WHY I Built an Escalade ESV Into a Drag Truck! (LSXcalade Was Originally My Dads)

I figured I would sit down and lay out the whole story of how this thing became a race car we're like how that whole thing happened because some of you may know that it it was originally my dad's and that's about it because that's hope they talked about in the 13 20 video just to clear it out right now no I did not buy this thing at first I didn't pick it out I didn't pick the color I didn't have any say in it whatsoever it was just there it was my dad's truck the original plan was see this was back in summer of 2014 right after I had graduated high school and was about to start college I decided I wanted to commute to college as opposed to staying on campus because I wanted to like don't work on cars and stuff and I heard a few were commuting you only have to take classes like three days a week and I was like oh hell yeah I can use the other days of the week too freaking dick around on the garage so that's what I did as a commuter you need a car so my dad was like all right you're gonna drive this to college it was like okay sure I didn't even want to go to college I really didn't know what I wanted to do at that time I just knew that I wanted to have a fun car which at the time was my 72 Monte Carlo yeah I just wanted to work on it and I didn't care about school I didn't care about any of that stuff I just used it as an escape because it'd be completely honest I didn't know what I was going to do with myself I had no future plans I didn't get good grades so just blocking all that out and focusing on my car was I was like my detachment from reality so that's why I didn't go to college in a traditional sense I commuted to a Penn State New Kensington when my dad got this it was about a year old it had 19,300 miles on it I remember that specifically because the first time I got in it smelled like all freakin new it was all like crisp had that new car smell I looked at the thing I said 19300 and I was like I was 18 at the time and be completely honest I felt like a douche bag driving it around because it was like so nice and new and black shiny I was just like this thing is way too nice for me like just this weird prior to that I had driven his 2008 suburban to high school that was also his work vehicle because he sells vacuum equipment like industrial vacuum equipment like micro chips and stuff like that and he had a suburban my entire life growing up like he had a 95 suburban and he had an O 3 Yukon XL then he had a no 8 suburban that eventually became my first car after all the grabbing the suburban I traded it for an Audi a8 that had like a bazillion miles on and they were like worth the same amount and I guess my dad was like he didn't use the suburban anymore for work and I was like yeah sure whatever so I drove that Audi for like not even a year ten months or something then I got Monte Carlo April 2014 and it was kind of like well this is sort of dumb to have two cars and I was like I wanna get rid of this Audi and get a suburban again and here's again you know I've been thinking about that and like I'd rather get an Escalade they got better terrier with the cooled seats and stuff and I was like cool six-two in my head I was thinking oh yeah it's got six - like I could put headers on it and tune it and it would probably be just as fast as out he was or at least just as not slow that he was kind of a turd bit 0-16 like 6.1 seconds or something and all I want to know if a daily driver was to be at least on to that because driving that suburban around it was just so slow that I couldn't stand it and that's why I wanted to get rid of it so badly then I kept learning before sixty but that's a story for another day this thing shows up and I start driving it driving to school man maybe like the second day he had it or something I came out from the basement with this little big vert RAM and take the cold air intake kit like the tripower one with the triangle and the hoses that went like that came up beside the grill there it was like a ram air deal I had that on the suburban and I took it off before I traded it and I was like oh well that'll work on the Escalade I'll put it on there he saw me coming up carrying that thing and he's like what's that and I said it's the old intake from the suburban I'm gonna put it on the Escalade cuz it'll fit and he's like don't effing touch it it still has a warranty I was like okay I won't I'll just take it over to the shop and get it out of the basement because I had this shop like not really shop it's like local garage a couple miles from the house that I like paid rent for by cutting grass and doing like random odd jobs for the guy who owned all the garages over there the real good family friend then I was an opportunity that legitimately changed my life because without a place to mess around all this stuff outside of the supervision of my dad I wouldn't be sitting here right now because I wasn't allowed to do any of this in the beginning anyways but uh yeah I took it over there and I'm gonna put on anyway because well I was 18 and I just didn't care so I was gonna do it anyway I went to put it on and I blew the mass air flow sensor fuse out or something cuz I tried to like jerry-rigged some other type of MAF sensor in there because the factory air box this thing didn't have the detachable one like the suburban did I needed to put that detachable piece into the vert ramp to make it work and it didn't work blew the fuse and I thought I blew it up because it didn't run for [ __ ] like it sounded like it was blown up when I was freaking out but and I've been a fuse I changed it it was all good and then like couple weeks later I went and got it tuned because I was never able to get the suburban tuned because when the blew the transmission the transmission had a warranty on it and my dad wouldn't let me do it because of avoid the warranty well this time I was like I don't I just don't care so I wasn't kind of tuned without telling him and why would that make a difference I was like that that's really what got me hooked cuz just popping the tune in there made it a whole new vehicle like you would really be surprised how well one of these things will move with nothing but a tune and a cold air intake at the time it just had the vert ramp and an ls3 throttle body on it which is 90 millimeters as opposed to 87 on the stock one I don't have really made a difference but I did anyway cuz I was a racer back then yeah that dropped the zero to 60 from like seven point three or four seconds to like five point eight like it was a huge huge huge difference in