A Conversation with Griot Motors: Exploring the World of High-Performance Cars

As we sat down to discuss the intricacies of high-performance cars, I couldn't help but notice the sleek and modern facility that is Griot Motors. With its diverse collection of exotic vehicles, it's clear that this team is passionate about their craft. From the moment we began our conversation, it was evident that every detail, from the car's specs to its detailing products, would be thoroughly discussed.

One of the cars that caught my attention was a well-maintained E46 BMW. The owner had taken meticulous care of the vehicle, and it showed in its low mileage – only 8,000 miles on the clock. I couldn't help but ask about the car's history, and the owner happily shared stories of how they had met with Jason, another car enthusiast, who had pulled up in this very same car just a year ago. The details that came out were nothing short of astonishing – from the 800 horsepower supercharged engine to the custom water-cooled system that uses refrigerant to cool the intercooler.

As we delved deeper into our conversation, I began to ponder an idea that might seem unconventional: putting one's air intake in their cabin. With the car already running its AC, it seemed like a straightforward solution – cooler air would be sucked in, pre-filtered and ready to go. However, there was a caveat – what if the airflow created a pressure difference? Would the car suck oxygen out of the air, or would it simply recirculate the existing air? I couldn't help but wonder if this concept had been explored before.

The team at Griot Motors seemed amused by my idea, and Nick, the owner, kindly offered to test it out. As we chatted, he mentioned that they had a special setup for their own cars – a custom cone filter right next to the driver's seat. The result was nothing short of impressive – the induction noise sounded like music to our ears, and I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to experience such a rush.

As we wrapped up our conversation, I couldn't help but feel a sense of gratitude towards Griot Motors for sharing their expertise and passion with me. From detailing products to high-performance cars, every aspect of this team's work is infused with dedication and attention to detail. Whether you're an avid car enthusiast or simply looking to explore the world of high-performance vehicles, Griot Motors is definitely a place worth checking out.

In fact, our conversation was initially meant to be a brief segment in an official FD practice video, but as we delved deeper into our discussion, it became clear that there's more to share than meets the eye. Nick and his team have been instrumental in helping me throughout the FD season, hooking me up with all the detailing products I need. As someone who's still learning about these products, I'm excited to get my hands on some of their offerings and explore new ways to care for my own cars.

As we parted ways, I couldn't help but feel a sense of appreciation for Griot Motors and the team that makes it all happen. Their passion, expertise, and dedication are an inspiration to anyone who's ever been bitten by the car bug. Whether you're exploring high-performance vehicles or simply looking to upgrade your own ride, Griot Motors is definitely worth checking out.

One final note: I wanted to mention the little segment where Nick mentioned having a friend named "Ricer" Miatas – a guy with a big pocket full of cash ready to buy this very car. It's clear that these team members have built strong relationships within the community, and it's always exciting to see people come together over their shared love for cars.

The rest of our conversation was filled with enthusiasm and excitement as we explored the world of high-performance cars. The next time you're out exploring local car shows or browsing online forums, be sure to check out Griot Motors – you never know what amazing stories and expertise might await you around the corner.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys welcome to this video again i had to make sure psychopath mike didn't switch my camera to 24 frames per second look at this look at this giant fantastic building so we are in uh seattle for formula drift and we wanted to make a quick pit stop at griot's because their headquarters is actually uh i think like a 15-minute drive from the airport uh we're gonna check it out today um and also heads up if you guys are in the area sunday we're gonna be doing like kind of like a meet and greet here at their location with the s15 maybe the e36 too uh from roughly like 4 p.m to 7 p.m i'll post more information in the description but uh should be a good time guys so we're here with nick griot uh super super cool to meet you man yeah you too adam um and uh we are lucky enough to get a tour of this place so this right here i know isn't like the the master mind collection that you guys have but there's some pretty cool cars in here and i know we're going to go to the other buildings this thing caught my eye he was going to tell me a little bit about it before so um tell us a little bit about this thing yeah so this is our detail wagon as we have dubbed it but it basically started life as an 89 325 ix we pulled it out of japan i think we bought it for like seven thousand dollars and uh it was all mangled so we got in the car because we didn't get him in the states so we were pretty excited to get it and my dad sat in the seat and had four doors at one point in time can i open it yeah he didn't like um how the b pillar kind of blocked his vision he's very particular about that and so he said can we make it a two-door started taking some measurements and uh long story short we ended up taking the b pillar from the front door moving it nine inches back to be able to accept the coupe door and in that early measurement we also found out that stock e30 m3 fenders fit perfectly on the length of the wagon so it's all oem steel from bmw that pain stinky grafted on there's custom braces inside like you said you thought it was oem it is so freaking cool man i'm like the biggest wagon guy and i was mad at myself because i don't know a lot about like older bmws or e30s and i thought it was a stock car that i hadn't heard of before and i'm sure whoever built this car would like take that as the biggest compliment ever exactly i mean we that is the biggest compliment because we have a lot of e30 freaks in the building um and just in particular when you start calling things m3 or putting m3 fenders on it uh you got to be right because some people have slapped them on and done a lot of different things but you know we took this car to sema in 2016 and then uh we got a lot of attention with it we actually got to talk about the motor too oh yeah because it was an all-wheel drive car and we um we kind of committed blasphemy and cut the front wheel drive component off so that we could fit a bigger motor in it and the motor actually um came out of a 1995 540 so it's a m60 v8 and all of the engine bay was cleaned and shaved by forest uh who you're going to meet later at griot's motors but it's really his project in entirety and we got the six-speed manual out of that same 540 redid the clutch and uh so now it's a rear drive car that had 120 horsepower now it has about 300 horsepower so you guys have this building you have grilled motors which is like more of like a workshop and you have grio storage is that what it's called so griot's motors is storage restoration detailing consignment and sales and my brother runs that side of the business i have to keep ourselves separate so i do the chemicals he does the car sales i think his job is slightly more fun but we still you know both have pretty rad jobs so all these cars these are your dad's cars yes a couple of my cars are in here i sneak them into storage but at the same time they are mostly his cars and you know as we were saying he doesn't really have a specific taste he appreciates you know design and just how the car drives is this a speedster it is a speedster that's a big money car it's not a real one okay got it but this one's pretty cool yeah um so it's an intermechanica roadster so it's a glass body car it actually