01/01/2023
2023: The year of mental health and happiness
(warning: long and very important read ahead)
This whole thing was never supposed to happen. In 2016, I picked up my white 88 coupe from a gentleman in Holdenville, OK. I knew as soon as I saw the b***y on that car it was coming home with me.
I had been looking for awhile, not for a car, but for a way to reconnect with my youth and to escape reality.
Some of my best memories from my late teens are with people like Ryan Gunn. We wasted full tanks of gas most Friday nights cruising the strip on 39th, racing virtually anything that pulled up at the stop light. Smoking clutches doing 1/8 mile long burnouts from his apartment down to the convenience store. Violently missing third gear on that damn Tremec 3550 at the track until the blower tubing would blow off the couplers. Making ram air intakes with no air filter going straight through the GT fog light hole and wondering later why there's a hole in a piston... for real, good times.
When I got this coupe, the previous owner had just put a vortech and fuel system on it, but it hadn't been re-tuned with the new stuff yet. It started and ran but that was about it. I paid him an extra $200 to trailer it to me until I could put together a plan.
I had one failed attempt to have the car tuned locally. The car sadly ran better with no chip at all than it did with that chip tune on it. I started doing some research about tuning with a Quarterhorse (primarily from efidynotuning.com), but was too scared to pull the trigger on self tuning. Figured I'd overlook something simple and blow it up immediately.
So I went back to the old school tactics I knew about from the early 2000s... MSD BTM box, Fuel Management Unit (FMU), wideband gauge, and a boost gauge. While this got me daily driving the car for the first time, I could see how absurdly bad the AFRs were from one pull to the next and I knew quickly this was only going to be a temporary solution.
I bit the bullet, picked up a used quarterhorse and Binary Editor dongle (if you see the name Tyler Wise in my earliest YT videos, that's why), and setup my first base tune from the efidynotuning writeups. Low and behold the car immediately drove better and had more consistency in the AFRs than ever before. Now keep in mind, this car was a true daily driver. My only car. I sold my reliable low mile truck to do this. So everyday I'd drive the car to work in the morning with the laptop hooked up. At the end of the work day, I'd look through my morning logs, make some changes, load the tune, and drive it home while logging. When I got home, I'd review those logs, make some changes, and write a tune for use the next morning. This went on for about a year, affording me the opportunity to discover firsthand just how amazing the EEC-IV logic is for a real 4 season street car with extensive modifications.
Around this time, I met someone who would turn out to be my best friend, Tony Kerley. We met at the local parts counter. I patiently waited for my turn in line. The parts clerk asked Tony what he needed today. Rather than answer the question, he nudged one of the boys forward and said "tell him what we need". And out came basically every gasket for a 5.0 engine build. I had no choice but to step in and introduce myself. The next many months involved both of us working on each other's cars (turned out we lived in the same neighborhood). Lots of beer and vodka. Entire weekends disappearing. Pi***ng off both our wives routinely. (More good times) Really getting to the heart of what building cars is all about.
Before long, I ended up tuning his car too, and eventually started helping people on a few facebook groups that were into this self-tuning stuff also. I knew I had learned so much through my own self exploration that I felt was not discussed online, and certainly not available in any kind of video format. Out popped the youtube channel. I never intended for this to become a company or a job. I just wanted to get the knowledge out there for others. And I was amazed by the amount of traffic these videos saw from day one. With a few days to spare, the channel became monetized just shy of one calendar year after it started.
The traffic continued to grow. And with that came a growing a number of direct requests to outright tune somebody else's mustang remotely. I did a few dozen cars for free, even though most offered to pay. But it got to a point where it consumed a significant number of hours in my personal life. So I figured what the hell and let people start paying if they wanted to. Beer money. Couple hundred bucks. Maybe two fiddy. didn't really care the amount.
That became so common that it was legally necessary to report this on taxes. So an LLC and bank account were created and Cody Lemon got drug into this thing. I had seen something in him that really stood out to me. He was a super young kid (not even 21 at the time if memory serves correct), but his knowledge of these cars was absurd. And he did a great job of keeping the Foxbody Mustangs of OKC facebook group active and healthy after Frank and Katherine Adams moved out toward the Tulsa area.
I was still making good money at my day job, and was in the habit of spending upwards of 10-15K a year on my car anyway. So I just started pushing that money into the business instead.
Somewhere around that time, Cody mentioned David Williams from the OKC group. Here's a real freak of nature. Another kid (under 21) out on a farm in Stroud, Oklahoma with the two generations of men above him. They had a shop with a lift, totally full of engine parts, and a small foxbody junkyard out on the edge of the property. He was into the weird stuff like Capri's, SVO's, and older 4-eye stuff. And he also had this freakish knowledge of older fox bodies and engine building.
Next thing you know, we've got about 10K in new consumables inventoried and on the shelf to keep him supplied as he built out engines for customer projects. The junkyard doubled in size. We filled up another 2 storage units full of used parts, grabbing basically everything local for sale that was priced right whether we needed it or not (usually not, lol).
