030: Building The Perfect 7-SECOND Street Car.

That car, to me, is still perfect. The last pass, I decided I was going to retire the car. I ran 760 at 185, and it still drives so nice at that level. That, to me, is probably the absolute limit of being a perfect street car.

Welcome to the HPA Tuned In Podcast, I'm Andre your host and in this episode we've got John Shepard from Sheptrans joining us all the way from the US. John is one of the OGs from the Import Drag Racing. scene and he's actually one of the reasons that I originally got involved in drag racing. I followed his exploits in his Talon Eclipse and at the time I think he ran a fastest ET of around 770. And I think he went about as quick as 194 mile an hour, maybe 195 mile an hour on the quarter.

Now obviously these days there's far faster cars, we talk in this interview, we refer to boost in performance and I think they're currently sitting around at 70, maybe 704, 204 mile an hour. Times have moved on. We need to understand that John was racing his Talon many, many years ago and we didn't have access to the technology in terms of engine parts.

billet blocks, turbo technology or engine management solutions that we have today. So the fact that he was doing that back in the day on a manually shifted H-pad and transmission is pretty impressive. Probably best known for his exploits through Shep Trans though which is what is now a very well recognised. in terms of upgraded transmissions for a range of vehicles. He got his start there in the DSM Mitsubishi.

Mark however these days he's doing transmissions for just about anything fast on the quarter or on the racetrack and particularly with the advent of modern dual clutch transmissions, his work has stepped up a notch. dive into the inner workings of these DCT transmissions and what's required in terms of the hardware to make these work as well as the software side of things which is really easy to overlook these modern DCTs.

transmissions rely heavily on the tuning of the TCM or transmission control module so these kind of go hand in hand. So huge amount to take away from this and I'm pretty confident in saying that John not only me to get into drag racing but he's probably inspired hordes of others through the years. He hasn't given up on drag racing while the Talon may be retired. He's got a couple of really fast R35 GTX.

His street car, believe it or not, running pretty deep into the 7s and his full on race version running pretty well into the 6s so he is no stranger to speed.

Before we get into our interview, just a quick introduction for those who maybe haven't heard of High Performance Academy before. We are an online training school, we specialise in teaching people a range of skills including EFI tuning, engine building, wiring, we also teach about race driver education and car setup. If you want to find out a little bit more about any of our courses you can head to hpacademy.com forward slash courses, that's going to give you a full list of everything we offer.

Relevant today because we're obviously talking drag racing and a lot of the drag racing elements really come down to tuning. Which is why I really love drag racing predominantly as an engine builder and a tuner. I find drag racing is the ultimate way of expressing...

just how well you've done with both of those elements. And we've probably all seen dyno figures that seem a little bit hard to believe, maybe slightly inflated out there on the internet. However it's pretty difficult if not impossible to cheat an ET in a mile an hour and those really tell most people all they need to know about exactly how much power your engine is producing. If you are interested in learning more about EFI tuning, as I mentioned, we've got a range of courses that come.

In particular our EFI Tuning Fundamentals course is a great way to get a solid understanding of what's actually going on behind the scenes with our modern range of ECUs, how they work and what we're actually trying to do. to do when we're optimising the fueling as well as the ignition timing. As I've mentioned, you can find that particular course at hpacademy.com forward slash courses. We will put a link to that course in the description of this podcast.

And as an added bonus, as a listener to this podcast, you can use the coupon code PODCAST75. That is going to get you $75 off the purchase of your very first HPA course.

Alright with our introduction out of the way, let's get into our interview now. Alright welcome to the podcast John, thanks heaps for joining us today. You're a guest that I've been wanting to get on this podcast for a fair while because your exploits back in the day in your Talon Eclipse were one of the driving motivators that got me involved in drag racing and around about... way that got my old business STM started which then in a roundabout way is why we founded High Performance Academy.

You've actually, we've got a lot to thank you for, which you're probably not aware of, but I'm sure your talent was also an inspiration to thousands, if not tens of thousands of DSM. slash Mitsubishi fans all around the world. We're going to get into that car in a bit of detail but before we do that maybe if we could just roll back the years a little bit and Give us a bit of a rundown on how it came to be that you got involved in automotive racing, drag racing and basically wrenching on cars.

Sure, sure. Happy to be here. I came up really not having any automotive background. It's kind of whether it's in your brain or not, whether you can have like a mechanical aptitude, whether it was taken. taking apart the hovercraft from a Star Wars character, our dirt bikes, started off dirt bikes, BMX bikes, everything was just mechanical, taking things apart, figuring things out, and that obviously just leads to...

leads to more things when you get to driving age and building muscle cars and building your own engines. That's really how I got started, just the wanting to learn, wanting to understand how things worked. That led to, I took like a vocational class in high school. I mean, that was kind of more just change of oil kind of thing, but it still got me in the mood to want to do more and went to...

an actual tech school after that, a couple of years, you know, tech school, which got me in the door to a dealership. And that's when you learn the ethics of, well, anymore. Back then it was ethical. Most dealerships. where I was at. I mean, it was, you know, treat your customers right and give them a fair labor for what they're paying for. And that's when the... It was an Eagle Talon dealership, a Jeep Eagle dealership where the Talon came out. And that was in 90, right around 90, late 90.

These things were like spaceships. I'm like, what the heck is this car? It didn't look like anything else back then. You think of all the old K cars and everything and the Dodge Shelbys, but the Talon came out and it was just amazing. I got to get my start learning how to work on those things under warranty. And obviously, they had a lot of transmission issues back then. Naturally. So, yeah, a lot of them. And so, four years later, that's when I got my first... That was my first...

big car was a talon i bought a 94 talon and that's kind of started everything okay so was that the the talon that you developed into what was your world record holding drag car it was not that was I still face this dilemma to this day. That was my pure street car that I didn't want to ruin for racing because you kind of cross that line. Like, okay, now it's not really a street car and you have the cage in it and everything else. So that was my street car. And then I...

bought one just to have as to be a race car. That was the old Buscher racing Talon. And it already had a cage, so a lot of the work was done. And it didn't hurt so bad to take some weight out of it here and there.

