He Lost The Dirty 30 a Year Ago...Nick Plewniak Explains His Journey Back To Racing - Project Car 2

i literally went from the most excitement i've ever had having a race car to uh losing it in about 12 hours if you liquidated everything i had like everything i owned that was easy 50 of everything i owned when you looked at your car all just destroyed and melted what were you thinking i like finding my own way to make things work and like i think about things in a totally different realm than a lot of people every time every time you said third chalk i'm just like third leg the third leg you gotta keep it in your pants otherwise you get distracted from race cars suck my third shot call i hate this do you love to win or hate to lose think about that in this episode of project car episode two we sit down with nick pluniak and his girlfriend maddie about um everything what makes nick nick how you handle losing everything you have and coming back because he built a new car he's got a 33 i can't remember what brand it is i'm not sure dude's a wealth of knowledge probably the hardest worker i know most dedicated person i know and i was just a sponge learner from and i think you will be too so buckle up for this also uncle rob shirts are on the website so just saying let's see it's like i'm ready to film stuff here it is like we're talking about just going off on tech specs and all kinds of stuff like freaking rain man over here that's not showing the data log of the last two passes like you don't need a data log you remember everything you freaking see on that dashboard i'm convinced of that now what did you show them the dash that i put in the 33 no what did you put in it i had to i sold my house and i was like i'm drinking myself to one gift on this car i mean i still got borrowed wheels and stuff on it but for for mismatching yeah there's not none of them match the others the wheels don't match each other no well the rear ones do now since i borrowed them from corey oh yeah that doesn't count some cool stuff oh a new hollywood i put the 12-3 dash in it and it fits like freaking perfectly 1am talking to people about how they should view their own stuff because they're they're not nick the machine yeah drawing engineering things while they're driving with their knee or see i'm not going to youtube stuff because i don't know most people can't relate if someone they want to relate to you though yeah i know you just have to help bridge the gap so how do you turn from a guy who works on stuff on weekends and wants to do more with it to the the machine because it doesn't just start you don't just go from a guy who has fun with cars to machine with life of cars what do you think what do you think if you had to boil yourself down into like phases of evolution mentally what is what is your nucleus and how does someone else farm that within themselves even in a little like a smaller capacity yeah if you can't answer that i'll ask you because you witness this guy all the time if he can't piece himself together you could probably do a pretty good job i feel like it doesn't matter what it is that you're trying to do like when it's something that you want like you just make it happen and i feel like yeah because like there's no there's no i don't know you have no plan b yeah i guess you could say no plan b but at the same time there's no no other option yeah kind of point right because like there's no i don't want to say i'm not smart but at the same time i'm not like overly overly smart like i'm not okay so like the people that i wouldn't consider myself a prodigy or anything like that i just do it way more than most people but you filter out a lot of the other bull people who could tell you all kinds of stats on football teams or hockey teams or baseball teams or whatever like none of that matters to nick he kind of like takes what the average person like spends their waste energy capacity on yeah and he puts it towards all of it towards racing that's a phrase i use a lot okay we'll go back to like like some stuff like back in school and so far right like i wouldn't say i got picked on but like your buddies and stuff like that would be like oh you didn't watch that movie like no i never i never sit around and watch movies like i wasn't doing that stuff like i didn't like go out and like do that stuff because like it never mattered to me like i don't he filters out a lot of what i don't like watching i don't watch tv really yeah like i don't you see i used to watch stuff and it's gone away like you filtered that out yeah like i have i was not always a machine i got rid of things as time goes on until my life is bare bones only what is needed to to move forward like even when i like go watch like some stuff from like 13 20 video or let's say like some stuff from like a 660 street or someone limpy's videos or uh matt rice's videos from uh dnr auto or street racing channel like when i go and watch their videos of like events like i don't even like i don't even generally just watch the stuff generally right like i'll go into if we're going to this race right i'll go through and i'll watch chassis sit-ups of the people like the badasses right like the the kendall goings the freaking ryan mitchells the brandon works the uh the guys that are like consistently fast um brandon morky just drops the ball and the semi's off now often no but uh he's a good dude he helped me out over the weekend but like ryan mitchell he's consistently fast kendall going he's consistently fast and i'll watch their chassis steps like i don't i don't watch the film for entertainment you rush to learn i watch it to learn right that's a key point right there remember that and like you could when you really start figuring out like i've been around the stuff for a long time right i can hear if i'm at an event i can hear a timing come into a big block chevy um whether it's like kendall's nitrous car or like ryan mitchell's car um you could hear stuff where the motor still sounds alive but the rpms come up and you you know that they're playing with something with like a dump valve setup or something like that where the car can still rpm but they're doing some type of progressive um transitioning through a transition in the track or something like that and uh most videos it's hard to pick up on but um i'm not going to give away all my secrets you've acquired that through observing no but you're getting around you could you could hear things like right so like if a motor is lagging it's not making power if the rpm is revving but revving at a different rate or revving at a different uh acceleration you know they're doing something with like uh