Editor’s note: The essay below was written in early 2012 for Grassroots Motorsports, just weeks after Skunk River Restorations opened its doors. It is preserved here as written. For the story since, see the update at the end of the page.
History for Grassroots Motorsports
About Me:
My name is Steve Myers, I am 32 years old, and I have always lived in Ames, IA. I bought my first british car, a 1969 Austin Healey Sprite in 2004 when I was attending Iowa State University for Mechanical Engineering. It seemed like my collection doubled in size each year since and today it is grown to probably between 60 and 70 cars. In November 2011 I decided to quit my job and try making my hobby a business, so I quit my job as a web designer and on December 12th 2011 opened the doors at Skunk River Restorations.
When my father met my mother he owned three cars, a Sunbeam Tiger, Fiat 850 Spider, and a 1970 454 LS6 Chevelle. Considering his first two cars were a 64-1/2 and 65 mustangs I think he falls easily into being labeled as a “car guy”. Today although the Fiat and Spider my father has managed to resist selling the Tiger and even did an amateur restoration of it in the 1970s after which he drove the car Sunbeam meets and at first Northwoods Shelby Club track events at Road America starting in 1977. A few years later I would be born and the track days would be put on hold and Sunbeam left to slumber in the garage.
Lighting the Passion:Growing up my dad would take me for a ride in the Tiger once or twice each summer. The rest of the time the car sat under a car cover in the corner of the garage. My dad was the kind of guy who likes to drive fast and sound good doing it. Long before I was born he built up a 289 to replace the stock 260 I thought the car had everything, the looks, the speed, the roar. For as long as I can remember I loved the Sunbeam, anytime someone at grade school mentioned cars I would talk about, didn’t matter that nobody even the teachers knew what I was talking about. I thought it was the perfect car, some things never change. I can recall going to car shows and auctions to look at cars with my dad and when we would find a TR6 or a MGB he would make a point to tell me about them. I knew like the Sunbeam they were British but when you are a kid some things are hard to understand without experiencing them and I didn’t know how much different those Triumphs and MGs really were.
Brave or Stupid:
I had always admired that my father was always tinkering with his vehicles, he seamed to know it all and yet he had never worked in a shop or worked on cars for a career. I helped him work on his cars and we even put a new engine his mustang. It is hard to learn something when you are just going through the motions and not having to figure it out for yourself. I decided that if I was going to really learn how to work on a car and have a fun car to drive I was going to have to go buy something old and dive in for myself.
Although I wanted a Sunbeam there was no way that I was going to be able to afford one. One day while browsing eBay I settled on a nice Austin Healey Sprite. I don’t recall ever having seen one before but the front kind of looked like a Sunbeam, it ran and I thought I could afford it. I ended up with the winning bid and went to the bank to take a out a loan for my first collector car, something I had not done before. After getting the car back to my apartment I rented a garage across the street so that I would have a place to work on my prize. I probably spent too much time working on my Sprite and not enough on studying and I am not sure that parents were keen on the car at first either. Eventually a few months later my dad became interested in helping me do a more professional restoration of the car than I had been doing in the small garage across the street and we got that car apart and back to a very good condition. For one thing all the wheels finally matched!
The Start of it All:
About six months after purchasing my Sprite I was tipped off by a friend to a neglected MG Midget sitting out on the other side of town. I found the car and I don’t recall how but also tracked down the owner. I couldn’t let the car stay where it was in those conditions, I saw real potential, and if nothing else I would have a car I could have fun with. I bought that Midget and was able to fit it into my rented garage with the Sprite. Surprisingly it only took a little bit a clean and tune up to get that car respectable and reliable.
The Sunbeams:
Another six months after the Midget my father, who I think knew that I really wanted wanted a Sunbeam had located two of them for sale and we went to look at them. The plan was that he was going to buy one of them for me for my birthday that had just passed and I chose which of the two cars that I wanted. I had to leave it there and come back to get it after the paperwork had been done. After thinking it over there was no way that we could leave the other car there at this backwoods vintage car dealer surrounded by rusting hunks of American iron. The car would either rust away or be abused and for my birthday I ended up getting two slightly rusty hardly running Sunbeam Alpines. We showed up with the trailer and loaded one in the back and I was going to chance driving the second one home and if it broke down I would switch the other car and hope to make it the rest of the way. The first car did make it all the way home, about a three hour drive, although I had to stop many times to deal the problems that kept creeping up. This day was two things for me that probably set the path of the rest of my life. First I was finally a Sunbeam owner and second, at least in my mind, the gift of these two cars meant that I was now a collector and that having a collection was an acceptable thing. From now on I always looking at cars for sale and I started bringing things home at an increasing rate. First a Triumph TR6, then the elusive Sunbeam Tiger that I had forever dreamed of owning, then a third Sunbeam Alpine, an Innocenti Spider, a Jaguar E-Type, and on and on. By December of 2007 I had 13 cars and was having to find creative ways to store them at my house.
Spreading to My Friends:
As I was accumulating Sprites and Midgets I would have friends over and we would take a bunch of them out all at once. We called them the Spridget Cruises. I can think of three friends immediately have bought a Sprite or Midget because of the experience they had driving mine.
The Clubs:
It didn’t take long after I bought the Sprite and Midget that I started getting heavily involved in the local car clubs. First it was the SCCA, then the local british car club. Today I am a board member of the British Car Club of Iowa, Central Iowa MINI Club, and the Mustang Club of Central Iowa. I also serve on the board of the Salisbury Concours and Road Rally Charities. The British Car Club of Iowa especially likes to arrange cruises leading out of Des Moines through the rolling country side to visit my collection.