I think that's something that is really easy to overlook for a lot of our listeners who are sort of thinking, I don't have the money maybe for two cars so I'm just going to modify and race my street car and on face value that seems like a sensible approach but the reality of living with and daily driving are very heavily modified. drag car or any form of race car for that matter, it really can take its toll, particularly in most instances, 90% of your time is daily driving the thing.

versus 5% to 10% of your time actually racing the thing. So I think that's an important takeaway there that is so easy to overlook. more often than not it makes a lot more sense to suck it up and not develop your street car to that level and actually save that for a dedicated race car. Sorry I just butted in there but I think that's something that I see a lot of people making that mistake.

going down that path and regretting it. That still holds true today, the safety aspect of it. Do you run a cage on the street, which isn't as safe as not running a cage on the street, but then you take it to the track. So which is safer and where do you cross that? line and the same thing applied to my street GTR. You realistically can't drive a street GTR with a full cage on the street without having a helmet. You're going to probably do more damage and the risk is probably higher.

than being the track so it was kind of like that that gray area where do you draw the line so it literally is the same situation it just happened when i retired the street car to street and bought the gtr for a race car only because i knew that i had to make a choice and you can't have both Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you've just touched on another really important point that most people would not even consider, you know, the roll cages actually.

not safe in a street car where you're only maybe wearing a diagonal seatbelt instead of a full harness and you don't have that roll cage. When you end up in a bad accident which obviously no one wants to be in but it can happen. And you're banging around in that car, moving around a lot, and your head can easily contact the roll cage in most instances. You don't have the protection of that helmet. So I just wanted to touch on that.

that safety element there of a roll cage in a street car. Most people think that they're doing a good thing for safety but actually it's usually the complete opposite.

All right, so let's get into the development of your talent. So you said you bought it as an already built or already partially developed. car from Busher. What sort of times was it running when you purchased it? And can you maybe give us a quick rundown on the spec at that time? This goes back pretty far. I believe it had not run a 10 yet.

I think that's the condition I bought it in. That was the goal to get in the 10s, and I ran a 10.7 pretty quickly. Can you maybe also give us – I know, again, I'm really probably stretching your memory here, but to give us a bit of a – kind of lay of the land at that time with the import four wheel drive turbo era of cars.

back then when you had that tail on and started racing it, what was the sort of fastest ETs in mile an hour that cars had run? I believe that was about it, really. There was all probably high tens, I think, was... It's funny, I just switched toolboxes and I found my old time slip from, I think it was DSM Times or something like that. It had the list of, you know, you had to kind of keep yourself up in that top 10 or whatever.

But I had two of them in the top, two of them in the tens at the time. And that was about it right then. I mean, we were dealing with HKS, the VPC, the running way too hot of plugs just to try to get the thing to, I guess... be on edge of detonation to get some timing i don't i don't know how they even work back then but yeah it's kind of crazy to think of the things we went through so so back in that day you're you're talking there about essentially running

piggyback controllers as opposed to standalone engine management right right yeah then you didn't have direct control of even timing so you had to kind of And go off O2 readings and not a wideband by any means, you know, so that would really push it to remember those numbers. But I remember it was point whatever to point this. And other than that, you're going to detonate this thing. We were running like five heat range plugs.

Again, it was just the infant, you know, just not knowing any better. I think these days people growing up and, you know, getting involved in... building and modifying cars do not realise how lucky they are with what we have access to relatively cheaply these days.

Back when I first started modifying my own cars, wideband air fuel ratio meters, they weren't a thing. If you wanted one... you were buying from maybe one or two manufacturers and you were probably looking down the barrel of a $4,000 or $5,000 lab quality piece of equipment, which obviously just wasn't affordable.

or realistic for the average enthusiast. And even a lot of the workshops that were tuning at the time were basing their air fuel ratio on narrowband which I think is probably what you're referring to because that's obviously what the cars were equipped with at the time. And now we look around, there's probably 20, 30, maybe 100 manufacturers of reasonably good quality wide band air fuel ratio controllers that could be had for, I haven't even looked recently, probably under 200 US dollars anyway.

That coupled with the plethora of quality standalone engine management systems, plug and play and wiring, it is... incredibly easy to get performance out of cars these days. So again I just don't think people maybe recognise the barriers that were in front of you when you're trying to get a car like that how long to run 10s at the start. Now in terms of the package, in terms of the engine,

What did you sort of need to do at that starting point when you're running it into the tens? Is this still relatively stock? I mean, the 4G63, it's a pretty stout engine for all intents and purposes. And the Talon, essentially, we never got that in New Zealand. It was a Japanese model. But essentially, for all intents and purposes, the engine is the same as the Galant VR4 6-bolt 4G63. So, yeah, can you talk to us a little bit about that? Well, back then, I believe the heart combo was the...

HKS 272s and everybody just ran them and then we went crazy and got the 280 exhaust cam or something back then you know that was pretty basic a lot of stock intake stuff and that was before sheet metal intakes really started taking shape you know different runner lengths and such but uh also trying to get the exhaust out of them you know we were on an oem based turbos which had so much back pressure that again we weren't testing things like that before and

That's when the clipped wheel came out and he's basically just shaving the side of the turbine wheel off to get some more exhaust out of it. That made huge differences back then. That was before the actual real turbos got put on and learning about what different cams did. the green cams, things like that. That wasn't even heard of really back then.

So at this time, what's your level of involvement with working on the car? Are you building the engines, modifying the turbos and doing your own tuning? Do you have access to dynos or is this seat of the pants and time slip based tuning? Definitely seat of the pants back then. We didn't have anything like that. As far as the engines, they were stock crank kind of, I believe we put rods in them.

We were running the second gen pistons for a while. It was just a cast higher compression piston that was available later. The J pistons were hot back then. I don't remember what rods we were running. Now we're obviously starting to run aluminum rods. All right, so...

And that got you into the tens and we've talked a little bit about the hurdles that were in front of you then. What was it that kind of accelerated you away from the rest of the pack? Back then, at least when you retired the car with a 770 191, and I think you mentioned it had gone as quick as 195 on the quarter.

What was different? What were you doing different to everyone else that gave you such a massive advantage? I think probably the most was just being so damn stubborn. I don't know how I didn't quit so many times. Just the drive of every two weeks having to race. I'll race the NOPE, IDRC, a few NHRA events. Just every week, every other week, wanting to go faster. You don't want to go and have the same thing every time.

and what can we do what can we try it was always just that game of okay let's try this and then see what it does the next race let's try this and that just makes you progress you know we won a lot of races back then but it was still more just trying to get the best et every event like what can we do what's going to make a change tough way to learn back then but it does make you learn versus just folding parts on yeah definitely and i think a lot of um import races spend more time

working on the car and modifying it than actually racing it. So it sounds like you were definitely getting some laps in as well which you obviously need to do as you mentioned to learn and validate a particular change.

