This was the ultimate chance to prove ourselves in the restoration world, and the ultimate chance to make a gigantic amount of money in the process. I had some cash in the bank. I felt like Gas Monkey was on sure ground. Now, once again, I knew I’d be risking almost everything to try to get these cars built to exacting standards in just two months—the sort of build that people might otherwise expect to take years.
A lot of change happened at Gas Monkey during those two months, too. First of all, Aaron is not a Concours restoration expert, which he readily admits, so I hired Jason Aker and threw him right into the mix on one of the toughest builds we’d ever had. I knew we needed his level of professionalism to get this job to the finish line.
I also knew that two of the guys on my team had been proving themselves somewhat less than professional with each passing build: Tom and Jordan. I haven’t spoken of them in this book because, well, why would I? They’re not here anymore. I canned ’em right in the middle of this build and I haven’t looked back. No one should feel sorry for them, either. Those clowns managed to land their own Discovery spin-off show called Misfit Garage.
In the end, the newly slimmed-down Gas Monkey team created what I felt were two flawless examples of Firebirds: car number one, the convertible in red, and car number two, the HO (so named for its High Output engine) in silver.
I sold those cars for $650,000 for the pair. It wasn’t the million bucks I’d hoped for, but it was still the biggest single payday in Gas Monkey history. After investing $340,000 and two months of our time in the restoration, I walked away with more than $200,000 in profit—and a whole new set of bragging rights for Gas Monkey Garage.
Through the years, I’ve actually owned quite a few number-one cars. I’ve had ’69 Firebird number one. I’ve had ’68 Camaro number one. I’ve had ’71 Barracuda number one. There are other number ones out there. If you search hard enough, you can find them. And if you do, I’d encourage you to bring ’em on down to Dallas. Because the fact of the matter—and the truth of the matter—is that Gas Monkey Garage is capable of restoring any car to its Concours-standard glory.
For the right price, of course.
The completed Holy Grail of Firebirds, revealed in front of a live audience. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
Aaron and me with the completed “Bad-Ass Bronco.” COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
There are so many other episodes that could qualify as favorites. I mean, a lot of fans went crazy for the “Frankensteined Ford,” where we pieced together a ’68 Ford F-100. What some viewers don’t realize is that after the show aired, K.C. went out and bought that truck back for himself. He’s always in here making modifications to that truck on his own time, and it’s even cooler now than when we got it finished on TV.
There are those of you who love the “Bad-Ass Bronco,” or the “Chopped and Dropped Model A,” or that crazy VW Shorty we did, where we fixed up a VW bus that’d had its whole middle chopped right out. I can’t say any of you are right or wrong. I hope every episode we do makes for great viewing.
I will tell you this, though: one of the builds that pretty much every guy in the shop wishes could be theirs came right as I was writing this book. It’s the truck I’d like to keep for myself. It’s a truck that Aaron wishes was his own. It’s a build that everybody poured their heart and soul into because we had total freedom and creativity to make it the best truck we possibly could, and to build it on a really fat budget, too.
I’m talking about the 1976 Chevy Silverado C10 pickup that we dropped for the big Cattle Baron’s Ball in season five. It’s rare that any one build we do would line up with everybody’s tastes. We all like what we like, you know? But I truly think that everybody is cool with that green-and-white color scheme. I think everybody is cool with the trim. I think everybody likes the rich, totally custom-stitched leather interior. They like the stance. They like the wheels. If they had the time and opportunity and money, I think everybody at Gas Monkey would have built it for themselves.
