Built While Deployed: The Hypermotive Performance Story
Most performance shops start in a garage. Hypermotive started Jason was in the middle of his Master's Thesis.
In August 2012, Jason Micallef was active-duty Army, and he launched Hypermotive Performance as a small online retailer selling parts out of whatever space and time he could find between deployments. There was no storefront, no shop bay, no sign out front — just a laptop, a growing list of parts, a vast knowledge of Ford, and a plan. What makes that start unusual isn't just that it worked. It's that for more than a decade afterward, Jason kept building the business from wherever the Army sent him next.
From Detroit to the Driver's Seat
Jason was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, which is about as close to growing up inside the automotive industry as a kid can get without actually working the line. His stepfather spent over 35 years as an electrical engineer at Ford, and that connection to the Blue Oval wasn't background noise — it shaped how Jason saw cars from the start. Long before "Ford expert" was a title on a business card, it was just how he grew up.
That foundation followed him when he joined the Army in May 2003. Over the next two decades, Jason's duty stations and deployments would take him further from Michigan than most people travel in a lifetime — and somehow, Hypermotive went with him.
A Business Built on the Move
Jason's military career put him at Fort Bragg and at Kelly Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, with deployments to Afghanistan, Qatar, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, and Tunisia. In between, his work took him to Vicenza, Italy; Stuttgart and Baumholder, Germany; and Montpellier, France. and many other locations around the globe
Running a performance parts business from a deployed environment, or from a compound on another continent, isn't something most business plans account for. Shipments had to get coordinated, customers had to get answered, and the business had to keep moving — all on Army time, often thousands of miles from home. Hypermotive survived and grew through all of it, which says as much about the business as it does about the man running it.
Putting Down Roots
For the first couple of years, Hypermotive existed purely online. In 2013, that changed when the company opened its first physical location in Dunn, North Carolina — giving local customers a real shop to walk into, not just a website to order from. Hypermotive called Dunn home for a decade.
In August 2023, with Jason's Army career winding down, Hypermotive made its next move: out of Dunn and into downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the shop has operated ever since. A few months later, in February 2024, Jason retired from the Army after 21 years of service — closing one chapter just as Hypermotive was settling into its next one.
Hypermotive Today
Hypermotive is still a small shop by design, but it's a sharp one. The team today includes:
Jason Micallef — Owner, Ford expert, and tuner Anthony Ross — GM Technician Cade Adams — Ford and GM Technician Jessica Hobbs — Customer Service
Rounding out the team is Andrew Dunkle of Looney Tuned Racing and Speed, Hypermotive's contracted GM tuner, bringing dedicated GM calibration expertise to every build that needs it.
The Short Version
Hypermotive wasn't built in a single garage, on a single timeline, or even on a single continent. It was built one deployment, one duty station, and one late night at a time, by someone who never stopped thinking about cars no matter where the Army sent him next. Fourteen years, five countries of deployment, and an important move from Dunn to Fayetteville later, that same drive is still what runs the shop — just with a lot more horsepower behind it now. The start and growth of Hypermotive is unconventional to say the least, but the enthusiasm, passion, drive and expertise was always there.