Piston Cup Productions

Gael Carranza (or most commonly referred to as Piston Cup Productions or PCP) is a YouTuber, most known for his videos based on and around Disney and Pixar properties, most notably Cars and Toy Story. He is 17 years old and lives in McAllen, Texas.

Early Life
PCP was born on March 23rd, 2004. In 2006, his parents took him to see Cars in the cinema, but the sound of the race cars at the start of the film scared him, so they left the cinema. It was also around this time he originally began collecting Cars diecasts from Mattel, small metal and plastic cars based on the vehicles from the films. He also enjoyed watching Thomas and Friends. His brother also enjoyed Thomas and Cars. At one stage, he had grown out of Cars and had thrown out or sold his Cars merchandise. He reconnected with Cars as the hype for Cars 3 began to grow. He used to make Thomas videos years before his Cars videos, under his real name, but he had deleted them all.

YouTube career (2017-present)
PCP came up with the channel name sitting in his bedroom one day, just tossing around names in his head such as "Piston Cup Studios". Somehow, "Piston Cup Productions" came to his mind, and it clicked straight away. He had a Cars crate, that said Piston Cup Racing Series, and he had came up with the idea from what that crate said.

He uploaded his first Cars video on May 24th 2017, which was a review of the Disney Store Rust-eze Lightning McQueen diecast. As of 2021, this video has over 22,000 views. His second video (a review on Disney Store's Fabulous Lightning McQueen) released on June 9th 2017, the eleven year anniversary of the first Cars movie. His first 'viral' video released on August 3rd 2017, and was a stop motion remake of the "I'm Sorry" scene from Cars 3. It currently has over 1.6 million views. More remakes released and people began to find his channel. He also became a member of Google+'s Disney Cars and Planes Community, where anything related to Cars could be posted. He left in 2018.

In November 2018, he released Racing Like a Fireball, the first of PCP Films, and the first in a trilogy. The film is 15 mins long. It is a race at Fireball Beach, featuring Lightning McQueen, Cruz Ramirez and other next-generation racers from the 2017 film. It is currently, the second most-viewed video on the channel, at around 4.5 million views. A sequel entitled Racing Like a Legend was announced in early 2019, but the Legend plot was scrapped. Instead, he created Racing Like a Drag Racer, which was his first feature-length project. The film released in mid-2019 and currently has over 297,000 views. The finale of the trilogy, titled Racing Like a Hero, released in Autumn 2020. It has over 428,000 views.

At the end of the year, he released a Christmas special called "Everything Disney Cars in a Nutshell", which contained funny and out-of-context clips he recorded. One of these was a short clip, where the camera panned over his collection of Pitties, stopped at Jerry Drivechain and randomly said "Pink". This is one of the most memorable memes on the channel.

In 2019, PCP began to release videos related to Toy Story, starting with a review on Interactive Drop Down Woody and Buzz Lightyear, from Toy Story 4. Among those Toy Story videos was one of the funniest videos PCP has released. It was a review on the Bandai buildable Woody and Buzz kits. 2019 became a memorable year with plenty of videos.

2020 brought an even better year of videos, despite the Car-on-a-virus pandemic. An example is the then-titled Toy Story: Reality Check. PCP and some of his friends would create and voice the series, which revolved around the Toy Story characters in a Mexican setting. Bullseye was changed to Firulais for the series. The first episode was mostly in Spanish, but episodes following the first were mostly in English. Also in 2019, was The Adventures of Lightning and Cruz. Before the release of Racing Like a Hero, it was a stand alone series, but PCP decided to attach it to the lore of Racing Like a Hero. This series marked the first appearance of PCP's brother on the channel, voicing and controlling Cruz. Near the end of the year, PCP decided to merge all of the lore he had created into one big universe, allowing characters from Racing Like a Fireball and Toy Story: Reality Check to cross over. He then catagorised them into one big series, calling it PCP Shorts. He has also released a few videos based on his childhood show Thomas and Friends (as well as not being happy with the new format brought in for Series 25).

On the May Monthly Unboxing stream, he 'leaked' some new projects such as 'Forky Goes to Jail', a soccer special and a fourth Movie.

Impact
PCP's videos have spread to a wide number of people. The channel currently has almost 100,000 subscribers and has a view count of over 60 million views. It is safe to say that his videos must be doing something right. Although, there have been cases of haters showing up and ruining the fun, especially on livestreams and hatred for the ending of Racing Like a Hero.

Trivia

 * PCP voices most of his characters, apart from Cruz Ramirez and some of the Toy Story characters.
 * PCP is a big Marvel fan, as well as being a fan of Star Wars, Miraculous, and Descendants.
 * He, along with Firulais, had a role in the ending of the 2021 Meme War.
 * He drives a red 2019 Hyundai Elantra, which occasionally has a Cars eye sticker on the windshield.
 * He has written and performed parodies of Old Town Road, Last Christmas, Silent Night and Deck the Halls. He currently has a Never Gonna Give You Up parody in the works, or at least has an idea to, following the April Monthly Unboxing stream.
 * He turns comments off.
 * His brother and friends own YouTube channels
 * He jokingly once said he identified as a Piston Cup.
 * He almost lost some of the props for Racing Like a Hero on a beach, when a wave came in and took some of the cars he was using with it. He got them back before they could be swept to sea.
 * More recently, he decided to announce what city in Texas he lives in, and announced it to be McAllen.