charged like dump valves or something like that where they're manipulating the charge pressure in the converter so they could like slip basically slip the transmission right through a transitional period and like they have different like i use them in combination this is crazy i use them in combination but you can figure it out and you can kind of start mimicking and learning from what other people are doing and uh i just like to make a comment here i just want to say every time i try to like you tell how focused he is every time i ask a question about something you just go right back into tech specs and data and everything it's the only thing you care about it's like blatantly clear that is the only thing on your mind and like a lot of people are like why do you race a car like the radio race right like honestly part of it is because like i like the challenge of it um a small portion of it is the marketing aspect of it because like there's no way i could afford to do this stuff if um i didn't have the support that i have whether it's from um companies that i've literally like spent my last paychecks on that have like you know um the last pennies of my paychecks on for years that you know have started giving a little bit of a kickback and stuff like that because they've seen the progression or they've uh or we've talked in technical terms and stuff like that and they know that i'm serious about this stuff or whether it's in like uh different terms right but um it's a whole lot more difficult to make the type of cars that i run even be remotely competitive right um there's a lot there's a whole lot more yeah even with like you know like the escalade or something like that right you do because it's it's hard it's hard and it takes a whole lot more but you'll learn a whole lot more about vehicle stuff and now like i wouldn't consider myself a tuner i do everything myself i'd build my own motor to do all that stuff but um i wouldn't consider myself a top like a great tuner or anything like that but i know a good chunk of information from multiple aspects of making the car down go down the track and like um literally like first pass on the car when the fives and that's no nothing really right home about but like it's not completely like horrible and uh three passes in three passes in we went into the 120s on a note prep in the 60 foot range and i ain't completely horrible where do you find your most internal satisfaction is that doing a specific thing is it accomplishing something because it seems like you're the kind of guy that is fueled by progress not specific things but like um what lights you up inside what do you when do you feel like you're doing it is it little moments or is it big things or is it a little bit of both i don't know i'm hard on myself anything i don't get excited too i don't get excited too often like don't get me wrong i get excited like i i love this i enjoy every last minute of it but like um it's pretty cool like this past weekend right like it was the first time i really brought the car out and like ran the thing and uh to see like my third shock set up working like literally flawlessly just with like a shock setting a spring rate and stuff that i'd literally just pulled out of my head and just kind of used um the information that i have in my head to kind of like take a shot at it right and um seeing that comes seeing that work and like seeing it work like smoothly it's like oh crap like you know like you're on to something right and like a lot of the stuff i do i don't want to say it hasn't been done before because like people have been doing this stuff for a friggin you know 70 years but um i don't generally try to duplicate what other people do and uh i like finding my own way to make things work and like i think about things in a totally different realm than a lot of people and uh yeah i don't know i like that aspect of it i like one of them one of my mottos is right i don't i don't like trying to prove other people wrong but i like proving it to myself that i can do it you know right and like i try to do things sometimes i do things in a different way just to do it in a different way because i feel like there's a more efficient way to do it or a different blended way to target the goal and uh that's true you making promises to yourself and keeping them like your people with high self-confidence make promises to themselves and keep them because why would you trust somebody who lies to you all the time it's the same thing inside that's why you go do stuff all the time because you you hit your mark but let me ask you this if um sponsorships and ability in that were not a factor and you could race regardless would you raise a fox body like everybody else or would you still pick something weird for the internal challenge to figure it out i'd like especially in this multi or no prep stuff there's some big money online so i'd probably build one car that was out there just to be competitive like that i feel like i could incorporate a lot of the knowledge i do have in a much more efficient platform but i'd most definitely have something freaking cool that has a larger longer evolution for success um when i say success i mean for progress right like this 33 it's it's going to be a long-term evolution right and uh starting off like literally the first weekend out there and like making some pretty solid licks and like making it some rounds and like doing all right for itself that shows a lot of promise but like if i had a different platform i mean i don't know i feel like i probably could have made it to like the semifinals or something like that right it was like a new car and uh that's on two totally different realms but um do you love to win or hate to lose think about that it's a good question i don't mind losing i really don't i mean not like a racing class i mean like a life sense whether it's a task or a challenge or do you love winning or do you hate losing or losing to yourself i don't like you say you're hard on yourself which which one are you which one do you think he is if he can't answer i don't think you i don't think you're really lost until you're not willing to come back and avenge the loss like if you're giving up i've lost to some bad i'll probably never beat vomit come come back but there's a lot of people that i've lost to that came back and frigging like kick their ass and like i mean i don't know i i feel like i'm i'm more driven for progress than a lot of other people like progression right and if i'm always progressing at a faster rate than the average person eventually you're gonna get there like you got to eventually get there right as long as