has all 911 guts so it's a 930 targa just a three liter straights or flat six so it sounds like a 911 it pulls like a 911 it costs 40 grand that's cool so it's not you know the real speedsters are hundreds of thousands of dollars this one can be enjoyed has heated seats has a bluetooth sound system so it's pretty cool yeah when you guys were talking about a collection i expected like more stock cars already like the the first two cars that caught my eye are both like cool like swapped cars um yeah there's a lot more that came from too man i mean it's just so again it's it came out of a targa we sold the targa body on bring a trailer and like so we i think we're pretty neutral on the whole swap but um you know it's got the old like braking system so it kind of still drives like an old-school porsche that's got no top and way more power than you'd ever expect in this little package you know what that weighs not much another car that i already caught my again i don't i don't even know what they're called but i know i've played it's a something evo right yeah yeah i've played this car in video games so many times it's like the the counterpart of the e30 m3 right yes it is essentially it's a gran turismo car for me as well so this is a 92 uh mercedes-benz 190e evo2 they homologated 500 of them and the bodywork is pretty much the exact same that's on the race cars obviously interior and all the other kind of road-worthy stuff adds some weight but it's a 2.5 liter you need to spin it up uh to get the best out of it but one of the jokes that bmw made was if that wing works our air tunnel is broken was it just purely for styling no it was it was actually functional and highly adjustable and they won the dtm championship with this bodywork and this car and bmw was like okay well we were wrong but yeah this was like fender defender e30 m3 mercedes all the time yeah this is my dad's uh first 911. so he bought this in when he was in college uh for 11 000. 1982. we sell it and buy back he sold it to our japanese exporter who worked for us then our and then our president who sold it to road scholars on the east coast and then he bought it back so um 72 911 s and about 200 000 plus miles on it so it's a well-loved porsche but it's all original paint the dog that i grew up with chewed on one of the valet keys and we still have that key so like it's a pretty sentimental car and this was on our first catalog cover and then it was on i think last june somewhere in the late 400s so that mclaren in the back is probably the most significant car that we own really yeah tell me oh okay let's go look at it i don't know anything about race cars so this is you know we were talking about can-am and can-am was this canadian-american endurance series i mean they they were hardcore racers and this is kind of at the beginning of it but if you know the name mclaren now there was a person behind that bruce mclaren and he was an excellent race car driver so this was one of the first times he really put his complete stamp on a car to compete in this can-am series this is a 1967 m6a and it is the one driven by bruce mclaren he won the championship in 1967 in this car uh small block chevy 600 plus horsepower tons of tire tons of aero and grip i've driven the sister car which is an m6b about three inches longer and it is an incredible experience is that the fuel cell right next to you yes that is crazy yeah so these cars killed people you know bruce mclaren died in one of his prototypes a few years later so these were these are dangerous cars they must be respected but um a lot of the can-am cars are kind of unhinged this one is really well balanced i want one of those yeah that thing is sick yeah that thing is sick is this uh do they come this color yes that's cool yeah so um the 675lt over there was actually the first uh mso car that they painted in this marlboro delivery and the color is rocket red it's definitely not going to come through the camera the same way it does in person looks like fluorescent orange it does the tv broadcast would make their true dark red like purple so they engineered the color to play with the tv broadcast and so when it comes to the tv it looks like marlboro red in the past but i could see that so i again i don't know a lot about certain cars i know that the senna and the p1 are like to me that kind of looks similar i know they're very different cars which is the one that's more track focused is it the center or the p1 the cena okay the p1 can definitely hold its own but this one so uh the knock on the p1 from a purist perspective is hybrid assist um but this thing is really really track oriented i mean just the no go for it yeah you gotta close the door too because you gotta just see the spaceship effect of the glass door i don't know where to touch right there yeah you got it so cool it's weird that it's got like brown carbon yeah it's actually red but it looks uh it's pretty dark so in atom in race mode the whole um instrument panel kind of tucks down and all you've got is your rev limiter are you trying to find the the latch yeah i'm stuck it's up in the center so the like right next to your head right there and then i got to manually open it it's not ready i'm not around doors like this off yeah i know i mean not many cars that open like that that would actually be really convenient in a drift car i wonder if there's a rule in formula drift like against it because i have a hard time seeing out the door and we have like zones and stuff that we're trying to fill if you could look through the door and see the edge of the track i mean it that's what it's for i mean you're literally looking you know through a corner yeah you probably shouldn't be looking right down at a corner but in your sport yeah sometimes sometimes i'm looking at it like a painted line on the edge of the track it feels so nice i like the carbon fiber too yeah it was this like fake wood and it's just stupid i mean it was cool for the time but um you know most guys it's static too i don't know if i mentioned that it's not on bags that's cool most guys put it on bags big fan of that yeah so it it's a really enjoyable car to drive it's unibody's not body on frame which was unique for the time and again it's just kind of like this rowdy nobody really like people just freak out about this thing all right so forest right here is the shop foreman of griot's motors not grio's garage it's a lot of tongue twisters going on here but uh i'm excited to see this place it's beautiful thank you thank you yeah so griot's motor started as kind of a concept idea from what we're doing directly on richard griot's car next door which is probably the room that you just toured we had basically this same operation set up and it has expanded into its own business i want to see the floor scrubber though we've been talking about floor scrubbers off camera absolutely so we've got a whole the whole system here and how we put cars through here everything goes through a process so we've got fabrication over area over here right now we're working on a 86 cj7 so it's a jeep completely torn the whole thing down uh the frame has gone out to powder coat all the suspension bits and pieces have also gone out to powder coat so we got everything down down to bare metal and we're able to put this thing into epoxy pressure and now we're just kind of going through and fixing damaged stuff well i like the layout you guys have in here it's very seems very intentional yeah so we're still expanding our capabilities here um in terms of what we can do but we do a lot of like tig welding corrosion repair uh you know i'm building a reserve fuel tank for like a overland jeep right now kind of a mess right now because i didn't know you guys were coming but do do our best to keep the shop clean you were talking about how do we keep it like free i know that there's a solution well i toured like a private collection in st louis one time and they had some sort of like air vacuum hepa filters or something something that like it also sucked all the carbon monoxide out so you could run sure yeah like 200 cars in there at once and be able to stay in there yeah so we have an extraction fan um there's vents on one side