The funny thing is, it didn’t go for anywhere near what it should have at that charity auction. I guess if we’d wanted to appeal to the good ol’ boys and Texas oil millionaires, we probably should have lifted the truck instead of dropping it. Maybe put some horns on the front. Some lights on the top? But the C10 represents everything that’s great about Gas Monkey. We’re not your standard builders. We’re not out to do something that everybody else can do. We’re about creating a unique style, and that truck has it. We’re about performance, and that truck performs. We’re about making a statement, and that truck makes a statement anywhere it rolls. I know, because I bought it back! Dennis did me a favor and bought it at the auction, then I bought it right back from him. I wasn’t gonna let someone get a big bargain on that truck. I figured I’d rather drive it myself, and maybe eventually sell it to someone for what it’s truly worth—and that truck is easily worth upwards of $150,000. My estimate for auction purposes was $250,000, and that was no exaggeration.
The finished Silverado C10, just before we took it to auction. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
When we finally took it to Barrett-Jackson to get a fair price for it in early 2015, it sold for an extremely disappointing forty grand. Forty grand! I hope that buyer realizes what he’s got, and appreciates it for the craftsmanship and care that went into every single detail.
When it comes to favorite shows and favorite builds, Aaron’s take is that the shows don’t really matter. “We make tangible goods,” Aaron says. “You can touch them. We’re responsible for them. We’re responsible for their quality. Twenty years from now, if the show is done and gone and no one remembers it, that car we made will still have everyone’s name on it.”
I disagree. I think the television we’re making is making a big difference, too. I think we’re touching people’s lives, and inspiring them, and giving them some great entertainment. That has as much or more value than the individual vehicles to me. I think we’re showing off just how much fun it can be to live a hot-rodding life.
Some of my favorite times at Gas Monkey Garage are after the sun’s down, when the cameras are gone, and some of the guys in the shop are adding unique touches to their own personal vehicles after hours. Standing there drinking Miller Lite, shooting the s—t, talking about tires and wheels and brakes and pistons and viscosity—those are good times.
The hot-rod business can be anybody’s business. Rich guys, poor guys, they can all play on the same field. They really can. At the end of the day, everybody’s hot rod is different. It’s a different idea. Surely you get into cliques. You might get a ’69 Chevelle fan and they’ve got a couple of buddies who are into those same cars, too. But you can literally be a hot-rod guy and have anything, from a Metropolitan convertible from the fifties to a thirties car to a muscle car. You name it. Hell, I’ve seen box trucks get turned into hot rods. It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen an actual trash truck made into a limo. People were sitting in the back! It really has no boundaries.
I think all of that stuff’s fun. I mean, if the average person out there watches the show and gets excited, I think it opens up possibilities in people’s minds. People might think, “You know what? I could go out and find an old car to have, and it doesn’t have to cost me $50,000.” That’s really the part I enjoy the most. I want people to watch my show and not be deflated. I want them to be energized and think, “Wow! I can do that, too!” They can have something like that, or flip cars like that, or maybe they can build something. Whatever. I mean, hell, I’ve got a $200 Pinto that I keep in storage. I think it’s freakin’ cool. Or at least it could be cool. You could do a bazillion different things with a $200 Pinto.
I keep that car as testament to a really important principle in the life of a Gas Monkey. I keep it to remind myself, “You know what? One day things might not be that awesome or they might not work the way we want them to—but I can still have a hot rod.”
It may be a Pinto, but how many Pintos do y
ou see on the road anymore? If I brought that thing out of storage right now, people would see it driving down the street and go, “Hey! Look at that! It’s a Pinto!”
And you know what? That’s pretty cool.
LET’S HEAR IT FOR OUR FANS!
I want to stop right here to say a little something about our Gas Monkey and Fast N’ Loud fans.
Part two of the Bandit Car build grabbed our highest ratings ever. More than 3.1 million people tuned in, and that’s not counting all the people who’ve watched it on repeats.
That episode garnered so much attention, it really put a spotlight on just how much our fan base had grown since the show first started back in June of 2012. Eighteen months after we’d first begun, we had a certified hit on our hands. Fast N’ Loud became the number-one car-related show in America, and we’ve been rockin’ and rollin’ ever since.
Whooo!
And it’s all thanks to you! The fans!
