The Biggest Automotive Purchase of my Life

What's up guys and welcome to today's video .

I got to say this s 13 in the new shop just makes me feel some type of way .

Look how nice it looks in here .

We're doing a little bit of T L C .

It's an old girl .

Got a big shoot coming up later in the day and this car is slowly becoming the , I have a big reveal or exciting news drift car , quick bolt check and fluid change and she's good to go .

So one of the things I want to get done today is a little bit of work on the 350 my friend from is in town .

So he's actually meeting me up here dropping off some arms because I got to do a little service at the rear end of that thing .

Oh yeah , it's good .

I know his car has been in videos before and we've driven together on track , but I still need to formally introduce you guys to do the founder of Drift HQ .

Hey guys , what's up ?

Excited to be here ?

So you guys know how much this cream car means to me .

Uh It's kind of a car that started it all with drifting and everything .

Automotive in my life .

That is a lot like this .

E 46 is .

So I wanted to take a second and kind of tell the back story of this car .

This pretty much is my baby and my Mona Lisa , which a lot of people call it because we took our time with it .

Although it's not my first drift car , but it's the first in house built with every possible best part that we could ever put because people kind of didn't take us serious until I built this car .

It created the foundation for what Drift HQ is today with the color that we use for this car is the color for all our cars in the team .

Only thing that we didn't do in this car was the paint itself .

Everything else was done in house and it pretty much like was an eye opener for getting out there for the first time and just like you loved it the first time that you saw it .

This is kind of like one of those things that people are like , wow , it's just a conversation opening .

This car was the car where I , you showed up to the track and I was like , who the fuck is this guy ?

Because I thought he was just one of those hard parkers like Mike with his L S 400 in the pits because this thing look at it it is a masterpiece , the attention to detail and everything on it .

It's definitely one of those things where you see it and you're like , there's no way this car gets driven hard , but it does and Dorte is an excellent driver and you guys might have noticed there's been quite a bit of Drift Q stuff here at the compound in this video .

So without further ado , I'd like to give a warm official welcome to Drift HQ officially moving into the compound .

You guys haven't seen this building in a long time for a specific reason .

Secretly behind the scenes , Dorte and this car been moving into this place .

So we have for the past three weeks , we actually moved in and we've been fully shipping from here .

So we strive ourselves to stay fully stocked on what's gonna get you immediately to the track .

So we focus on chassis BMW chassis and a lot of swap stuff on the left here .

We have P MC .

We are the only North American be for it , Jay Z swabs swab , less swaps and everything else like that .

But our main focus is to be able to have every component started from suspension to arms to shifters , to brake lines , to everything that you possibly could like put together in a car and get to the weekend and start shredding immediately .

So I'd like to interrupt this broadcast for a special message from Drift HQ for a limited time only we are going to be providing you with a limited edition Drift HQ shirt like this with the , as seen right here with all orders over $150 .

This special is only valid through August .

So don't sleep and visit Drift HQ .

Down below in the description , things might start to kind of come together and make a little bit more sense .

There's quite a bit of stuff here between these shelves , these shelves , these shelves over there .

And you guys have constantly heard me talking about why I wanted to make the move from the other shop to the new shop .

The plan is for Drift HQ to live in .

What was our old or our first shop at the main building ?

So this is kind of like a temporary situation .

Um I guess I left out an important detail too .

That's pretty damn exciting .

I now own the vast majority of Drift HQ .

Uh I don't even remember like , did you just do like , did you message me on Facebook one time ?

Just be like , yo , do you wanna buy Drift HQ ?

No , a bit more intense than that .

How we could work together was how I actually started .

I came to Orlando a couple of times and we really couldn't figure out what we could possibly do together .

Obviously , your other shop was tiny so we couldn't move into that shop and we just came in , we talked , we hung out , we went out to eat and we didn't do much of anything .

It wasn't really until the compound became a reality .

That kind of both things came to life .

