That whole event was a big, big victory for us. But, in the grand scheme of things, that build didn’t bring any immediate income into Gas Monkey Garage, either.
We kept getting all kinds of great news about the ratings for the show. There were millions of people watching what we were doing! Still, the day-to-day reality of running the shop under the pressure of constant deadlines tested us all. The financial disasters seemed to keep coming one after another, and it really started to get to me.
Then? Things got even worse.
“MASHED-UP MUSTANG”
The Mustang on its way into the shop . . . COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
I started out thinking this was going to be a great deal. Trading a ’58 Impala that’d been sitting on my lot for too long for a ’67 Mustang convertible with power steering, power brakes, and A/C seemed like money in the bank. We’d do some straight-up restoration, give it a little Gas Monkey attitude by painting it black and giving it a bit more of an aggressive stance, and sell it. Done.
. . . and after we’d given it a little Gas Monkey attitude. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
Then Jordan took that finished car out for a final test drive before we put it in front of our buyer, and some guy in a pickup truck ran a red light and smashed the hell out of our perfect moneymaker of a car. I lost my s—t. I was so angry. There were a few shots of me cussing out the driver that made it to TV, but the really choice words were said off camera.
Want to know what else happened off camera? Once the tow truck showed up, that red-light-running driver grabbed a bicycle out of his truck and pedaled away as fast as he could. He left the truck right there. He didn’t want to risk getting into any kind of trouble with the law. He had no insurance. More than that, it’s my personal suspicion that he may or may not have been in this country legally.
The Mustang was basically totaled.
What’s really interesting is the way people responded once that episode aired. Our Facebook page blew up with people who absolutely fell in love with that black-on-black mustang—and who cried when it got wrecked!
My out-of-pocket loss on that car was $23,000. It’s almost like the universe was trying to tell me something.
I decided to add a little postscript to that episode. When I was being interviewed on camera, I mentioned how that Mustang incident opened my eyes. I said, “Things are changing at Gas Monkey, and changing now. It’s time to step this game up.”
I knew I needed to turn things around, and I came to a big conclusion: we’d been playing it too safe. We shouldn’t be messing around doing traditional restoration projects like that. We shouldn’t be going for the easy money on builds. That wasn’t the Gas Monkey mission. We needed to go bigger and bolder in everything we did. I wasn’t about to sink because of these challenges, either. That’s not the Richard Rawlings way, and it’s certainly not the Gas Monkey way. Instead, I needed to take these challenges head-on and learn a valuable lesson from them. What we needed to do was to take on bigger risks, more-demanding clients, and put everything on the line—just like I’d done in the beginning.
What you didn’t see on the show was the after-hours moment when I gathered the whole crew in a big circle and thanked them for the hard work they’d done. Then, I told them: “We’re about to work a whole lot harder.”
That elicited a few groans, of course.
“But,” I said, “we’re also gonna work a whole lot smarter.”
By the way, for those of you who still cry over that car, here’s some good news: After further assessment and a lot of painstaking work, we were able to get that Mustang back together again after all. It would never be the same, and all of those additional man-hours would still mean I lost money on the car, but eventually we were able to sell it. So the mashed-up Mustang lives on. A happy ending.
“FERRARI FIX”
The Ferrari F40, as it looked upon arrival. COURTESY OF JOHN KRUSE.
Like I’ve said before, “go big or go home” just ain’t enough for me. Go biggest, go baddest, go raddest . . . that’s when I make the big score. That’s when I feel like I’m living. That’s when I’m living the true Gas Monkey lifestyle that this brand represents.
When someone’s faced with a completely wrecked Ferrari F40—a million-dollar supercar that was deemed “totaled” by the insurance company, as well as “totaled” and “unfixable” by Ferrari itself—any normal human being would run for the hills.
I’m not a normal human being.
First of all, Ferraris are built to incredibly precise specs. We’d need all kinds of expert help in bending and reshaping that frame to get it within three millimeters of where it was supposed to be or the car would be a complete failure. Second, there’s pretty much only one place to buy Ferrari parts, and that’s from Ferrari. Ferrari is an incredible company with decades and decades of reputation and history to uphold. They don’t take too kindly to anyone messing with one of their vehicles—especially a bunch of cocky hot rodders. So we knew we’d have to start this rebuild on the down low. As soon as we got it in, we worked with some other Ferrari folks in the Dallas area and started ordering parts in a sort of quiet way that wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.
I’m glad we did, because as soon as Ferrari got word that we were attempting to rebuild an F40 that they’d deemed unbuildable, they shut down all related parts shipments to the U.S. for three weeks just to try to stop us in our tracks!
Aaron wasn’t afraid to tackle this project at all. He loves a new challenge, and getting to learn all about a Ferrari F40 from the inside out was the chance of a lifetime. We’d be calling in some Ferrari experts as well, and he’d get to watch and learn from them. I think I said something about paying for Aaron’s education for the last eleven years? That Aaron went to the school of Gas Monkey Garage? Yeah. This was a prime example.
