Smart business people typically don’t respond to online attacks. But as this issue has spiraled out of reality, it’s clear I need respond to own the mistakes I made & clear the air about other things. This is more or less my version of the good, bad & ugly.
None of us can be 100% objective about things we’re emotionally involved in. What I say is the facts as I see them, and I know I have a bias like everyone else does. I believe some of what has been stated on Greg’s Mustang thread by people is true … some not … and of course there is always more to the story that puts events into context & perspective.
The big three issues … the dry sump vent, cooling system & body fitment … talked about on the Mustang thread are true.
I am not a race car builder anymore, and I do not want to be. I am a designer & setup guy these days. That is what I’m good at & what I love to do. I didn’t build this race car personally. I had it built. I have 3 good car builders in the U.S. we’ve set up as authorized Track-Warrior builders. Randy Chastain of One-Off customs is the guy in California. They are all super talented,
but I am responsible for the end product, no one else.
As most of you know my business has sold a lot of “Build-Your-Own” Track-Warrior chassis packages & clips for shops & talented Do-It-Yourself car guys with fab skills to build. Randy had built “Rollers”, but not a turn-key Track-Warrior until Greg’s Mustang, which we labeled TW001.
The LS, EFI & no-lift shift T56 Sequential powertrain was a new combination for us. I don’t build engines. I configure what I want & the SDPC Race shop in Lubbock, TX builds my Warrior line of engines. Kurt Urban works there now & builds most of my customer engines. Kurt does a great job. The engine ran great & built good power (707HP of the dyno). Joe Dederichs of Texas built the sequential T56 trans with all PPG internals. Worked great. Max Darrah of X-ineering providing the brain & programming for the no-lift shift. Had an issue in June but worked great at this NASA event.
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. We had issues with the cooling & dry sump vent all weekend. It was frustrating & embarrassing. As I stated in post #532 on Greg’s Mustang thread here:
https://lateral-g.net/forums/showthr...=56209&page=54
I didn’t design the cooling system. I bought the best from C&R, as I have for years, and Randy plumbed it as C&R told us too. That’s not Randy’s fault. But it is my responsibility, because I bought it, and I am responsible for the whole car. Same with the Dry Sump system.
I am not trying to shift blame. I am responsible.
Some people asked why we weren’t fixing the problems after the event. I thought we were going to. Greg & I made plans to. So I was as shocked as anyone on Wednesday when the feces hit the rotary oscillator online.
Back in the 80’s I built a lot of fiberglass bodied drag cars. All fiberglass race car bodies suck, but they are a light & affordable way to body a tube chassis race car. Just don’t look real close. Anyone who has built light weight fiberglass race cars knows this as well. Steel bodies are way better, but heavier & exponentially more expensive to build. Working with thin fiberglass race bodies is an art. This was the first time for Randy. Just before the car came apart the final time for powder coat & paint, I inspected the car & Randy had the alignment & gaps good. Not great, but good for a race car.
When the body went back together a few days before the event, the body fitment at the doors & front end was horrible. It’s not supposed to be a show car or even a street car. It’s a race car. But when it went back together for the vinyl wrap people to get started, things moved & the fit was not even good enough for a race car.
Greg told me he didn’t care about the body fitment … “it’s a race car” … and that the goal was to go run this NASA race & see if we could podium in TTU with the new car. Randy & I discussed how much time was needed to re-adjust the fit, and unfortunately we were out of time to make this event.
The misconception is that we put the car out like this as a finished product. Not true. We planned to fix these things when we had more time. I wasn’t happy or “OK” with the body fitment, but knowing Greg & I were friends and we were going to run the car together for the foreseeable future, I knew we would get the car back at Randy’s shop & take the time to fix it & several other appearance things that got rushed, like the wiring & the wrap.
The wiring wasn’t made neat when they ran out of time, so it needs to be cleaned up. The wrap installers started in the rear of the car with the stripes & they weren’t centered on the hood when they got to the front. The wrap surprised us that the yellow vinyl is not solid. The yellow vinyl has a degree of translucency to it, and each dark colored fiberglass filler spot on the body showed through the wrap as a dark spot. Not trying to shift blame. It’s all on me. I planned to have the wrap people re-move the whole wrap, primer the body white & re-wrap the whole car when we had more time, on my dime.
These issues were mistakes, not intentional. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have agreed to keep the original time line for this build when the custom widened body came 3 months late. I made a bad decision. Building a new car of this level for the first time, in only 4 months was unrealistic. It put Randy in a tough spot & there were errors. But Greg Weld has been very good to me. Anyone that knows Greg, knows he is a great person with a heart of gold. We had these dates set & I couldn’t tell him no.
The bottom line is I let Greg down & I’m sick over it. The loss of his friendship is a gut punch. You can always get more business. But a friend like Greg only comes along once in a lifetime. That is what I regret about this most.
Two other important issues were brought up on the thread that I need to address. One of me taking an extremely long time to get some people’s designs & custom parts to them, or their suspension setup with springs & bars. The second is comparisons to Frank at Prodigy who ripped people off for money.
The first is true for some of my clients from 2015 to 2017. I received LOTS of requests for custom car build chassis designs & suspension calcs with setup work ups. Way too many … and my dumb ass didn’t say “no” to anyone, so they piled up. I overloaded myself. I got so far behind that some client projects that should have taken a month took 3 or 4. A few client projects that should have taken 3-4 months took a year or more. Things don’t always work out exactly the way you plan.
My fault. No one else’s. I apologize to the folks that projects got delayed so long.
The comparison of me to Frank at Prodigy is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination. I have never scammed anyone out of money. It has been implied I’ve “robbed Peter to pay Paul” and that’s why people didn’t get their parts in a timely manner. Also not true. With the delays in finishing people’s custom designs, their custom made parts were delayed too. But everyone got their parts. With delays in finishing people calcs & suspension set ups … there were delays in getting people their springs or sway bars, until I knew the rates. They got the majority of their parts right away. But the springs & bars didn’t get shipped until I figured out what rates they needed. No one has made a purchase with me & not received their parts. Not ever. I just needed to clear that up.
Today my business is different. In 2018 we moved into a great facility with offices, R&D shop and warehouse with an efficient shipping & receiving area, as well as having a staff of four now. Wendi handles bookkeeping & errands. Susan is a veteran office manager that handles all the business & financial stuff. She also handles all the Workshop registrations. Dave Hanson handles orders & shipping parts out every day. Susan & Dave have freed me up quite a bit. I still handle purchasing, but we plan to add a person soon to handle that, as well as shipping to free Dave up for more customer service time.
We’re doing more business than ever & the business runs smoothly today. I now have more time freed up to do “tailored” designs for clients, of the stuff we already sell & have worked out, as well as do suspension calcs & setups. We have zero projects behind schedule. All the new design work & calcs coming in gets handled in a normal timeline of 1 to 3 months. That can’t get any quicker. That is just what takes.
With the launch of our big catalog in August 2017, I stopped taking on complete “new from scratch” car design work. These can be an ass kicker time wise, because you need to figure out compatibility of a thousand things in the new design. So no more complete “new from scratch” car designs. Not sure I’ll ever do those again.
Now we focus on only two areas. One is doing suspension geometry calcs & setups with folks with the muscle cars we are familiar with. The second being folks that want to build a tube chassis car, of any car/truck body style, using the 4 levels of Track-Warrior front & rear suspensions we already have developed & simply tailor the dimensions to fit their unique car or truck.
If anyone has further questions feel free to call or email me.