We went to Drift week too and you were just so happy about that .

You had found the compound that you came with me and you're like , this could possibly fit all of us inside there .

But it wasn't until a late night that we are talking about sponsorships on the S 15 that the conversation came to light .

And you're like , I'm actually not running in anymore because I want to get into parts .

And that's where the , where we land today .

This was a while .

I remember we got burgers in my mind .

I didn't , I didn't remember the burger day and I was like the just like slide in my D MS like , yo , you wanna buy Drift HQ and let it I wish .

But no , that's not .

That's not how it happened .

I had reached out to Duarte because I had seen what he had been doing for the community , both with throwing free events , putting so much time and energy into the parts fan that had saved my ass and many of my friends when we break parts of the track and it's just really cool .

You kind of took a new approach to drifting and to selling parts in a service way that like solved a lot of problems that people have .

And I wanted to know a way that I could get involved .

Obviously I had my relationship with and I had been wanting to start my own kind of like parts distribution .

So that was kind of like a conflict in a way and we just kept the conversation going and we kind of had mutual respect for what each other was doing .

And like you said , like the stars just kind of , I guess aligned once the compound came about .

Yeah , it was more of a situation where we're like , instead of us competing , we could do much better for the community , we could do much better for drivers better in parts if we actually work together .

And the only way to work together is to create some kind of partnership that we can both give back in a sense .

And I feel like for the past seven years , that's pretty much what we have been doing .

I started the company by myself , but later on down the line , I brought in Savio and Joel to kind of help me take it to another level .

This was like three years ago , I think , and they've done great .

They're still here .

They're not going anywhere .

So for the people think they're like , oh , they're gone or whatever , Joel is actually here along with two other ones that moved in with me .

Speaking about the guys moving up here .

Hey , it's pretty freaking cool .

But we decided we would give them their warm official welcome to the L Z compound in this video right here , we reached a threshold in Fort Myers that we could no longer do what we wanted to do .

And we are really big on giving back to the community by having events and doing things that we can actually give back on site .

And by every single track closing within three hours , it limited us to having to drive to Orlando all the time .

So all that traveling that we're doing essentially is just a waste of time giving back to the community is always gonna be our main focus and doing everything that we can to grow the sport .

Do you like cars like this ?

Cars like this are cool .

If you want to see more cool cars like this , make sure you follow Drift HQ on Instagram right now .

If I'm gonna do something , I like to be the best that I can possibly be .

I like to devote 100% energy to it .

Everyone knows this .

I'm stretched way too thin right now between the compound between F D between trying to be a youtuber , all the , all the things that go on in my head and that I want to do , I can't devote the time and energy to growing parts fulfillment company , whatever you want to call it to the scale that I want it to be .

So once we kind of started talking , it made a lot more sense for me to be able to take both your infrastructure that you've created between the site , your crew and yourself to run this company and to be able to try to create the ideas and wild fantasies that I have and manifest them and bring them to life .

Um because there's just so much stuff that I want to do and I have so many cool ideas , but I feel like I'm held back from a time management perspective .

So I'm super excited , man .

Me too on your end that if you try to actually run this business on this side , you just wouldn't have enough time to do everything .

And we were running in a situation that we didn't have enough time to keep editing and keep building while still attending events , while still taking care of the customers .

So we decided like six months to a year or so ago .

Let's take a step back and actually focus on customer service over making videos and you can see that we've dropped a lot from grown on at least on the media platforms , but we grew on another side creating products .

We design different CNC shops , some in the country , some all over the world to make us parts that we feel like necessary .

Like we were one of the first ones to do an N 54 swap and an E 46 .

The first one right now that has E 92 swap for a two J Duo Caliper for Corvettes .

We are the first ones to have that out in the market .

So being a first in a lot of things that we do is key to us .

First one to have the van that you guys saw in the video .

So that van kind of connects us even more to the community because we just keep helping drivers , the more , the more events that we can attend with that van , the more drivers it helps wholly grazed over the fact that the owner of a company like this drifts , like I , I , I didn't really think about it until today .

