Hope javier is doing fine. I remember him from the early 80s him working on my Datsun 510, he did a great job and made my five can move boy, will never forget about the race when he raced his Caprice up on stadium way against a bug that challenged anybody nobody wanted to go up against him but Xavier did and kicked his ***, Javier hope you're doing very well and hope to see you soon, I have to Datsun 510 that I just bought last year and I want these engines to kick some *** hope to hear from you soon, say hello to your wife

 

heya everyone, my name is Darren; I’m the owner of ArtSpeed Racing, and had a WD for JG from the mid-‘90s til early ‘00s. I fell across this thread by accident, and after reading all the bummer stories about JG, felt y’all deserved to know a bit of history and details about the outfit.

Javi and I met in the early ‘90s while racing in West-coast SCCA road racing; he drove a wickedly fast — and diabolically loose! — 240Z, and the two of us won more than our fair share of races and championships in our respective classes, becoming friends in the process. He was absolutely brilliant on the technical side of things; to this day I have never met anyone that could dream up camshaft profiles out of thin air like Javi could. At the time, he was working out of the basement of his house (!) building engines for everything from street-racer Hondas to rallye cars, and became known as The Man. All of us racer friends were saying “dude, quit your day job, stop doing this out of your basement, start a business!”. I kept telling him how we should start a mail-order deal and make some decent bucks. After a while, he decided quit his job at a dealership and go for it.

Since I’d run my own business (photography studio + a go-fast parts biz) for years, I helped him get things put together, all the stuff like business licenses, tax filings, etc.; with my art background, I even designed the JG Engine Dynamics logo for the company. As thanks, he gave me a WD (warehouse distributorship) and I added JG to my lines, which were previously only for old BMWs. I ran ads in Sport Compact Car and Turbo, and off we went.

As we all know, JG went “viral” — his guys like Steph P. (who worked at JG) and Miles B. kicked major *** at the track, and it made JG stuff what you had to have to win in the exploding import drag world; “If y’wanna win, y’better run JG” was the tagline in my ArtSpeed ads. It was golden times.

Then, around I think 1999, things in the biz changed. The big dawgs decided to get their piece of this burgeoning market; Summit and Jegs both jumped in, and that’s when the excrement began hitting the fan…

By this time, JG was growing very fast, and Javi was beginning to be overwhelmed by the success — at first, in a good way, getting another CNC mill, expanding the shops size, and hiring more help — but was still wanting to keep his hands on EVERYthing. Then Edelbrock came knocking. They decided that their quickest foot-in-the-door to this import thing would be to license stuff from JG with the Edelbrock name on it, and offered what sounded like a hella deal to Javi. Now, I don’t know what the deal was or how it was put together…but after a while, after seeing what it was doing to Javier, I came to consider it “a deal with the devil”. That’s when the wheels began to fall off of the thing, and it led to Javi’s first heart attack.

By that time, I’d sold my parts enterprise (I’d moved on to a driving career) and I sort of fell out of touch with JG. When I finally dropped by to say hi one day (it must’ve been at least a year later) there were a bunch of unknown-to-me people running the shop; Javi “wasn’t in” and things felt very weird. (It wasn’t until much later that I found out he’d had the first stroke). Then, the next time I stopped by (again, a year +, I think) JG Engine Dynamics was no longer there, and no one knew what had become of Javi and JG. I could never chase him down on FB, LinkedIn or Google; it’s like he’d disappeared from the face of the earth.

Fast-forward to about five months ago. I went by RC Engineering in Torrance to get some M3 injectors serviced, and fell into conversation with one of the techs down there. During talk of the good ol’ times, I mentioned JG and Javier and how I’d lost touch with him…”Oh, sorry, dude — he died some years ago.”

So, there you have the whole tale of the rise and fall of JG Engine Dynamics. Without making any excuses for the guy or the place, my feeling is that Javi just lost control of things, and, always aiming to please, just got overwhelmed by the pressures of success, and started effing up, and never got it back together. It’s an old story in business, and unfortunately it sounds like a lot of you got hosed in the process, something I’m sorry to hear. But at one time, JG was indeed the s**t, and his stuff was the stuff of winners.

I realize none of this will make up for all the grief noted above…but at least it may help clear some of the rumors and lend a perspective to what led up to all the bad issues. Best of luck to y’all from one of the old guys in the biz.