Jason Cummins of Buckhead Imports: 30 Years, a Mentor's Buyout, and a 706-Horsepower M5

Jason Cummins has been at Buckhead Imports for more than 30 years. He came in as a technician at 20, bought the business from its founder, and still runs it from the middle of Buckhead Village, almost across the street from the St. Regis. The shop works mostly on BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Porsche, with plenty of exotics in the mix.

Throttlecast host Grant Brewer has known him for seven to ten years, since Grant was selling McLarens and other exotics. Buckhead Imports was the go-to shop for those cars. Grant once watched a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead come back from its annual service with a four-figure bill when he expected five. Jason puts it more plainly: “We’re not the cheapest in Atlanta, but we get the job done and get it done right.”

He drove to The Ride Lounge in Peachtree Corners in the car he has owned for 15 years, a supercharged 2002 E39 M5. As he pulled in, the hosts thought the blower whine was a passing diesel truck.

Sorting bolts in a Marietta garage

Jason was born and raised in Marietta. His family didn’t have much money. His father worked at a NAPA parts store and rebuilt air-cooled Volkswagens in a two-bay garage behind the house. His mother tells him that at three or four he sat at the bench sorting buckets of nuts and bolts while his father worked at night.

By 10 or 11 his father had taught him to drive a manual. Jason took a Volkswagen Thing to the far end of their acre and did donuts around two apple trees, then parked it before his parents got home. Years later his father admitted he never worked out how so much mud got into the wheel wells.

After Marietta High School and vo-tech, he went straight into a job at Marietta Foreign Auto Repair through a work program. In his senior year he was doing timing belts on Nissan Maximas and rebuilding Volkswagen Rabbit diesels “for pennies.”

How he came to own Buckhead Imports

The move to Buckhead came through his father, who was in the parts business. One of his clients, Lloyd, had started Buckhead Imports and was getting too busy to keep up. He asked Jason’s father if he knew a good technician.

Once Jason saw what European cars paid, he knew which direction he wanted to go. He also liked the work. BMW, Mercedes, and the rest let a technician do the same job enough times to know it cold. On a 1992 BMW E36, he can pull every tool he needs for a clutch job before he starts.

Lloyd became his mentor. He taught Jason how to talk to customers and how to run a business, down to spreadsheets handwritten in pencil so you knew where every penny went. By Jason’s late 20s, Lloyd was burning out, and one day he asked if Jason wanted to buy the shop. Jason had no idea where the money would come from.

Lloyd knew that. He sat down with the company’s lawyer and built a five-year buyout. Jason owned the business, Lloyd came back as a mechanic on the payroll, and Jason’s job was to make sure the shop earned enough to cover every buyout check. In five years it was his.

The hardest part came after. The two clashed over the changes Jason was bringing in, and he had to let his mentor go. “That was the hardest thing I ever did,” he says. He still calls it the best decision for both of them.

The Want to Go Fast years

The shop’s reputation grew out of its AMG and M builds and the Want to Go Fast event at Heaven’s Landing, an airstrip where anyone could line up anything, a Honda or a Lamborghini, and run a half mile from a standing start.

Jason still calls the Mercedes E55 platform underrated. His E55 builds ran a larger crank pulley and a smaller supercharger pulley, long-tube headers, and methanol injection. A three-gallon water tank in the back got packed with ice before each run to chill the intercooler and keep intake temperatures down.

The build he remembers best was a G55 for a Piedmont surgeon who wanted the fastest one out there and didn’t care what it cost. Buckhead Imports built the engine and fitted a Weistec supercharger. The G-Wagon, which Jason compares to pushing a brick through the air, ran in the 150s. All-wheel drive let it “squat and go,” and it took the fastest SUV plaque.

Closing the performance shop

At its peak Jason ran a separate performance shop with an all-wheel-drive dyno, an in-house fabricator, and an in-house tuner doing one-off builds nobody else would touch. He signed that lease while his wife was about to go into labor with their third son.

After six years, the owner of the Buckhead property called: he was selling, and Jason needed to buy it. That same weekend, up at 4 a.m. for another car event, his wife asked how much longer he could keep this up. He asked himself whether he wanted to keep “trying to be the fastest kid on the planet” or look after his family. He closed the performance shop and bought the building. He has owned it for six and a half years.

An E39 M5 that makes 706 at the wheels

His own car still carries that era. The E39 M5’s 5.0-liter S62 V8 is sleeved, with Ross forged pistons, Carrillo rods, and a blueprinted and balanced bottom end under stock heads. A stage 3-plus supercharger system runs 22 pounds of boost through an intake manifold with its own cooler, and the ice tank is still in the back. On its last dyno pull it made 706 horsepower at the wheels. On drag radials, at full weight, it ran in the 11s.

He calls himself an M5 guy. He also owns an ’88 E28 M5, and his son drives an E34. The current project is an E60 M5 conversion that swaps the V10 car’s SMG gearbox, which Jason calls “awful,” for the dual-clutch transmission from the E9x M3. It uses the same bell housing. The hard part is getting the car’s own electronics to accept it. One of his technicians has spent three years on the tune, and four or five owners in Jason’s circle are already driving converted cars.

Building Lexus hot-lap cars for IMSA

Buckhead Imports also builds the Lexus hot-lap cars used at IMSA races, a project with his social media director, a longtime Lexus enthusiast. They take new IS 500s and add coilovers that plug straight into the factory electronic damping, BBS wheels, exhaust, and some aero work. Professional drivers take guests around the track in them, and the cars come back with the Michelin Pilot Sports rolled over at the edges.

Rapid fire

• Greatest BMW M car: the E39 M5.
• Greatest AMG: the E55, though the SLS Black Series is the closest thing to a race car he has driven.
• Most undervalued European car: the V12 Aston Martin Vantage. He has been doing a lot of Aston Martin work, including a manual 2011 V12 Vantage with long-tube headers.
• Dream three-car garage: Ferrari F12, E39 M5, E28 M5. He helped build a Novitec N-Largo widebody F12 for a customer.

What’s next for Buckhead Imports

Since buying the building, Jason has refaced the front, and Liqui Moly helped cover the windows with posters of cars the shop has built. Faith and family come first for him now. He is 51, with sons who are 18, 16, and 15. The oldest works at the shop and is learning the way Jason did, cleaning bathrooms and sweeping floors. Buckhead is growing fast around the property, but Jason hopes to be there another ten years.

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Jason Cummins is above and on YouTube. He also posts how-to videos for early BMW and Mercedes platforms on the Buckhead Imports YouTube channel.

Jason’s M5 spends most of its time in storage. Throttlecast is recorded at The Ride Lounge, a private car club offering climate-controlled car storage in Atlanta, at Peachtree Corners and Midtown. Members keep their cars in monitored bays and drive them when it counts. Schedule a private tour.