How cool that was because the fact that you're out here shredding with everybody .

The fact that pretty much all your guys shred , that's true .

It , it like everyone in the company drifts .

So in this official purchase of Drift HQ , a few things came with it , right ?

So I got Dorte and his crew , probably the biggest value all of this inventory .

There's a couple of cars that will go over with you guys .

But I think one of the really cool things that I would love to kind of expand upon is the exclusivity .

So there are a few brands that Drift HQ is the exclusive distributor of , of which you already mentioned is P MC that makes all the rat adapters .

Uh That's the same kit I have on my U 36 by the way , kind of cool .

Guess who I got it from .

Absolutely .

Um We have to build that whole car actually .

No , you did everything introducing .

I , I feel like that was also a pretty big selling point .

The customer service was on point that I don't know how Dorte has a life giving the service that he is to all these people .

So hopefully we will expand sales teams .

So Dorte can have more life .

Uh uh But anyway , another huge one is F D F .

I personally don't run F D F on any of my cars , but I know we helped Collette install it on her Corvette .

It drives really great .

F D F essentially makes a ton of angle kits for all sorts of cars and a lot of the newer cars as well as well as Corvettes , like he said , Mustang and parts for cars that nobody else would touch .

And he's also one of our drivers and F D prospect destroy or die , which we have exclusivity as well on that , which they make so many M X five parts .

That's the only things that we stock for them .

Taylor Ray runs these .

He loved it and they pretty much turned us into them like we saw that they make a great uh great product then is really good , really good customer service .

And we also have C N C 71 which is a friendly budget kind of angle kit .

Anybody that's trying to get in the E 36 E 46 game .

This is their number one choice .

They have many kids for the I S3 100 for the 8 36 E 46 as well .

Small little guys that make cool parts and we find them all over the world and if you're one of them out there , message me D M me on Instagram and tell me what you make .

And it's possible that we put on the website .

I can't even stress enough how many little companies started out of a garage and then they became a legitimate company that they have their own website .

We sell S pr Drift Tech .

These are all small guys that just started making one single part .

And then all of a sudden they're like , hey , maybe I can make two parts or three parts .

If you're out there , come find me and we're going to get your parts on the shelf .

These drop ship sites are kind of like a dime a dozen .

That is not what I want , right ?

Like you can tell by this warehouse there's , there's quite a bit of inventory in here .

Once we're moving to the other shop , we'll be able to expand more .

But like , yo , in the old shop right now , we have , I don't , don't want to know how many there are , but there's so many Christmas seats that I can't even walk in there .

My goal , my vision with this is to be able to walk from our shop two days over and have this beautiful warehouse stocked full of all the stuff that we use all the time .

It's so annoying when you go to order something from a site and then you get a message like three days later and like , hey , yeah , like we just contact the , you know , the supplier and they're actually out of it like that we want to have stuff on the shelf .

So when you order it gets from here , we make sure the product is good .

We make sure it gets to you as fast as it possibly can .

We need stuff overnighted like a day could make or break you making it to event .

Right .

And I know Duarte has personally , for me , gone out of his way to make sure stuff gets shipped on weekends , answered phones late at night .

And that is something that we've talked about potentially adding on into the future .

Like , how cool would it be if there was a phone line that people could call for support on the weekends , late at night ?

If we had a parts courier service that could deliver stuff locally , there's just so many ways that we can improve service .

Right ?

Like it is the , it would be amazing if we could develop something consistent .

So we could guarantee people that their parts would chip on the weekend if they paid a little bit more , have sales staff stay later , maybe on the weekends .

Who knows ?

I know that I'm constantly building my stuff .

After hours , most people are building their after work and it's inconvenient when all the places you call that you need advice from aren't there .

So it's on a weekend that you're going to fall in a situation that you're right about to go to an event .

Your car just got put on a lift , you go look at something , then you're missing this part .