of the building and a giant really loud fan over here which helps but in terms of dust it's a constant battle to keep this place clean so yeah all the assembly disassembly happens in these lifts this is a current project that we're working on for a customer a local customer it's a mark ii gti there's a bunch of volkswagen guys around here so we love these things but this guy had one as one of his starter vehicles was like he was 19 so a lot of the stuff that we work on you know doesn't make necessarily like financial sense in terms of these guys will never be able to take these cars and sell them for more than what they're putting into them but they're passion projects and they have like a deep attachment to them so this car is getting a 3.2 from a r32 so a vr6 and it's going to get built to wrap to nine grand by sherman performance on the east coast it sounds so good yeah it's i mean it's one of the coolest sounding motors in my opinion now we actually dry ice blasted this car too cool um tommy everyone's going to go in the comments tommy's got to drive one of our friends just got one oh no way yeah sick his big dry ice they're awesome yeah they they work really well i mean you're not gonna like take paint off a car with them but uh they can solve a lot of problems that will use them in engine bays yeah definitely yeah absolutely so like cool his legs clean his teeth in the morning might take some skin off yeah these are all cars that we're working on um and have restored within the last you know three or four years so this mercedes uh is a 1970 280 sl these originally came with a inline six mechanically fuel injected engine and this is a three and a half liter v8 from a 1970 300 sel so like a big four-door sedan 308 gt4 is the car we're doing a bunch of interior work for um we actually lowered the seat two inches because the guys pretty tall like i had to chop down like the factory seat rails there's not a lot of room for legs and we're just finishing up the interior and then we've got a stratos too which is probably the most unique thing in here this is richard's car and it just needs it's been sitting without being driven for too long so we're gonna go through the carburetors and ignition system and tune up the engine and then we've got a brand new like authentic interior for it so they have these like really crazy carpet i don't know how to describe it yeah some guy some italian guy has a source for it or reproduces it so the factory stratos you can see they have like this suede material on the sides but people will just wear through that like this this car's got 60 000 kilometers so that somebody actually used it so they did leather so you kind of slip into it a little easier without like the gt3s how they make the bolster protectors yeah exactly exactly yeah i always have you seen one of the windows on these things before no check out how that thing like opens and closes that is so weird i like the big cubby it's for a helmet oh oh that's cool so we're like yeah in the process of setting up our shop right now like our new shop what do you think's the most important thing like other than obviously layout layout is the biggest how about most used machine and then like biggest tip for shop setup oh man if you can do it in cad first that's my favorite thing the shop yeah the whole shop so obviously layout i kind of did that i used i figured out i use like home designer and yeah yeah we actually did ours at a 45 but we have like a single in and single out layout so it was kind of the traffic flows a little better yeah the other thing i did was air and electrical all the outlets there's you know welder outlets in between every lift so we can get like a 220 volt tig welder if we have to do any exhaust work or anything like that we kind of have four lifts and then one lift we just determined is going to be kind of like the fab lift so we have to plug there and then we have one another end of the building definitely yeah that's that's super handy you can't what i did i didn't want to any area in here that we couldn't get an air hose reel to um the lev rack is probably one of my favorites though yeah this is called a levrack so uh you know like probably the hardest part about what we do is storing all the crap that we pull off these cars like it's just thousands and thousands of parts sign me up right yeah this is the coolest thing i've ever seen and when you get some people like walking through filming a video you can close all these things and hide the mess our current plan was because literally the same exact problem we were going to use kind of like build carts if you will like rule carts per car and then forklift them up we have like a mezzanine kind of like that yeah so when the car is kind of in tear down stage just forklift up the the rack but this is yeah how expensive are these they're pretty expensive like like this whole thing 20 grand i think it was a little bit more than that yeah um but it's pretty cool though i'd have to look at the quote again yeah it's it's a little scratched if you want to sell it i know right what's this for that's for oh yeah we can't just walk by this thing yeah i know it's a mclaren f1 engine look at that i believe it's from the 90s i don't know exactly what car this is from it was a gift it is like i just love i could just stare at it the engineering wild yeah so the fuel sprays all the way up here yeah the the standoff injectors it's kind of a race car thing and then over here you can see this is this would be a stressed member of the car too so it's actually part of the chassis i believe this is the oil pump you you can see how this would just fit into like a monocoque it would just like slip straight in and seal all the passages so cool uh are you gonna be here on sunday i don't have any plans to be what's on site well just we're doing that like little meet but my guys would like love to come and check this place out oh yeah like between the shop layout and like sure stuff like this it might be it'll be like a field day yeah and we offer detailing services so you know gria's garage has the products and for the people who don't want to do the work themselves we will do the work for them um so we do everything from you know washes to ceramic coating full paint correction everything here you'll watch your car in here as well yeah we do yeah this is watertight how do you um like so clutch shop which will turn into a detail shop would make the perfect like wash bay yeah and it has a lift in it too for stuff like ice blasting so i'm but i'm wondering what is the process like to install drainage yeah the whole floor we did yeah everything from that wall this way is all new construction so does this go outside or it doesn't it drains into the floor and then goes through an oil water separator and that's like i don't know what the laws are where you're at but they they come down on like car wash places here pretty hard they don't want any of the runoff getting into the the sound or whatever so being inside yeah here's the four machine yeah you got his name on it too yeah moto velocity fancy next door we couldn't do any refinishing at all now we can actually fully refinish cars so this we did the 68 corvette it's fresh out of the paint booth it has five coats of clear and it's gonna get completely wet sanded flat to remove all the orange peel and polished out taylor is working on the hard top for the cj7 in there full fiberglass hard top fiberglass repair just fixing anything on it before we respray it with this like textured coating that they came with dirty work happens in there and then we've got the actual paint booth and this is where the cleaner stuff happens i don't know how familiar you are with this kind of process but this is like uh our toner bank cool so it is like full waterborne ppg system envirobase so we can mix any color back here which is handy because we'll do like bumper resprays like nick has a m5 that we did like this crazy metallic pearl original color so you probably have the gun and then it tells you which to pull from mix your own exactly yeah we've got the scanner that we can scan paint with and it'll measure the metallic flake and then the color and get us close