About IntakeSystems.com

Back in the mid 70s as I was trying to figure out how to make my in-line 4 banger faster, I asked around at the speed shops and dealerships how can I make more than 55 hp from this little 5-speed economy car that was all rage for its sportiness, mileage and clever design. The one common answer that kept coming back from experts and friends that raced 1/4 miles on Friday nights in the big O.C. was to get cooler air into the intake system quicker than you can with a stock air intake system. Many of them pointed to the big 350 or 454 V8 muscle cars of the day with either Ram Air or Cowl Induction as examples.

With those answers, further research, and a willingness to fabricate and and drill holes into a perfectly good brand new car, I attached and ran two flex hose tubes from behind the grill and routed them into a custom built twin-air snorkel that fed into the circular air cleaner equipped with better flowing air filter (from a new company at the time called K&N) replacement and rammed the sealed-cooled air into the carburetor.

It looked like a pretty clean install so I fired it up and gave it run through a variety of driving tests and sure enough, it was quicker. I was convinced I had coaxed that little engine past the 60hp mark. That's all it took and I was hooked on the power of cooler air and if it had a bit of positive pressure behind it, then so much the better. What a laugh looking back, there wasn't much available in performance bolt-on products for little cars during the 70s, let alone a bolt-on intake system. But there was a willingness by many to make it happen and eventually it did.

My car hobby rolled into a marketing career in the performance automotive aftermarket and as the decades rolled forward into the 80s and 90s, a new untapped phenomena began to develop called the Internet. It was a bit slow at 28kbps, but I was on it trying to figure out its potential for reaching new markets. With the help of some very clever Apple-trained programmers, we put together our first automotive e-commerce site in 1994 and with that experience, new marketing ideas began to fully occupy what was then being called my mental bandwidth.

To execute on the ideas before anyone else (it was all first mover advantage back then) I began to register or buy, what I thought, were some terrific domain names like Brembo.com, KandN.com, KandNfilters.com, ImportPerformance.com, BuyBrakes.com and IntakeSystems.com. You can bet I got calls from Brembo and K&N, so I played that right by handing them over to their respective copyright owners, but I was able to keep the rest to someday develop into specialized e-commerce stores in my favorite performance categories. I had no idea at the time if the concept was delusional or not, but I was driven to do it.

So this is IntakeSystems.com and I first registered it in 1999 with the vision of having a focused e-commerce site for all things relating to intake systems featuring some of my performance intake brands. From 2005 to 2009 this site was contracted to promote and provide customer service for one specific famous intake system company manufacturer. In 2010, with the help and blessings of my new business partners at TruckXL, we are together assembling this ever evolving e-commerce site devoted to the sales and service of intake systems and components from the very best performance manufacturers.

We work closely with all of our manufacturers and our customer service and sales staff are provided training materials, videos, hands-on, horsepower charts and new product releases to keep up to speed on new products. We are all devoted to making your IntakeSystems.com purchases a great experience and we invite you to participate in our product reviews and tell it like it is. Please tell a friend.

Thank you for your interest! 

John Butler
Managing Director, IntakeSystems.com
Superb customer relationships at IntakeSystems.com guaranteed by company founder and Managing Director John Butler, 30 Year Automotive Aftermarket Industry Veteran.