Ryan Lippmann — Projects & Garage

The 416 Sierra

The centerpiece of the garage is a 416-cubic-inch supercharged V8 that I designed and built for my own GMC Sierra. A pickup truck is an honest platform for a project like this: it hides nothing, forgives nothing, and gets driven, which means every decision eventually gets tested by reality instead of by the internet.

The build philosophy is the one I've used on jobsites for twenty-plus years: measured, logged, tuned on evidence. Establish a baseline. Change one variable. Log it. Compare against the baseline. Keep what the data keeps; throw out what it doesn't — including your own favorite theory, which is usually the hardest part. I run deep on HP Tuners, so every pull produces a datalog and every datalog gets read. "It feels stronger" is not a data point. It's a mood with a throttle pedal.

Designed-and-built means exactly that. The combination existed on paper before it existed in metal, because an engine is a system, not a shopping list — parts that are individually excellent and collectively wrong are the most expensive kind of wrong there is. Twenty years of preconstruction taught me that lesson at building scale; the Sierra taught it again at crankshaft speed.

That discipline is also where TuneView came from — tuning my own combination on evidence and wondering why the whole industry didn't work that way.

Open Tools

The other half of the garage is software. I build open tools for automotive diagnostics and design — the utilities I wished existed when I needed them, published so the next person doesn't have to wish. The code lives at github.com/lippmoney.

The pattern behind all of them is the same: take something the hobbyist world settles by argument and give it an instrument instead. A measurement you can rerun beats a forum consensus every time, and a tool that shows its work beats both. The biggest expression of that idea outgrew the garage entirely and became TuneView — a platform that grades engine calibrations against real datalogs. Same instinct, bigger dyno.

The Double Blast Footnote

One credit from a different life: I appeared in the 1994 action film Double Blast, where the credits list me as "Ryan Lippman" — one n short. Getting people to spell it right has been a passion project ever since: it's Lippmann. The full record of my brief film career sits on IMDb, where it remains exactly one line long. Some projects are engines. Some are spelling.