and then taylor has to work his magic to just dial it in and get the perfect color absolutely it's cool in here yeah it feels good in here almost more interested in the building than the cars right the insulation that they put on this building is incredible we need it in florida i don't know what it is for sure here's another levrax system we can load it up on a truck uh we do have enough room in the rig i need to put their instagram on the screen right here maybe they'll see the video maybe they can hook us up with a deal there's the vr6 that's uh our core motor for the gti this is a fun one that we've been working on it's kind of like a it's phillips car but it's kind of like a shop project i built a full header for this car full exhaust system and we love the cutter yeah that looks really good thank you yeah yeah thank you um yeah it's a six into two all the way back and it's gotta get those like they almost look like square runners i had to make them that's sick yeah and because the exhaust ports on the l28 some of the l28 heads are rectangular so i i didn't want to like do it janky and have a circle so they made two different heads for these and some of them are round port and some of them are square port has this been started since the color looks awesome yeah it's been run on the dyno it's just been run pretty hard on the street yeah it's fun we built the catch can and did you know everything on this thing put the motor in it's a dave rebello built um three liter so uh it's got about 260 to the wheels this seems pretty light i bet that feels good it's really fun you know there's a lot of different stuff in here but um including like a unimog which we're walking by is kind of crazy um it's such like a vast collection there's so much stuff that i know nothing about i know i know that it's cool but i don't know enough to say anything right i hear you people can pay to have their cars stored here um it's climate controlled we keep everything hooked up to a battery manager um this color is cool have that heritage i think it's called heritage white we'll call it beige yeah right maybe you'd like this this rig i know uh oh this one this is the this is the drift the drift yeah so this is a bob bondurant built crown vic and they did all the modifications on this before you know even like the marauders existed the brake duct right yeah you don't see that i think what they did is they cut this off a svt mustang and then just attached it so it's got a the the mustang engine as well from the cobra roll cage doesn't seem half bad no i expected it to be like hanging down in your face yeah bob bondurant signed the dash it's got a fuel cell it's a manual that's the big thing right so what i wanted do you know if it has angle mods that's what we're talking about i doubt it i don't think it does but that'd be pretty cool i've never had this car up in the air so can you could you turn the wheel from that side i don't open the door because it's kind of tight oh look okay that's it that's all you get oh it's it's still even got the bump stop so i'm gonna go i'm gonna venture and go ahead and say that it does not have angle mods full stock big sad they didn't even shave the bump mike was this the the car that you said you wanted for your dad yes this is my dad's car basically older though what year is this one uh it's a 72. where did you guys get this car from is this new no okay we've had there was one of these for sale in miami that i almost bought i love this car so much this is the same called my e36 oh really no way so uh funny story i have seen yeah i have seen your e36 so that makes sense i ordered a 901.2 in this color and they ended up not doing paint to sample on the 991.2s and i was real sad about it so i got lava and then i was like i really love this color and i want to see it on something so i painted my e36 that color sick i've never seen an actual like maritime blue portion person though yeah this is a euro rs too so it came from japan it seems like uh i've learned a lot of the cooler colors came from japan because like in the u.s it seemed like they made kind of like more boring stuff than the japanese dudes about all the cool colors yeah it had like that weird pink color i almost got a pink slant nose that i think was brought over from oh yeah exactly yeah so cool they they're different because like the way the the shell is molded is different compared to the modern seats but yeah it's all stopped like slammer it was like this before you can give your hair out yeah you'll be all right get nervous i just i don't want to like sometimes people see those are just disrespectful but some old cars you need to do it yeah this is a factory porsche cup car you'd buy this thing and it you know it's ready for the track i just drove one of these i think it was a little newer yeah yeah those seats are sick i love this car so much this thing's cool i was hearing the story about these yeah these are uh it's weird because either nick will buy a car or richard will buy a car and then they start like multiplying secretly like i think they're trying to get every color um yeah we're missing tornado red um i love the blue nick had one of these in college one of my friends had one of these too he had like a couple of them they're just so neat i drove it i was blown away by like just how well balanced of a car sound like everything feels super engaging this thing is a kind of a trip lancia delta integrale is the evo model martini special they only made like 300 of them this one only has 165 kilometers on it wow since brand new so is this did this come from japan this one came from italy so cool if you go take a look at the the interior the plastic is still on the carpet and the door panels like it's literally like a brand new car which kind of sucks because it means we can't really drive it without devaluing it wow but just mint we did a timing belt service on it so i could remove my fear of the timing belt exploding oh just because it's from like dry rot just from dry rot yeah exactly and then this thing is the star of the shell right here how many miles on this thing i don't know it's low i got a friend that'll buy it right now yeah i got a guy who he we can talk we can talk his name his name is ricer miata he's got a big pocket full of cash ready to buy this thing yeah both of these actually have super low mileage i can tell it's the only like i bet this is factory paint too yeah it doesn't look faded and every single red miata is like faded beyond belize super oxidized yeah it's cool it's like the gt2 version of my car i'm surprised you guys drive it to the dealer you said 8 000 miles yep every e46 just smells like crayons to sing is when jason and i were talking and talking and he was talking about you know maybe working for griot's motors a year ago he uh he pulled up in this thing and i just heard like this chopping noise happening outside and i was like did a drag truck show up or like what's going on outside and i saw this thing and the work that he had done to it and i've known him for a long time too but it was just kind of like the stamp stamp of approval it's got like 800 horsepower wise tech supercharged um he hasn't taken it to drag strip but he also has this thing called i think it's called like the thriller chiller or something like that it uses the ac refrigerant to cool the water to air intercooler that's so cool i was literally just talking about that with a friend i didn't know it was an actual thing he has his water lines plumbed to the trunk and then he's got a tank in the back with uh i don't know if it's coolant or distilled water or whatever and it's just constantly circulating and it gets like frigid so you don't have to put ice in it or anything so here was here's what i was thinking that maybe this is a great maybe a terrible idea if you can correct me on this would it make sense to put your air intake for your car in your cabin if you if you're already running the ac it'd be sucking in cooler air the air has already been pre-filtered i would say if you could open your windows because if you had your windows closed you think it would suck all the it would like i don't think it would suck the oxygen out but you you