There is a photograph somewhere in a box in the shop. A kid in a helmet sitting in a Junior Dragster at the starting line of a drag strip in 1993. The tree is lit. The car is staged. The kid is focused in the particular way that nine and ten year olds are focused when the thing they are doing is the most serious and most important thing that has ever happened to them — which at a drag strip in 1993 in the first year of the Junior Drag Racing League it absolutely was.
That kid is me. And that photograph is the beginning of this brand even though nobody knew it at the time — least of all the kid in the helmet.
The Beginning
My father drag raced. That is the foundation of everything that came after. Not as a hobby or a weekend pastime or something he did when the schedule permitted — as a commitment. As a way of life. As the thing that shaped the way our family spent its time and its weekends and its Saturday mornings and its garage hours and its conversations at the dinner table and its priorities in ways that I did not fully understand while it was happening and that I have spent the rest of my life understanding better.
He was a career machinist. A person who worked with his hands and his mind simultaneously in the way that the best machinists do — who understood metal and tolerances and the particular relationship between precision and performance that makes the difference between an engine that runs and an engine that wins. He built his own engines. He did his own work. He believed that if you were going to race you were going to understand what you were racing and that the understanding was not separate from the competition but inseparable from it.
I grew up in the shop alongside him. Not watching. Participating. Learning by doing in the environment where doing was the only curriculum that mattered and where the lessons stuck because they were attached to real things with real consequences — engines that either ran or did not, cars that either went fast or did not, builds that were either right or were not right yet and needed to be made right before anything else happened.
That education did not have a name while it was happening. Looking back it is the most valuable thing I have ever received.
1993 — The First Year of the JDRL
The Junior Drag Racing League launched in 1993. I was there for the first year. That is not a brag — it is context. The JDRL was a genuinely new thing in 1993, a program that put young drivers in purpose-built Junior Dragsters and gave them a real racing experience with real competition and real elapsed times on a real drag strip. Not go-karts. Not a simulation. A dragster — scaled down but genuine, competitive but safe, and serious in the way that anything with a starting line and a finish line and an elapsed time display is serious.
I raced Junior Dragsters from 1993 forward. The competition was real. The preparation was real. The results mattered in the way that results always matter when you have put in the work to earn them and when the people in your corner have put in equal or greater work alongside you. My father and I approached it as a team — the way we approached everything in the shop — and the results reflected that approach.
When I turned sixteen the Junior Dragster gave way to something with considerably more power. A full size rear engine dragster. The kind of car that changes your relationship with speed in a way that no other automotive experience quite replicates — not because of the number on the timing slip but because of what it feels like to be in that car at that moment when everything the build team has done and everything the driver has prepared for arrives in the space of a few seconds at the end of a quarter mile.
We built our own engines for that car. Did our own work. Figured out what needed figuring out and fixed what needed fixing and learned what needed learning — in the shop, together, the way we had always done everything. The results were good. Better than good. We were very successful in a world where success requires both the car and the person in it to be performing at the same level at the same time and where neither one gets to carry the other.
I am proud of what we accomplished on the track. I am more proud of how we accomplished it — by building it ourselves, understanding it completely, and doing the work that nobody sees before the work that everybody sees.
The Engineering Years
Racing teaches you to think like an engineer before you know what engineering is. By the time I arrived at the University of Louisville J.B. Speed School of Engineering I had already been doing applied physics and mechanical problem-solving for years in a drag strip context that had immediate and measurable consequences for getting the math wrong.
The Speed School gave me the framework for what I already knew how to do. Thermodynamics made sense to a person who had been thinking about combustion in practical terms since childhood. Materials science made sense to a person who had grown up watching a machinist work metal. Mechanical engineering made sense to a person for whom mechanical systems were not abstract concepts but real and familiar and already deeply understood through years of hands-on experience.
During those college years my father and I did not stop building. The shop in Louisville that I race engines in today and build Hand Built wall art pieces in today and run Rod Shop Collective from today was the same shop where we built hot rods through my college years. The education was happening in two places simultaneously — the classroom at U of L and the shop in Louisville — and the two informed each other in ways that made both better than either one would have been alone.
Engineering gave me precision. The shop gave me instinct. Between the two I have never once found a problem I could not eventually solve.
