Sludgo Rides Shotgun with hardtuned — Explained

The Riding Shotgun project has been an interesting one for me, to say the least, and as I picked up the e-phone to chat with the seventh subject of the series I couldn’t help but recall what a certain Mr. Gump had to say about that box of chocolates. Thus far in the project, whenever I’ve connected with any of the RS subjects, I’ve never known what I was going to get, and @hardtuned was no different. A handsome, youngish guy with chiseled features and a slender athletic build, he greeted me with a broad smile and an enthusiasm that was contagious. And when he began my ride-along by offering me a “ten-second tour” of his garage and its eclectic occupants, I knew I was in for another fascinating journey.

Nice garage.

It’s under my house. There’s a single door that opens up into about a 1,500-foot space. It’s kind of nice—a stealth storage area for sure. Right now there’s a Metris van right inside the door and then there’s a back area where there’s a ’66 VW Bus and a Porsche and of course some Alfa Romeo stuff and an Eriba Puck trailer. It works out well. We’ve lived here since ’98 and I’ve restored a bunch of stuff down here.

A Porsche?

It’s a ’65 912 chassis and it’s, well…white hides a lot of sins. I think the car had its roof cut off at one point and has had a lot of stuff happen to it over time, but it’s got a 3.0-liter in it and an ’84 front suspension and American Racing wheels. It’s a good one.

What gave you the car bug?

Birth and brainwashing! My father was always into cars. He bought and sold stuff while he was in college—two-hundred-dollar TR-3s that he’d paint for twenty-five bucks. He had a whole host of stuff he went through over his life. My initials are ‘J.A.G.’—he says that’s because he had a ’62 flat-floor E-type that he had to sell just before I was born when he and my mom moved from Southern California to Seattle.

The car thing really glued us together as a family. Both my mom and dad were into it. They autocrossed Corvettes in the late ‘60s, and dad did corner work for the SCCA back then too, so I grew up around their hobby of buying things and building things and selling things. Dad used to tell me stories of how he’d take me to the Porsche dealer when I was three and I could tell them if the wheels on whatever car were wrong!

The pic you sent me of your Mom in her racing helmet standing next to her Corvette is golden.

It was taken I think probably in ’68-ish in Southern California. It’s a ’64 Corvette and my dad tells stories about making eight sets of wheels for it to get ten-inch wide wheels that fit under the stock fenders. The story behind the story is that when they moved from Arizona to California after my dad graduated college they used that same Corvette to pull a U-Haul carrying all their stuff!

Most unusual car story?

In high school I gave a speech on how to put the top up on an English car, and to demonstrate I drove our Westfield Seven onto the school campus then into the school and down the hallway into the classroom. I don’t remember what I got for my grade!

When did you learn to drive?

I got my first car when I was eleven. An MGB. I had help from my father to buy it and we bought it to work on together. I was twelve or thirteen when we finished up. By then I’d driven some go-karts, but never competitively, just around the neighborhood. My first stick-shift car was when I was twelve and a half. It was an MG TF 1500, and by the time I was thirteen I was driving around with my mom on the back roads a lot. Then as soon as I got my license I started autocrossing, and when I was sixteen I went to the Bondurant school.

Tell me about your competition history and how J.A.G. Promotions began.

Well, I got a late start by today’s standards because I wasn’t racing karts competitively at age four, but when I began autocrossing at sixteen I was fairly successful. I started out with my MGB and then a mid-year ’65 Corvette with giant flares.

Then we had the Westfield Seven that kind of turned into a family autocross car and and I also had a Mini Cooper that I’d built. Then in ’92 my dad and I did this rally and concours event in our MG TC. The first place prize was a trip to England for two, and the second place prize was a four-day course at the Jim Russell school; we won second place. My dad asked me if I wanted to take the course and I was like, “Yes I do!” So I did that and thought that was pretty fun and kept racing autocross, but decided to start running SCCA events, too. It was kind of eye-opening.

We got a Sports 2000 and I ran a half-season in ’93, and wasn’t immediately super-quick out of the gate, but I came up to speed fairly fast and then won the San Francisco region Sports 2000 championship in ’94—that turned into the pro series for the Sports 2s.

At that time I was studying advertising, and with the help of some friends who were doing race car PR stuff I put together some racing sponsorships and that’s how the whole racing thing got started.

A favorite question I like to ask racers: What’s more important—a fast car or a fast driver?

Well, it’s more like how many guys are out there who are good enough to be at the top but never get the opportunity because the equipment isn’t there? It’s kind of like Mario Andretti. He had terrible luck with his equipment. Obviously he overcame this but could have won more. You definitely need the equipment and you need to get it to a point where it shows decently, but you also have to know how to get around a track. So I’ll say “both.”

All modesty aside, were you a fast driver?