know like your eardrums might pop oh the noise but that noise is amazing well the pressure difference because it's sucking and if they're unless there's like air coming from somewhere else inside the car i don't know i want to try it you should try it about it as a video induction noise for a turbo car it would sound so cool if you had like the cone filter right at your feet just you got to have a good tune on it no backfiring yeah forgot to feel light lighting yourself on fire in the process just like just turbo surge the entire time well thank you for uh yeah absolutely so cool happy to thanks for thanks for making it all the way up here from florida no i'm i'm pumped to be able to put this in it's a tight schedule but this place is awesome i know you guys didn't get to see every little nuance of this facility but they've done a fantastic job and i've i've found it really cool how diverse the collection is um both nick the owner forest over at griot motors um just really cool people really down earth and the cars have been really awesome um this was actually supposed to be just like a little segment in the beginning of our official fd practice video but uh we wound up talking about a lot and it was cool because there's a lot of like little nuances about the cars it wasn't just like hey look at this car um so i really hope you guys enjoyed it it's a little bit of a departure from what we normally do but awesome people of course awesome detailing products as well that was funny we didn't even talk about them we were just so involved with all the cars here but uh i've definitely been super appreciative of griot is helping me along throughout the fd season uh getting us hooked up with all the detailing stuff we need i'm looking forward to using more of their stuff and kind of learning a little bit more about some of the products that i haven't familiarized myself with but overall this is just really awesome thank you nick i appreciate it um and i'll see you guys soon when you say nobody knows youwhat's up guys welcome to this video again i had to make sure psychopath mike didn't switch my camera to 24 frames per second look at this look at this giant fantastic building so we are in uh seattle for formula drift and we wanted to make a quick pit stop at griot's because their headquarters is actually uh i think like a 15-minute drive from the airport uh we're gonna check it out today um and also heads up if you guys are in the area sunday we're gonna be doing like kind of like a meet and greet here at their location with the s15 maybe the e36 too uh from roughly like 4 p.m to 7 p.m i'll post more information in the description but uh should be a good time guys so we're here with nick griot uh super super cool to meet you man yeah you too adam um and uh we are lucky enough to get a tour of this place so this right here i know isn't like the the master mind collection that you guys have but there's some pretty cool cars in here and i know we're going to go to the other buildings this thing caught my eye he was going to tell me a little bit about it before so um tell us a little bit about this thing yeah so this is our detail wagon as we have dubbed it but it basically started life as an 89 325 ix we pulled it out of japan i think we bought it for like seven thousand dollars and uh it was all mangled so we got in the car because we didn't get him in the states so we were pretty excited to get it and my dad sat in the seat and had four doors at one point in time can i open it yeah he didn't like um how the b pillar kind of blocked his vision he's very particular about that and so he said can we make it a two-door started taking some measurements and uh long story short we ended up taking the b pillar from the front door moving it nine inches back to be able to accept the coupe door and in that early measurement we also found out that stock e30 m3 fenders fit perfectly on the length of the wagon so it's all oem steel from bmw that pain stinky grafted on there's custom braces inside like you said you thought it was oem it is so freaking cool man i'm like the biggest wagon guy and i was mad at myself because i don't know a lot about like older bmws or e30s and i thought it was a stock car that i hadn't heard of before and i'm sure whoever built this car would like take that as the biggest compliment ever exactly i mean we that is the biggest compliment because we have a lot of e30 freaks in the building um and just in particular when you start calling things m3 or putting m3 fenders on it uh you got to be right because some people have slapped them on and done a lot of different things but you know we took this car to sema in 2016 and then uh we got a lot of attention with it we actually got to talk about the motor too oh yeah because it was an all-wheel drive car and we um we kind of committed blasphemy and cut the front wheel drive component off so that we could fit a bigger motor in it and the motor actually um came out of a 1995 540 so it's a m60 v8 and all of the engine bay was cleaned and shaved by forest uh who you're going to meet later at griot's motors but it's really his project in entirety and we got the six-speed manual out of that same 540 redid the clutch and uh so now it's a rear drive car that had 120 horsepower now it has about 300 horsepower so you guys have this building you have grilled motors which is like more of like a workshop and you have grio storage is that what it's called so griot's motors is storage restoration detailing consignment and sales and my brother runs that side of the business i have to keep ourselves separate so i do the chemicals he does the car sales i think his job is slightly more fun but we still you know both have pretty rad jobs so all these cars these are your dad's cars yes a couple of my cars are in here i sneak them into storage but at the same time they are mostly his cars and you know as we were saying he doesn't really have a specific taste he appreciates you know design and just how the car drives is this a speedster it is a speedster that's a big money car it's not a real one okay got it but this one's pretty cool yeah um so it's an intermechanica roadster so it's a glass body car it actually has all 911 guts so it's a 930 targa just a three liter straights or flat six so it sounds like a 911 it pulls like a 911 it costs 40 grand that's cool so it's not you know the real speedsters are hundreds of thousands of dollars this one can be enjoyed has heated seats has a bluetooth sound system so it's pretty cool yeah when you guys were talking about a collection i expected like more stock cars already like the the first two cars that caught my eye are both like cool like swapped cars um yeah there's a lot more that came from too man i mean it's just so again it's it came out of a targa we sold the targa body on bring a trailer and like so we i think we're pretty neutral on the whole swap but um you know it's got the old like braking system so it kind of still drives like an old-school porsche that's got no top and way more power than you'd ever expect in this little package you know what that weighs not much another car that i already caught my again i don't i don't even know what they're called but i know i've played it's a something evo right yeah yeah i've played this car in video games so many times it's like the the counterpart of the e30 m3 right yes it is essentially it's a gran turismo car for me as well so this is a 92 uh mercedes-benz 190e evo2 they homologated 500 of them and the bodywork is pretty much the exact same that's on the race cars obviously interior and all the other kind of road-worthy stuff adds some weight but it's a 2.5 liter you need to spin it up uh to get the best out of it but one of the jokes that bmw made was if that wing works our air tunnel is broken was it just purely for styling no it was it was actually functional and highly adjustable and they won the dtm championship with this bodywork and this car and bmw was like okay well we were wrong but yeah this was like fender defender e30 m3 mercedes all the time yeah this is my dad's uh first 911. so he bought this in when he was in college uh for 11 000. 