It's a shorter episode this week as we prepped for the Avants Classics on the Green event! This week we talk about the best way to visit parks, NASCAR goes to Le Mans, the new CARB emissions for small engines, and Dan's dog tries to eat Nick's face. Again. 

On this shop talk episode Dan, Nick, and Megan discuss sacrilegious engine swaps we would do (like a K24 in Ferrari 308), hauling a long load in your short truck bed, and some safety tips after Nick almost loses his legs while doing some off-road recovery!

We did a poll on the Avants Facebook page on what special tools we might not have but should and several Avants members helped us out! Do you have any of these? We also touch on what we think are the best cars you should buy right now and save for a lifetime and some exciting upcoming events!

This week we talk to Andrew Norman, Financial Advisor & Managing Director of Colibri Capital, and a great supporter of Avants and keeping the car community moving forward. From his days as a thug at Exotics at Redmond Town Center to racing Ferrari Challenge cars and now sponsoring Indy driver Benjamin Pedersen, Andrew is a guy who truly supports the sport and the community.

We welcome Dominic Dobson back to the show to catch up and talk about his upcoming journey back to race Le Mans again, hopefully with less fire this time. Dominic joined us way back on episode 66, but he's back again and now as the owner of one of best Avants Partners, Dobson Stuttgart. Dominic shares exciting racing stories, upcoming plans with Dobson Stuttgart, and talks a little about electric motorcycles too! 

Check out Dominic at Dobson Stuttgart! https://dobsonstuttgart.com/ 

We're starting a new series! In addition to our regularly weekly shows, every other week we're going to do Shop Talk! This series will cover news, events, project updates, tool reviews, and more! We're looking for your ideas and what roads you want us to go down, pun intended. Listen in for a taste of the new series. 

This week on the podcast we interviewed Mark Raffauf, Senior Director of Race Operations for IMSA, about all things racing from IMSA, to Isle of Man TT, to Formula 1, and everything else. Mark is truly an expert on basically everything racing related and as it turns out even more. With over 50 years of experience in the racing world, you’ll find it difficult to find anyone with his level of experience and knowledge which made for a really interesting episode we really enjoyed recording.

As Dan went down the rabbit hole of trying to determine what lift to buy, we quickly found out we don’t know jack about lifts. We reached out to the experts at Hydraulic Solutions, Jarett and Sara Bailey, and asked them to come in and give us all the information on vehicle lifts we would ever need to know before purchasing one.

When you decide you need a lift for you shop, reach out to Hydraulic Solutions at https://www.hydraulicsolutions.net/ and follow them on Instagram to see some great design ideas! 

You can’t talk about wild car builds of the 80s without talking about the tuner cars of Koenig. Shant Meshefedjian is an expert on Koenig, especially their polarizing Mercedes builds. Shant gives us the incredible stories of how he acquired one the rarest of them all and his love for the over the top builds that Koenig is famous for.

Here at Avants we have one major complaint with car manufacturers and what they choose to sell in the US…they never give us enough wagons! Give us all the wagons! Megan Zalud joins in the studio again as we discuss all the cars we wish we could import to the US, but those stubborn manufacturers just refuse to give them to us. Did we miss one? Do you agree? Let us know!