The F40 with a bit more work to go. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
The fact is, even when it comes to a Ferrari supercar, Aaron was cocky enough to think that he could build it better than it was originally. Me? I agreed with him!
I just never imagined quite how big the cost was going to be. I thought I might sink $100,000 into that car. By the time we were less than halfway finished, I realized I was off by more than fifty percent.
The Ferrari took us more than a month to build, and in that time I decided to flip cars that weren’t just safe little $2,000- or $3,000-profit-type cars, but to take some big crazy gambles—just like I was doing on the Ferrari.
Guess what? Going badder and radder paid off for me, like it always does.
Who could forget that whacked-out Grateful Dead tour van I found, covered in stickers and filled with Grateful Dead memorabilia? I flipped that for a $40,500 profit. I flipped a ’58 Corvette for a $10,998 profit. I picked up a ’66 Porsche and made $12,000 on that. Then I made $12,485 on a 1917 REO. That’s like seventy-five grand in less than a month!
With all of my big risks paying off, I decided that we should take another risk and paint the Ferrari black—just to fly in the face of everybody who said this build couldn’t be done.
When all was said and done, we proved that Gas Monkey had the skills and wherewithal to tackle a seemingly impossible project—and we made ourselves a boatload of cash in the process. A hundred-grand profit on a single, forty-eight-day build.
Dennis Collins bought that Ferrari, and a little while later, just for fun, we got ahold of two other Ferrari F40s to do a little side-by-side comparison. These were pristine Ferraris with only a couple-hundred miles on them. We took them on head-to-head in terms of speed, acceleration, braking . . . and our rebuilt Ferrari blew those cars away. Aaron really had improved upon the original.
After the episodes aired in June of 2013, Dennis decided it was time to sell that car, and he took it to Barrett-Jackson, the biggest classic-car auctioneers in existence. Guess who bought it at auction? Reggie Jackson. Mr. October himself, the baseball Hall of Famer, picked it up for $7
42,500. Sadly, that meant Dennis lost some money on the car. But Reggie Jackson got himself a bargain, and one heck of a rad ride. He drove it for a year or so, and then put it on the auction block again. Want to know why? Because the car was too fast for him, he said!
The finished product, out for a heart-racing test run. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
In the end, there were plenty of Ferrari purists who were pissed that we’d messed with one of their cars. But there was another faction of Ferrari enthusiasts who cheered us on. One of them even wrote a nice review in a magazine, saying (and I’m paraphrasing here): “Like it or not, Gas Monkey Garage rebuilt a better Ferrari. They took a totaled F40 that Ferrari said themselves could not be rebuilt and they made it great. So too bad.”
“DALE JR.’S SICK NOMAD”
Aaron and me, with the finished Diet Mountain Dew–colored Nomad. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
If I had any doubt that Gas Monkey Garage was turning into a huge success, it was pretty much put to rest with the very first episode of season four. It was awesome finding out that Dale Earnhardt Jr. was a fan of the show, and a real big boost to think we’d be doing a build for such a well-known celebrity client—with a corporate backer in Diet Mountain Dew.
It’s funny to think that gigantic opportunity was almost lost because Christie didn’t believe that Dale Earnhardt Jr. would actually be calling our little garage down in Dallas. She kept hanging up on him! The fact is, Gas Monkey was stepping up in the world—and was catching the attention of some very big fish. Before long we’d wind up building a Camaro for Sonic, and doing a pink Cadillac for Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Those builds would bring Gas Monkey even more notoriety, plus, you know what’s really fun about those big-client corporate builds? They make a lot of money. Just check out the numbers on Dale’s Nomad alone. I paid $26,000 for the car. I invested $22,000 in parts and labor. Then Aaron and I spent $350 for gas, food, and lodging on our road trip to North Carolina to deliver that car to Dale, which means all in all, I walked away with a cool $26,650 profit.
Delivering to the happy customer himself, Dale Jr. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
We did it in ten days. That’s more than $2,600 in profit per day!
Find me another business that pays that well, and . . . hell, I just might buy it.
“BANDIT CAR”
That’s me playing the part of the Bandit, mustache and all, in the finished Trans Am. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
Who in the world would be crazy enough to pay me $70,000 to build them a rally car, throw in a $40,000 bonus if I could get it done in six days, and then bet me another $25,000 that I couldn’t get a certain movie star’s signature on that car in that six-day time frame as well? None other than my buddy Jay Riecke—the very same buddy who bet Dennis Collins and me that we couldn’t beat the world record in the Cannonball Run.
As you know, I earned a payday on that Cannonball Run bet back before Fast N’ Loud was on the air. There was no way I was going to lose this one!
The real bonus for me, though, was getting a chance to meet Burt Reynolds, the man himself, the legend, the star of so many favorite films from my younger days including Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and Hooper. Did you know that Burt did his own stunts on all of his movies? He’s one badass individual. The fact he’s still walking around at all after all the stress he put on his body and all the running around he did at the peak of his stardom is a freakin’ miracle. He’s a legend, and that’s all there is to it.
