For episode 76 of the Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast, Jon and Tasso talk with Preston Osborn, the Competition Director of the American Rally Association.  

2022 is all ready off to a fantastic start for the ARA.  Most of the Rally's that have opened registration so far this year have not only had good attendance, but have in fact sold out.  And fairly quickly too.  It seems like a lot of people have been working on and building rally cars in the last couple of years, and this has brought a lot of new cars and new faces to the ARA events.  

And there are still a lot of familiar faces too.  

But this year, there is a new development in the top class of cars.  The WRC implemented a completely new rule set for their unlimited cars, which requires a hybrid drive train.  This has opened the door for a few people (Ken Block most notably, but also Barry McKenna as of 2021) to bring in a recently retired previous generation of WRC car to compete in the ARA.  

So are WRC cars about to take over the ARA open class?  

We talk about that and the future of the ARA with Preston.    

Thanks for listening and Stay Tuned!

For Episode 75 of the Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast, our guest is Jamie Moreno, The Racing Chica!

A few weeks ago when Viet and Jon went to Utah to drive the new 2022 WRX and 2022 BRZ, it turned out that one of our friends, Jamie Moreno, was one of the instructors for the event and has been driving the 2022 WRX on track at the Utah Motorsports Park for a bit now. Because of all that time spent with the new WRX at speed, we had to bring Jamie on the podcast to talk about that experience.

Jamie has a heavily modified WRX that she has started out racing in NASA, and then moved on to competing in Global Time Attack, and Grid Life with it as well. We talk to her about how she got started driving on track, and how that lead to her to where she is now.

Thanks very much for listening and we hope you enjoy the conversation.

Stay Tuned!

For Episode 74 of the Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast, Ryan and I talk to Cole Powelson about his run up Mount Washington, World Time Attack, and the two crazy cars that Lyfe Motorsports is getting ready for the 2022 Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

I will mention that I was late getting Ryan the link for the Podcast, so I started to talk to Cole as he was getting set up, and asked about the electric Sierra car that he had just posted about on Instagram. that turned out to be a fantastic conversation so I left it in, but that is why you won't hear the intro to the episode for a bit. It sounds like a fantastic project and it sounds like a very cool application for an electric motor.

If you haven't seen Cole's run up Mount Washington, you should definitely take a look at that. Cole took 2nd place over all, and set a new record for the rear-wheel drive class.

Lyfe Motorsports is building two unique cars for the 2022 Pikes Peak Hill Climb. The first is a Prodrive built  GC chassis that is being updated with all of the best modern motorsports parts from a Rallispec engine to a Sadev transmission which we are really looking forward to see on Pikes Peak in a couple of months. The other is their 2015 Nissan GT-R known as "Frank the Tank". Cole ran the car at Pikes Peak before, but this time around it is being converted to rear-wheel drive, and it will have a Power Stroke Diesel under the hood.

This was a great conversation for sure, and I hope you enjoy it.

For Episode #73 of the Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast, Drew and Myles from Racecomp Engineering are back on the Podcast to talk all about the new 2022 BRZ and 2022 WRX.

When Drew and Myles were first on the Podcast, they had just taken delivery of their 2022 BRZ and the initial impression was that the car was good, but they needed a little more time to see just how good the new BRZ was.

Not only that, but they were also just about to get their hands on a 2022 WRX as well.

Not only that, but Jon was just invited by Subaru to go out to the Utah Motorsports Campus to drive the new BRZ and WRX as part of their Ride and Drive launch of the new cars. So he had some firsthand experience with these new cars, and to say the least, there was much to discuss.

Did the 2022 WRX and 2022 BRZ live up to the expectations?

Did one of them stand out?

Were there any surprises?

Thanks for listening and Stay Tuned!

We had a number of questions come in for our Question of the Week about switching from MAF based tuning to Speed Density and I decided to reach out to Harvey from The Boostcreep who has been tuning our cars for well over a decade to get to have a detailed conversation about how these two systems work, and when and why you might want to make the switch to speed density tuning.

We didn't know how long this might go, but when it was all done, I decided to put up our whole conversation as a Podcast rather than to break it down into a much smaller video that would just be a Question of the Week.

