“Yup. I’m gonna buy that rig, and I’m gonna put ‘Gas Monkey’ on the side of it, and I’m going to show up at these hot-rod shows and blow people’s minds. Look around! Everybody else is here with crappy trailers and cheap flyers. They’re barely making a living. They’re not making money. This will draw so much attention, everyone and their brother’s gonna wanna know who in the heck Gas Monkey Garage is and where they came from!”
“That’s just crazy,” she said.
“Well, I’m doing it. I want this rig,” I said. I knew I didn’t have the cash for that sort of thing. It was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I went over and talked to the guy to ask him how I could buy it with very little money down.
The guy wasn’t put off at all by my questions. He didn’t think I was crazy. He may have doubted that I was serious about buying it, but he answered me seriously, which I appreciated.
“Well, I suppose you could finance the back as a trailer, and you can finance the front as an RV, and you know, if your credit’s good, we can get you locked into that. The thing about this type of rig is that you can finance it for thirty years, you know, like a second mortgage.”
The big Gas Monkey Garage rig! COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
I quickly did all the numbers in my head and realized I could own that unbelievably rad rig for less than $2,000 a month.
“I’ll take it!” I said.
The guy said that one was just for show and wasn’t for sale at that time, but he promised he’d have somebody call me. I gave him my number. Then nothing. I don’t know if he looked at my long hair and tattoos and thought I was full of it or what, but a few days later, I tracked down the company, called the owner, and said, “Look. Here’s the paperwork. I downloaded it off the website. It’s all filled out.” I said, “I’ll be down there in a couple of hours and I want my damned truck!” And he was like, “Well, okay.”
Sue and I drove down there and loaded her BMW right up into the back of the rig for the ride home. I’d never driven anything like that in my life. It was huge! The best part about it, though, was that I didn’t need a truck driver’s license to haul it. The size just barely fit the specs required by law for a recreational vehicle and trailer, so I didn’t need to get a special license or special registration, I didn’t need to keep log books or go through the weigh stations that commercial drivers face. None of it.
I maneuvered that rig pretty well, and just about blew Aaron’s mind when I pulled it up in front of the shop.
“You ready to hit the road?” I said.
Aaron just shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, and said, “F—k it, man. Let’s go!”
GEARING UP
Aaron and I spent the next few years driving to every car show and rally we could get into, all over the country, in addition to doing everything we could at the shop to get Gas Monkey off the ground.
I stickered our rig up, basically wrapping the whole thing in our logo, and honestly, it was bigger than a damn billboard. It was insane how big that rig was. I remember thinking to myself, I’ve got to have something that makes these people believe that we are who we say we are—something that really makes an undeniable statement of “Hello, world! Here we are!” That’s Gas Monkey style all the way: kicking the doors in wherever we go, and not just showing up like everybody else. I guess that’s how I got ahead in sales long before Gas Monkey came along, too. In a way, it really has been my whole way of doing life, period. If I’m gonna do something, I do it bigger and better than anyone else.
I pulled that rig into our first show in the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and Chip Foose was out there with just a regular pickup truck and a trailer. Boyd Coddington was there with something slightly bigger, but nothing eye-catching. And then Aaron and I come driving in in this gigantic rig that barely fits through the industrial doors of the Palace. All sorts of fans of those other guys were already there when we arrived, and you could see them all turn and stand back and stare at us like, “What the f—k?” People flocked to us just to find out who the hell we were, and we started throwing out T-shirts and full-color flyers. It was rad.
