Well I got screwed in a big way by the shop in Las Vegas that took on the job of building my Monte into a semi-Super car. It's now clear to me those clowns at "Fast & Furious Performance" couldn't build a bicycle!! After 6 months of having my Monte and a trillion excuses as to why it was taking for ever and why we don't want to do this till we do that they tried to slap it together in 3 weeks. Brian Turner formerly from "Intense-Racing" flew in from Ohio to tune and dyno the joke and was ready to slap those dumb asses by the time he was 1/4 way through his tuning phase.
The car was on the dyno for 14 hours at $100 per hour (normally $140 but Mike cut me some major slack,Thanks Mike of Silverstate Autosports) and of the 14 hours Brian only dynoed it for 4 hours. It twice had 12" fire ***** erupt from the valve cover gaskets leaking so bad they were dumping oil onto the down pipe. This was later found out to be because the exhaust flange doughnut was misaligned causing a significant exhaust leak cooking the rubber valve cover gasket inside the new aluminum covers causing it to deform and permit oil to blow out when it was under boost. They had to remove the rear valve cover and replace the gasket. Seperate the exhaust and install a new doughnut. That took alot of time. Then the new ZZP front /rear fuellogs were mounted in such a half *** way the injectors began spewing out fuel and caused another 2 hours of delays, okay they are seated, stop stop stop they are leaking again, GRRR! Could have had the thing burn down right on the dyno. Then we had numerous vacuum leaks which had to be addressed one at a time. The new Delphi MAF air sensor was mounted in the wronglocation preventing it from being used, so Brian had to revert to using my smaller OEM and a MAF air translator.

Then after I got my car to drive back to Utah the normal 5.5 hour trip took me 39 hours. I didn't even make it out of Vegas before I broke down. Fuel issues this time. The Aeromotive A1000 pump was loud like hell from over working itself and I was sputtering, blowing fuses for the fuel pump. So back to the shop,pulled the inline fuel filter, there was black plastic shards from when they drilled the tank to add the fuel lines,small pebbles (which they said came from the Mobil brandgas station right there at the Vegas track exit, sure guys) then there was a piece of hot glue in the filter, it was so clogged up. Had to drain the tank and totally wipe down the whole inside of the tank. Cleaned it all up and off I went. Had to do this two more times on the trip back, once broke down in the same spot for almost 10 hours in the hot *** sun in Arizona, I got cooked real good then. The tranny was running 240 degree's which the owner Gary said was okay. They were to put in an auxillary tranny cooler, but also bypassed my factorywatercooled cooler. I guess they aren't bright enough to understand a small 5 x 6 inch air cooler won't cool of a tranny by itself.So I limped in on home.

Two days later it's in a great shop here in Salt Lake City. Wish to god I had known about them before I went to Vegas with my car. They took 2 days to look things over and said there be a butt load of problems. Here is a list the best I can remember.

Fuel lines were not anchored into place causing excessive fuel line vibrations.Fuel lines were too long,they now come out of the lowest point at the rear of the fuel tank, hanging down to the point where they could catch road debris and literally be yanked from the rear of the tank causing a big problem. Fuel lines crossed with in 1"over the wastegate exhaust pipe and the down pipe, causing me the vapor lock on the way home, my fuel filter was clean, so I kept draining the tank,cleaning the filter,fill up the tank all the way home thinking the filter was plugged again, when it was really vapor locking from all the super heated fuel. The fuel injectors were all at angles to the ports and the fuel rail, causing me to still leak fuel on top of the lower intake manifold all the way home. Lucky I don't smoke. The top bell housing bolt was stripped out and missing. The exhaust system was not supported by the anchor points except for one of the rubber hangers. The turbo flange and down pipe were just hanging with no bracket to stabilize them which could cause problems driving that way to long.The turbo flange and the exhaust flange were still misaligned by a 1/4 " preventing the V-band from properly tightening and there by causing another big exhaust leak. So now we have a flex pipe on there. We took off the upper intake manifold and found a lower intake manifold bolt just laying in there. The PCV delete was done improperly as they never plugged the hole in the manifold.So now with the bolt not being installed and the PCV hole open we now have about 1/3 quart of oil resting on the top of the lower intake manifold. Major air flow restriction there they told me. My new $7000 transmission from Intense was 4 quarts low on fluid, even though I would have seen or smelt it if it was leaking on the way home. The tranny fill tube was busted away from the anchor bracket, causing us to loose fluid when we were topping it back off. The methanol system was installed wrong.The LED fuel pressure gauge fluctuated so wildly because they said no fuel dampners were used on the fuel log ends. The right upper motor mount was loose, just fell over after we took off the dog bone.They broke my right front upper motor mount which I had powder coated red,then they did the Houdini and bought one and spray painted it red. So I took it off and had it powder coated and thats when we found the loose motor mount bracket. My spark plugs with 500 miles on the were so black from running rich we decided to replace them. So we figure while they are out we should pressure check each cylinder. All were happy except for my number 1 cylinder, which is only reading 87 pounds pressure. So now were are trying to figure out if we have a melted piston or what. His bore scope is infor repairs and will be back in a couple of days. God I hope the pistons are okay. He said if not then we have to essentailly rebuild the whole engine over since we will have to rebore and hone the damaged cylinder wall. So will have to do them all as I will need one bigger piston, so will have to buy 6 new ones all oversized to match the new bore. damn I hate that shop in Vegas.

