In ‘stock’ form you’d buy from the dealer, the popular Isuzu N-Series truck, with its 5.2 litre turbocharged four-cylinder diesel engine, makes 60 kW of power, measured at the wheels.

But not by the time Damian Lomax is done with it. You’re talking 150 kW (and that’s for the customer’s trucks – the shop truck is even more).

Or to put it another way, “it will walk up” the hill out of Queanbeyan along the King’s Highway in fifth gear – rather than second.

Damian is the master tuner at Stay Tuned, a Fyshwick-based performance workshop dedicated to extracting every last scrap of oomph from petrol and diesel engines of all sorts.

They’ll also cover your fleet log-book services, as well as other performance modifications, suspension upgrades, engine conversions, and a “wide array of mechanical services” They recently opened a fabrication bay to enable more complicated work, and so they don’t have to outsource the creation of custom parts.

But they’ve become famous across the country for their work on the Isuzu, to the point it attracted the attention of the Life Off Road show on Channel Seven.

Damian, and business partner Tony Winmill, have spent a few days over the past few months with the film crew in Robe, South Australia, capturing footage of it tackling the region’s toughest tracks for the latest series.

Getting the Isuzu muddy for the cameras while filming for Channel 7’s Life Off Road show. Photo: Stay Tuned.

“The next trip is to a local track, called the ‘Rock Farm’, which includes a massive gully that finishes in a vertical wall twice the height of the truck,” Tony says.

“It’s pretty scary when you’re sitting right at the front, over the wheels.”

There are obviously a lot of mechanical changes involved in a complete performance upgrade, but in the case of the Isuzu N-Series trucks, most of it is done by plugging the vehicle’s ECU into a laptop and updating the engine maps.

This has enabled Stay Tuned to remotely tune these and other vehicles from across Australia – and even overseas, including in South Africa – using a tablet, a cable and cloud-based software.

“We can remotely connect to a customer’s car anywhere, read and rewrite the ECU to deliver the upgrade,” Tony says.

A Mitsubishi Evo on the dyno at Stay Tuned. Photo: Tony Winmill.

It’s also not too much of a surprise that Tony hails from an IT background.

He came to Canberra for a RAAF IT project and stayed in Federal Government IT, before going out on his own and founding Veritec, specialising in Microsoft products. It’s merged into a much larger company, called Atturra, with offices in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

About eight years ago, he was introduced to Damian by a friend, and the rest was history.

Damian, with a long history in motorsport, was working as a driver trainer with Fifth Gear Motoring at the time, but tuning cars was his passion ever since he had traded one of his cars for a dynamometer and started “doing up a race car” with his mates at his in-laws’ farm.

“I basically taught myself to tune,” he says.

“I did a couple of cars for friends, and then friends of friends, and it just grew from there. I’d finish work on Friday and drive out to the in-laws’ place to get everything prepped for the weekend. Saturday morning, 10 vehicles would turn up and we’d work flatstick Saturday and Sunday.”

He says there’s “crazy demand” in the ACT, mostly from 4WD owners who want to get the most out of their beasts.

Nowadays, 70 per cent of what they do at Stay Tuned is related to diesel tuning, and “all of it is performance”. They primarily work with vehicles from BMW, Ford, Holden, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen, in addition to Isuzu.

But they do draw the line with some requests.

“Our industry sometimes gets a bad rap because a lot of tuners don’t really care at all about the legality of doing something,” Damian says.

“But everything we do, and our packages are all designed around being emissions-compliant and not deleting anything we shouldn’t. I want a customer to be able to drive their Isuzu D-Max across Australia and 55 police checkpoints without issue.

“Obviously, some people want to do some stuff for racing purposes, and that’s different, but for 99.9 per cent of people, you don’t need to do things that put your registration in jeopardy.”

But the Isuzu remains his tour de force.

“Customers are detouring to Canberra to upgrade their N-Series trucks,” he says.

You can stream all Life Off Road episodes on 7 Plus.