The internet is a great thing, when taken with a grain of salt. In terms of beneficial information you can get from derby web sites, or derby chat rooms/forums, please remember that just because someone posts often, doesn’t mean they are accurate. Engine builders who try to pump up the threads about their products are a joke. How many times do you need to post “PM’s sent to everyone”, or “thanks for all the support”, or whatever else they do to get more pages about their product that nobody has any real success with? It is annoying to read the fake hype about some products. I was one of the early members of Wecrash.com (March 2003, I think), and have just over 2000 posts. No fake screen names, no fake hype. How someone who joined 2 years ago has 3000 posts is beyond me.

The anonymity the internet affords people can be quite misleading. For instance, I regularly see people who post about all kinds of tips and tricks that they use. They appear to the average person to be more knowledgeable because they have so many posts and try to be in every area of a message board. Then you find out they are 19 years old. Now, how exactly do they know everything? Usually they are just regurgitating something they read from someone else, and have no real experience, and certainly no research and design proof. I regularly read about other engine builders who offer advice on the board in an effort to seem more knowledgeable, but fail miserably. If they actually tested the advice they were giving, they would know it was garbage. But they don’t, and to someone like myself who has spent years and untold amounts of money on research and design, it pains me to see people believe what they are offering. The only good way to combat their bad info is to offer the proof of many tests, but I’m not here to give away my information to lazy people. I have even posted info on a thread before only to have it reposted a year or so later by a person who read it - and they act like they did the research to come up with the info - and new people believe they did!! Scary.

One neat thing you can do on derby forums is go back and search an engine experts prior posts. It seems that everyone is trying to build engines for profit these days. Now that the sport has grown, everyone thinks they can jump on the band wagon and fake their knowledge. Funny thing is, many of them are the same folks who have called and talked to me about buying engines and admitted they know little about engines. You can see that in their previous posts. How they become an expert engine builder in 12 months is beyond me. Well, I guess the fact is they are just looking to make a quick buck.

The other cool thing you can do is look at all of the photos in their old posts. I’ve watched engine builders come and go. It seems when they come on the scene, they hype themselves with how much better they are than G.A.S. Once builder cracked me up because I was stupid for using factory intakes, 2G carbs, and small headers on my engines. It was obvious to them they built a better product with the big carbs, intakes, big tube headers, etc, and all their pictures had photos of big shiny parts. As they continued to have no success, they started to change course, and now you can see in their photos engines with cast iron intakes, 2G carbs, and a sudden knowledge of headers and their influence on an engine. It just cracks me up, because even with trying to copy a successful program like ours, they still can’t win much, if anything. If you want to buy an engine from someone like that, good luck winning important derbies against high caliber engines.

One last thought on internet HYPE. It relates back to the honesty and integrity of what they are trying to make you believe, and there is really no way around it. If they are selling as many engines as they have you believe they are with all of the fake hype and interest, and yet you never see them win any medium to large caliber shows, you only have two choices: 1) Either they are lying about how much interest there is in their product (bad), or 2) They do sell many engines but they are junk and never get to the winner’s circle (worse?). It is just that simple - they lie or they suck. Ask them which it is when you have a chance.