Looking back at my own racing stuff I was pretty impatient. While I did win an SCCA Pro Racing Sports 2000 series I also crashed into people a fair amount. In one race I was on the pole by 1.1 seconds—a huge amount—and I totally spun off the track and ran into a wall when I was warming up my tires. Awesome. So I came back into the field in fourth and tried to make it all up on that first corner and that didn’t work. I hit somebody and got penalized for it. Had to come in and came back from a lap down to finish second, but I could’ve won by a mile if I’d’ve just been more patient. There you go.

Most creative automotive repair you’ve ever witnessed?

There was one event in the Sierras—I want to say it was the 2011 Motherlode 400—where the roads are pretty rough and sketchy, and these guys came up from LA with an Alfa Romeo Giulia Super. They were cool but they came into the banquet super late and told us they’d hit their pan and had broken it and—I’m trying to remember where they got it—but they had a wheel of hard cheese on hand and had shoved pieces of it into the crack at the bottom of the pan and it was enough to keep it from leaking out so fast they could keep driving it. I thought that was pretty spectacular! And biodegradable!

Are you still racing?

No. My window there was like ’94 to ’01. I did some endurance stuff a few years after that but nothing serious.

So what came next for you?

I got into restoring. Bought and sold a number of things. Did a body-off restoration in ’02 on an MG TF 1500 partially because I’d grown up around T-series MGs and knew them and knew the network of people who could help me. The car I found was super low-mileage. It had been parked in ’72 because of a broken crank, but the wood inside was still fine and the body was okay except it had been cheaply repainted. I probably didn’t have to give it a complete restoration, but I did, and got all the money for it. It was 2002 and I sold it for like thirty-five thousand dollars! It came out really nice, but I tallied it all up and in the end I only made about three dollars an hour working on it!

First real car job?

When we moved to Pleasanton there was this aftermarket accessory auto place nearby and I ended up working there in high school. I met this guy there who turned into a lifelong friend. It was just a crazy great place to hang out. The owner was a super “hands-off” kind of guy and pretty much let the convicts run the prison. We eventually ran it into ground, and by the time I was in college it had gone under! But it was a fun time and great place to work and make lifelong friends through our common interest.

How did the automotive journalism gig get going?

It was really through making connections through car events. That’s where I met Jay Lamm. I ended up writing him an email asking to talk to him about writing for the magazine and he gave me some advice and warned me right away that if I wanted to make money automotive journalism wasn’t the path to success! But I was interested in doing it and he let me pitch some ideas and I started writing for him.

I’ve discovered your great Instagram page. Lots of fun car pics.

My Instagram stuff started in 2016 with me learning how to do it for content for the Lemons series. A lot of it was just finding things on the street. That’s kind of how the hardtuned website started back in 2001—just pictures and little stories or event coverages that I did for myself. My pre-blog blog. And that all started with walking our dogs. We’ve always walked our dogs all over the place and now we’ve got four-and-a-half year old knucklehead Belgian Malinois/Lab mix named Gretel that we walk and that’s how I find this stuff. You can see things at a different pace that way. In a car you just can’t take it all in.

By the pictures you sent me it’s obvious you’re an Alfaholic. What’s your present pleasure?

A ’65 Giulia Sprint GT Stepnose. Gray with green wheels. The car is kind of done on the outside but the inside still needs work. There’s no headliner and it’s just got a cheap carpet kit sitting in it loosely and the seats are all ripped up and, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t really finish cars until I get rid of them. It’s weird.

Any ride you’d like to have back?

In the early ’90s I bought a ’61 single-cab VW truck. Right-hand drive. The body was kind of messy when I got it, but it was backdated so it had all the early ’50s stuff—the domed glass taillights and the center brake light and the semaphores —so it looked like a ’52. I put a 1,914cc motor in it and the thing would do ninety miles an hour! I sold it just by taking it down to the Monterey Historics. That’s the one I’d like to have back.

I surprise you with an unlimited budget but you can only buy one car. What do you buy?

A Giulia TZ-1. It’s my favorite car. They’re like miniature Ferrari GTOs with the coda tronca—the cut-off tail. That is the one car that I’d pull the trigger on if I had an unlimited budget. They’re really cool.

Petro-power or electric. Pick one.

I think the overall effect of not having exhaust gases coming out of a car is great and if you can source cleaner energy than fuel that’s awesome. I mean, with electrics you can get Formula 1 acceleration in a four-thousand pound car. The biggest concern I’ve got right now is if the grids could handle the whole load if everyone switched to electrics but I think it’s definitely the wave of the future.

Most unforgettable movie car scene?

