off to have just left the vehicle stock. All right, we’ll take a quick break. We’ll come right back. This is Drive Radio, The Extra Mile, right here on KLZ 560, and we’ll be right back.
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SPEAKER 06 :
This program was recorded earlier for broadcast at this time. No phone calls can be accepted.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, we are back. Drive Radio, the extra mile. Thanks for listening again. We appreciate it. Don’t forget, you can go to drive-radio.com. Find previous episodes and some of the other stuff we talk about. All of our sponsors of Drive Radio, of course, are there as well. I just talked about cold air intakes, and I should have put quotations around cold air, Luke. Because some are not. And it was funny, Luke was in there nodding as I was talking, because you’ve seen some of the cold air intakes that I was just mentioning a moment ago. And you can see some of those on vehicles, in magazines or on the web or whatever. And at the end of the day, those guys, and I don’t think they even realize that they’re not gaining anything, Luke.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, and I bought my current Lexus used, and it had one of those chrome tube cold air intakes sitting right behind the radiator. I didn’t put it on, but the guy I bought it from obviously thought it was cool enough to put there. You know, it’s not my money, but… I’ll take it.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it looks good, but again, at the end of the day… I don’t think you did anything, no. Unless there’s some sort of… And what Luke could do, in your case even, if you haven’t done this yet, you could actually build yourself a nice little aluminum box that would literally close that off, seal up against the hood, draw cold air, and you would see a performance gain in doing that over what you have right now. Frankly, you could go find a stock one and probably gain some performance versus what you have right now because what’s there now is mainly for looks. versus anything else. So that’s the intake system. Exhaust. Okay, we talked intake. Exhaust is another one. And lots of claims when it comes to exhaust. And I learned this the hard way back when I had all my stores and was doing everything back in the day. And when I was a kid, dual exhaust was the fad. Everybody had to have dual exhaust. Well, as dynamometers got more popular, chassis dynamometers especially, we could literally sit and do different things, change out mufflers, change pipe, pipe size, mandrel bent versus non-mandrel bent and so on. You soon started to learn, or at least we did in the performance world, that even on like a small block Chevy, Chevelle or Camaro, you could actually make more power with a three-inch exhaust straight back as opposed to dual exhausts. And there was always an argument because guys would say, wait a minute, well, two is better than one. Not necessarily. Exhaust has different pulses and things that happen inside of it. And believe it or not, the right, nicely done, three-inch mandrel-bent high-end exhaust will actually make as much power as a lot of dual exhaust systems will. Now, am I against dual exhaust? No, because they’re cool and they sound great. Okay, so I’m not against them. But when you’re looking at true performance… In a lot of cases, you’ll find a single large diameter tube done correctly will perform just as well as a dual exhaust will. Doesn’t mean that I’m against dual exhaust because they’re cool in some instances, but some cases you’re diminishing power not adding power now that’s from in this case catback is in colorado and all of the states and what i have to talk about on air you can’t change the cats and so on so we’re talking about doing exhaust systems where the cats stay intact
SPEAKER 03 :
I had a question. Is this why, and maybe this is like super anecdotal, is this why I’ve seen in some instances when you go underneath the vehicle, there’s a single exhaust actually connected and then like a secondary exhaust is kind of just, hey, that’s all just looks. Correct.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. You’re exactly right.