We started making some waves back home at the garage, too. From the start, I planned to build a couple of cars all on our own to show off what we could do. A lot of shops get so caught up doing work for customers that they’re never able to turn around their own product, which can wind up being the stuff that sells for big bucks. Long-term builds for customers can also take up your entire shop, and then jobs start to pack up against each other and you get all backed up, and suddenly your customers are waiting not just months but years for their cars to get done. I insisted that would never happen at Gas Monkey Garage. We’d never get involved with a build that would take more than ninety days. So our customers would never be left in the lurch, the only work that we’d allow to get backed up was our own long-term builds. If somebody wanted something done, I’d guarantee them a completion date or they’d get their deposit back. Nobody else was doing that. It blew people away. Of course, I asked for more money in order to guarantee a completion date, but guys who are throwing money into hot rods immediately knew that it was money well spent. No one wants to buy a car and then have it sit in pieces in some garage for two years. You want to get out there and drive it! So that’s what Gas Monkey guaranteed they’d be able to do, faster than any other garage could offer, by far. It wasn’t rocket science. It was just a different business model. I was sure it would work. And it did. By flipping cars to make some cash here and there, and taking on projects that yielded results, I was able to pay Aaron his salary, pay the rent, and pay the entry fees we needed to participate in the hot-rod shows and big rallies that would build up some street cred and let people everywhere know what Gas Monkey Garage was all about.
Just as we got the shop off the ground, I realized there was another Gumball 3000 coming up—and I decided to run it not only for the fun factor, but for the promotional value. My wife didn’t understand how going off to run a road rally at the same time I was starting a new business made any sense. So I explained it to her this way: “I’m going to be playing with the richest guys in the world. And I’m doing it as Gas Monkey this time. I’ve got a brand. I’ve got a shop. So this is going to get me clients. Plus, if I can win, if I can push them, then that’s notoriety. That’s in the newspapers.”
I went out. I ran it. I won it, again. Suddenly Gas Monkey was on the map—and so was I. The car world is a pretty small one, and those road rallies and things don’t get a whole lot of press outside of hot-rod and supercar circles. But I was on my way.
I was so fired up, I started doing all the road rallies I could find—and kept whupping everybody’s ass along the way. There were times that Aaron and I were in the truck for two, three months at a time. We were crisscrossing the country, so there wasn’t any time to come home. Along the way, we would pull into gas stations and throw out T-shirts and just spread the word, like we were on some kind of a victory tour. When we finally got back, Aaron got to work building the most unbelievable rat rod anyone had ever seen. My plan was to run it in the Bullrun—another big underground road rally with a huge following. The Bullrun, like Gumball, runs a route that’s about three thousand miles, but it changes every year, and it runs through both Canada and the U.S. It also features a lot of exotic cars that have been super modified. We’re talking all kinds of top-of-the-line Mercedes and BMWs and Audis that are tricked out beyond belief by people with a ton of money. I knew that the sight of a rat rod among those supercars would draw all sorts of crazy attention. So I gave Aaron his task: “Dude, it’s got to have the look, the rust, the patina, but I want to be able to go 150 to 160 miles per hour. I want A/C, I want big brakes—I want this to be the s—t!”
Aaron dove in and he basically built that car himself. I mean, he was the only guy that we had, really, other than a couple of part-time helpers here and there. And when I ran it in the Bullrun, it got more press than I even imagined. I was doing a buck sev
enty down the freeway in a car that was one inch off the ground with no paint on it. I just knew that every other guy in the business wanted to get himself some of that!
I was my own promoter for all that time, too. I was always making calls to the magazines and TV shows and anybody who’d listen. I’m a big proponent of If you think it, you believe it, and you get it out there, it’ll come to you.
I was also the one making phone calls to production companies and TV networks, trying to get somebody, anybody, to come out and take a look at what we were doing. A company called Pilgrim Studios was the force behind American Chopper. They also produced Ghost Hunters and Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. As far as I was concerned, they were the only company to go to with my TV show ideas, and so I called them up. Every week or two. For years. I was absolutely relentless. Nine times out of ten nobody would pick up the phone, but then every once in a while, somebody would get on the phone with me and share some tidbit of information that would get me one step closer. The main thing I needed, as far as I could tell, was to keep developing my street cred while putting together a “sizzle reel”—a short, well-produced video that would show off Gas Monkey Garage and what a potential TV show would be all about. I wasn’t sure how one might go about getting a “sizzle reel” made, but I was confident I’d figure it out eventually.