One of the problems that we saw with our own Mitsubishi-based four-wheel drive drag platform is transmission reliability. We started as most did with the stock five-speed transmission, which was good to a point. And I think it was about the point we were running in the mid-nines that we're pretty consistently destroying.

fourth gear and that was if I remember correctly probably the first main weakness inside that OE transmission. What were you doing and did this lead to the development of Sheptrans or is this already going on in the background? That's exactly what started it. Back in probably 96, 97, some of my friends started having talons. And because I was a tech at a dealer, I had full access to parts and parts diagrams.

what running changes were being made and wait i'm warranting this car but then this one have this and then but this newer car has you know this cool double synchro setup why don't we do this and adapt this to this older one and But the later style had a weaker this and let's combine these parts and try to make this box that has the best of everything. And we would start doing that. And then, hey, can you do this for me? Oh, sure. Let, you know, bring it over. So that led to...

Another person telling another person. Then all of a sudden, within not too long, had people driving out of state for me to build their transmissions. And it was still just kind of fun because I really didn't have any, I didn't have a desire to leave the dealership. It was nice.

Constant job. There was a steady income. I had insurance and everything. So everything was going good. I just kind of was using that as a side deal for a while. So it never meant to take off the way it did until the dealership was foreclosed on. We literally didn't have, had zero warning. Just went to go clock in one day and gates were closed and you can't get your tools. You got to wait until this.

you know we're able to open up and then we were just left without a job so your hand your hand was pretty much forced at this stage right so i tried i went to another dealership and it just wasn't the same home that I had and try to know the dealership and the same thing. I just can't, it was just not the same family type operation that I was used to. And so they were generous enough to let me use the shop after hours and I would rent the shop after hours to...

kind of do my side deal which got busier and busier and busier then it just got to the point and then like well you kind of need to make a decision do you want to do this or this and i said i have to leave and that that was a turning point leaving with Two kids, two babies with no insurance, no city income. You got to sink or swim. So, that's when it all started. That was about 2000 when that happened. Yeah.

I want to dive into Sheptrans and the development and what that's turned into today but before we get into that we'll just finish up with the talon. Now you've sort of mentioned here you're basically mixing and matching the developed parts from the OE trends and basically building the best of the best of what was available and what was strongest from those parts but at a point you get to the situation.

where an OE transmission that was designed for a 300 horsepower stock car is obviously not going to really work too well with 800, 900, 1000 plus horsepower. So there's a limit. And I mean I forget the timeframes as well, I got involved well after you started racing but I mean I know when I first started drag racing the Evo 3. we didn't have the availability of dog engagement gear sets from the likes of PPG and PAR, which are available now.

There's probably half a dozen others that I've forgotten but that was a game changer when we went down the path of fitting the PPG dog engagement first to fourth gear set and that sort of really turned a corner for the reliability of our car. So you were in there earlier. Was that the same situation? No availability of these gear sets or you had something else going on? Right. That was the same situation. And I reached out to PPG back then.

It was a bit confusing because at first when I was doing the calculations for the ratios, it didn't seem right, but it's just the way they figured the center diff ratio before or after. So initially it was like, okay, it's not going to work. Let's not even bother trying to run this. And then...

figuring out the way they figured out their final drive ratio. I think it was after, before the center diff. Then I was like, okay, this is about right. So then I started working with PPG and that definitely was a game changer for sure. I mean, that was an early, early...

revision of that gearbox but that that definitely changed things quite a bit now with that it's it's a dog engagement gear set i don't want to go too deep into that but basically it allows for clutchless shifting provided you've got

some torque interrupt to allow the engine torque to be reduced so that the gear can actually be changed. Again obviously this really relies on the sophistication of the electronics which was coming in around that time but probably still pretty... archaic by today's standards were you using any flat shift facility through the ecu or are you actually clutching each gear yeah so we were on the well i was on autronic for a while and

I remember that I went through like three standalones until we got the AEM, which is actually a Honda box. It was made to work with the Talon ignition, but we were not using any, I was not using any shift interrupts at all. It was just a quicker version of being over driving a normal clutch.

Yeah. Okay. And that's still to the end. That's what I always did. I never, ever use the strain gauge or anything. And that's something that would have drastically probably changed now versus then. Yeah. And I think. Just from what I've seen with the cars that I've been involved with and again for those who aren't. racing cars at this level, the size of the turbo that you put on a small capacity engine to get the power to run 195 mile an hour.

The problem with this is every gear shift the turbo's falling drastically off boost and then it takes a very measurable amount of time, tenths of a second to get back on boost after that shift. That's the conventional shifting technique, even if you're...

really, really quick at going through the gears, that's going to happen. Whereas a shift interrupt, sorry, a torque interrupt with an ignition cut or something of that nature, the turbo's still going to fall off boost but nothing like it. So I mean, you know, 7.7. with a manually shifted transmission, that could have easily been 750 or quicker with just that one change. So I think people need to recognise how much of a deficit that was.

Now the other aspect here is that you were working in the time before the ready availability of billet blocks which now pretty much everyone at the... pointy end of the field is running, not all admittedly but most and that's made things easier certainly. What did you find sort of the weak points or limitations in that 4G63 engine?

Well, yeah, before even mentioning building blocks, we still were on a wet oiling system. They were a stock oil pan trying to keep the oil back down where it needed to be before the end of the... before you had to pull if you look at some of my videos i had little post-it notes and people make fun of me but it literally if you didn't push that clutch in before just the spinning down from if you just

didn't have that engine down quick and the G-force on the parachute and you're still spinning it close to 11,000 RPM. One little mistake like that, knock the rod bearings out of it. You're in the pits pulling the oil pans, trying to smack bearings in it to get to the next round. So, yeah, we didn't have... I mean, you would overfill the engine. It would all end up in the head and not pump back down. It just wouldn't get back to the pan. So, if you'd...

puts the pickup all the way to the back. So we'll work on acceleration, any little hesitation that would just suck air and just knock the rod bearings out on decel. Yeah, I think we had some interesting anecdotes from exactly the same situation before we went dry sump. And we had a fairly well-developed, baffled sump, which worked well off the line. And I mean, I think back in the day, my car was...

pulling a little over 2G during the launch. And then during the run, the oil pressure was actually pretty solid. But yeah, we found exactly the same as you. When you pull the chute, The deceleration of the car, we were still 10,000, 10,500 RPM and you'd see the oil pressure drop sometimes down as low as sort of 15, 20 psi so yeah I feel that, I know that pain and it's not sort of the area where you expect to see.

oil pressure problems but anytime the thing's spinning at 10 to 11,000 RPM you damn well want some oil pressure in there to keep everything lubricated. Yeah, post-it notes don't work either, by the way. When you're trying to keep the thing straight after the traps, yeah, it doesn't work. I've definitely failed on that many times.

