How a Muscle-Car Family Raised a Tuner Black Sheep
I grew up Mexican-American in South Central, raised in the smell of my parents' auto shop. My dad came to this country with nothing and built a small family repair shop with my mom, and that shop was my whole childhood.
After school and every weekend, you'd find me at Dad's shop — sweeping floors, handing him wrenches, then turning them myself before I was old enough to drive. He ran a straight repair shop, not a performance house, but on the side he built his own hot rods, and watching him make something faster than it left the factory is where the bug started.
Then the Fast and Furious movies hit, and like half my generation I was gone — not to muscle, but to tuners. Turbo fours, JDM engine swaps, cars that made big numbers out of small motors. My brothers went the other way, deep into muscle like our dad's hot rods, and the crew we ran with started calling me the black sheep of the family. It was a joke at first. It stuck because it was true. There's an old Bedouin line that fits the whole import world: "I against my brother; my brother and I against the stranger." My brothers and I will argue tuner-versus-muscle forever — but we're one family, and my dad backed my dream from day one.
From a Dropout at 16 to My Own Shop in West Covina
I left high school at 16 — not the move I'd tell a kid to make, but I already knew what I wanted to do with my hands. I went to work for an import tuner shop out in San Bernardino and spent eight years there learning the trade for real: tuning, forced induction, engine work, and every mistake you only make once. That shop has since closed its doors, and when it did, I knew it was my turn. Black Sheep is what came out of it.
Let me be straight about what "my shop" means, because the whole site is written in my voice for a reason. I'm the owner and the lead — I spec every build, I'm elbow-deep in the hard ones, and my name goes on the dyno sheet whether I turned the wrench or one of my guys did. It's not a one-man garage and I'd never pretend it is; it's a real shop with a real bench, run by someone who still does the work instead of just quoting it.
I build both sides of the import world, too. A lot of shops pick a lane — Subaru only, or German only — and everything that rolls in gets the same answer. I've spent years inside EJ and FA Subarus, K-series Hondas, 2JZ Toyotas, SR and VQ Nissans, rotaries, and the N54, EA888 and AMG side of the European market. JDM and Euro ask genuinely different questions, and knowing both is how I keep from forcing your car into the build that fits my comfort zone instead of your goal.
How We Build — Honest Numbers, Done Right the First Time
Most shops sell you the build you walked in asking for. I sell you the one your car actually needs — even when it's smaller, cheaper, or nothing at all. If your stock block already does what you want on the street, I'll tell you that before you spend a dollar on forged internals. The most expensive way to make power is to pay for parts you didn't need, then pay again to fix what they broke.
So every build starts with an honest target — real power, real fuel, real use case — and a real number on the table before anything comes apart. No parts-cannon. No "Stage 3" badge with no plan behind it. Every car gets verified on the loaded dyno and has to survive what comes after: August traffic, sustained canyon load, the occasional track day. Owners have rated us 4.9 out of 5 across 312 reviews, and the ones I'm proudest of are the repeat customers and the friends they send. You can see exactly how a car moves through the shop in my build process, and the finished work in the build gallery.
Come By on a Saturday — This Is a Family Shop
I'm married with kids, and the shop is a family operation in the most literal way. Swing by on a Saturday, or after four on a weekday, and don't be surprised if you pull into the lot in the middle of a special-forces Nerf gunfight — my kids treat the parking lot like a battlefield, and honestly, so did I at their age in my dad's shop. When we're not here, we're at the track or on the sideline of somebody's game.
My own play car is a Mazda RX-7 — a rotary, because of course the black sheep drives the engine nobody else wants to deal with. It lives at the track more than it lives on the street. HPDE is my arena, and most weekends you'll find me running lapping days somewhere in Southern California, learning the same lessons about brakes, heat and tires that I turn around and build into your car. If you've never done it, that's the whole point of taking your car to the track — it's where the culture actually lives, and it's why I do this.
That's who's building your car: someone who grew up in a family shop, went all-in on the side of car culture that gets looked down on, and still gets more excited about a clean track day than a big dyno number. When you're ready, come talk to me — bring the platform, the goal and the fuel, and we'll figure out the honest version of your build.
// Same family. Same fight. Let's build yours.
Come Talk to Me About Your Build
Bring me your platform, your real power goal and how you actually drive it. I'll tell you honestly what it needs — and what it doesn't — before we start.