You guys blow up our social-media feeds every single time an episode airs, and you send us all kinds of great feedback and questions, too. We love it. Every Tuesday morning after a new episode airs, I come into the office to find five or six hundred messages waiting for me. It floors me every time that y’all keep watching and wanting to know more.
I wish I could answer every one of those messages personally, I really do. And I answer a lot of them myself. But there isn’t enough time to flip cars, build cars, keep building the Gas Monkey empire, and respond to hundreds of e-mails in a day, too. So thankfully I have some great people around here who help me out and who take care of the fans as best we can. I love you guys, and I want to make sure every single one of your messages gets a response. It’s not easy to keep up with y’all!
Just saying hello to fans who recognize me when I’m out and about in my regular life takes more time than I ever could have imagined. I love meeting fans and saying hi and taking selfies with all you Gas Monkey maniacs. But again, it’s hard to keep up! I mean, I go to the grocery store and people are like, “Oh, can I take my picture with you?” I’m like, “I’m buying toilet paper, man.” It’s cool, though. Without the fans, I don’t know where we’d be.
My fans aren’t just local, either. Fast N’ Loud now airs in over 150 countries worldwide. We’re a huge hit around the globe! The magic is that we’re a show all about cars and motorcycles. That s—t translates. Cars and motorcycles and beer and women translate in any country. Every day we have people from out of the country who stop by our shop here in Dallas to buy T-shirts and get a glimpse of the garage they’ve seen on TV. It’s awesome. It really is. People are building their whole vacations around coming here, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
From the very beginning, I wanted Gas Monkey to be a worldwide lifestyle brand. I specifically wanted the show to be fun and accessible in a way that even people who can’t afford to have a hot rod would be able to watch the show and have a good time and enjoy it. So far, that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
Gas Monkey is not a garage so much as it is an attitude. It’s what I want and how I want it. Whether it’s cool or not, it’s cool to me. It’s not about being the baddest guy out there and, “Oh, look at me, I’m a tough guy,” or whatever.
I mean, the average Joe can be a Gas Monkey. If he’s a guy wrenching on his car in his garage and he takes it out and people laugh at him because it’s a green ’70 Chevy Nova four-door. . . . Well, you know what? He f—king worked on that. He’s a Gas Monkey!
Being a Gas Monkey is about getting out there and getting dirty with your hands, having a good time, and enjoying the fruits of that labor. At any car show, I’m more impressed with the guy who shows up hand-polishing his fenders on the beast he spent years building in his backyard than I am the rich dude who sinks $400,000 into a car just because he can. I hold that little guy in higher regard because he put his own blood, sweat, and beers into that build. I’ll never lose sight of that, even as Gas Monkey grows and tackles bigger, more expensive vehicles for all sorts of rich clients and corporate sponsors. Staying connected to the real fans, the gearheads, the folks who might not even own a hot rod of any kind but who feel that they’re Gas Monkeys at heart—that’s gratifying, and honestly it’s one of the best parts about being involved in this TV show.
Me, getting my own hands dirty in the shop. COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS.
Connecting with all of the fans on social media has been a trip, too. We hit three hundred thousand Facebook fans by December of our very first year on the air—and the show had only started that June! We’ve added millions of fans on Facebook since then. When I finally got around to putting up a personal Facebook page, I went from zero to seventy thousand fans in the first week. Christie has hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans herself. (And she’s done it without posting many naked foot photos!)
We’ve been putting a big push into Twitter, too. I live-tweet during every new episode. Getting everyone’s feedback in real time on Twitter is awesome. I almost feel like we’re at one big watch party where I’m sitting in everyone’s living room with them watching Fast N’ Loud together. I love all the pictures people send, too, like, “Hey, here’s me and my dog watching the show!” or “We all have our shirts on and our Miller Lites!” How cool is it that people are sitting around their living rooms with buckets of Miller Lite, and the guys out there are enlisting their wives and children to be their beer assistants while they watch our show? (I’m sure some of you ladies have your guys be your beer assistants, too. Don’t go writing me nasty letters, now, y’hear?)
