Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast

For Episode #158 of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast, Tasso and Jeremy are both in the shop this week. It was September 2022 when Tasso rolled his Rally car at the Alpine Horizon Rally Sprint, and the rebuild that was initially supposed to take 6 months has now been going on for 2 years. Jeremy and Cameron ended up rolling their WRX Rally car at the 2024 Rally Colorado, and so they are in the middl...

If you have been following with our Podcast, you know that a lot has been changing in the Automotive Aftermarket in the last couple of years. In the wake of the Cobb Tuning EPA settlement, one question that was on the top of our minds lately is how building a car has changed in the last 5 years. Is it better or easier to build a car now compared to 5 years ago? In this episode, Jon, Tasso of OTC R...

On September 16th, news broke that Cobb Tuning had settled with the EPA and was fined $2.9 million for violating the Clean Air Act. With Cobb Tuning being so involved with the Subaru community, this definitely caught a lot of our attention. Jon and Harvey from The Boostcreep talk about the implications of Cobb's EPA settlement, and what it could mean for the Tuning industry going forward. If y...

It seems like every year EV's are getting a bit better, and this year, a couple of them have made a big jump forward. As I have hinted at in a few earlier videos, I am now driving a 2024 Tesla Model 3 Performance, and when Mike Pettiford of Go 4 it Services heard this, he was initially couldn't believe it. Mike brought down his 2023 Golf R and we both took a drive in the others car to get...

You all had a lot of good questions about Rally Suspension, and for Episode #154 of the Flatirons Syndicate podcast, we are going to answer them. Subaru has a long history of competing in Rally with the Impreza, WRX, and STI. If you want to take your Subaru out to run a Rally-X event, Hill Climb, or Stage Rally on dirt, suspension is going to be a key component for success. There are a lot of opti...

If you have been following our Podcast, or the oiling issues that have come to light with the FA24 BRZ/GT86, then you may be familiar with the testing that Brian aka. 900BRZ has been doing with his BRZ and the work that Verus Engineering has been doing to develop an oil pan to solve the issue. Both 900BRZ and Verus have put out a couple of videos recently detailing their results with their higher...

On this episode of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast, we go through your questions about our Pikes Peak WRX STI! We collected your questions from a post on our Youtube channel last week about our car, the issues that we have had, and some of the details about running up Pikes Peak. The topics covered in this episode include talking about our current and past engine failures, chassis stiffening, runn...

If you have been following along with our 2024 run up Pikes Peak, you know that we had an engine failure during qualifying. You might also have heard us mention that we most likely hurt the new engine in our Pikes Peak WRX STI on race day. Now that we have a Haltech Nexcess standalone ECU installed in our race car, we finally have the ability to go through the data to see what happened to our car....

In this episode, we talk with Karen Bailey-Chapman, the Senior VP of Public and Government Affairs for SEMA about the effect that the Chevron Deference ruling from the Supreme Court could have on the Automotive Aftermarket. After our conversation with Lance and Billy from Cobb Tuning about their NextGen Flex Fuel system (Episode #145) a few of you commented that a decision had just come through th...

This episode of the Podcast is a little different. We have a Modena differential in the shop, and we are going to be taking a close look at it so I put up a picture in our Community section to see what you all would want to know about it. In response I got a number of great questions about differentials in general. And rather than answering them each in the comments, I decided to answer them in th...

Roncar aka. Ron Zaras was a core member of Hoonigan going back to nearly the beginning. He has now gone out on his own, and as of a couple of weeks ago, he has now raced up Pikes Peak. For the 2024 Pikes Peak Hill Climb, Ron drove a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N up pikes peak alongside Dani Sordo, Paul Dallenbach, and Randy Pobst. In this Episode, we talk to him about his path from Hoonigan to racing, and how...

Scott Crouch is the driver of the Flatirons Tuning Pikes Peak car, and he put down a new personal best time of 10:46 in the 2024 Pikes Peak Hill Climb. But believe it or not, this year also marks 20 years since the first time that Scott competed on Pikes Peak as a Co-Driver in the Flatirons Subaru rally car driven by Tanner Foust. For this episode of the podcast, Jon and Viet sit down with Scott t...