Hopefully, this will give you a much better understanding of what Mass Airflow tuning is, what Speed Density tuning is, and when you might want to consider making the switch.

Thanks for watching and Stay Tuned!

There has been a lot of change going on in the aftermarket performance world in the last couple of years.  And it seems like the speed of that change has been increasing pretty significantly lately.  Then yesterday Cobb sent out the April edition of their Green Speed Newsletter, and it has sent some shockwaves through the tuning community.

For a while now, tuners have not been able to deactivate any check-engine lights that may come up in the process of tuning a car due to any parts that are related to emissions devices that are either not functional or have been removed from a car.  But as of now, access to any of those functions or toggles has now been removed altogether.  And because they have been removed entirely, that has changed the function of a few other tuning options, the most notable of which is Cobb's Flex Fuel system.

In short, it is not now possible to use an Access Port to tune a car for Flex Fuel.  And there are a few other options that will not work as they did before.

Because there has been a ton of discussion on the matter, we wanted to put together a Podcast about this as soon as possible, and get it out as soon as we could.

And we were able to bring in Harvey from The Boostcreep to help talk us through the changes, and what his view of the situation was as well.

If you would like to take action and use your voice to try to help support our ability to tune and modify our cars, there are two very important links that you should check out.

The first is the link to support the SEMA RPM Act here:

The second is the Racing Enthusiasts and Suppliers Coalition law suit to clarify the terms of the Clean Air Act here:

Thanks very much for listening, and Stay Tuned!

We chat with Tanner Smith about everything he is doing with his Youtube channel, Smeedia.

If you have spent much time on Youtube, you would most likely have seen the 6-cylinder turbo STI that he has been working on for the last 2 years or so. Tanner has also been creating a lot of really helpful content for the Subaru community on his channel as well.

We chat with Tanner about how his channel started, how he is able to work through any and every problem that he runs into, and we get the latest about his over-the-top STI build as well.

If you aren't all ready, be sure to check out Smeedia on Youtube and Instagram.

Thanks very much for watching and Stay Tuned!

Jon, Scotty, Dussex, and Tasso talk about what they have been up to for the last couple of weeks. Scotty headed to the track to test his car out ahead of his next event, but that didn't exactly go to plan. Tasso had his car in our shop to hopefully get it up and running and ready for the season, but that didn't exactly go to plan either.

The main discussion for this episode is what to do when working on your car doesn't go to plan because that has been a theme around here lately.

Thanks for listening, and Stay Tuned!

For Episode 68 of the Flatirons Syndicate Motorsports Podcast, Jon, Scotty, Tasso and Dussex sit down with the Flatirons Tuning Rally Driver Scott Crouch to talk about the 2022 100 Acre Wood Rally.

This is the first rally of 2022 for us, and I knew that we had a bit of a stretch of bad luck, but it turns out that we have DNF's the last 5 Rally's that we attended.  Needless to say that is a streak that we definitely wanted to break.

The 100 Acre Wood Rally was absolutely huge this year.  There were a record number of cars entered at just under 100 cars, and there were a lot of fast cars in both the National and Regional classes.

We talk with Scotty about how the rally went for the Flatirons Tuning Rally team, as well as all of the other action that went on. 

Thanks for watching and Stay Tuned!

Jon, Scotty, Tasso, and Dussex have a chat about the bombshell that Subaru announced on March 11th, that the STI has been discontinued.

There was a lot of expectation and anticipation surrounding the next generation of STI.  The rumors seemed almost too good to be true in that the car was going to make close to 400 horsepower from the factory. We were even hoping that the next STI might get a long-overdue dual-clutch transmission.

It is hard to go from thinking that the next STI would be a huge step forward, to finding out that there would not be any new STIs for the foreseeable future.

But could there be a silver lining to the announcement?  Could this actually be a good thing?  

Listen to our conversation about this, and let us know what you think in the comments.

One thing is for sure, we would really like to know a little bit more about what Subaru has in mind for the future of the STI.

Thanks for listening and Stay Tuned!