David Vizard: Tell us Judson, where do you originally hail from and how did your younger years influenced where you are now?

Judson Massingill: I’m right where I started, born and raised in Houston, married Linda, my wife of 30 years and my business partner. As a teenager, the two things I wanted most were to go racing and to go to university so I could race better and faster. As fate would have it, these two desires were tied together. A lot of reading and research went into even my first engines and as a result they kicked butt on the street race scene. Can you believe I won enough money street racing to help pay for a university education? I look back on those days and realize it was not an exactly responsible approach to getting an education, but I was a youngster and on a mission. Anti–social though it was, this street racing presented some real opposition. You have to realize this was the muscle car era. I raced guys who were to become well known in drag racing just a few years later.

DV: When did you first start building motors professionally?

JM: I started in ’69. First part–time nights in my garage while going to school in the day. I ported heads, farmed out the machine work and did the assembly. I slowly bought pieces of equipment as I could afford them. At first it was just hot street motors but as time went by, the drag and oval track guys brought work to me.

DV: So at what point did you get into serious competition?

JM: I guess that it all really happened when Curtis Payne, a Texan who made it big in the oil business early in life, decided to go Winston Cup and ARCA racing. This was  77. He sort of picked me up as a hotshot engine builder showing some sort of promise. Curtis built a beautiful shop and then had me order every piece of equipment we would ever need including a dyno. We built and dynoed for the next seven months getting ready for the ARCA 250 at Daytona in 1979. The car, with local short–track driver John Rezek, qualified on the pole and finished second. During the year we ran about a dozen NASCAR races and qualified for every one we entered. The next year at Daytona we qualified on the outside pole and won the ARCA race. It turned out that the winners of the cup race, the Busch race and us all used Del West valves and Comp Cams camshafts. Comp and Del West did a lot of advertising letting everyone know they achieved a clean sweep at Daytona. We were written up right along with some famous Winston Cup engine builders and this certainly opened a lot of doors for us.

DV: I understand you started the school in ’85. Knowing how paranoid Winston Cup engine builders are in general, how did the quantum leap from keeping secrets to giving them away wholesale come about?

JM: In 1980 Curtis decided to spend more time with his business and family and less time racing. He said he would like to sell me the equipment and, if he needed more engines, he would purchase them from me. I gotta tell you that guy made me a great deal. I suppose all the ’round the clock’ stints I did, and sleeping on the workshop floor so I didn’t waste time driving home, paid off. There were times, before a race, I did not see what was supposedly home for days at a time and Linda brought my food and clothes to work. I know Curtis really appreciated the effort. At one time we were up to 11 employees, but guess what, I would train staff and just as they got really good they would up and leave and start their own business. There are now six machine shops in the Houston area owned by my ex–employees. When our shop foreman did just that, it was sort of the last straw. Linda and I knew that trying to find automotive machinists was the industry’s biggest problem. We decided we would start a business doing what we had been doing for free–training automotive machinists. Sounds easy when you say it like that, but it took two years of paperwork and bureaucratic antics to make it happen.

DV: I hear you saying opening statements to new students is along the lines of ’I may not know it all, but I’m all you’ve got so pay attention.’ Those that know more than me don’t teach or tell, "Is that what we might call the hard–line approach, sort of a real racer’s boot camp?

JM: Well I guess you might call it that but consider this: some schools just turn out graduates with a certificate of some sort. My students want to make it in the world of motor racing; I have to turn out winners, not certificate holders. In the nine to eighteen months they are here they have to pack in a tremendous amount of learning. If they make it through my course, the teams likely to hire them know they are getting quality help. They have a lot to learn starting with the math and theory, then moving on to machining and assembly. They also get to build their own motors during the course.

DV: Talking of theory, you have won a reputation over the years of being able to take a new engine, an unknown in terms of modification history, and quickly turn it into a power house in sometimes as little as a few short months. A recent example is the LS1 and LS6 motors. When you’re confronted with a new motor what do you typically see as the starting point in the search for power?

JM: I think one of my corny expressions might sum that up–’get a head, flow a head, stay ahead’. Granted, that’s an oversimplification, but it is a good basis on which to build a better picture. If you are just talking about a bolt–on deal then find the weak link and fix it. The flow bench will tell you where that is. If it’s a development program where the whole engine is under scrutiny then the weak point of any poppet valve engine is the intake valve and seat. It was well–known before I came along but it will stand saying time after time that the most important part of a high performance engine is the area ½ inch before the intake seat and up to ½ inch an inch after. The exhaust comes in a relatively distant second. I have seen many a super port job fail to deliver because the seat and the area immediately around it was not optimized. At SAM I impress on my students that life in the fast lane starts at the intake valve seat –period. I guess you could also say that a seat and guide machine is the root of all power. On a typical V8 engine, seat priority exists to about 300 to 350 thousandths lift. After that, it’s a port priority but it pays to understand the seat is never out of the picture. Of course you can’t develop a seat form entirely independent of the port it is a question of developing the port and seat in parallel so to speak. Heads are so important you can have the worst bore/stroke ratio, the worst rod ratio, the heaviest parts and so on but if you have the best heads you will still likely win.