Next came the shirts, hats, stickers, and tradeshow booth. Brew2L stepped up in a major way too, and for no reason other than being a good dude, he pushed people in our direction. Our following grew and we were absolutely swamped with work. David and Cody kept the in-person builds going while I hammered on the keyboards every day (still nights and weekends because I had a full-time career). And I just couldn't keep up with the demand. Back in May, I finally pulled the trigger and decided to sell my house (downsize), go full time with Leech, and leave my amazing career of 13 years at BIS/Grooper in Edmond, OK.
That was quickly followed by the Ford Takeover event and a long trip to California to work on customer projects and hang out with David's friends/family back home. Coming back from California, I never really felt like I could keep up with the demand. My response times for customers got painfully slow. I pi**ed off a lot of people. And at the end of every day, I felt like I was more buried than the day before. And I recognized that a large cause of this was mechanical problems with cars that we never see or touch in person. And becuase we did tuning for a flat rate per car, it was financially irresponsible for us to continue working on projects in that way. Trying to juggle upwards of 100 remote tune projects at a time is impossible. Absolutely impossible. I'd have hundreds of unread emails in my inbox at any given time, most of which contained data logs from people waiting for their next tune revision. And even in days where I'd be on the keyboard for 11-12 hours straight, there would be more messages in the box at the end of the day than when I started.
Then things started to get really ugly for me. Holley EFI has been the bane of my existence for many, many reasons. I never wanted to be a Holley tuner. But no amount of trying to convince the public of staying with the stock computer resulted in a customer base where the majority of our work was EEC-IV related. It turned into being about 90% holley efi. And for the types of cars we tune (street cars), it is just not the right decision most of the time. The tuning effort to dial in basic things is often just absurd. Many systems had sever misfires due to harness issues and interference. O2s failing or reading weird constantly. Data logs crashing constantly. And Holley EFI just doesn't have overall not good idle, startup, and idle air logic. We fought through this stuff on hundreds of cars, but man what a task. And not every project succeeded for these reasons.
Handfuls of bad apples would go to social media for the sole purpose of trying to tell the public that we were somehow bad people, had no clue how to tune anything, and were just here to take people's money. It got so bad at one point, I was actually accused of being a racist for not wanting to do a specific project, which frankly is just insane to me. SMH. Certain customers that received upwards of 30-40 hours of remote tuning/troubleshooting effort (because of mechanical issues) were issuing paypal disputes and wanting their money back for their tuning. I was accused of "not caring". I was accused of being a "thief".
Then Moates closed their doors with no warning. This was a huge blow to me, personally. Stock computer tuning is the one thing I truly pride myself in, believe in, and want to do. But with that no longer being a viable option, I'm going to be stuck with a bunch of Holley EFI tuning for the masses in a market where there are hundreds of "remote tuners" happy to do the "tuning" for a couple hundred dollars per car, essentially pricing true calibration professionals like us out of the market. To make a living doing that kind of work, I'd have to tune 400-500 cars per year, and I can guarantee you that such work would be extremely low quality and nothing to be proud of at all.
Meanwhile, I still to this day never even finished prepping my old house for sale and getting it on the market, which was a key part of my strategy to leave my previous career so quickly. So I'm financially stressed on top of everything else. I always put customer projects first and feel guilty taking even one day a week away from that to work on the house or do something with my family. So it sat there rotting. I've essentially been paying for two homes every month. And at the end of every day, being on the virge of a complete meltdown, feeling like I'm not worth it. Feeling like a fraud.
On Christmas evening, Amanda and I did what we usually do. Order Chinese take out (becuase it's the only thing open). And my fortune cookie really made it so simple... "You shall soon make a long overdue personal decision". And that's where I am today.
On January 16th, I will return back to my previous career and will no longer be tuning cars for a living. And truthfully, I'd rather not do it at all for now. I just need to get back to a simpler life where I don't feel like I'm always letting everyone down. It's just all too heavy, and it's time for me to heal.
I will have virtually no availability, as I'll have full-time work responsibilities again.
As for Leech Motorsports, Cody and David are going to continue forward. I'll be putting the company entirely in their hands and removing myself from the equation. I'll still 100% tune any car they put their hands on (personal or customer car). They are currently strategizing on what that future will look like. And there will soon be an announcement on our social media to discuss.
I may still contribute some tutorial videos on YouTube as I have the energy to do so. If the Quarterhorse returns or a suitable EEC-IV tuning replacement hits the market soon, I'll probably continue forward with that content (it's what I actually enjoy). David has some killer ideas for new parts to take to the foxbody market, and the prototyping has begun for some of these ideas.
The lesson I've learned is this: Find true happiness. Life is too short to be this stressed out. Find your happiness. Take care of yourself. Treat others with respect and dignity. Be compassionate. Recognize what severe depression and anxiety look like, and help those around you suffering through those internal battles.
And in the words of Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon, "When life is hard you have to change". With that, I wish you all a happy new year. Good luck and Godspeed. -Matt
