Forget the awards—for some hot rodders, arriving at the annual Paso Robles car show is reward enough
By Theo Douglas

ILLUSTRATION by ALICE RUTHERFORD

Every Memorial Day weekend for the past quarter century, more than 500 hot rods and custom cars descend on Paso Robles, a self-conscious little winery town that spends the other 51 weeks of the year wishing it were Napa. It’s like the swallows returning to Capistrano—if swallows leaked motor oil and drank cheap beer. But that’s just what Continental Restyling magazine once called the “desperate” hot-rod lifestyle. What really sparks the West Coast Kustoms car club’s annual blow-out is serious, dedicated car builders—some of whom rumble in with true-to-life throwbacks to Barris Kustom City, 1958. (The rest have fuzzy dice and those crying little kid dolls leaning against their fenders.)

Nick Garfias, a senior designer at Mercedes Benz’s Irvine lab, is in the former group. Every day he goes to work in a limited-access area with a paper shredder, checking his camera phone at the door—and every night since 2003, he’s been harvesting parts to build a Model A Ford roadster the way it would have been done by George Barris or Ed Roth around ’58: channeled, smoothed, chromed to the hilt.

“I just like the showcar hot-rod look—just a little over the top in terms of the chrome and the paint, and then influenced by drag racing, the period when the motor drove the whole idea of the car,” says Garfias, whose first car (this dates him) was a Renault Le Car. “I didn’t use any impossible things that are visible, any modern tools that would make it inconceivable.” After four years of late nights in the garage and a few hairy blasts around his Long Beach neighborhood near Wilson High, he figured it was finally ready to make the commute to Paso, which is about halfway to San Francisco.

“I always call it a rite of passage,” the Art Center graduate says. “Driving it down the street and to your local pizza car show, that doesn’t count. Not to me.” The road to Paso shows the world what your car is made of—or, to be precise, how well you made it. The only easy way here is on a trailer, but why would you do that? Take Highway 101 out of LA and you catch a little bit of a grade outside Buellton; you bang across a segmented bridge over a dry wash south of San Luis Obispo that’s hell on a buggy-sprung hot rod. Just outside Atascadero, you put your foot to the floor and hope for the best. Caltrans crews never seem to stop working on the Cuesta Grade just south of town, but it’s still a steep, seven percent grade nightmare that plays hell on your radiator. Alternately, you can blast north on the 5, then turn left at Bakersfield—but you run the risk of blowing an engine on the Grapevine or overheating in the switchbacks on Highway 46, where James Dean died. This is car country—but it’s new car country: as cruel to the white-walled, metalflaked, gas-drinking, design triumphs of the ’50s as it was to the horses before them.

“It’s weird,” says Garfias (full disclosure: my neighbor and good friend). “I’m torn all the time. I am in an industry that’s moving toward—every industry is—moving toward alternative fuels and alternative ways to power vehicles. As far as that part and hot rods, I guess I separate myself right there.

“My whole sense of purity is what takes over. And that’s what’s important to me: to build a period car and to make it right, rather than to appease everybody who wants me to run biodiesel and make it a hybrid.” And a period car runs on premium, the way they did in the ’40s or ’50s, when hot rodding and car customizing peaked—and when the push they gave Detroit helped the auto industry rediscover itself after 20 years of depression and war.

“The ’50s in general, if you kinda look at the grim politics of the time and the social behavior of people, it’s bad,” he says. “But the automotive world was kind of exploding. The industry was up for grabs as far as what you wanted to do.” And you could do almost anything. So for a decade, maybe 15 years, California customizers and Detroit draftsmen fed off each other. Hot rodders started shoehorning modern V-8 engines, instrumentation—even body parts—into their ’30s roadsters, and automakers brought some of their Model As and Model Bs back East to take notes. Then came the horsepower race and the ’60s, and drag racing sponsors and muscle cars, and by ’63—or maybe even ’57—it was mainly about horsepower. Not engineering or style or American ingenuity.

But that’s what Garfias loves: designing his own motor mounts, headlight stands that also mount the radiator shell, and graceful, one-of-a-kind suspension pieces—and then putting them to use. The way they did it when people still drove their cars.

“It is a way of documenting social stuff,” he says, laughing when I suggest the word “history” would have been better than the word “stuff.”

• • •

We left Paso Robles early Sunday, the day West Coast Kustoms and magazines like Hop Up actually hand out the awards, so no one knew if Nick won anything. We just knew that a lot of people had looked at his car in the show Saturday and at the cruise Friday night. Nick called the show organizers, and they said they weren’t sure if he’d won anything—but that to win anything, you have to be there. If they call your name and you don’t answer, they just pick another car. Which bothers Nick. But to him that’s not really the point, anyway. He’s already contemplating his next car, a flathead-powered bellytanker he wants to run at Bonneville.

“I think it would have been cool to get one, but that’s not why I did it,” he says. “I did it for me; and to me driving to Paso Robles is kind of a big deal. If you’re from the Bay Area or you’re from Southern California, it’s a decent drive to test out what you’ve done. I was happy. It made it. I did a good job.”