The Gas Monkey Bullrun rat rod. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.
Overall, my pushing seemed to be working. Unfortunately, though, all of my salesmanship, grandstanding, rule-breaking, attention-grabbing antics caused a lot of pushback among the “purists” of the car world. I put “purists” in quotations because there’s no such thing. A lot of the pushback I got was complete BS—but such is the nature of the game. Especially since the Internet was newly booming with bloggers, and for some reason people started giving bloggers a whole lot of power and sway despite the fact that most of them had no credentials or worth whatsoever. It was a battle I never expected. It caught me off guard. I tried to ignore it, but I also paid a price for not being better prepared for it.
The message boards were pretty rough on me in those first few years. There’d be all kinds of comments from people after a show or a rally saying, “Oh, that Richard Rawlings guy sucked! He’s just some rich dude with a trust fund and blah, blah, blah.” One of the biggest message boards in the hot-rod world is called the HAMB board, which I refer to as the Hokey Ass Message Board. It’s found on the Jalopy Journal, and it’s considered one of the more respected sites. Back then, it was very respected because it was a couple of guys out of Austin who were really into hot rods, and they had built this thing that nobody really knew. It was kind of the first big, giant blog thing that all these car guys were on. And all these car guys were negative just because I made such a big splash so quickly, you know? “Oh, f—king Gas Monkey and the trust fund strike again.” I mean, there were all these false stories out there about me being a bazillionaire with my own helicopters and islands and everything. It was nuts!
There was one particular guy who was always instigating problems and I didn’t know how to handle it at first. I didn’t have a public-relations consultant working for me. All I had was me! So I responded one time, in earnest: “Hey! You’re talking about my company and my money. This is all me. I don’t have rich parents. I don’t have anything.”
He turned that back against me and then actively started getting all sorts of other guys riled up about bashing me on those boards. Next thing I knew it was ruining my marketing plan and affecting my business. Companies and individuals didn’t know what to make of the blogs at first. They didn’t realize that most of them were just one whiny loser in a basement somewhere making noise in order to get attention. They believed what they read!
I learned pretty quickly that responding to haters online only gets you more hate. So instead I responded in person. I found out who this guy was, and I tracked him down at one of the big hot-rod shows one time. He was sitting there selling hood ornaments and vintage suitcases or something, like some pauper on a corner.
“You and me got a problem?” I asked.
He was shaking.
“No, no problem.”
You see, I’d done some research on the guy, and I knew that one way he made some of his income was by working as a photographer, shooting photos at all of the big car shows. The thing was, nobody knew that this photographer they were hiring was actually this troll who caused everybody problems on the Internet. So I called him on it, and I basically threatened to expose him for who he was. Without any fists flying or anything else, he quit bashing me.
I ignored the boards as best I could—until another round of bashing cost me a television deal. I studied up and did some investigating and found out the guy who was in on it was literally some kid who lived in his parents’ basement. No joke.
Aaron and I built a rat rod for Corky Coker, of Coker Tire, and it made the press. Discovery was interested in turning that build into a special, too—until the blogs messed it all up. They started bashing Coker. And then they got wind of the Discovery interest, and they started bashing Discovery, too!
There were cease-and-desist letters sent from lawyers on all sides, and none of it led to any resolution. It nearly crushed me. I couldn’t believe that these sites could have such a dramatic effect on my business, and the business of these big, powerful companies. People really believed what they read on the blogs in those days, and it set me back more than I ever could have imagined. There was nothing I could do. I thought about dropping everything and just beating the living daylights out of those guys. But in the end, I knew it wasn’t worth it. I just had to suck it up, stay back, and hope that they’d eventually move on to a different target. But to this day, those terrible, mean-spirited, completely untrue things are still out there.
