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O P I N I O N
The need for speed
A lack of speed is a big problem for too many A/E firms. You all really need to pick up the pace!
W hen I was young, I had a need for speed. I was always looking to go faster. At the age of 12, I learned I could reach down and pull the governor on my three- horsepower Sears mini bike, and it would go a whole lot faster. I put on a set of straight pipes and rejetted the carburetors on my Honda CB160 when I was 13, and it went faster. I tried (and ultimately failed) to put a 283 Chevy V8 in my first car, a 1950 Ford, at age 16 so it would go faster.
Mark Zweig
It just went on from there, as I owned many popular pony and muscle cars in my youth. I was always cranking up distributors to advance the timing, opening up exhausts, changing carburetors and pulling off restrictive air cleaners to make my cars go faster. After finishing grad school, I traded my mobile home for a CBX Honda, a six-cylinder bike with 105 horsepower. As I got older, I got into V8-powered BMWs and Porsche 911 coupes. I owned a heavily-modified 1972 Kawasaki H2 750 two-stroke (known as a “widow maker”) for years. We put hopped up V8s in everything, from my restored 1930 Model A Ford, to my 1935 Ford pickup, and even into my 1951 Nash Statesman, increasing its horsepower from 85 to 434. One of my last company cars at Zweig Group was a 2016 Cadillac CTS-V that had 640 supercharged horsepower and would do a quarter
mile in the high 11s. My current daily driver is a 22-year-old 6.75 liter V8 turbocharged Rolls Royce Silver Spur. We discovered that many of our architecture and engineering clients liked speed, too. Eventually, Zweig Group (then known as Zweig White) started having CEO retreats at racing schools. We did formula cars and Dodge Vipers at Skip Barber, Winston Cup cars with Richard Petty, and motorcycle road racing with Freddie Spencer. More recently, we did a supercar driving experience on a race track. But we aren’t here to talk about cars and motorcycles. We are instead here to talk about how to make A/E firms more successful. And I
See MARK ZWEIG, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER APRIL 19, 2021, ISSUE 1388
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