Since I have left "Fast & Furious Performance" I have never received 1 single follow up phone call, e-mail or nothing as to how is my car doing. I paid them close to $16,000 for the work, seems lkie I would ahve got the hey how are things phone call.My car left them like a piece of crap. I gave them a very nice car to work on and it was a bomb when I got it back. Grease every where, I never saw them use fender covers to protect my new $4600 paint job, I now have scratches on the fenders, top of the car and on one of the black stripes on the trunk.The roll bar was not completed, rough welded in and not painted, the swing outs we had to wait for 8 weeks for were never used,"oh, they went out of business" Gary said, what a liar. It took him 3 weeks to send me the build sheets for my motor that the other shop was interested in looking at, it was to funny, always, er er I sent them out, er I got them back, ewr I will get them out today for sure, er I will need to go over them one more time. Blah blah blah, lie after lie. Gary never cared. Thats the point here, He is a **** poor leader of the mechanic's in the shop. Never set them down and expressed my vision and his for the build to the men. He never had a vision I know now it is safe to say. I was always the fill in the slow times in the shop project, heyyou, go work on that piece of crap Monte Carlo.One guy said they laughed when it caught fire on the dyno because he said everyone who worked on the car always said they hated working on it and hoped it would burn.Nobody gave a damn about the $35,000 build they had taken on.
Gary Simon is a liar and a thiefand no one should evre take their car to them for any reason ever!! He is a master bull ****ter, smiles at you while he knows he is screwing you over.
My rods took 13 weeks to custom make, I start getting antsy, where are they, where are they, So I get a hold of Lawless Engines, a very fine machine shop and ask them directly where are the rods? Well there was a problem and we will have them over nighted in for you. So cool all is good. Gary gets the rods, it takes him 10 days to mock up the motor and then 19 more to build the motor once it's back from the machine shop. 29 days to build me my motor!! Thats really applying your self there Gary. You never gave a damn. I can only hope after 29 days to build a motor it holds up, did I tighten that bolt? Did I torque that one? But it seems like I will have to rebuild my motor any way. The other shop said it's possible my crank was put in wrong causing my number one to fire out of phase or something like that.

Any comments, I have more to be done this is just a right off the top of my head list.Take care guys, and did I mention to never ever go to F&F in Las Vegas? They are not Fast and only leave you Furious!! Later Greg Hubbs

 

I am so sorry that you had to go through this. I would seriously sue them and get your money back. Make sure you have all of your paper work of what they were to do and then log the problems you had at the dyno phase and document what the shop in Utah said. Good luck. I hope you get this figured out. Keep us updated.

 

good play on the name F&F there....

normally i would say "theres no way, thats crazy", but thats too crazy to make up right there.

I rememeber when you posted around here about all you were going to do to that car and just how excited you were about what you were getting done to it.

All I cna say is "wow"....

You know, he was probably busy fixing up the Corvettes and the Mustang Cobras to get good reviews amongst those guys, figuring some guy with a Monte Carlo would never give back any big reviewsor bring him more business anyway.

Heres what I would do: go to the forums of his mainstream cars, the places he will be talked about and tell them what has happened. As I said, he's more concerned about the higher end performacne cars and figures some guy in a Monte Carlo community won't bring him much more business anyway. Prove him wrong by demolishing his name is what I'd do. No one has ever screwed me more than once.

If you sue, which is about all you can do right now, it will take a couple of years to get a law suit of such caliber thru the courts. They'll most liekly want to settle out of court. The more people you can get in touch with, like Corvette and Camaro forums and such and get against him, the better your chances are of settling out of court.

Best of luck with the guys in SLC.

 

I dont mean to sound like a jacka$$ but didn't you look over the car when you picked it up, because if you saw i the problems when it was still in their hands whyy didnt you confront them right there.

but i am truly sorry this happened to your amazing monte, i would deffenitly go to any car forum you can get on and spreed the word of how horrible of a job they did on your car.

 

Geez! I'd definitely be spreading the word about this. But I'd also be suing his a$$ too.
Is that theplace on Speedway Blvd.? If so, I found their website. Which isn't too hard to figure out when you know the name of the place.

From the looks of their website, they look like they think they belong in one of those auto customization shows on tv. Like "American Hot Rod" for example.