SPEAKER 03 :
I was wondering why you would ever do that if you have, okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s exactly right. Good observation, Luke, on your part. Yes, absolutely. Now, let’s talk on the header side because, again, we’re going to keep cats in the same place, in most cases the same cat because changing them in a lot of cases, especially on the late model stuff, doesn’t gain you anything. They’re already free-flowing, and they work pretty well. They’re very unrestrictive as we’ve gotten into more and more of the later model vehicles. And in some cases, there’ll be four cats, not just two, on a V8 type engine or even a V6. Now, headers. Another big topic. Also another one where lots of misconceptions on headers. Not all headers are created equal. And again, I’ll go as far as to say in some cases, depending upon the choice of the header that you use, you may actually lose headers. not gain power and by the way create all sorts of other headaches along the lines depending upon what header you actually pick and it’s not as big of a deal as it used to be but you know back in the day you know if things weren’t positioned quite right you would burn plug wires and have all sorts of other issues and heat that would get inside of the engine compartment and on and on we go and it’s not that i’m against headers but i’m against crappy headers So I learned through the years, again, doing all the performance work and things that we did, picking the right header for that application was key, otherwise you were going backwards when it came to performance. So this is one of those where I can’t tell you what particular brand to buy because it depends on the vehicle and the engine. And again, going back to the blueprint, what are you trying to accomplish when it’s all said and done? Sometimes you can leave the stock manifolds that are there even the stock down tubes into the cat, change cat back, and actually be fairly well off when it’s all said and done, especially if you use the right cold air intake. now there are a lot of performance cars corvettes camaros mustangs and so on we’re a good set of high quality headers and when i say hey quality you’re not buying headers for a couple hundred bucks you know we’re talking you know 500 and above for a good set of headers thousand bucks in some cases so this is not a cheap endeavor you’re talking about spending some money if you want to go out and buy actual good solid headers and then the exhaust system that go with it now Lots of exhaust systems on the market. Luminized, where they take a pipe, they coat it. And for Colorado, to be honest with you, Luminized lasts a long, long, long time. Do you have to have full stainless steel exhaust in Colorado to make it last? No, you don’t. It is nicer, though. Does it flow any better? No. In my opinion, it’s nominal. Some would tell you that full stainless steel, because of the smoothness of the pipe and so on, you’re better off that way than you are with some of the other options that are out there. Frankly, in Colorado, if you’ve got a choice and you can save several hundred dollars by buying aluminized versus stainless and everything else is equal, buy the aluminized. You’re not going to bother anything. You can put a nice tip on the end of it. Nobody would know the difference unless it crawled underneath the vehicle anyways. Who cares? So I’m not a big one on only having to have stainless versus, you know, the aluminized because the aluminized, for all intents and purposes, in Colorado, if you take care of things, will last you the life of the vehicle anyway. So not a huge, huge issue. So exhaust systems are a big deal. A lot of people have this misconception that the louder it is, the better it performs. No. No. That’s not the case. Sometimes the louder it is, the worse it performs.
SPEAKER 03 :
You see it on the road every now and then. You’re driving down the 25 south, and you hear something real loud, and it passes you at five miles faster than what you’re doing maybe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. At the end of the day, that loudness doesn’t necessarily equate to horsepower. Thank you, Luke, for saying that because some of these guys can get all the cold air intake, which now you’ve got the second sound, and you get the exhaust going, and it’s got a nice loud sound, and the car sounds great. sounds good coming in sounds good going out but i’m i’m sorry to say at the end of the day probably doesn’t perform any better than a stock vehicle in some cases might actually perform worse i’m going to add another layer to this that’s the whole power programming end of things now in today’s world with emissions and everything else you better make sure whatever power programmer you buy works, passes emissions, doesn’t turn check engine lights on, or you’re going to have problems passing emissions in our Colorado area. Now, some of you that are in the outer areas, other states and so on, you know, I guess knock your socks off. What I learned, though, through the years, doing, again, what I did for 30, basically three decades, back when computers didn’t exist on cars, I remember when chips and all that stuff first came out. In fact, it wasn’t even programmers. They were chips that you literally put in. And then from chips, it became programmers, which then became, in some cases, reprogramming the computer itself, and on and on we go. Here’s what I learned, though. Programmers, good programmers, are hard to find. especially good programmers at our elevation going back to the discussion i had starting this particular program off at a mile high and farther up you go some of you that live up in the foothills and even beyond yeah it’s tough to find programmers to understand what it’s like to not have air And for some of you that may not believe what I’m saying, it’s why Roush and others have testing vehicles that they actually, the manufacturers bring in and put all sorts of computers and junk on and then run up the mountain and back because they can do testing at our elevation that, frankly, they can’t do anywhere else. I-70 is a perfect training ground, testing ground for those particular vehicles, and that’s what they do. And how do I know that? Because I don’t live too