John Carmack Used to Supercharge Ferrari's!! | Joe Rogan

So how did you get involved with turbo charging Ferraris? Like what? Because that's a no-no in the Ferrari world, right? It definitely is. The Porsche world, they sort of always encouraged modifications of the cars even from the early days. People have hot rotted Porsches. But when you fuck around with a Ferrari, people get really upset at you. So my path through the cars is interesting where I, as a younger kid, I was not a car guy. I was a step-brother with the Lamborghini posters and all of that. And I just did not care. I was all about computers. I knew what I wanted. I would much rather have a new Apple than I look at a Porsche or something like that. And my first car was this very boring Volkswagen Jetta. It was like, hey, it drives me around. I was just fine. Somebody ran into it. And looking around for the next car, my uncle-in-law or something had... I worked on cars and he had an old British MGB in his garage. You're familiar with the British sports cars? And in many ways, they're just terrible, terrible cars, but I fell in love with it. It was just beautiful. And I had to learn all about cars at that point because the clutch master cylinder broke the very first day that I had it. And just everything's breaking all the time. And it's a pathetic, weak little engine, but you're like, oh, I can make it a little bit faster by doing some of these different things. And I went through the... Like many other things that I've had in my life, I go through sort of this larval learning stage where I start reading the hot rod magazines and graduate to circle track or something. And again, this is Midwest, Missouri, where I grew up. So I learned all the basic ins and outs of the cars there. And then I go on, I started software and start getting successful. And I do the sort of natural upgrade from an MGB after it gearbox eats itself. I buy Miata, which is sort of the modern slick version of a British sports car. And that was going along okay for me. I enjoyed it, but almost on a whim one time, I went into the Ferrari dealership in Dallas. And here I am at... I was like Wolfenstein days, so I guess I was 20 years old or something. And I'm in a t-shirt and ripped jeans, and I walk into the Ferrari dealership and say, kind of, sell me a Ferrari. And they humored me. And I kind of walked around. We looked at the different things. And a lot of the Ferraris at that time in the early 90s, I am 3.48s and Mondiales. I didn't really like all that much, but one of the ones in the back garage, they had a Ferrari 328, which is kind of the fancier version of the Magnum PI car from the earlier days. And I thought it was just the most beautiful car. I really wanted to get it. And when I wound up buying it, it was interesting because the salesman gave me a little bit of a talk where he said, you know, if someone in the Corvette pulls up next to you and kind of revs their engine, just kind of hang your hand out the window like you got a thousand horsepower under the hood. And that didn't sit well with me. That was like this idea of like, he kind of knew that those cars weren't actually as fast as they looked or their reputation would have. And that there's this play that you would do to just kind of not get into a situation where it doesn't hold up to its looks. And I was like, you know, I don't like that. And so I wound up kind of calling around to all the different shops in Dallas where it's like, okay, I've got a Ferrari 328. I want to make it a little faster. And I had done all this stuff on my MGB back in the day. So I know the things that you wind up doing with intake and exhaust and cam timings and the options there, but they were all basically horrified. Like you just don't do this to a Ferrari. And like the only suggestion that came out was, oh, we can put an Italian to be exhaust on it. It'll make it sound better. And maybe it's good for a couple horsepower or something. Those are things that people largely do for the aesthetics, whether it's aural or visual with it. And that's not a big move. And right about that time, John Romero at the office had picked up there was a copy of Turbo magazine back in the day. And there was an article about an old replica, kind of race car done by a local company in Dallas called Norwood Autosport or Norwood Autocraft. And I thought, well, he's right here. I'll call him up. And so I call him up. I get Bob Norwood on the phone and I start going through my pitch. I've got a 328. I'd like it to be a little faster. What do you think we can? And before I could even finish, he said, we'll put a turbo on it. Like, yeah, now we're talking. And that was the beginning of kind of all the science project experiments. What does a 328 have standard horsepower? I think in the best, probably the European trim, it was probably around 300 horsepower. And what did you get it up to with the turbocharger? So we went through a number of steps of this. And this is all swapping out all the computer electronics and different turbos. And eventually I melted the engine in it when it was at like 500 or so. And I went through a long history of melting many pistons in the different device, different cars. But that wound up being this decade long set of interesting experiments there. That was my gateway drug into working on this. And we're like, okay, we've made all this power in this system. We know it's kind of at the limits of a lot of things in the chassis after we melted the engine there. We tuned it back down a little bit. That's the way so many engineering things wind up going. You go it until it breaks, then you dial it back a little bit and you stay there. It must have been radically fast for a 328. It's very light, right? Yes. What is the curb weight? Well, it's not super light. I think it was like 3,200 pounds. But yeah, you could really feel it rear back when you went into it. And at high speed is a little bit dirty if you start getting up in 150 plus miles an hour for that. So we thought, well, what's the next level? Where do we go from here? So he had done a twin turbo job on a Testarossa before, which is a much wider car. I have, you know, stock. They would go 180, 190 miles an hour with a normal Ferrari trim. And it was a bigger five liter flat 12. So there's a lot more possibility for doing things there. So I got a Testarossa and we said, all right, we're going to do the twin turbo job with intercoolers, with the new engine management systems. And we went through this long string of upgrades through this, which generally was like, okay, we melted the pistons. We broke the input shaft all these times. But at its top form in peak, I still have the dyno sheet for it. It was like a thousand and nine horsepower at the rear wheels. None of this crank horsepower talk. This was I, you know, over a thousand horsepower at the rear wheels. And it was amazing. That sounds ridiculous. What is standard horsepower with those? It was like 380 or something. Oh my God. So it was a huge, huge difference. And you had all these things like, you know, it couldn't launch like a dragster. Ferrari gear shifts are really gears in a blender sort of thing. And you've got a dog leg first. So