Fast N' Loud

by Richard Rawlings

  When I got out to San Francisco for the start of the race, who did I see in the car right in front of me? Dennis Collins! He’d entered the Gumball 3000, too!

  From that point on, Dennis and I were thick as thieves, man.

  Oh, and by the way: I won. My very first Gumball 3000. I beat the other guys by nearly two hours. In a Chevy Avalanche.

  I’m no race-car driver. I don’t even think my cop training helped me to become any kind of a better driver than anybody else. But I do have an intense amount of focus, and if anybody had any doubts about my stamina and determination when it came to driving, they were put to rest then and there.

  Dennis and I wound up spending a lot more time together once we got back to Dallas. He’d grown a successful business selling Jeeps, and I very quickly learned what an incredible businessman he was. He saw things that other people didn’t see, like the fact that the Jeep’s body style rarely ever changes, which means there’s endless opportunity for customization that never gets outdated. He capitalized on that in the biggest way possible and made a ton of money doing it, too. He was also into buying and selling cars just for fun. I’d managed to flip a few cars on the side during my twenties and early thirties, but never as many as I did back in high school or immediately after. I was hungering to get back into my car-flipping hobby, and Dennis and I discovered a whole new way to do that at the exact same time we became good friends.

  EBay was a relatively new company in the early 2000s, and when they started allowing people to buy and sell cars on the Interwebs, a lot of people thought it was a crazy idea. It was kinda crazy. Just crazy enough for me and Dennis to have some fun messing around with it.

  We started hanging out after hours at my print shop every Wednesday night for a little thing we called Wacky Wednesdays. Basically, we’d sit there drinking beers and laughing our asses off while we bought and sold cars on eBay.

  Because people were just starting to adapt to the Interwebs, a lot of the people who were selling cars were still in the backwoods on what their cars were actually worth. We would steal some absolutely incredible bargains online, then flip them for a huge profit with almost no effort at all. I remember one time we snagged up a ’63 Corvette for $15,000, knowing damn well we could sell it for $40K.

  I picked up some hot rods here and there that I kept for myself, too. I put a couple of ’em on display in the print shop, in the same area where I kept the pool table and beer cooler for customers. People loved coming into the shop and sitting behind the wheel of those crazy old cars. It’s hard to explain how much enjoyment people got out of it. They weren’t even driving them, like I got to do. They were just sitting behind the wheel of some car they’d never seen before, in the lobby of my business, dreaming about what it would feel like to take it out on the open road.

  Wacky Wednesdays became the highlight of my week just about every week. Of course Dennis’s wife and my wife would get pissed that we’d come home hammered in the middle of the week, but we were both basically like, “Whatever.” While we were drinking, it wasn’t uncommon for us to make $20,000 in a single night. All while having a good time.

  If that’s not time well spent, I don’t know what is.

  By 2004, I saw that the printing business was about to go through another major change. Computing power was growing so fast, it became clear to me that the design end of the business was eventually going to be eaten up by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who thought he could make his own logos and layouts on some homespun version of Photoshop or something. The debt load my company was carrying on all of that equipment was starting to feel too heavy, too. Back when I got the loans for everything, interest rates were at 12, 13, even 14 percent. Interest rates in 2003 had dropped to 5 or 6 percent, but no one would refinance my equipment at that point. The company was so successful that I’d turned down a couple offers to buy it outright over the years. I was making too much money and having too much fun to even think about selling it. But a part of me was quietly starting to think that maybe I should get out while I was still on top.

  That’s when the owner of another major print shop in the Dallas area showed up at my office, completely out of the blue. He seemed to know all of the ins and outs of my business, right down to where I kept my financial notes on my desk. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who had eyes and ears all over the place when it came to keeping tabs on the competition. One of my salesmen must’ve been ratting me out! Anyway, this guy sat there and ran through some numbers with me and asked me if they were true. I told him they were. He asked me if I really kept my business diversified to the point where no single client was responsible for more than 10 percent of my sales. I told him his facts were correct. Then he asked me what I realistically thought the business was worth, and I told him. I gave him a price. It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky price, but an actual price based on the actual numbers, which I ran in my head constantly and double-checked with Daphne every Monday morning like clockwork.

  Right there, with no lawyers, no accountants, no nothin’, that guy whipped out a pen and wrote me a check for the dollar figure I gave him.

  I looked at the check and didn’t even think twice. “Kick-ass!” I said.

  I stood up, shook his hand, and I was done with the printing business. Just like that. I didn’t make millions of dollars on that deal like some people think. That’s just not the way a business like that works. Running a printing business, even a very successful printing business, is a way to make a living. I did it big, and I did it fast. I’m incredibly proud of what I built, and that shop is still very much alive under that new ownership. In fact, it’s probably the biggest, most successful printer in the whole region now.

  But that business wasn’t big enough for me. I didn’t want to “make a living.” I wanted to make some serious bank. I wanted to build something bigger. I wanted to set the world on fire, you know?