far from the Roush facility on the west side of town, and I watch these cars come and go. Kind of cool, actually. You get to see a lot of the camouflaged cars come and go, but that’s what they do. And that’s what they’re doing is to test at our elevation because of the things I’m mentioning in regards to performance and so on at our elevation. So programmers – One of those things where there’s really good and there’s really bad. Now, what I would tell you on that is just do your homework. Look at a lot of the reviews and forums, and if you really have any questions, call the company. Ask them to put even a tech on, not a salesperson. but an actual tech that can talk to you about said item and what development went into it, what does it actually do, what kind of gains will you actually notice. The biggest thing that I always learned on the programmers was, yeah, they’ll gain you a little bit with some additional timing and fuel and so on, but the biggest things most of the programmers did back in the day, and it’s not a lot different today, is helping the transmission be controlled better. delayed shifts up a little bit earlier shift down things along those you know changing the torque converter lock up and so on which again there can be huge performance gains and some of what i just said basically utilizing the power that you have better by transferring it through the transmission in a more efficient way that’s in a lot of cases what the programmers did now something i was going to throw in especially for you truck guys One of the first things I always did, whenever somebody came in and they, number one, wanted to do a lift kit, they wanted to increase power, they wanted bigger wheels and tires, the first thing I sold them was gear change. Gear change. Not to go four-wheeling, but to gain that power back. Because if you jump from a 30-inch tire to a 35-inch tire… you’re losing a ton of horsepower because you can’t get it to the ground. You just changed the overall gear ratio of the vehicle immensely, and you’re not going to get the power to the ground as easily as you did before. So one of the things I always would do is before we did any performance upgrades, intake, exhaust, whatever, I’d be, okay, let’s get the vehicle geared correctly first. Let’s see what your power to the ground is like then. And then let’s tackle what you might need to do on the performance end of things and so on. And nine times out of ten, this is not an exaggeration, nine times out of ten, once I got all of that done, they didn’t need to do anything else. Because the vehicle was back to stock or maybe even better if I did the right gear change, ratio change. It might even be better than it was stock because what they’re doing is taking the power that they have and and getting it to the ground more efficiently. And not only did it help them on daily driving and performance and so on, but even when they went four-wheeling and so on was even better as far as all of that goes. But I’m a big one on making sure that you’ve got the right gear ratio, especially when you’ve made tire changes. So all you truck guys, Jeep guys, and so on, so important because you guys will go from a stock wheel and tire, again, to like a 33, 35-inch tall tire, 37s in some cases, right? then wonder where’d all my power go well guess what the power didn’t go anywhere The engine, transmission, all of that combination, still making the same horsepower it once did. That didn’t change. What changed was your ability to get it to the ground in a more efficient manner. You just defeated the efficiency of the drivetrain by putting those bigger wheels and tires on. And by changing the gear ratio, higher number meaning lower ratio. I know it’s backwards to what most people think, but a higher number means a lower ratio. So the way that works… For example, if you’ve got a 373 ratio, what that means is the driveshaft has to turn 3.73 turns for one revolution of the tire. That’s what that ratio means. 373 means the driveshaft turns 3.73 times for one revolution of the wheel. So if you think about it, if you put a 456 ratio in, it’s now turning 4.56 turns to one turn of the wheel. So I just improved… I lowered the gear ratio. Yes, it’s a higher number, but I lowered the gear ratio, meaning the driveshaft’s turning more to actually get the wheel to turn that one full circle, one revolution, meaning I can more efficiently get power from the engine and the drivetrain to the wheel. The opposite is true. If I go from a 373 to a 308, I’ve now gone from 3.73 turns of the driveshaft to 3 turns, 3.08 turns of the driveshaft to the wheel. Now, some would say, well, that sounds like that’s more efficient because the driveshaft’s turning less. If you understand how gear ratios work, no, it’s not. It takes a lot more horsepower when that driveshaft’s only turning three times. I’ll go back to the 456s, for example. It’s a lot easier for me to take the same horsepower from the same engine and go 4.56 turns of the driveshaft to 3.08 turns of the driveshaft. It takes a lot more horsepower to get the same zero to 60 times, for example, out of the 308s as it does the 456s. So just a little bit of schooling on how gear ratios and all of that work. And for a lot of folks listening, you maybe have never heard somebody explain what I just did. You hear people talk about higher ratios, lower ratios, and so on. Now, one thing that has helped in all of what I just said is the new automatic transmissions and the multiple speeds we have now. No longer do we use four speeds. Most are 8, 10, nothing over that, but 8 to 10, 6 even, 6, 8, 10. And what that means is they can put a lot lower first gear ratio, knowing that in a lot of cases there’s one or two or three overdrives that then allow you to cruise down the road at 80 miles an hour at 1,500 RPM. So transmissions have helped a ton, but that gear ratio itself is still a huge factor when it comes to everything we’re talking about, especially in the performance segment. End of things. All right, we’ll take another quick timeout. I’ve got more to talk about. I’m going to get into the suspension end of things and possibly diesel stuff if we have time. We’ll be right back. This is Drive Radio, The Extra Mile, right here on KLZ 560.