Yeah, I can imagine that trying to read anything at 190 mile an hour is probably not the first thing on your mind. The other issue with these four-wheel drive drag cars is actually getting them off the line in the first place. It's a razor edge that we're kind of walking between having the car light up all four and basically go nowhere or alternatively bog and fall completely off boost. There's a number of products on the market which sort of developed over the time I was drag racing which…

create a certain amount of clutch slip and we actually talked to Miles from English Racing in detail about that so I won't go too much more into it. For those interested, check that podcast out. Were you using any product like that or are you just doing it old school and you're just a guru at slipping the clutch with your left foot consistently every run? Yeah, it was definitely old school. We did use a stage and break, pull it up there.

crank the brake, pull the staging brake and just power brake up against that staging brake with the clutch and then just walk it out. That's not great for reaction times, obviously, but it kept the thing together.

I did try to go back later when I brought the car back out after we got it redone and I tried using it to like kind of launch and it just wasn't comfortable for me. I think the car needed to have that preloaded kind of slip coming out of the hole and you can only do that with a carbon clutch obviously.

Sure. And what you're talking about there is actually sort of almost partially engaging the clutch when you're staged to obviously building boost there, but also to reduce that shock loading when you actually leave the line. Right. I don't even think we were building that much boost back then. We were just pretty much up against the limiter, just kind of using the load to build boost, not necessarily on any type of anth lag though. Sure. Yeah, I can.

Obviously, this is a million-dollar question, but given the advances in technology since you ran that 770 with modern turbochargers, billet blocks, the advances in EFI, If you had your time again, what do you think realistically you could do with that car? A six is possible? I mean, Devin has definitely proven that it's possible, not just once or twice. I mean, he's always right there.

sure yeah yeah i mean he's a brilliant guy it's not not to say that i could be any quicker than him but that's definitely the potential that the car has i still have the car but at this point i just not reasonable for me to try to campaign a car like that and running a business and trying to have some type of life anymore. It's just too much work.

Yeah, everything's a balancing act and I mean obviously the transmission world has moved on and dual clutch transmissions really are, I'm guessing, your bread and butter these days. From a marketing perspective, it doesn't really make a lot of sense running an older car with a manual four-speed transmission.

You have more recently moved on to a more modern platform with the R35 Nissan GTR. So could you tell us how you went about choosing that as your next project? It was just a natural progression. I mean, the DSM went to the Evo and what's the next all-wheel drive thing to come out? And that was it. I mean, it just made perfect sense. Obviously, the R35 is a pretty well-established platform these days.

I don't know exactly how many there are but there's a fair number of them deep in the sixes and plenty of them in the sevens and eights. So it's a well-proven platform. how easy I guess is it to get an R35 into the sixes given I think you run 682, 684 in your own car recently. What was the development? development path to to go from a stock showroom stock car to two sixes yeah i mean i would never say it's easy obviously but i was we were close with with t1 race development and

I had bought a chassis that was already started from PRL. He just lost interest in it. So it was a perfect situation to get into a car that was kind of... Because a lot of people get into cars and you get the car half, even three-quarter of the way done. And it just stops. And that happens a lot. So it was just perfect scenario to get this car, have T1 finish it. Obviously, we built the transport. But other than a few weird quirks...

The car went sixes extremely quick. It was a blessing, but it wasn't because after that, what do you do? That's kind of where I'm at with the car right now. It's like, okay, now what? You run your first six and the next six is about...

20 of your first and now it's like okay just another six another six another six so that's that's the crazy part is you kind of get numb to it quickly yeah i know no disrespect obviously for for anyone who's run a six but But as you say, I mean, where is that next milestone?

Those who maybe aren't too deep in the drag racing world would think, well, five's obviously the natural progression but the part that's really easy to overlook is there's kind of almost an exponential learning curve in terms of what's required. to go from an 8 to a 7, then a 7 to a 6, and then a 6 to a 5. And sometimes with a given platform, that's just simply not realistic.

Now you did go through a development path with this car though because I remember bumping into you at TX2K a few years back and back then the car was nowhere near as quick as it is today. We've also seen a lot of people jump on the R35 platform and this almost rolls back to our earlier conversation about how fast can you go in a street driven car and where does that line exist?

The R35 seems to be one of those platforms where roll cage and safety equipment notwithstanding, you can genuinely have a 1500 wheel horsepower, 1800 wheel horsepower car. take to the track, drive it there and back with the aircon on and then drive it home through the McDonald's drive-through. For you, where's that line on where it no longer becomes a streetable car anymore?

Yeah, a lot of people get confused with my street car and the race car because they're all silver. They are completely different cars, different chassis. I still have both. But the street car was and still is, in my opinion, like the perfect stopping point. Full interior, full exhaust, no crazy dumps, no exhaust dumps, just the wastegate dumps, which don't really dump a lot when you're at high boost, you know, so.

That car, to me, is still perfect. It ran 7. The last pass, I decided I was going to retire the car. It ran 7.60 at 1.85, and it still drives so nice at that level. That to me is probably the absolute limit of being a perfect streetcar, probably too much. But when you're running a MoTeC, they're so seamless. You just turn the torque down and you don't really feel that it's being turned down. You just...

have a less aggressive hit, but you can still drive it. It's a 11-hour torque, not all the way cranked up, and you still have a decent tractability. So that would be my limit, I think. The very fact that you're talking about something that's capable of running 7.6s and you're using the term streetable car in the same sentence is just insane. and shows how far the technology in these modern cars has come. And I do apologise.

that obviously I've fallen into that trap of thinking your two silver cars were the same in a further development. But yeah, I do recall, I think it was at TX2K that it was your street car that I was referring to. So yeah, apologies on that front. The other thing that goes hand in hand with that, which is easy to overlook with, you know, the internet, social media these days, everyone's posting up huge power figures, dino graphs etc and it can be really easy to lose track of what living with a

1,500, 1,800, 2,000 wheel horsepower car with what is still a small capacity engine actually looks like. So could you talk maybe with that street car, you've said that's kind of what you think is the perfect limit for a street car. What's the sort of maintenance schedule on something at that level look like? Is it livable or does it require a pretty constant diet of trips to T1 or wherever for maintenance?

