I Can't Wrench Very Well. Am I still a Real Car Guy?

I can't wrench very well.

That's the sentence that runs through my head every time I'm around people doing real mechanical work. It's a vibe I've absorbed from the culture more than anything anyone ever said to my face, and I only recently sat with it. So I sat with it. And the more I actually looked at my own life instead of the voice in my head, the dumber the sentence started to sound.

Before I could drive, before I even had a bike that went fast enough to matter, I had a shoebox full of Matchbox, Hot Wheels, and Majorette cars, sorted and re-sorted more times than I could count. I used to build little garages out of cracker boxes so the cars would have somewhere to live when they weren't racing across the living room floor. That's not a metaphor. I was cutting doors into cracker boxes with safety scissors. In my teens, it was Countach and Testarossa posters on the wall, and every show that had a car worth watching: KITT from Knight Rider, the General Lee jumping something it had no business jumping, the Ferrari 308 from Magnum P.I., B.A.'s van from The A-Team. This may age me. I don't care.

 Here's the part that actually matters, though. When I was fifteen, my dad and I changed an engine together. Not a metaphor either - a real engine, in a real driveway, on a real car: an '88 Celica GTS. We couldn't afford anything nice, so my dad bought his cars at auction, and the rule was simple: the more wrong with it, the cheaper the build. So we fixed what was wrong with it. Ourselves. That was the first real one. Years later, in 2000, I bought the first 6-speed Celica GTS - on purpose, full circle, a better version of the same car that taught me how an engine actually goes together.

omewhere in there, I also spent years building HPI Racing RC cars, modified, every one of them, because stock was never the point. And longer than that, since Photoshop 2 - which tells you exactly how long - I've been taking photos of real cars and making them look custom, chasing a version of them that didn't exist yet. That's not wrenching. But it's the same instinct: look at a car, see what it could be, and make it happen with whatever tool is actually in your hands.

In 2019, I reached out to Larry Chen and asked if I could tag along and help him shoot, just to learn from watching someone who actually knew what they were doing. He said no. But he also told me my photos were already good, which I've held onto longer than I probably should. Around the same time, I asked RJ de Vera if I could photograph Scarlett, his gullwing Mercedes GTS. I reached out to a lot of people that year, trying to find a way in. Those two were the only ones kind enough even to respond.

Somewhere along the way I decided the gatekeeping was the problem, not me. Car culture isn't one thing. It's the guy with grease under his nails who can rebuild a transmission blind. It's the kid who cuts garage doors out of a cracker box because he doesn't have the real thing yet. It's the fifteen-year-old handing his dad a wrench because that's what they could afford instead of a mechanic. None of those people are less in it. They're just in it at a different point in the story.

There's a clip that went around of a kid at an EV showcase, walking around the back of every car, looking for something that isn't there. He finally turns to his dad and says it plain: he doesn't like electric cars because they don't have an exhaust, then asks to go to a different car show. That kid doesn't own a wrench. He's probably never changed anything on anything. But he already knows what he likes and why, before anyone taught him to, before he could explain torque or displacement or any of it. That's the whole argument right there. The passion shows up first. Everything else, including the tools, comes later, if it comes at all.

Here's where I've landed, for what it's worth: it's the knowledge and the passion that make someone real, not the tools in their hands. Torque specs are a skill. They're not a personality trait, and they're definitely not a membership card. What actually makes someone a car guy is that the vehicles signify something — that you noticed them before you could afford them, that you built pretend garages out of whatever was in the pantry, that you remember the auction car your dad fixed up with you like other people remember their first apartment. That wrench in your hand doesn't create any of that. It's just one way, among several, that people express something they already had before they ever picked it up.

So - can't wrench very well, am I a real car guy? Yeah. I am. I've been one since I was cutting doors into a cracker box.

Words and images by: Axiom Otto