Places with that "your car isn't good enough for us" attitude bug the crap out of me.
Wouldn't surprise me if they used your car (when it ran) to run errands, parts runs for the "real" projects, etc. Heck, wouldn't surprise me if they used it as a loaner once or twice before the started hacking on it.

F*** 'em. Get your money back from them. Sue them if you have to.

 

Hey so it's me the guy with the hammered Monte, but she will live again. I do have an attorney, I'm a contractor and am working on her personal home. She feels I have a claim but by me not being a Nevada resident, would have to go there to file and attend courts. So like mentioned earlier by Cowboy6622 we do hope the intent to sue letter will prompt them to settle out of court. I mean I'm not defaming them anymore than the ammo they gave me too.
And as far as seeing the problems early on, I did mention the obvious issues, but Gary is such a bull ****ter, you have to know the kind, smile at you and say thats how things go when you build cars like this. And next I just wanted to get my car back from their shop. I could see it sit there for another 5 months and it would still have problems,he wouldn't give a damn then any more than he did now.
I asked Mike at Silverstate what would happen if I didn't pay for somethings and essentially they could put a mechanics lien on the car and tie it up in court for a while. Which I could see them just leaving it outside and getting hammered even more. So I just got the car back, wanted to be done with them. Now that it is back in Utah and have an accurate assessment of the actual problems I'm able to put together a more comprehensive list of the short comings and use that against them.

I want to find other forums and post myhorrible experience with their shop. The owner of Silverstate made the comment that he never saw Fast & Furious turn down anything even if they didn't know how to do it. GRRR, now I find that out. Their damn salesman called me up after I made an inquiry of them and if they would look at my project, said oh no problem we can do everything you need done. Most of the guys there have race cars and run them at the Las Vegas drag strip, so I went down spoke with T.J.( son in law I found out of the owner)and the owner Gary, all sitting back in their chairs, being no problem, no problem etc. kind of people.

I have kept all my e-mails and how at the end I told them I feel like the (don't worry about him, he's a no good out of towner,doesnt matter customer), think I heard one word of (Sorry or What are you talking about?) back from anyone there, nope, not a peep. They just are not a professional shop at all. The men in the shop that I did like, Patrick and J.D. you could see they worked their guts out to help me when I was there, J.D. was there till 2 in the am with us when we were dynoing it. But their skill levels were being pushed to the limit I felt or it became obvious they were not able to fully do what was being asked of them. Where was the head cheese to supervise and instruct them to do things in a certain way.

But again, now I feel the car is in good competent hands and will be back on line here real soon. Their dragster took 1st place about 3 weeks ago out at Rocky Mountain raceway, and Matt
is just like some weird Super Guru about turbo's and everything else with the car. It's setting me back about $8,600 to $10,000 for them to get it all dialed in correctly. OUCH!! That shop in Vegas hasn't heard the last of me. I called them last week and put them on notice, saying you sold me the job and failed to perform up to the expectations we agreed on and you had better be ready to make it right. Their reply was, well it ran when it left here, I replied, "Barely, it took me 39 hours to do a 5.5 hr trip. And then they said they needed a list of things the other shop said wasa wrong so they could see if it really needed fixed. You frikin idiots, of course they needed fixed or we would not be having this discussion, I didn't tell them that, what I did say was in about 2 more weeks you will be getting a list and I expect you to be good for all the repairs. They will never touch my car again, I don't care if they say they want it back to work on it more, yeah sure let me drive it back down there so you can have it for 3,4,5 more months and half *** it even more, you had 5 months before and it wasa a nightmare when I got it back from you. Never again !! Thanks for all the words of support, I'm just trying toget a build done that would really get some attention for all of usMonte peeps. want to take it to "Super Chevy" in Tulsa on Oct. 28th of 08. They have an older Monte Carlo they built and I wanted to share the spotlight with them, a bad *** Monte with a bad *** Monte. I'm having a professional photographer shoot it and want to try and get it in a few rags and get recognition at the track for our car. The guys handling the car now believe we will be at 135 mph on the 1/4. The last dyno session with"Dyno Brian" the car pulled 423.15 whp and 371.90 torque. But now with all the vacumn leaks,exhaust leaks,fuel issues,injectors seated,larger Delphi MAF air installed, the methanol working, etc. we are tuning it for 100 octane race gas and then another tune for the 91 octane. A switch will permit me to swap back and forth depending what I have in the tank. We are expecting about 650 whp on 100 octaneand about 525 on 91 octane and methanol. Just got to find me some decent tires to apply all the power to the ground.

Take care, "And this to shall pass!!" Hubbs

 

Make sure any phone calls you made to these clowns you have a record of.




Wouldn't surprise me if they used your car (when it ran) to run errands, parts runs for the "real" projects, etc. Heck, wouldn't surprise me if they used it as a loaner once or twice before the started hacking on it.