I would say normally if you have a car at that level, you're probably not using it as your daily. So the mileage tends to get cut drastically. I don't drive the car often. I can take my dog to work or something like this. It's not like I actually use that as a daily driver. My maintenance is pretty limited. We ran the same motor for four or five seasons. Same short block.

That's what I would say is a limit. Do I suggest people that are getting into it get a car at that level? Probably not. I talk more people out of it than into it. Probably that 11, 12, maybe 13 horsepower range. That's probably really the limit you should consider if you're wanting to actually still like the car and drive it. I mean, that's going to make for an incredibly fast car.

With the transmission in that GTR platform has really been, as I've seen it from the outside and those that I've talked to who are deep involved. is kind of a blessing and at least initially was a bit of a curse as companies around the world, yourself included, kind of learned the weaknesses, shortcomings and what actually needed to be done with that GR6 transmission.

And for a start, we've used this term already, dual clutch transmission. I like to think that probably most people would have a broad understanding of what that means. Without making any assumptions, could you give us the 30 second rundown on what dual clutch transmission actually means? I guess the most basic form would be it's two transmissions in one and they're just sharing their job.

and passing handing off the job to the other one. So the other one doesn't have to work as hard to make the next change, which is exactly the term of dual clutch. It has a clutch for each input shaft. So the passive input shaft is pre-selected in S gear. So when it's commanded.

The hydraulics just swap the clutch over to the next one. It gives the other one a break and lets the other one shift. And that way it's not so dependent on how quick that shift is because it's already shifted in the next gear and you're just literally basically just swapping clutches. So basically you've got, as I understand it, you've split the gears.

odd gears will be on one input shaft essentially and your even gears are on the other. So as you mentioned, you're in first gear, you launch the car off the line, second gear is already pre-engaged on the other input shaft and then it's a simple case of disengaging the... first gear clutch and engaging the clutch that that will will take second gear that that's correct pat exactly yeah and then that's already in third by the time second is engaged so it's already pre-selecting third

So for the driver and going down the drag strip or acceleration times, the advantage there is... almost seamless shifting. So none of the sort of drop off and boost that you see with the bigger turbos that we talked about and much less interruption of torque compared to a conventional manual transmission. Correct. And you're not so dependent on synchronizer or needing a dog engagement box.

Yeah so I mean the dog engagement box is what we see conventionally in motorsport which gives a lot of the same advantages of a DCT transmission in terms of lightning quick shifts. However... A dog engagement gearbox would be an absolutely horrible thing for the street. So you're sort of getting that motorsport quality shift in a livable format with the DCT. Right, right, yeah. I agree.

So with the move into that R35 platform when it first sort of came out and became prominent, how quickly did you sort of jump on the bandwagon there with development of that GR6 transmission? It would have been right around 2010. So pretty quick. That was basic stuff, just trying to figure out, you know, why is this clip flying off this thing? Or why is, you know, they needed a lot of little maintenance things. And that was in the early...

Early days of LC1, which was if people had been around GTR long enough, that's when the very, very early stages of the launch control happened. And it was a 4,500 RPM. absolute massive clutch drop. There was no feathering the clutch out. It just hit the clutches so hard. Then that's where they got the battery out about the first gear. And a lot of people...

Don't understand. The first gear now is still the same first gear that they had back then. The box has not been upgraded gear wise since day one. So it's just a change in the software for that launch control strategy. Right. Yep. Okay. So if you take a stock R35 GTR and you want to go drag racing and let's say, let's use your streetcar as an example. I use that term streetcar loosely but something that's going to run maybe mid to high sevens.

What do you need to change inside that transmission to make it somewhat reliable? When you're in that torque range, you definitely have to have a gear set. You won't last long running a factory gear set at that level at all. You might get a pass or two, but it's not going to be reliable. Anything over 800 torque really starting to push the limits of a factory gear set. So that needs to be changed. Definitely the drop gears. Drop gears are the final drive to the pinion gear.

Not transmission-exactly related, but the axles are one of the most important things to change. Braking an axle is as hard on the transmission as launching it at 4500, really. It's actually harder on the trans braking an axle. And then the clutch, you know, depending on the power level, torque level, that's where the clutch comes in. We get into the 7s on a factory-based clutch. It's like our Stage 3 1K clutch. It's an 18 plate.

But that's getting to the limit of that. So once you go to the Pro Max, that opens up the world. say a 10 plate to a 13 plate clutch and any more with the new technology of tunes and higher pressure maps and everything that's available you can get by on an 11 plate clutch on like a mid 7 second car and it still makes a nice drivable car at that level.

OK so there's a bunch of stuff that you've just talked about there I kind of want to dive into in a bit more detail. So the factory clutches, and I'll talk about your relationship with Dodson in a moment, basically you've got Dodson there. who have developed replacement clutches. So is it as simple? I mean, I am.

making this sound easier I guess than it probably is but is it as simple as removing that factory clutch and then just replacing it with a clutch that has as you've mentioned more plates in it for additional torque transfer or torque handling capability? Well, so like the OEM base clutch where we can get 18, you can get 20 in them, but you start really pushing the limits. That is a factory-based clutch. You're using everything except for like using the same OEM cage, the OEM clamp.

the OEM pistons. So that you can get by with. They're still machining and setup involved, but that's more of just a billet basket. They're actually forged baskets and then replacing the disc and doing the machining to get the clearance you need.

That's kind of our entry level, say two and a half, three, which is super popular because it cuts the cost on the Pro Max when you get into the full billet assembly where you can get more plates because you gain a little bit extra clearance. Then now that's a full billet. clutch center, full billet cage, aluminum pistons and everything inside. So it's quite a step up to that. Does this become a bit of a trade-off though?