We’ve also got a lot of what we like to call “superfans” of the show who just love to take to Twitter and get into fights about stuff. It’s pretty funny. I especially like the super girl fans. Some of y’all are hardcore. There have been groups of girls who all got together from different parts of the country and came here on vacation, hell-bent on meeting me. I’ve even gone out for drinks with some of ’em! Why the hell not, right?
I remember there was this one lady coming in from Scotland and she was about to cancel her trip because her friend bailed on her or something, but then she tweeted about it and one of the other Gas Monkey Girls (which is what we call our female superfans) tweeted her and insisted, “No, come on down! I’ll meet you down there!”
That girl wasn’t even in Texas. She came all the way over from Louisiana or something. I can’t remember. They met here, hung out all weekend, and took all sorts of pictures.
We’ve even had a Gas Monkey fan marriage. No joke!
We did an episode that included a Pantera that we just couldn’t sell, and that episode drew all kinds of hatred of Panteras in our Facebook comments. People were just bashing Panteras for being terrible cars, and this one girl made a comment that came to the defense of the car. Two comments down, some guy responded, “She knows what she’s talking about,” and right then and there, love was born.
Those two with their mutual affection for Panteras wound up commenting back and forth, and then took their talk offline. Then they met in person. They lived on opposite sides of the country, but they sought each other out, and next thing we heard they were thanking us for allowing them to connect, and they were getting married!
Our show touches people in all sorts of ways. We used to get a whole bunch of messages from this one guy, and we would reply to him, of course, like we do to everybody. But then a couple of months went by without him writing. It turned out he had passed away, and the next thing we knew, his wife sent us a note, saying, “I just want to thank you guys so much. You made my husband’s week every time you guys replied to him. He was just so excited and it kept him in good spirits while he was sick.”
To me, that’s what this is all about. If we’re connecting with our fans, then our show and what we’re doing here matters. It’s making people happy. There ain’t nothing better than that.
Aaron has his own thoughts on why the show is popular with men and women, young and old: to him, it all comes down to the c
ars. “How many people do you know that don’t own cars? Probably next to none. And of those people, how many people’s parents own cars? How many people remember going on family vacations in cars? How many people have a percentage of their childhood memories based around a car, in a car, traveling and what have you? What’s been the biggest symbol of freedom in your entire life? I would venture to guess it was when you turned sixteen and got your driver’s license. Who doesn’t remember the feeling that they had the first time they brought their first car home? It’s almost better than the first kiss you ever had.”
Aaron’s right, in that the love of cars is a deep-rooted part of the American experience. There hadn’t really been any shows that captured that on the television landscape until Fast N’ Loud came along.
I think there’s another key to why we have so many loyal fans, though: I think people really like to watch people make a living doing something they love. Whatever that thing is, if you’re passionate about it, and you’re into it, and you’re giving it your all, it just fires people up to see it unfold.
And you know what? I want nothing more than for every Gas Monkey fan there is to go out there and make a living doing something they love, too. It’s one of the greatest feelings on earth to wake up every morning knowing that you get to do what you love. At the very least, you can turn a passion into some extra income on the side and have a whole lot of fun while you’re at it. And if your passion is cars, then maybe you ought to think about getting into the car-flipping business yourself. I’ll spend the last part of this book sharing some tricks of the trade about flipping cars, all in the hopes that some of you fans will go out there and tackle it and make a killing like I have.
I know you fans are crazy about this show, and I also know that some of you people are just plain crazy! For example, I dig all the cards and letters and random gifts that you send (like hand-painted portraits of my face). And if you’re pretty, I appreciate the nude photos and all the sexual wish-list notes, too. Just don’t go all stalker on me, okay? That stuff gets weird. It’s not exactly comfortable having to call the cops on someone who won’t leave the premises—or to sic Christie on ’em, either. (Like I said, Christie’s tough. She’ll cut a bitch!)
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