Your lollipop is falling out and you don't have something and that's where we come in .

We are consistently on Instagram Messenger on the website .

We try to answer people late .

I'm not promising you guys that we're gonna answer you every single time that you call after hours or message or do whatever email .

But we know the importance of having something shipped delivered .

Maybe somebody just went and bought a car recently and they wanna finish the car for that event and then parts didn't come from other places .

So they're just trying to get a part .

People have finished cars on the track and like went now drifting with all the parts that we have in a van in general .

There's many companies competing against us .

But if you go on Facebook and you're basing off customer service and customer service , we are always gonna win because we are drivers at the end of the day again .

And we understand that Duarte does and we're going to continue to pride ourselves on customer service .

I just want to throw this out there though , don't be head .

I hate when people call a company ask for advice or like what parts to use in their build and then go and buy it from somewhere else .

Have some respect .

Whether it's with Drift HQ or with another company , don't waste someone's time and then go buy the part somewhere else .

If you're going to call and you're going to seek input on the BUILD , try to award the people that give you that insight and share with you the knowledge they've developed over time .

Like I said , whether it's Drift HQ or another place or do you from that person , and if their price is slightly higher and you could save a few bucks somewhere else , let them know because a lot of these parts and a lot of the things that are stocked are actually regulated by the manufacturer and are supposed to be at a certain price .

So there's a chance that either there was a price change across the board that maybe one company isn't aware of or that the other company is not obeying the rules and they could actually lose their rights as a distributor for selling under what they have to .

I've expressed to them before as well as you guys about the whole situation of me kind of feeling trapped and wanting to do my own parts company and that's essentially what we're doing .

I just kind of took the foundation that you laid out with Drift HQ .

And it's going to make it a lot easier to get where I want it to be in a year than me trying to do it and get there in three years .

So Drift HQ did accommodate the public before in their old location .

That is not something that is going to happen here for obvious reasons for privacy , for security .

But we are going to work on developing some sort of courier service , whether it's meeting people at a certain location , delivering parts locally , we want to have the best presence that we could possibly have for Orlando and the best support for the people that we know are already in this community .

But unfortunately , I just want to make it very clear in this video that it's not going to be a place that you guys can just rock up to .

We've been talking a lot about parts , but that is just kind of the beginning .

One of the other things we want to focus on and kind of dive into is actually drift rentals .

So you guys know I've quite often driven other people's cars , whether it's a rental , a friend , whatever , a kind of cool business model that we want to do something with being so close to OS is offer a service of renting people cars .

So whether it's ac time car or something crazy drift HQ did come with two cars of which I'm not gonna say much about it , but probably the most joked about this thing .

I kind of just wanna slam it on these wheels and daily it .

But look , if you got to rent a fully caged car for a comp or something , this thing would slay .

It's a stock V six .

But these things rip .

Some pretty famous drivers have driven this car in the past .

Actually , one of them now is like a multi , another one too .

If you're more familiar with like a Z chassis or a G chassis , I should say we got this beautiful unit right here .

C Time Stallion , but it doesn't stop there .

We've got a lot of builds planned .

I kind of want to build cars that will probably eventually become rental cars and other purposes on the Drift HQ channel which by the way , go subscribe to the Drift HQ channel , please and will give us a purpose to build these cars and documents so we can have really good diy and tutorials for you guys of installing the parts that we sell , gain more knowledge from them and then also end up with a car that we can rent at the track .

So one of them is going to be a Corvette .

This is not a uh drift HQ car , although it is a drift HQ driver .

This is Savio , the man behind all my beautiful granite and the pretty much what you call him , the event coordinator , event coordinator and just the best cook ever , right ?

I feel so bad that I didn't talk about that .

What is the , what is the meat called that he makes God , it's so good .

Xavier is just a big bear .

He takes care of everybody .

He's like we call him United Nations because he is , he has no enemies .

He is everybody's friend .