that set the hook for everything but at the time my dad still thought it was stock because it had a warranty at 20,000 miles on it it was year old I lied about everything I did I didn't tell him about any of it and I didn't even know how to work on cars at that time that was just when I was getting into it because my Monte Carlo I had paid a shop to put a Muncie 4-speed in it I got it back they they sent to Jeff Lutz to get dyno tuned and that's actually how I met Jeff Lutz that's that's a story for another video because that led to me getting into the fabricating turbo world and all that stuff but that's how that happened six days after I got my car back from Lutz you know when to roll racing Evo and blew the countershaft out the bottom of the Munsey so broken and that same day is the day that my dad got this thing which is kind of but to be continued I couldn't afford to pay the shop that put my turbo 400 back in the Monte Carlo and I wanted to drive it so that's when I started like working on cars is calling on my buddies Sean whom I knew went to tech school and he was like yeah we could do that it's easy cool Sean knows how to do it like we'll figure it out like I got two hands two eyes in a brain we could do this and that was the first time I had ever really cut my teeth on anything seriously mechanical when I got this escalator when I when I started driving it I didn't know how to do anything and now it's six years later almost six years five and a half years and I can't even believe we're all this is gone but to continue on the timeline here so okay we're in like November December of 2014 I now put headers on it because I wanted headers sounded cooler but what I did is I scheduled it with the exhaust guy to work out so that I could put the headers on this the night before then bring it over there and have the exhaust made for it before my dad ever heard it with open headers because I had talked to him before and he okayed me to take it to have some dual exhaust made for it because it looked cooler and so I slid the headers in with that so that he would just attribute the extra noise to the exhaust I put on he wouldn't know that it had headers on it even if he looked at it he just doesn't wasn't that mechanically inclined to know the difference nor would he ever open the hood anyway so I did that and he got even faster at that point I was like roll racing Artie challengers and like tuned to Durham axes and stuff and I was like beating them and this thing is still 22s on it and it was just so much fun because I didn't think it was gonna be that fast and it was and then some of my friends were like dude I think bet that thing 100 mile-an-hour Club sticker at Keystone you should bring it out and I was like what you mean he's like well if you trap 100 miles an hour they give you this cool sticker it says 100 mile an hour Club I was like holiday hang I'd be freaking sick so this is like April 2015 I went out there with my friend Bill and he's not in the passenger seat with me when I made my first pass in this thing he kind of like told me what to do all the beams and stuff keep my this five years ago the first time I ever went down a drag strip and it was in this vehicle this Escalade and we ran like a 1480 and it was pretty bad and it went like 96 or something and I've bought her because it didn't get the hundred so once again that was another hook that was set I wanted that sticker so damn bad that throughout that entire summer I secretly went to the drag strip with this thing because hey my dad still thought it was stock beat he vehemently opposed me going to the drag strip because if you crash it's not covered under warranty oh my sister tried to rat me out once he freaked out once again me being me I was like okay I won't I won't pray so I'll just go help my friend bill with his car and I lied I went and I raced again I kept doing that the whole year and it got to the point where I went and got I like took all the seats out I got some junkyard 17-inch wheels and with dumpster-diving for some tires to fit on there and like get the rotating weight down cuz I wanted I would at that point it was running like 1430s and I was like okay if I rip all the seats out and put these wheels and tires on it I bet I'll get into the 13s and I'll get 200 mile an hour club sticker cuz I was it was doing like 98 at that point like once I start getting a little better with it and better weather and whatnot and so what I would do is I would go to my shop I'd rip all the seats out I would change the tires put the junkyard 17s on there I'd go to get the eighty-five and I'd run it like all the way down to cut all the weight out bring a couple of gallons with me I'd go race and then I get back to my shop with like 1:00 in the morning put all the seats back in change the tires back and then go home like wipe all the numbers off the windshield and stuff so my dad would never know about it and I did this for a while basically the whole like last half of that year and then that October of 2015 I put a 3200 stall in this because it was like just so freakin close it actually did run $13.99 one time without a converter and it still went like 99.7 it was like god dammit it's so close I just I wanted it so bad so I got the converter to cut the 60-foot down because it was doing like 2.2 or something it was just atrocious that was my dad still thought it was stock like I rounded up a couple of my friends who knew more than me and we freaking dropped the [ __ ] in this thing and punched that converter in there and I had to drive it back to my house the same night I got back at like 3:30 in the morning or something and again I had it set up with my tuner to go to knit the very next day so my dad wouldn't know it was inoperable or weird at all like I had all this stuff like really orchestrated so that there there couldn't be any downtime at all because it was my daily driver and I had to keep it a secret so we did that it brought in like 1368 I think was its best time with the converter the one time I took it out and that's when I found out that it needed limiting straps I made a whole video on that before because it launched so much harder that it would start bouncing and with all the seats gone the junkyard Seventeen's on it on like freaking a core 85 left the tank I got the zero 262 like 4.7 seconds that was substantial because at the time an SRT 8 Jeep this is before track Hawks would do like 4.6 or something and that's really where I wanted to be I wanted to be fast as an SRT AG pose like my benchmark you know it had headers and it was all geared up next logical step was a camshaft so I'd