Behind the Build Ep 6 HOT ROD Shop Tour with Roy Brizio Street Rods

It's a real treat for me to finally visit a builder whose work I've admired for years. Today we leave the confines of Southern California and drive up the coast to Roy Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco. One of the country's premier hot rod builders, Roy is a three-time recipient of the prestigious America's Most Beautiful Roadster Award and his shop is lined with dozens of other awards and trophies. What's it take to run a successful shop that turns out work at such a high level? Let's go behind the build to find out. My mom goes, hey, once you take this down to the shop, I think your dad would rather hang out with you than hang out at home. In fact, we had some people here from Australia a couple weeks ago, some girls and their husbands, and they said, can we sit in that car and take a photo? I go, yeah, but be careful. My dad's here with you. Huh? Well, you were telling us this room is sort of a tribute to your dad and the business and his legacy. So this was my dad's hot rod. We built this for him, God, close to 30 years ago. And when my dad passed away, we kind of attributed this room to him. And we had a big celebration of life party here for him. And he drove this car over 200,000 miles. A little small block Chevy with an Edelbrock carburetor just ran perfect. It's kind of a philosophy too, that, you know, you've carried into the cars that you build for customers too, right? Sort of a car that's able to be driven. Our deal was always kind of let's build straightforward hot rods that people could get in and drive. And they're pretty straightforward. You know, we're going to make a statement. It was usually done by paint and wheels and tires and stance, but not where it was so overly built that it was crazy. And we were going to have problems because, you know, you can have enough problems out on the road in these cars without adding to the problems. You know, we're going on 48 years this year doing these hot rods. That's incredible. Yeah, we've had a good run and have a lot of fun. And you do look like you said you've driven this car all over the place too, right? This was a project we did with B&M superchargers in 1988. Put 60,000 miles on this car, but that one year we put 20,000 on it in one year. Wow. Yeah. And that supercharger is still on there today. It'll never come apart. It'll never get restored. This car is going to stay like this forever. Good. This one will never get sold. This is the shop that I've seen in pictures. Yep. This is a working shop. We moved here in 2000. I started out in a little shop in San Bruno, which was 2,500 square feet. So when I found this building, we thought this is more than I think we need. But, you know, within a year or two, we're filling it up and it's worked well. Yeah. We've always kind of kept this area here, the assembly area, and then in the back of the shop, the dirty work and the mechanical work kind of works up in here. In addition to building cars from the ground up, you do maintenance work. We do a fair amount of service work for our customers that we've built cars for. And most of it is like prepping them for the summertime. And, you know, some of these cars actually come back and get restored. Yeah. I like this Ford pickup. It's actually, it's chopped an inch and a half. I don't know if you noticed that. No, I didn't notice. I mean, this one over here is all original. Oh, okay. And they both belong to the same person, Ross Meyers out of Philadelphia. That was his father's original truck. And this one is his truck. They're not going to be exactly the same. One's more of a hot rod, actually. And then this will be completely restored back to original because he wanted to have his dad's original truck. Yeah. So this is kind of a mild custom hot rod. It's on a TCI chassis, got an LS Chevy in it and made to look like a 427 Ford. We haven't even started driving it yet. We put 300 miles on all our cars. It takes us about three weeks to do it. We'll put a hundred on one week, come back, put it on the rack, go through, check everything out and put another hundred on it. And we figured that 300 miles was the number we tried a hundred and it didn't work. We tried 200. And so when we send these cars out, hopefully the customers, you know, it's good. They don't have any issues and they're totally fine with it. We tell them when we build them a car, look, we're going to drive these cars. If they get scratched up, we'll take care of it before, but we don't want to give you a car and have a problem. That makes sense. We're doing this 32 Roadster over here. That'll be next. That was the Duke Halleck Roadster. Yeah. The windshield on this is the only one ever built for a 32 Roadster. Yeah. He built a lot of them for Model A's, but never one for a 32. And we just came up with this car just recently. He wants to put it back to the way it was first built, which was full fendered, had a Cadillac LaSalle grill on it. But it's hard to find any, you know, original material written up about this car because, you know, Hot Rod Magazine is always the one you go, Hey, let's go back to Hot Rod and find it when it was in a magazine. This car didn't have a lot of notoriety. And it's luckily that the windshield and body stayed intact. Yeah. And it all worked out. Yeah. Before we go back to your working area, you said, this is your car. Yeah. Don't tell anybody. I've had this 18 years and it shouldn't even be in the shop. I actually need to do a little work to it. I'm going to take it on a cruise this year with a not even in the Shelby club, but I got invited and I was lucky enough to buy this from the original owner. And it's a supercharged car. It came from the factory with a Paxton supercharger. 