1982. we sell it and buy back he sold it to our japanese exporter who worked for us then our and then our president who sold it to road scholars on the east coast and then he bought it back so um 72 911 s and about 200 000 plus miles on it so it's a well-loved porsche but it's all original paint the dog that i grew up with chewed on one of the valet keys and we still have that key so like it's a pretty sentimental car and this was on our first catalog cover and then it was on i think last june somewhere in the late 400s so that mclaren in the back is probably the most significant car that we own really yeah tell me oh okay let's go look at it i don't know anything about race cars so this is you know we were talking about can-am and can-am was this canadian-american endurance series i mean they they were hardcore racers and this is kind of at the beginning of it but if you know the name mclaren now there was a person behind that bruce mclaren and he was an excellent race car driver so this was one of the first times he really put his complete stamp on a car to compete in this can-am series this is a 1967 m6a and it is the one driven by bruce mclaren he won the championship in 1967 in this car uh small block chevy 600 plus horsepower tons of tire tons of aero and grip i've driven the sister car which is an m6b about three inches longer and it is an incredible experience is that the fuel cell right next to you yes that is crazy yeah so these cars killed people you know bruce mclaren died in one of his prototypes a few years later so these were these are dangerous cars they must be respected but um a lot of the can-am cars are kind of unhinged this one is really well balanced i want one of those yeah that thing is sick yeah that thing is sick is this uh do they come this color yes that's cool yeah so um the 675lt over there was actually the first uh mso car that they painted in this marlboro delivery and the color is rocket red it's definitely not going to come through the camera the same way it does in person looks like fluorescent orange it does the tv broadcast would make their true dark red like purple so they engineered the color to play with the tv broadcast and so when it comes to the tv it looks like marlboro red in the past but i could see that so i again i don't know a lot about certain cars i know that the senna and the p1 are like to me that kind of looks similar i know they're very different cars which is the one that's more track focused is it the center or the p1 the cena okay the p1 can definitely hold its own but this one so uh the knock on the p1 from a purist perspective is hybrid assist um but this thing is really really track oriented i mean just the no go for it yeah you gotta close the door too because you gotta just see the spaceship effect of the glass door i don't know where to touch right there yeah you got it so cool it's weird that it's got like brown carbon yeah it's actually red but it looks uh it's pretty dark so in atom in race mode the whole um instrument panel kind of tucks down and all you've got is your rev limiter are you trying to find the the latch yeah i'm stuck it's up in the center so the like right next to your head right there and then i got to manually open it it's not ready i'm not around doors like this off yeah i know i mean not many cars that open like that that would actually be really convenient in a drift car i wonder if there's a rule in formula drift like against it because i have a hard time seeing out the door and we have like zones and stuff that we're trying to fill if you could look through the door and see the edge of the track i mean it that's what it's for i mean you're literally looking you know through a corner yeah you probably shouldn't be looking right down at a corner but in your sport yeah sometimes sometimes i'm looking at it like a painted line on the edge of the track it feels so nice i like the carbon fiber too yeah it was this like fake wood and it's just stupid i mean it was cool for the time but um you know most guys it's static too i don't know if i mentioned that it's not on bags that's cool most guys put it on bags big fan of that yeah so it it's a really enjoyable car to drive it's unibody's not body on frame which was unique for the time and again it's just kind of like this rowdy nobody really like people just freak out about this thing all right so forest right here is the shop foreman of griot's motors not grio's garage it's a lot of tongue twisters going on here but uh i'm excited to see this place it's beautiful thank you thank you yeah so griot's motor started as kind of a concept idea from what we're doing directly on richard griot's car next door which is probably the room that you just toured we had basically this same operation set up and it has expanded into its own business i want to see the floor scrubber though we've been talking about floor scrubbers off camera absolutely so we've got a whole the whole system here and how we put cars through here everything goes through a process so we've got fabrication over area over here right now we're working on a 86 cj7 so it's a jeep completely torn the whole thing down uh the frame has gone out to powder coat all the suspension bits and pieces have also gone out to powder coat so we got everything down down to bare metal and we're able to put this thing into epoxy pressure and now we're just kind of going through and fixing damaged stuff well i like the layout you guys have in here it's very seems very intentional yeah so we're still expanding our capabilities here um in terms of what we can do but we do a lot of like tig welding corrosion repair uh you know i'm building a reserve fuel tank for like a overland jeep right now kind of a mess right now because i didn't know you guys were coming but do do our best to keep the shop clean you were talking about how do we keep it like free i know that there's a solution well i toured like a private collection in st louis one time and they had some sort of like air vacuum hepa filters or something something that like it also sucked all the carbon monoxide out so you could run sure yeah like 200 cars in there at once and be able to stay in there yeah so we have an extraction fan um there's vents on one side of the building and a giant really loud fan over here which helps but in terms of dust it's a constant battle to keep this place clean so yeah all the assembly disassembly happens in these lifts this is a current project that we're working on for a customer a local customer it's a mark ii gti there's a bunch of volkswagen guys around here so we love these things but this guy had one as one of his starter vehicles was like he was 19 so a lot of the stuff that we work on you know doesn't make necessarily like financial sense in terms of these guys will never be able to take these cars and sell them for more than what they're putting into them but they're passion projects and they have like a deep attachment to them so this car is getting a 3.2 from a r32 so a vr6 and it's going to get built to wrap to nine grand by sherman performance on the east coast it sounds so good yeah it's i mean it's one of the coolest sounding motors in my opinion now we actually dry ice blasted this car too cool um tommy everyone's going to go in the comments tommy's got to drive one of our friends just got one oh no way yeah sick his big dry ice they're awesome yeah they they work really well i mean you're not gonna like take paint off a car with them but uh they can solve a lot of problems that will use them in engine bays yeah definitely yeah absolutely so like cool his legs clean his teeth in the morning might take some skin off yeah these are all cars that we're working on um and have restored within the last you know three or four years so this mercedes uh is a 1970 280 sl these originally came with a inline six mechanically fuel injected engine and this is a three and a half liter v8 from a 1970 300 sel so like a big four-door sedan 308 gt4 is the car we're doing a bunch of interior work for um we actually lowered the seat two inches because the guys pretty tall like i had to chop down like the factory seat rails there's not a lot of room for legs and we're just finishing up the interior and then we've got a