Sloppy Mechanics' Matt Happel makes Holley's LS Fest with Project 8F8 in tow. Project 8F8 packs a host of Holley products including a Terminator X. Get the low down on just what went down at LS Fest X - 10 years of mayhem!

We bought a Terminator like three days before the event and I sent him a tune, he loaded it with the SD card and a little bit of messing with his boost controller and he went 10.0 in a 4000 pound Dakota with an LS swap.

I'm with Ben Happel, the sloppy mechanic, and we're out here at LS fest, he brought the 8F8 Mustang out to LS Fest this year.

Everything worked great with the Terminator system, it came upon a targeted 26 and I got the closed-loop settings good so it came right up and hit 27 and went right to 26 and then promptly exited the rods out of the front of the engine.

So everything worked great, it's just the mechanical stuff couldn't stand up to all of that.

So just for anybody who's not familiar, what's up with this car?

The whole basis behind the car is a budget build, so we wanted to go as fast as we could for not exactly as cheap as we could because this is a little bit of a different direction, normally I build a burnout car that inadvertently goes fast so I thought it would be cool to build a drag car that's fairly cheap but also, this has like 90% of the safety equipment that it needs, I'm not usually known for that, so what I wanted to do was build like a practical fast car for a small budget.

So you ended up doing, you bought this Mustang as a roller. $1900. Already had some good parts to it.

Yeah it's the stuff ends up costing more than people think, they aren't realistic or they just start snowballing costs or they buy things that they don't need, that happens a lot, it's basically what my channel is all about is people learn what they don't need. People will tell you stuff that you don't need all the time and you run out of money and you're like, I'm not done, so we wanted to build the car to go 8's for in the 8's range in the $8000 range.

Partway through the build, I was like, this is going to be unrealistically cheap, so I started throwing products on the car to kind of future-proof it and show people that you don't have to be that stingy and we plan to upgrade the car.

There's a path for it once it goes 8's for in the $8000 range, we want to try all the other Holley products and see how good they are and see what it does as far as adding it, because a lot of people, if they have the money they throw the book at it and it would be nice to know for certain combinations whether or not something is good or not, so that's what we plan to do with it.

So you've got a 4.8 junkyard motor.

It's a 99' crank 48, it's running what we call "my camshaft", it's a camshaft cut in the late '90s but I have found it as a good budget cam. It's only a $500 long buck, so that's a $200 engine and a $300 cam and springs.

Not bad.

And it made a little over 800 to the tires. We've made over 1500 rear wheel with a stock plastic intake and stock higher manifolds so there's really no need.

People put the shiny, pretty, forward ones on, all it does is burn your spark plugs and take up room in the engine bay and overheat everything in there so it's a lot easier if you just look down in the engine bay, it's like really easy to reach, you can almost stand in there and do stuff.

So that's something else, I know that you've spent a lot of time tuning on Holley EFI stuff, factory ECUs, and some other stand-alone stuff,can you talk a little bit about using a factory ECU or something else vs using Terminator X, or Dominator, or any Holley EFI product.

So what's nice about the Holley products are the software is almost all 100% the same, the ECUs act almost 100% the same so once you learn one of them, it's extremely easy,on top of that the complexity isn't there,you don't have to fool an emissions device,you don't have to learn, well this ECU does crazy things.

You just tell it what you want it to do and it does it and the majority of the functions have closed-loop where you can tell it what you want and it helps you attain that target also so it's not working against you, it's helping you the whole time.

Anybody wants to know more about what you do, the car, any of your other builds, where can they go?

Well, a lot of people don't realize that it's multifaceted, SloppyMechanics.com is just like a placeholder for some of the links. There are links from SloppyMechanics.com to a google wiki page and it shows a lot of our popular combos or combos that did well and it's like an entire list of the simple setup for the car, what I put into it, everything else and a lot of that stuff I even have tune files available for, so if you build the clone but you load the tune, you're 90% there.

Alright man, well we appreciate you coming out and oiling it down the track a little bit.

Just a little, it's a fine mist.