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SPEAKER 06 :
This program was recorded earlier for broadcast at this time. No phone calls can be accepted.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, welcome back. KLZ 560, Drive Radio, The Extra Mile. Thank you all for listening. You hear this program every Saturday from 3 to 4 p.m. Luke Cashman, again, is with me today, helping out on the board and interjecting from here and there, and I appreciate that greatly. Let’s talk suspension. Another area where, and this one really is big on good, bad, and ugly. There is, I’m sorry to say, and it always has been this way, there’s a lot of really good solid great suspension products out there that really do aid and help your vehicle perform better and there’s a lot of junk and i’m sorry to say there’s probably more junk than there is good stuff because there’s no you know remember with a lot of the things i just mentioned all through this particular hour there’s no regulations other than the emissions side on cold air intakes and exhaust but there’s no regulations on how quality these parts are, and or do they really do what they say they’re going to do? There’s no governing body or there’s no federal law that says if you put an exhaust system on and it advertises 20 horsepower a gain, it has to make 20 horsepower. There’s nothing out there that regulates that, folks. And maybe there’s a misconception along those lines, but there’s not. So when somebody comes along and says, oh yeah, our product will do X, Y, Z, according to whom? It’s sort of like, I do Health and Wellness Wednesday on Rush to Reason. We talk a lot about supplements and things along those lines. It’s a lot like supplements. Yeah, there’s some third-party testing with supplements, but really at the end of the day, you just have to make sure you’re buying your vitamin, your supplement from a good, solid, high-quality company. Otherwise, you might as well not take anything. You might as well just take a placebo because at the end of the day, you’re not getting anything because there’s no regulation, no mandatory X when it comes to that product. Likewise, when it comes to car parts, there isn’t either. Now, there’s DOT specs and things like that that in some cases parts have to meet, but by and large – You know, Luke and I could go start a suspension company tomorrow. And let me explain how that works. We get together and say, you know what, we’re going to pick a particular vehicle, in this case a Jeep, a Wrangler, and we’re going to make a suspension line. So what Luke and I do is we kind of decide, you know, what kind of kits we want. Do we want two and a half inch lift, four inch lift, six inch lift? You know, what do we want? And then we go shop. We go to all the companies that make springs, that make control arms, that make shock absorbers, that make bushings, and we shop. and we sit down with Tenneco on the shock absorber end of things and say, this is what we’re looking to do, and we want a shock absorber that will meet XYZ. And by the way, in their case, they give us a menu. Okay, guys, here’s all the things you can put in your shock, from double-welded eyes to single-welded eyes to a can thickness to double can to we want Freon injected to keep the oil cool to we want the shock to be adjustable or not, and I want this type of valve, and on and on we go. And Luke and I decide what we want for the shock when it’s all said and done. And we pick from their menu board, if you would, of things we get to choose to put in our own shock. And once it’s done, it’s Luke and John’s Shock Company. You know, LJ Shock Company. Or LJ Suspension, whatever we want to call ourselves. So it’s LJ Suspension and boom, we’ve got our own sticker and our logo and it’s on that and off we go, we’re selling shocks. Even though we don’t make them. Teneco is because, by the way, there’s not that many shock manufacturers in the world. So a lot of the shocks you see are made by Gabriel Teneco, somebody like that. Mostly Teneco because they do third-party stuff constantly. So we have our shocks now. So that’s usually the first thing to get out of the way because it’s one of the most or it’s the higher commodity item when it comes to suspension kits. Then we go shop springs. Again, there’s only a certain amount of people that actually make their own springs, coil springs in this case. So we go shop coil springs. You know, what spring rate will you give me? You know, what kind of weight capacity does that have? You know, kind of dampening do I get with that? On and on we go. And most of all, are we going to have the right ride height when it’s all said and done? Based upon what we’re throwing in as far as weight of the vehicle and so on. And we could even design it to where we say, you know, we think this guy’s going to have a hard top versus a soft top. In fact, we want two sets of springs. By the way, very few do that. You can buy the same suspension, whether you’re a hard top, soft top, but think about the extra weight of the hard top and the carrier that goes on top and the bikes and all the crap the guy puts in the back versus the guy with the soft top. Weight difference is huge, and yet very few people build a spring for a soft top versus a hard top. And why don’t they? Because it’s more expensive. So they