On this week's episode of the High Performance Academy Tuned In podcast, Andre is joined by an absolute legend of the import scene.

John Shepherd has been around since the very early days of import drag racing. Through campaigning his AWD Eagle Talon, John lead the first charge and pushed the boundaries of just what was possible with a Japanese performance car.

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John talks about his early days and the many workarounds and bodges that were necessary during the sport's infancy. The Ohio-based racer and car builder was squeezing record-setting high-ten-second quarter miles out of his 4G63-powered Talon, and as the game progressed, so did the car. Andre and John track the development of the Eagle through to its retirement, at which point it was running 7.7-second quarters — all still in a time well before billet blocks, proper race transmissions, and modern turbo technology.

John has since moved on to Nissan GT-Rs and Audi R8s, and lays down his recipe for what he considers to be the "perfect" street car when working with these platforms. Easy to live with, perfectly fine to take on long road trips,... and capable of mid-seven-second quartermiles.

Finally, the guys dive into the world of dual clutch transmissions. These DCTs have become ShepTrans' bread and butter in recent years, and John goes into detail on how the clever gearboxes work and how we can make them far stronger in order to put up with the massive torque figures modern performance engines provide.

There's plenty of nostalgia to be found in this episode, and if acronyms like DCT and TCM have always left you scratching your head, you definitely don't want to miss this one.

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