He makes everybody feel loved .

So shout out to him for bring , that's his car .

The other one is also his car , his cop car and he's also gonna work with Adam in your event right ?

Coming in December .

The the date is not what I originally posted .

It's December 18th .

That may might have been what I posted .

We'll fill you in more details than that .

There's a lot of exciting stuff and Drift Two is going to be a huge part of that .

This is Dotes Personal car , Blue Thunder , beautiful E 36 S 54 power machine .

Another one , Dorte is basically like the BMW version of myself .

A lot of these cars you see here , actually his personal cars um and then his kids cars over there , the other Z 43 33 .

So this car here for us to be able to attend car shows and look at this Mikey even you could approve this thing .

It is so low , but yet it's drift ready .

Pretty much .

It has seats inside tucked in Hydro which a lot of people .

This is our Drift HQ hydro here .

I switched the windows to the right side and pretty much like you could drift , it has a full L R kit and this car is just because we wanna be able to have parts that are not specifically only for drift cars that you could apply for street cars , for them to drive better , look better and all kinds .

Right .

I changed the whole vision for drift HQ because of this car as well .

Drift Q N A person right now .

It's mainly Spanish as a second language right then Portuguese is the third or Portuguese .

So this is Savio's car .

As you can see here .

We built him a whole fresh new car this year because he told us his car and , um , the gambler .

So this car , the motor is actually pulled out of it as we are , uh , rebuilding it right now .

We're gonna put it in and in a couple weeks or so , he'll back , be back and ripping this car here .

We did not build Greg Jones .

I'm sorry .

Look at the color now .

He hasn't even seen the , the new color .

He keeps asking me for pictures and no , I'm not selling it back to you .

It's , uh , it has a L S six in it .

So it's a pretty , pretty neat car .

Look at it .

It's Marco's Nemesis right there .

Pretty much Jay Z L S .

It's a sick build and this is Andrew car .

This is one of our drivers been a long time friend of ours has been with us since the beginning .

Pretty much goes to every single event that we do helps us with the events .

Like , just is a , is an awesome person .

Nothing was spared on this car .

And it's , it's a beast .

6 , 700 horsepower car is doing really well .

It's like three months old .

It was Freddie's car .

This was Freddie's .

Oh my God .

I didn't even realize that .

Yeah , that's funny .

Yeah , that came out so clean .

So I think we kind of downplayed Chris and cricket as well because those two are just like a little mastermind mad team together between the fabrication and mechanical stuff .

And I'm like super stoked to have them as NASA here both for maintaining these cars for the rental cars and for development .

Right .

So we've mentioned before that Drift HQ make some of their own parts and we'll show you guys a couple more of those things inside , but having those guys kind of working on these little side projects and things will let me break free from all of the half working broken cars that we're gonna be working on over in that shop and they can go to town and we can develop things on these chassis , build new cars , test products and to show how all this stuff works .

So this beauty here is Cricket's car .

He is just a all wheel drive soon to the L S swap , but not yet these three here , this one is my , um , personal drift car that I built because I built my kids two Z threes .

I loved it so much that I wanted to get a , a third one so that I can actually drift with them , which I'm going this weekend .

And you , you were there that actually the first time they ever drifted , they are 15 and 13 years old and they shred absolutely shred .

First time on the track everyone .

Marco was like , I'm quitting .

I'm not drifting anymore .

This is it .

They really , like they got in the cars and it just muscle memory from a lot of sim practicing and it's cool to see new .

These are kind of like the , you know , like they're just , they're easy to work on .

They look cool and with uh low budget , I would say like a , like 2 , 3000 bucks , you can get yourself on track and you can have a fun little car that's not gonna blow the bank .

Pretty much one of these cars I think I paid 800 or 1000 bucks for .

So you can still drift relatively cheap and still have fun .

At the same time , my brain has literally just been vomiting with ideas .

I've had so much cool stuff that I've wanted to implement based on my own experiences .