11 cars were ordered right from Shelby. And this is one of them. Wow. And at the time I didn't realize how rare a car it was. Yeah. But the gentleman that, that owned it, he used to come in my dad's tire shop when I was a kid. So the first time I saw this car, I was about 10. Fast forward 20 years, we built them a hot rod and he still had this car. And I just said, you know, if you ever sell that car, I'd be interested. And he's like, yeah, sure kid. And so the time came and I went, Oh my God, I got to sell something. I got to buy this car. And I've been lucky that I bought it. And it was, you know, never knowing how rare the car turned out to be. And I wanted it just because I thought it was cool. And so I'm, I'm very fortunate to have it. This is a car we built about 25 years ago. It's actually a three 54 Chrysler. Yeah. And it, when we originally built it, we had an automatic transmission in it. And the guy wants to put a five speed in it. He'd same owner, Cliff Hanson. He's owned it all these years. And he's like, you know, I should have put a five speed in this one. We built it. It's a real hot rod. And so we're doing it now, which it isn't always easy to do after the car's done. Sure. You can see we're, we're getting it in there. So here's our Willie's projects that are huge. If anybody's ever built original Willie's coupe out there, they know what I'm talking about. Finding a good car. One of these is so difficult. For some reason, I guess they all rusted and you could swap any of these bodies. And honestly, they're all terrible, but all three cars are on art Morrison chassis. We've done two other ones with art and had great luck with their brains. We've got Kugel rear engine, so they're full independent. Okay. This got an LS engine in it and it's built by Don Hardy race engines in Florida, Texas. And if you look at it, it's got like a little Hemi head on it, like Dodge red rim. And they're actually just coil covers. That's an LS engine. This is the first LS dressed up as a Hemi that I've seen. I think it's the only one. I honestly think this is the first one that they did. You saw it right here. This one's kind of interesting because it's going to England. You can see it's right-hand drive. This one happens to belong to Eric Clapton. Eric has been a great customer and friend for us. This will be the 12th car we built for Eric. How did that relationship start? I met him through Jimmy Vaughn. Jimmy plays guitar with Eric quite a bit over the years. And Eric was interested in doing a hot rod. And he said, well, let me introduce you to my friend, Roy. He's been a lot of fun to work for a great guy. Good appreciates all our work and which was always great for years. I was an axle guy. This, this is us right here. Uh huh. I beam axle Pete and Jake's right. Winner's quick change. This was our recipe for so long. And I don't somewhere along the line. One of my customer goes, I want a Kugel front and rear end. And I went, okay, we don't really do all much, but then after we did it and got it done, the first thing I did is called Jerry Kugel and said, Jerry, I don't know why I hadn't been buying your product before. These cars are the best driving cars we've ever built. They just ride so nice. I just like hearing that their cars are getting driven. Our customers drive their cars. I'm not going to tell you everyone does, but I would honestly say 80% of the people we build cars for maybe even 85%. They drive their cars. You've got to talk about the fun looking car. It's an interesting car. I'm sure some people think it's really cool and other people might think it's crazy. Lost your mind. But this car came to us just like this. It's crazy. It's, it's overly rusted. Yeah. I think it took a little more effort than just sitting out in a field somewhere. It looked like it had some help. And you might be right. It might've ended up in the ocean for a while, or at least they dipped it in there for a little bit. This is going to stay just like this. And it's got a brand new fully boxed chassis with a winner's gate, quick change and torsion bar front and rear suspension. And it's got a nostalgia flavor, but all late model underneath for the most part with a little flathead. It's even got fuel injection. The only thing that'll be painted nice is the dashboard, steering wheel, steering column and firewall. Otherwise, besides that, it's going to be funky looking and we're going to put a nice interior in it. Sid Shavers will do a nice interior. It's got two Ferrari bucket seats going in out of a Lusso Ferrari. Oh wow. Yeah. So it's got some fun stuff going on. And this one here is getting ready to go to the body shop this week, actually. Yeah. Pretty straightforward. 32 high boy roadster. This is what we've done forever. And this is kind of our deal, you know, just real basic small block Chevy. Yeah. Even got a carburetor, which we really like. Wow. Right? Jack, we like carburetors. That's cool. No computers. I didn't say that. We had a lot of success with carburetors and distributors for the first 40 years and the last 10 years, boy, we've seen a lot of computers come through here. Yeah. And it's fine. You know, we've had great luck with the LS stuff, but, you know, when it started air conditioning, stereo, power windows, you know, fuel injection, you start packing all that stuff in these cars. Yeah. And we didn't realize how spoiled we were for the first 40 years. So you're guys working here then they've been here for a while. Like you have to find somebody. How many years you've been here? 43 years. He was 10 when he came here. It was 18. How long you been here? Seven years. Andric. Andric, how long you been here? 10 years. All right. He was like seven when he started. Most of my guys, we've done this as a team for a long time. Yeah. And that helps. Yeah. I mean, I have great guys, man. I mean, without them, we couldn't do any of this. Your customers and your guys building these cars are the two most important people. I'm just, I can be replaced. They can't be. This episode of Behind the Build is brought to you by Gearstar Transmissions. And we are here at Lucky Costa's shop looking at some of his project cars. And Lucky, I noticed a theme. There is a pattern. Wagon Gearstar, Project X Gearstar, Crown Hick Gearstar. Let's talk about the benefits of