don’t. They just build one spring, and they average it out, and here you go. And that’s why in some cases a guy will get a hard top Jeep lifted with all the stuff I just mentioned on it and then have to put spacers in it because he’s too far down in the back and it looks stupid. Guys, you can tell I’ve done a lot of this over the years. These are the things that happen because this is how that world works. It’s why typically speaking from the factory, at least it used to be this way, I haven’t checked any late model Wranglers, but it used to be if you ordered springs from the factory, you had to decide did it have a hard top or soft top because there were two different spring rates because the factory knew that. So they would build it accordingly. Don’t know if they still do that or not. I haven’t checked as of late. But again, Luke and I, LJ Suspension, we go out, we shop, we find everybody that we get bushings from, we get sway bar end links from, we get our control arms from, we get our track bars from, or the brackets to lower it, or we get a new track bar. I mean, there’s so many different ways to build these kits that we just go out and we get all of these things put together. We get all of our parts just like a person building a car does or an OEM company building a car, and these parts start getting fed into us. And we have a little office someplace. In fact, maybe Luke and I just start off with about a 100-square-foot office that stuff comes in and out of, and we start very small, and we start advertising, and we get on the Internet, we start word of mouth, and maybe we’ve got a halfway decent product, maybe we don’t, but we do really well on the marketing sides of things, and all of a sudden it blows up and we start selling a lot of suspension. And the other thing that happens in that world is pretty soon we start selling so much, we can’t keep the quality under control like we used to. Because Luke and I are a two-man band, and one of us is out marketing constantly, so it’s a one-man band. So at the end of the day, you know, I’m out selling and Luke’s back there packing. And we wonder why we’re getting behind because Luke’s only got so much he can do in a day’s time. So then we start employing his girlfriend and we bring this person and that person in. And guys, I’m not exaggerating in how these things get started. This is how it works. Some do really well at what I just said and they become really great companies. And others, by the way, do nothing but put out crap. Because again, everything I just told you, where’s the quality control outside of Luke and I and what I just said? None. Zero. Zilch. It’s all in really the following or the word of mouth and how well we do it, all of that. That’s where the quality control basically comes into play because at the end of the day, we’re not controlling the manufacturing process of these parts. We have no idea whether that track bar we sourced is going to last if the guy goes really hard four-wheeling and gets in an angle and the ball snaps off the end, the ball joint snaps off the end. Okay, see where I’m going with this? And this is where, when it comes to all the things I’ve talked about today, from wheels and tires, to the intake and exhaust systems, to the power programmers and or the programming you would do on the computer itself, to now the suspension end of things. Guys, you have to do your research. And it’s why back in my day, I would only ever sell name brand, top of the line, fully insured, liability wise, parts. If somebody came to me and said, you know, we want you to take on our line, first thing I would ask, what’s your liability insurance like? How much is it? Let me see a copy of your policy. You know, I’m going to see their certificate of insurance to find out exactly what it says. And by the way, if they didn’t have enough, I wouldn’t sell product. Because guess what? If it doesn’t work and there’s some sort of an injury, death, whatever, guess who it comes back on? Me as the seller installer. So that’s the other thing for some of you that are listening where you’re trying to buy some of these components. You really need to look hard at what’s the insurance, what’s the coverage, I should say, from this particular company on the parts that I’m buying. Because frankly, there are some parts you may buy from who knows where that probably have none. It’s called product liability insurance. There probably isn’t any. Some of the stuff that you even get off the Internet from some of the Internet sites that sell parts, look and see, is there product liability insurance on what you’re buying? Because in some cases, there won’t be. Which, by the way, is how they drive the price down some. Because if Luke and I, LJ Suspension, all of a sudden, we’re not buying proper insurance, well, look how much money we can save. And look at how much better we can compete with some of the big guys that are much larger than us because we’re not putting that policy cost out there because we didn’t buy it in the first place. We’re just selling parts. We’re having a good time. We think it’s great. People love our product. Awesome. Off we go. Until there’s an accident. Which, by the way, I’ve been involved in some of these. And once there’s an accident, guess what? Everybody gets sued. The manufacturer of the