actually met a guy named George Messer he did Drag Week and stuff with his turbo Silverado and he knew a dude who sold his LSA blower kits and they were a lot cheaper than I had expected I didn't know enough about him to like pieced all thing together myself so I saved up enough by that March to buy one pulled the motor out of this thing in my shop while my dad was out of town I wait until he was out of town so there would be no questions I used a different car to go to school because I got rid of the banana clip will pump thing and I was like I want to do it all right there was no corner cutting this it couldn't screw it up because if I had asked my dad if I could do this he would have said no and I would got my ass beat if I ruined my car and I couldn't use her school anymore but my logic was if I don't screw this up like if I can get it done and drive to school for a little bit before he finds out about it how could he be mad after the fact because it's still functioning fine so that was it I I went by the book for everything like I even used the torque wrench on the valley cover nobody does that like I use torque spec on everything on the motor no stone was left unturned I crossed all my T's dotted all my eyes and it came out really good and it worked yeah my dad didn't find out about it for probably a month when he did it was I found out over text message he was like going to look at jeeps or something on my he's a kind of look at different car for work I was like what do you mean is not what the Escalade is for I can't drive a fricken supercharged modified Escalade to [ __ ] Michigan I need reliable transportation that's a quote and I posted that screenshot on my Instagram I was like well I guess cats on the back he knows now and by that point I had already signed up for Drag Week I was gonna do it even if he didn't know I was doing it like I had already had a worker stray with my mom to cover for me that I was going to visit family in Michigan while I was gone for the week like I signed up I paid my friend George cash and he signed me up with his credit card so might there would be no paper trail yeah that was it like I was I was committed I was going to do it whether or not my dad knew about it he ended up did finding out about it because once the Escalade soared once he found out about it and I started racing he was just kind of like alright like whatever if your kid did that would you really be mad like damn my son put a blower on my truck what a jerk I don't know it was it was a calculated risk that he wouldn't kick my ass and it worked but yeah I go to like the flashlight drags and stuff and be beating up on Corvettes like it was cool I think he'll I was cool too but he never really went like showed that because I don't want to admit that uh that he would have been an obstruction if I had asked him to do it but I did Drag Week my original intention was to turbo my Monte Carlo and about on the Wednesday of Drag Week uh uh I was looking around like in every single car there is like an LS swap muscle car I'm like man this is so boring like I'm tired of looking at these things and this was cool it was fun people were just like dude look what the heck is that like it was just fun to race it I mean I was one of the slower people there cuz running high 11s at Drag Week like it you're slow but it turned heads everywhere everywhere because I've run it around on the four slicks and I had him on like a cargo rack on the tow hitch it was pretty cool and I camped in it too because I didn't want to pay for hotel I didn't have enough money for that so I blew up under your mattress in the back and I would like envelope my friends take a shower in their hotel room and then I'd go out to the parking lot and go to bed it worked out pretty well it's pretty cool it started gaining traction on social media because of that actually it was a the roadkill page had been posting things throughout the week cuz I guess a lot of sure back when she ran it she put something up in the drive week Facebook group saying you know we're gonna let the racers provide content for the week so I'd send her stuff and she posted that's kind of how that got going and by the end of the week I was like you know what screw the Montecarlo I need to turbo this thing I want to go tens I want to kick some ass with it because I have way more fun racing this than I had racing anything else all I wanted to do was go tens and I was gonna like maybe you know do rods and pistons in like a six liter with like some BorgWarner at 366 is there something cheap just like a basic set up Jeff Lutz jr. was actually one of the people who was instrumental in helping me figure a lot of this stuff out he was like he was willing to show me anything I wanted to learn when it came to fabrication stuff so I was like you know I'm gonna build this turbo kit myself because they're all that summer I've been helping them out at the shop and watching them make stuff and he had shown me how to weld I picked it up really quickly so he's like dude you need to go buy a welder so I did and that was kind of my plan I was like well I can't afford to pay someone to do this I could well like I'm gonna figure it out I have the resources to learn this stuff so that's what I'm gonna do where this thing really turned a corner and went from just turbo build to freaking weapon of mass destruction was PRI 2016 I had gone to SEMA with the Lutz's prior to that but I was just kind of like starstruck by the whole thing I didn't really have a purpose but I want to go to PRI and try to find sponsors to build this because it had done you know I had enough of a track record on social media from the drag-week stuff to kind of validate the concept that people would think it was cool so I went there for that and once again I didn't have the money for hotel room so it's like hell I'm just gonna pull out my little drag weed camp and set up and go camp I drove this I drove the Escalade to Indianapolis six hours from my house in Pittsburgh with the blower and everything in its eleven second form and I went to camp in the first night in Indianapolis is December it was like 14 degrees or something just terrible like I couldn't sleep at all they were frost from like my breath was like frozen inside the glass I was in a sleeping bag with like 18 blankets I was like popsicle it was terrible somebody who I met from speed society that I didn't really know that well at that point he had found out that I was I did that he's like bro you're not sleeping in your truck again like put your mattress on my floor okay so the next night I went to go do that that was 20 at…