  That offer to buy me out came exactly at the right time, because I’d recently had a bit of a revelation. I finally knew what it was I wanted to do with my life. I finally knew how I was gonna reach my goal of living the fun, freewheeling, rich-and-famous lifestyle that I knew I wanted to live.

  My true passion had been staring me right in the face all along.

  NO MORE MONKEYING AROUND

  I could do that,” I said.

  “Do what?” my wife asked.

  We were in bed watching TV one night shortly before I sold the print shop, and for some reason we happened to flip over to American Chopper on the Discovery Channel. I had seen the show before, and to be honest, I didn’t really like watching it very much. It seemed to me to be nothing more than a bunch of people yelling at each other and fighting all the time. I got frustrated watching it. But I loved seeing the bikes they built and the work they did, and like a whole lot of other people who tuned in to that show, for some reason I couldn’t turn it off.

  I was aware of what Jesse James was doing over at West Coast Choppers around that time, too. His brand had blown up, and he was selling T-shirts and apparel all over the country, just because he’d managed to get himself on TV. As a businessman it blew me away to see how big all of those guys got, even though in my opinion there were other better bike shops and custom fabricators in other parts of the country doing work that was just as interesting. The only difference with Orange County Choppers and West Coast Choppers was the fact that they had personalities and brands being showcased on TV—personalities and brands that the general public clearly seemed to be drawn to.

  All my dabbling in the car world had led me to learn a thing or two about Boyd Coddington, who was the premier hot-rod builder of his time and who’d lined up a TV show on TLC; and Chip Foose, who left Coddington to start his own company and was in the process of launching his own TV show, too.

  “Hell, Sue. I could do it better than any of ’em!”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I’m going to go after these guys. I think I can do it better. I think I can asse
mble a team that can build better.”

  Sue didn’t doubt me. She just wasn’t sure where I was going with all of it or why I was suddenly so fired up. “Well, yeah, so you could build a brand, but then what?”

  “Then,” I said, “I’m going to get on TV.”

  Sue just laughed. “Yeah, right,” she said.

  The next morning I sat down at the kitchen table and drew up a business plan. It wasn’t anything elaborate. I just put a few thoughts on paper and got myself pumped about the possibilities of this new venture. No one had really focused on building cars on TV at that point. It was all about motorcycles. I did some reading about these shows on the Internet, and it seemed that the main reason people weren’t building cars on TV is because there wasn’t enough time. TV shows need to churn out episodes quickly, and motorcycles were just easier to build. You couldn’t shoot one episode every six months. You had to turn out new episodes every week or two in order to make a TV show a success. I was sure I could assemble a team that could build cars just as quickly as those other guys were building motorcycles. Why not? Plus, I knew there was money to be made flipping cars. I had a pretty good idea that customizing and building hot rods for the types of guys who might have enough money to desire such a thing could be profitable, too. I had no doubt that I could go open up a garage and make a pretty good living doing something I loved—and with any luck, I could turn this thing into something much, much bigger than that.

  I thought about how many guys are out there in the world with some cool car in their garage that they like to mess around with on weekends while they drink a few beers with their buddies. I thought about my own sense of fun, and how everything I did that was fun seemed to be tied to wheels. I used to say to people, “If we’re gonna have fun, it better have a motor.” I mean, doesn’t everybody love cars at some level? Cars are about freedom! I really thought this idea could go somewhere. I just needed a name for it all.

  Then it hit me: somewhere along the line I’d come up with a term for guys like me and those weekend tinkerers—guys and gals who loved nothing more than messing around with cars every chance they got. I called ’em gas monkeys.

  Right there at that kitchen table, I decided that was it. My new business venture would be called Gas Monkey Garage.

  I called up one of my former employees at the print shop and we designed a logo. It was nothing like the logo you see today, except for the fact that it looks sort of vintage. It featured a monkey skull and a checkered flag, in more of a skull-and-crossbones type of look. I’d completed a couple of road rallies at that point, and the idea of racing was strong in my mind.

  I sold the print shop right in the middle of this crazy week of thinking and planning, and then a week later, Sue was out watering the flowers in the front when she heard the sputter-roar of an engine coming down our street. She turned and looked in complete disbelief as I came rolling into the driveway in a rusty old Model A open-top rat rod.

  I was beaming when I hopped out. I was completely pumped! I’d noticed that there seemed to be a trend of people buying and selling more and more rat rods that whole year. Traditionally rat rods were these rusted-out, pieced-together, piece-of-s—t hot rods that people built in their backyards from whatever spare parts they could string together. But the newest trend was to keep the look of those old cars—the unpainted, rusty, rough-looking bodies—but turn them into really cool cars. Fast cars. Loud cars. Safe cars. Cars that could compete in rallies and races without falling to pieces whenever you hit a pothole. Cars with the best suspensions and brakes and air-conditioning and the works, all hidden under that hunk-of-junk look that made ’em cool. I bought that first Model A for $7,500.

  “You sure as hell better know what you’re doing,” Sue said that day, shaking her head and thinking I’d lost my mind.

  I knew exactly what I was doing, and I knew exactly the man I needed to go see in order to get my Gas Monkey dream off the ground.