shopping at Gearstar. Well, I will say this. I am not the most conservative driver out there. I tend to flog on stuff all the time. So when I met Zach at Gearstar, he told me what he had. He sent me the first transmission I think is in my truck. I've been flogging on that thing for a long time. No issues whatsoever. Yeah. And the cool things are, he told me that one guy builds each transmission. I was just like, how busy is that guy? Right. It's a big company, right? Yeah. He actually has like a crew of people. But the cool thing is that one person builds a transmission from start to finish and then signs it and then dyno's it and sends you the dyno video of how your transmission works and all the gauges. I don't know what half the gauges mean, but it shows you that everything works. So I've never pulled one out of the box and had any issues with it at all. And you get a warranty, three year, 36,000 miles warranty on the transmission and a custom built Yank performance torque converter. They're always quick with helping you out. Absolutely. Yeah. I can just call them. So Ryan over there and Zach, super helpful. John, do you want to see more stuff? I would absolutely love to. We've got quite a bit of stuff around here. Yeah. And since you guys are visiting today. Yeah. You ought to see it. I have to show you the Hot Rod Magazine. Okay. That you're on the cover of? Yeah. It's like the Rolling Stone, right? 1993. Wow. I had hair. I had hair in 1993 too. This is my dad was on the cover in 1970. That is great. And actually he was on the cover of Hot Rod. He had a 32 Roadster on the cover of Hot Rod in 1974. Yeah. Some of this stuff here that you're looking at is stuff from different people. We worked for Reggie Jackson. He was my first famous customer, I guess you'd say. And I met him through Vic Edelbrock. Maybe I should say Vic Edelbrock was my first famous customer. And Vic was a wonderful guy. He helped me a lot. We ended up building 10 cars for Vic. Wow. In over 20 years. This is one of our latest cars we just finished. This is for Eric Clapton. Okay. And he did get to see it and drive it once. He was out here touring in California. We brought it down there for him to drive it and it'll get shipped to him in July. It's a 57 Buick. It's got a Roadster shop chassis under it with an LS and automatic. I'd call it a mild custom. We took some of the emblems off, but it's fairly stock body. This was a fun project. This was our 50th anniversary of Rod and Custom Magazine. This was the tribute to the Chuck Price car, which was on the cover of Rod and Custom in 1953. Luckily, they called me and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a replica of the car. And I said, yes, I'll own it. You guys do the story on it. It won't cost you any money. And so Rod and Custom loved that. And we drove it on the first Samara cruise. Wow. And I've been driving it ever since. Come on, I'll show you some more cars. All right. John, welcome to my dear friend, John Mumford's collection of cars. And I wish John was here today. I'd love to have you meet him. Yeah. But these are some of the cars we built for him here. Wow. But there's a couple really special cars here that I thought you'd enjoy. So this car we built in 2013. Yeah. And we won the America's Most Beautiful Roadster with it. Yeah. And it was actually started years ago by a guy named Kelly Brown. And Kelly Brown was actually a top fuel world champion. And it got stalled and Kelly decided to sell it. And I didn't know him, but I went and looked at the car and John wanted a 27T track roadster. And we already had a body and we were getting ready to start it. But this car was already started and had such a beautiful nose on it. Wow. Yeah. So we ended up buying the project and building the car. And it's got a little V860 with Arden overhead valve heads on it, which are extremely rare. Yeah. And this was a real fun project. So this is the Alicart, which was built in 1958. It won in 58 and it came back and won again in 1959. George Barris finished the car. This is a real special car. It's a famous car. Yeah. You know, I was honored that we got to restore it. Yeah. When I called John to tell him the car came up for sale, he had absolutely no interest in it. I wore him out. I said, John, you've got to buy this car. And he goes, I never liked it when it was built because I always thought it was ugly. And I go, I know, but it's such a special car. And I finally wore him out enough that now he's happy he has it. This car was in the shop for about two weeks. And honestly, in that two weeks, I had people calling me begging, will he sell that car? Will he sell that car? Leave it there. Just restore it for me. And I said, okay, John, here's your out if you want to sell it. Yeah. And then John was fortunate enough to get this car. That's a Sam Barris Merc. Sam Barris bought that brand new in 1950 and chopped the top right away. We think it's the first chopped top. We can't verify it, but if it's not the first, it's the second. But you'll get a kick out of this. Cover of Motor Trend, 1950. 51. 51. December 51. So it was chopped in 50. And this is a brand new car. So how many people would take a brand new car and chop the top? I am still in shock after seeing all the cars Roy has stored in his building. And I assure you, this is just a fraction of the collection. If you love 32 Fords that can be driven on a cross-country road trip, Roy Brizio is the builder for you. That's no mean feat either. Building a car that can win some of the country's top awards and can also be driven to the shows, handing them out. That's not an easy combination. What's your favorite car in Roy's shop? The Chopped 1950 Merc? Ross Meyers F100? Or how about the rusty 37 Ford? Let us know in the comments. And while you're at it, give Roy Brizio Street Rods a follow on Instagram and Facebook so you can stay updated on all these cars. Keep following us at Hot Rod too as we continue to go behind the build visiting the top shops in the country. Let us know where we should go next.