The Bourbon Years
After graduation life took a turn that nobody from the drag strip would have predicted. I spent years in the Kentucky Bourbon industry — traveling the country, representing one of Kentucky's most iconic and most globally recognized cultural products, building relationships and telling stories and learning the particular art of connecting people to something they love through the experience of sharing it.
It was good work. Important work in its own way. And it taught me things that the shop and the drag strip had not — about how brands are built, about how stories are told, about how a product that comes from a specific place and a specific culture and a specific set of values communicates all of those things to a person who encounters it for the first time and either feels the connection or does not.
Bourbon and hot rods are not as different as they sound. Both come from Kentucky. Both are made by people who take enormous pride in the craft of making them. Both have a culture and a community surrounding them that is more important than the product itself. And both reward the people who take the time to understand what they are drinking or driving with an experience that the casual participant never quite reaches.
I was fortunate to retire early from the corporate world. That is the honest version of a sentence that sounds luckier than it was and involved more years of early mornings and late nights and long drives and missed weekends than the word fortunate suggests. But the outcome was the right one — the time and the freedom to come back to the shop and the cars and the culture that had been waiting patiently the entire time.
The B.A. Colonial — Where Hot Rodders Gather
Today I own The B.A. Colonial Restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. If you know Louisville you know the building. If you do not know Louisville let me tell you about it.
The B.A. Colonial is a historic Louisville landmark. Elvis Presley performed in our building in 1956 — in the early days of a career that would reshape American culture, in a city that was already shaped by the same restless, creative, rule-bending energy that produced the hot rod and the kustom kulture and the drag racing traditions that this brand is built on. The building has history in its walls. The kind of history that cannot be manufactured or reproduced or approximated — it has to be earned over decades by a place that meant something to the people who passed through it.
Today The B.A. Colonial is a hot rod bar and hangout. A gathering point for the hot rod and car culture community of Louisville and the surrounding region — the place where the cruise night crowd comes after the cruise night and the car show crowd comes after the car show and the builders and the racers and the painters and the welders and the gearheads of Louisville come when they want to be around their people. The kind of place that every car culture city needs and not every car culture city has — a physical home for the community, a place where the conversation continues after the engines shut off and the taillights disappear and the evening turns into the kind of night that people talk about the next morning in the shop.
Rod Shop Collective and The B.A. Colonial exist in the same world and serve the same community and were built by the same person for the same reason — because this culture deserves to be represented at every level, from the shirt on your back to the barstool you sit on to the wall art in your garage to the place where the community gathers to be itself.
If you are ever in Louisville come find us. The bar is open. The hot rods are welcome. And Elvis has already been here — so the bar for a good night is set appropriately high.
Why Rod Shop Collective
The brand started the way most things in the car world start. Not with a business plan or a market analysis or a meeting with investors. With a passion that refused to stay quiet and a community that showed up when the first designs went on Instagram and said — yes, this, more of this, you are making something that represents us and we want to be part of it.
That community is the reason Rod Shop Collective exists in the form it exists in today. The State of Burnout collection grew because people from every state reached out and asked when their state was coming. The Profile Collection grew because enthusiasts of every vehicle wanted to see their car rendered in clean white line art on black. The Sasquatch Customs collections grew because the humor and the authenticity landed in a way that nobody expected and everybody appreciated. The Hand Built pieces sell because there is a specific kind of person who walks into a garage and sees a five foot wooden head gasket on the wall and feels something that no mass produced piece of automotive décor has ever made them feel.
Those people are this brand. Not the demographic. The actual people — with their actual garages and their actual builds and their actual careers in the trades and their actual passion for this life — who found Rod Shop Collective and recognized something of themselves in it.
I built this for them. I build it for them every day. And I will keep building it for as long as there are people who know the difference between something that comes from inside the culture and something that only pretends to.
The marina blue 1967 Nova SS is in the shop. The next Hand Built piece is in progress. The next State of Burnout state is in the design queue. The next Profile Collection vehicle is being drawn.
There is always more to build.
That is the whole point.
Rod Shop Collective. Louisville, Kentucky. Not for Everyone. Made for You.
Follow along on Instagram @rodshopcollective for new releases, build updates, behind the scenes from the Louisville shop, and everything happening at The B.A. Colonial.