HT: So you blew him off?
JG: No. He took me for a ride in [his ITR] and it blew me away. Scared the hell out of me really. Here was this little 1.8-liter that just pulled so hard and revved forever - and a street car! So I made him some B pipes for it.
HT: Wait, I thought the ITR had a 4-into-1 header?
JG: That was the JDM version. The USDM version had a 4-2-1, so I just did my stuff on the 2-into-1 and we picked up eight horsepower.
HT: Eight horses just from the 2-into-1 part? When was this?
JG: Yeah, it's just about tuning length and some other tricks. This was 1997, I think. If I had really gone at it then, I could have done a lot more B series stuff.
HT: Yeah, that was when it was just starting to explode with VTEC engines and Honda performance in general. Were you sitting around for five years?
JG: No, no. The next year a guy came to me with a '97 ITR and said 'let's do some real R&D on these things.' So I told him 'you find the dyno and I'll make up some pipe designs.' So the header you see is pretty close to what I started out with for the ITR. We made some pretty substantial power with that. The basic design came from the Toyota Atlantic engines that use the 4AG 1.6-liter motor.
HT: What kind of power?
JG: I don't remember exactly, but it was 15 or 18 without any kind of ECU tuning. We hadn't done anything there and I know that if someone could actually tune it, there would've been more power.
HT: Impressive. Did that lead to the side exit race exhaust that we often see on all-motor Hondas?
JG: Yeah, I can't remember who I built the first one for, but it was a modified version of my ITR header with some different stuff to help the really high revs that drag racers were achieving. I think I was the first to do that side exit and it's been copied a lot, but I did find it interesting that some of my competitors didn't look close enough at my designs to see the fine detail that makes a difference. It goes to show that they can copy the basics but they can't copy the technology.
HT: So you just sorta flew below the radar for nearly five years. It couldn't have been that low; our sister magazine Import Tuner just did a B series engine shootout and two of the five tuners said they planned to use a HyTech header.
JG: Yeah, I saw that. I know that one of the motors has my header because I can see the anti-reversion chambers in the photo. It's nice that these guys know.
HT: Let's jump to the present. You have a K23 that you're working on. I've seen prototypes for turbo and supercharged K motors as well. Were you excited to see a new Honda engine design?
JG: No, actually I was going to do a big project with Lexus V8s, but it fell apart with the dot com thing. I had put a ton of time and money into getting it launched and the investors just fell away. So I took another look at the market and decided on Honda. I looked at the WRX, Celica GT-S and a couple of other things, but I liked the RSX-S when I drove it. I was hoping it would be like the B series with potential inside it.