you're like progressing like and progressing like doing it like as much as i do it and as in depth as i do it and like literally like i mean you put points on the board every day you get points on the board every day like literally the last the three nights before i went to that race i spent two hours a night just organizing my uh my data logs and stuff like that so i can get it back to a back to uh the recollection of how i'd like to see my data come up in my boards in my in my overlays and stuff like that i literally spent two hours a night every freaking night um getting all that information set so when i get to the track and i had someone message me on my page and they're like my wife was completely amazed how quickly you went in there made a tune-up change that completely worked had the car ready and turned around ready to make a pass while you were there like literally working by yourself and that's because i literally spent two hours a night every night going through to put my data in different cells so like in the holley efi system um we have multiple sections right and i use uh three to four sections of that just for power management tune-ups not fuel tuning and not timing tuning um just power management tune-ups and i have it selected so i can go from one board to the next board to the next board and i do it in a series so the first board is like rough lining like okay it makes my uh where is not screwed up or where the car wasn't happy in the tune up very apparent then i go into the next board and it refines that a little bit more and i could go into the next section and refine it even more and i could go into the next section and refine it even more so i work my way through those tune-ups through those the data selection basically um in four levels so i can see my uh errors of my ways or the errors in my tuning in a much more clear aspect and uh it's just a way i found out to do and i figured it out with the 30 probably about two years into running with that car how i like to see the data and how it works for me and uh i don't know you ever data logged yourself like you ever think oh well i feel better if i drink this much water before i go to bed or if i do this i am i have more energy during the day or like do you ever go back and critique your own processes to not go through your own data log to make your tune up better i should probably do that i mean if i slept more i'd probably be a little more successful but i don't like that too much no but like when i focus like i can focus on like at like an unhealthy rate i've noticed and uh yeah it bit me it bit me medically to a certain point but uh yeah when i focus i can focus like how's your tolerance level for people who are unfocused when you're trying to work on the same thing i can't do it okay it doesn't yeah i can't do it i've noticed that that's a common that's a common occurrence with like high operating peoples they just don't have a tolerance for the thing is like i literally feel like like i can do just about anything and everything on the car and i don't expect anyone to operate at the level i'm operating at but you have to be operating at some type of especially with how fast we're going now you have to be able to have a certain attention to detail to be able to touch my car okay and that sounds rude and i'm it is kind of rude right but like you have to like literally we'll go zero to 150 and five seconds flat like it's not super super fast but it's plenty of fast to get like really screwed up right and like if you're i can't expect anyone to be as dedicated as me because that's just like oh you can't do it right because like i'm i'm on a whole another level as far as that goes but you have to have an attention to detail to be able to do stuff because like even the dumbest little mistake can screw up the whole operation right like um a half a pound of tire pressure which is the same a quarter pounder tire pressure can throw the whole setup off yeah like literally a quarter pound of tire pressure a half a pound of tire pressure can make it from a pass that like works and doesn't work and like you can't be like oh yeah this one's at 12 and this one's at 12 and a half like close enough it doesn't work like that no you're 12 years into this most people watching this have probably seen the dirty 30 at some point we'll throw in some clips of it if you haven't seen it before or they've seen your truck the strategy truck or your crash that was a pretty big video that was a bad one i haven't even look i haven't seen that video recently but i imagine it's got quite a few views on 1320 there what i'm interested to know is how you could spend so much time and effort into this car and then basically lose everything and how did what did it do for your head and yours too because i know you do everything with him and to preface all this you sold your house yeah you're going all in yeah i'm all in i mean this is the kind of stuff that people people need to hear about that you can actually be like you know what i'm just going to sell my house and put it all on the line i had a pretty good job the last four years like i had an opportunity going to the new york state troopers um i had opportunities to work at some pretty damn good paying jobs but i wouldn't have been able to do what i love right so like i've never been a rich guy i never really had money didn't grow up with money or nothing like that and i was always uh basically work enough to be able to go have fun and uh i never had a big uh i don't know what would you call it i never had much of a cushion like literally like if i didn't work two or three overtimes at work we weren't going out of town so i literally worked um the two years before we lost the 30 for those two years i averaged three and a half over times a week at work um during the racing season and a little more than that uh during the winter months up in new york but uh yeah that was literally like uh as averaging what hours a week at work and then like two two nights of like uh maintenance and testing um on the car like every week so like literally it was uh seven days a week with a 30 basically for like a solid three years yeah ladies i've been you know you've seen that on social media you're always doing stuff how did were you always a machine like that or was that an evolution over like as i was always your passion grows did your drive the drive grew but i've always been um very self um i'm hard on myself but i've always been very uh very self disciplined and part of that goes back to like i used to be a pretty good wrestler and stuff like that and uh the 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