About

The Faces

Karl Taht

Karl’s always been surrounded by motorsports. Introduced to track at a young age by his father, an avid auto-enthusiast and HPDE instructor for a local driving school in Texas, Karl got a jump start in the car scene. His prior ownership has included various BMWs (E30s and E36s) as well as an Audi A4 2.0T and VW R32. His most recent project has been his daily-slowly-turned-track-rat: a 2015 VW GTI. Purchased brand new, Karl’s shaped the car into something loosely resembling the vehicle he acquired 3 years prior. Equipped with a turbo upgrade, coilovers, a limited slip differential, and more, it now makes over 350 whp and has been known to pass the occasional Corvette Z06 on lapping days.

His experience is unique from most other car enthusiasts though. Karl pursued a bachelors in electrical engineering and is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science with focus on machine learning. His academic pursuits have involved him with internships at high level research groups in the semiconductor industry. You can say he has a thing for numbers and racing is no exception. He believes that a well-built car should be backed by quantification. This technical aptitude and his passion for motorsports drew him to Data Driven Motorsports.

Andy Hsiao

Pure insanity or overwhelming dedication? It’s hard to tell when you first meet Andy but one thing is crystal clear: racing is his life. His formly Infiniti-V6-powered Nissan 240SX (VQ35HR S14.5) perfectly embodies Andy’s persistence to go beyond an off-the-shelf build and create something both great and unique. While at first impressions may remind you of a run of the mill drift car, a closer inspection will reveal Andy’s focus on grip driving and function over form mentality. It’s hard to say whether Andy built the car, or the car built Andy.

Approaching car building with the philosophy that to build a faster car, one must understand the fundamentals, he began looking to technical literature to find more speed. While he could comprehend the concepts, he found difficulty in objectively evaluating them on a vehicle driven only a few times a month. Andy quickly realized that optimizing this moving target problem was going to take deeper analysis: one that required data collection. Armed with a high-frequency GPS module and OBD2 data acquisition system, Andy set forth on a mission to build his car backed by numbers. It soon became apparent the infrastructure he was building was going to require more than Excel and DataZap!

Outside of his racing pursuits, Andy is a graduate student working on a Masters of Science in Material Science/Engineering and works full time doing research and development at a fortune 500 semiconductor company.