Interrogation Room
I've known Eric Hsu for a minute-over ten-years worth of minutes. I remember him before he partnered up to open XS Engineering, before he was a Chief Engineer at A'PEXi, and before he was placed in charge of parts development at legendary motor builders, Cosworth. I remember when he was reflashing ECUs for cash and drag racing his second-gen Eclipse at Palmdale. And from the beginning, he was the kind of guy that didn't give a flying fart. He does what he wants and says what he feels. So after nearly breaking our age-old Time Attack record, I thought it was about time I caught up with an old friend.
What Was The First Ride You Modified?
Back in '89, I had an '87 Mitsubishi Starion ESI-R with a Garrett T04 turbo; HKS cams, AIC, wastegate; and a big-ass 5-inch Flowmaster muffler. You had to fabricate everything back in those days because nothing was off-the-shelf. I was only 16 so I had to learn how to figure it out, install it all and tune it. And trust me, I made my share of stupid mistakes working on cars.
What Got You Into Tuning?
When I was 14, my uncle Norman used to tune BMWs, Porsches and Benzes. We're talking turbo M5s and 911s with 16x13 rear wheels with K28 turbos, etc. I was his slave for about a year before I started tweaking on Mazda rotaries and Mustang 5.0s on my own.
What Was The First Part You Ever Developed?
The first part I ever developed for production was a Garrett T3/T04 bolt on for the second-gen Mitsubishi Eclipse for XS Engineering back in '96.
The Future: VIP, Show, Drag, Drift Or Time Attack?
That's a good question. I would say VIP and Drift, but I would also like to add Time Attack. Drift is fun to watch, but you won't see me building any drift cars anytime soon because of the subjective judging. I'd rather stick to just tuning the drift cars. Time Attack is the best. It's basically drag racing with turns. It's much harder than building a drag car because it uses every single aspect of the car: brakes, suspension, chassis, engine, drivetrain, etc. I love Time Attack because it separates the dyno queen tuners who use the word "Engineering" in their name (C16 + 40psi of boost = 800+whp?) and real tuners like XS who can build a truly fast car.
What Did You Think About Our Time Attack?
I thought it was fun and a well-organized event. I'm sure you didn't do crap and Elliott did all the work, though. What was kind of bull$#!+ was the GMG World Challenge GT3 Porsche Cup car. What the hell is a full dry carbon fiber, magnesium/carbon fiber wheeled, Moton triple adjustable damper racecar doing at a tuner challenge (Uh, we're not too sure, either - JN)? It's a beautiful car, but that freaking car is worth $400+k (well, $150k - JN)! It was our bad our boost controller failed, but we still almost took out the GT3. We were short 0.12 seconds.
What also sucked was that we were less than 0.3 seconds away from the Cyber Evo record. The XS R32 GT-R has only been on the track twice since the Street Tuner Challenge show on SPEEDTV, so I know the car has a lot more in it. We did mess up the GMG 997 GT2 street car though. That shows that a $160k German car with $20k in mods is still weak. German cars are great and I love them-if I want to cruise around wearing a striped button down shirt and pick up girls.
What Was This Cash Bet We Heard Of That Happened At Our Time Attack?
The ex-street racer side of me came out and I wanted to offer the GMG team $1,000 cash heads up. If they won, they would take the overall win and a grand out of my wallet. If the XS car won, we would just take the overall win and no cash. That's a win/win situation if I ever heard of one. Troy at XS spoke to the GMG driver James Sofronas (who is a badass driver) and they said they didn't have enough fuel, tires or balls (I threw the balls in there).