stratos too which is probably the most unique thing in here this is richard's car and it just needs it's been sitting without being driven for too long so we're gonna go through the carburetors and ignition system and tune up the engine and then we've got a brand new like authentic interior for it so they have these like really crazy carpet i don't know how to describe it yeah some guy some italian guy has a source for it or reproduces it so the factory stratos you can see they have like this suede material on the sides but people will just wear through that like this this car's got 60 000 kilometers so that somebody actually used it so they did leather so you kind of slip into it a little easier without like the gt3s how they make the bolster protectors yeah exactly exactly yeah i always have you seen one of the windows on these things before no check out how that thing like opens and closes that is so weird i like the big cubby it's for a helmet oh oh that's cool so we're like yeah in the process of setting up our shop right now like our new shop what do you think's the most important thing like other than obviously layout layout is the biggest how about most used machine and then like biggest tip for shop setup oh man if you can do it in cad first that's my favorite thing the shop yeah the whole shop so obviously layout i kind of did that i used i figured out i use like home designer and yeah yeah we actually did ours at a 45 but we have like a single in and single out layout so it was kind of the traffic flows a little better yeah the other thing i did was air and electrical all the outlets there's you know welder outlets in between every lift so we can get like a 220 volt tig welder if we have to do any exhaust work or anything like that we kind of have four lifts and then one lift we just determined is going to be kind of like the fab lift so we have to plug there and then we have one another end of the building definitely yeah that's that's super handy you can't what i did i didn't want to any area in here that we couldn't get an air hose reel to um the lev rack is probably one of my favorites though yeah this is called a levrack so uh you know like probably the hardest part about what we do is storing all the crap that we pull off these cars like it's just thousands and thousands of parts sign me up right yeah this is the coolest thing i've ever seen and when you get some people like walking through filming a video you can close all these things and hide the mess our current plan was because literally the same exact problem we were going to use kind of like build carts if you will like rule carts per car and then forklift them up we have like a mezzanine kind of like that yeah so when the car is kind of in tear down stage just forklift up the the rack but this is yeah how expensive are these they're pretty expensive like like this whole thing 20 grand i think it was a little bit more than that yeah um but it's pretty cool though i'd have to look at the quote again yeah it's it's a little scratched if you want to sell it i know right what's this for that's for oh yeah we can't just walk by this thing yeah i know it's a mclaren f1 engine look at that i believe it's from the 90s i don't know exactly what car this is from it was a gift it is like i just love i could just stare at it the engineering wild yeah so the fuel sprays all the way up here yeah the the standoff injectors it's kind of a race car thing and then over here you can see this is this would be a stressed member of the car too so it's actually part of the chassis i believe this is the oil pump you you can see how this would just fit into like a monocoque it would just like slip straight in and seal all the passages so cool uh are you gonna be here on sunday i don't have any plans to be what's on site well just we're doing that like little meet but my guys would like love to come and check this place out oh yeah like between the shop layout and like sure stuff like this it might be it'll be like a field day yeah and we offer detailing services so you know gria's garage has the products and for the people who don't want to do the work themselves we will do the work for them um so we do everything from you know washes to ceramic coating full paint correction everything here you'll watch your car in here as well yeah we do yeah this is watertight how do you um like so clutch shop which will turn into a detail shop would make the perfect like wash bay yeah and it has a lift in it too for stuff like ice blasting so i'm but i'm wondering what is the process like to install drainage yeah the whole floor we did yeah everything from that wall this way is all new construction so does this go outside or it doesn't it drains into the floor and then goes through an oil water separator and that's like i don't know what the laws are where you're at but they they come down on like car wash places here pretty hard they don't want any of the runoff getting into the the sound or whatever so being inside yeah here's the four machine yeah you got his name on it too yeah moto velocity fancy next door we couldn't do any refinishing at all now we can actually fully refinish cars so this we did the 68 corvette it's fresh out of the paint booth it has five coats of clear and it's gonna get completely wet sanded flat to remove all the orange peel and polished out taylor is working on the hard top for the cj7 in there full fiberglass hard top fiberglass repair just fixing anything on it before we respray it with this like textured coating that they came with dirty work happens in there and then we've got the actual paint booth and this is where the cleaner stuff happens i don't know how familiar you are with this kind of process but this is like uh our toner bank cool so it is like full waterborne ppg system envirobase so we can mix any color back here which is handy because we'll do like bumper resprays like nick has a m5 that we did like this crazy metallic pearl original color so you probably have the gun and then it tells you which to pull from mix your own exactly yeah we've got the scanner that we can scan paint with and it'll measure the metallic flake and then the color and get us close and then taylor has to work his magic to just dial it in and get the perfect color absolutely it's cool in here yeah it feels good in here almost more interested in the building than the cars right the insulation that they put on this building is incredible we need it in florida i don't know what it is for sure here's another levrax system we can load it up on a truck uh we do have enough room in the rig i need to put their instagram on the screen right here maybe they'll see the video maybe they can hook us up with a deal there's the vr6 that's uh our core motor for the gti this is a fun one that we've been working on it's kind of like a it's phillips car but it's kind of like a shop project i built a full header for this car full exhaust system and we love the cutter yeah that looks really good thank you yeah yeah thank you um yeah it's a six into two all the way back and it's gotta get those like they almost look like square runners i had to make them that's sick yeah and because the exhaust ports on the l28 some of the l28 heads are rectangular so i i didn't want to like do it janky and have a circle so they made two different heads for these and some of them are round port and some of them are square port has this been started since the color looks awesome yeah it's been run on the dyno it's just been run pretty hard on the street yeah it's fun we built the catch can and did you know everything on this thing put the motor in it's a dave rebello built um three liter so uh it's got about 260 to the wheels this seems pretty light i bet that feels good it's really fun you know there's a lot of different stuff in here but um including like a unimog which we're walking by is kind of crazy um it's such like a vast collection there's so much stuff that i know nothing about i know i know that it's cool but i don't know enough to say anything right i hear you people can pay to have their cars stored here um it's climate controlled we keep everything hooked up to a battery manager um this color is cool