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Restoring the Romance

They are part odd trio, part soul mates, part professional ménage à trois. They are living metaphors for what they do; they don't just embody their craft, they are their craft. For the past 18 years they have been quiet examples of what is being slowly realized in the '90s after being forgotten in the '80s, that quality of life and economic fortune are not the same.

Since 1982, Phil Reilly, Ivan Zaremba and Ross Cummings have been partners, and since 1973 they have worked together, rebuilding, restoring and maintaining vintage cars and their parts. At any moment their shop will hold maybe a dozen cars and sometimes that many engines, most notably Formula One racing cars and Cosworth engines. The shop's practice is as unpretentious as its early name: Phil Reilly & Co., Auto Repair. Located a few miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the shop has no sign our front, not even a name on the building, and advertises only once a year, in the programs for the Monterey Historics and Pebble Beach Concours.

The shop's small office has been run for 12 years by Becky Tweedie, who Reilly has known since she was eight, and it is off limits to everyone but her, which is fine by all concerned. There is a phone on the wall in Reilly's work space, hanging over two blocks from prewar straight-eight Alfa 8C engines that await Reilly's rebuilding touch, but the phone clings to life by very thin wires. None of the three partners has a desk, merely a long tidy workbench with a metal stool.

The shop is not meant to be exclusive, merely selective. From the beginning, says Reilly, "We made a conscious decision to only work for people we like." Reilly & Co. operates on the faith that its customers will understand and respond similarly to the commitment it makes to its own ideals.

"There is something egalitarian about the world of these old cars," says Reilly. "The level of relationships and trust and understanding far exceeds what you get in day-to-day life. Those businessmen that wander in and out of here sense the camaraderie and friendship here, and they're on their best behavior. They might act in some different way in their own work environment or somewhere else, but here, it's about the kinship of doing these great things together."

The building is leased from one of the shop's best clients, Tom Perkins, an enormously successful venture capitalist and car collector. Reilly says his friend and landlord just shakes his head in amazement and amusement at the shop's priorities. The company retains no lawyer -- it has never needed one.

"If you think about product liability, everything that can happen, it's spooky," concedes Reilly. "We might send some old geezer out there, who may be a lawyer, in a powerful car that may have been built in the '60s, who doesn't know his way to the first turn, and we might have to deal with his widow and her lawyer after he writes himself off."

They are children of the '60s, hanging on to many of the values of the 60's, having let go of the delusions and the tie-dye. Reilly holds up a photo of Judd Larson power-sliding his Champ Car at Williams Grove Speedway in the early '50s, his face smothered with powdery Pennsylvania clay. "This is what a race driver is supposed to look like," he says--although he sometimes works weekends on Ron Hemelgarn's IRL crew. "It's all the same shirt," he says, referring to his role in the modern racing world.

Says Zaremba, "One of the things we all share is admiration of the engineers who conceived something, made it out of a chunk of metal, then jumped into the arena of competition to compare it against the others. These are our real heroes, and we see that passing away every day now.

"But I love the way people react to these things," he adds, meaning the cars that he drives out of the shop. "It gives you faith that they recognize that all this stuff we are accumulating in mass quantities isn't a replacement for what came out of those days."

At the shop, they walk a fine line between engineering a correct restoration, and between their own pursuit of perfection and the practical limits that must be applied if they are to make a profit--between "what the customer wants and what he's willing to pay for," says Reilly. They want things to work, but they don't want to corrupt the labor or ideas of their heroes. Says Chuck Mathewson, who came to Reilly from a Trans-Am racing team 14 years ago, "I've had to unlearn a lot of stuff. You look at a Ferrari part, and figure Guisseppe made this with a hammer on a tree stump, after a bottle of wine. I had to learn how to duplicate that look. For example, you can use a TUG welder instead of an oxyacetylene rig, as long as you know how to make it look a little ugly and crude it up a little bit."

"Doing what we do here, you have to have a basic knowledge of the way the universe works," says Zaremba. "What makes this business different from from others is that there are no books. You have to try to figure out what the designer was thinking when he did something that may be problematic and baffling, and what's required now. It's wonderfully esoteric, and you have to be able to research. We like to look at the evolution of automotive design, and realize who stole from whom. Part of the reason we're successful is we enjoy those kinds of challenges.:

Zaremba admits to being consumed by the lifestyle, but says, "I hate to think of myself as one-dimensional." After all, this is a published author of science-fiction stories, and a man who listens only to record albums. He pauses, and a small wry smile grows on the corners of his mouth. "Some of my best friends are not car people."

Yes, but what does Zaremba actually do?  "Overall, my job is to ensure that the finished product represents what the customer wanted," he says. "I spend a lot of time on the phone. For me, a gregarious person trapped in a nuts-and-bolts environment, that's a pleasure. But I'm also a little bit of a machinist, a little bit of a fabricator, I'm the guy that goes to the dyno and runs the engine on the test bed. I sort of operate as a foreman among our eight or 10 employees. And I drive all the cars," he adds, gesturing toward the ex-Alan Jones Williams F1 car in his space. Not a bad gig for someone who once wanted to be in that very seat.

"But mostly," Zaremba says, "it's up to me to prioritize things."

"Ivan is the Prince of Cacophony," says Reilly. "It comes with being Russian. He's the road tester and goes to lunch. That's what he does around here."

Reilly also believes Zaremba is the best natural mechanic he has ever known.

Reilly might poke fun of Zaremba for missing the wave of collector-car appreciation, but, in the late '80s when that wave was a tsunami, the shop chose not to ride along--even though it was in an ideal position to speculate and exploit the market, given its knowledge and connections, and might easily have made missions.

Explains Reilly, "We made a decision not to get involved in the buying and selling of cars--the sordid part of our business. We always looked on buying and selling as a conflict of interest. That may be why we're still middle class, but it's also why we're still here."

Says Cummings, "Phil is one of those guys who's nice to be around, because he's not into the what's-in-it-for-me part. We make decisions based on what seems like the correct thing to do. I think if you ask people out there, what you get from Phil Reilly is what he said you were going to get."

But surely it must weigh on their minds, the wisdom of this choice they have made. Naturally, Zaremba is the one who rides such second thoughts into philosophical territory. "It comes up once in a while, these reappraisals of what we have done," he says. "And each of us has our own story about our choice to forego the lucrative fast track. I was a disaffected '60s radical, maybe, and I think that when I looked at the way the country was going, I kind of gave up my political idealism and retreated to my love of cars as a way of going down into this little backwater life. Three are certain regrets, now and then. I mean, I don't even own a house. I own a lot of cars. And there are people who think I'm an idiot for that--although I always say, 'Well, you can sleep in your car but you can't drive your house."

But on the other hand," he continues, "I listen to wealthy businessmen--customers, clients, friends, whatever--who walk in here and point out how great it would be to work in this kind of an environment, as opposed to what they do. This job is a license to indulge in your romances, and nobody's stupid enough to overlook all of that. Sometimes I wish that I had done something different, but I don't know who I would trade lives with, either."

The latter part of that sentiment is a feeling they all share. When a person can say that, he must be doing something right.