So , like , I want to kind of reconfigure an entire influencer program based on a lot of people and friends that I've met .

There's a lot that we can do as a company to make those people's lives easier and help grow , drifting as a sport .

And I'm super excited about that .

In addition to having a great relationship with customers , Dorte has also fabricated a lot of really good relationships with companies .

So he gets first dibs on things like the first ever F I A prisma seats in the country .

This is huge .

A lot of people have been asking for these , they make a lot of really cool seats like these Dorte has kept stock of a lot of it .

We have , there's got to be at least 100 of these seats here in stock on the shelves ready to ship where a lot of the guys that are listening , they ain't got it .

They try to get it from turn 14 , turn 14 A got it drift HQ got it .

What's also cool too is like I can bring now some of my relationships to the table that I formed with these companies through sponsorships and through cars that I've built and we now have the infrastructure , the support to be able to take these companies on stock , their stuff on the shelf , help people that want to purchase this stuff with information .

Like I don't want to say all these brands because there's a lot that I've been working on behind the scenes actually before we even were dead set on this whole business acquisition thing that now we're going to be on Drift HQ instead of me selling an L F G .

But like there's some really exciting stuff , some deals that were really hard to work through that are going to be huge and that it's going to be awesome for you guys and awesome for us .

I know you talked briefly about , I know what this is , but I was going to make a joke about it because it kind of looks like a , um , don't put that in the video , Mike .

Yeah , this is um A L S water pump Elite .

If you're running a electric water pump and this is something that Chris came up with .

Chris is very knowledgeable .

He actually went to school to learn how to design parts and stuff .

And when we come up , uh , in a situation that nobody has made anything up and we need something that's going to actually make the car run cooler better or more efficiently .

We come up with a solution and this was his like he came up with an idea , we ran it through our C N C guy .

He came up with a plan how it was going to work 100% and then it becomes a product .

So we have many other products here on the table like the N 54 engine mounts , fully full made out of bill .

We have um , the Corvette Duo Calipers , which is our probably the most sold product that we have on the shelves right now , I took my car to a shop in that area .

Nobody knew what they were doing with the drift cars .

And that is the reason why I actually opened Drift HQ in the first place .

And if you guys have any requests as well , it's something that we can think of that's not gonna be way out of reach .

We can put it in our notes and say when we have the time we can possibly develop it .

There is many parts that we were thinking of developing another company comes out with it .

So instead of just becoming copycats , we just stop development completely on that part and then just keep moving like it .

This sport is evolving .

I think it's just the beginning of it .

And I think there's so much more that's gonna come out of this , so many new cars that we're gonna figure out .

I think in a bigger picture , it would be a really cool goal to have our own CNC here at some point and to be able to actually develop stuff on site for now , pretty much all of our capital is going to go into stocking shelves even more than you already see it .

There's a lot of brands that you already stock .

There's a lot of brands that I want to stock from other countries , Australia , the UK Europe , it's going to take a lot to get there .

So there are a lot of goals that we have together that will potentially , I don't want to say be tabled until the next year , but to be competitive in this game , you really have to spend quite a bit of money in inventory and that's going to be a pretty big thing for us right off the rip .

So we got an order , bro .

I think we're gonna close out the video here .

There's obviously like a pretty complex acquisition transaction mega move whatever you want to call it .

Uh And there's so much that we probably haven't even touched base on .

I wanted to do the best job we could of possibly trying to touch all our bases and talk about as much as we can .

Well , there's gonna be stuff and I know you guys are gonna have questions , so we'll definitely have a follow up whether that will live on my channel or the Drift HQ channel .

We'll see , but do the best .

You can make sure to follow Drift HQ on Instagram , follow them on youtube , Facebook , Twitter , myspace , tiktok .

Do you have tiktok ?

Yes .

Have Tik Tok .

I don't even know that .

Thank you guys .

This is pretty freaking awesome .

I'm beyond stoked and I hope you guys are too when