Located in Culver City, California (a few miles north of LAX and the home of Sony Studios), Brainstorm Performance (BSP) is a well-respected tuner shop which has received countless awards and their tuned vehicles have been featured in almost every tuner magazine on the newsstands. The BSP showroom is housed in an industrial structure of brushed steel and glass. Many types of import cars are represented here and you can't miss Roshan Harilela's, the owner of BSP, black 911 Turbo sitting in the middle of the showroom floor. Roshan sat down with us to discuss his shop's approach to tuning, his dream cars growing up in Hong Kong, and the future in tuning and for BSP.

RacingCode: So, what do you guys do?
Roshan Harilela: Basically we specialize in making cars a lot faster, while maintaining driveability that’s very close to stock. While this may sound very simple, it’s always a real challenge to make a car really smooth and consistent on a day-to-day basis and still be a killer on the streets and track.

Most people think they want a “race car” on the streets, but in actuality, you’d never want to drive a race car everyday. The criteria for what’s acceptable in terms of driveability is very different for a race car versus a street car.

To that end, we make very deliberate choices as far as engine management is concerned and set up a system that’s tailored to a specific vehicle, its owner, and its planned use. What most people don’t realize is that we spend a lot more time tuning a vehicle’s driveability characteristics, than we do on high power tuning.

It takes some specialized equipment like our full load all-wheel-drive Dynamic Test Systems (Australia) dyno to allow us to do our best work. Under a controlled environment, we can tune a vehicle very accurately and ensure consistency under a wide range of situations. A non-load, inertia-type dyno like a Dynojet, would never allow us to do this. Years of experience tuning numerous engine management systems doesn’t hurt either!

RC: Do you specialize in any cars in particular?
RH: Although we’re comfortable in dealing with a wide variety of vehicles, what we do most are Nissan 350Zs with Twin Turbos, Subaru WRX/STIs, Mitsubishi EVO 8s, Mazda MX5s (Miatas), and engine management work on Porsche 996 Turbos.

RC: What makes Brainstorm Performance unique?
RH: I think our emphasis on finding the right combination for a particular car and owner, makes us similar to a custom tailor. We setup parts that fit perfectly. We like to keep it simple. This formula ensures that our customers only spend for what they need and keeps the whole package reliable. We take great pride in seeing cars we’ve set up go to huge mileage without any problems.

RC: Could you give us a list of magazine features and awards?
RH: Oh boy, I think I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve been written up! I used to keep a log of them, but sometimes there’s stuff about us in magazines that we didn’t even know about. We’ve been featured in Turbo Magazine, Modified Magazine, Sport Compact Car and a few others. We’ve also been featured on Redline TV and a few other enthusiast videos. In the next month or so, we have a tuner shootout for Road & Track’s Speed magazine with a twin-turboed 350Z.

RC: What were some of your favorite cars when you were growing up?
RH: Growing up in Hong Kong, there was a big emphasis on street racing. The kings of the races were the AE86 Corollas. Then there were the R32 Skylines, which were in a different league altogether! Just watching an R32’s pair of round taillights disappearing into the haze of a rainy night made my day!

RC: So what do you drive now?
RH: I have a problem with keeping the number of cars I drive to a minimum, but what I drive most are my 1992 Mazda MX5, which is turbocharged. There’s nothing quite like a simple sports car that’s light and has a lot of power. It reminds you who’s doing the driving.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is my Porsche 996 turbo. With all the electronics and all-wheel-drive traction, it can make an average driver seem like a gifted one. The power delivery of the Porsche is so superb that I was very careful with my mods to ensure that I didn’t change that characteristic. All I did was an engine management upgrade that I custom tuned on our dyno. It netted an extra 85hp with no loss in driveability, on an otherwise completely stock vehicle. It will now pull cleanly from 1500rpm all the way to over 190mph in sixth gear. Believe me, I’ve tried it!

RC: What do you see as the upcoming trend in tuning? Which cars will be the must-haves and which modifications do you think will be hot?
RH: The biggest trend I see in tuning is that people are recognizing the importance of having a load-type dyno. In the next 5-10 years, any serious workshop that has any interest in doing things right will have to have one. The advantages are so fundamental, that educated consumers should be demanding this from their shops.

As far as cars that are hot and probably will stay hot for a while, I think that Subaru’s WRX/STI, Nissan’s 350Z/Infiniti G35 and the upcoming Skyline are the hot cars to watch. With each successive generation, these cars keep getting better and smarter, although they still leave room for tuners to do their magic.

RC: Since you guys are pretty well respected, do owners ship their cars to you to have worked on? What's the farthest location you've gotten a car shipped from?
RH: We’ve had cars shipped from clear across the country. In fact, we are currently working on a 350Z from Mississippi that is scheduled to be trucked back home next week. We recently did a 2004 STI that was shipped to Tahiti. That was a tricky one because we know that there’s no way that car is going to get anyone with Subaru specific knowledge to work on it in the future and there are no dynos there either. It had to be perfect before leaving us with enough margin of safety for their fuel quality and for extended maintenance intervals.

RC: What's in the future for Brainstorm Performance?
RH: We’re going to continue to do what we do, which is keep it simple, get great results and build long-term relationships with our customers. You’ll start to see major changes in terms of the range of cars we’ll be working on with more exotics, more turbo diesels, and more development and testing of products. We test everything we sell extensively before we recommend them and stand behind our products and workmanship. Our crew is expanding and our breadth of expertise just gets bigger and better. In addition we’ll put more emphasis on regular servicing as well as upgrading, so that we offer an all around package for our clientele.