I mean, obviously the higher spec transmissions that you're building are really going into dedicated drag cars in most instances. So drivability becomes a little bit less of a concern. But does this become a trade off if you want a transmission that can reliably support 1100 pound foot of torque or above?

you're going to have some downsides in terms of the drivability and the shifting at part throttle? Or can you really have the best of both worlds? I'm sure we'll touch on this later, but that really a lot of it has to do with... how well the car is tuned, how the V-MAP and how the TCM is communicating with the ECU as far as what torque it thinks it has and what torque it really needs to make the pressures that it commands because we're falling out of things still. And that's...

Probably the biggest issue right now with GTR platform is we don't have a dedicated TCM. Yeah, so you're still, that's actually a good segue into the TCM or transmission control module mapping because this is a... pretty sophisticated vehicle where you've got an engine control unit which controls the engine tuning.

pretty straightforward and in a lot of ways not too dissimilar to what we'd use on any engine for tuning. But then you've got the transmission control module which is in charge of the shift strategy, shift. RPMs and also I'm going to assume here without having much involvement in it myself, pressures inside of the transmission for the clutches etc. And the interaction which you've kind of alluded to there between the two is really key. So if we looked at a built transmission, what sort of...

How important is the mechanical spec of the transmission versus the specific TCM tuning? Are both critical or can one go without the other? Well, I guess I think I know what you're asking. As far as the TCM is concerned, it only knows the defined amount of limits. So if it's X amount of torque, if you're at one-to-one torque, well, now you're making far above that, even in the mid-range or something. So if you don't lie to the TCM...

It's going to shift horrible because it's used to a six plate clutch. Well, six on each basket. It thinks it needs, say, 16 or 17 bar clutch pressure to hold this torque. But now we've got, let's just say, a 12 plate clutch over double the capacity of torque.

Because it doesn't know what is behind it. It still thinks, okay, I'm at this torque at this RPM. I need to give it 17 bar clutch pressure. So that's a massive problem in the mid-range of these cars. If you don't really fine-tune the translation from the ECU to the TCM and lie to it, basically.

It doesn't know any better, so the mechanics are doing exactly what it's told. The TCM just doesn't understand that 17 bar clutch pressure on this clutch can hold 1,500 foot-pounds of torque because in Nissan's engineer's mind, it's holding 500 foot-pounds of torque. Yeah, okay, so there's a lot that goes into cheating or lying to the TCM in order to actually get everything shifting nicely and holding the amount of torque that the engine can produce.

Exactly. Yeah. It's not an exact science either. The TCM also will get finicky in and mount a clutch slip before and after so it can... progressively ramp up your pressures. So there's a lot of background tables in the OEM strategy. In terms of that, is there now a really well developed understanding of what goes on in that Nissan TCM? Because just like reflashing an engine management system, Nissan...

probably don't sort of hand out the documentation freely and easily on exactly what their strategies are with all of their functions inside the TCM. So a lot of this is kind of reverse engineered and it's been developed. As you mentioned, there's a lot of tables here, there's a lot of sophistication in how Nissan have developed this and what it's capable of doing. What is the level currently in the aftermarket of the understanding of that Nissan TCM? Or is there still a bit of a...

unknown elements to it there's yeah there are definitely hundreds of hundreds of tables of undefined parameters that you just don't know what to change and accutects have been great labeling them as much as they can and they keep finding more but you'll just start clicking and there's tables. It's like, okay, what if I change this number from a one to a 10? What does it do? What if I change it from a one to 255? What does it do? That's just...

mind-boggling to try to think of the time amount, the time allowed to even try to just test one thing at a time. How many broken parts are going to happen? How many things are going to be destroyed just finding this one table that might be magic or might do anything? So I think that's to the point where...

really it's in this age we just need a standalone tcm yeah yeah i think it's it's easy to overlook that you know it's not a case of well Testing these, as you mentioned there, it's expensive. It's time consuming because realistically, the only way to test some of them would be maybe at the drag strip.

you're dealing with an undefined parameter or table that you don't really know what it's going to do and if you get something wrong you could turn a very expensive transmission into scrap metal I assume. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, one parameter might cause a massive clutch bind and break something or one might try to have it smacked in two years at once and put the transmission in a huge bind and smash gears too.

It's amazing how far things have come with the OEM TCM because I'm sure it's been done to a certain level, but I couldn't imagine running an OEM ECU at this level on the engine and expecting great results.

So what is the limitation on further development around this transmission? Is it a mechanical aspect or is that pretty dialed now and it's really waiting for someone to come up with a full... standalone TCM which gives the tuner or the transmission builder complete and defined control over every aspect of its operation. I believe the standalone TCM will make everyone's jobs easier once it's obviously sorted, which that's going to be a learning curve as well. But just...

To be able to control the amount of crossover, which crossover is a huge term in the DCT world, because you do have two clutches that have to fight against each other, but how much do they fight against each other to get to the next side to where they can let the other one go?

That's probably the hugest thing we struggle with right now because you can really do a lot of damage if the crossover is too high and we don't have direct control of that. So that's something a standalone TCM could control. without trying to manipulate a whole bunch of background tables to get the result you want when you use that term crossover just so i'm clear on it are you talking about we don't have one clutch completely

disengage and then the other clutch engages. They're sort of simultaneously engaging and disengaging at the same time. Is that what you're referring to? exactly right exactly so so if you get that wrong you are you essentially are in a situation where you've got two gears engaged simultaneously which which is never going to end well right we face that a lot for example you can have two years on whatever the tcm decides to do it

At a given time, if some parameters, if they're reading too high of torque or if it's not happy about something or if your clutch capacity is too high, you can have it be literally at 19 bar clutch pressure on both clutches for a period of time.

That's approaching, say, 1,800, 2,000 foot-pounds of torque holding on each clutch. It stalls the momentum of the car and obviously destroys parts. You can't have that happen. And that's the learning curve. So even if we weren't to improve... the mechanical gear train of the gr6 having that step would make them go much further being able to control that be able to hold it to like a six bar crossover even let some ignition control let it cross over and let it slip through without

limiting too much torque versus letting it bind up and actually stall the car. stall the momentum of the car because it's fighting two clutches at the same time, something's going to give. And it's the weakest of the two gears. If it's third and fourth, fourth is going to give. If it's second, third, second is going to give. It has to find a way out, the torque.