car. the manufacturer of whoever sold you the kit and all the parts that goes with it, the person that installed it and sold it. Everybody’s going, folks. Been there, done that. Everybody’s going. And a lot of shops and installers don’t understand what I just said, and that’s why for me, I always made sure that everything we sold had huge product liability insurance on it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t sell it because if something ever happened, you’re screwed. So that’s the difference, by the way, and I could go through what I just said on every part that I just mentioned, from intake to exhaust to programmers to wheels to even some tires, depending upon who’s selling you the tire, to now the suspension end of things. And by the way, folks, I could take this conversation to almost every part of your vehicle, including stock parts that you would buy from windshield wipers to ball joints. Who are they coming from? Do they have product liability insurance? Are you buying Amazon, Rock Auto, this website, that website, eBay, and so on? Okay, great. Some of you that are listening to me, by the way, that are shops and installers, with what you’re buying, are you covered? Did you check to see if, in fact, you are? If you bought, by the way, a set of ball joints from eBay and you have no idea who the seller is and you go put that on a customer’s car, who’s covering that? Who’s taking over the product liability? You know, by the way, some of you that are installers, does your insurance company know you do that? Does your insurance company know you put on parts the customer drags in for you? Which I would highly advise you don’t do. If you don’t sell it, don’t put it on because you have very little coverage on the liability side when you do that. So for a lot of you that are listening, whereby you go and you buy your own parts and you take it into a shop and you get mad at them because they won’t install it, I just told you why they won’t. I wouldn’t. Again, as an owner, you can’t because you don’t know all of the liability sides of things, and you’re now exposed to things that you don’t want to be as a business, so you stay away from those things. So a lot of customers get mad because they go and they buy their own part and they bring it in, and Joe’s Suspension Shop won’t put that on, nor should they. And I always used to ask these people this question. So I guess you take your own steak to Morton’s and have them cook it for you. Of course you don’t. You buy the steak. They cook it. And, yes, it’s much more expensive than if you go to King Soopers and buy said steak and cook it yourself. Of course it is because they’re preparing it and taking care of it for you. And, by the way, in that case, even taking some product liability. If you get sick from that steak, who’s covering it? They are. You’re not. They are. So all these parts, all the things that we talk about from a vehicle, from bumper to bumper, all of those parts matter greatly when it comes to the product liability sides of things. And what I can really tell you is do your research. And what I mean by that is Don’t just look at the reviews because guess what? Reviews can be falsified over and over and over again. Really do the research. Do you know somebody that has said part? Have they had good luck with that part? If it’s a suspension kit, do you know somebody that has one? Did they have really good luck? If it’s a new company you’ve never heard of, do they have a referral list of somebody you can actually contact that has their kit on their vehicle? And ask questions. And what’s the quality like? And, and, and we go. One last thing on the lift kit end of things before I forget on suspension. For the love of God, if you do a suspension kit, adjust your headlights when you’re done. Nothing worse than these guys that put on suspension kits, lift things way up, put bigger tires and wheels on, and then leave the headlights high. Which, by the way, for all of us that are enthusiasts, just make us all look bad because now everybody’s mad at that guy, including me, because you can’t see when he’s coming at you. So for all of you that do some of that, please adjust your headlights correctly, which should be part of the installation process if somebody’s doing lift kit correctly, by the way. We always did. But by the way, a lot of guys don’t because it’s sort of out of mind, out of sight, out of mind. It’s not dark. They’re not thinking about it. They’re not worried about it. And the other thing along these lines, which will get you into trouble if you don’t do it, is calibrate the speedo. Bigger tires and gear ratio changes, like I mentioned earlier, all of that throws off the speedometer and you’re liable to get a ticket if you go one direction, especially if the speedometer is reading slower than what you’re actually going, which bigger tires automatically do. Be careful of all of that because you’re going to find yourself with a ticket when it’s all sitting in. All right, this will be our last show of the year, not for good, but for 2025. This is Drive Radio, The Extra Mile. We’ll definitely be back in 2026. Got a lot more in store. Anything you’d like to hear us talk about, send us an email. I’ll be happy to talk about it. But this is Drive Radio, The Extra Mile, right here on KLZ 560.
