People don’t like it when I say other builders don’t really know what they are doing. But it is very easy, when you know what does and doesn’t work from real world testing, to see when another builder is a hack. Most of them make it very obvious with some of the stuff they put on the outside of their final product. It take almost no time to see that if they really knew what they were doing, they would not use certain products.

If you are like most derby people I know, the goal is to win. So make your search very easy - ask each builder you interview how many wins their engines have. Oh, and don’t stop there. Ask them to list the big show wins they have. Winning some small derby in the middle of nowhere means nothing. Our shop can’t even keep track of the county fair shows and similar caliber shows we have won. I’m not taking anything away from those wins. They pay well, they are often times hard fought, and a win is a win for most circumstances. But if the show only lasts 30 minutes, it is hard to equate how that product will do when you have a fuel limit and a two hour feature. Don’t let builders fool you with their fake win records and self hype. Ask them - Have your engines won Metal Mayhem? Spring Explosion? Greeley Stampede? Night of Destruction? Derby Icons team shows? XDDL shows (now defunct)? UDP team shows? Hell, any major regional show? See what they say. And ask for the driver and year. I’ve caught other builders trying to claim wins at shows that my engine won. Pathetic, really. I also like when they congratulate someone for 7th place at a show and say things like “you would have won if you wouldn’t have (insert stupid excuse here)”.

Here are some things to ignore when looking for an engine builder - number of posts that say “PM sent”, or “thanks for all of the interest”, or people who are only interested in showing you some dyno video, or other video that means nothing. The reality with videos is that the sound quality is so bad, you can’t really tell anything about the engine other than how much volume it has. So what if it has headers that make it loud? Loud doesn’t win anything, as far as I have seen. Again, you can’t argue with wins.