Boost Loves Tuning

A note from ProjectCarTV

I first read Maximum Boost in the 7th grade, while the other kids were drawing on

desks and playing Iron Maiden off a Walkman. I grew up on the east coast, on

welfare, and there was a point where I genuinely couldn’t tell a pair of pliers from a

wrench — never mind SAE from metric. I was eleven, holding a flashlight “wrong”

while a neighbor worked under the hood of a used car , getting yelled at for it. And I

was hooked. Air , fuel, spark. That was all it took.

I memorized every tool in the hardware store before I could afford a single one of

them. I dreamed about a Snap-on truck pulling up to my lawnmower-go-kart

operation in the backyard. I took apart everything I could get my hands on and put it

back together — occasionally with a bolt or two left over , not installed, just extra. A

neighbor who’d worked as a Marine aircraft mechanic finally put me on task properly .

Her call sign, if you want to call it that, was MSGTR — Master Sergeant. Under five

feet tall, carried herself like six-foot-two. She taught me that a 10mm socket is

usually wherever the socks go in the dryer , and that you find it first, before you touch

anything else — because on an aircraft, a missing 10mm doesn’t mean push-ups, it

means something a lot worse. She believed there was one way to do things: the right

way , the first time. That stuck.

I blew up more small engines than I can count go-karting through the 1980s,

convinced I was a tuner because I could turn a carburetor screw . I wasn’t. I was a

hack who wanted, badly , to do it right. I remember reading Corky Bell’s explanation

of AFR and altitude and finally understanding why the same tune that ran clean in

Denver would choke a car in San Diego or New York.

In the early ’90s I pulled a 4G63 out of a buddy’s graduation-present Plymouth Laser

— the one he’d sideswiped into a pole — and dropped it into a 1989 Hyundai Excel I’d

been handed. Stick shift, stock 14B turbo, no interior , all-terrain tires up front.

Somehow it was one of the fastest cars in my city . It was a death trap. I loved it.

I learned horsepower the hard way too — not as an abstraction, but as 550 foot-

pounds per second, and that torque is what actually wins the race off the line. I

learned interference versus non-interference engine design the hard way , same as

most people do. I learned that a stock 2JZ-GTE in a Mark IV Supra could shrug off

boost that would have killed anything else I’d touched up to that point. And I learned,

on VBulletin forums in the early internet era, that if you claimed a horsepower

number with no dyno slip to back it up, you were running a “butt dyno”

— and you’d

get called out for it, every time, by people who’d actually strapped their car down and

printed the graph.Somewhere along the way I picked up a saying — no idea who coined it —

“there’s no

replacement for displacement, except the turbo in my basement.

” I also learned, the

expensive way , that a properly built turbo motor runs “cooled under pressure,

” and

that MSGTR’s other rule mattered just as much as the 10mm one: never touch a

torque wrench after a beer .

“Beer-thirty” and blueprinting an engine do not mix. I

mean that as more than a joke.

I was a kid who got told by classmates I was dumb for building “stupid lawnmowers”

out of stuff I dragged home from the trash. I was also a kid with undiagnosed ADHD

who cried on the walk home some days for not being allowed to blurt out every

answer in class. Turns out the path of least resistance — learning things on my own

terms, hands in an engine bay instead of a textbook — is what carried me. I’ve

forgotten more about cars over the years than most people ever learn, and I’m

grateful for every bit of it.

So this note is a thank-you. To Corky Bell, Jeff Hartman, and Mark Warner — men I’ve

had the good fortune to meet and talk with more than once over the years — thank

you for decades of work that took kids like me from “which one’s the wrench” to

actually understanding what’s happening inside a spinning turbine housing. If you’re

looking for where to start, my answer hasn’t changed since someone first asked me:

start with Maximum Boost.

And to everyone else — the busted knuckles, the redneck “gitterdone” fixes that

somehow actually worked, the strangers who showed up to car meets with something

to teach me about my own car , and yes, even the guy with the Type R badge on a

Hyundai Accent who got out-run by my other Hyundai — thank you for the memories.

Boost loves tuning. Turns out I do too.

— ProjectCarTV

The replacement for displacement is the turbo in my basement.