Something cool happened off camera at Burt’s house, too. He waited until filming was done to do it, but it’s a moment that I’ll never, ever forget. We spent some time talking to Mr. Reynolds about Gas Monkey, and how much time Aaron and I had put into building the brand. I also told him about beating the world record in the Cannonball Run, and I showed him my tattoo commemorating that feat.
Just before we left, Burt disappeared into another room and came back with something in his hands.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked me.
“Yes, sir, I think just about every guy on the planet knows what that is,” I said.
The Bandit hat Burt Reynolds gave to me, proudly displayed on a shelf in my office. PHOTO BY MARK DAGOSTINO.
He was carrying his black cowboy hat from Smokey and the Bandit II.
“Well, I want you to have it,” he said.
“Sir, I couldn’t possibly take that,” I told him.
“Well, you are gonna take it. So here,” he said as he handed it to me. “You’re carrying the torch.”
I don’t like to admit this sort of thing, but my eyes actually welled up with tears. I couldn’t believe it. I thanked him over and over for the gift. It means the world to me. I keep it up on a shelf behind my desk in my office now, so I see it every time I walk into that room. It’s right there over my shoulder, reminding me how far back my love of cars goes, and reminding me just how far this journey has brought me.
“AARON’S FALCON RACE CAR”
Something we’ve wanted to do here at Gas Monkey from the very beginning was to build purpose-driven cars—race cars and rally cars for specific races and rallies, whether it’s the Texas Mile or a hill climb or another Gumball 3000. Apparently our TV fans like that idea, because one of the most talked-about cars we’ve ever done is Aaron’s Falcon.
Racing that car to the top of Pike’s Peak in the annual Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb was a big moment for Aaron. I asked him about it recently, and he said, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid. I never thought I’d have the opportunity. I’ll be going back to race it again for the rest of my life, as long as I can afford it.”
He’ll keep taking that car back, too. He’s done a bunch of modifications to it since he first got his hands on it.
“My primary goal was simple,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who race for years or decades and don’t summit. There’s way better drivers, more experienced drivers than me, that don’t summit. So all I wanted to do in my first race was I wanted to finish. I wanted to have a time and not have a ‘DNF.’ I just wanted to see the top.”
Aaron’s Falcon. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
He did. In fact, he did it in under thirteen minutes. The fans loved it. Everyone in the shop loved it, too. Most of the guys weren’t able to travel to Colorado to see the race live. We had too much work that needed to get done. So when that episode aired, a bunch of them got together and watched it on TV. It was a real thrill for every one of us at Gas Monkey to watch Aaron summit in that car. It felt like a real achievement. For everybody.
Aaron cried when he reached the top, only none of us knew that until the episode aired. We saw it on TV, just like all of our fans did. We got all kinds of Facebook comments and tweets from fans saying they cried right along with him. It’s an emotional thing to watch somebody achieve a lifelong dream.
Aaron’s Falcon, all ready to race. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
The pace truck in all its glory. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
“It’s only going to get better,” Aaron insists. “There are plenty of things coming for that car. I’m hoping they’ll be all done for next year’s race.”
Besides being a big moment for Aaron, that race provided a big moment for Gas Monkey: Building the Pike’s Peak Pace Truck for that event was something everyone at the shop was proud of, and one more chance to show the world what Gas Monkey is all about.
“HOLY GRAIL FIREBIRDS”
Nearly two years after we’d gotten this crazy TV show off the ground, we found not one but two cars that knocked us for a loop: the first and second 1967 Pontiac Firebirds ever made.
Chuck Aleksinas, a former University of Kentucky and NBA basketball player, had them sitting in his garage. He’d purchased them online a while back and then never got around to restoring ’em. He wasn’t really planning on selling them at tha
t point. Wasn’t planning on doing much with them at all—until we found out about those unbelievably rare automobiles and came knocking on his door.
Once we got a firsthand look at them, we jumped on the Interwebs and did some serious research into those Firebirds and their history. Here’s what we found out. When Pontiac introduced the Firebird in 1967, it promoted five distinct models and called them the “Firebird Magnificent Five.” The engines and body styles were the main differences between them. The serial numbers on the cars we found were 1000001 and 1000002. These cars also had trim tags clearly marking car number one with SHOW1 and car number two with SHOW4. So the two Firebirds we’d located were two of the original cars that made up the Magnificent Five. Show cars don’t often survive. They’re taken around the country and shown off to get dealers and car enthusiasts excited about the new line, and then they disappear. Just like in the art world or antique world or anywhere else, having the “first” of anything is a big, big deal to collectors. We knew we really had something.
When I was able to buy these cars for a grand total of $70,000 combined, I just about soiled my pants. Our research indicated that these cars—fully restored—could be worth in the ballpark of a million dollars. A million dollars!
The Firebirds as we found them—number one (above) . . . COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
. . . and number two. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
Then I found a potential buyer who wouldn’t balk at that potential price tag if we could get both of those cars restored to Concours standards in sixty days. (Concours standards are those that reflect “best original condition,” and are generally regarded as the highest standards in the business when it comes to classic-car restoration.)
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