If it's as important as you've obviously suggested it is, are you aware, you're obviously at the cutting edge of the transmission development, are you aware of any companies that are currently developing TCM, standalone TCM units for it? I know MoTeC has the ability to have a TCM and it just needs to happen. I know that it's been worked on and it's been around for a long time. I just don't know if they thought the market was there yet, but it's there.

these are not slowing down we're busier now than ever yeah and i mean obviously people are making more and more power and

Those who are at the pointy end are obviously only going to want to go faster so that makes that next step obviously become more important. Stepping back a little bit, one of the things I'm just interested in with the launch strategy. getting the car to the 60 foot is really critical to a good ET in mile an hour. And a conventional... two frame drag car with a proper, maybe a Liberty or a Lenco transmission.

would have a slider clutch or a slipper clutch which is purposely designed to slip. It's got adjustable base pressure and it's got centrifugal weight. So the clutch tuner can really control. how the clutch slips off the line. So the idea there is to control the engine RPM, not let that get out of hand and keep the car essentially hooked up so it leaves well without breaking into wheel spin.

Is that something that can be applied to these dual clutch transmissions off the line or can you just not slip these smaller clutch baskets or are you just going to create too much heat and destroy parts? I would say it can be done to a point. And that, again, is where we're relying on the factory TCM because we don't have direct control of that either. So you have to... I don't want to give anybody's...

You know, trade signature way, but you have to lie to TCM to tell things that aren't happening that are happening to get it to slide out because it... It doesn't have the knowledge. It doesn't have the ability to set a program slip. So you have to fudge so many things to get that to happen that it's not... I don't know that it's as accurate as it needs to be versus like a time-based slip like you could have in a TCM if it was made by...

Motec or whoever, like you could say, okay, X amount basis time and then let it grab. I don't think we have that control. So that's the tough part. We've seen a lot more slip than I thought we could get away with and the clutch would be fine. But it's just going to take fine tuning. Like let's... How many tents can we get away with it at this level? How many tents can we get away at this level? And just kind of walk it up like that. But right now, we just don't have that kind of fine-tuning.

You've got a pretty close working relationship from what I've sort of seen with Dodson's over here in New Zealand. They've sort of, from again what I see, they've kind of cemented themselves as the go-to supplier for a lot of the DCT upgrade parts, particularly around clutches. How pivotal has their work been on what we're now seeing these cars do? Yeah, I think it's been massive. The good thing is that we work together closely, and that's the key word, work together.

Because you just can't take parts blindly and put them together and rely on them to just keep on making them better. You have to get feedback. And especially as of late, they've been really good at feedback. If I see things that need changed, they're very, very willing to. try things or make me custom parts to try, to test, to see if we can make it better without flooding the market with the things that aren't tested. And that's a big issue for companies that aren't.

at the level that can do a lot of in-house testing. You end up, you know, a lot of the customers end up being guinea pigs and we try not to do that, but it's hard at the same point. You have to progress as well. So we, you know, we test a lot in the race car. We test a lot in the street car.

But I think it's always been, I mean, there's been setbacks. It's not been all easy. There's been some CO problems people knew about. But again, you learn from it and you move forward. And now they're better than they ever have been. I mean, I think that is a valuable aspect that's easy to miss is being able to actually put these components to the test in your own vehicles as opposed to turning your customers into guinea pigs.

When you can develop the parts, prove them on the strip or on the street and then sell a known package to your customer. The customer obviously benefits from that and the end result's obviously going to be superior for everyone.

Now we're focused a lot here during this discussion obviously on the R35 platform but there's a lot of other... high-end cars that are making similar power now and the GTR versus the Lamborghini. and now the Huracan market, there's a lot of sort of rivalry there. We're seeing some really quick times from the twin turbo Lamborghini market.

Is it kind of the similar philosophy for developing and building pretty much any current generation DCT transmission? I assume they all have their own quirks and intricacies but is essentially the... the recipe the same i would say yes it is the same but they are like you mentioned they have their own quirks everything is completely unique you can't really rely on your information from one to use on the other other than just understanding the basics of

you know, basis of DCT technology and how the clutchers work and how oiling works. I can't say you can rely on any of your past experience though. That's just a new learning curve. Right. Yeah. Just their own, they all have their own quirks that you have to learn. And that just takes monotonous over and over doing them and learning and getting them back and defining what works, what doesn't work.

If you had to look into your crystal ball at this point and sort of see what's coming up for the future of Sheptrans in terms of maybe... new transmission technology that you're maybe aware of that's on the fringe or maybe just newer models that you want to support? What do you see sort of happening there?

Right now, obviously, the hot market is the R8 Huracan. There's being able now that it's been proven by several shops from on 7th on the stock motor. And the cars, well, they were coming down in price before. this whole pandemic but the cars were a natural progression from a dtr to an r8 or something like that you can run sevens and you can have them you know the true beauty of a dct is the driver comfort you just drive this car you know just

For example, I have my R8 down in Florida, all through the Keys, just driving around. It's just, I cannot believe a $1,500 car can just drive so good. And that's the beauty of it. So trying to perfect that, I think that car is going to be around for a while. and it's going to be the next thing. I mean, it already has been the next thing, but just volume-wise, I think it's going to get higher and higher right now. Yeah, yeah. We're seeing more and more shops, including...

The likes of T1 recently sort of branching out and developing support for their R8 and Hurricane platform. And, yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, they were getting down to a price point where they were at least... mildly affordable. It's a lot of car for the money definitely and anything that can run 7s on a stock engine that gets my seal of approval for sure. Actually we'll just rewind it a little bit as well because

We've talked a bit about Sheptrans but you've been in business for a fair while at this point. Can you give us a bit of a 30,000 foot view of your operation now? What size is it? How many staff have you got on board? And maybe broadly, what kind of platforms do you support with upgrades and modifications? Yeah, sure. We're still fairly small. I have 12.

12 employees. I like it like that. I never wanted to get too big to where I lost focus on just every little aspect. I'm in there every day. Little known fact, I build every single clutch that leaves there. That's my own passion. I love building clutches and it gets me out of the monotony of doing emails and phone calls all day.

If you don't get a hold of me, that's probably because I'm building a clutch. But I like to interact with the guys. My son actually works for me now. And that's kind of a crazy thing. Growing up and having him growing up and having him work for me now, he's hopefully taking over the reins here after a while. Yeah, we keep it small. Could probably double in size, but I don't want to lose focus on what we like to do. I think that's always a difficult balance.

when you're building a business as well because naturally, no matter how dedicated you are or how hard you try, what systems you put in place, as you grow, you tend to inevitably... lose control of some of the finer points. So balancing that.