This is the week of the 2024 Pikes Peak Hill Climb, and our car and the team are up on the mountain getting ready for the race this Sunday. With all that is going on, we didn't have the chance to record a new episode of the Podcast, so this seemed like the perfect time to go back to our Pikes Peak Roundtable from episode 30 of the Podcast. This was recorded as we were getting ready for the 202...

Cobb Tuning has just released their NexGen Flex Fuel for the 2015 - 2021 WRX, which comes after the release of their first NexGen Flex Fuel kit for the Sti. We were definitely glad to see Flex Fuel come back as a function of the Cobb Accessport, but when we saw that the new system was running through the CAN Bus on these new cars, it was clear that there was a lot more that Cobb had to rework to m...

For episode #144 of the Podcast, Jon and Jeremy sit down to talk about taking an old car to the track. Jeremy has a number of Subaru's that he has driven on track, and all of them have some years on them. As more of us are looking back to the earlier WRX and STI to build track cars, this is becoming a more common thing to see at the track. So what should you do differently to prep an older car...

We just had Dominic Acia of GetaDomTune on the podcast a few weeks ago, but he happened to be in the area and when he stopped by the shop, we had to sit down and record another conversation. One of the biggest questions or suggestions that we got after talking to Dom last time was about the Subaru FA20DIT and FA24DTI engines. So that is what we talk about here. Dom only had a limited amount of tim...

Smeedia returns to the Podcast for Episode #142 to talk about the end of his 6-Cylinder STI. This is Tanner's third time on the podcast and the original intent was to bring him back on after his 6-Cylinder STI was fully up and running. But now word has come out that he has decided to part out the EG33 6-Cylinder engine he has been working on for all this time, so we had to get him on to talk a...

A rally car goes through a lot on stage between the rough terrain and demands that the driver puts on the brakes, suspension, and especially the engine. One of the keys to success in Rally is to have as reliable a car as possible, and it is with that in mind that Jeremy from Money Shift Rally installed an Emtron Standalone ECU in their Rally car. For episode #141 of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast...

Dominic Acia is back for the second part of our conversation in episode #140 of the Flatirons Syndicate podcast. In this second part, we dive into Dominic's experience developing and making parts for the Subaru EJ platform. We talk about pistons, stroker and de-stroker EJ25 builds, and of course we discuss the his Cylinder-4 Cooling mod. We also talk about somethings that he is working on, inc...

Dominic Acia of GetaDomTune has been a constant fixture in the Subaru world for over two decades. For this episode we sat down to talk about how Dom got started working on and tuning Subaru's, and the plan was to talk about what he is doing now with parts like the Cylinder 4 cooling mod, and the new parts he is working on, etc. And we did. It was a great conversation, but we chatted for over 2...

For Episode #138 of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast, Jon, Tasso, and Viet sat down to talk about the state of both Tasso's new OTC Racing Rally Car build, and the Flatirons Tuning Pikes Peak car. The conversation started out well, and some good points were made.... But then the conversation got a bit chaotic. It is a good chat and we hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening and Stay Tuned!

For episode #137 of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast, Jon sits down for a deep conversation about Subaru Engines with Ryan from P2P Racing. P2P Racing has been building up a diverse set of engine packages, and they have been doing a ton of testing in their project cars at events like Super Lap Battle, and World Time Attack. From that experience, they have learned a lot about what works on high-powe...

For episode #136 of the Flatirons Syndicate Podcast, Jon has a deep conversation about Turbochargers with Matt from Turbo Dynamics. Turbo Dynamics has been building high performance Turbo Chargers for Sport Compact cars since the mid 90's, and one of the first cars that the specialized in were Subaru WRXs and STIs. We switched to a Turbo Dynamics MDX555-450 turbo on our Pikes Peak car years ag...

In the last few years, Subaru has been making some big changes which have helped them continue to grow, but some of those changes have not gone over well with enthusiasts. The BRZ has made a big step forward with the second generation, and so has the WRX with the new VB chassis, but we have lost the STI. The Crosstrek and Outback Wilderness Editions are big hits, but they only come with CVT transm...

On this episode of the Flatirons Syndicate podcast, Jon sits down with Tasso and Jeremy from Money Shift Rally to talk about all of the lessons that they have learned building a new Rally car/Race car. Both Tasso and Jeremy have been working on building up their cars, and while Tasso is still in the midst of his build, Jeremy has completed the build of his car and run a couple of events, but in do...