I try to attend as many British car shows throughout the midwest as I can and everyone knows me as the kid with all the cars, although most of them have never seen even a picture of them other than the cars that I bring to shows year after year.
Rallying:
About five years ago I ended up meeting a group of like minded individuals my own age who were doing really cools things with cars. They were meeting once a month to host a car show of their own and then putting on a large 50+ vehicle rally once a year. Before I met them I didn’t even know there were other people like me out there. Things really change when you know that you aren’t alone and that what you are spending your time on isn’t completely out of the ordinary. I competed in the rally year, I went dressed as The Stig, a reference that few knew back then and I was put on as a board member that following year. Since then I have entered rallies all over the midwest covering Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin and Utah.
Surprisingly several of the rally groups are run entirely by people in their 20s and 30s. In fact the last rally I participated in, the Sunflower Rally, was a vintage rally following tulip diagrams and run by a chap in his 30s. I went with a good friend of mine who is on the board of Road Rally Charities with me and we won that rally with a time of only one second off the target.
Concours:
I had attended a couple concours events but in 2008 I was invited to show my Sunbeam Harrington Le Mans at the Salisbury Concours in Des Moines. At first I was in denial that my car was worthy of being shown with the caliber of cars that are usually invited but a good friend talked me into taking it. Some of the people running the show I already knew from other clubs but most I was meeting for the first time. I am not sure how it all came about but someone on the board suggested that they invite me onto the board to give them new talents and a different perspective. You see I was the youngest member on the board, probably by 20 years. At first I was overwhelmed and tried to stay out of the way as I thought this was a big deal and I don’t want to mess anything up. In the end I have now had nine entries into the concours, last year taking second in my class, and even created a new and very popular exotics class now in its third year. This new class allows friends my age who usually more modern cars to come and display their new Ferrari or Lamborghini and also introduce and surround them with all of the other types of vehicles at the show that they would normally not have access to. Secondly this new exotics class draws in a younger crowd who also get exposed to the great pre-war classics and brass era cars of which they have probably only seen in movies.
Crap Cans:
When some of my friends heard about the event called the 24 Hours of Lemons we started talking about it a lot and ended up deciding that we would drive all the way to Houston, TX to give it a go. I was the only person with track experience on the team and I was also the most knowledgable on how to fix the car should something go wrong. Crap can racing is a great way for you to get together with your buddies no matter what experience they might have and allow them to experience what the motorsport of road racing is all about. At first we went and bought an old MGA with a custom Fastback roof on it but one of the members decided they wanted to keep it and the other decided it was too much work. We settled on our first car a 1992 Infinity Q45. Barely we had enough time to get the car ready to Houston but we made it and after that event the team was hooked. We did several more events with Lemons and also some events with ChumpCar sometimes traveling for 13 hours to reach a track. We have campaigned now a Datsun 510, Porsche 914, and Datsun 280z in addition to the Infinity which has now long been crushed after the motor went at Nelson Ledges. Our one salvation of loosing the Infinity was that Jay, el presidente of Lemons, gave out a challenge of who could make the best pit. We brought 2000 lbs of cardboard with us to the track and built the legendary shanty town around our trailer and pit vehicles. Gladly Jay awarded us with the best pit award over the other competitors who had done things like bring xboxes, grills, and other luxuries.
From the experience of crap can racing five of my friends are now getting cars ready to start running NASA events with me next season.
Racing:
After many years of driving track days it made sense to try wheel to wheel racing. I am now running a Panoz GTS in ST1 class of NASA and a Lotus Elise in Time Trials. We are currently working on getting race cars ready for my friends whom I have now convinced need to come racing with me this coming season.
Skunk River Restorations:
Skunk River Restorations opened for business on December 12, 2011 after I had decided that I had to get out of the office because I was spending all of my time outside of work on auto related things. I hired Cody Cook a friend who I had met through the 24 Hours of Lemons message board when he was interested in coming and seeing the car I was building to compete with. I had not seen him again for probably six months when he showed up at a ChumpCar event that we were at. Cody has been working the five previous years at a local import cars repair shop and since meeting me has added a bugeye sprite, TR7, and MG Midget to his already growing collection of cars.
I have never worked at a shop and rely on some of the experience that Cody can bring regarding how the shop should be run but mostly we are just trying to figure everything out as we go. In the three last weeks we have been open we have started the restoration of a Morris Mini Minor and 65 Mustang Fastback as well as worked on many classics such as a bugeye Sprite, TR6, Jensen-Healey, Trans Am Corvette, Ford Ranchero, Jaguar E-Type, Series Land Rover, and a Austin taxi cab.
The Story Since
A lot has happened since this essay was written. The shop’s work drew coverage from the Des Moines Register, KCCI-TV, the Ames Tribune, the Classic Car Club of America Bulletin, the Goodguys Gazette, and The Muscle Car Place podcast — collected on the In Media page. In 2016, Steve earned his rookie license at Bonneville Speed Week and broke a class land-speed record in Tom Donney’s two-stroke Saab Sonett II, a story featured in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car. In 2019 he launched the This Week With Cars YouTube channel, which has grown past 100,000 subscribers and 35 million views documenting the shop’s kind of work — real repairs on real cars. And the web designer turned restorer came full circle: under the Skunk River name, Steve now builds apps for collectors, led by LastDrive. Since 2025, This Week With Cars has been a major sponsor of the Austin-Healey Conclave.
The full story: About Steve Myers