131: John Nguyen quit his day job to pursue Track Spec Motorsports and has parlayed that into the Spec Corvette racing series

John was born in Florida but moved to Philadelphia when he was 10. His dad and he were always tinkering and fixed things rather than replacing them. He stayed in the area and went to college at Penn State to get a Mechanical Engineering degree. Even though his passion for cars never went away, he got a job at a beverage company and ended up in California managing a facility. During that time, he had a side hustle of selling other people’s parts online. It became more and more difficult to make a profit and he wanted to take the company a different direction. He had a list of parts that he wanted and needed personally for his 05 Mustang GT which he road raced. The first one was to deal with an overheating and front-end lift problem he was experiencing. So, he came up with the Track Spec hood vents by using Magnahelic Differential Pressure Gauges to find the optimum location to evacuate heat and equalize pressure. He now operates the entire business out of a 2-car garage! He has found companies to manufacture his products and focusses his efforts on R&D;, sales, and customer support. Onto his next adventure, John was talking with a racer friend who was reminiscing about racing C5 Corvettes when they first came out. Within a 3-hour drive, they had formulated a plan to create a Spec Corvette series! The idea was to have a very reliable and available car that can be race-ready (including the car) for around $20,000. They have had a few races so far in 2018 and plan on expanding to areas outside of California. They teamed up with a race coordinator called Speed Ventures to actually conduct the race and now have 27 drivers in SoCal and 10 others spread across the country.