have that heritage i think it's called heritage white we'll call it beige yeah right maybe you'd like this this rig i know uh oh this one this is the this is the drift the drift yeah so this is a bob bondurant built crown vic and they did all the modifications on this before you know even like the marauders existed the brake duct right yeah you don't see that i think what they did is they cut this off a svt mustang and then just attached it so it's got a the the mustang engine as well from the cobra roll cage doesn't seem half bad no i expected it to be like hanging down in your face yeah bob bondurant signed the dash it's got a fuel cell it's a manual that's the big thing right so what i wanted do you know if it has angle mods that's what we're talking about i doubt it i don't think it does but that'd be pretty cool i've never had this car up in the air so can you could you turn the wheel from that side i don't open the door because it's kind of tight oh look okay that's it that's all you get oh it's it's still even got the bump stop so i'm gonna go i'm gonna venture and go ahead and say that it does not have angle mods full stock big sad they didn't even shave the bump mike was this the the car that you said you wanted for your dad yes this is my dad's car basically older though what year is this one uh it's a 72. where did you guys get this car from is this new no okay we've had there was one of these for sale in miami that i almost bought i love this car so much this is the same called my e36 oh really no way so uh funny story i have seen yeah i have seen your e36 so that makes sense i ordered a 901.2 in this color and they ended up not doing paint to sample on the 991.2s and i was real sad about it so i got lava and then i was like i really love this color and i want to see it on something so i painted my e36 that color sick i've never seen an actual like maritime blue portion person though yeah this is a euro rs too so it came from japan it seems like uh i've learned a lot of the cooler colors came from japan because like in the u.s it seemed like they made kind of like more boring stuff than the japanese dudes about all the cool colors yeah it had like that weird pink color i almost got a pink slant nose that i think was brought over from oh yeah exactly yeah so cool they they're different because like the way the the shell is molded is different compared to the modern seats but yeah it's all stopped like slammer it was like this before you can give your hair out yeah you'll be all right get nervous i just i don't want to like sometimes people see those are just disrespectful but some old cars you need to do it yeah this is a factory porsche cup car you'd buy this thing and it you know it's ready for the track i just drove one of these i think it was a little newer yeah yeah those seats are sick i love this car so much this thing's cool i was hearing the story about these yeah these are uh it's weird because either nick will buy a car or richard will buy a car and then they start like multiplying secretly like i think they're trying to get every color um yeah we're missing tornado red um i love the blue nick had one of these in college one of my friends had one of these too he had like a couple of them they're just so neat i drove it i was blown away by like just how well balanced of a car sound like everything feels super engaging this thing is a kind of a trip lancia delta integrale is the evo model martini special they only made like 300 of them this one only has 165 kilometers on it wow since brand new so is this did this come from japan this one came from italy so cool if you go take a look at the the interior the plastic is still on the carpet and the door panels like it's literally like a brand new car which kind of sucks because it means we can't really drive it without devaluing it wow but just mint we did a timing belt service on it so i could remove my fear of the timing belt exploding oh just because it's from like dry rot just from dry rot yeah exactly and then this thing is the star of the shell right here how many miles on this thing i don't know it's low i got a friend that'll buy it right now yeah i got a guy who he we can talk we can talk his name his name is ricer miata he's got a big pocket full of cash ready to buy this thing yeah both of these actually have super low mileage i can tell it's the only like i bet this is factory paint too yeah it doesn't look faded and every single red miata is like faded beyond belize super oxidized yeah it's cool it's like the gt2 version of my car i'm surprised you guys drive it to the dealer you said 8 000 miles yep every e46 just smells like crayons to sing is when jason and i were talking and talking and he was talking about you know maybe working for griot's motors a year ago he uh he pulled up in this thing and i just heard like this chopping noise happening outside and i was like did a drag truck show up or like what's going on outside and i saw this thing and the work that he had done to it and i've known him for a long time too but it was just kind of like the stamp stamp of approval it's got like 800 horsepower wise tech supercharged um he hasn't taken it to drag strip but he also has this thing called i think it's called like the thriller chiller or something like that it uses the ac refrigerant to cool the water to air intercooler that's so cool i was literally just talking about that with a friend i didn't know it was an actual thing he has his water lines plumbed to the trunk and then he's got a tank in the back with uh i don't know if it's coolant or distilled water or whatever and it's just constantly circulating and it gets like frigid so you don't have to put ice in it or anything so here was here's what i was thinking that maybe this is a great maybe a terrible idea if you can correct me on this would it make sense to put your air intake for your car in your cabin if you if you're already running the ac it'd be sucking in cooler air the air has already been pre-filtered i would say if you could open your windows because if you had your windows closed you think it would suck all the it would like i don't think it would suck the oxygen out but you you know like your eardrums might pop oh the noise but that noise is amazing well the pressure difference because it's sucking and if they're unless there's like air coming from somewhere else inside the car i don't know i want to try it you should try it about it as a video induction noise for a turbo car it would sound so cool if you had like the cone filter right at your feet just you got to have a good tune on it no backfiring yeah forgot to feel light lighting yourself on fire in the process just like just turbo surge the entire time well thank you for uh yeah absolutely so cool happy to thanks for thanks for making it all the way up here from florida no i'm i'm pumped to be able to put this in it's a tight schedule but this place is awesome i know you guys didn't get to see every little nuance of this facility but they've done a fantastic job and i've i've found it really cool how diverse the collection is um both nick the owner forest over at griot motors um just really cool people really down earth and the cars have been really awesome um this was actually supposed to be just like a little segment in the beginning of our official fd practice video but uh we wound up talking about a lot and it was cool because there's a lot of like little nuances about the cars it wasn't just like hey look at this car um so i really hope you guys enjoyed it it's a little bit of a departure from what we normally do but awesome people of course awesome detailing products as well that was funny we didn't even talk about them we were just so involved with all the cars here but uh i've definitely been super appreciative of griot is helping me along throughout the fd season uh getting us hooked up with all the detailing stuff we need i'm looking forward to using more of their stuff and kind of learning a little bit more about some of the products that i haven't familiarized myself with but overall this is just really awesome thank you nick i appreciate it um and i'll see you guys soon when you say nobody knows you\n"