I would be to #$%^&* pissed they would have to lock me up.

 

OK here ya go, Talked to a Friend of mine that had something like this but ended up his car was stolen from their shop.

Get a good lawyer in your state and also see if they Can get you one in Vegas so they can Handel the filing papers etc...
Put alein against their building and request that their doors are locked untill they pay up . for damages done to the car, expense's,mental anguish over you having to deal with the stress of this whole thing. Any time of work loss, anything you Can add to help your case it is defiantly worth it.
Also get photos of the car, get a estimate to have to car repair the way it needs to be. Get a parts list of the new parts and also have the mechanic say why they are replacing it.
I.E. fuel tank - Replaced due to lines being drilled in the wrong place and not N.H.R.A. Safe to run/will not pass tech check.

Also he did say if they haven't dont to much to the car take it in and get the tech there to fail the car so that it showers it cant be run at the track due to safety violations.
Also document anything that happened at the first Dyno session. I would also have the pay for his time for the guy to fly in,his hotel etc... anything you had to pay for him to come waste his time and attempt to rebuild the car.
Also get a paint and body shop to give you a estimate on the repairs of the paint and what they would charge you to redo it.

Also add in all your lawyer charges,filing fee's and air fare both to and from the hotele cost etc...
court cost. do not for ge tthe food tha tyou will need to eat during your time there and also on your way to and from.

you siad your a contractor this is the same thing so are they get a lawer and ask them if you screwed a client over like this what can they do to you. I bet you would besuprised what can happen. Also your talking more then 5,000 it is not small claimes cort.
Also report to teh Better Bisnus Buro (B.B.B.) there in your area,lasvageas california etc...

As for trashing them be verry carefule on how you do it so that they can tput that against you.
If you cna befrend others on the bords and do it threw a personall phone call etc..
I would call the vett clubs in thier area and get a hold of thier club presidents and explain it to them . this way it is your word agians thier as far as you "Slandering" thier name,
This is verry hard to prove for them unless they set you up . and then it is all their word agians yours sayign you have done this.

as much as it eats you up think and be very deliberate on what or how you do things for this whole thing. If it gose to court it could get real nasty and the trick is to be a better person.
Now once court is DONE I WOULD HAVE A BALL GOING NUTZZZZZ !!!
also if you really want to pos thtings on the bords etc... go to the local library acrossed town and do it from there with a untraceabel screen name to you and i would not sing your name to it.
and i would say it is a car not a Montecarlo.
also get a Email acount from someplace like yahoo.com. and make it somethign that you will only deal with them or others about the car with it. somethign like F_Fspeedshopsux
this way it is all in one place.

Man i am truley sorry to hear this about your car i was hopeing i could see photos of it etc..
Good luck and please keep us up to date on it.

 

 

Hey all, I appreciate all the helpful tips as to go about handling this whole fiasco. I in turn don't know that I'm really slandering them all I'm doing is repeating the truth and my feelings about the interaction or lack of action I have had with and from the shop. I would love for them to contest the points I have made which are all true, if they were not it would be shameful of me to come out and publicly proclaim all these issues, that is also why I did sign my name as I'm not either smart enough not to or I'm not fearful of being called forward to account for my words. But from here on out in order tonot shoot myselfthe footwith possible issues it is probably prudent to accept having vented my anger and proceed in a more tactful and professional manner.
I will say only good things about them, well the location is nice, right there at the Las Vegas Speedway. And, and , and so anyway I will keep you men and ladies posted as to how things arecoming together on the repairs. I will shoot a video when we dyno asa Matt will put it through a full 1/4 mile pull on the dyno. He says if you have never seen on of those it's something to see. Sounds neat.

Also I do have more pictures but when I attempt to post them it keeps saying my file is to large. Any tricks to getting them posted here when I have that issue about file size??

Again appreciate all the words of encouragement and your venting out on my behalf. Those bone heads just didn't respect the opportunity I gave them. I spent almost $14,000 with Intense and had the motor / tranny sent to them from Intense-Racing of Ohio. Gave them pretty close to another $12,000 in parts, flew Brian Turnerand his father out to tune / dyno the car for about $1800 in air fare car rental and hotel then paid the dyno shop $1400 for the dyno time, now it's costing any where from $8,600 to $10,000 for the new shop in Salt Lake city to bring all back on line and then the $16,000 I paid the F&F shop inVegas to do the work. Not to mention the 5 trips and hotel fee's for my visits to deliver more parts and follow up on the job.They had a unique opportunity to build a one up car and totally never gave a damn about the uniqueness of it. The above is $54,000 , wow, money just got gobbled up. And I still have to finish the interior, this build killed me, being so poorly handled and causing me to go over budget like it did. Take care men!! Greg Hubbs