Giving the best product to your customer and being able to oversee everything, as you say, you're building the clutches yourself, versus doubling in size and maybe losing some of that control, that's kind of always a difficult... cool to make I think so I get keeping it smaller and by the sounds of it if your son proves to be capable, maybe there'll be the opportunity to retire at some point. Maybe you can focus on bringing the talon back and running it down the street again. Right. Yeah.

And again, like trying to manage growth is probably the hardest because it's hard not to grow too quick. It's hard not to take on every new platform, every new job, every buck you can make because it's... I think a lot of people just keep taking that greed and try to get everything and you have to take a step back and just do what you do and do it best and try not to go quicker than you can handle.

I think just from what I've seen through my own experience, through other shops that I see, that... temptation to grow too fast more often than not ends up coming back and biting you because you do get into that situation where you know Some of the processes or things get overlooked and the end result getting to the customer starts to suffer. And this is an industry, no matter what area of the industry you're in, that is so driven by the customer.

And these days everyone's interconnected via social media, by forums, by Facebook groups and one bad experience from a customer. that spreads like wildfire. So yeah, I totally feel that, John. It is such a difficult balance to get right.

I think we'll move towards wrapping this thing up, John, and we do have a few questions that we like to ask all of our guests each time. The first of those is, I mean, maybe we've kind of... touched on this already but to more formalise it, what is next for you in the future for yourself, maybe your drag racing and for Shep Trans? Yes, for myself I think the goal right now is to try to

try to get the systems in place so we can run more efficiently, which is really tough with the parts situation. And that's something we didn't talk about. I mean, that's everybody's struggling with right now, trying to manage jobs with... limited parts or maybe no parts at times but trying to get a process in place for again for my son to take over trying so i can so i can try to enjoy a little bit of life because i've worked really really hard to get

to where it's at right now. Um, and racing, I'm not, I'm not really sure. I probably won't be racing much longer. Um, I just, I raced a lot in my early years and I don't enjoy it as much as I used to, to be honest. And it's just the stress because it's. Probably just because you're running a shop. It's more of a job now to stop and get the car ready and stop and take it to the track and get this. It's just not my passion as much as it used to be. Yeah, and I think it's easy to...

maybe overlook the amount of work that goes on in the background preparing the car for a meeting, getting it to the meeting. You guys often travel fairly long distances to compete. And then post-meeting, pulling the car apart, fixing something that's broken potentially. And that also... has a knock-on effect if you've got your staff maybe tied up working on your own car versus actually doing the business that makes you money. So I think it definitely does take a toll.

And I mean, I found myself, my passions have changed over my career. I used to be absolutely in love with drag racing and my passions now changed. I really like. road racing circuit racing and interestingly I always while I was deep in it you know it didn't really sort of play too much on my mind but when you look at drag racing it is a crazy sport because you spend more and more on your car in order to spend less and less time in the seat.

So circuit racing is quite different where you're actually out on the track for sometimes an hour at a time and you feel like you're getting quite good value for your money. No, I can see that. For example, just our last race down in Florida we went to and... it was insanely cold down there and we traveled so 40 hour round trip and uh we just had a freak the battery went low trying to start it because on methanol and 41 degrees out um we just had a freak

TCM processor fault that popped up just from low battery voltage and first round wouldn't go in burnout mode, wouldn't eliminate the first round. It was like that was a long 40-hour drive for about... Seven seconds of power on one pass. So, maybe I should try something like that. I just, you know, I raised so much in early days. Remember the days back when I still had a...

40-hour week job, 40 or 50-hour week job and traveling to the races every weekend. Racing all weekend, falling asleep almost all the way home, trying to just make it back to get in time to go back to work, to work all day. to build transmissions at night just to get by the next week to get the car. And it just was, you know, many years that I sacrificed and, you know, my kids sacrificed, my family sacrificed.

So it's tough. It's tough to keep going at that level. I kind of like, okay, I spent my time. I need to enjoy something else for once. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the grind that so many people don't see. They see the overnight success that just took 10 years to become an overnight success. Nothing happens without a lot of hard work in the background. But yeah, at some point you really need to, you often change focus as well, which is completely natural.

Now, given your career so far and everything you've done and everything you've learned, if you were to go back in time and maybe give any advice to a younger version of yourself. to maybe avoid some of the pitfalls, maybe fast track your career? What would that advice be? I think really just being honest with people because it's too easy to...

over-promise and under-deliver just to get the money. Sometimes I'm just really kind of sometimes too honest with people and they might take it the wrong way, but I'm pretty matter-of-fact. I'm pretty realistic. Just try to stay true to that and not try to grab every opportunity that you might make a dollar on because it might come back to hurt you.

Yeah, I think that's solid advice. And again, it comes back to what I was saying before. This is an industry that's so driven by customers and you do have to keep your customers happy and provide.

yeah a solid solid result for them otherwise you're not going to be in business very long and last question for today john if people want to follow you check out what you're doing maybe they're interested in uh an upgraded transmission how do they get hold of you where should they go yeah as far as marketing i am the worst

person marketing. I don't even think I have an Instagram. If I do, I don't know what the name of it is. Our Facebook page, I just use my personal page. But cheftrans.com. I'm still old school enough that I... rely on email. I love email. It's just a quick way for me to communicate. So yeah, email is our best way of communication. That's sales at sheptrans.com. And I personally do all the emails.

To go back on your previous question, that's another thing. I do not leave things hanging, and that's probably something I've been very proud of and stuck early on. If you email me, and a lot of my customers know that if you email me, I either instantly get back or... At the most, usually within an hour. If it carries on overnight, it's because there was a reason why. And that's something I think is very important.

Yeah, that's incredibly uncommon in almost every industry. The amount of frustration I have with emails that never get replied to, but it's kind of a fact of life, unfortunately. All right, John, look, really appreciate your time today. It's been really interesting sort of getting a bit of a ride down the history of...

Your Talon, obviously, as I mentioned, very influential card to myself and a lot of other people and also getting some insight into the more modern endeavours that you've got involved with. Look, again, appreciate your time and we wish you all the best for the future. Thank you very much for having me.