I knew then and there that the bigger my business became, the more I’d need to get out in front of everybody else on the Internet. Of course, I never could have imagined that blogging would lose all of its steam to the immediacy of social media. But when those changes came along, I was ready. Going through that difficult period prepared me for the future that I hoped was still on its way.
I did my best to move on and not focus on it. I went out to more shows. I kept doing rallies. I was right in the middle of another Bullrun in 2007 when a buddy bet Dennis and me that we couldn’t beat the world record for the Cannonball Run, and I abandoned that race from up in Canada to head straight to New York City and make the driving run of a lifetime.
I was flying high when Dennis and I accomplished our goal. Thirty-one hours and fifty-nine minutes! It was a rush, man. Dennis and I both were so pumped that we accepted yet another bet to go run another rally down from Miami to Key West immediately on the heels of that. That race got crazy and involved helicopters and planes and all kinds of crazy tricks—I could write a whole book about that week—but we’d win that one, too! Getting on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was the capper to all of it. I was getting all of the hype and attention on a national level that I’d been aiming for from the start.
Still, that negativity online hurt. I was deflated by it. When Discovery backed out of that special, I thought about shutting the whole business down. I really did.
And then the economy tanked on top of everything else. Business at Gas Monkey Garage leveled off. I wound up selling the big rig just to help with our monthly budget. It had done its job. It had pretty much run its course. I was sad to see it go, for sure. But I wasn’t about to give up. I kept going to shows. We kept flipping cars, using all sorts of advice from Dennis and my own personal experience to keep turning a profit even at the worst of times. Still, the only word I can come up with to describe my mood during that late-2000s period is deflated. The air seemed to be draining right out of my Gas Monkey balloon.
Life sure can be a roller coaster, can’t it? Just as I was hitting a real low and wondering if Gas Monkey was ever going to make it, I wound up talking to a guy at a car show who was launching a new clothing c
ompany. I offered to wear all of his clothes on the next Gumball, but there wasn’t enough time for him to get them to me. They were only in prototype mode, making clothing from fabric from old car interiors. That conversation took an interesting turn really quickly, though, when I told him about my ambitions for turning Gas Monkey Garage into a TV show on Discovery. (Just like Pilgrim was the studio I wanted the most, Discovery was always the network I wanted the most. Always!)
“I think I can help you with that,” the guy said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’ve got a little production company up here, and we’re trying to break into bigger things. So we could shoot your sizzle reel for you,” he said. “After hearing what you’re up to, I’m gonna say we can do it for nothing,” this guy said. “It’s worth the gamble for me.”
Seriously! That opportunity just dropped in my lap—all because I didn’t give up, and because I wasn’t afraid to talk about my big ideas, even when things didn’t feel so big at that moment.
Right after I came back from Gumball that year, we shot a big sizzle with me and Aaron. The show concept at that time was more about what we were doing, which was finding cars, changing them enough to make a profit on them, and reselling them quickly. It was also about hot-rod culture, as we took the cameras to hot-rod shows and talked to all kinds of interesting people at the shows.
I got that sizzle to Pilgrim—and Pilgrim liked it. After all that time, they put an option on it to shop it to cable networks! Finally things were looking up.
Of course, sometimes when things look up, that only means you’re about to hit the crest of the hill. That sizzle didn’t land us a show. It kept hitting wall after wall after wall. The roller-coaster ride continued.
It was during this same period when I let the Gas Monkey notoriety go to my head a little bit too much. I was so focused on work—and on the partying lifestyle that came along with life on the road—that I neglected my marriage in the worst way possible. Sue and I got into some heated . . . let’s call them “debates” over what I was doing and how I was spending my energy. Finally she said she wanted a divorce, and I moved out that day. I left all of my stuff behind and bought brand-new everything. I wanted a clean start, and I certainly didn’t want to stay with anyone who didn’t want to stay with me. I loved her, but I screwed up, and I accepted the error of my ways. There was no fighting from that point forward, as far as I was concerned. We’d always kept our businesses and finances separate, and so we just split everything the way it was and went our separate ways.
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