it would not do a really fast zero to 60. But if you were on the highway, I'm, and you could just downshift to fourth, you could go from 50 to 150 faster than anybody's business. It was with that much horsepower. I, you know, I would run down super bikes. It would, it would just be faster than anybody. It was shockingly fast. How did it handle? Really pretty well. So we, we had bigger tires, some stiffer suspension on it. It was not designed to be a super track car. I had taken all of my Ferraris to the tracks, but I was no, no pretensions about being any kind of an SCCA champion or anything, but I could wing them. I could move them around the tracks reasonably well. But the main thing about this was this just ungodly amount of power. It was this see Jesus effect when somebody takes a ride in it. You're like, okay, we're going, you ready for this? And you have enough space. And for all of those years that in software, our building was positioned. I off of this, we had this long highway access road that led down to it. And I mostly more often than not, I was working kind of night owl hours and this car was so loud, I'm kind of obnoxious in retrospect, but I am, I had this personal drag strip basically every day when I would go there and everybody in the building could tell it's like, Oh, John's coming, which is sort of the signal better get to work and look busy by the time he gets up here. I, but it was, especially in the early days before we got some traction control dialed in, it could get really squirrely just because when the boost would come up fast enough on there, it would tend to throw the car a little bit sideways. And I'm, you know, I'm happy that I can look back and say, I, you know, I never spun a car on the, I have one of the big cars on the streets. I did spend my little MGB. I, when I was learning how to drive as a teenager, but I never did that with the big Ferraris on public roads. Although there was one time at the, the motorsports ranch, when I pitched my F 50 like through the infield, just spinning it around over and over and we're like, well, there's the world's most expensive lawnmower. Now, what did you do with those cars? So the first one I gave the 328 I gave away for the red annihilation tournament. So that was I, that Thresh won that one. So no, he wound up, that was, there were some pictures of that going around recently where it was a little bit weird, sketchy, because I, it was a turbo charge. There's, it really wasn't technically legal in Dallas most of the time. I, you know, we would make it legal sometimes, but much of the time it probably wouldn't have passed an emissions test and it really wouldn't have passed a California emissions test. So he wound up using it as he had it sort of in the lobby of his company for a while as kind of a conversation piece. And he did, I think eventually wound up selling it. I think I got a message from someone last year that still had it. So it's still functional at this point, which is saying something because it had a, an early almost one off Paltech engine control system that probably no one can do anything to right now and you'd probably have to completely replace it if something went wrong with it. The Testarossa, we eventually detuned it a little bit down to six or 700 horsepower or something and somebody bought it from me and I felt he might've been buying more car than he should have at that point. Well, because it's gonna break again. It's going to have problems. I, you know, he wanted it and I think that he got some great satisfaction out of it, but I know it broke again on him later and I, and I think he had to get rid of it. I, you know, after that, then I had, I had a Ferrari F40, which is beautiful, beautiful car, and that was the only car that I didn't really modify. I am, all we did was turn the wastegate and close, you know, lock that off. So it was making all basically race trim F40 there. And the F40 is an interesting car in that it has, I, in those early days, the turbos weren't nearly what they are right now. It was a small engine 2.8 liter because it was spec'd for racing. It really was sort of a race car. And if you didn't ring its neck, it was a pretty slow car. If you just like idled it off, it felt like a Honda Civic. It was terrible at the low end. You had to really rev it up and slip the clutch out, get it up on boost. But it was, it was a great car because it was like this amazing race car that you're driving around on the road. And that was still where it didn't even have internal door handles. It had a little pull cord inside there, which led to the point where there was one time I was getting at valet parked and you could tell the valet that had to go get the car for me. It's like, this is okay. Highlight of the week. He gets to go drive a Ferrari F40 and he pulls it up and he can't figure out how to open the door. So all of his friend, you know, everyone else working with him are just kind of looking at him and I had to come over and tell him how to, to get it out. So that went from the highlight to like the worst day of his time there. Do you still do that? Do you still have cars like that? So no, right now I am all about the Tesla where I have, I, I have a P100D and I think it's the best car I've ever owned by far. So I've gone through all of these hyper exotics and I love my Tesla. I have the same and it's as fast as anything. It's the fastest car I've ever driven in my life. So compared to my, you know, my super cars there that the Tesla is much quicker off the start, which most of the time that you're driving is, you know, my point about then I talk about how antisocial the old cars were where I did, you could not just go use this, you would have to plan ahead where, okay, you make sure that you've got enough room if you have a traction issue going here, you're going to cover a huge amount of distance. It was so loud. You really wouldn't want to do it in most places, but the Tesla is so magical where I had one of the first roadsters and one of the, I, when I was letting some other people take it out for drives, they said, you're driving a rail gun, which essentially you are, it's this electromagnetic pull on the car and you just push the throttle down and it just goes. And it's this amazing feeling and it's not antisocial. Every stop sign you stop at, you've got traction control. It's not burning rubber. You could just floor it every time you stop. And it's amazing. It just brings a smile to your face. It is this happiness machine. Well, the stunning acceleration is so confusing to people. I've like, my wife hates it. My, I've had people in my car and I go, you ready for this? And I stomp the gas and then just go Jesus. Yeah. Cause it doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem like a car that looks like, uh, you know, a nice four door sedan should be able to do that. Yeah. So that launch is definitely really something, but I am compared to like, if you're, if you're already moving the, the old test Rosa with a thousand horsepower was a very different beast where that Jesus sense that you get at the very beginning, it's that magnified extended for quite a while, as you're running up through 150 miles an hour or so.