The intro to the original Italian Job. I was a child when I first saw it. I’ve seen that movie so many times I can’t tell you how many. Probably sixty, literally. And that intro is so great. It’s Matt Monro singing and you’re in the Miura and you’re in the Alps and it’s just like the quintessential Italian car. And just the way it’s filmed. That first shot when you’re overhead on the bridge and it comes in to where you’re in the car and seeing the scenery and the drop-offs and it’s what everybody wants to feel like when you’re driving a sports car. It just burned into my head. The rest of the movie is so wacky, but the cars are so good that it cemented a lot of ideas at a very early age about the kinds of cars I wanted to have. And I still enjoy it now.

What did you think of the remake?

Never saw it. Never watched it. But in this discussion I have to mention two more favorites because I have three on my list. Obviously Bullitt has a great chase scene in San Francisco which is local to me and then the original H.B. Halicki Gone in 60 Seconds which is just, you know, two hours of a random chase scene.

How did you first come across Bring a Trailer?

I met Randy in 2007 and we were both in the same ether—doing car events and being in the same circles and me knowing what he was up to and doing with the site at the time, posting ads and stuff like that.

What keeps you here?

The whole comment thing in general seems to be more in-depth and a little less snarky than other similar sites, although the site has changed over the years with its growth but I still feel there’s more of a positive information flow here than on other sites.

Tell me about your screen name.

I registered that name as a .com domain in 2001 as kind of a play on Japanese car culture phrasing in magazines. The website was the place I could put photos and captions up—event photos and coverage—and at the time it definitely played a part in the transition to magazine writing. Many people in the Northern California vintage rally scene knew I’d post photos and other stuff there, so when I needed a handle on BaT, it was a logical extension of my goofy attempt at branding.

Anything we can look forward to seeing you list on BaT?

I just got a ’64 356SC in this morning and it’s got documentation going back to the early ’70s. A nice rust-free 356.

 

I can’t wait to see it! In the meantime I’ve gotta hear more about the Lemons thing. A phenomenon in and of itself.

It was the evolution of an event that Jay Lamm and Martin Swig were involved in called the “Double 500”, which was the source of many oddball cheap car purchases—using cars in costumes and with certain themes and stuff like that. One night in 2006 I was at the “No Frills Iron-Bottom” dinner with Martin and Jay, and that was the first time I’d heard it thrown around that we needed to do something harder than a five-hundred-kilometer—something that got us back in time for dinner. The thought came up: can we do something on a race track? And then Jay came up with the idea that we should call it the “Twenty-four Hours of Lemons,” and it just grew through that wordplay. It went from one event to like three events to then seven and then ten, and in 2009 became a full-time job for me, putting on the races and doing tech, vetting the tracks and making sure they were suitable for our needs. It was basically a 24/7 job for ten years and I did it until the end of 2019 when I was pretty burned out on it. But it was fun. In the beginning the winner was paid in nickels—six hundred pounds of them!

I know you’re an avid cyclist. Tell me more.

I’ve always ridden, even back when I started autocrossing. I enjoyed mountain biking then. Did it in college and it served for some sort of cardio training for my racing. I’d just get out on trails or go across town. I always had my bike in the trunk of my Cortina, so from the shop I could go up into the hills and hop on and ride. That was in ’97 and I was living in San Francisco and I’d ride across the city and the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Marin Headlands and back. Then I met my wife and we were mountain biking a bit together, but she was into road biking and I tried that out and it was, like, “Whoa! This is way faster!” and I kind of switched gears, going from a mountain bike to a road bike.

Not only way faster, but way more dangerous too.

Yeah, I’d never broken a bone in any car-racing accident, but I was commuting back from work on my bike one day and had my backpack on and was looking over my shoulder to try and change lanes and I hit a manhole cover that was tilted in and it threw me off. I was going about twenty and hit a street sign tree with my shoulder and broke like fourteen bones and put a hole in my lung! It was a multi-month recovery, and it took me a minute to get back on my bike, but I did and went back to commuting on it and touring with it.

So when’s the autobiography? You’ve had a great life.

I’ve been very fortunate and try not to take things for granted. I really appreciate the opportunities I’ve been given. I’ve been able to step into a lot of really interesting things within the hobby and it’s not lost on me that that’s an opportunity not everybody gets. I’ve worked hard to make things happen but I also realize that doors have been opened based on luck and fate and who you know.

What’s The Big Next?

I don’t know. I’m trying to work on that. We’ll see. My car sales volume is small and I could do more if I changed the way I do it, but I’m not sure I want to. Time is an incredible asset—time so you can get out and do things, and waiting to have experiences because you’re tied to a nine-to-five, well, that’s just part of the math. If I could figure out a way to get paid to ride my bike around I’d do that, but that’s not happening.

Well, when you find work like that clue me in! In the meantime, thanks for the ride-along @hardtuned!

Images courtesy of Jeff (hardtuned) via hardtuned.com, jeffathardtuned on Instagram