  I first met Aaron Kaufman a couple of years before this, mostly by chance.

  I’d picked up a ’51 Ford Customline that was in need of some sprucing up, so I took it over to a local auto body shop to see if they had anyone who might be able to do something with it. I wanted to put some new wheels on it, maybe add some cool suspension. They sent me straight to this twenty-year-old self-taught hot rodder named Aaron.

  He did a whole bunch of work on it, and what really impressed me is that he went above and beyond. Every bit of work he did was methodically well done. He had to fabricate some components for it, because they just weren’t available back then, and everything he did was super clean. It wasn’t hack work like you get from a lot of shops that are just trying to turn a buck. Not only was everything where it was supposed to be, I could just tell that he cared about what he was doing. He took pride in it. He was the opposite of one of those mechanics who hates his job and smokes cigarettes all day and gets pissed off whenever a customer comes in. (Admit it: you know you’ve encountered those types of mechanics in your life, even if you are one of those guys!)

  I told him I was impressed, I told him I’d be back, and a couple of months later, I was.

  I’ve only been burned by a car I purchased on eBay maybe four or five times over the years, and one of the first ones that completely pissed me off was a ’64 Galaxie convertible I picked up during one of my Wacky Wednesday sessions. Well, it was supposed to be a ’64 Galaxie convertible, and that’s certainly what it looked like in all of the pictures online. So I bought it, and I had it shipped in, and it turned out that it wasn’t a real convertible at all. This guy had basically chopped the top off of it. It was nicely done, but it ruined the value of the car.

  I took it to Aaron hoping he could do something—anything—to help me recover some of the money I’d spent once I went to resell this thing. As soon as I got there I started bitching and moaning about the money I’d spent on that car, and how I got ripped off, and instead of offering me suggestions on how to fix it, Aaron said, “Dude, I like the car. Why don’t I just buy it from you?”

  I think he took it off my hands for $4,500, and that was that.

  A couple of months later I stopped by and Aaron showed me what he’d done to the Galaxie—and it was rad! He put twenty-two-inch wheels on it. Then he put a full air ride on it and laid it on the ground. That was cutting edge technology at that time. No one was doing what he’d done to that car. Frankly, I was upset that I’d sold it to him, ’cause I knew as I stood there that I could’ve turned around and sold that car for a heck of a profit if it was still mine!

  Aaron just seemed to see things that other people didn’t see. He was self-taught, and because of that, he saw possibilities in vehicles that were so far out of the box that the box wasn’t even visible from where he was standing. I was impressed as hell. And that impression stayed with me.

  When I thought of what I wanted to do with Gas Monkey Garage, Aaron was the first guy I thought of. I knew I needed to get something going before I’d be able to steal him away from the shop where he was already working, though, so I went out and rented a garage space. I hired some kid just out of college who’d be able to help with the basic flips, who could take care of putting a little shine on some old cars so we could turn them around and sell them. But what I really needed was a fabricator, a guy with some vision, a guy who could help me build a reputation for building great cars, fast cars, loud cars that would grab attention wherever they went. Aaron Kaufman was the guy I needed.

  Finally, with a few things in place, I went to see him. “I’m going to start this company called Gas Monkey Garage. Here’s the logo,” I said, and I showed it to him. It was a really cool logo. It wasn’t just black and white. It had some color. It had some attitude, you know. I tried to convey to him that the logo represented the attitude I wanted the shop to have. “So I got this little shop, and I want to build some cool cars, fix them up, sell them. And I’m going to buy a big rig of some sort, you know, a big truck and go out on the road to all t
he big car shows and rallies and sell T-shirts, and take some of our cars with us and try to show the world who we are and make some money doing it.”

  Aaron didn’t seem real interested in the business aspect of it. He got pretty fired up about the car side, though, and the idea that he’d basically be in charge of his own shop.

  “You really think you can do all that?” Aaron asked me, and I said, “Yeah. Don’t you?” And he goes, “No!”

  I was a little taken aback.

  “Wow. You don’t?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you can, but I’m along for the ride.”

  We shook hands, and I hired Aaron right there on the spot. I told him I could pay him what he was making at his current job, even though I didn’t know how in the heck I was going to do that after my funds ran out in a month or so, but I had a vision, and I had a plan, and I went for it.

  “Cool!” I said to him. “Let’s get to work!”

  About a week later I went down to a hot-rod show that happened to be in Austin, just to check out the scene and see where Gas Monkey would fit in as I looked ahead to the coming months. That’s where I spotted the next big thing I needed to build my business: a big, full-on NASCAR-style, eighteen-wheeler-sized motor-home-and-trailer combo. The trailer held two cars up top and one below, with a full shop, all air-conditioned. The motor home that pulled that trailer had full living quarters and a shower, and slide-outs for extra space when you parked. It looked like a million dollars’ worth of vehicle to me, truly like something an established race team would own. I looked at Sue and I said, “This is what I’ve been looking for.”

  “What?” she said. (She said that a lot. A lot of people wind up saying that when I get talking about my crazy ideas.)